Hiroshima in the Morning Page 12

  “And then . . . two weeks later, my grandfather died. Three weeks later, my aunt died. Because of the aftereffects. And a month later, I was almost dying; we never knew what it was.

  “But coming to think of it, maybe that overnight stay in the city made all the difference.”

  —Seventy-one-year-old male survivor

  Date: Tuesday, September 18, 2001

  Subject: DAY 5&6

  To: reirei

  From: Nathan

  Today, lower part of Manhattan was open for the first time. My friend Cindy and I took our bikes down to Little Italy and Chinatown, which were bustling with newly re-opened shops and markets. We made it all the way to Battery Park where the smoke became quite heavy and we realized the wet streets were not from the rain but from the massive cleanup effort. We never got to Wall Street because of blockades manned by the national guard who asked for ID, but we were able to see a lot of the debris and damage and connect with fellow New Yorkers who were piling out of the subways in droves to see what they could see.

  Some of the images I won’t forget include the group of people on the edge of Battery Park holding cardboard signs with their addresses scrawled on them hoping for someone to escort them behind the blockades to their homes; Trinity church obscured by smoke but standing tall; the burned skeleton of the Tower at the end of Church Street with the smoldering pit behind it; the ASPCA rescuing tons of pets from apartments behind the barricades; and, most creepy, the two flattened cars parked along the side of the street . . . flattened to about two feet tall, covered in dust and debris as well as flowers that people had put on them as a memorial.

  As we rode back up to the Village, it seemed Manhattan was getting back to normal. People shopping, eating at outdoor cafes and being New Yorkers on Saturday. Only the occasional emergency vehicle to remind us of the permanent change that has taken place in our city. Tonight my friend Chris and I went to a movie to do something “normal” and to laugh and forget. We found the perfect film . . . a movie from Thailand, a true story!, about a volleyball team made up of drag queens who ended up winning the country’s championship match. Hysterical!

  Luv,

  n

  “The black market sprung up around Hiroshima station. It was a sprawling mess. Shacks and tables, and everyone yelling, ‘Buy this! It’s cheap—get some!’ Everyone was in the same boat. Everyone was filthy, buyers and sellers. There were orphans polishing shoes there. For the occupation soldiers.

  “There was food, yes, but it was dirty. I do remember meat, dog meat, being sold. At least that’s what everyone said it was. The taste was bad but we couldn’t get regular meat so people ate a reddish kind of dog. I don’t think they were pets—nobody had pets at the time. So we must have been eating wild dogs.

  “There were other black markets too. There was one around Eibashi bridge, right next to the ruins of a burnt out house. Even now, I can remember it clear as day. There were bodies inside the house, frozen in position right in the middle of breakfast. Two people turned to ashes, charred black, just like that. They had been left there, and people walked by. When we saw them . . . why didn’t we do anything? What did we think? Well, the bomb had numbed hearts and our brains . . . ”

  —Seventy-two-year-old female survivor

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

  AMI SAYS IT IS SURE NOW that Bush is going to declare war on Afghanistan. She says ninety percent of Americans support war.

  Afghanistan? A country? The home of already devastated citizens who had nothing to do with the attack? When I call Brian and begin to rant, my left-wing, nonconfrontational husband says, “Well, they can’t just expect us to do nothing.”

  I wait. He doesn’t retract it.

  This is the man who wanted to join the Peace Corps. Who says, every Thanksgiving, that we should be serving food in a soup kitchen on the Bowery. Who cannot kill anything bigger than a cockroach. This is the son of a high school teacher who has the soul of a parish priest.

  This was the man.

  In the silence, I can hear his words repeat, exactly, with the same lift and toss, the same fall. They. Us. Do. It’s the kind of statement that loops, disembodied, on a playback button: it will never fade, never soften; it can never be explained.

  In the face of such a crisis, Dr. Fujita wondered, who can say how a human being will react?

  For Christ’s sake, he said to me—was it only days ago? We’re not going to drop a bomb on anyone.

  What does he know that I don’t know? In what scenario is this retribution okay? One of my own aunts is forwarding me hate-filled op-eds, and when I try to write my own op-ed about this opportunity for empathy and self-reflection, my agent tells me I am out of touch and flatly refuses to send it out. Far better for us to kill them, because their friends might have tried to kill us. Before they can act again, before they think of acting, because they are weak, unaware. In a far off place, in a foreign country, small children dance to the news of September 11 while my friends wrap their grief and their sandwiches in cellophane.

  Kill Mowgli, before he can grow into a man.

  A rift has opened—between me and Brian, me and my country—that I’ve been trying to ignore. It’s as if I’m watching the tower fall again: always seeing, never understanding, never believing, unable to accept. I would like to accept, intellectually; I would like to do something more than look on in horror, but my gut does not allow my brain to function. How, in this world that makes no sense, can we make requests of each other? How can we share our feelings when we don’t know what we feel? Any development in Brian’s life is nothing in the face of terror, and any report from mine is too fortunate. And though we say almost nothing in our daily conversations, still misunderstandings trip us. We try to stand up, brush ourselves off, toss each small, stubborn obstacle away, but they are everywhere. He doesn’t see the world the way I do.

  We no longer live in the same world.

  Date: Thursday, September 27, 2001

  To: reirei

  From: Lorrie

  Subject: YAWN

  [That would be the sound of deafening boredom crashing around my ears. . . .]

  So WHAT’S UP OVER THERE??????????

  L

  PART IV

  LIKE A DREAM

  Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

  —Voltaire

  RUNNING

  I HAVE BEEN OUT. No longer inside, hiding; no longer whispering my worries in my head, voicing them to Brian who will not listen. I’ve been plucked off the ground—running from interview to interview to bar. If I’m not home, I don’t have to answer the midnight calls from well-meaning friends about anthrax. If I’m out, pumping more alcohol into proper Japanese women than they have ever drunk before, I’m in a world where people will reveal themselves; they will confess to me, worry, ask me questions I can answer; they will give in to me, race down the center of deserted streets on their bicycles in the early morning. Here I am, wind in my hair of my own making. Behind me, a whoop of warning that my companion is gaining inches.

  Behind me, white poison, and unease about where the next envelopes will be mailed.

  Do you want to come to Japan now? I ask Brian again. Maybe now, with the anthrax . . .

  He scoffs into the phone, and then lets the sound sink beneath the careful calm we’ve been trying so hard to create. Even though we have not stated it so baldly, the camel that was our life together, which had always seemed infinitely hardy, has become so burdened we’re afraid to add to the load. I have ranted at him, in my own cloaked terror at not being able to recognize—not him, not my city—I am navigating by old snapshots of before. He has dismissed me: I have no idea. This is his mantra, this and the fact that he is waiting for this to be over. These are the gates we must pass through every time we pick up the phone.

  In the chasm between us, black and white are beginning to edge each other, and the flexible grey that was our life together no longer has the strength to lead us through.
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  While we are gathering ourselves, waiting for the echoes to fade, he does not ask me whether I want to come home. This omission is immediately obvious, and all the louder for remaining unsaid. Am I being judged on my inability to get on an airplane to return to the center of the storm? I jump to this, read threat into it because that’s how we communicate. If he asks, then he will be responsible for my loss of my fellowship; if I offer, the choice is mine. His silence is my chance to give up my life here, to choose him and the web that has always supported me.

  This is my old world, the one I excelled in: of “shoulds” and “supposed tos”; of definitions and absolutes ready to jump on any offered word. The questions, refusals, agreements, counter responses—the permutations have a calculus of their own, with volumes and surface areas that change depending on who says what, who says it first, on the exact formula of the sentences. But none of the equations are harmless.

  He is waiting for me to respond.

  The children . . . but that’s a vague start. I would interject: you can bring them here where it’s safe. And he would finish: . . . are fine.

  Death is a crapshoot. It doesn’t matter where you are.

  It appears, on the silent surface, that we’re in perfect agreement. We are struggling to see the war as “not a big deal”—each one continuing to live a life, equally, separately, in the way we once agreed. The anthrax is nothing; it is not connected. In the space where there are no answers, it is better to pretend it’s not happening at all.

  If I once thought my trip would be easier on him in his own environment, it is now easier for me in some ways, because I can fill my head with another war, with the question of war, its nature, philosophy, with its broad history that has nothing at all to do with us, and little to do with what he’s feeling. If only he would tell me what he was feeling, if only he knew. He will not admit to injury, and neither of us imagines that I might also be hurt. All our conversations are now edged, but there’s nothing personal in our talk of the war. I am delving into the feelings and fears of other people, a subject that he is emphatically not interested in, and when I ask him a direct question about his own feelings and fears, I cannot shake the story that he’s okay. That he’s “ignoring things mostly.”

  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.

  “I walked through the city for days, looking for my aunt first and then for my mother’s bones. I remember the blackened streetcar, the electrical wires hanging down, but mostly, there were so many dead bodies. Many women with their heads submerged in water basins—dead—I still remember the long, black hair floating in the water. There were bodies in the rivers, not moving, so many crammed together in layers. Bodies still lying where they died along the streetcar line. You could scarcely pass. There was no clean up yet. No buildings. Everyone was naked; everything was burned.

  “The city was so hot. It was all ashes, two or three inches of white and grey ash over everything. I can’t remember others searching, or any soldiers, or people cremating bodies. In my mind, it seems quiet. Lonely. My sense is that I was the only one.

  “I went back to my house ten days after the bombing. It was completely burned. I found one rice bowl complete and unbroken. It was dark blue. But everything else, the spoons, forks, iron, it was all melted, twisted and stained. There were two piles of ash where my mother and brother had died. The fires had cremated them.

  “Their bones were so white in the ashes. They gleamed in the sunshine.”

  —Seventy-seven-year-old female survivor

  OCTOBER 3, 2001

  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.

  I cremated her—I was six—I dragged pieces of wood, wooden rail ties, off the bridge and piled them on top of her. I knew that was what she would have wanted. I set it on fire.

  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 descr
iptive 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?