But there was no way we could stop them. There were flies everywhere, and somehow they could lay their eggs on even the most fastidiously cleaned injuries. A full year after Fat Boy, I was still dressing Sakae’s wounds and would regularly find that her body was being eaten away by a fresh outbreak of maggots.
The doctor paused with his scissors to scratch at the corner of his chin. “I wonder why there are no maggots,” he asked. “It’s very unusual. And you say she was out in the open?”
“She was,” I said. “She and Shinzo were lying out in the garden, and... there did not seem to be anything unusual about it. “ I paused to recollect what I had seen in the garden. “There were some chickens –”
“Chickens!” said Dr Kinoshita triumphantly. “I knew it!”
“Chickens?” I queried. “What about them?”
“The chickens must have eaten the maggots!” he said. “Perhaps we should bring them up to the hospital.”
“Amazing,” I said, allowing myself a little smile – and it really was one of those extraordinary imponderables of fate that Sakae’s life had been saved by a few pecking chickens. Just one more of those tiny little details that decided whether we lived or died. But on the flip side of the coin, Shinzo lost his life because he fell into a river; and contracted diarrhoea; and missed a train.
Much later, I learned how Shinzo had hitched a lift into Nagasaki on the back of a truck. He had only just arrived back at his home when the bomb was dropped. The pair of them were caught outside embracing in the garden. I still find the arbitrariness of it all quite staggering: a man is killed because he was caught short at a railway lavatory; and his wife survives because she happened to keep a few chickens. It is a neat philosophical point. It is not that small things matter. Most of them don’t. It is just that some things matter very much indeed. Though it is only long after the event that we have any clue which of these trifling matters were all-important, and which counted for nothing. But to dwell on it is the route to madness. Instead, we should strive to embrace life and to do right – and to accept that, while small things do occasionally matter, that in general, nothing matters very much at all.
It is in this spirit that we come to the end of my war. It was now six days after Fat Man. The Yankees had dropped another batch of leaflets, complete with the Royal crest of the Chrysanthemum, which read in part, ‘For your own sake you should ask his Majesty the Emperor to bring this war to an end and surrender as soon as possible.’ But the leaflets were rather wasted on us. Our existence was so hand to mouth, that the war had become an irrelevance.
Sakae, like so many bomb victims, was a long way from being on the mend, but her condition did seem at least to have stabilised. Once, she opened her eyes and tried to smile when she saw me.
I spoon-fed rice into her mouth and tended her wounds. There were other people who I treated, but she was my favourite. If only as a small token to my friend Shinzo, it had become my personal quest to save her. I did what I could for all of the victims, but any spare moments I had, I would spend with either Toshiaki or Sakae. Even though she could hardly speak, I would tell her about Shinzo and how much he had loved her – and how much I had loved him.
Along with the doctor and a few nurses and, of course, the girl, the occasional help squads would be foisted on us. Sometimes, as in the case of a team of Navy medics, they would stay for a morning, would treat the sick in a clinical, efficient manner – and then when their medicines had run out, they would depart.
These teams usually meant well, but they did grate with the routines that we were already beginning to establish at the hospital. Without a word of apology, untrained helpers such as myself would be shoved out of the way to make room for the professional medics. It grated that they all thought they knew best. There was no time for a kind word as they methodically went about their business. When they left, it was always with a sigh of relief that we said goodbye to those self-styled mercy teams.
But if the teams of trained medics were bad, far worse were the roaming squads of civilians who came to help out. It was partly to do with their lack of respect for what we had accomplished at the hospital, and partly – as always – to do with Japan’s knee-jerk obeisance for anything in a uniform. You only needed to put a man into a uniform and he suddenly expected people to dance to his every word.
We had just breakfasted and the girl and I were quietly checking our patients’ dressings and wounds. We were doing the best we could with our very basic medicines, though at that stage we had not an inkling of the size of the vast mountain that we had begun to climb. All of us were still entirely ignorant of this obscure new disease, ‘radiation sickness’. It had not occurred to us that some of these festering wounds would take years to heal.
I was extracting some maggots from a back wound with a pair of forceps. When we had pulled back the bandages a few minutes earlier, the maggots had been as tight bound as a bag of boiled rice. One by one, I dropped the maggots into a bucket being held by the girl.
Then I made a little grunt of surprise. For the first time, I had noticed the man’s leg. His trouser-leg had been torn off almost at the thigh, to reveal a long, pale white leg. I stared at the man’s footwear – and that was also quite different.
“Know who we are treating?” I asked the girl.
She looked at the man’s scorched back and shook her head. “Should I?”
“Look at that hairy white leg,” I said. “It has to be a Yankee.” The girl peered at the prone man. “This is a Yankee? Is that right, Beast?” she asked in wonderment.
“Must be one of the prisoners-of-war.” I tweezered out a couple more maggots.
The girl proffered up the bucket. “A Yankee?” she said again.
“Are you going to start kicking him like you did with that dead Yankee on the Aioi Bridge?”
She twisted her hair into a ringlet, fascinated at having a live enemy specimen in front of her. They were always so big, the Yankees, taller and much better fed.
“No, I’m not going to kick him,” she said, decisively making up her mind. “It does not occur often. In fact it occurs very rarely. But on this occasion I’m prepared to admit... ”
“Admit what?” I grinned.
“Admit that you were right. This man may be a Yankee – but he also is a victim of the bomb. He needs our help.”
“Very well put,” I said – and only a fool would have said anymore.
So for two minutes we worked on in contented silence, as the girl quietly digested the fact that she no longer loathed the Yankees.
A shadow fell across my arm. I turned round to see an assistant police inspector standing over me, his clothes in tatters. Somewhere along the way, he had acquired an army pistol, which was slung at his leg in a khaki holster. Behind him stood another uniformed officer, while milling round the gates was a cluster of about 30 civilians.
“Who’s in charge here?”
I passed the forceps to the girl and stood up. “Dr Kinoshita is in charge. But he’s been up all night and is asleep.”
“Wake him up.”
“Perhaps I can help,” I said. “What is it you want?”
“We have been authorised to open a first-aid hospital.” The man seemed to stand a little taller as he spoke, as if aware of the weight of responsibility on his shoulders.
“You have come to the right place then,” I laughed.
“I do not think your humour appropriate.”
“Perhaps so. What would you like to do?”
The policeman looked all about him at the clusters of victims sprawled around the grounds. “Why aren’t they inside? Why have you left them out here?”
I spoke to the man as I might speak to a slow child. “Where there is space, we have put the victims into the gymnasium and the storerooms. The hospital was gutted by fire and is not yet fit for human habitation. But if you and your men might care to clear it out... that would be most helpful.”
“My men must first be fed,” he said. “Where is your food?”
I bridled at that. “You have a very abrasive manner.”
“This is a national emergency,” the police officer said, and as he spoke the second officer sidled up beside him. He was much younger, barely out of his teens, and his fingers trailed over a wispy moustache. “How can you expect my men to work without food?”
“Do we now we ignore all the common courtesies?”
“I have the personal authority of the emergency committee of Nagasaki,” he said primly.
What was the point? Why was I wasting my energy on this man, who was no better and no worse than all the other excrescences that had crawled out of the war? I no longer even knew if it was the man’s request I was objecting to, or his uniform and his curt manner. And anyway, who was I to say that these 30 hungry civilians couldn’t be fed?
“Very well,” I said, as I retrieved the forceps from the girl. “Our kitchens are in a semi-basement beneath the hospital. There should be a cauldron of rice there. With luck, there should be some left for you.”
The man gave a curt nod, before adding, “That is as it should be – and in future, do not waste my time. I’m here with the full authority of the emergency committee.”
“So you mentioned,” I grunted, stooping down to once again apply myself to the maggots.
I spent the rest of the morning with the sick. To some, this was a most unrewarding task. But I was different. It gave me joy just to salve a patient’s wounds or to bathe a festering body, for there was not a moment that I did not appreciate the blessing that had been conferred on me.
The party of civilians had sated themselves on our rice and had begun to clear the lower two storeys of the hospital. The floors were structurally sound, as they were made of solid concrete that was half a metre thick, but, inside, it was as if the hospital had been shaken like a giant rattle. Everything, from furniture to solid steel machines, had been smashed beyond repair, and the blaze had been so hot that much of the glass had melted. The walls and ceilings were charred black and still stank of smoke. Although the windows had been blown out, the hospital did provide some small shelter, so was a marginal improvement on living rough outside.
I did not really notice what the men were doing. From the periphery of my eye, I would catch them carrying bits of burnt furniture which were tossed on a pile outside the hospital gates. For the larger bits of machinery, it would sometimes take three or four people to manhandle them out of the hospital. When the two floors were relatively clear, they swept up the worst of the glass. Hundreds and hundreds of medicine bottles must have been shattered in the fire, and all the floors were carpeted with sharp, sticky shards.
I suppose it was a useful enough job. It had to be done, and they had done it; though the assistant police inspector might have been a little more gracious.
It was a few minutes before noon, and I remember the moment well because it was the first time that I had begun to comprehend the full ramifications of radiation sickness. We all knew we had been punished by a quite different type of bomb. But it took me nearly a week to appreciate the symptoms of this disease.
I was treating a woman who, on the surface, appeared to have suffered only the most superficial wounds. Her leg had been a little burned and when I had first treated her a few days earlier, I had thought she was going to be walking out of the hospital that afternoon. But her condition had deteriorated markedly over the past three days. She was always tired, her gums had started to bleed and her frazzled hair was falling out. She had not yet developed the purplish spots on the skin which would mean that her condition had become terminal. But she seemed to be dying before my eyes. I remember this feeling of helpless impotence. I had no idea what ailed her, nor how to make her better.
From one of the outhouses, I heard the sound of raised voices – and recognised at least one of them. I jogged over, wincing as I caught my injured arm on the hem of my trousers. How filthy those trousers were. I had been given a crumpled shirt to wear, but my trousers were still the same ones I had been wearing when I had been blown up by Little Boy.
The noise, the row, was emanating from the small shed that housed the hospital’s only water-well. I could already imagine what had happened.
In the shed, stood about the well, Dr Kinoshita was in a stand-off with the two assistant police inspectors. By the wall were four of the civilians’ troupe, who’d just drawn off a bucket of water. The first police officer, the one who had already berated me, was pointing his finger at the doctor.
I tried to capture that calm poise that I had experienced a few days’ earlier from the quartermaster. “What’s happening?” I asked.
There must have been something about my look as I stood there in the doorway, for although Dr Kinoshita was greatly my senior, he now deferred to me. “These men... ” he said, before trailing off. He had been working so hard that he was on the verge of total exhaustion. “These men have finished their work at the hospital and are now helping themselves to the last of our water. And I... ” The poor man shook his head mournfully as he stared at the ground. “I have suggested that they have their fill of the spring-water outside the hospital.”
“Well you heard the man,” I said to the two officers.
I will try to describe the exact feeling that tingled through my bones at that moment. It was this awesome sense of confidence, such as I have never experienced, as I finally knew I was fighting for a just cause. “Get out of here and take your men with you.”
“I will not be spoken to like that,” snapped the police officer.
“Let me say it another way then,” I replied. “Would you be so kind as to gather your men and leave the hospital?” But the feeling was just intoxicating. Finally I was taking them on – and it had been a long time coming. After four years, no, a lifetime, of being a supine crawler, I was telling these stuffed shirts where to go. They were an abomination, as vile and disgusting as those fat white maggots, that had somehow been allowed to thrive and prosper during the four years of the war.
“We will do no such thing,” said the officer, and for the first time I saw his fingers stray to the army service pistol at his hip. “I am here by the authority of the emergency committee and my men must have water before they leave.”