Fireflies

by Ben Byrne

  “Come — please,” he said, clutching at me with his bony fingers.

  “Hands off,” I said, shoving him away. He stood there for a second, apparently contemplating another attempt, before he clearly decided discretion to be the better part of valour.

  “Come — please,” he repeated, walking toward a wide stone staircase that led away from the lobby. He stopped at the foot of the staircase and waved his fingers at me as if beckoning to a cat. I followed him up puddle-stained stairs to the third floor, through a set of doors that bore the insignia of the police force. Inside, men sat at splintered desks laid with maps, scrolls, and jars of cloudy tea. They wore overcoats as they worked — the room was cold enough to see the vapour of their breath. They glanced up at me curiously as I was led through the room. The officer knocked softly at a door. At the sound of a bark from within, he opened it, saluted, and hustled me inside.

  A man with a silver beard sat behind a desk, glaring at me with sharp eyes under a beetling brow. The room was bare except for a beige raincoat slung over a screen in the corner and a portrait of the emperor that hung askew on the cracked wall.

  The man fired off a torrent of angry Japanese.

  “I can’t understand you, Chief,” I said, “No matter how loud you shout it.”

  He stomped around the table to face me. He was tough and grizzled, and about a foot and a half shorter than me. He jabbed a sharp finger into my chest.

  “Hold on now, Chief,” I said loudly, grasping my epaulettes and thrusting them into his face. “Let’s not forget who’s who.”

  A timid knock came at the door, and a dishevelled man with a toothbrush moustache came inside.

  “Excuse me,” he said in English, with a hesitant bow, “I am translator.”

  The chief growled and retreated to his desk. He snapped at the man, who nodded meekly every now and then, pencilling words in a small notebook. The translator turned to me and cleared his throat.

  “He asks, ‘Why are you in Hiroshima?’”

  “That’s a good question.”

  He gave me a look of anxiety. I took pity on him.

  “I’m here to visit the hospitals.”

  “You are doctor?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m a reporter. Shimbun kisha desu.”

  As the man warily translated, the Chief uttered a guttural volley of Japanese that crescendoed with a slam of his hand on the table. The translator looked at me and cringed.

  “He says — no reporter in Hiroshima. Forbidden.”

  I wondered whether I should try to bluff it out with my press pass. I thought I might do better with cigarettes and a few tins of Spam. The chief tapped his fingers against the table, apparently unable to decide what to do with me. Suddenly, he picked up the telephone, and barked into the receiver. There was a crackling voice on the other end. The chief grunted as he listened.

  I went over to the window and looked outside. Flat ruins stretched for miles around. Here I am, then, I thought. Ground level at last. Millions of tiny snowflakes were falling through the air. They stuck to the glass and melted away into tiny droplets of water.

  The chief replaced the receiver. He stood up and put on his coat and hat. He flung a few words at the translator and wrenched open the door.

  I looked askance at the man.

  “Where are we going?”

  The translator dipped his head. “He says — to visit hospital.”

  “We are?”

  “Yes. We go now.”

  “Why should he take me to the hospital?” I asked, hurrying after him.

  A look of painful embarrassment passed over his wrinkled face. “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  “He says — to show America what it has done.”

  The chief himself drove the battered sedan, the car toiling over the pits and crevasses in the road. The translator sat next to me in the back and I asked him about the state of the city now. He responded with terse, nervous answers. Yes, people were returning, though most still clustered on the outskirts, too scared of sickness to venture further in. No, there was no electricity yet. They still relied on the army generators. No, they rarely saw any Westerners. Teams had come a few weeks after the surrender, dressed in protective clothing and carrying peculiar pieces of equipment. They had drilled in certain areas and taken away samples of rocks and brick, but had not returned since.

  I rolled down the window and started photographing. Men in rubber boots and helmets shovelled debris, sawed planks, and dug foundations. In an open patch of ground was a long, low building painted in crude camouflage, with piles of scrap metal set up outside — warped radiators and railings. Men in blue overalls dragged over still more, sorting and arranging it by type.

  We bumped along a dirt track lined with rows of identical wooden huts, newly built. There were black squares of vegetable gardens between them, the earth dotted with tiny sprouts of green.

  We drove past a long yellow brick wall and emerged into the muddy yard of what had once been the Red Cross hospital. The car slid to a halt and we clambered out. The chief snapped at the translator, gesturing toward the building.

  A doctor, a bespectacled man in his mid-fifties, his beard cut in a tapering European style, emerged from a side door, stepping delicately around the muddy puddles as he approached. I thanked the police chief for his help, and he laughed mirthlessly.

  Frankly, the translator said, he should have had me arrested at the station when he had been alerted to my arrival. He had orders to call the Allied commander of the area if any unfamiliar personnel arrived in the city.

  “And yet he chose to ignore his orders,” I said.

  The chief scowled at me.

  “He says — it is better for you to see for yourself.”

  “I agree.”

  The chief’s eyes narrowed and his face became full of contempt. He gestured once more at the hospital. With that, he climbed into the car and slammed the door shut. It trundled away, the worn wheels splashing through the flooded potholes as it went.

  ~ ~ ~

  Dr. Hiyashida had studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and spoke good English. He had come to Hiroshima from Osaka to make a special study of radiation disease. Shamelessly, he told me that he hoped his thesis would glean him a position on the medical council.

  “You weren’t here yourself on the day of the blast?”

  “No,” he said, frowning. “And now there are no more than a few A-Bomb cases still in the hospital. It is most unfortunate.”

  The inside of the hospital was a shambles. The window frames were warped, the glass gone. An icy wind blew in from the hills, visible in the distance.

  “How are conditions now?”

  “Improving,” he said, apparently without irony. “We have more medicine now, vitamins and plasma. But we still need more operating tables, X-Ray machines.”

  Patients wrapped in bandages were lying on mats on the floor, sleeping or reading miniature books.

  “You see?” he said in a frustrated whisper as we passed amongst them. “Few of them have any interesting symptoms any longer. They just say they feel empty and listless. They complain of tiredness and melancholy. I find that difficult to ascribe to radiation. After all, who ever heard of a bomb causing melancholy?”

  Further on, in another ward, he kept his more “interesting” cases — the more grotesquely injured victims of the bomb that I guessed he hoped would form the notable chapters of his thesis. I felt acutely awkward as he strode from one patient to another, ordering them to display their symptoms, as if they were performers in a circus freak show.

  One young man raised his shirt to expose his midriff. It was covered with the same thick, rubbery colloidal scars that the victims in Weller’s photographs had shown. Another man had the striped pattern of the yukata he’d been wearing burned into hi
s skin by the flash. The doctor urged me to take photographs — “For your newspaper!” — and he poked and prodded his patients, snapping at any of them who appeared too listless or embarrassed to respond. I grew irritated. He put me in mind of a particularly difficult superior officer I had known during my service, and I felt an incipient wave of hatred for the man.

  I walked ahead, noticing an old woman, her white hair pulled into a bun, sitting on the edge of her bed. I asked the translator to politely inquire whether I might talk to her. Dr. Hiyashida rushed over and took her arm, shaking it, which made me so angry that I almost struck him. I ordered him to leave us, and he slunk back to the doorway, glancing at us every now and again with a sulky look.

  She had been beautiful once, that was clear. Her eyes were almost pure black, and her nose was still a soft, elegant curve. But her face seemed to have slid an inch or so around her skull, like a loose mask, and her skin was etched with a deep web of lines and whirls, as if she had been supernaturally aged by many hundreds of years.

  She spoke in a low voice, almost without intonation. She had been a dance instructor, she said, though she’d had very few students left by the end of the war. She had arrived at her studio in the centre of the city at around eight o’clock on the morning of the blast. She had been walking along the corridor on the first floor, where she had paused for a moment to open a window to let in some air, glancing as she did so up at the mountains, thick with green against the blue summer sky.

  There was a flash. An explosion of glass pitched her backward. She tumbled in the air with the last thought that a bomb had landed directly upon her. When she awoke, she was pinned face down in the darkness, her mouth full of plaster. The floor above her had collapsed and she lay there for several days until men dug her out of the ruins. Outside, the city was flattened. Drops of oily black rain were falling from the sky.

  Barefoot and dressed in rags, she made her way along the river to the park where hundreds of women and children lay dying. Some were vomiting up their innards; others had flesh peeling off. She saw two of the women from her neighbourhood association squatting by a fire, and hurried over to them. When they saw her, they turned their faces away, aghast. The next morning, she went to a pool in the river and looked at her reflection.

  She closed her eyes, and gestured with an elegant hand toward her face. Her brows looked as if they had been pushed in by the thumbs of a sculptor, and her lips were almost entirely smudged into her face. She made an almost imperceptible noise and hunched back over. As I left, I happened to glance at the chart on the edge of her bed. I felt an uncanny prickling on my scalp. The old lady was just twenty-five years old.

  On the other side of the room, I saw two old men lying side by side in bed. One sat up and smiled vaguely as the translator and I came over. His scalp was bare and blotchy and his arms were as thin as twigs. As with the girl in the photographs that Weller had showed us, his withered chest was speckled with red liver spots. The other man was asleep and his breath came in rasps.

  The old man spoke so softly that I could barely hear. He smiled and made tiny gesticulations to illustrate his story. Sir would never believe it, he whispered, but they’d both worked on the railroad as labourers until just six months before. They’d been brawny and tough back then, with full heads of hair — wives, mistresses! They’d both been working on the tracks that morning, when the man had noticed the far-off glint of “Mr. B” in the sky, but they’d assumed it was just the weather plane and ignored it. There’d been an air raid warning earlier that morning, and it had passed without incident.

  “Hiroshima was lucky, we used to say. The Americans didn’t want to touch it.”

  He’d never been on a plane himself, he said, but as he’d looked at the silver glint in the sky, he’d wondered what Japan must look like from above.

  “How beautiful it must be to fly, sir,” he murmured, “to see the whole country stretched out beneath you.”

  He’d watched the plane as it passed. He’d put his hand above his face to shield his eyes from the dazzling sun. That was the moment.

  There was a flash. There was no sound. He felt something strong and terribly intense and there was a pulsing of colour as he was hurled forward. He lay splayed on the ground with fragments of stone like teeth in his mouth. He thought he was dead.

  Great crashes came from all around and he saw train carriages tumbling across the ground like toys, as an immense cloud rose up and blotted out the sun. Then, all around, debris and dust began to rain violently down from the sky.

  He fell silent, staring into space.

  “How do you feel now?”

  He drew in a breath, then let out a long sigh. He rubbed his hands together dreamily, as if he were washing them. Last year, he said, he’d used his hands every day. Flinging a pick, hammering rivets, laying track. His body had been all muscle. He held up his shaking hands for me to see, then laughed. He didn’t even think he could lift a glass of beer now. He felt so light that he thought he might float off into the wind like a feather. I took his photograph and thanked him. He gave a trembling smile and bowed, pressing his hands against his forehead as if in prayer.

  As we left the ward, Dr. Hiyashida shook his head and crossed his hands behind his back. “Awkward cases, these A-Bomb people.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Darkness was seeping from the hills and I needed to catch the train back to Tokyo. It was the only passage for two days and the idea of being stuck here in this strange city at night filled me with a baffling fear. Dr. Hiyashida insisted that one of the hospital ambulances drive me to the station and this at least I gratefully accepted. I told myself I should be wary of encountering army personnel, although, in all honesty, it was the thought of traipsing back across that mournful wasteland in the dark that filled me with dread. What I desired more than anything was to be back in my room in Tokyo, a brazier smouldering away on the floor, a large glass of whisky in my hand. Dr. Hiyashida waved me off at the hospital gate, the translator having now departed. He promised to send me a copy of his thesis when it was published. He urged me to be sure to mention his name “in your newspaper.”

  “I’ll make sure I do,” I called back.

  The driver of the ambulance was a handsome young man of around twenty. To my surprise, he spoke English too — his parents had been Christians, and he’d been taught German and English by the monks at the church school, though the English lessons had come to an end several years earlier. He’d lost both of his parents in the blast, he said, but he himself had survived largely unharmed, a feat which he ascribed — admirably, under the circumstances, I thought — to “God’s grace.” All he’d suffered were some small burns that wouldn’t seem to heal. Out of thanks to God, he had now dedicated his life to helping the sick and the injured.

  As we drove along the dark, wide gravel road, he recounted some of the grim stories and grotesque myths that had persisted in the wake of the blast. The bomb had been the size of a matchbox, they said. The bomb had been tested on a mountain range in America, which it had destroyed entirely. Some other stories had a ghastly ring of truth. A group of soldiers had wandered lost in the park that night, holding each other’s hands in a macabre line, their eye-sockets empty, their eyeballs having melted down their cheeks. A whirlwind had torn through the city a few hours after the blast, uprooting trees and sucking dead bodies up into the sky.

  I pictured the old man as he lay on his hospital bed, the dreamy look in his eyes. He’d been imagining what it would be like to fly, thinking how beautiful the world must seem from up there.

  Poor devil.

  I asked the driver if he’d suffered any effects of radiation disease himself.

  He said he didn’t know. He’d lost some hair, but it had grown back. Far worse were the headaches he got at night, the inertia that sometimes pinned him down for days.

  He frowned, then carried on in a low, confidential tone.


  “The worst of it is that the women’s menses have stopped. There are fears over whether they will ever begin again. My wife and I were only married last year, and we so want to have a child one day.”

  It was pitch black by the time we reached the station and I said goodbye to the boy with a fervent handshake. The snow was coming down in steady drifts now, and in the ticket hall, the shivering inspector made me understand through sign language that the train would be delayed.

  I wandered around the back of the station to the railway sidings. A long chain of carriages was tipped over on its side, the wood scorched. There was a low hill nearby, and partway up, exactly one half of a torii arch marked the entrance to what had once been a temple. Nothing remained now but the broken stones of the votive pool, which was still bubbling with water from some mysterious spring, and the stumps of what must have once been enormous cedars. Beyond them I found a mound of rubble, and atop it, two perching Buddhas, about to topple. The face of one was sheared away. The other gazed at the ground, his hands resting in his lap, a silent, secretive smile on his face.

  As I walked back down the hill, soft snowflakes brushed my face and settled between the tracks and along the rails. I stood on the lonely platform and watched the snow fall until finally, with a distant glow, a train approached the station. When it pulled in, I clambered up into an empty compartment where I took a hard wooden seat by the window. With numb fingers I slid the whisky bottle from my knapsack and took a long swig as the train jerked into motion. I craned my head out of the window as the train gathered speed, and I watched as the station passed into the distance and snow whirled silently in the black sky. For a second, there was a faint glimmer of light somewhere far out on the plain. Then came a scream of wind as we plunged into a tunnel, and it was gone.

  17

  THE BLOOD CHERRY GANG

  (SATSUKO TAKARA)

  The Ginza was crowded with American GIs wearing fur hats and thick gloves. They slid along the frosty avenue and flung little icicles at each other, bellowing with raucous laughter. I didn’t even notice the plump streetwalker girl until she had almost barged into me. Wearing a violet dress and reeking of liquor, she peered at me and cursed. Then she spat full in my face.