by Jay Rubin
Away from the television set, she stood by the window, watching the traffic sweep past the Nagasaki Citizens’ Hospital as if that was what it had always done, flowing freely from the north as if there had never been a mushroom cloud hanging over the Urakami Cathedral, as if the Peace Park had always been a pleasant open space for the people of the city to gather in, not a smoldering heap of ruins.
Then she was in the train again, leaving her baby daughter behind in the green fields of Chiba, shocked in disbelief at a black, broken, twisted Tokyo. No longer did the city’s buildings crowd the tracks; instead, the rubble stretched off into the distance, unobstructed.
Such views soon became all too familiar. Long stretches of track were gone in places, and the connections from train to train could only be made on foot, though a few times she was lucky enough to find space in the back of a charcoal-powered truck or a horse-drawn cart. The shabby inns where she stayed along the way could only cook for her the rice from her dwindling personal supply. The cities that the American bombers had visited stretched in what seemed to be an unbroken carpet of smoking black from one end of the country to the other.
She had come back to Nagasaki to help her brother Ichiro’s wife take care of their children and her own parents, but now it was clear there was so much more to do. Nagasaki itself had seen raids on and off for a year, the latest on August 1, just two days before her arrival. How much the city had changed since her departure in February the year before! Across the harbor, charred areas were discernible in the huge Mitsubishi shipyard, where the country’s greatest warships had been built. The people on the streets in their drab citizens’ uniforms moved along slowly, their pale faces reflecting hunger and overwork. More people were on foot than before. The streetcars ran infrequently, and those that did run were covered with passengers clinging to window frames and any other protuberances they could get their hands on.
Hands. All hands had to be free for unaccustomed tasks—and for emergencies. Everyone had a lumpy canvas haversack slung over one shoulder, each person carrying what might be the last of his or her worldly goods—some roasted soy beans in an old tobacco can, bandages, a triangular piece of material for a sling, burn medicine, a bankbook. Here Mitsuko kept her mirror, her last tie with the past. She had considered leaving it with Jiro or his wife for Mineko, but they would have thrown it away. They wanted nothing to do with her, nothing to remind “their” child of her real mother.
On the morning of August 9, she left her parents’ house in Matsuyama to offer her services at the University Hospital nearby. She was not a professional nurse, she told them, but she had worked in a hospital and she wanted to help. Volunteers were needed at the twenty-two relief stations scattered throughout the city, they said, but not here. She should try the relief centers that had been set up in the elementary schools in Kozen or Katsuyama downtown—just a short streetcar ride away.
“Yes,” she grumbled, “short, if you can manage to get on.”
She trudged along beside the tracks, mopping the sweat from her brow. It was simply too hot to wear her padded air raid hood. The thick morning mist had cleared, and the sun beat down mercilessly. What she would have given to be able to wear a skirt. But any woman not in homely trousers risked mob harassment for lack of cooperation with the war effort.
Passing Nagasaki Station, she followed the streetcar tracks to the left, half-consciously staying with them until she had reached Katsuyama, which was actually somewhat farther from home than Kozen, though easier to get to if she could ever manage to board a streetcar. Standing in the school entrance, she checked her watch. A little after 11:00 a.m. Traveling back and forth between here and Matsuyama was obviously going to be very time-consuming. Today, at least, having come this far, she would see if they had work for her.
A broad-shouldered man wearing spectacles with a cracked left lens was coming down the corridor toward the door. Mitsuko nodded to him, and as she stepped across the threshold, a blinding blue-white flash washed away the building before her. In the next instant, the earth shook her feet out from under her and the building lurched. She landed on her knees, facing forward. From inside came the sound of shattering glass, and the entryway and corridor filled with a thick cloud of fine dust as the mud coating of the walls crumbled to the floor. The building itself remained standing, but through the dust cloud she could see doors leaning at crazy angles. The man who had been walking toward her a moment ago now lay on his back, bleeding from the top of the head.
A bomb!
But it couldn’t have been a bomb. There had been no sound of planes or of the bomb rushing earthward. At least, it could not have fallen close by. But to shake the earth like that, it could not have been far away.
Before she could pull herself to her feet, a nurse in a dirt-smeared uniform appeared from out of the dust cloud and knelt by the bleeding man.
Mitsuko stood and backed slowly away from the school building. Her eyes moved up to the roof. Part of it had caved in. All the nearby buildings had damaged roofs, some where a few tiles had been stripped away, others where the peaks had collapsed inward. The entire second story of one building looked as if it had been chopped off. Everything was strangely quiet. There was no sign of a fire nearby. Where could the bomb have hit? This was obviously the center of the blast, but why were there no fire engines or police?
And then she saw the cloud. Up, high above Tateyama Hill to the north. Higher even than the big, green mound of Mount Konpira, which cut the city in two. A swirling white cloud with a burning red core. Again and again something flashed inside the cloud, and each flash was a different color—yellow, red, purple. She had never seen anything so huge and powerful and strangely beautiful. She stood there, mesmerized, as the cloud swirled up and up, flowing over its own top and down again, its bulbous cap rising on a thick gray stalk, like a huge mushroom growing out of the north side of the mountain.
The north side of the mountain! Matsuyama! Her family was over there! She started to walk back the way she had come, sidestepping little piles of roof tiles that lay on the street like the scales of a giant fish. The closer she came to the station, the worse was the damage to the buildings, many of them on fire. There were more people with cuts and scrapes, then more serious wounds, many gushing blood.
At the station, she turned north toward Matsuyama, walking as quickly as she could in the blistering heat. Now the mushroom cloud had changed to a dirty charcoal gray, spreading out toward the east. It continued to fume and boil, growing thicker and blacker. A sick feeling began to gnaw in her breast. The hills no longer obscured her view to the north, and it was clear from the rising black smoke that something far more terrible had happened there than in the rest of the city. A conflagration was enveloping the entire northern Urakami district, including the cathedral and the place in Matsuyama just below it where she lived with her parents.
The farther north she walked, the more wounded she encountered. A few were living pincushions, the “pins” stuck into them slivers of glass. Some were carried on stretchers, others on doors made to serve as stretchers. Soon the wounds were like nothing she had seen before. The skin on one old man’s face and head and on the backs of his outstretched hands was ashen gray and shriveled. Blinded, he was being led by a woman who seemed too young to be his wife. When they had passed, Mitsuko turned to see that the hair on the back of his head was black: he was not old at all.
Now almost everyone she met moved along with hands held out, the skin on them horribly seared and oozing. The skin of some had actually slipped away from the raw, glistening flesh and hung down below their arms like tattered cloth. One boy seemed to have a pair of rubber gloves dangling from his fingertips, but the “gloves,” she saw, were his own skin.
Most of the wounded were silent and dazed. A few murmured, “Water, water.” Now the procession of stumbling ghosts was so thick, Mitsuko had to twist and turn to keep from touching them.
She saw a young man with a gash on his arm who seemed othe
rwise unhurt. Running up to him, she asked, “What happened? How did all these people get injured?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “There was a flash, and then everything was gone.”
“Where did it hit?”
“I don’t know. The Mitsubishi Munitions Factory, maybe. There’s nothing left.”
“Matsuyama?”
“Gone. Just a bare slope. The cathedral is a heap of stones. The university may be even worse. There’s nothing left.”
“No, it can’t be. Where were the planes? The bombs?”
“I don’t know. It just happened. Maybe it’s a new bomb like the one they dropped on Hiroshima. Some people saw a plane.”
“One plane?”
“I don’t know.”
He moved off with the procession, and Mitsuko stood aside to let the seemingly endless flow of deformed human beings pass her by. Suddenly a slimy hand was on her shoulder, and she gasped when she came face-to-face with a blinded woman, half whose face and hair had been turned into an oozing ball. The woman wore not a stitch of clothing, and her huge pregnant belly was covered with tiny, red slashes. “Take me to a doctor,” she groaned. “Please, help me.”
Mitsuko wanted to vomit, but she took the woman’s uninjured right hand and began to lead her in the direction toward which the crowd was moving. The woman said, haltingly, that she had been working in her garden in Iwakawa, and the next thing she knew she was lying on the ground, naked and blind. A neighbor had told her that her house had collapsed and was burning, her son trapped inside. The man had led her to the street but had gone to find his own wife, and she had groped her way this far south by herself. Her name was Eiko Wada, she added, and she was early in her eighth month of pregnancy. Her husband had worked in the Mitsubishi shipyard but had been killed in a bombing raid there on July 31.
They had passed the station and turned left toward Katsuyama. The relief center in Kozen would be closer, so instead of following the streetcar tracks as she had done earlier, Mitsuko led the woman through the back streets of Kaneya-machi to the New Kozen Elementary School (or People’s School, as it had been renamed with warlike zeal).
“I’m beginning to feel contractions,” Mrs. Wada said.
“Are you sure?” asked Mitsuko. “It could be—”
“Yes, I’m sure!”
“Just a couple hundred meters now,” she encouraged the woman, who was leaning more and more heavily on her, but when they turned the corner, Mitsuko felt her heart break. The throng of wounded at the entrance spilled out onto the street. Those who couldn’t stand or had given up were lying in the dusty schoolyard, squeezing themselves into spaces between the piles of roof tiles shaken off by the blast. Patches of the dry earth were stained blackish-red with blood. Some of the people on the ground were lying very still. Mitsuko saw that one man was unmistakably dead.
“What’s happening?” Mrs. Wada asked when they came to a halt.
“There’s a long line,” Mitsuko said as calmly as she could.
“Oh, no! The contractions are getting stronger.”
“Wait here,” said Mitsuko. She edged her way through the crowd, trying not to touch people. She had handled some repulsive cases in the Minidoka hospital, but this was different. The smell of the crowd was like nothing she had ever experienced before; she imagined it must be the smell of a slaughter house.
She expected curses from the people she had to nudge out of her way, but no one said a thing. They just stood there, those who still had eyes staring vacantly ahead, mouths hanging open.
To a nurse processing people in the entryway, she said, “I have a pregnant woman back there, terribly burned, who is starting to go into labor.”
“I’m sorry, she’ll have to wait her turn like everyone else.” Mitsuko saw that the nurse herself had a bandage around her arm and a long, brown bloodstain on one side of her dress.
“You don’t understand. The baby is coming now.”
“No, you don’t understand. This place is full already, and look at the ones waiting to get in. One of our doctors was crushed under a bookcase, and the other one is going crazy trying to do something for all these people.”
There was no point in arguing. Mitsuko would have to drag Mrs. Wada through the crowd and force this stubborn woman to look at her. But by the time she made it back through the crowd, Mrs. Wada was clutching her belly and moaning. Her thighs were wet, and the dust between her feet had turned to mud.
“It’s coming!” she cried. “It’s coming!”
Mitsuko pulled the cloth triangle from her haversack and spread it on the ground. Then, as gently as possible, she helped Mrs. Wada crouch down until her haunches were on the cloth. She felt the woman’s loose skin slide atop her flesh. The woman lay back on the bare earth, clawing at the ground, her whole body convulsing with each new contraction, her moans rising to wails and finally to ear-piercing screams.
Tearing at the hard, dry ground, Mrs. Wada’s fingernails were soon streaming with blood, and still the baby would not come. “Take it out! Take it out!” were the only words that Mitsuko could catch amid her screams.
Suddenly the contractions stopped, and there was only the sound of the woman’s panting. Then, with amazing calm, Mrs. Wada said, “If it’s a boy, name it Tsuyoshi after my husband. If it’s a girl, call it Tomoko.”
“That’s for you to do,” said Mitsuko.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Mrs. Wada. “I’m not going to live through this.”
Before Mitsuko could find the words to reassure her, the contractions started again. On and on Mrs. Wada screamed, until finally, with an enormous gush of blood, an inert lump of flesh disgorged itself from between the woman’s legs and lay in Mitsuko’s hands. Almost at the same moment, Mrs. Wada gave a long hiss, and her pain-racked body shriveled up like a pricked balloon. One corpse had given birth to another. The tiny dead creature would have been a girl.
Mitsuko carried the little thing to the side of the building and laid it on some roof tiles in a shady spot. She searched among the waiting victims for someone who might have the strength to help her carry the mother, but most had all they could do to remain on their feet. Wiping away as much of the blood and slime from the body as she could with the saturated cloth, she picked up what was left of Mrs. Wada and staggered to the place where she had laid the little girl, Tomoko, who had never drawn breath. She wished there were something she could cover the bodies with decently, but she realized that in the short time since they had arrived at the schoolyard, several more corpses had joined them on the ground. Mitsuko did her best to drag these out of the direct sunlight, after which she struggled through the pressing crowd to the nurse in the doorway.
“I can help,” she panted. “I’ve worked in a hospital.”
“In there,” said the nurse, motioning with a jerk of the head.
Mitsuko stayed “in there” for the next two days without sleep and little more than an occasional toilet break, helping the doctor oil wounds and extract glass splinters from eyes—when he could do anything at all for the lacerated remnants of humanity who streamed into the relief center. For a while on the first day, there was some talk that the building would have to be evacuated if the sudden wind that developed were to sweep nearby fires in this direction, but by six p.m. the winds had shifted and the danger of fire was not mentioned again.
The patients who could speak told of the skies burning after sunset, of new fires near the train station, of horrible swarms of mosquitoes attacking the suppurating skin of the victims trying to sleep in the schoolyard. Over and over word came that the area around Matsuyama had been decimated. The Mitsubishi Ordinance Factory had been destroyed, killing all the high school girls working inside. The Urakami Cathedral had been dashed to the ground. The handsome old camphor trees that shaded the Medical University campus had been uprooted or transformed into skeletal stumps, and the buildings reduced to smoking rubble. In some areas, corpses littered the ground so thickly that it was impossible for the l
iving to walk in a straight line. In other areas, the destruction had been so complete that there were not even corpses left. Matsuyama was said to be one such place.
Alarms were sounded when enemy planes passed overhead, but no one seemed to care. All through the night the planes came, at one point in such numbers that the building shook with the roar of their engines, but at least they dropped no more bombs.
Mitsuko was still working like an automaton the next day when an advance party of doctors from the Sasebo Naval Hospital arrived. She put in one more unbroken night of work, during which time the school was being set up as sleeping quarters for the medical teams pouring into the city. Finally, nearly forty-eight hours after the bomb fell, she dozed for an hour in the corner of one “dormitory” room and then set out on foot for Matsuyama.
None of the rumors had prepared her for the totality of destruction that she found where her family had been living. It was impossible to tell where the streets had been laid out. Except for a few scattered stones, the slope was barren as if a gigantic bulldozer had scoured its way from top to bottom. She was almost thankful. How much more terrible it must have been for those people who had been trapped under buildings and slowly suffocated or burned to death. Here, there was nothing to react to. One day, she had had a family; today, they no longer existed. They had all been at home when she left, even Ichiro, who had little more to do in Nagasaki than tend the vegetable garden. Perhaps they had not even suffered.
She stumbled up the hill to see what was left of the Urakami Cathedral, center of the city’s Catholic community. How many of the faithful twenty thousand had been killed? How many of the huge, red edifice’s six thousand seats had been occupied at the moment of destruction? What did the survivors think now of their God? The few remaining sculpture saints still cast their gazes heavenward as if seeking an explanation for the indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. But up there, in the heavens, lived no God. Up there were only the planes from Seattle, the Boeings, the B-29s, delivering their gifts of hate, as if sent by Tom for Mitsuko herself. Perhaps, between white saints and their white God, no explanation was necessary. Those who had died here had not been Catholics or Christians or even human beings. They were just Japs.