by Gail Jones
Against his uncle’s advice and wishes, Hiroshi returned to Nagasaki. With a portion of his inheritance he purchased a saki company – one still teetering on the edge of oblivion after the death of most of its workers in 1945 – believing he could remake the family tradition and honour his father. Under his control for six months, the saki business was a moderate success; however, Hiroshi found he had no feeling or instinct for the processes and practices that had so occupied his family over generations, and in the end appointed a manager and returned to his books. He watched the gradual redevelopment of the city of Nagasaki – the tram tracks, the schools, the stores and harbourside – but no longer felt any connection to the place he had grown up in. Every building was new and unrecognisable, and the hammering, hauling, carting, scaffolding, seemed to continue both day and night, even now, fifteen years after the unmentionable event. The population who had remained included many burns victims, gaunt figures with melted skin and woeful eyes. They appeared everywhere as a kind of indictment. Hiroshi felt obliged to stay, but hated being there; he hated coming across a burned person and the reminder of what cannot be repaired.
Only the view of the harbour remained essentially the same. There were more ships, these days, but the water was a clear turquoise blue and the view across to the shimmering horizon was, as ever, transfixing. The sky seemed larger now, and the hills more steep, especially since there were still areas of deforestation and small young trees. Hiroshi stood at the front of his wooden house – built in the traditional style – and stared for hours at the ocean and the sky, at the forces that pull the rain and the clouds, at the screen of colours that swapped back and forth the day and the night with what seemed such perpetually meaningless insistence.
At length, desperately lonely, Hiroshi noticed a pretty young woman of a good family who was not Clare MacDougall, but whom he believed eventually he could love. Mie was a small woman who seemed delicate to the point of fragility, and Hiroshi felt tenderly protective towards her. He found himself bending over her, looking at the top of her head, then her face would upturn and she would smile at him directly. It was an offering, a benevolence, amid the city’s waste. When they married, he thought she looked like a doll. Perhaps he had been too long abroad, but the white face powder and the heavy kimono and the elaborate decorations in her hair, presented his bride as an ornamental stranger. During the ceremony Hiroshi had irrepressible misgivings, but decided then and there that he would be a devoted husband. His mother cried. Uncle Tadeo looked pleased. It was a late spring morning and the cherry blossoms were at last beginning to fall. Loose petals flew in the air like snowflakes. He was reminded that there was lightness, as well as gravity, that there are presences in the wind, unassuming, and precious possibilities.
Mie had two daughters, Akiko and Haruko, and Hiroshi rejoiced. In his children he was healed. In his children there was a future, and the swapping of day and night at the end of the ocean was now the meaningful marker of their daily growth. Akiko and Haruko were cheerful and without burned history. They laughed at the slightest pretext and were inclusively sociable. Hiroshi read them storybooks and bought them sweets and electronic toys. He liked nothing more than to walk along the street holding hands, one daughter on each side, watching their linked shadows, a wobbly triangle, proceed in silhouette over the earth before them. When they both went to school he found it difficult to adjust. He would wait at the school entrance to walk them home, and then become annoyed when they wanted to close off and watch television. He looked at their backs, crouched in the flickering light. He thought often of Harold O’Toole and Masa Tanaka, and still believed in the superiority of words over images.
Mie died when her oldest daughter was twelve. Her leukemia was probably the consequence of radiation exposure; in any case her death fell over the household like radioactive ash. Akiko became sullen and withdrawn and as an adult would later suffer depressive episodes and acts of self-harm. Haruko was more resilient, but still altered by the loss and robbed of her unselfconscious delight. It was she to whom Hiroshi secretly felt closer, but in truth he could talk to no one of what Mie had come to mean, of her quiet solidity, of her offer of redemption. His mother came to live with them, but she was by then withered and ill, and Hiroshi feared that his children would meet with a second death. When she died just two months later, he felt at the point of collapse. And it was his mother’s death, not Mie’s, that threatened to derange him.
It was then 1972 and Hiroshi was at last experiencing the grief of 1945. It was as if he had held it under control for all these years, just to have it now bubble up to the surface, released through the fine jagged fissures a single death might cause. He ceased eating and sleeping. When he slept for what seemed only a moment, he was engulfed by nightmares. When he was awake he encountered long-ago visions. For the sake of his daughters, he pretended stability, but Hiroshi was shaken daily by the deep seismic forces of what had never been confronted or resolved. One day Uncle Tadeo visited and took the girls with him back to Tokyo, to stay for a time with their relatives. Hiroshi spent four weeks in a clinic by the ocean where, chemically sedated, he entered another kind of time and began in dread negation to sleep. It was the drowned sleep of drugs, it was obliteration. Outside his window the water swelled and subsided, swelled and subsided, a truly dull repetition. A dozen dead oceans, Mr Sakamoto said, a hard rain. Hiroshi discovered that the clinic was exclusively for Hibakusha, for atomic bomb survivors. There were people with decades-old burns scars and conspicuous injuries, but there were also people like him, who bore no visible scar at all, but who had seen what was unassimilable and been occupied by loss.
When he was reunited with his daughters, Hiroshi resumed his daily life with as much regularity as possible. He met them after school, and let them watch too much television. He prepared simple meals, and the girls began, through his poor efforts, to take an interest in cooking.
Once a week he saw a doctor from the clinic, a kindly man who shared his interest in literature and with whom he exchanged his favourite haiku. So Hiroshi moved again into the solace of seventeen syllables, into the space of the meticulous image and the precise meditation. He found there a nonchemical repose, an amethyst light. Drops of water, chrysanthemums, the beat of moth wings in smoky air: these noticed felicities, these forms of simple praise, reconfigured by small degrees the entire world. As he dipped the brush and created the ink characters, he felt as if old Masa Tanaka was still sitting at his side. And although his own efforts often seemed inept, he enjoyed, most of all, the task of attention, and practised haiku as a spiritual exercise.
Each day Uncle Tadeo spoke to him on the telephone. Hiroshi grew to cherish their quirky conversations. His uncle was more fluent and open on the telephone than face to face, and an intimacy grew between them that had not existed before. Even Hiroshi found himself whispering into the mouthpiece things he would not have been able to say directly, personal things, about Clare and Mie, childhood things, about the old Nagasaki, fearful things, about what he held within him, about his darkness, his memories, his crater of nightmares.
Once Hiroshi told Uncle Tadeo at length a dream from the night before: how he had seen Harold O’Toole, his blond hair a helmet of flame, shouting to him for water, shouting, and then screaming, screaming, and then chasing him, like a monster, dragging fire. The telling of this dream was a surrender of feeling into words. It was an unprecedented relief. It allowed Hiroshi to release into voice alone, into the unseeable chamber that lay between him and Tadeo, what had seemed physically to inhabit him, to rest corrosively within, to lock him into abstract and timeless isolation. He heard his own voice expelling phantom presences and wounding secrets. He gave up ghosts. He exhaled poisons. Gradually, too, Uncle Tadeo began to speak to his nephew of the war, telling for the first time his experiences of shame and desolation. In the wires of the telephone, in the windy space between mouths, they became father and son; they spoke the truth; they expressed their love. Their voices floated
into each other, in a disincarnate embrace. Each time he put down the telephone receiver, Hiroshi felt he had been kissed.
Akiko and Haruko both had difficult experiences of adolescence. When they were little, Hiroshi had delighted in watching his daughters, with their Hello Kitty scarlet school bags, their lacy ankle socks, their fluffy hair ornaments and novelty keyrings, walking hand in hand as they entered the schoolyard. They looked decorated, happy. But in their teenage years Akiko became withdrawn and tormented, as if she had inherited her father’s sadness, and Haruko took to exhibitionist forms of identity. At one stage – and to her older sister’s great embarrassment – Haruko became a ganguro, tanning her face dark in sun-bed salons, dying her hair green, wearing an assortment of PVC and chains, and acting aggressively. Tadeo counselled patience, and said that grief takes many guises. Grief, he said, is a mysterious subtraction of the self; one then builds self again with whatever resources are available. When the sisters at last finished their schooling, both, in a new concord, entered the world of finance. They enjoyed the rigour of numbers and strict calculation. Fractions, decimal points, neat lists of figures. There was a quiet there, within numbers, a clean, stable space. Arithmetic saved them. Akiko and Haruko became independent, adult. The apartment they shared was a paradigm of neatness and order.
Hiroshi Sakamoto began travelling again, sliding in jet planes from country to country. Wherever he went he telephoned Uncle Tadeo every day, often speaking in sunlight to his uncle at night, or speaking in the night to his uncle at breakfast. The size and rotation of the planet did not interfere with their daily conversations. Words sped over mountains and rivers and ignored whole continents. Only on the telephone could Hiroshi utter his truths. Only there did he find expression and relief. At some point or other, at some foreign location, Hiroshi conceived of a project to which he wished finally to devote his skills and time. He would write a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, the Scotsman, the inventor of the telephone. His beloved Uncle Tadeo thought this a splendid idea.
6
The bistro was cramped, in the French style, with too much chunky wooden furniture, and suffused with the mingled odours of baking and cigarette smoke. Two fussy waiters in long aprons moved sideways in the narrow spaces between the tables, their plates held high. They seemed at war with each other and carried perpetual sneers.
Alice and Mr Sakamoto discussed the buzzing world. Over onion soup, trout with almonds, and chocolate mousse, they began gradually to know each other, to exchange ideas, opinions and stories. Mr Sakamoto was staying in Paris for an indefinite period, for no reason, he said, other than to revisit cherished sites and attend screenings of old movies. He was staying in a simple hotel on rue des Ecoles, just up from a small art cinema that showed only movies from the thirties, forties and fifties. So far, he had seen four comedies by Ernst Lubitsch and three police dramas in a Bogart retrospective.
‘Movies? What do you think of movies?’ Mr Sakamoto asked. ‘Do you have movies in your book?’
‘Not yet,’ said Alice shyly. ‘I’m still thinking about it.’
‘When I was a child,’ he said, ‘before the catastrophe, my sisters often took me on outings to the movies. My father never quite approved, but he indulged us anyway, believing that American cinema, in particular, was somehow culturally educative. Mr Smith Goes to Washington: that was one of my favourites. And anything with Gary Cooper. Morocco, Beau Geste. Beau had two brothers, John and Digby, and they all joined the Foreign Legion and ended up fighting Arabs in the desert. It was all about glamorous sacrifice; I found it very appealing. I suppose I wanted brothers … One of the scenes I remember most clearly is from early on in the movie. The three brothers are little boys and they are playing at setting up a Viking funeral. It’s a noble burning. A splendid death. I remember discussing this afterwards with my English tutor, and he too liked the idea of a Viking funeral … For whichever of us dies first, he joked, the other will perform a Viking funeral. Then we shook hands.’
Mr Sakamoto paused in his monologue. He took a sip of wine.
‘I’ve seen very few old movies,’ Alice admitted. ‘Some on TV. Some at festivals.’
‘Then you must come with me. This afternoon. Lubitsch’s Ninotchka is screening, starring Greta Garbo. How can you write on modernity if you haven’t seen Ninotchka?’
Mr Sakamoto was smiling at her. Alice saw that this was a man of true generosity and spontaneous joy. He wiped a trace of mousse from his chin with a napkin.
‘You’ll love it,’ he added. ‘I promise.’
They agreed to meet in front of the cinema later that afternoon. Mr Sakamoto kissed Alice twice on both cheeks and again waved broadly as they parted. His post-prandial nap awaited him, he said. Alice watched as he climbed the steep street to the rue des Ecoles, with a faltering, uneven step she had not noticed before.
The weather had turned chilly and Alice hurried off in the opposite direction, winding her grey woollen scarf as she went. She would take the Métro to the Village Voice bookshop, and buy a book. A novel. Something difficult. Something fashionable and new. Dining out had given her a spendthrift inclination.
But when Alice entered the Métro, she immediately heard below her loud, abusive shouting and a woman’s high-pitched screams. The voices sounded echoic, enlarged and thick with emotion. She found herself running down the steps into cavernous yellow shadows, impelled by instinct, rushed on by fear, or adventure, or foolishness. Around the bend of the tunnel, at the foot of the tiled stairwell, a man was kicking, again and again, a woman lying prostrate before him. Other people hurried by, studiously ignoring them. A single old woman stood at a distance, remonstrating, jabbing her finger towards the man and shouting in a knotted language that was certainly not French. The couple were young and dark-haired. They had the distracted, edgy look of smack-hungry junkies. Alice hurled herself at the man, and pushed him bodily away. He stumbled backwards, for a second or two dumbfounded, but then swung at Alice, missing, and turned a wide arc in a kind of drunken reel, swearing to himself and kicking at the wall. Alice bent and lifted the woman to her feet. She was about twenty years old and had blood seeping in channels from her nose. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Her face was marbled with distress. Tendrils of damp hair clung to her cheeks. Without thinking, Alice wiped the woman’s bloody nose with the end of her scarf, as if she were tending an injured child. The woman shrugged off her help and also turned away, following her abuser, with limping gait, towards the far exit.
There was a roar of noise and wind and a semi-dark smearing of outlines. Light-emitting diodes composed the time in a dangling box. The train had come and left; Alice stood numbly on the platform. The old woman, who seemed also to have missed her train, pulled at Alice’s sleeve and said something reassuring. She may have been speaking in Polish, or Yiddish; in any case, it was an expression of friendship and approval. Alice nodded, submissively. The encounter with the bleeding woman had left her with a giddy anticipation of despair. Random violence, no matter how minor, had this predictable effect: the shuddering sensation of watching the concussive recoil of flesh, the general sense of a collapse of civility, the reminder, above all, of graver, sorrowful things that exist beneath the hyper-shine and fast-motion of cities. Alice smiled at the speaking woman, and they waited together, side by side, for the next underground train.
When it came, they entered the same sliding door, and sat looking at each other. The woman pulled up the sleeve of her coat. There, on her forearm, were blue tattooed numbers. The woman nodded at the numbers, then smiled sadly at Alice. She knew, Alice thought. She knew what this all meant. Alice nodded back. It was the barest of communications, a wordless understanding. Alice found herself, like an author, constructing a biography. The supposition of a life that carried a tattoo. Film footage played from somewhere. Visions pre-emptive. Photographs of disaster in hazy tones of brown. When the woman left the train before Alice she did not look back. She moved away into the crowd and was almost immediate
ly obscured.
Arrived at the bookshop, Alice browsed without pleasure. The books conveyed both intimidation and overabundant presence. They lined up like the immense bar code of some key to all mythologies. There were new novels, in hardback, with expressionistic covers and virtuosic claims, and colourful paperbacks, each announcing a superior, unmatched talent. Tables sagged under so many new-minted words. So many leaves of meaning, so many sentences, strung together, in immoderately shiny covers. After slow deliberation, Alice bought a volume of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Although she had read it before, she felt it was a choice-against-disappointment, a choice that retrieved something swept away, rudely disintegrated, by blows struck against a young woman’s body in the dark arcades of the Métro.