Hiroshima in the Morning Read online

  They did not die in vain. They did not disappear. Another person sees, and maybe that will make a difference.

  He needs me as much as I need him. He builds his safety one person at a time. One image at a time. Each painting, each new mushroom cloud, a new instant and still too many to purge. Both in anger and in sorrow, he is trying to make witnesses, witnesses who have never seen that moment that’s too strange to capture—in words, with paint—but who can recognize it nonetheless, who will not be caught like a dumb animal but who can see the future, change it, who can see the past. I have yet to see a realistic image of the bombings or the aftermath, and his art is no exception. Yet it’s the pikadon in my hands that makes me realize that it has never been their lack of words, or any failing in my interpreters, that holds me separate from the hibakusha. It is a lack of words.

  But the tears will tell me.

  The tattered fabric in Tokita-san’s fingers. His dead sister’s clothes.

  NOVEMBER 13, 2001

  WHAT IF THE ANSWER is not in words, but not in silences either? If it is not in labels, nor facts, nor lies?

  What if the answer is in the pictures?

  The hibakusha’s pictures are children’s pictures. They are scratches, squiggles; they look nothing like what must have been real. The adult mind tries to block the nightmare so it’s the children within the hibakusha who must keep trying to tell the story, the mewling finger-painter who has learned to never temper pain. When Tokita-san paints the mushroom cloud in endless series, each one is different. Each one, if you put words to it, is orange, roughly the same shape and size, each a poor copy of the previous and an even poorer representation of the day. But what if the point is not to copy?

  When I ask the hibakusha to describe the explosion, they tell me: It was red; It was black; Everything was grey; I couldn’t see a thing. It was like a rainbow, so many swirling colors; I only saw the smoke later; It was the most beautiful sight anyone will ever see. I have assumed all these answers are true, factual, that they can be mapped somehow, snapshots arranged according to age or location or timing. But Tokita-san’s artwork points to many visions and interpretations, even within the same heart. He points, not to the facts, but to the feeling.

  IN THE MONTHS BEFORE I left Brooklyn, I remember I spent a morning at Ian’s primary school. The children were drawing, and they were so proud of their pictures; they would point to each scribble and tell me what it was. They had an impulse to create, and need to share, and if it looked nothing like a dog, nothing like what is “real,” it didn’t matter because they were young enough to believe in their own visions. I remember asking—“Where are his eyes?” “Is this his tail?” “How many legs does your dog have?”—telling them that the goal of art, of drawing, is to replicate as closely as possible what we all agree we see. Now, the voice in my head is Ian’s, repeating what I never fully understood: “Mommy, if you give me a pen, I will show you what the inside of my imagination looks like.”

  The inside of us, and what it looks like. This is what I overlooked, even as I have always understood that I can conjure the truest stories with my own imagination. My imaginary narratives, their imaginary pictures—these are what move us, unedited, this is the experience that is “mine.”

  I know now what I was hearing before September 11: it was the story from a distance, a chorus of what “we” did, and also “he” and “she” and “they.” It was nicely digested, put away. But it was fragile. In the face of a global trauma, an “I” emerged. If I go back, circle the pronouns, even in translation, I can trace the shift. Each individual found himself standing inside his own narrative, opened, once again, to his own experiences. As the man who finally gave up his famous anger showed me:

  “If I try to talk about it, to put it another way, the flash and the absolutely terrible . . . to try to convey it in a single word, our experience of the war as children, it was a poor . . . hard . . . scary . . . life.”

  How we tell our stories makes all the difference. They are where we store our tears, where the eventual healing lies. If “we” are talking, then we are safe in our group perspective; we do not have to own our experience alone, nor do we have to feel it. What September 11 gave to the hibakusha, and what they gave in turn to me, is a way to re-enter memory. As scary, and painful, as it is to claim our pronouns, “we” cannot inhabit our own lives until “I” begins to speak.

  Subject: From Ian

  To: Mom

  I miss you. I’m at Auntie’s, we’re listening to Prince. I called you not very long ago. When I called you, I felt like I missed you really much. Max is my best friend in school. We play in the block area. (Raspberry Beret just came on.) Ms. Debbie is my teacher’s name. My brother is playing. If you forgot his name, I am going to write it down—Dylan. He is dancing like a maniac! Now he’s shaking his booty. I have a boo-boo on my big toe, I kicked my soccer ball too hard, now I have a Band-Aid on it. Now Dylan is jumping on Auntie’s bed. Bye mom.

  Love, your son Ian

  “My two sons, they were five and seven, were walking together to their grandmother’s house when the bomb dropped and they got trapped under the wreckage of the falling buildings. Toshi threw himself over his little brother to protect him, but still, Ken died first. And after that, Toshi stopped speaking. He survived for a few more days, but I believe he really had nothing to say.

  “I carried Ken’s body to the cremation site in a bureau drawer. There were so many mounds of bodies, some more than three meters high. I didn’t want to put him in one of those piles. I begged for wood, asking the officer in charge to please understand a parent’s feelings. I put the drawer on an iron plate, and faced him with his head toward Danbara, where we lived, so that I would recognize his bones. But when Toshi died, the Lieutenant in charge was very stubborn and he made me leave the body next to the mound of bodies in front of the station. When I got there the next morning to pick up the ashes, Toshi’s body was only half burned. I didn’t tell my wife for years.

  “It just wasn’t something she could bear.”

  —Eighty-five-year-old male survivor

  NOVEMBER 14, 2001

  She had two sons, ages five and seven, and now they are gone. She left them, and they died. She went to do some volunteer work in place of her neighbor, and that’s why her sons were killed. No one else in Danbara died. She went to work that day; they were walking hand in hand to their grandmother’s house . . . she can add details or strip facts.

  The fact remains.

  For the last half an hour, we have been talking while we waited for the TV crew to leave. The crew needed footage of me doing an interview for a story about my research, and it has been torture to have them here. Ken and Toshi live in this room, forever children; they look down from a lifelike portrait, they gaze at their mother, they keep her real. Their lives are just as bright, their deaths just as raw to their father, but she is the one revealing her scars from the bombing, the one who can wrap my heart in their final silence so completely I can no longer hear my own questions. I worry I will cry and the producer will try to stay longer; I worry that this woman will skim through her memories to keep her tears off TV. But mostly, I can feel that, for the first time ever, my defenses are being met—embraced and coddled, not with a soothing whitewash, but with an even greater sorrow. When I sat with Tokita-san, I could feel him drop the barrier between himself and his experience, but with this woman, it’s the boundary between the two of us that is not there. I am open to the world behind my own protections, and suddenly I am the one who might burst into tears.

  I am steering. Blind, but steering. Do you remember the first time you laughed after the boys died? The first beautiful image? These questions are safe for TV, but important. When does life begin again?

  She doesn’t remember.

  The crew is gone, thanked profusely and now waiting outside. They know I will be another hour, but they’ll stand in the cold in the courtyard to find out how it went. I sag in their absence, me and
the elderly couple, pushing ninety: two people who are bent, frail, shrunken, grey, with failing eyesight and a hearing aid; old folks you might help to cross the street, but whom you would never imagine were witnesses to the beginning of the end of the world, or the keys to its future. They are the oracle, but they are also two sad people reliving their loss because a strange woman has appeared and asked them to. Their importance to the world ebbs when the camera crew leaves. I will resurrect it later, but for now, their greater gift is their humanity.

  I sit beneath the painting of Ken and Toshi, myself the mother of two small boys, two years apart. Their own mother is crying, we are all beyond comfort. Beyond words. This story has become my own: my own pain, my own healing. How do I ask the unaskable?

  How will I keep living if it happens to my children?

  How will any of us survive the next attack?

  It’s been almost five months since I saw my sons. Yesterday, or was it several days ago?, I got a “breaking news” email from CNN that another airplane had crashed in New York. And the fear, the worry, the loneliness, and the abrupt and selfish thought that this might give me a reprieve from the potential disaster of my reunion with Brian all collided as I wondered: Should they cancel their visit? Is it too much risk? Released from his dormant anger—as I allowed myself to be just for a moment, just for that brief, fantastic maybe—I could imagine their fragile bodies in the sky. Just them, my little family: bones and skin and smiles and sleepy hugs. With no barriers, no protection, I could feel their excitement; I could imagine how much they wanted to see me, and I missed them so. Faced with the sudden specter that they might rise and never land, the uncertainty of their safety, I can suddenly feel how hard these months have been on all of us.

  I have been away from my children too long. So far from my husband that neither of us knows what we will find once we are reunited. Brian said it was a bird in the propeller this time, not a terrorist, and I will choose to accept that because I need to. I will trust, because I love him, and we still have the time that the woman beside me lost when she left for work that August morning. And beneath the images of Ken and Toshi, arms around each other, I know for certain that that time is worth every risk we face.

  PART V

  ONE MUST ASK WHOSE?

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  —T.S. Eliot

  THE FAMILY ARRIVES

  GOLDEN HAIR, BOWL-CUT, and oddly pastel eyes. My two sons, in Crayola sweatshirts and baggy jeans to match their father, and their father himself—my husband—towering above even the few foreigners in the stream of passengers pouring out of the customs exit around him. In motion, all of them: a rangy zigzag, hands, ankles, heads falling off the spine as they spin around and drift in the arrivals area, looking for me. I wave to them from the counter where I am in the act of spending one hundred dollars on train tickets back into the center of Tokyo, but their eyes slip over me, if indeed they swung in my direction.

  They look good: unfamiliar; so familiar; unbelievable. As if they are not quite real, and not quite guaranteed, still they have materialized, whole and safe and tired and just slightly different. When at last my husband pulls my more Caucasian features from the crowd and throws up his hands just as I finish getting the tickets and turn toward them—there she is! his fingertips say, flung in my direction—the boys, too, catch sight and we are converging: my sons in a run, the three of them shaking off the distinct paleness of thirteen hours on a plane, and me just shaking. I kneel down and am pelted, for the space of a big, brief kiss, in bodies that are heavier than I remember, which press hard and release swiftly. My sons slide away, checking spaces, size, looking for bathrooms, before I can record them.

  Hey, Mom, hey, Mom. Cool hair. How come you’re so tall?

  There is always a warning, and it comes when I stand; the first shot—a stiffness in Brian’s hug announcing itself as an edge of anger that I was not here when they arrived, or at least not waiting, not pressed against the ropes as he imagined. In a more peaceful time, I might protest that I was here, challenge the definitions of his words; I might tell him of my own journey from Hiroshima: leaving the city on the six a.m. train, getting lost in Asakusa looking for our hotel where I went first to drop off my own bags so I could carry theirs and make sure there was in fact a room, and then lost again on the Yamanote line and barely making the airport express to meet their flight. Or maybe that is not the problem. Maybe it’s the hair my children mentioned, which is curling in Japan’s humidity, or the shoes? I look down, taking inventory, trying to remember where I bought these black, blocky boots with two inch heels, trying to remember if I wore heels before I left, if I was tall. My boys are taller, thicker, and more meaty in their clothes, our height differences have diminished in five months, but was it in Muji or the Greenwich Village Peddler that I bought these shoes?

  Would it matter?

  “How was the flight?”

  It’s not an urgent question, but I don’t know where to start. Any topic, even How are you? is fraught, seems too big for the space we have, does not, in the reflection of Brian’s face, seem safe. With the length of the flight confirmed between us—the longest trip my children have ever taken—and the assurance that it was fine, I take in their mountain of luggage. Three huge duffel bags, none of which, when I test them, I can lift. None of which have wheels. I seem to have forgotten there is such a thing as luggage without wheels, let alone that we owned so much of it.

  We are not going straight home to Hiroshima. I have made a plan to stop along the way: we will make the best of the grand or so the train tickets are going to cost; we will meander, through Kyoto, where I have secured a reading to pay for part of our vacation, and then to Nara. I want them to fall in love, to see the beauty of Japan as soon as possible. I know I mentioned this to Brian and asked him to put everything they needed for the week into a single bag we could carry, but it seems that that was impossible, or incorrectly articulated, because when I ask which bag we are taking, and which will be sent on to Hiroshima by takkyubin, everything is mixed up, or not enough choices could be made in the chaos of getting out of New York, so the choices must be made here, in the arrivals area of Narita airport, near the window next to the takkyubin counter.

  The boys have returned from the bathroom and are playing King of the Mountain on the luggage. I don’t know which one of us moved, or whether we both did, but Brian is standing on the opposite side of the bags, waiting for me to take over, to pull the children off the luggage and, apparently, to repack everything. I am on the other side.

  Brian watches as I busy myself, pulling open all three bags at once, stacking stuffed bears and blankets that we must have for security even though, as I explain to the boys—or is it begging?—we will all be sleeping together on the floor in the same room, along with short pajamas for the son who is always too hot and long pajamas for the other one and several pairs because they will only sleep in fresh ones. Every item becomes a requirement of living I am unused to, and it becomes immediately clear why there is no single bag packed and ready, even as it should be clear to them that some choices will need to be made. Underwear, socks, outer clothes and jackets, and toothbrushes go in the bottom of the bag, and everything else must fit according to priority or meet us at home. The boys protest the loss of their books, their extra hats, but they are more interested in playing tug of war with their sweatshirts and flinging each other onto the floor of the airport.

  I work quickly. I don’t look up to catch the eyes that will tell me I should not be repacking in the airport—of course I should not be repacking in the airport!—because there is no choice and I know no one will approach a gaijin directly to stop me. I don’t look at Brian. When I woke up this morning and put on the black flared pants I bought in the Shareo in Hiroshima, the plain dark blue Uniqlo t-shirt that brings out my e
yes, I was creating the first image he would have of me in months: someone to be proud of—my strength, my happiness—someone who could reassure him with my smile. Now, I wonder what he sees, whether I am as different as he is, more different than I can see myself, where the armor he is clad in comes from, and whether I have it too. Looking down on me now, on my industry, perhaps he will see me, let his gaze shift from whatever he might have expected—a vision from a hot New York June?—to who I am here. If I don’t look up, I can imagine that transformation is beginning. If I look into the future, to Brian almost killing himself trying to carry the stripped down version of his luggage—a single fifty-pound duffel bag—as well as one of two unwakeable and comparably weighted boys out of the train station and through the night of Asakusa, I believe I am helping by stripping them of their habitual appendages: I am lightening his load. Brian waits until I’m finished and helps me drag what I’ve culled to the counter.

  I smile at the agent, pretending he didn’t just see me strew my family’s life all over the airport floor. Ano, sumimasen . . . I begin. Nitmotsu wa okuritain desu ga . . .