I’ve used up my page, dearest Wes. I can’t write on the back because my family will be able to read what I say to you. Dad said Franny is married. To what’s-his-name Devon the ranger. Glad to hear it. May she get pregnant immediately and stay pregnant for the rest of her life.
Chapter 21
WHEN PATTY became pregnant, Kado’s mother, Shinsa, who had lost two sons and six grandchildren to the bomb, was overjoyed. Patty explained in her best Japanese that what they were doing was fraught with danger. Kado’s mother did not understand radiation and thought Patty was being neurotic. Kado took over and spoke about radiation and the problems it caused not only for pregnant women but for everyone in Hiroshima. He told her of the thousands of births over the eight years since the bomb that had revealed deformities and other problems. Shinsa told him he was being melodramatic. Nothing could impede her happiness.
Kado’s mother and father took it for granted that the child would be raised in Hiroshima. They didn’t know of the long discussions between husband and wife on the issue of continuing to live in Hiroshima after the baby’s birth. Kado said his parents would never leave Hiroshima and move to another part of Japan, far less to Almond Tree. ‘From hell to paradise,’ said Kado of the Almond Tree option. ‘But we cannot.’
‘Then we have to accept whatever comes,’ said Patty. ‘The women who have children here have no choice either and they have to deal with whatever they give birth to. We have to accept that we’re in the same boat with our patients. We stay.’ But all through the pregnancy, she was worried sick. She prayed for the baby a number of times a day, standing still with her eyes shut, not making a sound. She asked her mother to enlist the community in praying for the baby. She had seen the worst that radiation poisoning could do to a child and had to lecture herself to be content so long as the baby was born alive. If there were problems, deformities, whatever, the baby would be loved and cared for. But so much better if it was born whole and healthy.
Her mother-in-law couldn’t keep her hands off her. Shinsa would have Patty lie down with her tummy exposed and massage the bulge with an ointment she had obtained from a Zen monk. The ointment had a pleasant aroma, like rosemary, and had to be left on for an hour. As she massaged Patty, she chanted a prayer over and over, not in Japanese, that sounded to Patty like, ‘rub-a-dub-dub’. Kado’s mother said it was from Nepal. Religious rituals from all over were being invoked to overcome the possible harm to the baby of the atomic bomb. Patty was happy to receive assistance from any deity at all. But the baby’s heartbeat was not entirely regular, a concern. Kado listened to the heartbeat himself and confessed himself a little worried. He outlined five possible causes and thought the most likely cause was ventricular septal defect—a hole in the wall between ventricles. A frantic note came into Shinsa’s chanting.
The baby, a boy, was born on time at Kado’s hospital. Kado delivered it himself. The baby howled as he ought and displayed the right number of fingers and toes. Kado listened to his heart and detected the same irregularity as in the womb. Patty, the rigour of birth already forgotten held out her arms, ‘Gimme!’ and cradled the baby to her breast. She wept with happiness and cooed the baby’s name, Francis, in keeping with Kado’s dead wife’s family tradition of giving Catholic names. Patty’s mother-in-law and father-in-law called in as soon as they were permitted, twenty minutes after the birth. Shinsa was besotted with the baby instantly and kissed his cheeks. Kado’s father, Maka, produced the first genuine smile Kado had seen on his face since the bomb, and the death of his sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
Patty didn’t ask if the defect in her baby’s heart could be fixed. She expected it to be, without question. Kado had to tell her that Francis wouldn’t be ready for surgery for two years and that it was possible that he could die in that period. Patty said that if he let the baby die, she would cease speaking to him. ‘You keep him alive. Then get Haru to fix him.’ Haru was a surgeon, a friend of Kado’s. She alarmed herself with the way in which she held her husband accountable for the baby’s survival. As tender as she was with Francis, she could look up from his face to Kado and something almost savage would come over her. He was a doctor, he must make the baby live.
He did have some good news after a month. Haru had examined Francis and reported that it was possible that the gap between the ventricles might close by itself—he’d known this to happen. But if it came to surgery, it would be difficult. ‘We would have to patch. Very awkward.’
Patty’s mother-in-law, besotted with the child since twenty minutes after his birth, seized on this possibility of the gap closing by itself. But the baby needed help in the healing. When Patty returned to work six months after the birth, the baby came with her in the care of Shinsa, and Patty would slip away to the nursery at intervals to breastfeed Francis. She wanted to stay with the baby, but there were so many patients at Hiroshima’s hospitals and so few nurses willing to work in a radioactive atmosphere that she was forced to make the sacrifice. The hospitals were no more radioactive than anywhere else in Hiroshima, so exposure was no greater. The baby seemed well, except that he wasn’t.
∼
Patty took a day off to go with the baby and with her mother-in-law by train to a Zen temple fifty miles north of Hiroshima. Fast, modern trains ran on a meticulously observed timetable. Everything in Hiroshima was fast and modern. Nobody spoke about the bomb. Nobody spoke about the war at all. Whatever humiliation the Japanese had experienced in defeat had been buried almost too deep for recall. It was as if the humiliation had been altered and expressed as a devotion to industry, to construction, especially. Even where Kado and Patty lived, five miles from the booming city, new houses were being built. People from the south were moving to Hiroshima, rather than away from it. Crowds turned out on commemoration days, but all they heard—Patty had attended three—was the mayor speaking in public language and platitudes about the need for the world to embrace peace. People listened but they didn’t believe anything that was said. What they believed was that the Americans and Russians were building more and bigger nuclear bombs and were likely to go to war with each other. It was widely believed that the British were developing nuclear arms and that the French and Chinese were also working on a nuclear bomb (they were). They believed that soon six or seven countries would have nuclear weapons and that these bombs would be used against Japan if the Russians and Chinese wished it so. They listened, went home, woke up the next day and continued industriously building Hiroshima into a glistening city, one of the most prosperous in Japan. They took pride in what they were achieving. They took pride in their fast, modern trains.
The temple was five miles from the station. There were no taxis so they had to walk, taking turns to push the pram uphill along a dirt road. At the temple they were met by a novice with a shaven head who greeted them courteously and told them he would convey their request for an audience to the abbot.
The master, it transpired, would be only too glad to receive them.
They were shown not to the temple but to the stables, where a tiny man in a robe and apron was using a pitchfork to clean out one of the stalls. A huge grey horse was standing motionless just outside the entrance to the stall. The master or abbot, for so it appeared that he was, put the pitchfork aside, wiped his hands on his apron and bowed to his guests. ‘You are asking yourself why I don’t get a novice to do this. But the horse is my friend. He works for me, I work for him. You have a baby to show me.’ He reached down into the pram and lifted the baby, cradled it in his arms like a mother. ‘You are worried about the child. You can stop worrying. This child will be here on earth after we are all gone. You are not Japanese,’ he said to Patty in English that carried a strong accent of the southern states. ‘Not American, I think. Not English. Are you Australian? Yes? I have been to Australia many years ago. Brisbane. I wanted to learn from your Aboriginal people. I spoke to Johnno, a wise man. Johnno knew much more about the world than me. Please excuse me while I continue my work.’ H
e returned the baby to the pram.
Shinsa said, ‘Welcome news, much thanks, master. May we leave a donation for the temple?’
The master cackled. ‘One million US dollars.’
‘Ai, too much for us to afford, master.’
‘No? Then stroke the horse. His name is Hero. He pulls the wagon up the hill and down. This you can afford? The time to stroke the horse?’
Both Patty and her mother-in-law stroked with pleasure the horse’s smoothly brushed neck.
‘Come again,’ said the master.
Over the next two months, the baby’s heart gave evidence of repairing itself; of the ventricle gap closing. It was as if Francis’s tiny body had consulted a blueprint and noticed a defect. Haru came to the house to examine the baby and confirmed Kado’s diagnosis. ‘He is fixing his own heart. It is not common, but it happens sometimes.’ Shinsa applauded with joy and Patty burst into tears. She picked Francis up and held him tight. ‘You clever chap. You little champion.’
Elsewhere in Hiroshima, less good fortune. Babies died in their thousands. Graveyards on the outskirts of Hiroshima were so crowded that new plots of land had to be set aside as cemeteries every month. The cemetery industry rivalled the construction of factories, apartment blocks, houses, roads and highways, shops. The mayor was deeply concerned at the death rate and wanted to call a day of community mourning. But he was talked out of it by his deputy. Morale in the city was high. Why risk damaging it to draw attention to something that could not be changed?
Patty became pregnant again. If the baby was born with troubles to contend with, she would take it to the master. He would hold it and say: ‘No need to worry.’
Chapter 22
BEFORE WES’S six-month wait for the visa was up, Vladimir Petrov ruined everything. Petrov was a second-tier diplomat in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra who owed his appointment to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of state security and the most feared man in the Soviet Union. Following the death of Stalin, a struggle for the leadership of the Communist Party broke out with Nikita Khrushchev and his supporters on one side, Georgy Malenkov and his gang on the other. Beria also wanted the leadership, but nobody on either side wanted Beria. Everyone in the Politburo had a relative or a friend who had been murdered on Beria’s orders. Without the support of Stalin, who had been happy to permit Beria to murder anyone at all, his influence was diminished.
The appeal of Khrushchev to his supporters was that he had no charisma. What, another Georgian psychopath like Stalin, who could do anything he pleased? Best not. Khrushchev and his allies organised the arrest of Beria, and his execution in December 1953 was bad news for Petrov in Canberra. He feared, not unreasonably, that he would be called back to Moscow and shot. People tainted with loyalty to Beria were being shot every day. Petrov allowed himself to be cultivated by ASIO agents who promised him security, a house, access to Bondi, a pension, and what amounted to a bag of lollies whenever he asked for one. All this if he brought them evidence of Soviet espionage in Australia. Petrov took the bait. He didn’t tell his wife, Evdokia, who also worked at the embassy, what he was planning. He was prepared to leave her to whatever fate the Soviet state might have in mind for her.
Once news of Vladimir’s defection reached Moscow, Soviet security agents bundled Evdokia on a flight back to Russia, but were prevented from leaving Australia by the Australian police, who took her off the flight at Darwin. The prime minister of the day, and of many, many days to come, Bob Menzies, cheerfully exploited the Petrov defection and the attempted kidnap of Evdokia to stoke up the simmering hatred of communists in a big part of the electorate to melodrama and hysteria. He ordered a royal commission into Soviet espionage in Australia, conducted at lightning speed, and the commission found, so it said, plenty. The commission’s findings were not made public, just the conclusion. Menzies, outraged by the look of him, red in the face, broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and ordered the embassy closed.
Wes’s visa application disappeared in the helter-skelter of packing papers into tea-chests and cardboard cartons. He had no need to be told in any official way that his visa would never be heard of again. He’d followed the Petrov drama with sickening foreboding. But he had a plan. His grandmother had been born in London and he was entitled to a British passport, which Doris, his grandmother, had secured for him so that he could carry it with him to New Guinea. Her motive was to protect him if he were captured by the Japanese, who, she reasoned, would treat him more leniently if they thought he was British rather than a crude Australian. Wes thanked Doris, but left the passport with Teddy when he departed for New Guinea. Wes still had it. He intended to go to London and apply for a visa at the Soviet embassy with his British passport as a British citizen. Doris, in her application, had entered Wes’s full name, Wesley George Fox Heavenly Grace Cunningham. In his Australian passport, the authorities were content with plain Wesley George Cunningham. So he might be thought a different Wesley Cunningham, as he hoped.
∼
Wes wanted to tell Bill at the Department of Foreign Affairs, or wherever, what he intended to do, so he sent a letter to the DFA, Canberra, simply addressed to ‘Bill’. Astonishingly, in three weeks he received a reply, short. ‘Come to Canberra on October 2nd, ask for me at reception, 3.00 p.m.’
This time Bill hadn’t been in the water. He was wearing a stylish green suit, close-fitting, with gold buttons. His hair was cut to leave some length and brushed straight back. His tan had faded, but he was as cheerful as if he’d come straight from the beach. Espionage seemed a source of delight to him, like a thrilling game he had mastered in all its nuances. The office was the completely blank little place in which they’d met before.
Bill sat down and rested his folded hands on the desk. ‘I’ve just come from lunch with your prime minister. Amiable fellow. Appetite on him like a famished jackal. Now, one or two things, Wes. Oh, and if you’re wondering why I’ve given myself over to your case, it’s simply because I admire you. And your love and loyalty to Elizabeth. You know, I was home recently—England—and Mrs Bill and I were having one of our customary chilly episodes. I asked myself, what would my life be like if I felt the way about Mrs Bill that Wesley Cunningham feels about the prospective Mrs Wesley? But I don’t have your heart, Wes, alas. And if you scooped my soul out with a spoon, you could probably fill an old marmalade jar with a substance the colour of tar. Enough of the sorrows of Bill. You want to go to London and apply for a Red visa on your British passport. That would probably work, and in London you can obtain, generally, a visa in six weeks. When it comes to your interview, do not mention that you are a Quaker, or a believer in any sort of “supreme being”. The Russians don’t welcome Quakers.
The Bride of Almond Tree Page 14