As for my husband, well, same old, same old. He is heroically absent, and when he’s at home, he wears the expression of someone who has abandoned the troops on the Normandy beachheads. I accepted long ago that he would never retire from his research. We don’t get on so badly. I know of worse marriages. After all these years, we agree without the need to speak. We even argue without raising our voices.
He behaves more or less the same toward the children. He is interested from a distance. He doesn’t retain details. He asks them about things that happened ages ago. We must put ourselves in his shoes. When someone decides to become responsible for the well-being of the entire human race, a case of flu in the family must seem very trivial.
More than once, he has criticized me for not understanding his professional commitment. Untrue. What I find hard to comprehend is not that he loves his work, but that this love leaves so little room for him to love others. Personally, I would have suffered if I’d been absent when my loved ones needed me. It amazes me how many men accept a situation that will sooner or later turn against them.
My husband says that I think like this because I’ve never really had a vocation. And because I chose to give up working at a certain point in my life. That theory puzzles me. Looking back, I don’t feel I made a choice. But that circumstance, the needs of my family, certain habits in our relationship, ended up pushing us into our respective roles. That our life moved in an inevitable, and for me unfavorable, direction. Am I fooling myself?
One thing I’m sure of is that I never wanted to depend financially on anyone. That happened to us gradually. And I regret it now. When I was younger, I used to wonder if I should have secured a steady job before we had Adélaïde. If I should have made more of an effort to carry on teaching after I had Muriel, and especially after Jean-Pierre. I try not to dwell on these things now. The problem is, I have a lot more time to think about them than I used to.
* * *
I’d rather not know how long it’s been since I last saw Yoshie. Tallying the years terrifies me. That reminds me of Gide, who said nothing threatens our happiness so much as the memory of our happiness. I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes we old people are happy only when remembering. Which is why we end up sweeping the most unpleasant memories under the rug. In the end, only one thing is for certain. That the present, this age I am now, is the only time in my life I won’t get to look back on from afar. I’ll never see what my life is like now.
I remember everything, and everything seems so distant. Not just Yoshie, but the way I was back then. My life without my family. It’s as if your children construct your future and they also monopolize it. They throw up a barrier between you and the life you had before them. Or rather, everything that existed before them belongs to an imaginary time. That’s why I haven’t thought about Yoshie in so many years. And yet lately, with all that’s happened in Japan, I think of practically nothing else.
It’s not that I miss him all of a sudden. I don’t miss my youth either. If anything, I miss the circumstances of my life back then, or rather the lack of them. All that I could have been when I was still nobody. If I could travel back to those days, I would just stay perfectly still, filled with wonder, contemplating the brutal vastness of the future. That’s the closest thing to happiness I can imagine.
If he’s been in my thoughts lately, why don’t I try to get in touch? It’s hard to explain. I fear not being part of his memories. I wouldn’t even know what to say to him, or how. Because there is no language of the past.
Or is there?
3
THE SIZE OF THE ISLAND
YOSHIE WATANABE GREW UP IN NAGASAKI, the city of his childhood and his forgetting. They had moved there because his father, Tsutomu, worked as a marine engineer for a zaibatsu armaments manufacturer. Not that the move to Nagasaki entailed any drastic change for the family. After all, they remained in the same region, and only a prefecture away from his native Kokura, at the time a town that produced munitions.
While it was true that Tsutomu worked too hard (for which even his brother in Tokyo used to criticize him), the family was comfortable. But the war complicated the situation: longer hours, less money, a worse diet.
Mr. Watanabe remembers how rice and sweet potatoes became staples throughout the war. When he asked why they couldn’t eat something different, his mother replied that sweet potatoes possessed magical properties that made children invincible. Nowadays, he can’t help feeling a vague anxiety whenever he tastes one of these root vegetables.
From time to time, on a weekend, fish would appear at their table, colorful and juicy. And, on rare occasions, a few morsels of meat—treats in the rice, cleverly rationed by his mother, Shinoe. Not very often (because of the scarcity and the expense) nor too infrequently (so as to keep the children’s expectations alive). Shinoe succeeded in turning these privations into a game.
Their mother had instilled in them a rule they didn’t dare disobey: never throw anything away even if it was broken or old. It’s a crime, she would tell them, this thing might come in handy. His father laughed at her obsession with holding on to every object. It would take Watanabe years, at least until he lived on his own, to understand what his mother had meant. If we don’t know how to put something to use, then we are the useless ones.
The family of five lived north of the city, in a traditional house with wood and tiles, close to the School of Medicine. The bells of Urakami Cathedral would declare that Yoshie must finish eating his breakfast and leave for school with his two little sisters, Nagae and Sadako. Their father (who had brought them up in an unorthodox Buddhist faith based on little Zen poems) told them they may just as well have the God of the Catholics ringing in their ears, since you never knew what gods you might need. He and his sisters would get to school a few minutes before eight thirty. Punctuality, insisted Tsutomu, means arriving early. If you arrive on time, you are already late.
Yoshie mostly got on well with his schoolmates. He was charming enough to attract them and shy enough to avoid their resentment. He was a good student without having to try too hard, which allowed his grades to go more or less unnoticed. His sole enemy was Yukio Yamamoto, a tirelessly competitive child with strident hairstyles, always ready to suck up to the teachers or bully his classmates. The only good thing about him that Mr. Watanabe can think of is that he taught him how to hate. Which, in his estimation, was a lesson well learned.
The other lesson he learned was about his hands. He preferred his left, which felt more agile and precise. It drew animals that his right hand couldn’t. Until his teachers made him see that to write with the wrong hand was a form of treachery.
During his first year at school, a soldier came to show them a map of Asia. The Japanese empire was shaded in red and included several regions of China. The soldier, Watanabe recalls, told them about Chinamen who ate their children, Chinese girls who beat their mothers and Chinese boys who spat at their fathers, Chinese teachers who mistreated their students. However, most of them have no wish to live in this savage way, the soldier explained. They envy our glorious nation, he said. That is why we are fighting over there. To free them from their misery, so that they can live like us.
Throughout the following school year, the principal himself would enter the classroom to inform the students about the patriotic army’s exploits. Battles in which they were heavily outnumbered, or which even appeared lost, would end happily in a victory. The war was always about to be won. And the enemy on the verge of surrendering to the emperor. This was an image that thrilled Yoshie: thousands and thousands of American soldiers lined up on their knees.
During the lunch recess, he and his sisters would gobble up the rice balls and boiled sweet potatoes Shinoe had cooked for them. Which made their schoolmates jealous, especially after Yukio Yamamoto made it his business to tell everyone what was on the Watanabes’ menu. Spurred on by hunger, the children would chant before the break: We were born thanks to His Imperial Majesty and for His Imper
ial Majesty we shall die. If His Imperial Majesty gives us a single grain of rice, we shall not waste it. Still in her first year, Nagae sometimes cried because she missed their mother. And Sadako would sing in her ear.
In his gym class, Yoshie pretended to perform pull-ups. He would hang by his arms, unable to lift himself above the metal bar. As soon as the teacher turned his back, he and his friends would play imaginary Ping-Pong. The first to reach ten points had the right to pull anyone’s hair. Yukio countered by getting hold of a real ball and began to organize matches during recess, which soon put an end to Yoshie’s invisible games. Meanwhile, on the playground, his sisters made straw dolls. The dolls were the enemy and the girls would stab them with bits of bamboo.
* * *
If anything excited Yoshie, it was going on excursions. The more distant the place, the more interesting he imagined it would be. He was frequently disappointed. Mr. Watanabe can recall maybe two unforgettable excursions in his childhood. The first, with the whole family, was to the city of Shimabara. The forty kilometers from Nagasaki seemed an immensity to him that day. He was most impressed by the volcano.
According to his father, Mount Unzen had last erupted a hundred and fifty years before, and had caused the biggest volcanic disaster in history. However, now it was at peace. Yoshie peered at Mount Unzen in the distance with a mixture of fascination and incredulity.
If a volcano can’t explode anymore, he asked his parents, what use is it? Volcanoes are of no use, his father replied. Yoshie still didn’t understand how something so big could be useless. But why is it still there? he insisted. His mother explained to him that mountains spit fire when they are alive and stop when they die. This new piece of information only perplexed Yoshie further. So mountains are alive?
The second excursion was very different. On Sunday, August 5, 1945, he accompanied his father on a brief trip to the city of Hiroshima, in the neighboring Chūgoku region. The aim was to obtain new parts for the Nagasaki shipyard. To Yoshie, who had frequently begged to go with him, this was proof of how grown-up he was: Dad and me, working together! It also gave him the perfect excuse, at least for a couple of days, to get out of doing the homework he’d been given during the holidays.
In response to Shinoe’s repeated objections (she considered it dangerous to visit a city that was a naval base and a rallying point for the imperial army), Tsutomu reminded her that Hiroshima had never been bombed. Which meant it couldn’t be one of the enemy’s prime targets, he explained to his wife. In fact, he added, it was less dangerous than Nagasaki, where they had mounted attacks on ports and factories in the southwest. Not to mention the thirteen students bombed the previous week at the university. So she needn’t get alarmed over a simple train journey.
When Shinoe got down on her knees (a gesture that was to remain Mr. Watanabe’s clearest image of his mother) and implored her husband not to go, or at least to reconsider his decision to take the boy with him, Tsutomu simply insisted: We can’t stop living just because there’s a war.
AT A QUARTER PAST EIGHT THE FOLLOWING MORNING, when the B-29 Enola Gay, named in honor of the pilot’s mother (exactly what kind of feelings did he harbor toward his creator?), dropped its uranium bomb Little Boy at the beginning of the working day, Yoshie was walking with his father some three kilometers from the center of the blast.
They had just crossed Kanko Bridge. People were doing their best to go about their business as usual. Shops had opened, though they had few goods to sell. His father moved with the urgency of Mondays. Or perhaps, seen from the point of view of Mr. Watanabe’s memory, with a degree of anxiety. Yoshie had difficulty keeping up with him. Two steps of his equaled one of Tsutomu’s. What was worse, his shoe was chafing him.
Not long before, the air raid sirens had sounded again. No one paid them much attention. Almost every day, enemy planes flew over, dropping pamphlets, which he was forbidden to read. In those days, such things didn’t prevent people from doing what they had to. They simply took precautions (water, fire extinguishers, first aid kits) and carried on. In fact, the sirens had already sounded twice the night before. His father had continued to undress (flesh folds on his tummy, armpit hair), and Yoshie had helped him into his yukata. Then they had both fallen asleep. Tsutomu’s snoring had protected them. With that racket, nothing and no one would’ve dared come near.
Suddenly, Yoshie could hear engines in the distance. He looked up, cupping his hand to shade his eyes. It was an aircraft. Just one aircraft. It didn’t make much noise. It didn’t even frighten him. Nothing like those squadrons that terrified him so much. Nor did Tsutomu show signs of fear. But Yoshie felt, or perhaps Watanabe now thinks he did, his father squeeze his hand.
Yoshie saw it fly by for a few seconds. Like a model airplane. A four-propellered one. With a sheen of silver. He loved it.
His shoe was hurting his foot more and more. Yoshie stopped in his tracks. Tsutomu ordered him to keep walking. Yoshie wriggled free of his father’s hand. Ran to lean against a wall, and bent over to adjust his shoe. That wall painted yellow. His father was waiting for him up ahead, at the corner, a look of impatience on his face. He called his name. He ordered him to hurry up.
The aircraft let something drop. A trace in a sky with no clouds. No more than a trace in the sky.
The flash filled the horizon. X-ray light. The skeleton. The blindness.
Swept off his feet by a wave of heat, Yoshie flew through the air. The blast spread and seemed to have no end.
Afterward, an emptying. Darkness in broad daylight. The negative of the sky.
When Yoshie opened his eyes and saw the blackness, he thought he was dead. That this was death. But around him things started to clear, and soon he recognized his father’s body a few yards away, his head beneath an uprooted tree, and then he knew that he was still alive.
He coughed. He spat. Felt his limbs. He could see only a few cuts on his hands and arms. The skin on his back was burning. His muscles ached, as if he’d been straining them for hours.
His disbelief stunned him more than the hit. The wall. That yellow wall. His shoe, his father, his disobedience.
Then he saw the mushroom and a glow ascending.
He tried to shift the tree trunk off his father. For some reason, Watanabe reflects, possibly because of the comics he used to read, he was sincerely astonished to find he couldn’t do it. He tried to rouse his father. He called out his name several times. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his face.
Soon enough, he realized that there would be no reply. No reaction. Zero movement. He lay down next to his father, and for a while copied his stillness, hoping this gesture might unite them.
Only then did he become aware of the screams all around him, the fire, the crackling, the crunching, the collapsing. There was more. Much more. All of a sudden his focus widened.
Deafened by so many things shattering, Yoshie wandered in search of assistance. He wanted help moving the tree. The buildings weren’t there anymore. Only a few were left, in positions he had never seen before. There was a hole, Watanabe remembers, where the city had been. A map erased. Hiroshima was now a scar the size of Hiroshima.
Yoshie scanned the horizon. He could see, mysteriously in place, the dome of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The same one his father had proudly pointed out to him the previous afternoon. Still a long way from becoming a symbol.
Everything made of wood was blazing. Every house burning in its own way. A wind of a hearth, or of an open oven, began to blow. As a precaution, or perhaps instinctively, Yoshie skirted around the most devastated area. He couldn’t have known it, but it was also the one most exposed to radiation.
On his search for the help that nobody could give him, he saw charcoal shadows. Shadows on walls. He saw burnt objects that he didn’t even know could burn. Nothing had kept its color; the mushroom had drained it away. Debris and bodies were intermingled. Everything was in pieces. A type of jigsaw puzzle that, Watanabe can see now, was never
meant to be assembled. He saw the same expression on every face he passed. The same corpse, over and over.
He had no saliva, and he couldn’t find his tongue. He heard the babble of a spring. He walked toward some children more or less his age, their heads surrounding a pipe from which flowed a stream of water. The sound was music. When Yoshie tried to approach, the other children barred his way with pushes, scratches, kicks. Their tongues lapped ceaselessly. One boy raised his head and glanced sidelong at him. His lids were so swollen that he couldn’t open his eyes.
Yoshie discovered that few of the faces left looked like faces. He touched his own brow, his nose, his chin. Everything appeared to be in place. The only pain he felt was from the cuts on his arms. And the stinging on his back. Many people ran past him. Hair like firewood. Cheeks like balloons. Eyes like slits. They dived headfirst into the river. Others stopped short, plunging instead into the water tanks. He still remembers feeling revulsion rather than compassion for them. Not so much sympathy as disgust.
He considered returning to the tree to watch over his father’s body. He glanced about. Realized he couldn’t even see where he’d set off from. With each step, he could hear Tsutomu’s voice among the other voices. His scream among all the screams. When he tried to follow the sound, it faded until it vanished. Everywhere, he came across people crying for help, arms flailing amid the wreckage. Yoshie didn’t stop to help anyone. He simply passed by, in a trance, walking along the river.
Fracture Page 7