Hiroshima in the Morning Page 11
I’ve spent most of the rest of the day down on the West Side Highway which offers an unimpeded view of the rubble. We stood along the street to cheer on the steady stream of National Guardsmen, firefighters from all over the country, buses of rescue workers and dump truck convoys as they headed down into the War Zone, like soldiers going off to rescue our city. We waved for hours and held up signs that said THANK YOU and OUR HEROES. Later the dump trucks began returning, filled with the carcasses of cars and twisted beams that were being carted off to barges somewhere uptown. I met a woman from Battery Park City who had literally run from her apartment with nothing but the clothes on her back as the towers fell around her. She had to dodge body parts and an airplane tire before getting to safety in the Village.
The test for all of us will not be getting through the initial attack, but how we will try to move forward. Our IDs are checked each time we cross Fourteenth Street like it is a border. Right now the wind has shifted and the smell is getting stronger as the cloud blows over the island instead of out to sea as it did yesterday. I’m thinking of relocating for the night to a friend’s uptown although the mayor is saying the air is not toxic. I’ll wait a bit and see. All New Yorkers are gaining a great new respect for our controversial mayor and feel in good hands with him at the helm.
That’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted. Keep us in your thoughts. n
SEPTEMBER 13, 2001
I HAVE BEEN WAITING in my apartment for something to happen, for nothing to happen. It’s so still here, in the silence; I can hide here, I can believe the dreams of yesterday are just that. I will wake up, and if I don’t wake up, I will be passed over, unharmed, just as I imagine that my family will be safe in our house if they stay inside and wait. I have friends in New York who are venturing out, searching the wreckage, roaming the ruined city. Except, it is not exactly ruined. They are fine, seem safe. They are snatching life from the debris.
New York is not Hiroshima. The world is safer if New York is not Hiroshima. Not a ruin where it was impossible to sightsee in the first stunned months, impossible to visit the epicenter as a tourist from a place of safety and normalcy for years.
Still, I imagine that my family is inside, like I am, all of us in the closet in the dark, waiting for the footsteps to fade, waiting until there are no more planes in the air—it seems, now, that there are no planes in the air. There is no word—no news, no more threats, no explanation or assurance to coax us out of this nothingness, this refuge where grief cannot move through the vacuum. Not yet.
There is nothing to do yet. I don’t have anything to jump at, like Nathan, no way to move to prove that I’m not dead. Of course, I am not dead. My home is raining pieces of paper and bits of fiberglass and I’m not even affected.
I am the only person left on the planet who has no experience of war.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2001
THE CALLS HAVE BEEN COMING steadily, into the silence. One of Kimiko’s friends, Maiko, calls at ten a.m. Her son is in New York and she still hasn’t been able to get through to him. She wants to know how I am. She wants to know if she should cancel the interview she’s arranged with Dr. Fujita this afternoon.
Cancel the interview?
What is today?
I have an interview.
I have been up for hours; I am showered, dressed. I have nothing to do but sit by the phone, knowing that it cannot be Brian and wondering if perhaps it might be. Nothing to do but write in my diary. I haven’t eaten; I haven’t looked at my calendar.
Will anyone mind if I don’t cancel my interview?
I have been waiting to speak with Keiko Fujita since I arrived in Hiroshima. She was a practicing doctor in Hiroshima during the war—one of the few still alive. I am writing a doctor into the novel, so I need Dr. Fujita’s information.
Need is enough, I know. Fulfilling an obligation in Japan is enough reason, enough excuse to go out. But the fact is, I want to talk to her. I want to talk to someone. I want my life to move again, more recognizably, more truthfully than the sound of my voice on the telephone saying: “Yes, I heard. Everyone is fine. Yes, it’s lucky isn’t it? No, don’t worry.”
But Maiko’s son is in New York.
“Hmm,” I say. “What do you think? Perhaps it’s not a good time for you?”
“No problem,” she says. “I am fine.”
Keiko Fujita has not just the promised two, but a full four hours of energy to give me. She has been telling her story, and helping others tell theirs, for decades, so she has more versions than I’m used to, with more details. Since she was badly injured in the bombing, she can’t report on the hospitals, but she’s delighted to go off the track and gossip about the colleague who stole her lunch in the waning days of starvation before the bombing; about husbands and families; about how she made a choice to care for her mother instead of being married; about wedding hairstyles; about hats. For the first time during one of my interviews, there is no need to keep her talking or press for details. Either she has an incredible memory or something has opened in her today. But today, there’s nothing for me to do, nothing but listen, but watch. Amid these anecdotes are vivid descriptions of her wounds, her back sliced open, of the blackened post-bomb rush to get out of the city—some of the most powerful, certainly the most personal, descriptions I have ever heard. I feel myself relaxing as she talks, though I had no sensation that I was not relaxed before. Perhaps it’s that I have found myself doing what I was doing before the World Trade Center fell, something I know. Perhaps it is that the narrative of Hiroshima is now familiar, soothing in its utter destruction, so much worse than now. The emotional blanks of Hiroshima have suddenly become reassuring: if Hiroshima is too terrible to be reexperienced, even from the distance of time, if it cannot be described, then it is intangible, just a nightmare. Something too aberrant to be repeated.
When Dr. Fujita is finished and has passed on other people’s tales of horror, it must merely be politeness, then, that turns her attention to how awful the terrorist attack was and how happy she is that my family survived.
She makes no relative judgment between the two, so I am compelled to. What happened to her, I point out, and to Hiroshima, was a hundred times worse. An entire city, an entire network of roads, shelter, medicine, families destroyed vs. downtown Manhattan cordoned off but with email access and intermittent telephone. I tell her of the stream of messages I’ve received from every friend and acquaintance in my address book: “We are fine.” “Family Flood is safe.” “It is very, very weird here.” “I have a cold.” Everyone alive, home, safe. Some even with humor intact. Brian wrote to me about the guy who called his office several hours after the attack to rant about the rat running around his apartment.
But in Dr. Fujita’s eyes, there is a break in the timeline, a union of past, present, and future. And it doesn’t lessen her sorrow.
Her sorrow for me.
“I was looking at the airplane from the window and wondering whether I should leave home or not. Then, I felt as if my back was being sliced open with a sword. I couldn’t walk, my leg was cut, my face was bleeding.
“One of the X-ray technicians who I worked with came to my house to rescue me. They prepared a stretcher. It was so painful, and then something happened, the string broke on the stretcher and I fell to the ground. I was in so much pain, so I stayed in the field for a while. Of course, there was no shade at all. I didn’t drink—no water. I stayed in the open air.
“While I was lying on the ground, a woman came up to me carrying a stone—a large mortar. She put it down on the ground beside me, and then she died. I don’t know why she was carrying the mortar. During the war time, we had such a food shortage, so maybe it was very precious to her. In the face of such a crisis, who can say how a human being will react? That woman picked up a heavy stone and carried it, and then she died.”
—Eighty-nine-year-old female survivor, doctor
“We knew the world would not be the same: a few people laughed, a few
people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer, recalling the reaction
at Los Alamos after seeing the Trinity Test—
the first explosion of an atomic bomb
SEPTEMBER 13, 2001
WHAT IF, INSTEAD OF PLANES, they had used nuclear weapons? My parents, children, my husband would all be dead. My friends would be dead. Everything I own, everything I know, would be gone in an instant.
Just as the hibakusha have described.
This “instant” is where my head is now. I have known, intellectually for a while that, from the instant the bomb was dropped, the world was never the same. Not only crushed, not only gone, but also threatened by the very weapon we created. If anger brought me to Hiroshima, and if that anger was based in fear, then I am beginning to understand why I’m frightened. It’s impossible to know anything about the bomb and not be frightened. The less you know, the more the gaps terrify you. The more you know, the more difficult it is to sleep. It’s this haunting that my Aunty Molly passed on to me. It is not so much the effects of the atomic bomb that we have no protection against. It is, as one of the creators of that bomb once said, its mere existence.
And now, in the middle of a new attack, I realize that the possibility of war, the possibility of terror, has been with us all along. Why didn’t we see it? Why couldn’t we all feel it, in enough time to face it, in enough time—how naïve am I?—to stop it? What must it have been like to see it happening, to see the bomb dropping and have the time to wonder—just as Brian did when he saw the hijacked plane, too low amid the buildings in front of him, and realized something was not right? So there is that moment, then; the last breath of before: when life is about to change, utterly and forever, into something we have no way to conceive of. When the trajectory is already being drawn and there is no way to stop it.
Have we been living in that moment all along?
And when does after begin? In Hiroshima, there were thousands of people who were trapped in the rubble as the fires approached after the bomb itself had fallen; in New York, there were thousands of people who were hijacked in the air, or trapped in elevators or in their offices, with the full knowledge that there was no escape, that they were dying, that there was not enough time. And there were those of us who couldn’t get through, who didn’t know what was going on. Those who will retrace the steps that left us alive, that led our loved ones to the wrong place and the wrong time, who will finger our scars, the smooth skin where our ear used to be, and wonder if we should feel blessed or guilty.
This is the hibakusha twilight, the uncertainty that even the strongest of them dwell in today.
“My brother and I had no clothes on. Our feet were bare, and the ground was so hot that the soles of our feet burned and our skin stuck to the soil. I carried my infant sister on my back, and my father carried my mother, so our pace was very slow. Still, we made a desperate effort to get out of the burned area, which stretched as far as my eyes could see. The water pipes were broken everywhere, and near them, the dead bodies of people who had come for one last drink of water were piled on top of each other, crawling with maggots. There were half-burned bodies under the crushed houses. I made such a great effort not to step on those bodies, but there were too many. This is one memory I shall have to carry all through my life. I was eight years old then, but still now, after more than fifty years, the soles of my feet ache when summer comes.”
—Sixty-four-year-old female survivor
Date: Friday, September 14, 2001
To: reirei
From: Brian
Subject: Re: Fwd: Returned mail: Cannot send message within
3 days
Hey,
Bush is coming to town. What the fuck do we need him for? He says he wants to hug people. Can you imagine? The kids are back in school. Mike was digging yesterday. He said it is far worse than anything they show in the media. Took me two and a half hours to get home last night with the car.
Slept like shit last night. Thunderstorms are running through town. Must be miserable digging today. They pulled five guys out yesterday though, in an SUV.
Running out of milk at the delis in the neighborhood. I feel alone despite all the people around me. The office is quiet as hell. I’m here earlier than usual, though. There was police action in the train this morning. Kind of weird. About six cops got on and looked around. People are obviously edgier than usual.
I continue to love you despite everything.
B.
Date: Saturday, September 15, 2001
To: Brian
From: reirei
Subject: Re: Fwd: Returned mail: Cannot send message within
3 days
they pulled five guys out alive?
i feel very alone here too. i know it can’t compare to what you are going through. here, i have shifted in status from “different because i am american” to “different because of tragedy.” even though technically, i have no tragedy.
i would love to hold you, i would love to have you in my sight and know that you are safe. i keep thinking we should get the hell out of new york and go back to hawaii. live a simpler life together, the kind i am living here.
i have been loving you always. “despite it all” you say? because of it all, i say.
always.
r
Date: Saturday, September 15, 2001
To: undisclosed recipients
From: Karen
Subject: great article
For those of you who didn’t see it, great article in Wednesday’s Miami Herald . . . click on the link, but here’s a taste:
“You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before. But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall.
“This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain.
“When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force.
“When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.”‘I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.”
SEPTEMBER 16, 2001
WE ARE TALKING ABOUT nuclear war here. The Miami Herald is talking about nuclear war. The peace activists raised the possibility immediately, but when I tell Brian, he thinks I am nuts with the same speed.
Nuclear war? For Christ’s sake. We’re not going to drop a bomb on anyone.
It’s where I am living, I know, but even though this is the right statement, the best statement, it’s also the most ridiculous thing I have heard since I left home.
One of the boys is refusing to go to school, Brian tells me when it’s clear I’m not responding. He’s been banging his head on the wall.
I can still hear my son saying, Mommy, a big plane came and crashed the Twin Towers. There was paper all over the school yard. It is very sad. I can still see Brian’s email: “[He] told me not to speak about the WTC yesterday cause it would make him cry . . . Dunno where that came from.”
I have my theories, but Brian has other ideas. He thinks my children’s mommy has been away too long.
Why don’t you guys come to Japan now? I ask him. In case there’s another attack? Or a war?
Forget it. What would we do there? Sit in your apartment and hide?
What else can I offer? What else to say when two of the tallest buildings in the world can collapse in ten seconds flat? I can’t say, Why don’t you go to Barnes and Noble and get a book on how to help children who are worried about war? Brian
saw the plane through the slats of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was there, yards away, before any of the relief workers. The events I saw on the television unfolded over his head. Wasn’t this, at least, something we shared?
Yes, I think, let’s sit in my apartment. Let’s stop. Hold hands. Be together here, where it’s safe.
Forget it, he says again in my silence. We’ll be fine.
I was searching for war when I came to Japan. How stupid to be searching for war. How strange that in Brian’s mind, now, war is not the subject. Perhaps he’s right: there is no one to declare war on. Terrorism is an act; it is improvised, isolated, and singular. The future does not involve nations, or armies, or arsenals.
A-bombs are a thing of the past.
But here in Japan, in Hiroshima, we are waiting. There is a sense that, from the moment the bomb was dropped, we have simply been holding off the end of the world. And we are about to lose our grip.
“Why didn’t I die in the A-bomb?
“Why didn’t I die?
“I was just a mile away from the hypocenter, Tenma-cho, working at a cannon factory. I was about fifteen at the time. My maternal grandfather and my aunt were at about the same location; they were living nearby so they were also exposed to the A-bomb. The only difference, they stayed overnight in Hiroshima City and then came to our country house. I only stayed a few hours in the city after the bomb. The following day, I went into the city again to look for my grandfather and my aunt. I couldn’t find them, so I came back. They were there—they looked so good. No burns, no nothing.