As you read on, you’ll see portraits of certain colleagues of yours, perhaps a relative, maybe even you yourself. If you don’t like what you see, you can go ahead and break the mirror or burn the pages, but you’ll never be rid of the infection, the rot that pollutes the rivers, seas, wombs, and fields. And you’ll never be able to take from me the joy I’ve finally come to feel.
I call myself H because I’ve never been given a voice, and a Spanish man once told me that h is a silent letter in his language. So this letter will be my name, seeing as it’s a name I share with many other mute people who might discover their voices here.
I’m sure they’ll find me before long. I won’t resist, as this story is what stands as my resistance. Whoever is coming to arrest me will see the same brown river I’m gazing out at now from my African refuge, a place that has allowed me to transcribe my testimony over these days. Perhaps my captor is so near that he’s watching the same hippopotamus as I am right now, in the same position, with the same bird on top, drying off in the sun as if there were no such thing as hell.
I penned this last note after narrating the story that follows. I’m weary now; maybe that’s why you’ll find in these last words that my tone has grown colder. Don’t take it personally. Love has always prevailed in me. I love and have loved as if I had been born for it. If you pay attention, you’ll see how love stands steadfast behind every deed. Judge me according to your laws, but consider this as my last wish:
Once you too have taken my voice away, if ever you should have the chance to speak in my name, don’t employ the vocabulary of death. When you raise my head with your fist, everyone will know that I’ve killed. So if anyone ever asks, please remember H’s last words were these:
“God knows I stood for life.”
H
The Democratic Republic of the Congo
Zero Gravity: 1942
We Who Carry the Bomb Inside of Us
The refugee camp’s main tent was on fire before us. Hungry flames engulfed the tarpaulin as if it were synthetic fur. I stretched my hand out to clasp Yoro’s. I noticed she was trembling and that her tremors seemed in sync with the roaring fire. As if they provided the flames with something more than sound alone: substance. Yoro and the blaze were like the sternum and spine of a single creature, two integral parts of a whole, a drum and its stick. Through her, my hand was able to perceive the swan-song hiss of a tin cup, of the metallic tubes that held the tent up. I was absorbed in these subtle details, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel for the people and things being consumed right there, though I’ve trained myself to resist the instinct to flee in dire situations, and not to sob or try to find a solution for something beyond my control. I tried hard to keep from blinking. Blinking too much is like hyperventilating. A steady movement of the eyelashes saves oxygen, energy, and helps keep my knees from buckling. That’s how I could remain standing. That’s how I could fix my gaze. Of course I was scared. Of course I felt compassion. But I held myself in check, not only because if I fell, others would come to consume me, but also because I promised never to move a muscle out of rage or despair. Not a single one. I had promised Jim that. Dwelling on these thoughts helped me keep my promise, observing from a distance the heat so close it was like my own skin. I found serenity in my own way, tugging at a string of memories to find some experience that would help me sustain my composure. I found it. The string was the death of Quang Duc, the seventy-six-year-old monk who immolated himself in front of me and a host of fellow monks on a street in Saigon. He torched himself for freedom, incinerated himself without varying his meditative lotus position; even when the flames enveloped him, he did not move a muscle. The other monks and I, we sobbed over him without opposing his will; others begged for help, wishing to rescue him, for his sake but against his will, because he had to burn in order to end persecution, to achieve peace for his brothers and sisters and others like me, who had to avoid blinking while facing a fire. Eventually I found serenity. The heat of the flaming tarp carried me to a distant place, far from the here and now, and rekindled the heat of the monk I saw immolate himself in Saigon, and the more the refugee camp’s tarp burned, the further away I slipped, motionless, toward the instant of Quang Duc’s death. Just as Yoro’s trembling seemed to give flesh to the sound of the flames, so the sobs of we who loved the monk seemed to give sound to his silence, because the man who burned himself alive said nothing, not a moan, not a hiss to express complaint or pain or reproach.
THE FIRE CULMINATED A PURSUIT that had begun when I met Jim, exactly fifty-five years ago. Jim’s story is my story. It’s not that his story is linked to mine, it’s not that my love for him has had a bearing on my life, it’s that without him I would never have become, since becoming, to me, is that moment when I first dared to open my eyes and see myself for what I was. I could finally know, I could finally be—that’s what I owe to Jim. I said goodbye to the skinless me, the me who lacked the body’s biggest organ—the epidermis—the me who’d never claimed a right to the only hide ever offered freely. Slowly but surely I became the hunterly me tracking the prey that had been ripped from my teeth, the racing lion me pouncing, fighting to take back the stolen flesh, the lion’s own flesh, not zebra or antelope, not the flesh of some other lion, but its own. I became the lioness stalking her own self. That’s how I became the me that I am now—intact, golden, menacing. Jim’s hand was the first to see and to stroke the earnest skin my mother delivered me in, skin that gave me back the natural protection that belonged to me. I’ve become; I see myself now as being so strong that even naked I still feel dressed in armor. Long gone are the times I used to wake up trying to fit into someone else’s skin, so that by the end of the day I went to bed distraught and with throbbing joints. How wouldn’t my bones grow misshapen, trying so hard to fulfill other people’s expectations? But it doesn’t hurt anymore. Thanks to Jim, my fingers stopped deforming by endlessly picking fruit grown for other people; thanks to Jim, my legs began straightening out once I stopped following the curves of landscapes that didn’t matter to me; and thanks to him, in my dotage my back is even straighter today than it was when I was twenty.
I reckon I knew Jim’s significance from the beginning, so I started scribbling a few notes, and naturally the writing accumulated over our years together. I never realized the material might come in handy later, maybe today, for reconstructing the story that gives the fire meaning. Guided by the notes, then, I’ll try to articulate the long journey, which I suspect is now reaching its conclusion.
BEFORE WE MET, before ever acknowledging my role in his life, Jim had been one of the American soldiers in occupied Japan. For a long time, his days came and went, shorn of significance; he was simply an officer occupying the territory of his commission. There were only minimal assignments undertaken to help the country recover, and as a result, the changes were also minimal. There was nothing to give purpose to a soldier’s life, neither in humanitarian aid—which in those days hadn’t yet been defined as such—nor in terms of personal or national self-interest.
Jim didn’t know at the time that these were the months when our union really began, before we ever met, when the base gave him custody of a baby in May 1950. He told me the baby had been delivered unannounced, given like any other order, like his assignment to occupy the region. At first he rejected the infant, but they bonded very naturally by the end of the first day, when he realized this almond-eyed baby just might be a catalyst for the reconciliation he’d sought for the past six years, since the Japanese shipped him off to Manila with sixteen hundred North American prisoners. Everything Jim had suffered on that ship and the misery of his captivity prior to that turned to benevolence when he felt the delicate heft of the baby in his arms for the first time. He’d never completely overcome the lasting ache of what had happened to him, but this tiny girl, this victim of the United States, was like a piece of fruit placed in a weighing dish that struck a balance in the division of cruelties perpetrated on either side.
The ship where Jim had been confined was built in Nagasaki in 1939, and was initially intended as a Japanese passenger cargo ship. It was christened with the name Oryoku Maru. The ship was later repurposed as a floating prison, earning the moniker “Ship of Death.” Jim never liked to talk about what went on there—his memories were too disturbing—but a few years ago, some of the accounts General MacArthur had tried to destroy came to light because George Weller, the author, had stored carbon copies in his trunk. They were recovered by his son, who delivered them for publication. They helped me fill in some of the gaps in Jim’s testimony.
The Oryoku Maru, then, was intended to transport hundreds of Japanese civilians. The American prisoners would be confined to the hold. The voyage, which the prisoners expected to take some ten days, ended up lasting seven weeks. Jim said if he had known what was in store, he would have let the Japanese soldiers run him through with one of the bayonets they used to herd the soldiers into the ship. If so, if Jim had ended his life then and there, I would have grown to be a timorous woman, obedient and gloomy, a twenty-year-old cadaver waiting forty, sixty, seventy years for someone to come and lay me to rest. But Jim couldn’t imagine what was in store, and so he made it through. Of the sixteen hundred and nineteen prisoners, only some four hundred survived (the exact number is unknown). A hundred of them arrived so far gone already that they perished before being turned over to the authorities on land, and as many died in Japanese work camps. It’s believed that only around two hundred of the initial sixteen hundred and nineteen actually survived through liberation in 1945. Jim was twenty-nine at the time, and one of the survivors. I give thanks for it still, every day of my life.
I MET JIM IN NEW YORK on April 27, 1960. There are four medieval cloisters in the northern part of the city, in Fort Tryon Park, brought over from France stone by stone. The gardens are carefully groomed—then as now—in the tradition of Romanesque horticulture. That day the skies cleared up for the first time after weeks of rain, and I walked from cloister to cloister following the movement of the sun. I’d emptied my mind of thought; all I wanted was to keep warm and abandon myself to the simple pretensions of a sunflower, when someone said, “The sun makes for strong bones. You need it if you spend winter in the city.”
I glanced over my shoulder and there was Jim, sitting on the ground with his back against the stone wall. He was looking at me. His words must have been directed at me. I drew closer and he said, as if picking our conversation right back up from where we had left off, that according to Herodotus the Egyptians already knew the sun was good for the bones, which they reckoned was why the skulls of their dead withstood so much more than did the skulls of their Persian enemies, which could be crushed artlessly with a simple rock. Egyptians knew not to protect themselves from the sun as children, while the Persians wore turbans that blocked it out, not allowing it to strengthen their crania. The stranger said his name without asking for mine, and gracefully segued from Persian and Egyptian bones to pointing out the park’s variety of indigenous birds and flowers. I was amazed at how many different species he could name when for me the world was divided in only two: plants and animals.
A few hours later in a nearby café, still chatting with the same fluid grace, he said that like me, he too was searching for something. The context of the search was the same, World War II; he had lost something in the war, while for me something had been won. The crucial word for both of us was daughter; for Jim it was about his missing daughter, while for me it was about a daughter that I’d never conceived. As we left the café, I could detect the velvety touch of synchronicity, an inkling that the relationship between both of our explorations might meld our two paths into one.
I found my answer as to how almost immediately, when he told me the story of his heartache. The more I learned about the daughter who was taken from him when she turned five, the more I identified his missing girl with the child I wasn’t able to deliver myself. Every time Jim shared things about her, the desire to find her grew stronger in my mind and heart, and eventually in outward ways too, as in my breasts, in whose swelling came the proof that hope, under special circumstances, can produce milk just like gestation. My milk ducts reacted with a pasty liquid that dried up a few weeks later, probably obeying the messages relayed from my brain warning that the nine months of a normal pregnancy would have to extend over a much longer period of time in a case like this.
What I didn’t know was that my so-called psychological pregnancy would initiate a journey that began in Japan and would end in Africa. Here was the speedy head of a spermatozoon—the atomic bomb of Hiroshima—and over there its little tail—a fire in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thousands of victims of the first atomic bomb on this side; a few deaths by fire on the other in a land where cadavers pile one on top of the other daily from hunger, from slavery, from illness, until their number matches the number of victims of the bomb. From wartime Japan to contemporary Africa, a seventy-year span outlined by this sperm-comet whose current flows from the Japanese genocide to where I am now in this African land, sweeping me along with it together with shrapnel from the bomb itself. I take in the view here of life spread across the continent where the first human was born only to die, over and over again.
* * *
I once heard a forestry expert say that woodland trees are not individual beings, but units that together form an organism that exchanges carbon dioxide and nitrogen underground through bulbs, mushrooms, and roots. The breath of one tree comes from the lungs of another. A tree’s quality of life and longevity depend on the others around it. My life is rooted in Jim’s story, and his life bears the marks of mine. Jim and I were—are—part of the same rhizome, trees connected through the first atomic mushroom. The weapon planted us in the same forest when it was christened seven months after they boarded Jim on the Oryoku Maru, changing history, touching my life in such a peculiar way that today it’s still hard for me to describe things from the distance I read in historians’ accounts. They don’t move me in their writing; they don’t affect me. There’s no sting when I read a history book, and I find it difficult to understand how anyone can try to explain a war without its causing heartache or provoking empathy. Historians like to say it’s being impartial, but pain can be communicated from impartiality too. I call it indifference, which means being partial to the victors, doing them a service. Doing you a service. Just a few pages into my testimony and already I’ve forgotten that I’m writing mostly to you.
Well then, allow me to explain why I don’t like history books, since this story on the whole is about history. At some point you’ve no doubt heard an eyewitness to some great historical event say things on the order of “I was born to bear witness for other people.” History with a capital H could be said to have imbued his or her life with a sense of purpose. Well, sir, that is not my case. I didn’t survive Hiroshima to bear witness. I survived Hiroshima because it was my duty to survive; this is why my mother brought me into this world, to observe what is in front of me, whether it be a bomb or a flock of sheep nibbling some peaceful green pasture. So simple, and yet not everyone can admit it. People need spectacular missions. Someone born in a tiny village in Provence decides it’s a tedious place. What kind of mission is it to wake up and see the same rocks every day? So he or she decides to study the Spanish Civil War. Then come a few trips to Spain and conversations with survivors. The tender small-town soul can’t abide such cruelty and a tear spills over a cheek, so she reads more books, let’s say several books, and the rest of her life is devoted to writing paragraph after paragraph from the lens of the side she has chosen to champion. She found her source of meaning. Research. Spread the word. Maybe that’s the historian’s ambition after all, to act as a messiah of information. And that’s all well and good, sir, it’s needed.
But let me tell you something else. This kind of so-called history isn’t worth a plugged nickel if it isn’t written from the emotion of universal pain. A war is much more than
statistics, body counts, lists of atrocities. A war is a gaping wound in a human being’s sense of dignity; it’s a defect, a congenital deformity that expresses a failure of humanity. The historian who hasn’t lived through the episodes he or she is narrating should be writing from feelings of shame and compassion. Of course I could write a chapter on Hiroshima, not because it’s my birthplace, but because even as a child I could sense this human defect stealing into everyday life until it detonated into a Hiroshima, a Vietnam, or another tributary of the mighty river of war. I swear to you: a tree is not a single being. One tree’s breath comes from the lungs of another. Until a historian realizes this, his students appropriately will go on hating his classes, and what’s worse, forgetting them entirely. So I’ll try to give my own account, far removed from the detachment of a library-writing historian, as I lived through the events in the trenches, so to speak. I’m not sure whether I was on the winning or the losing side, and frankly I couldn’t care less. What I do know is that I lived my time in the first person, which gives me an advantage over those who find themselves in the dusk of their lives believing they participated in their time on earth because they read the Sunday paper.
As I said, a few months after Jim was boarded onto the ship, the history-altering baptism took place. It was August 6, 1945. The creature had no hands to bear arms, yet annihilated more than two hundred thousand lives that day; no mouth and yet it blew houses, trees, and factories to oblivion in a single breath. Conceived outside of any human warmth, it melted steel, cremated parks, pets, and pigeons. They hadn’t given it a gender either, but they did give it a name—Little Boy—and at 8:15 on a cloudless August morning, they unleashed that device over Hiroshima.
The Story of H Page 2
