Fire Flowers Page 11

  Michiko left me just a few weeks after that. In my heart, I’d always known she would. Every night now, she joined the band up on the stage, a red plastic rose in her hair. She smiled into the piano player’s eyes, and sang into the silver microphone in her birdlike voice, occasionally pausing to throw out expressions she’d learned from Uncle English to the audience. A white-haired American officer reserved the seats directly beneath the stage every evening, his legs spread wide, gazing up at her as if spellbound, clapping and bellowing with laughter.

  One morning, she returned home and told me that the man—some general, or admiral—wanted to set her up in an apartment of her own in Akasaka, where he could visit her whenever he chose.

  “Michiko,” I murmured. “Perhaps I could come and visit you sometimes? I could even come and stay at first, just to help you get settled in—”

  “No, Satsuko,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “You can’t, he’s very jealous, you see. He’ll expect me to be there for him at all hours.”

  A hard lump grew in my throat. “Well then,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Michiko clung onto my arm, and rubbed her lovely face against my shoulder like a cat. “What do you think you will do now, Satsuko?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Well,” I said with a forced smile. “I imagine I will just carry on working at the Oasis. With all the other, less beautiful, girls.”

  Michiko’s face crumpled and she burst into tears. She hugged me, burying her face in my hair.

  “But you are beautiful, Satsuko,” she cried. “You are!”

  But whether I was or not, at the end of that week, a swish black sedan rolled up at the end of the street, and a driver with white gloves came in to help Michiko move her things. He loaded up her trunks of dresses and gowns, her boxes of creams and vials, and, as she strapped on her new high-heeled shoes, she took one last look at our leaky room. We bowed to each other and she tottered outside to the car. With a wave, she clambered into the backseat. The chauffeur closed the door and, with a whining engine, he reversed back down the alley.

  13

  NO.1 SHIMBUN ALLEY

  (Hal Lynch)

  A grizzled mongrel nosed about in the dark fluid welling from a broken standpipe on a street of ruined buildings near Yurakucho Station. On the front of the dilapidated hotel was a hand-painted sign: Tokyo Foreign Correspondents’ Club. A staff car ground to a halt in the dirt road outside and I followed two Allied colonels up the worn steps, through a set of glass doors to a lobby, where correspondents stood in telephone booths, dictating stories on the overseas lines. After a creaking ascent in the iron elevator, the old operator wrenched open the guardrail to reveal a hallway redolent with the smoke of pipes and cigarettes and cigars. Two Japanese busboys bowed, and swung open a further set of doors. A polyglot clamour emerged from within.

  The ballroom was crowded. A gleaming baby grand stood in the centre, a diplomat with a white bouffant and dinner dress sat upon its stool, holding uproarious court to an obsequious coterie. A clump of reporters harangued a U.S. Army major, who spread out his hands in apparent defence as their pencils jabbed the air around him. A pair of British naval captains stood with white caps under their arms, woollen socks pulled high, as they were cheerfully molested by two old ladies in grey chiffon and horn-rimmed glasses. To the side of the room, crumpled correspondents interviewed nervous-looking Japanese; Chinese generals slumped on leather sofas and Allied officers sat drinking with women too pretty to be their wives. Between the encampments floated Japanese boys in red and gold uniform, carrying trays laden with square bottles of whisky, delivering glasses, squirting soda siphons, slipping their tips into their side pockets and tapping them for good luck.

  “Glad you could make it,” growled Mark Ward, as he materialized by my side. He gave a lopsided grin when he noticed my expression.

  “Where are we, Ward? Casablanca?”

  An exquisite Japanese girl came down the steps, black hair piled high to show a snow white neck, a string of silvery pearls tracing the prow of her ruffled silk dress. I’d seen her before, I thought, in surprise—the pinup from the Oasis club, who’d sat on McHardy’s lap that night. She was clearly moving up in the world. A grizzled, white-haired Third Fleet admiral barged forward to greet her, and she let out an almost genuine cry of delight as she took hold of his outstretched hands.

  Ward led me into the crowd, signalling to a boy for drinks. “This is the nerve centre, Lynch—the reliquary!”

  The boy handed me a glass of raw Japanese whisky and I took a large gulp.

  “Who runs the show here?”

  “We do.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Wherever newsmen gather in the world, Lynch, needs must that they have a bar. Without such a place, stories go untold, confidences unshared. Last September, MacArthur decided that Japan didn’t need any special correspondents, with their irritating habit of independent thought and inquiry. He stopped giving them billets. So we took over this place instead.”

  A grunt came from behind us and a heavy hand fell on Ward’s shoulder. Two bulky, shaven-headed men glared at us. One pushed Ward contemptuously on the arm, as the other jerked a warty thumb toward his mouth and emitted a phrase in some Slavic language. Ward grinned.

  “Lynch, meet Gorbatov,” he said. “Boris One. The other fellow’s Agapov. Boris Two. Don’t ever get them confused or they’ll break your arm.”

  “Good evening, comrades.”

  Boris One jerked his bare head at Ward. “We drink soon,” he ordered, and the pair headed off toward the bar. Ward smiled as he watched them go.

  “Friends of yours?”

  “If you ever want insight into the dark recesses of the Soviet mind, Lynch, they’re the men you should talk to. Oh, look who it is . . . ”

  As we worked our way toward the back of the ballroom, Ward recounted his mental encyclopaedia of all those present. At the piano, the diplomat prodded the ivories to delighted applause, and the first notes of a Chopin sonata floated through the ballroom.

  “Anyhow,” Ward said. “We’re all in the library. Something that ought to interest you.”

  “Oh?”

  We proceeded down a corridor to an underlit, smoke-filled room. A couple of cracked leather armchairs had been set up and dozens of foreign and Japanese newspapers were draped over wooden rails. A crowd of men, waistcoats lined with pencils, shoes scuffed, were gathered around a wide table. A man with a thick brown quiff sat behind it, gesturing at a series of photographs laid out under a green-shaded lamp.

  “A friend from Chicago,” Ward murmured. “George Weller. Just got back from an unauthorized trip.”

  As we slid into the huddle, a couple of men nodded at Ward in greeting.

  “The Mitsubishi shelters were useless, of course,” Weller was saying. “They were at the epicentre of the blast. The factory makes a strange sight now, I must say—like a metal rib cage, only all the bones are bent outward.”

  I stiffened. I knew with instant conviction what he was talking about. We’d flown over the big Mitsubishi works at Nagasaki a month before the city was A-bombed. The firm manufactured torpedoes and ammunition for the Japanese navy and I’d been surprised to see the place still standing. A graceful city by the seaside, just like Hiroshima, sprinkled with the spires of Christian churches.

  “Most of those that died did so straight away, or within a few hours of the blast,” Weller continued. “But then some- thing else happened. Something strange.”

  Weller held up a photograph of a ruddy-faced Japanese girl, smiling into the camera with a knapsack on her back. It triggered a memory somewhere in my brain.

  “This young girl escaped the blast itself with no more than a burn on her leg. She left the city that day to stay with relatives. She came back two weeks later. Days after she returned, she looked like this.”

  Ano
ther photograph. The girl was sitting up in a hospital bed now. She had the look of a scarecrow—bald patches on her head, prickles covering her skin as if she had been dragged through a thornbush.

  The memory came to me. The trembling girl and her scarred boyfriend at the back of Ueno Station.

  “This is her two weeks later.”

  The girl once more. Withered almost to a skeleton now. Completely bald, her body covered in thick welts.

  Weller paused, gauging the reaction of the men.

  “But here’s the thing, gentlemen. This girl didn’t start to get sick until she came back to Nagasaki. And that was three weeks after the blast.”

  I struggled to recall the boy’s garbled tale as Weller handed around the photographs. The men scrutinized them, muttering soft prayers and obscenities before handing them on. I studied the print of the ruddy-faced girl. She looked out with empty eyes from a frayed hospital mat, dark blood clotted beneath her nose.

  The bomb? The bomb made her sick? The boy’s fervent nod.

  Perspiration prickled on my forehead as Ward took the photograph from my hand.

  “What is this, George?” he asked.

  Weller shook his head, lit a cigarette.

  “The doctors won’t make a diagnosis. Because they don’t know how to diagnose it. It’s sinister.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  “No. For now, it’s just Disease X.”

  “What’s the official take?” Ward asked.

  “Headquarters don’t buy it. Or they don’t want to buy it. They say it’s a scam. That the Japs are looking for sympathy. Easier terms.”

  Weller unfurled a newspaper. To my dismay, I saw it was a copy of Stars and Stripes—the same copy, in fact, that had our piece on Himeji Castle printed toward the back, just before the sporting green.

  “This is from one Colonel Warren, of the University of Rochester medical school.”

  “That august institution,” Ward murmured, to snorts of amusement.

  “He states, quote: ‘There absolutely is not, and never was’—note that,” said Weller, his finger raised, “‘any dangerous amount of radiation in that area.’”

  He paused. He had the men’s entire attention now.

  “‘The radioactivity of a luminous dial wristwatch is one thousand times greater than that found at Nagasaki.’”

  He set the newspaper down on the table. “Do any of you gentlemen wear a luminous dial wristwatch?”

  A few raised forearms. “Ever find your intestines choked with blood? Blood spots in your bone marrow?”

  Furrows spread across the assembled brows. My mouth was dry as I raised my hand.

  “Mr. Weller?”

  He glanced up. I swallowed as the faces of the other men swivelled towards me.

  “Disease X. Has it been reported in Hiroshima also?”

  Weller shrugged.

  “God alone knows. Both cities are now out of bounds. Under penalty of court-martial.”

  I pictured the MPs loping along the platform, scrutinizing the Allied carriage for passengers.

  Ward stepped forward. “When’s this going out, George?”

  Weller stubbed out his cigarette with sudden bitterness. He slumped back in his chair.

  “It’s not.”

  Incredulous noises came from the assembled men.

  “How so?”

  “I was fool enough to file it in Tokyo. Headquarters have killed it. Every last word. Diller told me I was lucky to still be in the country. I doubt I will be much longer.”

  Noises of anger and disenchantment came from all sides of the room. Ward slid behind Weller’s chair and raised big, calming hands.

  “Okay, boys, here’s what we do. We form a delegation, we go to Diller. We impress upon him that this is unacceptable censorship . . . ”

  I barely heard him. The photograph of the girl was propped up against the lamp, her eyes boring into my own. Sick. Dead. So—desu.

  The newspaper had fallen open at our story and the photograph I’d taken outside Himeji Castle: Eugene holding up a samurai sword, baring buckteeth with a ferocious expression.

  I pushed urgently out of the library. The noise and chatter of the ballroom washed over me again, along with the frenzied crescendo of the Chopin sonata. I signalled urgently to a boy for a drink and when it came, I threw it back, feeling the alcohol liquefy the pressure in my temple. Men began to stream out of the library as the meeting wrapped up. They lit cigars and made a beeline for the bar. Ward approached me, thick eyebrows raised.

  “Everything okay, Lynch?”

  “Little claustrophobic in there.”

  He nodded. “Pretty strong salts, huh?”

  “Yes. Pretty strong.”

  “Another drink?”

  “Some other time.”

  “Okay, Lynch. Make sure you come again.”

  A thick cloud of blue smoke curled over the ballroom as I strode through the animated crowd and took the elevator back down to the lobby. Outside, the night was cold, and I stumbled through refuse and mud. Just before the junction, I glanced up at a building. The front was still there, but the back was missing, like the façade of scenery in a cheap Western. You could see right through the walls, and where the roof should have been there were stars.

  I bought a pint of whisky from a hood at the Ginza crossing, and swigged it as I strode home. Back at the Continental, I lay down on my bed and swilled some more. Then I switched off the light, still fully clothed, and drank in the darkness until the face of the skeletal young girl had dissolved from my mind.

  Down in the dusty basement of the press club, I scoured archive boxes of newspapers for any article concerning the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was precious little to read. Access to both areas was interdicted now, and there were no official reports on the state of things in either city. The London Express had carried a report by a correspondent named Burchett who had raced down to Hiroshima in advance of our lines—“The Atomic Plague!” screamed the ghoulish headline—but the article itself had been suppressed and the copy in the archive was scored with black ink that stained my fingers. There was the set of photographs in LIFE, the surrender issue, which showed the familiar ruined plain of Hiroshima. It made a brief, tantalizing reference to reports from local doctors of bleeding gums amongst the surviving population. But the article abruptly cut to a consideration of the future of war and the place of the atom bomb within it, and no more reference was made to its victims.

  The only other piece was in the New York Times, by a man named Laurence. He’d flown as official observer upon the Bockscar to Nagasaki. His writing was lyrical, almost poetic, as he described the swollen tub being loaded into the bomb bay on Tinian.

  “A thing of beauty to behold, this gadget,” he wrote, as if extolling the virtues of a new refrigerator or vacuum cleaner. The pilot had taken the bomb up to 17,000 feet, and from there, in the air-conditioned cabin of a reconfigured Superfort, Laurence had pondered the fates of those on the ground below.

  “Does one feel any pity or compassion for the poor devils about to die? No. Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbor and of the death march on Bataan.”

  I’d heard the line so many times now, it seemed worn smooth by repetition.

  His tone became rapturous, almost sexual, as he described the blast and the mushroom cloud exploding into the sky:

  “The smoke billows upward, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward, descending earthward . . . ”

  Floating over that desolate plain. The city swept away. Poor devils.

  The last paragraph of the article struck me as odd. As if in preemptive defence, Laurence emphasized that there was no “mysterious sickness” caused by radiation in either of the two A-bombed cities. Any such reports were “Jap propaganda,” wily attempts to wring conc
essions from the Allied powers, a cynical ploy to win sympathy from the American people, with their big hearts and deep pockets.

  I lay the paper down, and closed my eyes.

  Hibiya Park was located auspiciously. To the north lay the Imperial Palace, aloof and remote behind its moat and thick stone walls. At its eastern corner stood the granite fortress of the Dai-ichi Insurance Building, now General Headquarters of the Supreme Command of Allied Powers—SCAP—as contained in the body of General MacArthur, Japan’s most recent and now omnipotent emperor. The country’s feudal past and democratic future faced off, so to speak, across its patchy fields, and, suitably enough, the park had become Tokyo’s premier site for demonstration, a rallying point for the new political parties that had burgeoned in the wake of the war’s end.

  A small crowd was gathered when I arrived. Up on the bandstand, a stout man in a green jersey was striding about like a boxer, bawling through a whistling microphone. Jeeps lined the flowerbeds, bored military policemen observing the events. The crowd seemed very much of a type—early middle age, circular spectacles, drawn faces. Despite the bitter cold, they were rapt, cheering loudly as the speaker’s hoarse voice rolled across the park. Red flags and banners were unfurled and then came the first, eerie, ululating note of a chant. It was haunting and somehow melancholic and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The men began to sing in chorus, their voices welling up above the mud of the park, floating high into the crystalline fall air.

  A familiar bulky figure clapped gloved hands and cheered along. I strode over and touched the arm of Mark Ward’s woollen overcoat.

  He turned to me, eyes bright behind thick spectacles. “Intoxicating, isn’t it?”

  A phalanx of men and women started to jog back and forth, waving their banners with balletic fluidity. They danced forward, halted on a dime, then went back the other way. I had a sudden impression of migrating geese, of brittle red maple leaves drifting down along the Hudson. I stood there for a moment, letting the feeling wash over me.