After another kilometre or so, we found a part-destroyed bridge that served to get us over the last river. It was only then that Shinzo could relax enough to thank me.
“I’m grateful for what you did,” he said.
“What are friends for?” I said, pleased at least to have evened things out a little. I had not forgotten the grace with which he’d handled my explosive anger the previous night.
“I think I should learn to swim.”
“Good.”
“My brother threw me into a river once. I’ve been terrified of water ever since.”
“You may find you enjoy it.”
“That’s what we shall do,” he announced, pleased with himself. “When we get back to Nagasaki, you can teach me to swim.”
I laughed at the thought. “Maybe we could get to do it all over again.”
“Though without the hitting.”
“And without the strangling either.” We were both sniggering at the banter, as we each sought to trump the other’s put down. What a pleasure it was to be with that man, affectionately teasing each other as we wandered on the final lap through the western outskirts of Hiroshima. The buildings were as much of a wasteland as every other part of the city that we had visited, but we were so inured to the destruction that it no longer registered.
It was Shinzo who brought up exactly the subject on which I had been dwelling.
“Where will the girl be?” he asked.
“I hope she goes to Koi station.”
“She knows we were going to that station?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I think so. Did we specify a station?”
Shinzo pulled a face. “We didn’t. I’m sure she’ll find it.”
“Will she stay at the bridge?” I asked. “Will she wait for us there?”
“She’s a bright girl,” said Shinzo, with all his usual complacency. “She’ll find us.”
After he had said something like that, I absolutely knew the girl would not be at Koi station – and so it proved.
Our Hiroshima journey finally came to an end in the early afternoon, when we wandered in to Koi station. I know that in retrospect this sounds astonishingly naïïve, but it really felt like journey’s end. But it’s only journey’s end on the day you die, and for the rest of it, the end of one journey is merely the beginning of the next. And we always hope that after a tragedy in our lives, the next journey will provide a little light relief. We almost feel hard done by if we go straight from one disaster to the next. That, however, is very often how it is in life.
The station had been knocked about by the bomb, but was still very much standing. What a relief that was. Many people were milling around, but it took only took a cursory inspection to know that the girl wasn’t there.
I cannot say that I missed her – not then. But it felt odd not having the girl beside us. Without the unceasing prattle of her voice, an unusual silence hung in the air. We had been through so much over the previous two days. Two days! How astonishing that figure still seems; it’s no great length of time at all to get to know a person, but for the three of us, it was more than enough to see each other at our very best – and worst.
Shinzo had loose bowels. It came on quite suddenly. One moment we were sitting peaceably outside the station and the next he had got up without a word and was tearing off to find a private spot to relieve himself.
I went to look for food and to see about the trains. Within two minutes, I had found a woman at a nearby stall and had bought almost half of the wares that she had to sell: rice-balls and raw red onions. I bought enough food to get us to Nagasaki, paying with the cash from my money-belt.
It was just as easy finding out about the train. There was indeed a train running to Nagasaki, the last that day, and it was leaving, as I remember, just after 5pm, arriving around 9am on the morning of 9th August. After my labours of the previous two days, everything suddenly started to fall into my lap. I wanted food – and I found it. I wanted a train to Nagasaki – and there it was.
And I wanted the girl to arrive before the train departed – and there she was, with just minutes to spare, a ragamuffin wandering up the road and quite bursting into tears at the sight of Shinzo and me eating our rice-balls in the dust. It was a grand reunion, a quite lovely reunion, with the three of us hugging each other as the girl planted a kiss on Shinzo’s cheek – but he was always her favourite.
If I could end my story there I would. The struggle is seemingly over; our happy band could finally quit Hiroshima with heads held high and full of good cheer at the prospect of our new life in Nagasaki.
But looking back, I find it difficult to square my emotions of that moment with how events turned out. That joyous reunion now seems like a little fizzle of light set against the overwhelmingly bleak backdrop of a thundering typhoon
But did I see it? Did I know what was to come?
I had not the slightest inkling. I only had eyes for that little spurt of light that flickered between the three of us, the smile on Shinzo’s face and the shining tears of the girl – and I never thought to look at the storm-clouds gathering overhead.
The irony of our last minutes in Hiroshima was exquisite; there is no other word for it.
If only the girl had tarried a little longer at the bridge, where she had waited for a full two hours before following us to the station; if only she had got lost not once but twice along the way; if only she had not been personally led to the station by a kindly old woman...
If any of those eventualities had occurred, we would have missed the last train out of Hiroshima that evening – and there would be no more story left to tell.
But the girl did arrive. Of course she had to arrive; you knew that she had to arrive. We would never have boarded the train without her – and if I was not on the train, then how ever was I going to keep my date with Fat Boy, which was due to explode over Nagasaki approximately two hours after my arrival there?
In hindsight, all my actions seem to have a prickling sense of inevitability about them.
It is like that fabled story from the Middle East, ‘An Appointment in Samarra’.
A rich man is with his servant in the marketplace in Damascus. They are browsing through the stalls, looking for food and oddments, when the rich man rounds a corner and with a shock realises that he is staring Death in the face. The Grim Reaper, dressed in ragged black, appears to be stunned, even wrathful; the servant is so awestruck that he swoons to the ground in a dead faint. Without waiting another moment, the rich man races back to his mansion-house and takes two horses. He rides and he rides all through the heat of the day, until eventually it is quite dark and he arrives into the little town of Samarra.
The man is tired but elated at how, through his quick-wittedness, he has managed to cheat Death. He goes to a little tavern to celebrate – and there, waiting patiently for him in the corner, is the Grim Reaper. The rich man is dumbfounded, almost aggrieved. “What were you doing in the market-place this morning?” he demands of Death. “You pulled such a forbidding face that my servant collapsed with fright.”
The Grim Reaper stands up and stares placidly at the man – for death is never unkind. “I was shocked to see you,” replies Death. “I knew that we had an appointment in Samarra this evening. I never thought that you would arrive in time.”
No matter how much a man writhes and turns, he can never cheat fate.
And I was that man.
For over two days in Hiroshima, I had scurried hither and thither, ignoring victims here and brutalising girls there. But always in the background there was this clock ticking away, clicking down the seconds until my appointment in Nagasaki.
Now that I am wizened and have the benefit of hindsight, I do like to think of it as an appointment. It was not just my destiny to be in Nagasaki at 11.02 on the morning of 9th August, but also my blessing. Nagasaki, in small part, was my chance to make amends.
And how did it all turn out? All that I shall come to. But what I do know is this: although one should strive to be kind and to embrace life, one must also be prepared to do battle.
Sometimes, though not often, you have to fight fire with fire.
Sometimes, you may even have to be the brute.
And I certainly knew all about that.
We were such a happy little band as we climbed on board the train. It might have been waiting expressly for our arrival. The train was full, packed with people who knew there was nothing left for them in Hiroshima, but we crammed ourselves onto one of the wooden benches. As soon as we had sat down the train pulled out from the station, black smuts of smoke puffing in through the window. The coach was Spartan with little more than wooden benches to sit on, but after Hiroshima, we would have been happy in a cattle-truck.
“Goodbye!” said the girl, waving not at the people on the platform but at Hiroshima herself. “Goodbye!” We stared silently out of the window. It was like leaving the bedside of a terminally ill friend who has finally passed away. We could do no more, and all that was left was to gaze at the ruined city that was as dead as Pompeii.
As I stared out of the window, embedded memories flickered past my mind’s eye. And eventually Hiroshima trundled out of sight, and all the passengers aboard the carriage seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief. We had witnessed something terrible in Hiroshima and now we were moving on.
I slept on and off, but my clothes were still damp from the river and eventually I gave myself up to pondering that one rather painful matter that for so long I had chosen to ignore: my wife.
Like most Japanese marriages of the time, it had been an arrangement. She had been suggested to my father, who in his diffident way had mentioned the matter to me. It was not the first time he had come to me like this. I heard the old man out with equanimity and expected that this prospective bride would go the same way as all the others. But then I saw her for the first time. She was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. Heart-stoppingly beautiful. She was a science teacher at one of the local schools and, or so I thought, was being offered to me on a plate.
I think that I once loved her. We had married during a maelstrom of sex at the start of the war; now she hated me. For my part, my love had turned into the most cold indifference.
I do not blame Mako for hating me. Knowing, as you do, how I had behaved in Hiroshima, it will come as no surprise to learn that for the duration of my four-year marriage, I had behaved like the very devil. Let me make a clean breast of how abominably I had conducted my marriage. I was unfaithful, many times over. I had numerous lovers. I was unkind, both in word and deed. I did not give her time to talk and when I listened, I did not even attempt to understand. I hated her when she cried and I hated her even more during those endless deserts of malign silence that broke up the tedium of her screaming. In short, I was a repellent husband who provided Mako with a home and who had given her a son – but beyond that, I was, or at least I had been, a selfish reprobate.
I pause for a moment there to wonder if I have done myself an injustice.
Probably not.
It is true that I brought out the worst in Mako, and that in the middle of her rages, this quite stunning woman could be transformed into a foul-mouthed harpy.
That said, it was I alone who had wrought this transformation. She had never yet caught me out in an act of infidelity. But I believe that, almost from the first, she had intuited it in her heart, and from that she became colder and less obliging in the bedroom, and so I too continued down that same slippery marital slope. By the end, the dear woman seemed to have but three modes of communication: the awesome chill of silence; the whip-crack of a sniper’s bullet; and the atomic detonation of the all-out row.
For the first two years of our marriage, there had been the occasional languor, when we could talk about matters of inconsequence without hurting each other. But since the birth of our son, the fighting had been ceaseless. For both of us, it had been such a relief when I had been posted away to Hiroshima to build kites.
And now I was returning home – but a quite different man from the beast who had left Nagasaki three months ago. As the train trickled on through the night, I wondered if it was too late to save the marriage. Were we now so deeply entrenched that there was nothing that I could do or say to win Mako round? I could – would – apologise. I would try to make a fresh start and strive to court her anew. But would it be enough? Or was I destined for another torrent of Mako’s abuse, and meanwhile denied the satisfaction of answering her back?
I had been looking out of the window, though oblivious to the spectre of the trees and the smoke sparks that glowed in the night. Shinzo had been watching me for some time.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
I continued to stare blindly out of the window. “What am I thinking?”
“Will Mako ever forgive you?”
“And what is the answer?” I turned my eyes to look at him.
“I doubt it.” He smoothed the girl’s hair. She was tucked into his flank, snuggled in the crook of his arm. “Mako is a very beautiful woman. She had high expectations.”
“How I hate high expectations.”
“Yes, it’s always better to be hopeful rather than expectant. But Mako expected much of you and her disappointment has now turned sour.” He peeled the skin off an onion that had gone soft with age, stripping the layers back and tossing them out of the window, until with one bite he ate it. “I presume that you’ll be going back to apologise. It might be too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
“It’s never too late – look what happened to you.”
“You noticed?”
“Noticed that this embittered old friend of mine is once again attempting to behave like a human being?”
I laughed and clapped him on the knee. Despite his ample girth, Shinzo was a sly fox. He did not miss a thing. “Should have married a woman like your Sakae? The pair of you define marital bliss.”
Shinzo dismissed the thought with a flick of his hand, as if the very acknowledgement of his own happiness would be an invitation to hubris. “We get on well,” he said. “She’s a fine woman and I love her. You may not consider her a beauty, but to my mind she’s beautiful.”