Mr Two Bomb (12 page)

“And now you can get me out of here,” she said.

“So I shall.”

I can still picture her exactly in that dark little hole, only her head above the surface, as if she were drowning in a well of rubble. Still smiling, just for the pleasure of having me with her. Perhaps she knew all along that she would never escape.

It became increasingly difficult to clear the rubble. Although we had found Sumie, there was very little space to work with, and all the fragments had been heavily compacted. Eventually, after what felt like an hour, I had loosened enough to free Sumie’s arms. She held her hands loose above her head.

“Much better,” she said. “Now I can kiss you properly.” Her arms snaked round my neck and she kissed me on the lips. I could taste the dust.

“Come on you two,” Shinzo called down. “This is no time for kissing. Let me help.”

We swapped places and I caught another glimpse of our ever-changing city. Every ten minutes, it seemed that something extraordinary, fantastical was occurring to Hiroshima. Long after the bomb was dropped, the city was still in a constant state of metamorphosis.

I was shocked at how quickly the individual fires seemed to have linked together. They were sweeping across the city in a single red rampant wave – and our waterways, our very own natural firewalls, made no difference whatsoever. The hot air was rising and the cold air was sweeping in underneath, creating a vast tornado which could jump streets and even rivers.

I watched the flames as I continued to shift the debris. It was difficult to judge distances, but it looked as if the firestorm was about a kilometre from us. I tried to guess at its speed, but I had no idea. I would have been horrified if I had known it was ripping through the city at five metres a second.

The bomb had also had the most extraordinary effect on our weather system. For some time there had been crackling thunder overhead. I felt the pleasant smack of rain falling onto the back of my head. I had not had anything to drink all morning; I was parched.

I closed my eyes and turned my face to the heavens. I might even have had my mouth open, if only to savour a few drops of rain on my lips.

“Yuk!” said the girl. “Yuk! What is this?”

I opened my eyes. She was looking at the backs of her hands and then rubbing them against her top. She looked as if she had been flicked with black oil.

“The rain is black!” she said. “Are they now dropping oil on us?”

I looked at some of the rain drops on my skin. They felt much colder than normal and had the density and tackiness of black ink. Even when I had wiped the raindrops away, they still left a residual stain. I sniffed at my hands. They didn’t smell of oil.

“It is all the muck in the dust-cloud,” I said. “The rain is bringing it down. I wouldn’t drink it.”

That, as it turned out, was an understatement. The black rain did not just contain dirt from the cloud, but radioactive fall-out – an entirely new concept to the world. The Yankees spent years denying that there had been any lingering radiation from the bomb. For those squeaky-clean moralists, their bomb was a good, wholesome US kind of bomb, and the only casualties were those who had been killed in the first explosion and the subsequent firestorm.

It would take the Yankees some years to accept that the radiation from Little Boy – which lingered over Hiroshima for perhaps a month – may ultimately have been responsible for more deaths than the actual blast. Not that this fact was ever going to spoil the Yankees’ riotous celebrations after the bomb had been dropped – “It’s the best goddamn news in the whole world!” trilled that oaf President Truman. But I may later have given them pause for thought as they realised that they had condemned perhaps 100,000 people to painfully lingering deaths from cancer, leukaemia and all the other foul by-products of radioactivity.

How much it must have vexed the Yankees. They spent years denying that their baby had anything to do with all these thousands of anomalous deaths that were occurring every year in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – in the same way, I imagine, as a tearful mother defends her serial killer son.

The black rain did not – fortunately – stay over us for long. We were on the very eastern outskirts of that hellish black raincloud which was drifting into the countryside to the northwest of Hiroshima. In some places which had hardly been touched by the bomb, some ten centimetres of black rain fell in three hours, and for those that were caught out in the storm, the long-term health consequences were catastrophic.

The firestorm was worryingly close, sweeping up from the south and now also on our flanks. I swapped positions again with Shinzo, pulling him out of the hole before jumping down to Sumie. We had minutes, at best, to free her.

She gazed up at me, proffering her lips, and I kissed her.

“I love you,” she said.

“You’re not finished yet.”

“Still you cannot say it?”

“Plenty of time for that when you are free.”

Shinzo had cleared much of the debris around her chest, but Sumie was still pinned from beneath the waist. I squatted above her, hooking my elbows underneath her armpits. “Brace yourself,” I said. “This might hurt.”

I shifted my feet, like a weight-lifter before the clean and jerk, took a deep breath and rolled backwards. My eyes were shut tight, teeth clenched. I was pulling with all my might. I gave it perhaps ten seconds, every sinew straining upwards, but Sumie did not move so much as a centimetre. She must have been in the most excruciating pain.

I gave it one more try, but, again, nothing. She gave an involuntary yelp, but that was the only indication of her discomfort.

“There is something pinning me,” she said. “I cannot feel anything below my waist. Is there a beam over my legs?”

As I climbed out of the hole, I could see the beam that was pinning Sumie down, but there was too much rubble on it, tons and tons of tiles.

We tried, how we tried, to shift it, Shinzo and I straining away and the girl also adding her puny weight, but it would not budge. For a few minutes, I worked above the beam, manically trying to clear debris, then back to Sumie, tugging, tugging, as wisps of glowing ember started to fill the air. I called out to Shinzo for some rope, hoping that together we might pull her out. A last snatched kiss, as I struggled back out of the hole, and that sickening moment as I realised that the flames were all but upon us. The speed of the firestorm was shocking. It appeared almost to have flanked us and even now was licking at the ruined houses at the end of the street.

“Come on!” I screamed at Shinzo, suffused by this rippling flood of panic. I was too late. There was not enough time to save her. All I could do was scream out my rage at Shinzo. “Forget that. Come here! Help me! Help me move this beam!” My breath coming in short, quick pants as a trembling red mist descended over me. Oh, butI felt such brute power then I was not capable of thinking straight. All I could do was throw myself at the beam, again and again, as senseless as a bull that repeatedly charges the red cape. I was clawing at it, mewling with frustrated rage, the tears streaming down my face. Hammering the wood, punching it with my bare fists. It was hopeless.

Shinzo threw himself at the beam. For the first time, I could feel it shuddering beneath our weight, perhaps a centimetre or two. We just needed more time.

“Sumie! Can you move?” I screamed. “Can you move at all?”

I could only just make out her voice. The roar of the firestorm was deafening. “No,” I could hear her say. “I cannot move.”

Shinzo and I gave one last despairing heave at the beam, but it was never going to be enough.

Shinzo and the girl jumped down from the rubble and were standing in the road. The flames were all but upon us. I could feel the heat washing over me, along with this thunder of a thousand homes being reduced to charred ash.

“There is no time!” Shinzo screamed at me. “Move!”

I looked down at Sumie for the last time. The panic was already starting to ebb, to be replaced by this dull resignation that I had failed my lover.

Her hands were now clasped in front of her face, as if in prayer. She looked up at me.

“You must go,” she said. “Save yourself.”

“I am sorry.”

The flames from the firestorm were within seconds of torching the wreckage of Sumie’s house.

That last harrowing plea from Sumie, as she realised that her life was all but over. “Will you live for me?” That is what she asked. The last wish of a person who realises that their life is over and who knows that the very best that they can hope for is that their life be lived vicariously through someone else.

I paused, stumbling over my words, not knowing what to say.

“You will? You will live for me?” she asked again.

“I will try.”

The smoke was so thick, so dense, that I could hardly see Sumie at the bottom of the pit. A glimpse of her gazing up at me. And as the flames crackled at my feet, I gave a last despairing wave and bounded down onto the road where Shinzo and the girl were already racing away from the firestorm.

After about 50 metres, I stopped and looked back. Sumie’s house had already been engulfed in the inferno, a moving wall of flame which indiscriminately devoured everything in its path. The sound and the fury was intense, like the thundering roar of a storm at sea. I never heard her scream.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After the war, as I came to take quiet stock of my life, I often wondered if I could have done more for Sumie.

Some say that I did everything in my powers to save her: that I reached her house as quickly as I could after the explosion; and that when I was there, I did not stint myself in trying to free her.

That is possibly so. But what I do also know is that, over the years, I have heard of many tales of heroism that put me to shame. One story particularly struck a chord as it was so very similar to my own. A mother was trying to rescue her daughter from the wreckage of their home. Like Sumie, the girl was pinned tight beneath a beam, and the ruins were only minutes from being swallowed by the firestorm. Some bystanders had tried to shift the beam, but had given up. “It cannot be done,” they had said. “Leave your daughter and flee.”

The mother was horribly injured. Her skin was hanging off her in great bleeding strips, her face had been burned black by the blast. Yet still she summoned the energy to totter over to the beam. She braced her back underneath it, and then with one galvanic thrust lifted the beam clean upwards – by herself lifted a beam that was so heavy that it had already defeated three men. The woman’s daughter scrabbled free and the pair of them fled the firestorm.

What a miraculous event, and the pity of it was that by the next day that wonderful woman was dead. But she had done what every parent aspires to do: she had saved her child’s life, and I like to think that when she died, she would have had a smile on her lips, and would have known in her heart that she had done everything that a mother can do.

But had I? I suppose I had made an effort to release Sumie. It was not nearly enough, however, and, over 60 years on, I still wonder if I could have done more for her.

I could certainly have eased her last moments. I could have given her the words that she longed to hear – “I love you”. But, out of blinkered pride, and that ill-judged conceit of being “true to myself”, I had bitten back any thought of kindness.

We ran any which way we could away from the flames. The smoke was all about us, and all we could think was to flee the firestorm, running in any direction that would take us away from that crackling roar.

Shinzo was quickly spent. He stood there, bent over with hands on knees, gasping down great lungfuls of smoky air, and hacking as he tried to talk.

We were on a street corner, I know not where. In the smoke and the chaos, it was impossible to get your bearings. All I could see was the firestorm following us like some unremitting fiend from hell and, no matter how hard we raced, the flames were always licking at our heels.

“You go on,” said Shinzo. “I’m done.”

Was I, perhaps, in half a mind, to take him at his word? It is all too possible that that odious man that was myself would even have left his best friend to fry in the flames.

But, fortunately, the girl was there. She did the most remarkable thing. She kicked Shinzo – hard – on the ankle, as if cajoling a stubborn bullock. “Come on,” she said. “Come on!”

“Ouch!” he said. “Leave me. I cannot do it.”

The girl kicked him again. Her foot connected right with the seat of his pants. I watched in slight bemusement as the girl started to dance round Shinzo, poking him in the ribs with her finger. “Come on!” she said. “We’re not leaving you.”

“Ouch!” he said, as she kicked him again on the shin. “Can a man be left to die in peace?”

“No, not you,” said the girl, giving him another kick on the backside. “Even when the flames have taken me and even when my hair is burning and my skin has turned black, with my last breath I will still kick you.”

Shinzo caught my eye, the look perhaps of a mule that, stubborn as he is, knows when he is beaten.

“This has nothing to do with me,” I said. “If you want her to stop, then just start moving.”

Shinzo gave a little smile. “Was she always this bossy?” he asked, crying out as she kicked him again on the ankle.

Like a farmer who knows the exact moment when to switch from the stick to the carrot, the girl took Shinzo by the hand and was leading him down the rubble-strewn street.

He was stumbling down the road, head bowed as he stared at his feet. He coughed down another gasp of air.

“Take his other hand!” the girl ordered.

I complied, taking Shinzo’s fat, calloused fingers in my own. I gave his hand a little squeeze for luck, but he did not return it.

“Count to ten!” said the girl. “Count each step as we go.”

“What do we do when we get to ten?” I asked.

“We start at the beginning again.”

Shinzo was so worn out, I doubt he even had the energy to count. All he could do was plonk one foot in front of the other and then gird his loins to make the next step.