The Heat of the Sun (31 page)

And that, I thought, was the end of my book. I pulled the last page from the typewriter with relief. Of all the books I had written, this had been the
hardest. After the war I felt as if a curtain had come down, dividing me decisively from the world I used to know. There was so much I wanted to forget. I ignored articles about Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. I appeared indifferent to campaigns against nuclear weapons, angering my students at the liberal arts college in Monterey where I taught for many years. Only a sense of duty compelled me
to tell my story. Now I need never look at it again. My neat stack of pages, bound in twine, would lodge in a drawer of my filing cabinet, undisturbed until their author was dead. I was finished. I
could forget.

Soon I received a letter that changed my mind. PEN, the writers’ organization, was sending an American delegation to Japan to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bombings.
As arguably (I liked the ‘arguably’) America’s most distinguished living biographer, would I... ? Would I! My first reaction was a rage I could neither control nor explain. I
crumpled the letter and flung it across my study. But I knew it was a summons I would not be able to resist. Rage gave way and I retrieved the ball of paper, smoothing it flat with a sorrowful
reverence, as if it were a love letter from long ago. Would I...? Of course, though I told myself I was a fool. I was old. I expected to die soon. Perhaps I would die in Japan, overwhelmed by
memories.

I need neither have feared nor hoped. The world of skyscrapers and neon, salarymen and pachinko parlours that confronted our delegation when we landed had nothing to do with me. Modern Japan has
about it the quality of a stage set. The modernity so strenuously imitated seems likely at any moment to vanish, revealing the eternal country beneath. Nothing seems real.

In the days that followed, we travelled in a plush coach, a sort of movie star’s Greyhound, from Tokyo to Kyoto, Kyoto to Hiroshima, Hiroshima to Nagasaki. Even when our travels provided
us with visions more picturesque, I saw them unfold like a film, outside me: the toppling tiered rice fields, the temples and torii, the painted geishas, the Shinto shrines, the statues of the
Buddha. This was Japan, and Japan was pictures.

Piously, my fellow delegates clicked their cameras. I suppose they found me remote. Arwin Janis Quirk, the prolific feminist novelist, made no attempt to interest me in her denunciations of
patriarchy. Earl Rogers, a boozy literary lion some twenty years my junior, who had published a ‘searing’ war novel in 1948 and not much since, lost all respect for me when he learned I
had spent the war as what he called a ‘pen-pusher’; I resisted saying I had never respected him. Schneider Kipfer, the Beat poet, had few interests other than smoking marijuana and
reading the I Ching. I had hopes of friendship with Hooper McGee, the Southern short-story writer, but while she warmed to me when she thought I was Southern, she cooled when I told her I had grown
up in France. Chip Striker, the black activist playwright, whose political pronouncements had made him even more notorious than his taboo-defying plays, had too much to do in speechifying on race
prejudice, war, and American imperialism to pay much attention to me. On the coach stereo, our Japanese driver played American country music. Chip Striker complained, to little effect, about
‘redneck shit’. There was a song by Buck Owens about a man who left his heart with a girl made in Japan. The driver repeated it remorselessly.

The three days we spent in Hiroshima were – or were meant to be – the most important part of our itinerary. Dutifully, we trailed through exhibitions, stood through ceremonies, sat
through speeches, and made speeches of our own, but the blankness in me remained. I was grateful for the kindness of our Japanese hosts, who treated me with a solicitude I felt I hardly
deserved.

On the morning of August 6, at the commemoration of the bombing, I did my best to be moved by Peace Memorial Park, with its cenotaph and surmounting arch. Standing between a blissful Schneider
Kipfer and the ostentatiously sobbing Arwin Janis Quirk, I gazed across the pool and lush gardens to the old Industrial Promotion Hall across the river, one of the few buildings left standing after
the bombing, with the skeleton frame of its shattered dome.
This is life. This is death. This is what men do
, the dome seemed to say, but I did not want to hear.

There is a torch in the park called the Flame of Peace. It always burns.

‘An eternal flame,’ I said, when our Japanese lady guide had explained it to us the day before.

She shook her head. ‘No, not eternal. When the last atomic weapon is destroyed, the flame shall be extinguished.’

The ceremony wore on. Voices spoke in Japanese and English, reciting familiar facts, but still I felt only numb: the destructive power of so many thousands of tons of TNT, the radioactive
fireball, the heat so searing that only shadows of some of the dead remained, branded on the rubble like photographic negatives. I breathed slowly, as if I were sleeping. We build our memorials and
make our speeches: what else are we to do? What had happened in this place was too great to comprehend, let alone allay. Had it been inevitable? It was no act of God: men had made decisions, bent
their inventive arts towards this end, and this had happened. It is what men do: we kill one another, and invent our reasons why.

I looked away from the impassive arch and the faces all around me: towards the trees that stirred a little on a scented breeze; towards the blue, cloudless sky to which, forty years before, an
indifferent gravity had reached up and pulled down the sun. Birds sang in the trees, and the speaker quoted lines from a thirteenth-century text: ‘
Ceaselessly, the river flows and yet the
water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation
.’

That evening I excused myself from a banquet and rested in my hotel room. There was something comforting in the anonymous plush decor. I could have been anywhere: Atlanta, Buenos Aires, Cairo,
Delhi...

Next morning the movie-star Greyhound took us to Nagasaki. It was an afterthought of sorts, if a necessary one. Our mission was accomplished: the main business over, the main photographs taken,
the main quotations recorded by reporters. I wished I could go home at once. I was weary of solemn, useless words; weary of floral tributes; weary of Earl Rogers and Chip Striker with their
aggressive voices and confident simple certainties and competing never-resting efforts to go to bed with Arwin Janis Quirk.

When we reached Nagasaki I announced, to the consternation of our hosts, that I would attend only the memorial service on the morning of August 9. I pleaded tiredness and was believed; I was an
old man, and frail – but not so frail as I made out. Liberated from a conference on nuclear weapons, I set out to explore the city.

Nagasaki had not been destroyed so thoroughly as Hiroshima. Hills and valleys had confined the worst of the blast to the north, where the harbour narrows into the river. Around the harbour, much
of the old city I had known could still be made out, like scraps of a collage, papered over here and there with many a recent addition.

Renting a cab to drive me around, I surprised the driver by saying I had no wish to see Hypocentre Park or the Peace Statue or the Atomic Bomb Museum. I visited temples and browsed in stores. I
looked at the view from Inasa-yama, across the harbour and over the sea. Whether my purpose was clear to me from the first, I cannot say. Can our intentions grow in us unknown, deep in our minds,
before we become aware of them? Mine revealed itself to me with no surge of insight; I felt no surprise, unless at the fact that it had taken so long to come to light. But of course: I could avoid
it no longer. On the afternoon of August 8, I asked my driver to take me to the top of Higashi Hill.

My heart beat hard as the cab climbed. How could so many years have passed? How could I have grown so old? I closed my eyes. The afternoon was hot. A fly buzzed against the back windshield, and
I wanted to tell the driver to stop and let it out. The motion of the cab made me feel sick; but then the cab slowed, gravel crunched under the tyres and I let my eyes open.

That the house would still be there was more than I had dreamed. The place was neither dilapidated nor altered in ways that I could see; still it stood in its fecund gardens, gazing down to the
harbour. I hauled myself from the cab, and looked back at my driver, who had alighted as well. He smiled, gestured for me to go ahead, then bent with a scooping hand into an open back door,
endeavouring to release the trapped fly.

Summer caressed me and scents were strong as I moved through the gardens. Unreally, I ran a hand down the warm trunk of a cedar; I touched the flesh of ferns; light flickered over paving stones
in a dance of shadows and sun; none of it was real, and nor was the man I saw when the path turned: an old Japanese man – a gardener, I assumed – hunching his coppery, naked back over a
bed of azaleas. His hands were knotted and his head was bald. Trimming stalks, he hummed a little. I moved closer. The old man had not heard me, but my steps were slow and soft.

I wondered if I could make him understand me. I wanted to ask him who lived here now.

I cleared my throat and tried.

He did not turn.

I tried again.

‘He’s deaf,’ came a voice behind me. ‘He likes to say it was the bomb. Just old age, really.’

I turned, and was sure I was dreaming.

‘Trouble,’ I said. ‘You’re alive!’

I can hardly say he had not changed. He was an old man, like me; hooded folds half-concealed his eyes; his hair was white; when he smiled, as he did then, his face pleated into a thousand
wrinkles and his teeth had acquired the brown-ivory patina of age. Yet somehow, strangely, he defied time. He was still what he had always been. He was still my Trouble.

‘You aren’t surprised to see me?’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I’ve been waiting.’

‘For forty years?’

‘Don’t flatter yourself. We get the papers even here, you know. I read about your delegation. Come into the house,’ he added. ‘Or doesn’t a busy man like you have
time for tea?’

As we passed the gardener, Trouble bent down, laying a hand on the old man’s back. The face turned to look at his, and Trouble, enunciating clearly, said something in Japanese. The
gardener nodded to him, then to me, and smiled, but I knew by then that he was not a gardener.

‘Isamu,’ I said.

Shaken, I let Trouble lead me up to the veranda. A sparse tatami room stood open to the outdoors. We sat on mats at a little low table. Isamu joined us, and a girl who looked like a young Suzuki
served us green tea.

‘Of course, hardly any of this is original,’ said Trouble, gesturing around him. ‘We’ve replaced so many walls and beams, it’s a whole new house, really.’

‘But still the old house,’ said Isamu, whose deafness, I gathered, was not complete.

Much of our conversation that day was trivial. We were three old men whose lives had been and gone; there was little left for us but to enjoy the garden and wonder whether there would be rain
soon. Yet I learned much. Isamu had married after the war, though his wife was dead now; the girl who served us tea was his daughter. Until his retirement, he had been a Mitsubishi executive;
Trouble had given English lessons and translated business documents. In old age, the two men were comfortable, but not rich. Prince Yamadori, executed by the Americans as a war criminal, had left
his nephew nothing; Yamadori’s title had been stripped from him, his assets confiscated.

Still the war, and its bitter end, loomed over them. Vividly but calmly, Trouble spoke of those desperate days after the bombing, when thousands of dying refugees crowded the roads around the
harbour, many of them blind or mutilated hideously, all of them struggling uselessly to flee.

‘We cared for them,’ he said, ‘as best we could. But it was never enough.’

He looked into the distance, and I thought: he’s changed. But of course he had changed. When I had last seen him he was over forty, but even then he remained in essence a callow boy.

Now, at last, Ben Pinkerton was a man.

I wondered if he regretted anything and was not sure he did. Life had been difficult for him during the years of the occupation. At all costs he could not be identified as Benjamin Franklin
Pinkerton II. Lying low, he had kept out of sight of the Americans. He had changed his name and carried forged papers; to this day he was known in Nagasaki as Mr Glover.

‘Hey, Sharpless, remember this?’ Trouble said suddenly, leaping up like a man much younger. In a corner of the room stood an old-fashioned phonograph with a frilly, yawning horn,
like the one the fellows at Blaze had smashed years before. He wound it up, let the needle drop – and the years fell away; it was 1914, and there I was, hearing that intemperate bellowing
voice, rising startled from my dorm-room bed, moving down a line of curtained cubicles to meet a boy with the most extraordinary eyes I had ever seen.

A lifetime later, I looked into those eyes and wondered if I would weep – cast myself down and weep helplessly, abandoned to all dignity and shame.
Some of these days – oh,
you’ll miss me, honey
, sang Sophie Tucker. Good old Sophie Tucker! She had been right about everything.

When tea was over Isamu retired to rest, and Trouble and I took a turn about the garden. He praised Isamu’s gardening skills, and I was keen in my admiration; I kept my voice light, but
something was slipping inside me, ready to fall. Was there a lesson I must learn, too late? Trouble asked me about my books. One of them had won the Pulitzer and he said he had better read it; I
doubted that he would. I told him about the PEN delegation and he murmured interest politely. We talked about Aunt Toolie, and the theatre company she still ran in Carmel – though by now she
was well over ninety; we talked about Le Vol and his recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Trouble urged me to give them his best wishes. I said I would, and, of course, I would not. I
would never tell them he was still alive. He would be my secret, locked inside my heart.