“We are free to go?” I asked.
“Yes – and thank you.”
“That woman who was working here with you last night. Who was she?”
“I don’t know. She came to look for her mother – and then, like you, she stayed.” He cocked his head to the side, as if struck by a thought. “I never properly thanked her. I would have liked to.”
“She’s gone?”
“Yes. A pity. I must go now. Thank you all.” He bent down to the girl and cupped her cheek. “And an especial thank you to you. You were very brave.”
I was disappointed not to have seen that woman again. But her words – and her elfin beauty – have been cast into amber and that is how they will always remain. Sixty years may have passed since I last saw her, but to me she will always be this angel who bestowed on me both her wisdom and her grace. And perhaps it is as well that I never did see her again, because otherwise her beauty and the simplicity of her message would have become sullied by the whole sordidness of living life.
It was like a short but very intense chapter had come to an end – and, since I will not be returning to the subject of that school hall again, I may as well reveal what happened to all those children there. The school became a place which, after all the horror of Hiroshima, would celebrate the green shoots of the next generation: it became an orphanage.
“That is that,” Shinzo said to the girl. “Shall we go and look for your grandmother?”
The girl looked at me almost shyly, was about to speak. But I got in there first. “Let’s go and search for your grandmother.”
“And then?” said Shinzo.
I mused. “And then we go back to Nagasaki.”
The girl looked from Shinzo to me and back again. “I’m coming too.”
Shinzo scratched at his fat pot of a stomach. I watched as a man brought out another child’s body and placed it on one of the pyres.
“Beast! I said I’m coming too!” said the girl.
“We heard you the first time – and I am a beast and thank you for reminding me,” I said. “But it’s not that simple. Besides, we might find your grandmother.”
“You thought she was dead.”
“Well -” I paused. For once, I was thinking, ‘Be kind. Be kind!’ “I fear that your grandmother might be lost. Do you not have other relations?”
“No – that is why I’m coming with you.”
“But... but... ” I faltered. “We can’t just take you back with us to Nagasaki. Hiroshima is your home –”
“I do not have a home, Beast! Nobody has a home! There is nothing left!”
“That’s right. But that doesn’t mean we can take you to Nagasaki. Who would you stay with?”
“I’m coming too.”
“I think... ” I was striving for the right words. I wanted to break it gently to the girl. It just was not feasible to take the girl with us. Let alone that we might well be separating her from her grandmother, the practicalities of taking her to Nagasaki would be enormous. “I think that, after we have searched for your grandmother, we should hand you over to the authorities.”
“You’re not leaving me.”
“Who would you stay with in Nagasaki?” Despite my new ‘Embrace Life’ mantra being barely more than six hours old, I was annoyed.
“I’m coming with you, Beast.”
“You cannot come. It’s ridiculous. It’s nothing personal. But it would not be right.”
Shinzo snorted at that, breaking off from his scratching. “Since when have you ever been concerned about what is right?”
“Well, what do you think?” I said, turning to him.
“If she wants to come, she should come. It’s not as if there is anything left for her here.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “And where is she going to stay?”
“She can stay with me.”
“You – you just... ” It was absurd. We had been with the girl for, what, two days, and now Shinzo was proposing to adopt her? The man was mad and I was about to tell him as much, when I glanced over at another pyre, and there it was blazing out its message to me: embrace life! Have courage! Be brave and embrace anything and everything that comes your way! “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard you say, Shinzo.”
I went over and embraced that great gorgeous bull of a man and kissed him on both cheeks. I caught the look of astonishment that passed between Shinzo and the girl. They must have found my sudden about-turn quite incomprehensible – but then they knew nothing of Wisdom’s words the previous night.
I said one thing more, and I can still remember my exact words: “May God bless you for it” – and if only he had.
For a short while as we walked through Hiroshima we were a jolly little band, the girl walking in the middle and holding both our hands. That silent city was still the wasteland that it had been the previous day, but those that had survived the bomb were now largely being cared for. I don’t remember seeing any survivors pleading for help or water.
There were still many, many corpses, in all their grim variety. They ranged from those black, carbonized statues, to the grey swollen bodies, missing limbs and with cankered wounds. It was the first time I had seen the maggots. They take around two days to hatch, and from that day we saw them everywhere. They were repellent. I have rarely seen anything more disgusting than a body alive with maggots, wriggling and squirming in what looks from a distance to be a rippling mass of live white blubber. Perhaps it was the white, fatty, translucent nature of the maggots that disgusted me so; or perhaps it was the knowledge that they were engorging themselves on human flesh.
But before we arrived at the Shima hospital, we came across one rare moment of the utmost hilarity: we met Motoji.
I am sure you will have long forgotten that sly ferret who worked with Shinzo and me in the kite-factory. He had been with me in the factory at the moment Little Boy was dropped, and the last I had seen of him, Motoji had been lying on the ground and skewered through the shoulders by two pieces of bamboo. I had said I would return to him, but I never had any intention of doing so and had walked off into the maelstrom that was Hiroshima – and that, I’d thought, was the last I would ever see of him. But as it is, that doltish patriot still merits one last mention in my story. I include it chiefly for my own pleasure, as its memory still makes me chuckle.
We had noticed what looked like an old man, bent with age. He was hunched over his stick and tottering through the ruins. We were heading in a westerly direction towards the Shima hospital, while this ravaged man was heading across our path and towards the sea.
We’d given the man a cursory glance when Shinzo suddenly piped up. “I think that’s Motoji,” he said, before calling out, “Motoji! Is that you?”
It was indeed Motoji, his wounds now bandaged and looking as if he had aged two decades in as many days.
Motoji’s eyes went from Shinzo to me, and back again. He didn’t even bother to look at the girl. “Shinzo,” he said. “It is good to see you.”
“And you Motoji.”
There was a pause as Motoji portentously tapped his stick on the ground. “So we have survived and we must all be grateful for that,” he said.
“And you got patched up?” I said, ignoring that he had not yet spoken to me.
“Yes, I have,” he said. “No thanks to you.”
“I’m sure you would have done the same for me,” I replied.
Shinzo had been carefully examining Motoji, his eyes taking in his ragged trousers and the blood-stained bandages underneath his shirt. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m going back to the warehouse – where else?”
A look of complete puzzlement passed across Shinzo’s face. “What is happening at the warehouse?”
“I’m going there to build kites.”
The utterly fantastic nature of Motoji’s quest was still beyond Shinzo’s comprehension. “To build kites?” he repeated.
“Yes, I’m going to the warehouse to build kites. That is what I was tasked to do three months ago and that is what I will continue to do.”
“But... But... ” Shinzo gaped at the man. “Are you not injured?”
“Hiroshima may have been destroyed, but ultimate victory is still assuredly ours.”
“But the kites,” said Shinzo. “How will kites help us win the war?”
Motoji leaned forward on his stick, clasping it with both hands. “Three months ago, I was asked to make kites. I will continue to make kites until I am ordered to do otherwise.”
I smirked and then, when I caught the girl’s eye, I started to titter. Yes, even after America had developed the world’s most powerful bomb, Motoji was still intent on building his bamboo kites, the better to preserve our shipping.
In those days, it was far simpler to get through life by doing what you were told, rather than to ever once think for yourself. And as for common sense, that ranked a very poor second in comparison to the direct orders of a commanding officer. Perhaps you can now understand how, even years afterwards, all those lone Japanese soldiers could still be at their posts in the jungle, still fighting a war that was long since over.
Motoji’s eyes flickered over me with distaste. “Yes, I will continue to make kites for the good of the Motherland and because it’s my duty.”
Shinzo plucked at his lips as he tried to stifle his smile, but when he saw the grin on my face there was no holding it back any more. His fingers seemed to be almost smothering his face, but the laughter had to come out.
I was laughing quite openly now, hands at my sides, quivering with mirth. My laugher may seem inappropriate in such a city where we were surrounded by death. But I was not laughing at the dead, and nor, bless him, was I especially laughing at Motoji; like most of the rest of us, he’d had any trace of original thought stamped out of him long ago. But still! In all my life, I have never encountered anything quite so hilarious as Motoji wandering through the ruins of Hiroshima as he thirsted to get back to his kite-making.
When Shinzo let go, there was no stopping him. He stood there, hands on his knees, quite doubled up with laughter, until his face was as red as a ripe pomegranate and the tears were dripping into the dust. I am not sure if the girl knew why we were laughing, but the mood was infectious and so she also started, her arms crossed tight across her chest.
“What are you all laughing at?” said Motoji. “What is so funny? I am going to make kites. That is what I have been ordered to do. That is what you both have been ordered to do! Your behaviour is disloyal to the Emperor!”
It only made things worse. Shinzo was quite hysterical and for all I knew was going to collapse in a heap. The girl with squealing in her high-pitched yip. And as for me, well it was without doubt the best laugh I’d had during the entire war.
Motoji’s eyes twitched from one to the other of us. “You devils!” he screamed as he stalked off. “You are treasonous devils! I shall report you to the authorities.”
It still brings tears of merriment to my eyes to remember Motoji cursing us amidst the ruins. We were still laughing 20 minutes later, when that bent relic of a man was long out of sight.
A very brief moment of respite in another day of hell.
The Shima hospital, where the girl’s grandmother had been working two days earlier, might never have existed. I had been past it many times. But as we walked through the ruins at the bomb’s hypocenter, all of them now reduced to crumbled pebbles, it was impossible to tell one building from another.
We spent over two hours there, calling out as we poked amid the rubble. It was only for show. From the moment we’d arrived, Shinzo and I had known that nothing could have survived.
That said, I was certainly not going to snuff out the girl’s dreams. I would have carried on searching all day. At length though, she came over, disconsolate, shoulders slumped.
“She is not here,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, putting my arm round her shoulders.
“She is all I had left.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Shinzo came over. “We could leave a sign here. Just in case.”
All about the ruins were scores of hand-written signs, a final plea for those who might have walked away. We wrote two messages with a piece of charcoal, one on a stone step and the other on a plank of wood which we propped in a prominent position against some rubble.
“They will soon have a full list of the survivors,” said Shinzo. “In a month’s time, we’ll get in touch with the authorities. If she has survived, we’ll find her.”
The girl didn’t cry. She was past crying by now. Looking around the site of the Shima hospital was merely confirmation of what she had long suspected.
“And now we’re going to Nagasaki?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Shinzo.
“Yes?” she said. “Are you happy with that, Beast?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very happy.” Though how it would turn out having the girl in Nagasaki, I had no idea.
Our plan was to make for one of Hiroshima’s outlying railway stations. The main station, as I had already witnessed, had been devastated by the bomb, but there was a chance that trains might still be running from the other stations. Even during the height of the war, the efficiency of Japan’s trains was legendary.
We were heading in a north westerly direction for Koi station. If that was closed, we planned to work our way down the tracks until we found an open station.
Almost the first steps of our journey took us over the Aioi Bridge, that famous T-shaped bridge that the Yankee bombardier Tom Ferebee had used as his aiming point for Little Boy. It was still standing, which was more than could be said for most of the bridges in Hiroshima, but had been shorn of its lamp-posts and its concrete balustrades. The river was still teeming with bodies, but by now they were so commonplace that I didn’t give them a second glance.
Halfway across the bridge was another body, sprawled on the ground surrounded by clumps of masonry. We all stopped to look. It was the body of a Yankee prisoner-of-war, wearing a US Air Force uniform. He was tall and well-muscled, quite different from our Japanese men. Around his neck was tied a sign proclaiming that it was he who had been responsible for the bomb. The man’s head had been battered beyond recognition, the dents in his skin revealing where his skull had been shattered. His face, crawling with flies, was nothing but a black musk of dried blood.