Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  “You are alive!” Shinzo said, now holding me at arms’ length as his eyes raked over my face. “We didn’t know. The city looks as if it’s died. It’s good to see you.”

  “And you too,” I said, clutching at him. “And you too!” I was pleased to see him, of course I was, but I could not mask my worry any longer. “Where is Sumie?”

  The girl looked up from the rubble she was trying to shift. “She is here,” she called out. “Come and help. We still have time.”

  “The girl is right.” Shinzo led the way through the rubble, before winking at me. “How refreshing it is to meet a girl who is always right.”

  “Thank you, Shinzo-San,” said the girl. “And you would do well to remember that.”

  The girl was standing at the very apex of the rubble, her blue skirt and top grey with dust. But what a jaunty little pose she struck, hand on one hip, and feet in one of those finicky ballet positions.

  I ruffled her hair. “You survived,” I said. “Well done.”

  Shinzo knelt next to where the girl was standing and gestured for me to follow. “We think Sumie is here,” he said, pointing to a little hole that they had just started to scrape out. “She must have been in the kitchen. The whole house is on top of her. But if you listen carefully, you can hear her knocking.”

  We knelt in silence, watching the dust drift in from the wind on the sea. You could taste the smoke in the air. Over towards the centre of Hiroshima, sharp jags of flame were flickering up from the murk. Individual ruined houses, spontaneously bursting into flame. It would be perhaps an hour yet before the fires linked up into one single devastating firestorm, so vast that not even our rivers could prevent it from eating everything in its path.

  And then I heard it, a little tap-tap-tap from directly beneath us. Three knocks and a pause, followed by another three knocks. Was that her voice I could hear? It was dreadfully muffled, from deep, deep within the rubble, but I was certain that I could hear that one word, “Help”.

  Immediately I set to work, set to work with a will, as if trying to make amends for my utter self-centredness of the previous hours. Previous hours? Why not make that a lifetime. All that the bomb had done was to magnify the gaping character defects that had been with me since childhood.

  I started hurling tiles and handfuls of house rubble onto the street.

  “Be calm,” said Shinzo. “We are only trying to dig a small hole, not move the entire house. Just throwing a tile four metres should suffice. Watch how the girl does it.”

  I rested on my haunches to scrutinise the girl.

  “Watch and learn,” she said, daintily tossing a tile a few metres down the slope.

  As we laboured, we discussed the one single fascinating topic that was to dominate the city’s conversations for weeks: how we had survived the bomb.

  I told them about the events in the warehouse.

  “And Major Akiba is dead?” said Shinzo, sweat dripping off him as he eased up a large piece of timber.

  “The bastard was dying, I know that,” I replied.

  “You did not think to help him?”

  “He had been sprayed with glass shards. He was caught by the windows when they exploded. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Perhaps,” said Shinzo, “I would have put him out of his misery.”

  “That, dear Shinzo, is because you always see the best in every one – even bastards like Akiba and Motoji ”

  “And let us not forget your good self.”

  The girl laughed merrily at that. Such a tinkling laugh, she had – a laugh that could, for a minute, even make you forget the bomb.

  “And you two?” I asked. “How did you escape?”

  “Staying in bed this morning saved my life!” Shinzo said, as he came over to help me shift a beam. With our combined weight, we were able to nudge it back and forth before finally dragging it free. “The flash woke me up. I could see it clear through the blackout blinds. I just wrapped myself in the bedding and rolled onto the floor. The next thing, the windows were blown out, the house had fallen down and I was somewhere near the top of the heap –”

  “And I saved him!” said the girl.

  “That is so,” said Shinzo, not letting details spoil the story. “And I am sure you will save many more. She was here within minutes, digging away like a hound.”

  “And you?” I nodded to the girl. “Lucky you were not still on your roof-top.”

  “I was in a ditch behind a wall. When I felt the flash, I threw myself flat. I buried my thumbs into my eyes and my fingers into my ears, just like I had been taught at school.” She smiled, twisting a lock of hair between her fingers. “It was fate. For two hours, I had been out in the open. But when the bomb came, there I was in the ditch.”

  She carried on talking. Even at the age of seven, her natural mode was to chatter. Such incessant chatter. “I wonder what has happened to grandmother. I do hope she is alright. But I think she might be dead. How was it in the city?”

  “Terrible,” I said. “I cannot believe a single bomb could do so much.”

  “And the Shima Hospital? The place where my grandmother works?”

  “I -” I paused in a rare moment of delicacy. In truth, I had all but walked past what was left of the Shima Hospital, and it had seemed to have taken the full force of the explosion. It would be months later before analysts were conclusively able to determine that, give or take a few metres, the Shima Hospital was at the very hypocenter of Hiroshima. Little Boy had exploded directly above its rooftop. Not a single person left alive.

  “I did not see the hospital,” I went on. “But most of the buildings have collapsed.”

  “Oh,” said the girl. “Oh.” I can still remember how she stood there in the midst of that rubble, staring vacantly at her feet, twisting a lock of her hair around one finger.

  “I am sorry,” said Shinzo, breaking off from his work to cradle her shoulder.

  “It’s alright. I must be strong, otherwise we will not win the war. That is what my grandmother would have said, anyway.” She turned her face to stare up at the grey mushroom cloud, which still smeared the sky. “My grandmother is gone. My house is gone. I have nothing but the clothes I am wearing.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Shinzo, hand still clapped round her shoulder. “We’ll look after you.”

  Fine words – but I never thought he meant them. I believed he was just trying to comfort the girl. And yet how costly these little promises, given without a second thought, can prove to be.

  The girl had walked off to be by herself for a few minutes and Shinzo was continuing to dig with rhythmic stolidity. “How did it look by the Tsurami Bridge?” he asked.

  “The one by Hijiyama Hill?”

  “My sister Tamiko, you have met her, has been working around there for two weeks.”

  “I did not see it,” I said. “She may have had more luck than the people in the Shima Hospital.”

  “If there is a chance later, I’ll try to find her.”

  “Very well.” It was not exactly a ringing endorsement. At the time, I felt that if Shinzo wanted to search for his sister among the numberless victims, then that was his decision; I certainly did not feel obliged to accompany him. Searching for one single person among that chaos? That carnage? It would have been like searching for a single grain of sand on a beach; and a grain of sand, mind, which you might not even recognise. Many of the dead were only distinguishable by the stopped watches on their wrists, or the blackened rings on their fingers.

  By now, our hole down to Sumie was so deep that I had to squat inside it and pass the bits of debris up full height to Shinzo and the girl. It was awkward because although the hole was wide at the top, it tapered inwards. At the bottom, there was barely room enough to stand.

  I could hear Sumie’s voice quite clearly now. “Help,” she said. “Please help.”

  “I’m coming,” I replied.

  With my feet on makeshift steps, I tugged and clawed at three pieces o
f tile which were so tight-wedged they appeared to be interlocked. But I was unable to prise them up.

  “Taking your time?” Shinzo called.

  The girl also looked down. “The hole must be bigger,” she said, her grandmother now seemingly already out of mind. “We must make it wider at the top.”

  As I worried at those three stubborn tiles, I could hear the dull clonking sound of Shinzo and the girl removing debris from directly above me. I wormed my fingers around the edge of one tile and put my full force on this one point. I felt it move fractionally. I tried the tile next to it, and that too had an imperceptible amount of give. I pulled at each tile in turn, working one after the other, and then with a rending crash one of the tiles cracked in my hand. The other two tiles burst upwards and suddenly I found that I was looking straight down at the top of Sumie’s hair.

  She was able to lean her head back a little and, when she saw me, she smiled. “I hoped it would be you,” she said.

  “I came as quickly as I could,” I said, reaching down to brush the caked grey dust from her face and hair. I stooped to kiss the top of her head.

  “And now you can get me out of here,” she said.

  “So I shall.”

  I can still picture her exactly in that dark little hole, only her head above the surface, as if she were drowning in a well of rubble. Still smiling, just for the pleasure of having me with her. Perhaps she knew all along that she would never escape.

  It became increasingly difficult to clear the rubble. Although we had found Sumie, there was very little space to work with, and all the fragments had been heavily compacted. Eventually, after what felt like an hour, I had loosened enough to free Sumie’s arms. She held her hands loose above her head.

  “Much better,” she said. “Now I can kiss you properly.” Her arms snaked round my neck and she kissed me on the lips. I could taste the dust.

  “Come on you two,” Shinzo called down. “This is no time for kissing. Let me help.”

  We swapped places and I caught another glimpse of our ever-changing city. Every ten minutes, it seemed that something extraordinary, fantastical was occurring to Hiroshima. Long after the bomb was dropped, the city was still in a constant state of metamorphosis.

  I was shocked at how quickly the individual fires seemed to have linked together. They were sweeping across the city in a single red rampant wave – and our waterways, our very own natural firewalls, made no difference whatsoever. The hot air was rising and the cold air was sweeping in underneath, creating a vast tornado which could jump streets and even rivers.

  I watched the flames as I continued to shift the debris. It was difficult to judge distances, but it looked as if the firestorm was about a kilometre from us. I tried to guess at its speed, but I had no idea. I would have been horrified if I had known it was ripping through the city at five metres a second.

  The bomb had also had the most extraordinary effect on our weather system. For some time there had been crackling thunder overhead. I felt the pleasant smack of rain falling onto the back of my head. I had not had anything to drink all morning; I was parched.

  I closed my eyes and turned my face to the heavens. I might even have had my mouth open, if only to savour a few drops of rain on my lips.

  “Yuk!” said the girl. “Yuk! What is this?”

  I opened my eyes. She was looking at the backs of her hands and then rubbing them against her top. She looked as if she had been flicked with black oil.

  “The rain is black!” she said. “Are they now dropping oil on us?”

  I looked at some of the rain drops on my skin. They felt much colder than normal and had the density and tackiness of black ink. Even when I had wiped the raindrops away, they still left a residual stain. I sniffed at my hands. They didn’t smell of oil.

  “It is all the muck in the dust-cloud,” I said. “The rain is bringing it down. I wouldn’t drink it.”

  That, as it turned out, was an understatement. The black rain did not just contain dirt from the cloud, but radioactive fall-out – an entirely new concept to the world. The Yankees spent years denying that there had been any lingering radiation from the bomb. For those squeaky-clean moralists, their bomb was a good, wholesome US kind of bomb, and the only casualties were those who had been killed in the first explosion and the subsequent firestorm.

  It would take the Yankees some years to accept that the radiation from Little Boy – which lingered over Hiroshima for perhaps a month – may ultimately have been responsible for more deaths than the actual blast. Not that this fact was ever going to spoil the Yankees’ riotous celebrations after the bomb had been dropped – “It’s the best goddamn news in the whole world!” trilled that oaf President Truman. But I may later have given them pause for thought as they realised that they had condemned perhaps 100,000 people to painfully lingering deaths from cancer, leukaemia and all the other foul by-products of radioactivity.

  How much it must have vexed the Yankees. They spent years denying that their baby had anything to do with all these thousands of anomalous deaths that were occurring every year in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – in the same way, I imagine, as a tearful mother defends her serial killer son.

  The black rain did not – fortunately – stay over us for long. We were on the very eastern outskirts of that hellish black raincloud which was drifting into the countryside to the northwest of Hiroshima. In some places which had hardly been touched by the bomb, some ten centimetres of black rain fell in three hours, and for those that were caught out in the storm, the long-term health consequences were catastrophic.

  The firestorm was worryingly close, sweeping up from the south and now also on our flanks. I swapped positions again with Shinzo, pulling him out of the hole before jumping down to Sumie. We had minutes, at best, to free her.

  She gazed up at me, proffering her lips, and I kissed her.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “You’re not finished yet.”

  “Still you cannot say it?”

  “Plenty of time for that when you are free.”

  Shinzo had cleared much of the debris around her chest, but Sumie was still pinned from beneath the waist. I squatted above her, hooking my elbows underneath her armpits. “Brace yourself,” I said. “This might hurt.”

  I shifted my feet, like a weight-lifter before the clean and jerk, took a deep breath and rolled backwards. My eyes were shut tight, teeth clenched. I was pulling with all my might. I gave it perhaps ten seconds, every sinew straining upwards, but Sumie did not move so much as a centimetre. She must have been in the most excruciating pain.

  I gave it one more try, but, again, nothing. She gave an involuntary yelp, but that was the only indication of her discomfort.

  “There is something pinning me,” she said. “I cannot feel anything below my waist. Is there a beam over my legs?”

  As I climbed out of the hole, I could see the beam that was pinning Sumie down, but there was too much rubble on it, tons and tons of tiles.

  We tried, how we tried, to shift it, Shinzo and I straining away and the girl also adding her puny weight, but it would not budge. For a few minutes, I worked above the beam, manically trying to clear debris, then back to Sumie, tugging, tugging, as wisps of glowing ember started to fill the air. I called out to Shinzo for some rope, hoping that together we might pull her out. A last snatched kiss, as I struggled back out of the hole, and that sickening moment as I realised that the flames were all but upon us. The speed of the firestorm was shocking. It appeared almost to have flanked us and even now was licking at the ruined houses at the end of the street.

  “Come on!” I screamed at Shinzo, suffused by this rippling flood of panic. I was too late. There was not enough time to save her. All I could do was scream out my rage at Shinzo. “Forget that. Come here! Help me! Help me move this beam!” My breath coming in short, quick pants as a trembling red mist descended over me. Oh, butI felt such brute power then I was not capable of thinking straight. All I could do w
as throw myself at the beam, again and again, as senseless as a bull that repeatedly charges the red cape. I was clawing at it, mewling with frustrated rage, the tears streaming down my face. Hammering the wood, punching it with my bare fists. It was hopeless.

  Shinzo threw himself at the beam. For the first time, I could feel it shuddering beneath our weight, perhaps a centimetre or two. We just needed more time.

  “Sumie! Can you move?” I screamed. “Can you move at all?”

  I could only just make out her voice. The roar of the firestorm was deafening. “No,” I could hear her say. “I cannot move.”

  Shinzo and I gave one last despairing heave at the beam, but it was never going to be enough.

  Shinzo and the girl jumped down from the rubble and were standing in the road. The flames were all but upon us. I could feel the heat washing over me, along with this thunder of a thousand homes being reduced to charred ash.

  “There is no time!” Shinzo screamed at me. “Move!”

  I looked down at Sumie for the last time. The panic was already starting to ebb, to be replaced by this dull resignation that I had failed my lover.

  Her hands were now clasped in front of her face, as if in prayer. She looked up at me.

  “You must go,” she said. “Save yourself.”

  “I am sorry.”

  The flames from the firestorm were within seconds of torching the wreckage of Sumie’s house.

  That last harrowing plea from Sumie, as she realised that her life was all but over. “Will you live for me?” That is what she asked. The last wish of a person who realises that their life is over and who knows that the very best that they can hope for is that their life be lived vicariously through someone else.

  I paused, stumbling over my words, not knowing what to say.

  “You will? You will live for me?” she asked again.

  “I will try.”

  The smoke was so thick, so dense, that I could hardly see Sumie at the bottom of the pit. A glimpse of her gazing up at me. And as the flames crackled at my feet, I gave a last despairing wave and bounded down onto the road where Shinzo and the girl were already racing away from the firestorm.