Fire Flowers Read online

  I surveyed the blank plateau before me: a hardened, empty desert. The sky was swirling with heavy cloud that obscured the ridge of mountains in the distance, and flakes of snow were drifting down. I took a deep breath and started to walk, my footsteps crunching upon the earth.

  Tokyo didn’t come close, I thought, even at its worst. There, at least, the remnants were identifiable—the broken frames of buildings, hewn chunks of masonry and cauterized brick. Here, any human vestige, any recognizable form had been ground into abstraction. The landscape was moulded from pulverized fragments as fine as sand, and thick, gravelly dust formed strange, surreal hummocks and formations, solidified now by the rain. It was a wasteland.

  Every so often, a bicycle creaked toward me. The riders wore cloth masks over their mouths and turned their handlebars to steer around me in a wide arc as they passed.

  I began to detect a vague tang in the air—a bitter, acrid smell I couldn’t place. I followed the shadowy outline of what must have once been a streetcar track, the overhead lines swept clear away. Fifty yards away, in a solitary heap, lay the twisted metal frame of a destroyed trolley.

  Up ahead was a high step to a stone bridge. A stream of pungent water trickled at the bottom of the channel. Corpses of fish and mangled bicycles cluttered the riverbed. I took out my camera, and started to take shots.

  For a long stretch after the bridge, though, there was nothing to document. No broken-down houses, no graves, no signs of settlement whatsoever. Just a vast expanse of thick, reddish-brown dust, punctuated by clumps of bushy yellow grass and spiky, poisonous-looking shrubs. The light was hazy and grey, the sun a pale, far-off disk, and I had the feeling of walking on the surface of a distant planet. Time seemed somehow disjointed, as if I was floating through a dream landscape. There was no sound of birdsong or human activity; no trees or vegetable gardens. The place was poisoned, stricken, dolorous.

  By the banks of another, much wider river, a shattered dome loomed, resembling the frame of an observatory. I recalled the umbrella roof of the central market building from my aerial photographs, and realized I was coming close to the hypocentre. Clumps of plaster still dangled from the curving struts of the dome, and plants were growing in the ruins—tendrils of dying morning glory that spiraled amidst the broken tiles; tangles of thorny herbs and small yellow broom-like flowers that clutched at the blackened brick. There were signs of life on the other side of the river now as well. A man led horses, pulling a cart laden with furniture while others went by on bicycles.

  I picked my way out of the dome and walked over to the bank. Fifty feet to my left, I saw it. The big, white bridge that I’d proposed as a primary target. The cement structure was askew, as if it had been shoved from its supports. The stone itself seemed ancient. As I crossed the bridge, I was put in mind of mythical tales of rivers to the underworld. Fields of lost souls on the other side.

  Shanties stood alongside the avenue, lines of laundry strung between them. Down by the river, women were scrubbing clothes in wooden tubs and children splashed about in bathing caps.

  I was so absorbed that I didn’t notice the rumble of the army convoy until it was almost upon me. I turned and froze. Figures stood in the backs of trucks, silhouetted by the cloud of dust raised by the heavy wheels. I wondered whether I should run, but some instinct told me to stay and so I stood rigid, my hand held up in stiff, formal salute. British markings were painted on the sides of the vehicles. My panic turned to relief as the cheerful troops in the back called out, thumbs held up in salute as they rolled past. The friendly sound of a horn blared out as they disappeared into a haze of red dust, my heartbeat slowly subsiding.

  I strode along the avenue toward a tall building that looked as if it had once been a five- or six-storey office block. On entry, the impression turned out to be illusory. Only the outer shell was still standing. The interior walls had collapsed, and the ground floor was gutted and charred, leaving nothing but rubble and emptiness.

  Further along, another tall building seemed solid and undamaged. People were coming and going through its main doors. They glanced up as I approached, stopped in their tracks and stared.

  Inside was a large, high-ceilinged hall, clerks at desks flipping through ledgers and stamping forms, counting out coins and notes for people lined up before them. At the end of the room, a huge clock hung on the blackened wall. I glanced at my own watch. The hands of the clock had been frozen in time.

  I raised my Leica, and the image of the clock sharpened as I focused the lens. A hand pulled at my arm. For a second, I thought that I was being robbed, and I raised my fists as I spun around. Two policemen stood cowering, while another stepped gingerly forward and attempted to grasp me again.

  “Come—please,” he said, clutching at me with bony fingers.

  “Hands off,” I said, shoving him away. He stood there for a second, apparently contemplating another attempt, before clearly deciding discretion to be the better part of valour. He walked toward a wide stone staircase that led away from the lobby.

  “Come—please,” he repeated. He waved his fingers at me as if beckoning to a cat. Up the puddle-stained stairs, on the third floor, was a set of doors that bore the insignia of the police force. Inside, men sat at splintered desks laid with maps, scrolls, and jars of cloudy tea. They wore overcoats as they worked—the room was cold enough to see the vapour of their breath. They glanced up at me curiously as I was led through the room. The officer knocked softly at a door. At the sound of a bark from within, he opened it, saluted, and hustled me inside.

  A man with a silver beard sat behind a desk, glaring at me with sharp eyes under a beetling brow. The room was bare except for a beige raincoat slung over a screen in the corner and a portrait of the emperor that hung askew on the cracked wall.

  The man fired off a torrent of angry Japanese.

  “I can’t understand you, Chief,” I said. “No matter how loud you shout it.”

  He stomped around the table to face me. He was tough and grizzled, and about a foot and a half shorter than me. He jabbed a sharp finger into my chest.

  “Hold on now, Chief,” I said loudly, grasping my epaulettes and thrusting them into his face. “Let’s not forget who’s who.”

  A timid knock came at the door, and a disheveled man with a toothbrush moustache came inside.

  “Excuse me,” he said in English, with a hesitant bow, “I am translator.”

  The chief growled and retreated to his desk. He snapped at the man, who nodded meekly every now and then, penciling words in a small notebook. The translator turned to me and cleared his throat.

  “He asks, ‘Why are you in Hiroshima?’”

  “That’s a good question.”

  He gave me a look of anxiety. I took pity on him.

  “I’m here to visit the hospitals.”

  “You are doctor?”

  I shook my head. “No, I’m a reporter. Shimbun kisha desu.”

  As the man started to warily translate, the Chief uttered a guttural volley of Japanese that crescendoed with a slam of his hand on the table. The translator cringed.

  “He says—no reporter in Hiroshima. Forbidden.”

  I wondered whether I should try to bluff it out with my press pass. I thought I might do better with cigarettes and a few tins of Spam. The chief tapped his fingers against the table, apparently unable to decide what to do with me. He picked up the telephone, and barked into the receiver. There was a crackling voice on the other end. The chief grunted as he listened.

  Over by the window, I looked outside. Flat ruins stretched for miles all around. Millions of tiny snowflakes were falling through the air. They stuck to the glass for a moment, before melting away into tiny droplets of water.

  The chief replaced the receiver. He stood up and put on his coat and hat. He flung a few words at the translator and wrenched open the door.

  I looked
askance at the man.

  “Where are we going?”

  The translator dipped his head. “He says—to visit hospital.”

  “We are?”

  “Yes. We go now.”

  “Why should he take me to the hospital?” I asked, hurrying after him. A look of painful embarrassment passed over his face.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?”

  “He says—to show America what it has done.”

  The chief himself drove the battered sedan, the car toiling over the pits and crevasses in the road. The translator sat next to me in the back. As I asked him about the state of the city now, he responded with terse, nervous answers. Yes, people were returning, though most still clustered on the outskirts, too scared of sickness to venture further in. No, there was no electricity yet. They still relied on the army generators. No, they rarely saw any Westerners. Teams had come a few weeks after the surrender, dressed in protective clothing and carrying peculiar pieces of equipment. They had drilled in certain areas and taken away samples of rocks and brick, but had not returned since.

  I rolled down the window and started photographing. Men in rubber boots and helmets shovelled debris, sawed planks, dug foundations. In an open patch of ground a long, low building was painted in crude camouflage, scrap metal piled outside—warped radiators and railings. Men in blue overalls dragged over still more, sorting and arranging it by type.

  We bumped along a dirt track lined with rows of identical, newly built wooden huts. Black squares of vegetable gardens lay between them, the earth dotted with tiny sprouts of green.

  Past a long yellow brick wall, we emerged into the muddy yard of what had once been the Red Cross hospital. The car slid to a halt and we clambered out. The chief snapped at the translator, gesturing toward the building.

  A doctor, a bespectacled man in his mid-fifties, his beard cut in a tapering European style, emerged from a side door, stepping delicately around the muddy puddles as he approached. I thanked the police chief for his help, and he laughed mirthlessly.

  Frankly, the translator said, he should have had me arrested at the station when he had been alerted to my arrival. He had orders to call the Allied commander of the area if any unfamiliar personnel arrived in the city.

  “And yet he chose to ignore his orders,” I said.

  The chief scowled at me.

  “He says—it is better for you to see for yourself.”

  “I agree.”

  The chief’s eyes narrowed and his face became full of contempt. He gestured once more at the hospital. With that, he climbed into the car and slammed the door shut. It trundled away, the worn wheels splashing through the flooded potholes.

  Dr. Hiyashida had studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and spoke good English. He had come to Hiroshima from Osaka to make a special study of radiation disease. Shamelessly, he told me that he hoped his thesis would glean him a position on the medical council.

  “You weren’t here yourself on the day of the blast?”

  “No,” he said, frowning. “And now there are no more than a few A-Bomb cases still in the hospital. It is most unfortunate.”

  The inside of the hospital was a shambles. The window frames were warped, the glass gone. An icy wind blew in from the hills, visible in the near distance.

  “How are conditions now?”

  “Improving,” he said, apparently without irony. “We have more medicine now, vitamins and plasma. But we still need more operating tables, X-ray machines.”

  Patients wrapped in bandages were lying on mats on the floor, sleeping or quietly reading miniature books.

  “You see?” he said in a frustrated whisper. “Few of them have any interesting symptoms any longer. They just say they feel empty and listless. They complain of tiredness and melancholy. I find that difficult to ascribe to radiation. After all, who ever heard of a bomb causing melancholy?”

  In another ward, he kept his more “interesting” cases—the more grotesquely injured victims of the bomb whom I assumed he hoped would form the notable chapters of his thesis. I felt acutely awkward as he strode from one patient to another, ordering them to display their symptoms as if they were performers in a circus freak show.

  One young man raised his shirt to expose his midriff. It was covered with the same thick, rubbery colloidal scars that the victims in Weller’s photographs had shown. Another man’s skin was burned with the striped pattern of the yukata he had been wearing at the time of the flash. The doctor urged me to take photographs—“For your newspaper!”—as he poked and prodded his patients, snapping at any of them who appeared too listless or embarrassed to respond. I grew irritated: he put me in mind of a particularly difficult superior officer I had known during my service, and I felt an incipient wave of hatred for the man.

  Up ahead, an old woman, her white hair pulled into a bun, was sitting on the edge of her bed. I asked the translator to politely inquire whether I might talk to her. Dr. Hiyashida rushed over and took her arm, shaking it, which made me so angry that I almost struck him. I ordered him to leave us, and he slunk back to the doorway, glancing at us every now and again with a sulky look.

  She had been beautiful once, that was clear. Her eyes were almost pure black, and her nose was still a soft, elegant curve. But her face seemed to have slid an inch or so around her skull, like a loose mask, and her skin was etched with a deep web of ancient lines and whirls.

  She spoke in a low voice, almost without intonation. She had been a dance instructor, she said, though she’d had very few students left by the end of the war. She had arrived at her studio in the centre of the city at around eight o’clock on the morning of the blast. She had been walking along the corridor on the first floor, where she had paused for a moment to open a window to let in some air, glancing as she did so up at the mountains, thick with green against the blue summer sky.

  There was a flash. An explosion of glass pitched her backward. She tumbled in the air with the last thought that a bomb had landed directly upon her. When she awoke, she was pinned facedown in the darkness, her mouth full of plaster. The floor above her had collapsed and she lay there for several days until men finally dug her out of the ruins. Outside, the city was flattened. Drops of oily black rain were falling from the sky.

  Barefoot and dressed in rags, she made her way along the river to the park where hundreds of women and children lay dying. Some were vomiting up their innards; the flesh of others was peeling off. She saw two women from her neighbourhood association squatting by a fire, and hurried over. When they saw her, they turned away, aghast. The next morning, she went to a pool in the river to look at her reflection, and realised why.

  She closed her eyes, gesturing toward her face. Her brows seemed to have been pushed in by the thumbs of a sculptor, her lips almost entirely smudged into her face. With an almost imperceptible noise, the old woman hunched over. Her medical chart lay on the edge of her bed. My scalp prickled as I deciphered it. She was only twenty-five years of age.

  On the other side of the room, two men were lying side by side in bed. One sat up and smiled vaguely as the translator and I came over. His scalp was bare and blotchy, his arms as thin as twigs. As with the girl in the photographs that Weller had showed us, his withered chest was speckled with red liver spots. The other man was asleep and his breath came in rasps.

  The old man spoke so softly that I could barely hear. He smiled and made tiny gesticulations to illustrate his story. Sir would never believe it, he whispered, but they’d both worked on the railroad as labourers until just six months before. They’d been brawny and tough back then, with full heads of hair—wives, mistresses! They’d both been working on the tracks that morning, when the man had noticed the far-off glint of “Mr. B” in the sky, but they’d assumed it was just the weather plane and ignored it. There’d been an air raid warning earlier that morning, and it had pass
ed without incident.

  “Hiroshima was lucky, we used to say. The Americans didn’t want to touch it.”

  He’d never been on a plane himself, he said, but as he’d looked at the silver glint in the sky, he’d wondered what Japan must look like from above.

  “How beautiful it must be to fly, sir,” he murmured, “to see the whole country stretched out beneath you.”

  He’d watched the plane as it passed. He’d put his hand above his face to shield his eyes from the dazzling sun. That was the moment.

  There was a flash. There was no sound. He felt something strong and terribly intense and there was a pulsing of colour as he was hurled forward. He lay splayed on the ground with fragments of stone like teeth in his mouth. He thought he was dead.

  Great crashes came from all around and he saw train carriages tumbling across the ground like toys, as an immense cloud rose up and blotted out the sun. Then, all around, debris and dust began to rain violently down from the sky.

  He fell silent, staring into space.

  “How do you feel now?”

  He drew in a breath, then let out a long sigh. He rubbed his hands together dreamily, as if he were washing them. Last year, he said, he’d used his hands every day. Flinging a pick, hammering rivets, laying track. His body had been all muscle. He held up his shaking hands for me to see, then laughed. He didn’t even think he could lift a glass of beer now. He felt so light that he thought he might float off into the wind like a feather. I took his photograph and thanked him. He gave a trembling smile and bowed, pressing his hands against his forehead as if in prayer.

  As we left the ward, Dr. Hiyashida shook his head and crossed his hands behind his back. “Awkward cases, these A-Bomb people.”

  Darkness was seeping from the hills and I needed to catch the train back to Tokyo. It was the only passage for two days and the idea of being stuck here in this strange city at night filled me with a baffling fear. Dr. Hiyashida insisted that one of the hospital ambulances drive me to the station and this at least I gratefully accepted. I told myself I should be wary of encountering army personnel, although, in all honesty, it was the thought of traipsing back across that mournful wasteland in the dark that filled me with dread. What I desired more than anything was to be back in my room in Tokyo, a brazier smouldering away on the floor, a large glass of whisky in my hand. Dr. Hiyashida waved me off at the hospital gate, the translator having now departed. He promised to send me a copy of his thesis when it was published. He urged me to be sure to mention his name “in my newspaper.”