Butterfly's Shadow (39 page)

When Suzuki reached the outskirts, at first she could see nothing, the smoke and the fires too thick. But the boiling wind that hurled people and animals into the air like toys did one thing: it lifted the smoke. And then she saw that the whole area was strewn with corpses and the near-dead. Bodies clogged the river, some flung by the force of the explosion, others who had crawled into the water to try to quench the burning that split and blistered their skin, only to drown. The living stumbled unsteadily through the rubble, reaching out as though blinded; naked, their hair and clothes aflame. Liquid dripped from their hands, as if they had emerged from the river. Puzzlingly, they appeared to be draped in rags. Then she
saw that what looked like rags were strips of shredded skin, fluttering from their arms. The liquid dripping from their hands was blood.

She would tell Joey none of this; she was not sure she could speak the words. He could read about it in books. Books were already being written, dissertations prepared; artists would paint pictures. The cycle rickshaw was climbing higher, slowly zigzagging towards the house Suzuki had shared with Henry. The rules of hospitality were rigid: Joe must rest after the journey, eat, sip some tea. Then she would take him to the place where he was born, on the other side of the harbour.

Henry’s house lay beyond iron gates, square, solid.

‘This was the American side of town,’ Suzuki told him. ‘These houses stood firm on strong foundations.’

She showed him into a large room and disappeared to prepare his refreshment while Joe stood, looking around him at the room, where Nancy’s uncle had lived and raised a family and died peacefully before the bombs fell. There was a view over the bay and surrounding hills.

As he turned away from the window he was startled to find a young girl standing in the doorway, watching him.

‘You must be Joey.’

‘Yes. And you are?’

He spoke in Japanese; she responded in English.

‘Mayu. We talked many times about you.’

Of course, she was Henry’s daughter, it would be natural for her to speak English, yet there was something ungiving about the tone.

‘We?’ he asked.

‘My mother and I. And Cho-Cho.’

He felt a strange constriction around his heart, not a pain, more an intimation of pain. This child had talked about him with his mother.

‘She used to tell us stories. About when she was young.’

He found he was pressing a hand to his chest, easing the not-pain, trying to breathe normally.

He said, ‘You know more than I do.’

She nodded. ‘Of course. She told us everything.’

Suzuki, pausing in the door with a tray, heard the last phrases. She said rapidly, ‘Mayu was a favourite of your mother’s. Cho-Cho used to say that when Mayu grew up she would be an example of the Japanese New Woman. Free to control her own life. She would have been so happy that women will have the vote now.’

Suzuki knelt to place the tray on a low table.

‘When you have rested after your journey, we will go to your mother’s house—’

‘What’s left of it,’ Mayu murmured.

Suzuki, embarrassed, said rapidly, ‘Well of course, like everything else, the damage . . .’

This girl was his cousin. He wondered at the chill he sensed, and set out to win her round.

‘So my mother must have told you about how she and my father met and got married,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ Mayu said tranquilly. ‘
So desu ne.
She told us how he rented her. For a while.’

From Suzuki, a small cry as she folded into herself, bowing over the tray of green tea and plate of sweet bean paste dumplings. The girl held Joe in her level glance for a moment, smiled, and left the room.

So here it was, the dirty little secret that was his patrimony. He was descended from a hooker and a sailor looking for a good time in a foreign port. As so often in the past, Joe waited for some spontaneous emotion to seize him. And as in the past he remained empty.

He did not feel betrayed: his life had been built on hypocrisy to maintain a semblance of family respectability, but also with kindness, to protect him. But he could not endure further
protection; he wanted information, he wanted the truth. He saw that Suzuki could not be trusted here.

‘Is there someone I could talk to, someone else who knew her?’

Suzuki thought for a moment, shaking her head doubtfully.

‘So many are no longer with us . . .’

Then she clapped her hands, remembering.

‘
Isha!
’

‘Doctor? Her doctor?’

‘Yes, yes. For many years.’

‘Where do I find him?’

The building was no more than a wreck; but broken windows had been patched, the door repaired and, inside, the lobby was clean and polished. The waiting room seethed with distress. People perched cautiously on stools, huddled in chairs; some had only the floor. They held themselves carefully, arms bandaged, some with faces swathed in gauze covering. Joe glimpsed skin marked with burns, unhealed sores. The patients made no noise, their pain taken for granted.

Among them, as at Tule, he loomed. But worse, he stood out in his health, his lack of scabs and surgical dressings. Through gaps in the boarded-up window he could see melted metal, blasted walls and a burnt city; the truth that bore out Oppenheimer’s words when he witnessed the first explosion of his invention:
Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, . . .

After just a few minutes he heard his name called out by the receptionist.

He said, protesting, ‘Others are before me—’

‘You are a visitor; please go through. Dr Sato will see you now.’

Joe paused in the door of the surgery. The thin, grey-haired figure behind the desk rose and bowed.

‘Good morning. I hope you didn’t have to wait too long.’ A trace of American in the delivery.

Joe said, ‘I feel bad, coming in ahead of other people. You have a busy day.’

‘All days are busy, Pinkerton-san. We have unusual circumstances: my patients all suffer from the same sickness. Bomb poison, they call it; these are among the lucky survivors.’ He studied Joe for a moment, silver eyebrows raised questioningly. ‘What can I do for you?’

He felt guilty again: taking up a doctor’s time while outside the door, the urgent needs of the sick awaited attention.

‘I was told – I was hoping you could answer some questions about my mother. About Cho-Cho-san.’

Dr Sato’s pale hands shuffled papers on his desk. Questions about Cho-Cho.
A lifeless girl carried in on a stretcher; his first experience of a botched suicide.

This was not the time to recall that day.

‘I knew Cho-Cho-san for many years.’

For a long time she had refused to speak to him except to answer medical enquiries: he formed part of the unwanted rescue team, ‘saving’ her from her desired end. Gradually she accepted that, welcome or not, a doctor was occasionally needed. Much later, he had become a friend.

There came a day when, formally, tentatively, he had suggested that if he ceased to be her doctor, he could offer her care and attention of a rather more personal nature. She responded impatiently: as a medical expert he was useful to her. As a friend, she valued him.

But as a husband? A shake of the head.

Recalling that day he said aloud, ‘
Gankomono
!’

Startled, Joe repeated, ‘Stubborn?’

Dr Sato, equally startled, said, ‘You understand Japanese. Ah. I meant the word in its positive use: your mother was . . . an independent spirit. I should have said she had
dokuritsushin
.’

He looked across the desk at Joe, searching for words that were safe to use.

‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘At the beginning she was
fujin
, an
old-fashioned girl, she followed tradition. Later the traditionalists called her a troublemaker, one of those modern women, trying to be a man, as they put it, attending meetings, marching. But then she changed. Became a businesswoman. She was quite a figure.’

‘Did you like her?’ It was a loaded question.

The doctor frowned. ‘I do not
like
my patients. I offer them my skills.’

‘Suzuki tells me she died in the explosion.’

‘The blast, yes. It would have been instant.’

‘I keep hearing that. But how can you know?’

More shifting of papers on desktop. There were no
right
words here. The doctor gave Joe one of the long, steady looks his patients were familiar with.

‘I will avoid euphemism. The blast victims were extinguished. Literally consumed by the heat. Vaporised. As we have no verifiable evidence of an afterlife we cannot know their feelings but, scientifically, there would have been no time to suffer. She will have passed from life to nothingness faster than the human physiology can register.’

Outside the doctor’s surgery Suzuki waited in the rickshaw, her face closed. The day was not going as she had planned. After the debacle of her daughter’s revelation she had attempted not only an apology but an explanation: the Americans had been the enemy, the Americans had dropped the bomb, killed her friends and families of friends. Joe’s father was American.

‘Mayu decided to punish you. I am sorry.’

‘But she was telling the truth.’

‘Truth is shapeless. Like water, it can be different things to different people, it can bring life if you drink it or death if you drown. One truth will tell how a tea-house girl took an American sailor into her bed. There’s a truth in which an orphan child was sold by one man to another. There’s a truth
in which a girl saw a golden man walking up the hill towards her and loved him for the whole of her life.’

He climbs the winding road from the harbour. In the brilliant sunlight his blond hair is almost white. Even from afar he looks American. He pauses, turns and waits.

Hobbling to catch up with him, Suzuki calls breathlessly, ‘It was easier before they rebuilt this as a proper road; I find the surface painful to my feet.’ She adds, ‘I remember watching your father walk up this hill to the house in his white uniform. He was so handsome.’

What Joe recalls is a tired man, with big hands, hair dulled to a dusty non-colour, who sang along with Bing on the radio.

Listening to her describe the events of that day, dim, blurred like a landscape seen through rain, twisted into so many puzzling shapes in his mind, Joe takes from his pocket the battered spinning top, its paint long ago rubbed off, flakes of red and yellow clinging to the surface. Suzuki glances at the top and exclaims, ‘You still have that! The top! I ran down the hill and bought it for your father to give you!’

And here it is again, the unreliable truth. Whose version will it be this time? Are all his memories to be stolen from him, one by one? Surely the top was a present from his mother? How can he remember that so wrong? Is nothing to be trusted?

They are approaching a cluster of buildings when Suzuki says, ‘I shall rest here for a few minutes. Please go ahead.’

She points out the remains of the house, and then the path is at his feet – just a few steps to the door with the stone lintel step where he sat. Didn’t he? He can recall the cool, hard feel of it beneath his small buttocks. While voices came from the room behind him, he sat here, leaning forward to pick up a snail. He had brought the snail up close, the gleaming slime sticky on his fingers. The waving horns twitched in response to his warm breath. Then someone knocked the snail from his hand, startling him. That must have been his father;
he recalls a white sleeve, a tanned wrist with fine gold hairs. What happened next is a jumble. Was that when they took the child’s hands and walked him down the hill? When he remembered his spinning top and pulled his hands free, ran back—

The child screaming, tugging, tugging at the woman’s white sleeve, so that her hand fell away from her throat, the knife dropped to the floor, the blood flowing . . .

The breath is sucked from his body, and he groans – Suzuki’s head twitches as she hears the sound and then she has covered the ground between them and is holding him, the small woman soothing, rocking the muscular young body that is shaking with a grief for so long blanked out.

The roof and wooden walls are gone, door blown away. To the right of the doorway one wall survives, damaged by the blast but still standing.

He stares into the shell of the house, into what had been a room, and Suzuki, resting her hand on his arm, fills in the blank places: Henry, who had come running from town, who had rushed his mother to the doctor. How the two of them watched over her. How angry she had been, afterwards.

‘Henry used to say she never forgave him for saving her life.’

They have spent hours picking their way through the maze of the distant past; the three years of the waiting, when Cho-Cho endlessly repeated, as though invoking a spell, that one fine day Pinkerton would return, sail into the harbour, walk up the hill. Until the long-awaited day arrived, with all that followed.

As Suzuki talked and talked, the silent one, the servant, the observer who had enabled the others to lead their chosen lives, who knew everything and now had someone who was listening, she found herself for the first time playing a central role. And as the words flowed, an unsuspected bitterness went too, leaving
her emptied, serene within, as she had always outwardly appeared to be.

When she paused, he had questions and more questions; he mined her for the gold of information.

They walked back together down the hill towards the harbour. He told her he would be departing for America when he could get leave, to attend to a couple of things. He tried to explain to Suzuki how much Nancy had suffered, conscience-stricken, for what she did; he recalled something he had learned in his lessons with Mr Murakami: the concept of
honshin
– original truth of heart.

‘She has listened often to her original heart. I’d like to set her mind at rest.’

She took his arm, allowing him to guide her steps.

‘You have your own
giri.
You are a good American son.’

‘She’s not my mother, but she did everything—’

‘We have an old saying.’