Fracture

by Andres Neuman

  Something glistening on the ground caught his eye. A pot shone in the August sun. The sun roasting itself inside there. Slowly, Yoshie peered into the pot and saw that his face was still his face. Among the debris, he also discovered a pocket watch, with arrow-shaped hands. He stooped to pick it up. The glass front hadn’t a scratch on it, but the mechanism had stopped. He tried to wind it up. Stare as he might, the hands indicated the same time. A quarter past eight. A quarter past eight. He has kept it since. He hasn’t tried to fix it.

  In the distance, Yoshie saw a black rain begin to fall, as though painted drop by drop. Mr. Watanabe can barely admit his fascination with that rain back then, not knowing what it meant. Can it possibly retain any beauty in his memory? Does it deserve to be remembered as he saw it?

  The air began to cool. A rainbow enveloped the remains of the city, its ends tying them up like a garbage bag. When Yoshie lowered his gaze again, he saw a horse in flames galloping by.

  * * *

  On the banks of the Ōta, Yoshie at last found refuge in a school. The ruins of the building were being turned into a first aid post. A hospital without beds or doctors, where people came to lie on the ground. Or, in the more serious cases, on a desk. Yoshie felt reassured by it being a school. It was the only place with which he could identify. The students’ drawings still hung on one wall. His little sister Nagae could draw better than that, he thought.

  A woman offered him water. Without alarm, she said, There’s blood in your eye. Although it didn’t hurt, Yoshie ran to rinse it in the river. The blood washed away easily. It wasn’t his. Bodies drifted slowly past him.

  He’d entered the first aid post to seek help for his father. He soon saw that no one was in a condition to provide it. Mr. Watanabe has never been able to convey what he saw in that place. Not for a lack of words, but rather of meaning.

  More than the suppurations, which he avoided looking at, what shocked Yoshie most were the women’s backs. Many bore the marks of the clothes they had been wearing at the time of the blast. Dark-colored clothes, he learned, had been imprinted on their skin, while lighter colors absorbed less energy and therefore left fewer traces. And so he discovered that, as well as the yellow wall he’d leaned against by chance, dressing in white had protected him.

  The tangles of clothing and skin repulsed him more than the wounds themselves. He noticed many men who looked like they had bowl cuts, because they were wearing hats when the bomb exploded. Skin had become a focal point of horror. It felt, they cried, as if they were tearing it off.

  Few doctors were left. Many seemed in a similar state as the patients they were treating. Spots that had hot running water and strips of cloth, two luxuries in short supply, were turned into makeshift operating rooms. The wounded got worse after being treated. They caught infections that festered in the summer heat. Reduced to chemistry, they died uttering the word water. Yoshie couldn’t understand why the worst affected were left to die instead of being tended to first.

  Piles upon piles of them were cremated beside Sakae Bridge, Kyo Bridge, Hijiyama Bridge, at the rate of matches. The stench of those bonfires would disturb his sense of smell forever.

  Contrary to what one might think, Watanabe recalls, many people in the refuge were concerned with details of seemingly no importance. Finding some geta among the debris, or at least a pair of socks, was enough to bring solace. Any trifle could take on, for a moment, the significance of a lifesaver. And also talking to someone. Telling them. Making sure that this had really happened. Each person recounted, over and over, the same minute. Like the watch that Yoshie had found.

  A clerk was thrown against a filing cabinet, which acted as a barricade.

  A teenager ignored his mother’s protests, as he did every morning, and stayed locked in the bathroom, which became a bunker.

  An old woman managed to cover her head with the pan she was going to use to cook vegetables.

  A police officer stepping out of his house had time, as the flash spread, to roll under the stairs.

  Two boys, who were sweeping the fire walls at their school, collapsed on top of one another and were able to help each other out of the rubble.

  A woman was hanging out her family’s laundry and the walls surrounding her flat roof protected her. She was still clasping a T-shirt.

  A civil servant managed to get out of the carriage of the streetcar he was on, only to discover a line of corpses digging their nails into the shoulder of the person in front of them.

  A music teacher was saved by her piano while she waited for a student who never turned up. Some of her neighbors had accused her of high treason when they heard her playing.

  One man said nothing and just walked around and around in circles, not listening to anyone.

  Everyone talked about the whistling. The whistling before it happened. A subtlety heralding the destruction. Some people’s eardrums had been pierced and even then, they could hear it.

  At the time, each person believed that their house, their office, their factory, their school was the only one that had been bombed. After the explosion, they explained, they couldn’t understand why no one came to help them. How could they be so completely ignored? Maybe that’s how tragedies work, reflects Watanabe. We make them ours to the point that we are incapable of believing there are others. The fact that there are is both a comfort and an affront.

  When the survivors managed to dig themselves out and look around them, there was no name for what they saw. Where were the craters? What was all this nothingness? There was no framework. Only a fear of everything and an understanding of nothing. This they said without words, even as they continued to search for them.

  Yoshie saw a young girl curled up taking notes. She was perhaps the only person in the refuge who had found a corner where she could observe her own suffering. Watanabe remembers her well because that night she got him a blanket to sleep on. And because she was called Sadako, like one of his sisters.

  Rumors began to spread like the fires outside. Some spoke of fifty thousand or a hundred thousand dead, possibly more. Figures Yoshie was incapable of imagining with any accuracy. And which years later, when he was a numbers expert, he still found impossible to comprehend.

  And yet none of this was mentioned in the war communiqué that day. They were forced to resist until the end of something they didn’t know. In the shelter, the same questions were passed back and forth. What type of weapon had attacked them? What had they done to deserve such punishment? Nothing, they repeated to themselves, nothing whatsoever. They had simply obeyed their parents. Who had obeyed the authorities. Who had obeyed the emperor. Who had obeyed what was written in the stars.

  What was most needed were water and shade. A human chain was formed to fill receptacles from the Ōta. Yoshie went over and was immediately handed a bucket, which was too heavy for him. Someone took it from him and the chain continued.

  Jostling at the river’s edge, the flames had the shape of waves. A tsunami of fire.

  Many people gazed toward where a grove of trees had always stood. The earth was a naked body. The pines now looked like folded umbrellas.

  The burn victims needed shade. They piled up wood and other debris, which promptly collapsed. No cloud softened the rays. What constituted good weather? The sun beat down. The sun.

  As the Enola Gay retreated from the skies above Hiroshima, the copilot, Captain Lewis, whispered: My God, what have we done?

  The pilot, Colonel Tibbets, replied: We did what we had to do.

  An entire nation occupied one seat or the other.

  A DAY AND A HALF LATER, Yoshie was included among a list of passengers who were to travel by train to Nagasaki the next morning. Because of where it was located in the city, the train station hadn’t suffered too much damage, and a few locomotives were once again up and running. Residents, pregnant women, and children had priority. All he could think of was returning to his mother and sisters. He checked the time constantly. It seemed as though his stopped wat
ch had infected all the other clocks.

  Mr. Watanabe has a clear recollection of that night. Agitation and fear kept him from closing his eyes. The absence of light amplified the noises in the darkness. The echo of the prayers for the dead, namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu, alternated with cries of water, water. Bones spluttered and crackled along the riverside. And beyond, a blade of silence. He couldn’t hear the insects that so fascinated him. A summer without insects couldn’t be summer. Yoshie tried to calm himself by repeating the syllables for mother, haha, haha, and by imagining his room.

  In the early hours, there was a smell of roasted sardines. He sat up with a start, and headed toward the river. Then he saw they were burning bodies. He returned to his floor tile in the refuge and curled up under his blanket. A man sleeping beside him opened his eyes very wide. It seemed to Yoshie that the night was pouring into them. The worst part, murmured the man, is that there’s no waking up.

  As streaks of light began to appear, Yoshie’s yawns became more frequent. Soon, once the sun was up, he would go to the station. He had to wait only a little. Hold out a bit, a few more minutes, no time at all. His head tilted forward. His eyelids drooped. He thought of asking the man next to him to help him stay awake. Daylight was arriving. The images were fading.

  When he opened his eyes, it took him a moment to understand what he was doing there, what had happened to the world he woke up to. He sat up with a jolt. His joints cracked. Sleeping outside wasn’t what he’d imagined. Many of the others were already on their feet. Yoshie asked what time it was and started to run toward the train station, on the far side of the river.

  The first bridge was damaged. Tree trunks had been used to block access to it. The shape of the railings, a shadow in negative, was imprinted in white on the ground. To avoid a detour to the next bridge, Yoshie considered swimming. But he scarcely knew how. And the idea of floating among corpses terrified him.

  He walked on, until he came upon some boys inching their way across two girders, which spanned the river in a V-shape. Once they reached the end of one girder, they had to swim only a short way to the other. He followed them cautiously. The boys jeered at his slowness. They yelled that he would drown and the current would sweep him away.

  His trousers dripping water, Yoshie ran as fast as his legs would carry him. He hurried across Enko Bridge, a stone’s throw from the train station. He recognized it. He saw it growing. It was already before him. He reached the entrance. He pushed his way through and arrived on the platform gasping for breath. Only to discover that his train had just departed, leaving him in Hiroshima.

  With no other plan, Yoshie returned to the first aid post. Inside the building there were no more supplies, not even space to lie down. The man next to him mussed up his bangs in greeting and didn’t question him.

  Some army vehicles came to take away many of the wounded to the island of Ninoshima. He was surprised to see them resist.

  More trucks soon arrived. Together with a group of children and mothers with babies, they moved Yoshie to a reception center in Eba, in the south of the city. A soldier assured them that from there, attempts would be made to locate their relatives. The girl who had gotten him the blanket, Sadako, smiled at him in the distance.

  On the way to Eba, he met two students from the school where he had taken refuge. One was very ill. He couldn’t swallow anything without immediately throwing up. And yet he continued to clutch the lunch box his mother had prepared for him, before she’d gone out to help with safety and maintenance tasks. Noticing he hadn’t touched its contents, his classmate asked for permission to eat his lunch if he died. The boy told him he would think about it.

  Another boy told Yoshie that, unlike those of some of his friends, his parents had decided not to evacuate him from the city. They considered it his duty to continue his studies as soon as the vacation ended. That life should carry on as normal. Yoshie remembered his father had said exactly the same thing.

  The next morning, many of the passengers from the train he’d missed were to die in Nagasaki, together with his mother, his sisters, and tens of thousands of others. The B-29 Bockscar, piloted by Major Sweeney, dropped a plutonium bomb near the Mitsubishi arms factory. This second bomb, named Fat Man, supposedly in honor of Winston Churchill, produced a fireball that burned like the sun. A sun shattered into pieces. Fat Man. Is there a connection, wonders Watanabe, between humanizing a bomb and dehumanizing a people?

  His family wouldn’t have the good fortune of being saved by the terrain. On one side of the hill, survival. On the other, the void. The explosion occurred in the Urakami valley, on a tennis court next to the School of Medicine, exactly half a kilometer from the cathedral whose bells Yoshie used to hear every morning.

  * * *

  The reception center was surrounded by a field with pools of water, debris, bits of machinery, and backs of people floating up to the surface. Flies swarmed back and forth. Like Yoshie, they distrusted that water. It was a color he’d never seen before. A mixture of oil, earth, and blood.

  The flies played a leading role in those days. They buzzed with the insistence of a premonition. They were attracted only to certain patches of skin on the wounded. For all that the doctors succeeded in treating the burns, their patients’ insides were liquefying. Human anatomy was no longer as they’d studied. The bomb had stripped them of knowledge.

  Although it surprises him now, Mr. Watanabe can’t forget how accustomed he grew to the suffering of others. His childhood games had taught him that a word repeated many times ends up losing its meaning. The repetition of pain seemed to obey the same rule. What was the meaning of nausea, blood, agony? Bodies seemingly without harm would collapse all of a sudden. They were heaped up, doused with fuel, and burned.

  One afternoon, Yoshie saw a nurse help her colleague who was in labor. At that moment, he discovered where children came from, and that his parents had lied to him. The following morning, the midwife was dead. Bringing forth life and losing it were one and the same job. The summer sky insisted on parading its blueness, adding to the refugees’ frustration. As if, in the midst of calamity, they were waiting for the heavens to offer an opinion.

  Watanabe recalls the density of people’s rage in the south of Hiroshima. A kind of crust that adhered to and united them, a solidarity in reverse, that resulted less in sympathy toward victims than in a hatred of the enemy.

  Some mothers’ milk dried up. Babies were passed from breast to breast, suckling a few drops from each mother. The children now belonged to all mothers. Or no one belonged to anyone anymore. Of the many curses he heard uttered in that place, one in particular still echoes in his head. It came from a mother clutching the remains of her child in her arms. Without swearing or raising her voice, she said: I wish this upon them. Exactly this.

  * * *

  They had to wait another week—during which there was an attempted uprising and the Ministry of War declared its intention to fight to the death—until the government finally announced its surrender. A word that, in any event, Emperor Hirohito abstained from pronouncing during his radio speech. The first one to unveil his voice to the world. And the last one, if Watanabe is not mistaken, that an emperor would address to the nation until the Fukushima disaster.

  Their flag had been transformed into a halo of blood on a background of bones. Empires fall, mountains endure.

  But even so, Watanabe thinks, the Allies knew Japan was close to surrender. Negotiations of the terms of their defeat had been ongoing for several months. Their navy and air force had barely been functioning. Their cities were under attack every day. Food was scarce and transport networks were starting to collapse. The Pacific islands had been taken. The Third Reich had already surrendered. What doubt could there have been?

  Possibly around March, he concedes, during the bombing of Tokyo, his country had still been an enemy to fear. Even in June, up until the Battle of Okinawa, there may have been some reservations. But, by the summer, absolutely none. N
ot in August. Not on the sixth. Nor on the ninth. Saving the world, warning the world. What was the difference?

  Prior to their defeat, the Nazis were suspected of experimenting with nuclear energy. Both sides were fighting from their laboratories as well. Of course, Watanabe reasons, this was a justification for building the bomb. Not for dropping it. Maybe that was why those scientists who contributed to its invention, including Einstein, started a campaign against its use. Their advice was ignored: it was no longer necessary. The Allies had declared that peace and harmony reigned once more. Any further questions were obliterated, just as the two cities had been. The terror was over. A new terror had begun.

  * * *

  In early September, after a search through the debris and the bodies that he would prefer not to remember, Yoshie learned that none of his family in Nagasaki had survived. Occasionally, he still wonders whether they felt any pain or if they evaporated on the spot. If they tried to flee or called out a name.

  His aunt and uncle on his father’s side, Ineko and Shiro, who had lived for years in Tokyo, managed to locate him. They took him in. That was how he went to live in the capital, which was gradually starting to rebuild itself. Rubble and tunnels surrounded his new home.

  His aunt Ineko would often remind him how, after he arrived in Tokyo, for many weeks Yoshie slept, ate loads of yōkan, and remained plunged in an impenetrable silence. When he started to speak again, he didn’t say a single word about his time in Hiroshima. Nor did his aunt and uncle think it good for him to be reminded of that. Forgetting was a daily medicine.

  Almost directly opposite their house stood a former police station, now filled with members of the occupying forces. At the entrance fluttered the star-spangled banner, to which his aunt and uncle seemed averse, but which Yoshie, in spite of everything, found luminous, brimming with sky. It was around then that he first tasted ice cream: those multicolored balls that vanished into the Americans’ unintelligible mouths. He had difficulty persuading Shiro to buy him one. His uncle maintained that losing the war was no excuse to imitate the enemy’s customs. That’s when Mr. Watanabe developed a quirk that has stayed with him to this day: choosing desserts according to their color.