by Gail Jones
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.
Alice fled the museum, spiralling upwards. Time shuddered and stopped. Heaviness of being. Death clouds. Ash. She found herself back at the tram stop without remembering anything of her walk there. She felt numb, vacant, caught in a dismal trance. Then the material now intercepted: here was the tram, here it came, to carry her physically away. Alice boarded the tram, rode shakily, and almost missed her stop at the railway station. When she disembarked she walked quickly through the crowds to her small brown room. There she could sit still, alone and in silence. Alone. In silence.
Akiko had not been present, but Alice, Haruko and Uncle Tadeo had spent a surprisingly pleasant afternoon together. Uncle Tadeo proudly showed Alice their raked stone garden, pointing out to her the sinuous consistent curves around a central shape, the pond with a bamboo drip, a stone resembling a mini-mountain, a granite lantern.
‘Your nephew’, said Alice, ‘says the raked garden is a picture of sound waves.’
Uncle Tadeo nodded. ‘It is,’ he confirmed, pleased that she knew. He made witty remarks and asked curious questions about Australia. Haruko patiently translated. Then she talked to Alice about her job, and her love of literature. Over tea she seized Alice’s hands and made her promise to return.
‘I promise,’ Alice said. There was no question, somehow. She knew it to be true.
Uncle Tadeo smiled.
Alice left before dinner, claiming she was tired, with parcels of gifts and sincere embraces. To Uncle Tadeo Alice had given a small Aboriginal wood carving of a kangaroo, intended for Mr Sakamoto. It was a charming object, rough-hewn, the colour of desert. Uncle Tadeo bowed and tucked it in the front of his yukata robe, making a joke about pouches. When she was leaving, his eyes filled with tears. Haruko would not hear of Alice catching a taxi, and drove her back to the centre of the city.
‘I will stay in touch,’ said Haruko. ‘I will let you know what happens.’
Alice visited the department store and again bought sake and sushi, and ate once more on her bed in the hotel room. She fell asleep very early. She would pack in the morning. She would catch the 10.30 train directly to Fukuoka, then switch to the shinkansen for the route to Tokyo.
Alice woke with a start in the middle of the night, thinking of herself, obscurely, as a silhouette. Visits to museums always resulted in this accumulation of images, this messy spilling over. But when she was fully awake, she realised she was thinking of Mr Sakamoto. The silhouette was a child. A small boy, running, his legs flying up behind him. Alice tried to imagine what Hiroshi Sakamoto, as an eleven-year-old boy, had witnessed on that cloudy August morning. His house had been on a south-east ridge, protected from the blast. Had he run down the hill, looking for his sisters, for his father, for his tutor, Harold O’Toole? What had he seen before him? Had his feet burned on melted asphalt? Were there bodies all around? Was the sky like a shroud?
The electric billboard flashed in on Alice’s imaginings. She was a stranger here, she knew nothing, she could only guess. She could not enter into Mr Sakamoto’s experience. She rose from her bed and switched on the light, and, having nothing better to do, began her meagre packing. An image from the museum surfaced inside her. It was a photograph of the shadow of a man and a ladder, imprinted by the blast on a wall. A persisting shadow. That was all. An autograph of death.
14
In clear light, flights over Australia showed the continent as a crimson body. You could almost believe it was skin there, mottled, veined, incised with scarification, tattooed with blue print, bulging, recessed. Cloud shadow accentuated these incarnations. Curves arose, a suggestive crevice, the flank of a ridge resting seductively, like an arm on a pillow. Other countries appeared, more inhumanly, in green or grey, and Alice had forgotten this fleshly appeal, this summoning of matters of skin, of sex, of appetite. It was good to return. To skim across the river. To sit with her legs in the sun. To hear raucous birdcall in a cobalt sky.
At the airport everyone seemed to dial on a mobile phone as soon as they left the plane. Such frail cargo. There was an urgency in saying yes, we have arrived safely from the sky; we have managed to journey from the other side of the planet. Travellers who had been in sedated suspension and dull disengagement, now spoke in loud, unnatural voices. There was a kind of pleasure in the air, a tremble of call and responsiveness. Conversations of a
ll kinds were developing, overlapping and warm tones everywhere met with other warm tones. Alice remembered something Mr Sakamoto had once told her about Alexander Graham Bell. Alec was fascinated, Mr Sakamoto said, by the phenomena of ‘sympathetic vibration’. Playing the family piano, he discovered that by pressing the pedal that lifted the felt dampers from the piano wires, then singing into the piano, he could sound the wire that matched the pitch of his voice, the others remaining silent. He also discovered that one piano would echo a chord struck on another one nearby. This inspired Alec to try to invent an ‘electric piano’, by moving electromagnets beneath each wire. But he returned, in the end, to the simplicity of agile fingers dancing over ivory, and the press of a single foot on a shiny brass pedal. ‘He returned to the body,’ Mr Sakamoto had said firmly.
Alice was thinking of sympathetic vibration when she saw her sister in the crowd. In the history of families there exist moments of raw shock, when one exposes oneself, or sees exposure, or links in some private way to a self normally hidden. The shock was in realising that Norah had not revealed her illness, but had entered the valley of the shadow of death and suffered there, and struggled, without telling her sister. One breast had been removed, and now she was fixed into regimes of drugs and chemotherapy. When Norah met her at the airport she had been out of hospital for only three weeks. Her skull was exposed and her body blue and emaciated. Alice embraced her sister and Norah returned the embrace fiercely, as if she was drowning. They looked into each other’s faces.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Alice asked. ‘Why?’
But Norah could not answer. She turned away.
Michael, who was standing nearby, said ‘Righteo, then,’ and Alice realised she had not acknowledged her brother-in-law. They offered each other perfunctory hugs. Michael looked uneasy, abashed. He reached forward to take Alice’s case.
‘The kids are with Mum and Dad,’ Norah announced. ‘We’ll head there together. They’re all dying to see you.’
Alice linked her arm with her sister’s while Michael carried the luggage. Norah felt hot, mortal. She was so thin Alice could feel the form of her bones beneath her skin; it was as if she were holding someone breakable. Alice grasped her protectively. The airport terminal was full of people, all with trolleys or wheeled cases, rattling along, avoiding collisions. So much clattering. Alice heard the greetings on arrival, the unexpected surprises, the embraces, the questions. Then Michael’s mobile phone rang, playing the Star Wars theme. He stopped and released the luggage while he snapped open his phone and answered the call. Norah and Alice stood waiting, bound together by great, unsayable things, by the sympathetic answering of one to another, like pianos communing.
Her apartment had a musty, closed-up smell. Alice drew the curtains, opened the windows and looked around at her books, her table, the souvenirs of her travels. Items in the room asserted their claim on her: she was this, she was that, she had been to India, to Spain. She was someone who read way too many books. The television looked enormous – a bulb of glass, waiting. The radio was there, the CD player, the simple black reading lamp she had always loved. The stillness was reassuring; everything was in its place. As Alice looked at the telephone, it began suddenly to ring. It rang and rang, but she did not pick up the receiver. She realised she was expecting the answering machine to click on, but she had disconnected it, months ago. The more she waited the louder and more insistent the calls seemed to become. It may have been Haruko, she thought after a few seconds.
‘Yes?’
‘I knew you were there, hiding. Norah told me when you were coming back.’
It was Stephen. Oh no, Alice thought. Oh no.
‘I’m ringing to invite you to dinner. To meet my new girlfriend. It would mean a lot to both of us.’
Alice was exasperated and tired beyond patience. She could barely bring herself to respond.
‘I’ve just got back from the airport, Stephen. Can we talk later?’
‘It’s just that we really need to make a time and place.’
Alice knew there was no shaking him.
‘Next Friday at eight. At Benito’s.’
Alice put the receiver down without saying goodbye, just as he had not said hello. She felt foolish, agreeing so readily to see him. He had caught her off guard. He would demand things, bring his pathos with him in a bundle on his back. She pulled the phone lead from the wall. Haruko, surely, would not ring this soon.
The summer weather had begun and the days were long and bright. Alice was woken by loud birds, squabbling and feeding in the bushes and trees near her apartment. Magpies called to each other with sovereign command. Wattle-eaters cackled. There were kookaburras far off, in the stand of tall salmon gums down near the river and the brash distant caw of a flock of black cockatoos. Here, at home, she could identify the birds.
Alice rose, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, ate a small meal of fruit and headed for the river. Often she would simply walk its banks, grateful for the enlarged sky, the return of colour to the world, clean wind from the coast sweeping into her lungs. In her jet lag the world was susceptible to fractures and elisions. Sometimes time slowed, and her body remembered the northern hemisphere, its sluggish inclinations; sometimes it accelerated, so that she lost an entire hour. She had flown from Tokyo to Paris and then back to Australia. Her zigzag around the planet had left her slightly crazed, cracked in what she imagined was the globe of her self. Five days had passed since she left Tokyo and she had not heard from Haruko. Five days.
Alice lay on her sofa listening to music. Bob Dylan, The Smiths, Tom Waits, Nick Cave: all of it world-weary and moaning, sad men in dark crumpled jackets, their eyes lightly closed, tilting silver microphones into smoky half-light. She played ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ to hear the line about a dozen dead oceans, and she remembered Leo, and the allure of solitary music.
What Alice could not understand was Norah’s secrecy. Her sister had been able to write of the Iraq war and to chat about home life, but was unable to disclose her own serious news. Illness had severed them, when it should have brought her home. Perhaps she had not yet warranted or earned Norah’s trust; or perhaps the husband and family had erased those dependencies, those secrets the sisters might want to keep together. An old longing resurfaced, to have Norah’s approval. Old as the day, years ago, of the slaughtered kangaroo, when the gore of it and the muck of it and the skull-cracking violence had slanted her family’s feelings complexly against her, had weakened something simple that might have been shared between them.
In the drear space of waiting, of slow elapse, Alice was unsure of how to spend her time. She tried to read the newspapers, but found herself sickened. War, refugees. Asylum seekers in Australia held in cruel detention. She was succumbing to the havoc of her many emotional misalignments. The country felt physically the same, but otherwise depressed her. History had given them this: the wounded and dispossessed held behind razor wire, contiguous, somehow, with green tracer lights at night preceding explosions, nineteen-year-old soldiers shooting nervously in the dark, tanks, bombers, missiles, grenades. Television collapsed distance: loss and war was everywhere, filling up eyeballs all over the planet. There was no limit, it seemed, to what might be shown, what thinnest apparitions might come to haunt you, what remote event, what fucked-up invasion, might veer into assaulting, hideous proximity. On the sofa, unrelaxed, Alice felt overwhelmed. She was waiting for whatever would trigger a release. If Mr Sakamoto had been with her, she would have found something to marvel at; she would have been reminded of the other side of things, which rests beyond shadows.
Alice arrived at the restaurant a little late. In the Australian style, it was decorated with dead sticks, jutting at inorganic angles from the ceiling, and uranium-yellow walls, streaked with fake rust. Stephen was talkative and keen to impress. He introduced his girlfriend, Karen, who was pretty and quiet, and worked, she said, as a kindergarten teacher. She had long blonde hair, which she twirled in her fingertips and see
med unable to leave alone. Her distracted fidgeting kept catching Alice’s attention, sometimes mid-sentence, so that she heard herself halting in speech and becoming self-conscious, wondering how this woman had retained such childish habits. The restaurant was full and noisy, brittle with the sounds of crockery and laughter. They made small talk and Alice felt the return of jet-lagged exhaustion. She looked at her hand clutching a napkin and thought of Mr Sakamoto.
And then, at no particular moment, Stephen leaned forward, earnestly. ‘I have an announcement,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be a father.’
He took Karen’s hand and she smiled shyly. Someone dropped what sounded like a tray of cutlery. The air rang with spoons, forks, clashing knives. In the midst of this commotion, Alice disguised her surprise and congratulated them both. She leaned across the plates and gave each a kiss on the cheek.
‘I’ll have a family, Al. I’ll make a real go of it.’
He spoke in an overloud voice to defeat the noises from the kitchen. Stephen had not called her Al since they were at university together. Alice looked across at Karen, who was staring at her plate, and felt a flood of tenderness for them both.
