Mr Two Bomb

by William Coles

  As I had walked in, my eyes had been caught by the body of a small child lying face down on a blanket, whose legs and back had been scorched quite black. The burns had gone so deep that the scored flesh looked like a piece of over-cooked meat, while through the back of the leg protruded the white tip of a shattered thighbone. I had thought the child was dead – had to be dead from such appalling injuries – and yet suddenly an arm was flung out to the side and she was calling for her mother.

  A small boy, barely older than my son, screaming over and over again, “It hurts! It hurts!” His face had been so horrifically burned that it was nothing but a black mask, swollen eyelids sealed tight and white teeth stark against his charred lips.

  I walked further into the candle-lit hall. There were a few people who were tending to their relatives, but the main work was being done by a man and a woman. The pair of them were pitifully outnumbered. They could do little more than apply oil to the burns in a vain attempt to ease the pain, before swiftly moving onto the next child. The man had a tub of ointment, while the woman carried a metal jug. She might have been a teacher at the school. Even in her drab clothes, I could see that she was beautiful, elfin – though she looked exhausted. I doubt that she had slept in 36 hours.

  She cradled the children’s heads as she gave them a sip of water. I watched as she cosseted a boy who was calling for his mother. She was stroking his hair as he died.

  I plunged further into the hall. Two young girls holding hands on a blanket – one dead from her injuries and the other about to die. “Don’t go,” she calls out to her sister. “Don’t leave me.”

  A boy, savagely burned across his chest, thrashes his head from side-to-side as he manically chants, “Water! Water! Water!”

  The misery and the pain was unending, and all of it voiced in a score of screams and shrieks as the children called out for their mothers, fathers, or just an end to the unbearable torment.

  “Kill me,” pleaded one boy, whose arms and torso had been riven with glass shards. “Please Sir, kill me. Please kill me.”

  I had to bury my nose into my fingers to mask the smell. It was not just the stench of rotting, cooked flesh. Most of the victims soiled themselves where they lay. The air reeked of death and that sharp, almost heady whiff of urine and all manner of other human waste. The victims would vomit onto their own bedding, just able to turn their heads to the side as they retched up what looked like a thin yellow gruel.

  Shinzo had already walked through the hall, hurriedly going from one victim to the next to check if they were his sister. The girl, who had been following, whispered something to him. Shinzo nodded and the next moment stood right in the middle of the hall and bellowed, “Tamiko! Tamiko Wakita!” His voice silenced all the moans and screams instantly.

  “Tamiko!” he called out again. “Has anyone seen Tamiko Wakita?” The hall was so quiet that you could even hear the echo.

  “Tamiko! Has anyone seen Tamiko?”

  Nothing happened, and then from the far end of the hall came a small moan and someone raised their hand. Shinzo and I went over. She was a young woman whose swirling shirt pattern had been scorched into her skin in some ghastly parody of a tattoo.

  “I was with Tamiko,” she said, timid eyes staring up at us. “She was in charge of our party. She came here with me. She was... ” The woman trailed off. “She was burned.”

  “She is here?” Shinzo said in astonishment. “Tamiko is here? Here in this room?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “She was brought here.”

  Shinzo bustled over to the man in a white coat who appeared to be in charge. The doctor had just finished applying a handful of salve to a boy’s legs. He glanced up at us.

  Shinzo – still, unbelievably, carrying his bucket – was tongue-tied. “I... I was looking for my sister. I understand she is here, but I cannot find her. Are more survivors in another room?”

  “This is all there is,” said the doctor, gesturing out over the hall. “I’m sorry. If she’s not in this room, then she will have been taken outside. There is a box of personal items that we have been collecting. You may have a look. Again, I apologise. We did what we could.”

  Like a man in dream, Shinzo weaved over to the corner of the room, where there was a wooden crate on a table. He started to pick his way through the contents, holding broaches, bracelets, earrings and hair-clips up to the light of a lantern before carefully placing them to the side.

  He soon came across what he had been dreading to find. Tamiko’s square-faced watch with its steel strap, and looped through it her belt. They were positioned near the top of the box; she must have died that afternoon.

  How poor Shinzo’s shoulders slumped as he clutched those two little mementoes to his chest, the tears falling freely down his cheeks. The girl and I watched from a little distance as that great man stood in the corner, his shoulders quivering in pain, grinding the heels of his fists into his eye-sockets.

  “Shall we go outside?” I said to the girl.

  “You go. I’ll stay.” She trotted over to Shinzo and clasped both arms round his midriff, burying her face into his flank. How I wish I had done the same for my friend. But I did not. After a last peremptory look about the hall, and at the doctor and his pretty helpmate, I stalked outside. The hall and all those ravaged children had left me feeling nauseous. And I did not wish to intrude into private grief.

  Out in the open air, there was a scene that was different but no less hellish. Three soldiers were hauling bodies over to the pyres. They had dug a shallow pit and were dragging the bodies towards it like so many haunches of meat. Two of them would hold onto the limbs and with a single swing the corpse would be flung onto the mound of bodies with arms, legs and naked torsos all on wanton display in a repellent orgy of death.

  I was mesmerised. The three men stolidly went about their work with all the detachment of foresters who had been tasked to clear a wood. For them, the corpses had lost all trace of their humanity and were now nothing more than detritus which had to be cleared away.

  The mound was now the height of a man. Who knew – Tamiko might even have been at the bottom of it. A soldier tossed one more body onto the top, a baby’s, so light that he slung it up single-handed as if throwing a stick for a dog.

  The men conferred for a moment, before one of them picked up a can of kerosene or some other oil and doused it over the bodies. He sprayed all around the mound until the can was empty. Without any further ceremony, he struck a match and held it to a dead woman’s hair. With a dull, flat boom, the pyre exploded into flames. Even I, so heartless, spineless, was stunned at the lack of dignity, the lack of honour. Not a prayer, not a single acknowledgement to the victims’ humanity, as if they were so much rubbish that had to be disposed of. And now they were not even corpses any more, but had been reduced to one single burning mass of flesh, their only calling card being that awful smell of cooked meat which carried for kilometres in the wind.

  All this and more I thought of as I watched the three soldiers at their work. Already they had started work on digging a fresh pit. Perhaps I do them a disservice. Perhaps the only way to have completed a job such as that was to be the automaton, switching your mind off and letting your limbs take over.

  Shinzo and the girl had come out of the hall hand in hand and were watching the pyre beside me. Shinzo, his face streaked with tears, had shut his eyes and his mouth was moving in silent prayer. The girl was fascinated by the blazing pyre and how these things that had once been human were melting into ash. The smoke eddied up into the sky, the only memorial that these victims would ever know.

  Behind us, we heard a gentle cough. It was the doctor, in his stained white coat. “I am sorry to bother you at a time like this,” he said, rubbing his hands down his sides. “I know that you are grieving. But, as you can see, we need help. Could you stay? Could you help us? If only for the night?”

  How my stomach turned when I heard those words. Was there no end to the chores that I was
being volunteered for? So I had been lucky and I had survived the bomb. But did that mean that I was indebted to every person I met? Did that mean that I had been forfeited into a life of service, where in every instance I had to think first of others? No, no! Never! I was my own man and would do as I pleased. For over a day now, I had – under sufferance – helped out as best I could. But because of my health, was I now morally obliged to tend the sick? And if for one day, then why not another week? A year? Was it suddenly my duty to care for them for the rest of my days?

  Shinzo had turned to the doctor. “Of course,” he said. “Of course we will stay. We’re not trained, but will do what we can.”

  “What?” I was maddened with rage, like a bull that has been pricked and pricked again until it would gore its own shadow. Who was this man, this idiot, to think that he could answer for me? Never mind that he had just lost his sister. Hiroshima was awash with grief that day. The girl had lost her grandmother; my Sumie was dead. So why did Shinzo suddenly think it was within his boon to offer us up for the night? And without even the courtesy of a ‘by your leave’.

  The longer I dwelt upon it, the more enraged I became. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I said. “Just who the hell do you think you are? Are you some officer ordering his troops? Is that what you think?”

  Shinzo stared at me in puzzlement. “I thought this morning you suggested helping out at an aid station. Did I misunderstand you?”

  “I am sick of being taken for granted!” I said.

  “I thought you wanted to help.”

  “Well listen to this – I am off! I am going! I am leaving Hiroshima as soon as I can! I have had it! I have had it with you! I have had it with this city!”

  Shinzo nodded in agreement, before bringing up his hands and bowing his head in a deep salaam. “You are right and I am sorry,” he said. “I have been thoughtless. I said that we would stay the night – when what I meant was that I would stay the night. It goes without saying that you are free to come and go as you please.”

  “I am staying,” said the girl, agog at my fury.

  “Good for you!” I was grinding my teeth I was so livid with anger. “Good for both of you! Do what you want! Spend the night! Spend the week! Save as many of these children as you want! I do not care! I do not care what you do! But please – please – do not bother to include me in any of your plans ever again!”

  Shinzo again salaamed, bowing even deeper than before. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have taken you for granted.”

  “Do not worry about that, Shinzo!” I said, my voice almost cracking I was in such a perfect fury. “It is a mistake that I will never allow to happen again!”

  “I am sorry.”

  “Goodbye Shinzo, and I hope to see you again, if and when you ever bother to return to Nagasaki! Goodbye!”

  My eyes raked briefly over Shinzo, the girl and that stunned doctor before I turned on my heel. I stalked out of the compound, quite consumed with rage, and all I could hear was the dry crackle of those funeral pyres and the pleading cries of the girl.

  The shallowness of that man that was myself almost makes me weep. To think that I could not even have spent a single night tending those burned wretches.

  It would be easy to claim that the world was out of kilter that day and that we all of us in Hiroshima had gone a little mad. But the truth was that I was acting entirely true to form. I had been a beast since childhood. It was in my nature – and it was only in the aftermath of the bomb that my true character, red in tooth and claw, had been unmuzzled.

  Though it was quite dark, there was enough light from the sporadic fires to guide me north-west to one of the outlying stations at Hiroshima.

  The lethargy that had been hanging over me that day had quite gone, replaced with a vast reserve of energy and determination. I was my own man again; I could do as I pleased. If I wanted to work in a hospital or an emergency aid centre then I could do just that – but it would be my call, my decision. And if I wanted to go directly back to Nagasaki, that was also my decision.

  What had happened to Hiroshima was a tragedy. But was it of my making? Was I now bound to stay there until every last victim had been either saved or incinerated? And did I not have some obligation, also, to my wife and my baby boy – or did these thousands of injured strangers have a greater call upon my time?

  And so, round and round, went my thoughts in this angry swirl, as I fulminated against Shinzo and all those other parasites who had impinged upon my time. In my rage, I lashed out at a rock. I gave it a full kick with the toe of my boot. It clinked satisfyingly through the ruins.

  “Stop!” came a cry. “Stop!”

  I didn’t stop. I wouldn’t have dreamed of stopping. I dug my hands deep into my pockets and continued to walk.

  It was the girl and still she came after me, pattering down the street before tugging at my sleeve. “Please stop.”

  I did not even reply. I shook her with a brisk flick of my arm. But she was having none of it. This time she ran directly in front of me. “Why will you not stop?” she said, holding her ground. “Are you frightened to talk to me?”

  I didn’t even bother to walk round her. I shouldered her out of the way. She gave a little cry as she fell to the ground – but it didn’t stop her coming back for more. Again she darted in front of me.

  “Please stop,” she said again. “We want you to come back. Please.”

  This time I cuffed her round the ear with the back of my hand. She let out a squeal of pain.

  “How dare you!” she said, and with that she started kicking me with her dainty little shoes and drumming her fists into my chest. “How dare you! You are a beast, a selfish beast, and you have been a beast since the day you were born. You never think of anyone but yourself and you never have. You are a beast! Beast! Beast!”

  It was difficult to tell what angered me more. Was it her puny kicks and her feeble punches, or was it that I was hearing the truth?

  Either way, my reaction was savage. I gave her a full roundarm slap across the face. Her head jolted to the side. She was flung off her feet, crumpling to the ground.

  And what happened next. Did it really happen? Or is it one of those hideous memories which you can only peep at through clenched fingers? Have you ever regretted something so much that the very thought of it still makes you wince? Well, this was that memory tenfold.

  Perhaps it did not happen. Now that I am in old age, I sometimes like to fancy that it’s just my memory playing tricks.

  But in my heart, I know it to be true.

  I kicked her.

  Not content with knocking the girl across the street, I followed after her and then gave her a scything kick which landed – and I know this precisely – on her buttocks, so hard that she was lifted off the ground. She screamed in pain, mewling on the ground in a foetal ball.

  For a moment I stood over her, the boxer triumphant who dares his opponent to get up for more. I glanced back. Shinzo was standing five metres away, his hands clutched either side of his head, as shocked as I had ever seen him.

  He rushed over to the girl, cradling her in his arms. He never once looked at me nor said a word.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The destruction of Hiroshima would, you might have thought, have galvanised Japan’s leaders into action. Far from it.

  Some, like the war minister General Anami, were all for continuing the fight. “Would it not be wondrous,” he said, “for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?”

  Others hoped that a peace deal might yet be brokered with Russia; it would need only another 24 hours before the Russians nailed that particular lie.

  And that night of 7th August, there was also a third argument going the rounds in Tokyo: that despite President Truman’s claims, it was not possible for an atomic bomb to have razed Hiroshima to the ground. It was a physical impossibility. Our scientists knew all about atomic bombs; we had even tried to make one ourselves and knew for a fact that it wa
s quite impossible to have produced enough fissionable material to construct an atomic bomb.

  Further to that argument, Admiral Toyoda also stated that even if the Yankees had achieved the impossible and built themselves an atomic bomb, then they were certainly incapable of producing a second. That would have required twice as much uranium or plutonium, which was self-evidently impossible; in fact not just impossible, but exponentially impossible. It was not just doubly impossible, but impossible to the power of two.

  So, two days after Little Boy had been dropped, Japan was not even close to surrendering. They were like the gambling addict who’s in so deep that he can never stop – and who yet hopes that everything might turn good on the last throw of the dice.

  I shake my head with unconscionable weariness as I think of our war leaders. America had its Roosevelt and Britain had its Winston Churchill – not just great leaders, but perhaps their country’s greatest leaders of all time. And who did we have to lead us through the Second World War? The Big Six, those fusty throwbacks to the Samurai era, who still believed it better to die with honour than to surrender.

  But did it all turn out for the best? Japan is definitely a kinder, more gentle, more considerate country than it could have ever have been without the war. And perhaps we needed this awful catharsis to break the mould? Perhaps -

  I know I certainly did.

  As I walked away from the girl, my boiling anger was replaced by the most toxic horror.

  We all of us have an image of ourselves. It is our currency, our definition of self-worth.