Dreams of Speaking (19 page)

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Authors: Gail Jones

BOOK: Dreams of Speaking
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‘I went nowhere,' Alice confessed. ‘Nowhere at all. I stayed in my hotel room and read a novel.'

Haruko looked concerned. She offered to take her guest sightseeing, but Alice refused.

‘I will go to the Atomic Bomb Museum, perhaps tomorrow, because I feel I must. But otherwise, I will leave. This feels all wrong, Haruko. I have no wish to enjoy myself with him lying there …' She could not say the word ‘dying'. Alice was having trouble containing her feelings. Haruko, however, appeared composed and wise. She seemed in manner very like her father. She wore a tan dress of raw silk and a tailored brown jacket. Alice felt shabby beside her and without emotional poise.

‘I'm sure you will return,' Haruko said kindly, ‘in other circumstances.'

They were in the small private booth of a noisy restaurant. At intervals, unintrusive women in rustly kimonos slid aside their paper screen. They brought artfully constructed dishes, each small and compactly designed, on black laquered trays. Fish, rice, mushrooms, pickles. Alice wondered how Mr Sakamoto had been able to enjoy heavy French food served with a clunk on gigantic plates. She liked the fastidiousness of chopsticks and the sundry range of dishes. The slow processing through the meal. The frills, the flourishes, the garnishes that were pink and green and stacked as chrysanthemums or pagodas.

‘It is something', Alice said, ‘your father and I share. A love of food. We had many meals together.'

‘He told me,' said Haruko. ‘He once rang and said he had met a woman who talked as he did and was interested in food. You had just been out to the movies together. We thought he was falling in love. It was a shock to learn your age.'

Alice paused. ‘It's a friendship,' she said carefully.

Haruko smiled. ‘I know. Don't worry. Uncle Tadeo was fascinated and he interrogated my father. We know all about you.'

Here Haruko smiled again. Alice felt uneasy.

‘You've heard, perhaps, of their special relationship – my
father and Uncle Tadeo. It's rare between men, I think. They know each other's secrets. They tell their lives and thoughts in detail. They even tell each other their dreams. This time is hard on my Uncle Tadeo. He is missing the telephone calls. He is missing Hiroshi's voice.' Haruko fell silent. ‘It's hard on all of us,' she added.

After a few cups of warm sake, Alice and Haruko both began to relax. The noise in the restaurant was growing louder, but they seemed enclosed in a room of relative quiet. Alice wanted to say:
I know things about you too
, but instead, searching for a neutral bridge of words between them, she asked Haruko about the
kamishibai
man.

‘Ah, I suppose he said Akiko and I adored the
kamishibai
man. In truth he was the one who always suggested the visits. We wanted to watch television. My father has an affection for storytelling and redundant technologies. We used to go to the library with him and watch the
kamishibai
man perform. He was a man in his seventies, I suppose, and his equipment – the
hyoshigi,
the wooden clappers used to start the performance, the little stage he showed his pictures on – these were probably from the 1920s. But he was agile and gifted, especially with accents. We always resisted going, but when the story began we were always entranced. There was a particular folk tale we loved, “The Bamboo Princess”.'

‘Your father mentioned it,' Alice said. ‘He told me the plot.'

Haruko looked up from her bowl of
agadashi tofu
.

‘My father hated the idea that the Bamboo Princess left her parents, so he made up his own endings. Did he tell you that?'

Alice shook her head.

‘In my father's version, the Bamboo Princess takes her parents with her to live on the moon. No parent, he used to say, would exchange the elixir of life for separation. So there is a little family up there, never separated. Over time he added
bits and pieces to the story. The Bamboo Princess recovered brothers and sisters she thought she had lost; she met a Bamboo Prince, with a similar history of exile. They fell in love, of course, and were married under earthrise. He used to sit between our beds as we were falling asleep and tell and retell ‘The Bamboo Princess', adding each time a fresh detail to the story, a twist, an adornment … I actually believed she was up there, up in the moon. Sometimes, as a small girl, I talked to her. But I really didn't believe my father's happy family version. And I suppose I rather liked the idea that she had a space to herself, that she had deliberately chosen it, that she was at home, and remote.'

‘I was always told,' said Alice, ‘that there was a man in the moon.' She heard herself sounding trivial. She felt dull, boring.

‘No, no, not at all. You can see her face. She has a round Japanese face, pale as a geisha.'

Haruko laughed and leaned back from the table. Alice noticed her slender hands around the square wooden sake bowl. She wore no rings, no jewellery of any kind.

‘How did you meet my father?'

‘Uncle Tadeo didn't tell you?' Alice asked wryly. ‘We were on a train, between Chartres and Paris. An old-style train. One that rocks, that stops frequently, is rattly and slow. Someone played John Lennon's ‘Instant Karma' and we began talking. I liked him at once, his candour, his humour. Then we discovered we were both, in a sense, researching technology – he with his biography of Alexander Bell, I with a book on the poetics of modernity. He seemed to take for granted the idea that my project was worth pursuing. It gave me confidence. Our friendship consists almost entirely of shared meals and long talks. Talks about anything.'

‘Did he talk of my mother?' Haruko asked.

‘Not very much.'

Alice told her the story of the Spanish astronaut and the abbreviated honeymoon. Of his sense of despair.

Haruko looked down at the table. ‘It always seemed such an estranged marriage to me. I never understood how they got together.'

The screen slid open and a waitress came in to remove more dishes. Haruko spoke to her rapidly. Alice was feeling drunk and hoped she was not ordering more sake.

‘Green tea,' Haruko said, when the panel closed. ‘Otherwise neither of us will be able to walk out of the building.'

Alice smiled at her and said nothing. She was again reading thoughts.

‘Do you want company at the museum tomorrow?'

‘No,' said Alice firmly. ‘But I would like to say goodbye to Uncle Tadeo. Can I call on him sometime in the afternoon? I'll catch a taxi.'

It was settled. Over whisked green tea in Hagi china bowls, they made a plan for Alice's last day in Nagasaki. She felt the mixture of euphoria and despondency that drunkenness induces. Alice had spent her day in words, evading the real; now the physical world asserted its substance and irreducibility. When she stood up from the low table she misjudged the space and banged her knees, then as she caught herself toppling she knocked over a bowl. Haruko leaned forward across the table and held her elbow. The panel door opened, yet again, and a sash of orange light illuminated Haruko's blouse. Everything was vague and receding. Haruko said something to the waitress and a pair of hands reached under Alice's armpits and helped her from the cavity beneath the low table. She was embarrassed, and at a loss. She felt metaphysically uncoordinated. Huge kimono sleeves embraced her and almost carried her from the restaurant. There was an embroidered crane visible through her alcoholic haze. A
decoration, perhaps, an unexpected vision of something illogically beautiful.

On the tram Alice counted the stops so that she would not miss the museum. She was standing up, crushed within a group of secondary school students, who talked across her, giggled, sent and received text messages on their mobile phones. The school uniform was dark blue, prim and formal, modified by the girls with hitched-up skirts and socks with lace trimming. Boys had loosened their ties and mussed their hair and looked a little rakish. Every school bag bore fluffy or plastic accessories. Alice was pleased to be travelling like this, in the embrace of this youthful exuberance. She felt she understood them. If she spoke Japanese she would strike up a casual conversation, discussing television or movies. As it was, standing so very close to their faces, she thought how attractive they appeared, their hair, their black eyes.

Alice found her stop and followed the signs up a steep street to the white museum building. Wet blossoms lay in the gutter and blew alongside her. She expected crowds at the museum, but there were none. It may have been too early in the day, or perhaps this was not a popular site. The foyer to the museum appeared almost empty – one of those ringing public spaces, perpetually clean – but for a display against one wall of objects and illustrations made of origami paper cranes. There were strings of cranes in every colour, cascading in a kind of waterfall, forming peace signs and peace objects, collage-created images of doves and flowers. School children from across the world sent origami cranes to this place.

Alice was thinking: I'll be OK; I can cope with the A-Bomb Museum.

But then she truly entered. The architecture of the
building was such that one walked down a spiralling ramp, descending from light and cranes into the dim area of exhibition. The walk in downward spirals was disconcerting and Alice felt a sense of dread. It was like walking into a pit, like moving slowly underground. There was a muffled hush and a sense of overheated enclosure.

At the bottom she entered shadowy corridors and sombre spaces. Near the entrance to the exhibition, almost in darkness, was an exploded wall clock, halted at 11.02 on 9 August 1945. Opposite were six large video screens, playing and replaying, in a continuous loop, six mushroom clouds photographed from B29 bombers. They rose in a grainy, scratchy slow motion. They were quiet, compellingly abstract, yet also carried the routine associations of black-and-white film – old news reels, war movies, the smell of cigarette smoke. Six mushroom clouds were five too many: someone, perhaps the curator, imagined multiplication would register unthinkable dimensions. The bonfire of humans. The ghastly thunder.

A group of school children, no older than ten, hurried past Alice and moved on, chattering ahead of her. She could hear them exclaiming. There was an echo effect here, a distortion of sound. Alice turned a corner, following the children's voices. Objects and images of catastrophe rose to meet her. She could barely look. A steel helmet with the wearer's skull fused to the inside, hand bones embedded in melted glass, a schoolgirl's charred lunchbox, tatters of clothes, any number of mournful, forfeited things. There were photographs of grievous burns and women cradling dead babies, survivors with no skin, people reduced to effigy. Photographs of blasted space, all mud and ash. A smouldering primary school, a shattered cathedral, a whole town gone. Everywhere Alice looked there were lists and statistics: deaths – 73,884; injuries – 74,909. The names of schools and their numbers of students, of
patients in hospitals, workers in factories, inmates in prisons. Children's high-pitched talk threaded the gruesome numbers and images. Two girls murmured nervously before a description of the effects of gamma rays and radiation. Alice wondered why they were allowed here – so young – to see all this. All this atrocity and ruin. All this documented death, shrill with agonies.

Alice tasted mud in her mouth. She felt a constriction in her chest and moved towards the exit. There, as if to capture her, were witness testimonials, with English language translations. Alice glanced at the words and could not stop herself from reading. Accounts from children, young adults. A British prisoner of war. A Buddhist monk. The narratives seized her almost as if they were overheard utterance, whispered for her alone, directly into her ear.

From the window I saw my mother in the garden, picking aubergines for our lunch. She burst into flames.

Voices told of bluish light, then unforgettable fire. Of skin burst open, and tempura oil used as medicine. Of shoes stuck to melted asphalt, the soles of feet burning. Of defoliated trees, of featherless birds raining from the sky.

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