A Chorus of Stones

by Susan Griffin

  I am thinking now of Emilio Segre, and a remark I heard him make as he described the way he and Enrico Fermi discovered how to create the first chain reaction. He was speaking to a small seminar on nuclear technology I regularly attended at the university in the city where I live. He told us that the real secret to penetrating the seemingly impenetrable nucleus of the atom had been to slow down the neutrons aimed at it. But why slowness? one of us asked. If you have a lion passing with the velocity of light through this room, he said, it will not eat us, it does not have the time, but if it starts walking around leisurely, well … Even then I was struck by this portrait of the inner nature of matter as a ferocious beast.

  Just as atomic structure has been altered in our century to mirror our civilization’s idea of the true nature of matter, the movie studios reshaped Rita Cansino to fit an ideal. Given a new anglicized name, Rita Hayworth, she was remade to look at one and the same time more sultry and less Hispanic, her browline moved back, hair dyed, eyebrows removed. Did she know that these changes echoed an older chapter in her family history? Eduardo Cansino had descended from Muranos, those Spanish Jews forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition. Though they continued to practice Judaism in secret, for most the knowledge of who they once were was eventually lost.

  A few years after the end of the war, when I was five years old, Rita Hayworth made a famous film called The Lady from Shanghai. It was directed by Orson Welles, who was then her husband. He played the hero and she the heroine, a lady named after the most wicked city in the world. The hero, a detective, is drawn by the heroine’s beauty into danger. Slowly she entraps him. They enter a house of mirrors. She points her gun outward at him and at us who watch as the story concludes. A gun explodes and the mirror is shattered. But the hero lives. It is the evil lady who dies, and of course we too, who are the witnesses, survive.

  Three years earlier, in August 1945, two atomic bombs had been dropped over Japan, in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. I remember a faded bookmark from this time. I found it in my grandmother’s books. A caricature of a Japanese man, painted yellow, glowers over a lighted match. Behind him a small green forest bursts into flame.

  At least once that I know of, Rita Hayworth complained about the image Hollywood produced of her. What troubled her enough to speak out was the decision the studio made to put her image on a nuclear weapon. Her brothers had been in the Second World War and come back different, scarred. This had made her against all war, she said, and she wept when the bomb bearing her image was detonated.

  Is it possible that Helen of Troy was only a caricature of a woman? In one version of that story it is said that she was never really in Troy at all, and that what the Greek armies saw was only a phantom. The blast at Hiroshima left phantoms of a kind, shadows instantly impressed by objects, parts of buildings, fleeing people, who existed in one moment and then in the fraction of a second vanished into vapor.

  In the fall, when I traveled to Hiroshima, I asked to meet a woman my age, who, like me, would have been two years old when the bomb exploded. Yōko was thrown through the air and out a window on August 6, 1945. She still has two small scars on her face, where the glass was embedded. But she does not remember the blast.

  Her first memories are of grade school. She was living with her older sister, a brother and a cousin. Her father had disappeared in the explosion. They searched for his bones or his ashes but no sign of him could be found. His passage from life could not be consecrated. Her mother, very badly burned, lived until August 23, when she died of radiation sickness.

  Yōko’s sister worked to support them all. But she was also sick of radiation exposure, the work was hard, the wages small. They lived frugally with no electric lights, no heat, the barest minimum of food and clothing. Then Yōko’s sister became very ill. She was taken to the hospital. Yōko’s brother, who was older, abandoned the two younger children. As a boy, he had been raised to be taken care of, and he could not face the responsibility. The two small children were left alone. Yōko’s cousin would go to help in the grocery for some food. And then, for long periods, she would not return. Yōko remembers one New Year’s Eve. Her cousin was gone. It was cold. She went outside to make a fire, and when she looked at the night sky, she told me, she felt very alone.

  After this, the two children were taken in by relatives, the cousin to one home and Yōko to another. But her loneliness did not end. She moved in rotation among five different houses. An extra child was a burden. She carried her belongings in a scarf and opened them in a corner of a room. She had no room or bed of her own. Many times she sat and listened as her relatives argued over who should take her next. She saw how the natural children of each family were treated differently. If she had a quarrel with one of them, she would be told, Our parents are raising you. In one family she had to work until late at night or, on special days, until midnight. When she began to menstruate she had no one to approach with her questions.

  Somewhere inside herself, she felt she had no reason to exist. She was like a neutron, lost from its path of meaning, without a matrix, with no world of relation. She went to her middle school by a train that passed over a bridge. And while the train made its way over this bridge, she would think of taking her own life.

  I nodded as she told me this story. Between us a kind of knowledge passed, half spoken, half unspoken. From our meeting we both understood that what we felt had come from circumstances outside our control. Such a childhood settles into flesh and bone. It can be seen. It is not invisible but present in the line of shoulders, the measure of breath, a hand moving to lips, words spoken or unspoken, so that even a story not told is told over and over again in mimed gestures of shyness and fear and conscribes a place in the body which holds this old suffering almost with tenderness. Yōko has not spoken of her childhood to her husband or to her children.

  How much do we know or not know in those we love? Love is, in some way, a kind of seeing through which many intricate facts are embraced. What is hidden, kept secret, cannot be loved. It exists in a place of exile, outside the realm of response.

  In a famous short story written about the bombing of Hiroshima, a man who is poisoned with radiation returns home to his village. He tells his family and friends what he has seen. No one believes him until news reports arrive. Then they listen to his story with shock and grief. But after a time they no longer want to hear his story. He is condemned to repeat what he has witnessed over and over to those who do not listen.

  Some argued that, because of the high intelligence of the people of Kyoto, this city would be the best target for the first atomic bomb. These citizens, it was said, would best be able to appreciate the significance of the new weapon. But Kyoto was not chosen. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson felt the city too beautiful to be destroyed. Kyoto has for many centuries been the home for an ancient and gracious culture. Its streets are resplendent with temples, gardens; it is a center for the manufacture of silk and the practice of the tea ceremony.

  Beauty lies at the heart of the tea ceremony. Each object used must be beautiful. Special cups are made for this ceremony. Even to look on these cups is to be brought into a wider, calmer realm of the self. The tea master Okakura Kakuzo has said that beauty evokes harmony and the mystery of mutual charity. What became at one point in history an art reserved for the samurai warrior is really the distillation of all the ways that women had of shaping life. Ways of setting a table, design in fabric, old recipes, songs, ways of bowing, of serving, of sitting. All that we call beautiful—the shape of a balcony, a certain landscape, a phrase, an alphabet, the curve of an airplane wing, a mathematical formula—is a kind of vessel, like love, that holds what we know.

  There is a museum for children in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. One room of this museum holds objects left behind from Wheat, the farming community that once stood on the site of Oak Ridge—scythes, plows, butter churns, wooden chairs, hand-carved toys and musical instruments—and they are beautiful. When I was there I saw two
temporary exhibits. A room was filled with pottery made throughout the Southern states and it had a haunted quality. I had just returned from Japan and could not help noticing how many of these objects resembled Japanese ceramics. In a long corridor, photographs were displayed from Oak Ridge during the war. April 14, 1944, a church service held in the central cafeteria. December 13, a Sergeant back from the war in Germany urges a crowd of assembled workers to get the job done.

  The weapon the young navy ensign had raved about was taken on a long voyage over several oceans. Bit by bit essential pieces were assembled from many places. A heavy crane from England. Fissionable matter from Oak Ridge. A crate, fifteen feet long, carrying the inner cannon of the bomb, a leaded cylinder two feet high, a foot and a half wide, holding a uranium projectile, all journeying toward the island of Tinian, near Japan.

  Hiroshima is on an inland sea. And there are several islands in its harbor. One of these is a famous shrine, some say to an ancient female deity. Another, Ninoshima, was the site of a quarantine station for homecoming soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War. After the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, many of the most severely wounded were taken to this island to die. Few buildings in the city itself were left standing. On the island, the old hospital was still intact, though its corridors and rooms were almost empty. There were few doctors, or medical supplies. Those who were very badly burned were taken there by rowboat. The trip took two hours. Often the dying crawled into the woods or back into caves and tunnels. Even today bodies are still discovered there.

  I went by ferry to Ninoshima. The trip across the water was brief. It was November and just beginning to turn cold. The sky was gray and white. The water, waved, shimmering with a silver reflection of muted light, a green darkness beneath. I stood on the deck watching as we made our progress toward the island, remembering suddenly my ferry trip to another island earlier that year, the island of my father’s birth.

  That day, though it was midsummer, the sky was gray and white and there was light on the water. And it was there on that water, in the midst of the reverie of travel, that I found in myself a feeling of urgency, under the calm surface, and beneath that an indefinable pain, sharp as a bud. This island of my imaginings was real. And so then were the stories I had heard. The water we navigated became then like the water of legend, between one kind of knowledge and another.

  Even the trees, green and orange, growing over the hills of Ninoshima, reminded me of Grand Manan. And here too legend sprang to life as if time had stopped and the dying who had for two hours of agony looked to this island for hope and refuge, who lay near the water or crawled into caves or forests, were still there, in suspension for a moment from physical pain, without weeping or admonitions to heaven, the air itself pregnant with the breath of words impossible to speak or hear or, even, to forget.

  Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us. Mitsukuni Akiyami, who was a schoolboy at the time of the blast, has written of the moment that the bomb exploded. He felt an eerie silence. Sound and color stopped. Then it was as if an instant of time had frozen and within that instant—a fraction of a thousandth of a second, he called it—he said that an unimaginable number of incidents took place. He looked toward the city. In this instant it had disappeared. And before the instant had passed the boy had already prayed, Please let this all be a bad dream.

  There is a territory of the mind, vacant and endless as the miles and miles of rubble the city of Hiroshima had become. One enters this territory as one speculates for instance over a disaster. If I had traveled a different road would there have been no accident? A life can be gone in an instant. To grasp the meaning of the explosion of one atomic weapon at Hiroshima would take more than one lifetime. One would have to hear every story, and take in the memories too, how the vanished repeat themselves in the minds of the living. The telephone ringing in the early morning. The sound of feet on a certain staircase. Echoes resounding for years in the experience of each woman, each man, each child who survived.

  I went to the island of Ninoshima to hear a man tell his story. He was a boy of twelve when the bomb exploded. His father had died of illness earlier in the war. With his younger brother and sister he tried to get back to their house. His mother must have died instantly there. They lived close to the center of the explosion. The great mass of those fleeing, injured severely, skin hanging from arms, legs, faces, stunned, silent, moved out of the city and toward the hills. They found themselves in a crowd walking toward Yaga, three kilometers away. Soon Ota had to be carried. He was burned over half of his body, his back, legs, arms.

  When there is death, even one death, time seems to stop, as if perhaps, in stopping, the dead could be called back into life, or events could be erased before sinking irrevocably into knowledge. He did not know at what hour they finally arrived. People hovering between life and death were spread out everywhere, lying on the grass where he, too, would rest.

  Between each cell, and neighbor cell, there is an elaborate network of membranes, closed, resembling pockets. These structures can make fleeting connections with each other, or with the plasma membrane surrounding them.

  We sat together almost forty years later, circling a low table, Ota, Mr. Masako, a reporter who, like me, wanted to make a record of this story, Becky, who interpreted for me, and Mr. Kikawa, director of this school, once an orphanage for children cast into a state of abandonment by the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The island of Ninoshima had to be cleared of corpses to make way for the children, several weeks after the bombing. Years later, mass burial sites were still being discovered. Now to speak of it, he told us, is almost unbelievable.

  They lay there, Ota and the others who were wounded and dying, endlessly, day after day. A list of names was posted. Each time someone died, another name was struck from the list. Many vomited blood or lost hair. Bodies were swollen. These are symptoms of radiation poisoning. Burns became infected and filled with pus. Maggots grew in the open, unhealing wounds. Ota told me he believes he survived only because his younger brother picked the maggots from his body every day. Those with no one to do this died. Because of his burns, he lay on his left side. In this way, as it healed, his ear was fixed to the back of his head, as it still is today. His mouth was filled with dust unsettled by the blast. But he had been told not to drink the water.

  All over Hiroshima people were warned about the water. Those too badly injured to move would cry out again and again for water that never came. And in moments of extreme pain people of all ages would cry for their mothers.

  How did he bear the pain? Everyone was in the same pain, he said. At times they would cry out together. The most severely injured could not cry. Over time, it was better for all of them to lie there quietly. Then, the pain was felt, not as if in one body alone, but in all bodies at once. Together they floated in a timeless element, suffused with agony, ringed with death, held in one another’s presence.

  After an immeasurable period of time he was taken away into the home of strangers in the country. Here he would be cared for, for a few weeks. From that time, until the spring of the next year, when he could once more walk, he was moved from one house to another so that the burden of his care could be shared.

  The day that he gained sanctuary in the countryside, he lost his brother and sister. A few years later he was able to find his brother again. He believed his sister had died. He did not ask about her. There were so many dead, and for each the same question was held mute within, Where? Even if you have witnessed a death, this is not a question that can be answered.

  Thirty-two years later, when he was a grown man and teaching children in the same school he had attended as a child, he saw a woman’s face on television. She had appeared to ask if anyone remembered her, if anyone could claim her as part of a family. She had been so young when she was separated from her two brothers that she did not know her family name. Something about her face seemed familiar to Ota. Her personal
name sounded the same, but she was spelling it with different characters. She did not immediately recognize him when he called. In her infancy he was older and gone at school much of the time. She had played with her younger brother. But she remembered that she had two brothers. Slowly the pieces fell together and they were reunited.

  His feeling is not easy to describe. Had only ten years passed their meeting would have been different. He felt sorrow, happiness and confusion at once. He said his heart was filled, that he cried, and he touched his throat and said he was not able to speak.

  Knowing how many years had gone, knowing both parents had died, they embraced in silence. A place of quiet had been broken into, in this reunion, as if the sharp edge of separation had only now penetrated what they had taken to be ordinary.

  The dimensions of Ota’s suffering, great with the magnitude of that terrible explosion, were beyond my comprehension, except as we who sat in his presence that day were infused with this story which found a stillness in all of us who listened. Yet still there was something in his story familiar to me. A few months earlier I too had found one of my family, someone who belonged to me, but whom I had never met. As that ferry made its way to Grand Manan, I questioned the woman sitting next to me. Did she live there? Had she heard of anyone bearing my family name? She pointed to a man on the other side of the cabin who sat talking with his wife. Full of apprehension, I approached him and told him who I was. My father, he told me, would be able to answer your questions, and he lives just one thousand yards from where the boat docks.

  A more recent development, the Vulcan gun fires ammunition that is incendiary and pierces armour at the rate of 7,200 shots each minute.

  My daughter beside me in our rented car, I followed him on this short drive. Time was not passing. It had become a more flexible element. I entered the door. At the end of the narrow kitchen, sitting at a small table, I saw an elderly man who looked just as my father would have looked today, had he lived. This man looked at me with a face of shock, before he assembled himself into cordiality. Later, near tears, he said to me that it had seemed to him that his mother walked into the room when I entered.