Hiroshima in the Morning (16 page)

I don’t ask which “things.” Nor do I turn the question
on myself. Although I would never admit to ignoring anything, I am the grand suppressor: an emotion rises, pokes up its crown, and before I can see its face—before the eyes can tell me I am hurt that he won’t come, that he makes fun of my fears and has never once tried to find something in Japan he might love in the extensive time he could have given himself here and chose not to; before the lips can say that I’ve changed, without intention, and do not want to be sucked back into my old life before I can understand what my new self looks like—I push it back down. I have never been strong enough to reject a direct request, especially from my husband. And if I have gained that strength in his absence, if I have my own stake in his denial, neither one of us is prepared to know.

Don’t go to the World Series
, I beg him.
Something could happen there.

He has tickets.

I stay in Japan.

I want to be in the company of the
hibakusha
—because they have seen the worst and will recognize the end when it is coming while the rest of the world watches, as dumb and disbelieving as we were the first time. I don’t know why this is so important to me exactly, except that the clock can’t be turned back, nor can it go forward, nor can I find any reason for it to stop here, any reason for any of us to have suffered so much to get to this place. To find myself in a place of no larger purpose, where people die
just because
—this is my nightmare. And to arrive there without warning—without
any way to measure how much more time there is before the worst begins, and how long before it will finally be over.

It is my sense that the world is ending, and I can’t bear to think it will end amid ignorance and indifference. I want, not just a witness, but a witness who
knows.

I am doing too many interviews to prepare for. Often more than one each day. I am talking, almost compulsively, about how I don’t agree with Bush’s rhetoric, about how Americans couldn’t possibly approve in the record numbers the polls are suggesting. Is there relief in their eyes?

Is it my imagination, or have they become more emotional? Their faces look different since the terrorist attacks. There seems to be more anger. More threatened tears. More connection to family: mothers lost, children lost, fathers.

Something is breaking open in the
hibakusha
, and everyone needs to know what’s inside.

CYCLE AND RETURN. The hand back, the pointing finger, to motherhood. My mother stars in every story.
She saved my life. She pulled me out. She screamed for me to leave her before the firestorm surrounded the house
. And when she dies and her child is too young to understand; when the infant can’t find the milk at his dead mother’s breast: that is heartbreak.

But mothers are also unarticulated.
I’m not sure of her age then. She looked—well, like an ordinary Japanese woman. She wore her hair? . . . like an ordinary Japanese woman. I’m sorry I can’t tell you what she looked like. I think she was small.
When you try to sift her pieces out, to pick her apart, bone by bone, she loses form and meaning. She is something felt, not there in the details. She does not exist except in the presence of her children.

 

MY OWN CHILDREN—how do they remember me? If something were to happen here, what details would they carry in their minds? On black and white paper, echoes of me, frozen in anecdote; an angle of chin fading. With each passing year, I would look more like a stranger, until the woman in the photograph and the mother in the heart were no longer one.

People ask me:
Don’t you miss your children?
As if my feeling for them is attached to where I am, declared by a physical place, that I couldn’t be here if I loved them. Can’t I be? Is “missing” attached to a specific body’s presence? How could it be when so many people I have spoken to cannot describe their own mothers?

They ask:
Don’t they miss you?

So far away, I wonder: do they? And if they don’t, as they seem not to when I call them, as they seem fine, busy, surrounded, perhaps, by so much love, so many grandparents, aunts, friends, and their father that they have no fear of being alone, what is a mother then? What do we give to our children that remains, long after our hairdos fade? The Maiden I spoke with credited her mother with her life, but could not remember what they talked about. She was convinced of her mother’s dedication, yet had very few memories of her.

It is not just descriptive detail that mothers slip away from during my interviews; even in memory, they are unmoored. I know my own mother intimately: I know her blood, the sound and smell of her movement, and yet I am surprised by the fact that she was my age now when I graduated from high school. This fact should be a reminder, yet it drops like a piece of fresh news. She is mine—where I came from, where I have recorded my identity—yet I cannot access most of our lives together. There is no concrete proof that we both were there. When I think of it this way, there is panic. And still she comes to me, now more than ever, in new poses, with words that I can’t be sure she ever
said. It is a comfort that visits me; it’s that sense of comfort that we miss, and mourn.

We don’t have to know who our mothers are to love them, but to be a mother, we have to know who our mothers were. When my mother was thirty-six, what did she look like beyond the photographs? What image is uncaptured? What memories are mine?

When I was thirty-six, I took my four-year-old son to pre-kindergarten for the first day of school. And when it was time to go, he turned to me with his small, trembling chin, and said: “Mommy, I will always remember you.” Now, in Hiroshima, I am thirty-seven, and a man in his seventies who will not talk about the war or the bombing tells me about his mother:

AMI AND I ARE looking for beer.

We find it in an outdoor beer garden set up just northeast of Hiroshima Castle; we grab a plastic table and some Kirin in paper cups. It’s Sports Day. On this gravel and dirt rim around the moat, in the field of red and white striped
Kirin umbrellas, we have found fair food, and some kind of game Ami can’t identify being played beneath a huge balloon—a child’s head on the body of a globe. There are children, everywhere; most of them small.

There is a pause—this day is a pause. I have not spoken to Brian in several days, and in this silence, the world is saved. The
taihens
are fading, I am not such a magnet anymore for strangers who swerve off their paths to ask,
America-jin, desuka
?, followed by
it’s terrible: taihen
. If I have been ranting, against the rhetoric and fears that are urging retaliation; if I once thought vulnerability would bring empathy—I am still naïve, still very much alone.

In Hiroshima, now, there is more fear. In this pause, this beer garden, we have come to test it. Long before September 11, I asked Ami to help me “find the shadow,” the emotion that must have been burned into the persons of every Hiroshima citizen, even those who were not yet born. This is my quest—to find the past in this very modern city—and in the wake of the
taihens
and the realization in the eyes around me that America is not as civilized as was once supposed, I have begun to glimpse it. What Ami’s interest in all this is, though, I’ve never been sure.

“Let’s talk to people,” she says. Her cup is empty. “How about that guy? Are you ready?”

I freeze.
Talk to people
? About what?

“Anything. You pick the questions. I’ll translate. What about those two?”

“What about him?”

“I don’t know . . . ” What don’t I know? What more is there to hope for? “Okay. Here’s a question. Ah . . . .hmm . . . ‘Do you think about war?’”

“
Sumimasen
!” Ami calls to get the attention of two high school-aged boys, and suddenly they are at the table. Rangy, slouching, one of them is wearing a towel on his head folded over as if he escaped from a beauty salon. Their hair is dyed; one is showing a strip of very taut belly above his pants. Both have cell phones.

Very polite.

They are talking about America, and Bush, and what will happen next with the same level of interest as they might have responded to
Do you think about camping
? No mention of World War II. So I ask, “Do you think about World War II and the atomic bombing?”

Not really.

Is there anything in this city, about this city, that makes you think about the bombing?

Well, there is the Gembaku Dome . . . But, not really.

The next two
sumimasens
yield nothing. An older woman who does not want to talk, a bald man with a lost child in tow who promises to return but doesn’t. Then a couple in their fifties walks by.

“Do you think about war?” Ami asks them.

Yesterday, the woman begins, they went to Iwakuni and saw the place where the kamikazes took off during the war. Sixteen-year-old boys who wanted to give their lives to protect their mothers. So she has been thinking a lot about war. These boys are just like the ones in Afghanistan: indoctrinated. They are going to give their lives. She has tears in her eyes. Ami is trying to do a simultaneous translation under her breath, but the woman is focused on me, communicating her concern, her eyes red, and I am trying to communicate back empathy and agreement. The woman is on the proverbial roll—no questions would even be heard—Bush is doing the wrong thing, and Hiroshima should respond; Hiroshima has a responsibility to teach the world what war truly is. She keeps talking about food and water, that they should be the focus, not bombing civilians. She gets into a riff, where food and water chase each other around with not bombing civilians and the kind man standing with her is looking thoughtful and trying to talk, but there is no room. She is leaning toward me, taking off her glasses to wipe her eyes, still talking about food and water, clutched by her conviction that bombing civilians is wrong.

It seems it could be the beginning of something. When the couple is gone, we are giddy. We could do this, from time to time, in a spare moment, Ami says: grab people, ask them questions. I consider this offer as I look at my friend, younger than I am; I have met the parents she lives with, who are not
hibakusha
themselves; I’ve gone on excursions
with her, thanks to her vaguely jobless state. Ami asks for nothing—no money, no favors, no compensation for her tireless translations. It’s her pleasure, she says; she is a peace activist. She is doing something good, something that presents itself in the world as needing to be done. But now, as I look into this face I’ve come to recognize in silhouette and half-light—the beauty mark, the outsized smile—I have to ask:

“Why do you do this? All of this, for me. Why does it matter?”

At ground zero of the world’s first atomic bombing, it is peaceful. We sit on the edge of the moat, looking toward the white-winged castle on the opposite bank, framed in an angular skeleton of scaffolding. This was the headquarters of the regional military during the war, now being refurbished, put on view.

“You have been to the Peace Museum,” Ami ventures. “What did you see?

“I was in elementary school,” she continues. “We went as a class. I was maybe nine? Ten? It was a group of us, silly girls, oohing about anything, making a fuss. We were supposed to answer questions about what we saw, and in the first rooms, so many kids were crowded around the same boxes. I remember I was looking for something interesting . . . ”

Then she tells me about Shin’s tricycle.

Shinichi Tetsutani was three years old when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He was playing in the yard on his beloved tricycle at that moment, and he died later that day. His father buried Shin’s tricycle with him
because he couldn’t bear to think of his three-year-old boy alone in the ground. Forty years later, when Shin’s bones were moved to the family plot, the charred and twisted tricycle was donated to the Peace Museum. And because of this single, rusted exhibit, Ami can no longer step foot into the Peace Museum.