Shrewed

by Elizabeth Renzetti

  “Everything that has happened since the publication of Wolf Hall has astonished me,” she said, leading me slowly over to an overstuffed sofa. “I should be shockproof, but I’m not. It’s not a world I thought I’d be in.”

  That world, for a woman sometimes confined by illness to an area close to her writing desk, was a huge and liberating one: two Booker Prizes for the first two novels of the trilogy, smash success stage and television adaptations, millions of copies sold. Even stranger, this popularity hadn’t arrived on the wings of vampires or wizards or S&M–loving billionaires, but through highly literary, dense novels narrated in an archaic tense called the “historic present.” The books are not for all readers, and some complain that they’re too complex, too allusive. Yet, there they remain, the unicorn of the publishing world: thorny masterpieces that sell like iPhones.

  “You can’t go wrong with Henry VIII,” Mantel said with her sly smile. We both knew that the real star of the books was Thomas Cromwell, the king’s reserved and compelling consigliere, who began a pauper and ended with his head at the mercy of an incompetent executioner. The entire narrative arrived in one swoop, she said, when she heard a voice in her head say the words “So now get up.” They are the first lines in the first novel; they will likely reappear at Cromwell’s ignominious end.

  We chatted about Bring Up the Bodies, because that’s what my newspaper and her publisher wanted (in fact, I had had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which is pretty hilarious for a novel outlining some of the best-known episodes in Western history). Really, I wanted to talk to her about her own narrative: about how writing saved her, about the children she never had, about the intersection between the two. In my mind, she was heroic, having overcome pain and rejection, and quietly plugged away writing extraordinary novels that hardly anyone noticed.

  I wanted to ask her about pain, because I, too, had felt my guts hollowed out with knife-spasms. She had endometriosis; I had Crohn’s disease. I wanted to ask how she had overcome that pain to write — not just overcome it, but fed it into her furnace, watched it burn and char, the blackened ash turning into words on the page. She began researching her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety, an invigorating, vast novel about the French Revolution, on “days [she] was half well.” No publisher wanted it, at least not at first; it was the first novel she wrote, the fifth to be published.

  But I didn’t ask her about her pain, nor shared mine. It would have been too weird. This wasn’t a therapy session. But I could ask her about the unborn children she wrote about so beautifully in Giving Up the Ghost; they were the phantoms of the title, “stretching out their ghost fingers to grab the pen.” Ambivalent about whether she wanted to have children, the decision was made for her when she had to have a hysterectomy at twenty-seven.

  “You had that psychiatrist,” I said, “the one who diagnosed you with an excess of ambition.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, with a light laugh. The laugh of someone who is generous in triumph. “He recommended I go work in a dress shop.”

  Could she ever imagine a doctor saying such a thing to a young woman now? “Probably people wouldn’t dare couch it in those terms, but things have really not got a lot easier for women,” she said. “The agenda of control has just become less overt. People still have a tremendous struggle in trying to live a woman’s life, and trying to bring up children and go out there and be an actor in a world that is still so much a man’s world. We still work to a man’s timetable and a man’s agenda.’’

  The obvious question to ask, as she watched me calmly with those huge blue eyes, was whether there would have been fewer books if there had been any children. Could one make such a crude and lumpen equation? Would she have been as productive, if she had to stumble over the famous pram in the hallway that Cyril Connolly said was the death knell for artistic ambitions?

  She answered quickly, in her cool, bright voice. It was not the first time she’d thought about the question. “Probably not. Something would have suffered. To be honest, I’m quite a maternal person, and I’m a bit of a control freak, so it probably would have been the writing. Someone said one child equals two books.”

  Well, that was a relief. I now had an excuse for four books left unwritten. I did have one book at home, a comic novel that I’d dithered over for three years. I worried, at that point, that it would never be published. I worried that it would.

  On the train ride home, and on many days since then, I thought about Mantel’s immense productivity, her genius for creating character and situation, her unwillingness to be cut down by rejection or dismissal or fear. Years later, I would have a coffee mug on my desk. It says, in an antique, typewriter-y font, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” I try to live up to it. And on some blessed days I do.

  “THEIR DEATHS WOULD HAVE SIGNIFICANCE”

  When I sat down with Setsuko Thurlow in her Toronto apartment in the summer of 2017, I wasn’t sure how to tell her about the strange connection that joined us across decades and continents and world history. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to tell her. My family’s livelihood was connected, oddly and tangentially, to her family’s destruction. How do you bring that up in polite conversation?

  I had come to talk to her about the devastation of Hiroshima, which she had survived as a girl. But first, we would commune over a plate of midsummer cherries. “They’re very good this year,” Setsuko said, as she wheeled over to her fridge on her walking frame. She handed me the plate to carry into the living room, as I wondered whether to bring up our connection. It certainly didn’t seem like the right moment.

  I felt Japan everywhere: In Setsuko’s accent, in the plate of cherries, in the beautiful silver wedding kimono hung on the wall. “Not mine,” she said, pointing to the kimono. “I didn’t wear that one.” In fact, she married her Canadian husband Jim in a traditional North American bridal dress, in Washington, D.C., in 1955. They couldn’t get married in Virginia, where Setsuko was studying at university; the state banned whites from marrying non-whites.

  But all that came ten years after the day that changed her life — the day that changed the world, really. Setsuko is a hibakusha, one of the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now she is eighty-five, and tired, but also elated because her life’s work as a disarmament activist — necessary work that had seemed painstaking and fruitless for so long — was finally showing some small reward.

  She settled herself slowly onto her sofa. Her legs had been bothering her, the result of recent trips to the United Nations in New York, where she had given survivor’s testimony in support of a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The ban passed, with 122 countries voting in support, and although it’s largely a symbolic document, it’s a monumental one in the eyes of hibakusha and other disarmament activists — a first step to outlawing the last remaining legal weapons of mass destruction.

  Setsuko told her story at the United Nations, the story she’s told countless times over the years, to audiences of children and adults, politicians and veterans. Her voice shook at the UN, and some of those listening wept.

  Setsuko recounted it for me in her Toronto apartment, while I wondered if I should tell her my small piece of the puzzle. An elegant woman, she wore a fuchsia blouse and bold red lipstick, almost exactly the same shade my mother wears. They are only one year apart in age. When Setsuko spoke, her eyes were lost in the middle distance, and sometimes they welled with tears. But she made a decision, long ago, that whatever pain remembering brought, it was much preferable to the numbness of forgetting. She chose her voice over silence.

  “I feel it’s really important to tell my story,” she said. “I made a vow to my loved ones, my schoolmates, to family and friends, that their deaths would have significance. It would not be in vain. I would not forget this. I would do my best till my last breath.”

  She clasped her hands in her lap, perched on the edge of her sofa, and remembered that d
ay again.

  On the morning of August 6, 1945, she was Setsuko Nakamura, sitting on the floor of her girls’ school in Hiroshima, listening to an army official drone on about duty to the emperor. For the past few months, she and her grade 8 classmates had been used as cheap labour by the army, sewing buttons on uniforms and packing cigarette boxes. In recent weeks, they’d trained as decoding assistants in preparation for the final Allied invasion of Japan.

  But the Allies didn’t invade Hiroshima. At 8:15 a.m., Setsuko saw a blinding blue-white flash out the window and felt herself lifted through the air. She came back to consciousness in pitch darkness, and the only sound she heard was her classmates calling for their mothers, or for God. She was pinned under something. She heard a male voice — a soldier, perhaps — tell her to crawl toward a patch of light. He shoved her. She crawled. When she got free, she turned to look at the wooden schoolhouse, now engulfed in flames, her classmates inside.

  She felt no panic. She felt nothing. She was thirteen years old. “All around, everything was destroyed,” Setsuko said. “There were some moving objects, but they didn’t look like human beings. They were moving about slowly, silently. That silence was a spooky thing, I remember. Nobody was screaming.’’

  She joined this ghostly procession, shuffling along in a morning that was dark as night. The 20-kiloton uranium-based atomic weapon had detonated 2,000 feet above Hiroshima, causing unimaginable damage. Setsuko used her hands now to try to demonstrate: Skin hanging in shreds. Eyeballs hanging out. Intestines hanging out. Thousands were incinerated immediately, or died within the next few days. By the end of the year, 140,000 people would die as a result of the bomb in Hiroshima, 75,000 from the plutonium bomb that fell on Nagasaki three days later.

  With two classmates, she came to a military training ground where thousands of victims lay dying. They cried for water, but Setsuko and her friends had no way to carry water. Instead, they took off their blouses and soaked them in a nearby stream, and pressed the dripping cloth to the mouths of the dying. That night, Setsuko and her classmates sat on a hillside and watched the city burn. She wondered if her house had burned, her favourite dress with it.

  Her parents found her in the morning. They had survived the blast, but Setsuko’s sister and her four-year-old son had been in the city centre visiting the doctor and were horribly burned. For the next several days, Setsuko and her parents nursed them as best they could, with no water, no food, and no medicine. Her sister spent her last days apologizing for failing her son, while the boy begged for water.

  When they died, soldiers came and tossed their bodies into a pit. They poured in gasoline and lit a match, turning the burning corpses with bamboo poles. Setsuko watched, alongside her parents, and felt no sorrow. Worse, she felt nothing. This numbness would haunt her, a secondary casualty of war.

  “For years after I thought, What kind of human being am I? My dear people were being treated not even like human beings, and I didn’t even feel sadness.”

  She paused in the telling of her story. I had the urge to take her hand, which would not have been very professional. Instead, I told her a bit about my interest in nuclear disarmament — how I co-founded a nerdy group called Youth for Peace in high school, which attracted almost zero students to showings of If You Love This Planet and discussions of The Fate of the Earth.

  I was terrified in those days. I pored over maps that depicted potential blast zones if Toronto were ever the target of a nuclear weapon. I was a strange and morbid teenager, I know. You don’t have to tell me.

  That was not even the connection I wanted to discuss with Setsuko. We talked a bit more about the new international nuclear ban treaty, and how she felt betrayed by Canada and Japan, which had not participated in the negotiations. Still, disarmament work had given her peace: she had fulfilled the promise to her friends and family killed by the bomb.

  The bomb: There it was. I said, testing the ground, “So there’s this strange connection between us . . .” Setsuko looked at me expectantly. I took a deep breath — I was crossing from my position as neutral journalistic observer, a position I’ve never been particularly good at maintaining, anyway — and told her my family’s story.

  “My grandfather worked at the mine that produced the uranium ore for the bomb.” There, I said it. She looked at me with curiosity, but not horror. I told her the whole story — my maternal grandfather, Herman Mulvogue, was an accountant at Eldorado Mines at Great Bear Lake, NWT, where some of the uranium ore for the Manhattan Project was dug from the ground. He also worked at Eldorado’s refinery in Port Hope, Ontario.

  No one knew where the uranium was going, least of all my grandfather. He used to tell stories about American soldiers guarding the ore, with rifles pointed out at the bleak tundra. The Dene men who mined and carried the ore were never told of the dangers they faced from their toxic loads. It was shipped south and processed and sent to New Mexico, where it became part of the most dangerous weapon the world would ever know. A weapon that tore apart Setsuko Nakamura’s world when it exploded above city like “a sheet of sun,” as The New Yorker’s John Hersey described it in a famous article.

  My grandfather was lovely, gentle, and learned — a deeply thoughtful man who struggled with alcoholism most of his life. He taught himself the Japanese national anthem, and would sing it to us. Why? I have no idea. I wish he were alive to talk about it, but he died when I was twelve. I think he and Setsuko would have liked each other. He was one tiny cog in a giant machine, a machine made of millions of human cogs and gears that stretched from northern Canada to Japan. The role he played was inconsequential. Most of the uranium for the bomb ending up being imported from the Belgian Congo anyway.

  Still, we are tied across history, Setsuko and I. I finished telling her the story and she looked at me for a minute and said, finally, “What fate!” I don’t believe in fate, though. I never have. I don’t think she does, either, really: She has always been furious with people who suggest that God spared her life because he had a special purpose for her. What did that say about the people who were melted that day? Did they have no special purpose?

  I helped Setsuko put the cherries back in the fridge. She had to save her strength for the Hiroshima anniversary celebration that was quickly approaching. It was held every year at Toronto’s Peace Garden, a garden she was instrumental in building.

  A few days after we met, she sent me a note, thanking me for my visit, expanding on her thoughts on disarmament, and reflecting on the story I told her about my grandfather: “I tremble with the thought,” she wrote. “Two innocent human beings become connected totally by chance in the larger scheme of life.”

  It made me tremble, too. The world is a random place, full of chaos and chance: This has always been my view of the universe, which is both wildly terrifying and oddly comforting. Because if there is no fate, no grand plan, then all we have to fall back upon is the ingenuity and resilience of the human project. The comfort we can bring each other in the eye-blink we have together. The things we can make, and share.

  Every time I interview someone I come away enriched; I can never predict which impressions will linger. It’s the intelligence and courage that Phyllis James talked about, and the damn-the-torpedoes fieriness of Germaine Greer, the doggedness and brilliance of Hilary Mantel, and Setsuko Thurlow’s determination to insist on speaking for the dead who cannot. Every one of them was a teacher, and I was lucky to listen and learn, if only for a brief moment.

  A VIEW FROM THE OUTSIDE: A LETTER TO MY YOUNGER SELF

  Dear Young Liz,

  Look at you — only twenty-two years old and you’ve got a desk at Canada’s national newspaper. A full-time job. Yes, you’re too afraid to ask anyone where the bathroom is, and you’re anxiously chain-smoking your way to the pulmonary ward. But you’re doing it.

  As a copy editor, your job is to smooth the stories that come your way, to find errors and fix them.
You try to write funny headlines on funny stories, serious headlines on stories about war and death. When you accidentally put a typo into the very first headline you write for the paper, you will go home and cry, and then drown your sorrows with your boyfriend, the budding alcoholic. You will be grateful that a senior editor caught the mistake before the paper was printed. You will come back to work again the next day, head down, and open a new story to edit.

  Sometimes, you’ll be required to call the reporters and ask questions about their stories: This will take more nerve than calling strangers. This newspaper is the voice of Canada’s establishment, and its writers are experts in their fields, experienced, battle-hardened — and, as it turns out, very affable. Most of them are men, though this is changing. Almost all of them are white.

  This will not strike you as odd. In 1989, the country’s media landscape looks like the Prairies after a winter storm, featureless in its whiteness. There are exceptions, of course, but they are too few. The number of Black, Brown, Asian, or Indigenous reporters or on-air personalities is tiny. The country’s schisms are still taught along historical and linguistic lines, English and French.

  And, shamefully, this won’t bother you very much. You don’t even really notice. You pass as one of the token ethnics at the WASPy picnic. The vowel at the end of your name makes you distinct from the Mcs and Macs who fill the pages of the newspaper; you are duskier than just about everybody else. When a story about the mafia in Toronto enters the editing system and someone jokingly suggests “Give it to Renzetti,” you’ll laugh along with the rest of the editors. It’s just easier that way.

  Besides, you are too hung up on issues of sexism to notice the presence of racism. Feminism is your cause, and you seek out the older female journalists at the paper, some of whom will become mentors. They too are all white. You are ready to fight one injustice only: You don’t see that injustice is a web, and that all exploitations are strung together, and that in many, many ways you are more fortunate than most. You won’t realize it for decades to come.