Butterfly's Shadow (37 page)

Three days later the jokily named Fat Man burst its steel belly over Nagasaki. A plutonium bomb. Again the official announcements spoke of factories flattened, Mitsubishi steel-works pulverised. The troops listened to Truman on the army radio, the mild voice, neutral words: docks, factories, railroads, communications . . .

At the time Joe heard nothing of people burning like torches, bleeding, dying. The details emerged later, slipping past MacArthur’s censors, smuggled out by the typewriter-toting press the general hated, what he called a fifth column undermining their own countrymen.

What Joe heard at the time and what he learned afterwards had melded in his head, numbing him. Misinformation overload. The atomic plague. The plague ‘his’ people had visited on ‘his’ people. And somewhere in there, among the obliterated, or the surviving, was a mother he could no longer visualise.

He said, ‘I can’t stay here.’

*

Nancy had heard nothing since the long-ago letter and the snapshot of the woman with pale hands folded in her lap; no word since the Bomb and the surrender. The country had been destroyed; she had seen the newsreels, listened to radio reports of Tokyo firebombed to a desert of ash. Gehenna recreated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the reports spoke of buildings; of concrete and steel. They did not describe the dead or maimed beneath the mushroom cloud. No details of human suffering were offered, only the triumph: an end to the war. She had closed her mind, her eyes, her ears to what that might mean to one faraway person.

She felt dread building inside her; if she spoke or looked at him the tears would spill. She stared at a button on his shirt hanging loose on its thread. She wanted to cry out, don’t abandon me! But appalled by her shocking admission of need she pressed her fingers to her lips to prevent such words of weakness from tumbling out.

He took the hand she had pressed to her mouth and held it tightly between his own.

‘If it weren’t for you, Nance,’ he said. And then was unable to continue.

Outside, the sun had been blotted out by heavy clouds seeping rain. Tyres hissed briefly. In a silence between passing cars, she heard him say, ‘I have to go back.’

She pulled her hand free and nodded, as though he had announced he needed to fill the car with gas.

‘Right.’

She waited, resigned.

‘She’s probably a statistic,’ Joe said. ‘But who knows? People did survive.’

He said, without bitterness, ‘I’ve tried to understand, to accept she thought giving me away would give me a better life. But I always come up against a wall. There has to be something more.’

And this, Nancy sees, is what is meant by the moment of truth.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘That day in Nagasaki . . .’

Weighed down by a guilt that has burdened her for half her life, she no longer has the strength to put up another barrier.

‘I talked to her, you were with Ben playing outside the house. I talked and talked. She just listened. And I found the way to get to her. Just me. Your father never knew.

‘I’d tried everything: a better future for you, a boy needs a father, all that. She was like stone. Then . . .’ Nancy faltered. ‘Then I told her I could never have a child. You were Ben’s only chance to have a son. I told her how it would finish him, never to be able to care for his only child.

‘I said to her, “You’re a young woman, you can rebuild your life, have another child. Ben can’t do that. We are in your hands.”’ She stopped, took a deep, shaky breath.

Joe had wondered, in the past, why Nancy had never produced any children of her own. It must have been hard, he says to her now, to have been aware so young that she could never bear a child. For her to live with that knowledge.

‘Ah, but I didn’t know,
then
. I did an evil thing. I lied.’

She tries to lick her lips but her dried-out tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth.

‘I told her I was barren and she parted with her most precious treasure. She gave you to me.’

Now was the time to go through the words she knew so well: how she had never forgiven herself. How the Church became enemy territory, God out of reach, how she could no longer pray to be forgiven. But she said none of this.

‘And then it turned out to be the truth. We tried for years. I never conceived. My lie became a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

She is shaking as he holds her. Joe is surprised by how small she is, the way her head rests, tired, on his breast. She, who has always been the strong one. He draws her close, rubs his chin gently against her hair.

‘Hey, Nance, trust a churchgoing gal to beat up on herself,’ he says, and Nancy attempts a shaky laugh, and sobs on his shoulder, in an abandonment of grief and the healing release of an old, enduring sorrow and her long agony of punishment and guilt.

What was he expecting of Tokyo?

The Germans bombed Guernica; the Japanese bombed Chungking; the British bombed Dresden, the Americans Tokyo. Tokyo the last of a terrible line.

On one March night, two hundred and seventy-nine B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped half a million napalm-filled incendiary cylinders on to the city below. Walls of fire trapped people fleeing for their lives and the burning wind sucked them into the consuming flames. Water boiled in the canals, and waves of molten glass poured through the streets. Birds burst into flame in mid-air. Fifteen square miles of the city were flattened; more than 100,000 people were killed; another 40,000 injured, burned. All this Joe knows from what he has heard and read. Now he stands in the place itself.

In Italy he witnessed devastation – helped create it. The ruins of Cassino, the shattered towns and villages, the transforming hand of war. This is something else.

The city has been crushed to ash and cinders, a burnt-out emptiness where houses stood, where people worked and lived and slept. Here and there a concrete structure breaks the rubble surface – a gutted department store, a square stone building topped by a blasted clock tower, a blackened mass that had been a movie theatre; two twisted metal shafts that once were office blocks.

Joe had one long-gone day driven past a Californian hill-side consumed by fire, blackened, still smoking, the gaunt
skeleton of what had been a forest. Tokyo, like that forest, is a graveyard of trees: not one wooden building survived the firestorm, not a dwelling was left standing.

Eerily untouched, the Imperial Palace sits within its moat as though ringed by magical waters. A few yards away he can see the Dai-Ichi insurance building, squat and solid as a fortress; busy with people in uniform coming and going, jeeps lined up outside. This is the American HQ.

He steps through the doorway and enters America. Gleam and polish and comfortable chairs; young bodies encased in crisp khaki come and go in a hurry. There are ceiling lights, desk lamps, shades and chandeliers. The air smells different.

At Reception, he gives his name, presents his papers. Here there is no second glance, no mismatch. Joseph Theodore Pinkerton. Here, he’s the right man in the right place.

He is located on a list, identified, tagged, but this time with a difference: now he wears a label that proclaims him a regular guy. One of the gang running the show.

At his desk he is engulfed by checklists, information of every sort: guidelines, schedules, ‘categories of suppression’. At the next desk is another uniformed figure surrounded by papers.

Joe calls across: ‘These categories. What are we suppressing?’

‘They’ve given us thirty-one topics to be avoided: Criticism of Occupation Forces, Criticism of the United States, Criticism of Allies, black market activities – it’s all listed.’

‘So basically we’re censoring . . .’

‘Everything. Yeah. But we’re not allowed to mention it. See there, under ‘topics to be avoided’: References to Censorship.’

He walks the streets, charting the ruins as an archaeologist might rebuild a Roman city from its surviving foundations, and he sees that, slowly, life is returning. Here and there the yellow of new planks glows bright against the cindery grey; buildings are rising. From all around comes the sound of dragging footsteps: clogs clattering, boots clanging on metallic
residue. People move slowly; they look bewildered. They wear bizarre combinations of clothing: a beaded evening blouse salvaged from wreckage, summer pants, dirndl skirts, torn kimonos, rags reborn as shirts, strips of cloth made from wood pulp which disintegrate in the rain. Young ex-soldiers shuffle past in tattered uniforms, dazed remnants of the Imperial war machine who would have gladly died in action, condemned instead to live.

Water and soap are scarce, which means the normally fastidious locals wander uncaring with dirt-streaked faces, muddy feet, grubby clothing, cracked and gaping boots. Children go barefoot.

By the side of what had been main thoroughfares stalls have sprung up, with anything portable for sale or barter – old war medals, fine leather bags scorched and stiff from flames; here an army greatcoat, there a pair of shoes too fine to wear. One woman beckons Joe over to show him an example of her miraculous refurbishing service: unwanted military helmets refashioned into cooking pots, ‘for only seven yen!’

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

As a child in church he had heard the familiar words declaimed, but Isaiah never got round to helmets.

In one broad plaza the crumbling walls are covered with handwritten notices on grubby scraps of paper. He slowly identifies the
kanji
characters, picking out the frequently repeated ‘mother’ and ‘home’. Next to him an elderly man points to a sign, begins to translate, but here is a chance for Joe to practise his Japanese, newly polished from training camp immersion. He reads one message aloud, ‘
Your brother waits for you
.’ And, slowly, from another : ‘
Your mother waits at sunset each day . . .
’

He too has sent messages, not scrawled on torn paper but
carrying the same hope of a response. The letters, via the military grapevine to Nagasaki, have gone to Suzuki, hers the only address he has.

Rain has washed the words away on some notices, the ink blurred as though by tears, the fluttering paper the sound of a thousand unheard voices.

He has been fighting off a sense of horror since he got here; drawn and quartered again, pulled in different directions. Where does he stand in this dead land, the land of his birth, where a smell of burning still rises from the rubble? Where people are starving. Is he among the victors and the generals or is he one of the conquered and slain? Where does he want to be? Where might he be, now, if Nancy had not scooped him up and carried him away?

The streets are crowded with cycle rickshaws, there are carts pulled by horses or oxen. A few taxis powered by charcoal wheeze past, billowing smoke. The city seems enveloped by fog, and people wear improvised mouth masks to ward off the choking fumes. Threading through the traffic, moving fast, bouncing over potholes, are the jeeps of the occupying force. The troops look startlingly bright-faced, healthy, clean.

Further off, gutted factories stand, empty, their broken chimneys smokeless. On the horizon, with a shock of pleasure and surprise, he picks out Mount Fuji, the purple-yellow of a half-ripe plum, a scarf of cloud swirled at its peak, recalling the Hiroshige woodcuts he had pored over in Mr Murakami’s hut. This is a sight newly revealed to the city: until they were bombed flat, tall buildings would have hidden Fuji from view.

When darkness descends, with no street lamps left standing, acetylene torches from roadside stalls beam lurid brilliance on to the nearest faces; the passing headlamps of Occupation vehicles throw moving silhouettes against the walls as the lights from cars had done long ago when Joey sat on the steps of
his grandmother’s house and watched the homeless men tramp past, outrun by their shadows.

There are hot dog stands run by and for the Eighth Army on corners of the Ginza, where silver coins were once minted. Locals silently watch as GIs grab burgers and orange frank-furters in long bread rolls. They do not beg, they simply stand and watch. This is their town but the hot dog stand is an outpost of America: Japs not served.

Joe knows already that he is not permitted to buy an item and hand it straight over. Nothing pristine can be passed on; first he must take at least a bite, to render the roll ‘left-over’. The insensitivity of this repels him, and he finds a way round it: buying a hot dog he breaks it in two and hands half to a grey-haired man, half to the woman by his side.

‘
Tsumaranai mono desuga.
’

The traditional phrase hardly seems appropriate: the ‘trifling thing’ he is asking them to accept could be their only food today, but they accept it silently, with a dignified inclination of the head to express their thanks.

Everyone knew who was in charge of the Occupation; the picture had gone round the world: the tall US general, relaxed, hands on hips, towering over the defeated Emperor, Hirohito standing blank-eyed, stiff as a doll. A god defeated by a
gaijin
: MacArthur.

Not everyone appreciated the significance of the two flags in the signing of the surrender – also recorded in a photograph. Alongside the Stars and Stripes was the original flag flown by Commodore Perry when he sailed into Edo harbour in 1853 and invited the Japanese to trade with the West – or be blown to bits. There was a touch of ego here: SCAP – the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers – was not just waving an old flag. Perry was a SCAP kinsman.

For Joe, too, family came into the story: it was an ironic
twist of the knife that SCAP, the hero of the hour, should be the murderer, the man who caused his father’s death. MacArthur’s order to the troops in Washington had sent Ben sinking to the bottom of the river. Here, he had usurped the Emperor, taking on the mantle of a god to bring the nation back to life.

The jeeps bounce past; the GIs see a blond head and wave at Joe. Otishi told him one night in Italy, as they shared a patch of mud and canvas, that if you stood on a certain corner of the Ginza for twenty minutes you’d be sure to see someone you knew. They had made a pact, sealed with a half-melted Hershey bar, to test the theory one day.
How do you make God laugh?