Hiroshima in the Morning (7 page)

In the part of the room I couldn’t see, there are two chairs, and in them, already waiting, are a female translator and an older man with only one ear. That side of his head is facing me, facing the door so anyone entering can see it clearly. They are dressed formally, in somber suits in the heat.

I find myself moving slowly on the edges, not to startle. I am the last one to arrive. I find a space on the floor and sit quickly, pen ready, in silent protest to the idle chatter around me that had led me to imagine, from the hallway, that the guest of honor had not yet arrived. Surely these people can understand this is not entertainment? The man in the chair
does not acknowledge us. I give him my attention, to show respect; to assure him that I understand how important his story is. I try to find a way to look at his face but not the side of his head where the skin has run like wax and there’s only a pinhole where the ear canal is.

He begins, without preamble, at the moment the bomb was dropped. He was a third year schoolboy, conscripted by the military as most students were. He was one of many young people who were making pistols for zero fighters, and that morning, that split second before, they were receiving instructions for the day’s work, even though by that time, there were no materials to actually make the guns.

He says it felt like being thrown into a furnace.

He talks, or, rather, he recites the events of the day and the weeks and months that followed. His voice alternates with the interpreter’s, both absolutely without expression; the story spins out, or rather it races past us, even with the pauses for interpretation, it does not linger. The dictation I am taking contains gruesome outcomes visited on groups: scorched, carbonized bodies mounding the river banks. A list appears, of deaths: his classmates, his teachers, his mother, his aunt. He was expected to die too, this fourteen-year-old boy. This he states. A simple fact.

“We were numb,” he says. He is numb now, this man whose face has melted on one side. He was one of a handful of children who survived and he has lived the last fifty-six years without an ear. How can he sit there without crying? How can he relive this experience in front of a bunch of gaijin munching shrimp chips?

What must it be like to carry the bomb on your body? It defines him. But of course, it defines them all.

The story is finished, but more than that, it is complete. He wraps up with some brief comments about the need for nuclear disarmament and then falls into silence. No one seems to hear this last bit. A few hands are raised, a few questions asked. Something is missing—this testimony had all of force of the books I’ve been reading, which is to say that it’s too easy to set it down, but at the same time, he was faithful to his story. What had he said?
It was like seeing through a camera, a different dimension.
This is how it still feels.

The man leaves quickly when the questions have dwindled. Ami sees the visitors out, and joins me in the living room.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Ami asks.

I don’t know how to respond. I want to ask if there’s more, if it’s always like this. If it is, I’ve come here for nothing. I am replaying the audience’s questions, noting that they were never addressed to him, but to the translator about “him”—as though he was an object. Was it him, then, or the circumstances? Ami’s expression, which I’d earlier thought to be familiar in its transparency, is now unreadable, and I don’t know how to ask her without seeming rude.

My notes, in my own hand, are enigmatic. “Yes.”

Ami has been watching me struggle with her question, and now she smiles. “Yes,” she says. “I know lots of
hibakusha
. You are in luck.”

IAN TELLS ME: “Seven times! I vomited seven times!”

Dylan breaks in—both my boys are on the telephone because this, finally, is a story, a massive event that Dylan participated in by vomiting only three times but he adores his older brother and expects him to lead so he is reveling in Ian’s greater bounty, ratcheting up his awe of his brother—and I laugh, grateful to be an audience member instead of the midnight mop brigade. They’re creating family lore that will be proudly declared and laughed at for years to come; a memory being rehearsed in my ears:

Brian gets on the phone to confirm, to add the loads of laundry, the hours of no sleep, the final count of beds affected into the boys’ report of the evening. He wants to know whether pillows can be washed or if he should throw them out, and he adds this number in too, with a calculation for their replacement. He is tired—that is part of his message—but he’s also proud to have taken the family through the fire.

Brian misses me. Not as another set of hands in the bathtub or forty-five minutes more of sleep; his mother is there on an extended visit to help out during my absence, there to
swap naps as they all try to recover. He misses my calm, the simple peace that comes from knowing that there’s someone in the world who knows your needs better than you do, and that person is there to meet them before you have to ask. And although he doesn’t say it so directly, there’s a quality to his delivery, to the lovingly detailed minutia, that assumes I would
want
to participate, even in a night of endless regurgitation. That I would want to know it all, to have him relive it with me, so I can take up my pose inside our family frame.

Home is farther away, after only two weeks. There’s no danger I’m forgetting my life there, in fact I remember it so clearly I could tell Brian the exact number of amoxicillin bottles I’ve poured down the throat of one child or the other in my years of young motherhood. Which one cried, which one I had to sit over, lying him on the ground and pinning his arms with my knees so I could hold his mouth open and get the medicine in. The memory of one son catching the medicine in his mouth and spitting it back into my face is my first thought when Brian adds the latest ear infection to his list of domestic upheaval, but to remind him of it now seems churlish. I can’t figure out why it should seem so.

I listen, and murmur comfort about the ear infection. I murmur comfort about his mother’s lengthy visit and some problem I dismiss with the people who live downstairs. I am waiting for the last three days of their life in New York to be thoroughly covered, for my turn to speak, because I finally have some progress to report. I’ve done an interview, with another one lined up. I tell him how odd it was—perhaps
the effect of translation—how the answers felt packaged, pre-prepared. I tell him about Ami, who has agreed to help me with the translations and how we’ve been talking about how to get the real story.

I can hear myself, hear that I am rushing to fill a silence, that I’m reporting, not having a conversation, and that Brian hasn’t spoken. As I wait for his reaction, I find myself talking—I don’t even know about what. I push on, trying not to hear the empty space between us. I want him to know that the trip is not a failure;
I
am not a failure. He doesn’t have to know I did nothing to set the interview up.

“That’s great,” Brian says. “No apartment?”

The boys have to start their day, he tells me—it’s Saturday morning and time to get going. And it’s late for me, too; time to go to sleep. I dumped too much on Brian just now. I don’t know why my mind wandered so far toward my own preoccupations.

“I miss you,” I say, stopping myself from adding, “Really.” It’s my imagination that he isn’t listening, or his lack of sleep. “Tell the boys I miss them too.”

I MUST BE MORE productive now. I have heard the stories of two survivors; I have notes and tapes and no clear idea of what they mean to me. If I had a plot rather than a vague urgency, rather than a need to know, as in
Americans don’t know!
, I might be feeling more accomplished. What was it that they did not know exactly; what was this need of mine, which I could taste but not identify? I’ve been asked, by Ami, by Kimiko, by everyone I’ve met in Japan: What’s your novel about? What do you want to know?

I want to know what war is. What happens? Not who fights, or who dies, or how does the amputated family rise from the ashes, but: What is the subtle effect of fear, uncertainty, aggression, starvation? How do the things we can see and name, even when we think we’ve survived them, change the people who we are?

Aunt Molly was an enemy in America. She was a misfit in Japan.
Am-e-li-can
they sang to her, but it was more than that, more than children in the street flinging stones at her ankles. She was outside their suffering. Outside her own.

And there were others: women whose names I came across, Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan for one reason or another during the war. One of them was a “girl monitor,” drafted by the Japanese government to translate Allied messages intercepted in the Pacific. Another was a young mother who was sent back during the war on an
exchange ship, pulled from the internment camps, reaching Hiroshima just before the bomb. I found them in the books I read in the days before my second visit to Aunty Molly, written by a professor at a University in Tokyo. “Were we the enemy?” the title asked, and now I realize this is my central question. My new book is also about identity and survival.

I have my answers ready now, or rather my questions: What does a person do in the face of rejection? Discarded by two countries, abandoned by family, what behavior is justified to save yourself? And, most importantly, when you are being torn in two directions, how do you decide who you are and where you belong? Kimiko is going to call the director of the Peace Museum and she wants to know what to tell him about my research. But when I try to communicate this new understanding of my novel to her, it seems too odd.

“These women,” she says. “What are their names? There might be a record of them in the museum archives.”

After a brief search, I have them. “Well, my aunt, of course. And here are two others: Yuko Okazaki and Irene Saeki.”

“Who are these women again, what did they do?”

I go over the few details I have, pairing stories with each name.

“All right, then. I will speak to him about these people and we will see.”

Anything and everything can happen now—can materialize spontaneously any time the telephone rings in Japan.

Today I have a new home; a grand place by Hiroshima standards with plastic floors in the living area, and two six-mat tatami rooms with sliding glass doors onto a balcony that looks out over the Otagawa, one of Hiroshima’s six rivers. The river is lined with cherry trees—it’s fairly wide and muddy green and tidal. At certain times of the day, children can play sand baseball in the river bed. I can see the city center from my balcony, and, once I get a bicycle, which Kimiko has promised to lend me, it will be no more than a ten-minute ride to wherever I want to go.

Kimiko found it for me; it is right across the river from her house. She filled it with furniture and bedding, dishes and a desk all loaned by people I don’t know, people I will never meet. In addition to a full set of necessary furniture, I’ve been given a microwave oven that doubles as a toaster, an electric wok for making shabu-shabu, three toothbrushes, six bars of soap, and five medium-sized plastic bowls and buckets, all of which are for washing myself before I take a bath. And now, she is whirling in the center of the floor making magic: transformed from stern to child-like, from elegant dress to multi-patterned moving clothes, from “perhaps, we will see” to “get out of the way so they can bring it
through the door.”
It
being a washing machine, a refrigerator, an air-conditioner.

Kimiko has given me a place for my family when they arrive, a new home. Everything that has walked though her door is a gift to her—for who am I? She has tested her place in the fabric and found thick layers of friendship, and many people who are delighted to return her favors. I’m not the first person she’s been so generous with—Kimiko works regularly into the single digits of the morning for clients, colleagues, and friends—and this is her thanks: a new life for me.

 

I HAVE BEEN IN HIROSHIMA for exactly fifteen days and at last the ground is under my feet. If it has not been as slow a start as I imagined, it has felt eternal. Tonight, I’ll be sleeping on the floor on a futon barely thicker than a winter quilt. I will be writing in my own home. Tomorrow, I’ll learn how to take out my own garbage. Kimiko is worried that it’s too complicated, that I’ll never remember which things go out on which days and how to wrap them, but she doesn’t realize that I
want
to learn. I’m looking forward to taking out my own garbage, because that was Brian’s job. Until I got here, I never realized that, in sharing our lives for so long, Brian and I each grew to excel in some things and to allow other talents to atrophy. If garbage removal doesn’t seem like a talent, still I want to bag it, wrap it, tape it, and set my alarm to make sure it goes out sufficiently early on the right day.