Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  “That is where I went to school for five years,” I said, pointing out the place that had taught me boredom and how to deal with it. “Shinzo lives just round the corner. We’ll try to see him tomorrow.”

  “Yes, we must! Dear Shinzo. I miss him,” said the girl with a sigh, before finding something else to distract her. “What’s that big building there?”

  “Urakami Cathedral,” I replied. “It’s our Christian capital. There are more Christians here than anywhere else in Japan.”

  “And if they are Christians, does that mean they’re more likely to survive the war?”

  One of the things that I love – truly love – about children is that they ask the unthinkable. And – as I now endeavour to do with all children’s questions – I carefully weighed up my answer. “This is only my view,” I said. “I’m sure many would disagree. But I don’t think your survival will depend on whether you’re a Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Muslim or atheist. Look at all those Christians walking in there. In a few minutes, they’ll be praying for peace and victory and whatever else they want to pray for – and yet on the other side of the world in America, there will be millions of Yankees praying to the exact same Christian God – and yet they will be praying for our total annihilation. So what do you think? Is God going to listen to one side and ignore the other? Or is it all meaningless?”

  I was exploring my way through a series of nebulous thoughts, seeing if they could somehow coalesce, before I batted the question back to the girl. “Religion is a personal matter of faith. Believe what you want – but always, I hope, respect other people’s beliefs, or even their lack of them. Tell me what you think.”

  The girl looked over at the white cathedral, where a troupe of young women were walking in past a large statue of the Virgin Mary. “I think that if they believe their prayers work, then that’s a good thing. The prayers may help them – even if they’re not answered.”

  I laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. Truly, she had more wisdom between her ears than any number of adults I have known. “Yes, you’e right. Praying may well bring them some small solace – even if it doesn’t help them survive the war.”

  And sadly on that day, the Christian God – if you so believe in him – decided to listen to the Yankees’ prayers and to ignore those of the Japanese. It was another unsettling little irony of the atomic bombs that Fat Man’s epicentre was almost directly above Urakami Cathedral, wiping out more than 10,000 of the Yankees’ so-called Christian brethren.

  We had arrived – back to the street where I had played as a child and the home where I had been born and where both my parents had died. It was a wooden bungalow with a tiled roof and was of a decent size. It nestled in the lee of one of the steep wooded mountains that surround the Urakami Valley. They are always referred to as mountains, by the way, even though the highest is only 330 metres. But to those of us in Nagasaki, these green hills so totally dominate the skyline that they always seem like mountains, and so that is how they have come to be labelled.

  I could just make out the large garden at the back, along with the rock shrine my father had so painstakingly built with his own hands. I had been but four years old when he built it as a memorial to my mother, and helped him mix the cement. My father and a friend had spend two weeks on the job, using a trolley to haul the great rocks through the garden. Some of the stones had been so heavy that the two men had barely been able to lift them. And now, nearly 90 years on, just a single quicklime whiff of cement takes me back to that long summer.

  My home had been built at around the turn of the century and my memories had used to be happy ones – though in recent years they had been superseded by ugly moments of rowing with my wife. But still – it was never too late to make amends. I would make amends.

  So as I walked with the girl up the front path, I pledged to do my best with Mako. For the sake of our son, not to mention our marriage, I would try to be a new man. And I owed it to Sumie and to all those countless victims of Hiroshima. It is difficult to explain how I felt, but I will try. It was partly to do with my “Embrace Life” revelation outside Hijiyama primary school. But I also had come to have a much greater appreciation of my own good fortune. It almost felt as if I owed it to Hiroshima to be, or to strive to be, a better man. I was not expecting to be the model husband. But I had made a secret pledge to myself to try harder: to be more tolerant, more forgiving, and more faithful.

  “Here we are,” I said to the girl, trying to smile though my guts were churning up. I knocked on the door. “I hope you like it.”

  Just as children do, the girl had instantly detected my nerves. They have this sixth sense which always knows when things are awry.

  “It looks very nice,” she said

  From far inside, I could make out the distinctive sound of Toshiaki screaming – and of my wife shouting at him. The boy’s high-pitched ululation stretched on and on; my wife’s bark was more staccato. I thought at first they had not heard us, but after one more explosive scream and a smack, I heard footsteps. The girl took a step or two backwards, I think terrified at what was about to emerge.

  The clump of footsteps through the vestibule; the rattle of a chain; and the door is flung open to reveal my darling wife, the mother of my child, as beautiful as ever and coruscatingly angry.

  “Yes?” she spat, before looking more closely at the vagabond on her doorstep.

  “It is you? I thought you were dead.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is me.” I moved forward to give her a hug. It might not have been what she wanted, but it was a token of intent. It would show, I thought, that I wanted to build bridges.

  But I might as well have been embracing a block of wood. As I tried to kiss her on the cheek, she ducked her face so that I connected with the hair beneath her ear.

  I do not blame her. I do not blame her at all. She had endured much during our four years of marriage; how was she to know that I was no longer the husband from hell? How was she to know I was intent on changing my ways?

  “You have been eating onions,” Mako said, breaking away to look past me at the girl who was standing diffidently on the path. “Who is that?”

  “This is a friend,” I replied. “Her family are all dead. Shinzo and I are looking after her for a while. Did you... did you hear about the bomb?”

  “I did,” Mako snapped. “I heard it on the radio. A new type of bomb. They said it caused some damage.”

  “Some damage?” I almost laughed at the outrageous understatement. “They said there was some damage? But... ” I trailed off, as I caught sight of the great love of my life, who had come tottering out into the hallway to find out what was going on. I had never seen him walking before. He was wearing just a pair of short trousers and at the sight of me, his face lit up into a beam of rapturous delight. Just for that one smile, it was worth getting back to Nagasaki.

  “Daddy!” he called, before hurling himself into my arms. I held him as tight as any other human being I had ever held before, and we capered together in the vestibule.

  Mako had at last found her manners, gesturing for the girl to follow her through to the kitchen. All I could do was stand there, stand there, with that beautiful brown boy in my arms, who was gurgling with the ecstasy of being reunited with his father. In all my life, and with all of my lovers, I have never had a reunion to match it. Of all the moments that have touched my soul, that is my benchmark, standing there in the vestibule, waltzing with my boy in my arms, him giggling for sheer pleasure as I showered his cheeks with kisses. If there’s to be but one single instance of my life that I could live again, that would be it.

  It was a moment of perfect happiness, with nothing feigned and just our mutual delight at being reunited.

  “You have learned to talk since I have been away!” I said to him.

  “Daddy!”

  “And you have learned to walk too! Will you lead the way into the kitchen?”

  He clutched onto my shoulder as I crouched down to
ease off my old sea-boots – boots that had not left my feet for three days. They had been on so long that they seemed to suck at my toes. When I eventually peeled off the damp socks, my feet were soft, white and wrinkled. My right foot was badly bruised, purple and yellow, from diving into the river after Shinzo. It throbbed, but nothing seemed broken.

  Toshiaki takes my hand and leads me through to the kitchen, where the girl is sitting upright at the table; for some reason she strikes me as a wild animal, forced into a cage, silently longing for freedom. Everything was exactly as it had been when I had left three months earlier, with cups and plates all cleaned and neatly stacked away. I pulled up a pillow and swept the boy into my lap, where he nestled into my arms.

  Mako was making tea. I have to say that she was still a very beautiful woman. She took good care of herself. Her hair, long and clean, was swept back over her shoulders, a match for her black shirt. But her chief endowment was her bone structure, those exquisite high cheekbones, which were set off by immaculate white teeth and the most perfect button nose. Beauty is such a wonderful thing to gaze at. But as I have said, it is such a absurd basis for a marriage.

  “How has it been?” I asked politely. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” she said, banging cups of tea onto the table in front of me and the girl. “Thanks for writing.”

  I winced. I had written once a month, three curt little cards, but nothing more. I pressed on. “The boy looks well. You’ve got him walking and talking.”

  Mako was about to say something when she sniffed – and sniffed again. “You smell. You should have a wash.”

  “I am sure you’re right,” I said apologetically. “We haven’t been out of these clothes for three days.”

  I think the expression is that I was walking on egg-shells. I was being careful not to cause offence. But I did know that, whatever I said, more than likely it was going to be interpreted the wrong way.

  My eye was caught by a leaflet on the table. It was bright white, quite different from the dirty mottled brown cards that were usually found in Japan in those days. I picked it up – and as I read it, my hands began to shake.

  There was a picture of a clock with dates, on which the day of 9th August had been circled. Beside the picture was some poetry, written in the most precise Japanese lettering: ‘Back in April, Nagasaki was all flowers. August in Nagasaki there will be flame showers.’

  “Where did this come from?” I asked.

  “There were hundreds of them lying all round the street,” said Mako. “The Yankees must have dropped them.”

  “But... ” My mind was suddenly awhirl with thoughts. “But they dropped these leaflets over Hiroshima just before they dropped the bomb ”

  Suddenly, and for the first time, a most sickening thought popped into my head. For the last three days, I had blithely believed that the Yankees would be dropping just the one bomb. But what if they had more? Why stop there? Why not continue bombing our cities until they had reduced every urban area in Japan to ruins?

  There ineluctably followed the next unsettling thought in the sequence: if the Yankees were going to target a Japanese city, where else might they choose? Perhaps a city with a good number of munitions factories? Perhaps a city that had specifically not been targeted for any of the standard fire-bomb raids? Perhaps... perhaps... perhaps a city like Nagasaki?

  In under ten seconds, I had seen it all. The second bomb, if it was coming, might just as easily be targeted at several other cities: Kokura for example, or Kyoto, or even Tokyo itself.

  A prickling sixth sense, for so long stifled, told me that the Yankees would be coming back with another bomb. I simply knew.

  I remember this queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as it dawned on me that it might have been safer by far to have stayed in Hiroshima.

  In my stunned stupor, I had not even realised that my wife was talking “– if it is only one bomb, then how much damage can it do? How can a single bomb do that much damage? I teach science. It does not make sense.”

  “I do not know,” I shrugged helplessly. “They say it’s a new type of bomb.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “No – I was working in the warehouse.”

  She picked up my cup, tossing away the dregs before taking it to the sink. She was almost talking to herself as she scrubbed at the cup. “It is not possible. The sort of single bomb you’re talking about doesn’t exist.”

  “There were only three planes, I remember that –”

  “If there were only three planes, they could not have been carrying a bomb big enough to destroy a whole city.” She dried the cup with a towel and slammed it onto a shelf. “You were probably concussed. It must have created a firestorm. That must have been what destroyed the city.”

  Three months back I would have argued the point; would have argued the point till we had managed to dredge up all the other grievances from our marriage. I had been in Hiroshima, after all. I had been there when it had happened! Who was she to tell me that, with all due scientific respect, it was just not possible?

  But how Hiroshima had changed me.

  “Perhaps you are right,” I said. “You’re the scientist ”

  “And you’re just the kite-maker.” It is amazing the contempt she managed to inject into those last two words. I am aware, by the way, that this conversation is not making my wife sound like a kind woman. But she’d had much to put up with and marriage had embittered her. I blame myself entirely. And as for her perhaps blinkered view of the bomb, I think she found it much more difficult to grasp the concept of an atom bomb because of the very fact that she was a scientist. The idea of a single bomb destroying a city was incomprehensible; it did not make scientific sense. And if it didn’t make sense, why then the facts themselves must have been wrong.

  I could feel my wife glowering at me as I kissed the top of Toshiaki’s head. “And I’m just the kite-maker,” I said.

  The girl had been sitting in silence, eyes darting from one to the other of us. And she did something so artful, so selfless, that, even at the time, I was disarmed at how easily she changed the subject.

  “Can you show me how to fly a kite?” she asked.

  I delightedly accepted the life-buoy that had been tossed to me. “Yes!” I said. “Let me show you how to fly a kite. I would love that – and little Toshiaki can learn too.” In a single moment, all thought of the bomb was forgotten as I bustled off to my father’s old workshop. It was exactly as I had left it, with the old workbench by the window and a score of kites hung up on the walls. I picked up my most colourful kite, a plain diamond of mulberry paper in red, white and blue. They were the colours, as it happens, of the Dutch flag and were a brief nod to Nagasaki’s heyday as the most cosmopolitan port in the country.

  Much of the garden had been turned into a vegetable patch and by happy chance the dry crusted earth hurt my soft pallid feet. I was forced to go back inside to find fresh socks and after that I once again put on my father’s old, slightly damp sea-boots. Fat Man was now only 20 minutes away from making his grand entrance and – as I may have mentioned – good boots are a necessity in the aftermath of an A-bomb.

  How fresh all my memories seem of those last few minutes before Fat Man, when our entire lives depended on what we chanced to be doing during one single moment of time.

  It had been three months since I had last flown a kite for pleasure; funny to think that I had spent so long making all those box-kites in Hiroshima, yet had never taken one out to fly. Doubtless it would have been considered a frippery, an indulgence, in time of war.

  “Shall I get the kite up?” I said to the girl. “Then you try.”

  Like many things, kite-flying is not as easy as it looks. You launch the kite as you might throw a paper airplane, throwing it forward until it catches the wind. But it is all about timing and that only comes with practice. At the critical moment, you have to flick your wrist and give a tug of the string; if you get it right, she is up and away, jinkin
g into the sky.

  In my boyhood, my favourite pastime had been kite-fighting. We would coat the hemp kite-string with powdered glass and try to cut the other boys’ lines. You had to yell out a warning before you attacked and then you were duelling, two kites darting this way and that until one or other line was cut.

  There was nothing to touch the euphoria of seeing your opponent’s kite die in the air. From being a living thing, it was transformed into a piece of dead bamboo and paper, cartwheeling downwards before it flopped to the ground.

  Now I have no urge to fight other kites. It must be part of growing up. My kites are my meditation and I am quite content to watch them dancing on the mountain tops, free spirits in the sky. Perhaps I am that kite and when my string is eventually cut, I hope that, for once, I will continue to waft upwards on an unending thermal.

  It was very heaven standing there in the garden with the boy slung in my arm and the kite tugging gently at my hand. A zephyr of wind was coming in off the sea and up the valley.

  The girl was eager to have a go. I passed her the string and said the kite-flier’s mantra: “Speed-o, speed-o”. Her face lit up as she took control.

  The wind died and she ran backwards, tugging the kite behind her, and for a while it worked and the kite stayed aloft. But, soon enough, she had run out of room, almost colliding with the shrine at the bottom of the garden. The kite gave a little sigh, tossing its nose in the air before falling to the ground in a flat dive.

  I laughed as I ambled over to her, the boy twitching and gurgling under my arm. “You don’t have to run to keep up a Nagasaki kite,” I said, picking up the kite and spooling in the string. “Most kites you do. But you can keep this kite up just by shortening the string.”

  I tossed the kite into the wind and with a snap of my wrist flicked it up again into the sky. I passed the string over to the girl. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mako watching us.

  “If the wind dies, I shorten the string?”