#
"Now hear this, now hear this. At eight zero one five this morning, a 4.5 ton device with the unprecedented force of 20,000 tons of TNT was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on the island of Honshu. Preliminary reports indicate that massive damage was inflicted on the target."
A roar of exultation explodes from every man of us on deck, from lieutenant commander to seaman. Someone claps me on the back, hard. Wheeling around, I look into the grinning blubbery face of Gallup, who hails from Frog Pond, Tennessee, and had once called me, not a damn Yankee, but a "Goddamn mother-fucking Yankee." Catherman, so fat he huffs and puffs and turns beet-red climbing a ladder, and Vincenti, the smallest and oldest inductee in the division, who shamelessly weeps every evening over his wife and daughter back in Perth Amboy, are jitterbugging together. Thompson and Zelinski, who, glutted with warm beer, had bloodied and battered the features of each other's face with their fists on the coral reef island named Mog Mog, Ulithi, during a three-hour liberty we'd been granted between Iwo Jima and Okinawa, are embracing like eleven-year-old girls. Cragg, who had never oeen out of Flat Rock, Alabama, before he'd been drafted, snatches off his white hat, flings it onto the deck, as if to say, I'm done with you forever, then, letting out a rebel whoop of jubilation, tramples it as he dances an impish jig.
Sounding like a grand pipe organ, the ship's horn blasts three short and one long peal of triumph. Body feeling light enough to fly, I let go a full-throated cry of joy and playfully poke Gallup, whom I loathe, in the ribs.
#
He recalled the controversy in 1995 over displaying the Enola Gay, named with what would be an oedipal pathos, were it not so bitterly ironic, for the mother of the pilot of the plane that had dropped the bomb, called Little Boy— litotes to beat all litotes—as part of the exhibition mounted by the Smithsonian Institution to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima. Above the mellow tones of the commentators when the cricket match was resumed in Melbourne, fifty-eight years after how many mothers and little boys had been incinerated and doomed and disfigured in the blink of an eye, he heard a jumble of voices in his head clamoring for his attention.
Still immersed in the Guardian, Alma seemed not to notice that he got up, crossed to his night stand, again picked up tablet and pen, and returned to his chair. He supposed she supposed he was still watching and listening to the match. Neither the images of the game nor the commentary on it distracted him. After many false starts, much crossing out and rewriting, he managed to sort out the voices he still was hearing.
I turned to a clinker that burned ten years
before consuming itself.
Still simmering, I have scoriae for fingers, a
blister where my left breast ought to be.
We, the lucky ones, flashed and burned out,
Roman candles, sparklers, Catherine wheels,
celebrating your Fourth of July a month and
two days late.
I, pilot of the weather plane that scouted the
skies over Hiroshima and gave the all clear to
the Enola Gay for letting Little Boy fall—beyond
forgiveness, denied rest, haunted, drifting, an outcast,
cashiered, committed, all those charred and radiant
bones lashed to my back, the lament of a ghostly
choir of a hundred thousand souls humming in my ear.
In unison we cry: bury the bird that dropped
the egg of fire. Exhibit us.
#
As the cricket players became no more than moving images on a screen, he knew his eye was losing interest in the match. Shame and remorse were carrying his mind back to his effort to contend with the accelerating guilt he' d felt while reading John Hersey's Hiroshima after returning from the war, anything but a conquering hero. He remembered telling himself that at that moment of spontaneous celebration he'd really had no way of comprehending the enormity of what had happened.
Besides, his own life, he'd been convinced then, had been at stake. He'd experienced the ferocity of the Japanese resistance, had witnessed the sinking of destroyers, the kamikaze attacks that had killed and burned and maimed his comrades-in-arms on carriers, cruisers and battleships. Reports of the cruelty of the Japanese military to those they'd conquered and of their barbarous treatment of prisoners of war he'd believed were more than propaganda churned out by the films he'd been exposed to, which heavy-handedly divided the globe into two worlds, the light and the dark, the good and the evil, the Allies and the Axis. Hadn't the Japanese allied themselves with Hitler and treacherously attacked Pearl Harbor?
In the "pony" editions of Time, which were passed from hand to hand, he'd read that the Japanese had held countless planes back from combat, had stockpiled ammunition along the entire coast of its home islands with an unbroken line of shore batteries, that a million ground troops, some battle-hardened, some fresh, as well as every able-bodied old man and boy, and thousands of women had dedicated themselves to fight to the death against the invasion of their homeland, scheduled to commence in November. The forces he was a part of were still depleted and exhausted from the battles of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
According to Time, reliable intelligence estimated the number of casualties the American people were being prepared to expect ranged from hundreds of thousands to a million. Feeding in the luck he'd enjoyed so far, he'd calculated the odds on his survival were less than even. Any wonder he'd shouted with joy and clowned in exultation when he'd heard the flat-toned voice on the PA system announce that a device of unprecedented destructive power had been dropped on a Japanese city named Hiroshima?
#
He clicked off the TV and pushed himself out of his chair. From the corner of his eye he could see Alma looking up from the Guardian, toward him.
"I should get some pounds from the ATM. It's my turn. No need for two of us to go out. Finish the newspaper. Just don't tell me a word of what you've read."
Throwing her a quick glance, he saw that she was staring at him quizzically. Unused to practicing little deceptions on her, he lacked the touch to be successful.
"Okay. Though I hate to see you leave the cricket. I have enough cash."
"The truth," he winced inwardly as he uttered the word, "is I can't seem to get into the match. A walk will do me good." So pathetically feeble was his rejoinder that he felt a rush of gratitude for her consideration in ignoring it.
The sky was lowering, the air chill.
After withdrawing two hundred pounds from the ATM outside the bank, directly across from the inn, he started to saunter around the square. His feet carried him through the lychgate of the graveyard beside the parish church at the far end of the village. Immediately inside, on opposite sides of the slate path stood two war memorials, a gritstone obelisk for those who'd died in World War I, a lighter, perhaps limestone, slab for the dead of World War II. On both monoliths were two long columns of names.
So many from a single village cut off before their time, most in their prime. He couldn't estimate the sum he'd get by multiplying the number buried here by a like proportion from all the hamlets, villages, towns, and cities in all the homelands of those who had fought and been killed. And then he thought of the unnumbered who'd died unburied, those swallowed by the sea and those blown to debris or burned to ashes. To say nothing of the countless civilians.
A gray melancholy infiltrated his depression, mist thickening to fog. Beyond the demographic and moral lurked the cultural, anthropological and biological. How feeble the sunlight of civilization in such darkness, how cold and remote the moonlight of art, how rarefied the beams of saintliness! Had not a sudden rage at the silent conspiracy of avoidance, at the hypocrisy, pretense, and self-deception surged through him, he'd have had to weep his grief on the spot.
His feet, about to carry him along the slate path through the mass of gravestones of the village dead, centuries of them, were stopped by the thought of a possibility that da
rted into his brain as might a fragment of an exploding shell. Here he was, having reached a ripe old age by the merest of chances, sound of body and mind, with a loving and beloved wife, three children, and five grandchildren to carry on his seed, and he'd witnessed and played a part in the murder of the airmen whom, surrendering, he'd seen blown to bits, and in the death of the kamikaze pilot who, trying to kill him, had been obliterated by a five-inch shell. Although he couldn't do the calculus of years and chances, mathematically astronomical as such coincidence had to be, the age he'd approximated for Yuko Miyataka made it possible she could be the daughter of one of the two Japanese airmen. For that matter, she could even be the child of the kamikaze pilot he'd imagined as little more than a boy, who had got a young wife or girlfriend pregnant, perhaps deliberately, with her agreement, as a token of his love and a way to continue his bloodline, before taking off on his sacrificial though futile mission. What of the life none of the three had ever had? Here he was, alive to wonder.
Approaching the parish church, ancient enough, despite obvious extensive renovation, for him to make out traces of Norman architecture, he told himself that in this landscape of tombs and the stones of the past he was clouding his mind with morbidity. As he entered the edifice and slid into a pew near the narthex, an afternoon during a visit to this village in late summer of 2001 came breaking into his mind. Hemmed in by the architectural reminder surrounding him and held by ihe strength of the memory, he was trapped in a time of no time.
#
After torching the bed in our room in late afternoon, we stroll the village. We're still simmering, fingers locked, too wedded to separate. With a will of their own, feet take us into the graveyard of the parish church, then usher us through a portal. Damp as a bog inside. Sidling into a pew, we settle rib to rib, to prevent the gloom of the place from seeping between us. Still living in you, my seed will perish there.
Between two massive pillars, the Lady Chapel tells of generations who, laboring for Mary's sake, hewed, lugged, dressed, carved, and piled these stones in cruciform.
A sudden shaft from the sun illuminates the Virgin and Child in glass— sapphire, ruby, emerald, amethyst, gold. Inwardly I vow, two unbelievers, we'll make a sanctum, not of rock by faith, but of ourselves with love.
In the afterglow of passion, the radiance of the jewels of the Madonna obscures the blood that's stigmatized these stones.
A hundred years of carnage across the Channel. Henry's murderous lusts. His daughters' righteous slaughters. Harvests of opium, cotton and slaves. Gifts of Bibles and smallpox.
We breathe in silent harmony until the bells of evensong clang out of tune.
A fewiveeks later we're back in the U.S., just in time to reprise Babel on a screen. Watch the genius of engineered architecture, twin towers, which prove more vulnerable than caves, crumbling in slow motion. The height of civilization collapsing on itself. A cathedral of modernity settling into a tomb for melted flesh. The slow-motion picture confounds our brain, ties our tongue, and shrivels what we can only call the heart.
No more than it can consecrate those bones and ashes or resurrect the lives I've buried in you, can love make bombs fall skyward, guide missiles to open sea, keep kitchens from turning to ovens for roasting children, bedrooms to burial chambers for brides and grooms, mosques and synagogues and churches to morgues for corpses and dismembered parts of bodies.
There are no sanctuaries for the sanctum sanctorum of love.
#
The clang of the hour brought the present back. Gnawing on his soul was the ache of memory, a spurious relic, born during after-love in this Yorkshire church.
#
As they were finishing lunch in the dining room of the inn, he tendered a suggestion. No way Alma could know it was against his will, which was overpowered by the grotesque though improbable possibility that had struck him in the graveyard.
"What say we invite the Japanese schoolteacher to have dinner with us this evening? Tomorrow morning she'll be leaving to respect the graves of Charlotte and Emily Bronte." He hoped his echo of her quaint idiom conveyed a kinship he wished to feel, rather than any mockery.
"A lovely idea. Except for our after-dinner coffee with her, she's been alone."
"This time you do the inviting. Since it's for dinner. You know, more formal. And the Japanese have such a sense of propriety."
"You're a bit retrograde, as I suggested before. The fact is Yuko has been traveling without a male to escort or help her. And she's had to be in contact with many men. Besides, she's every bit as easy with you as with me."
"All true. Yet somehow I think she'd be more comfortable if a dinner
invitation came from you."
"Meaning you'd be more comfortable."
Not much got past Alma. Though she couldn't possibly know the reason
for his reluctance after he'd made the suggestion, she sensed some ambivalence in
him.
"Oh, I really don't mind," she conceded in the face of his unyielding
silence. "I suppose she's still in Cock's Wold, trying to find the grave of the
fellow of infinite jest. See, I remember. Wonder where in Japan she comes from." "Using some clever discretion maybe you can find out." "Just idle curiosity. I really know so little about Japan." Japan. As they climbed the staircase and he moseyed down the hallway to
their room behind Alma, the sound echoed in his head like a gong.
#
Alma was about to drive to Thyrsk with a woman of the village they'd come to know during their previous visits, to poke around in the secondhand bookshop. He'd begged off, pleading an incipient headache. More deception. Alma had sniffed that out too, though, again, not the reason.
"Come on, Dan, you know you never get headaches. They're all mine. Migraines. And I won't give a single one up to you. More likely your interest in the cricket match has been rekindled. Or maybe it's just that you prefer not to listen to a couple of jabbering women, the girl thing I haven't had with Yuko."
"You're as right as our government's intelligence is. I want to give you two dames the chance to hatch a conspiracy I'm not privy to. Better check Aurelia's automobile for bugs. I'd love to inform on you to MI6."
No sooner had she closed the door, after holding it open a crack to throw at him, "Ta-ta—hope the headache doesn't hit full force while you're watching cricket," than he sat down at the Queen Anne desk, a centennial piece, he was certain, on the inside wall of the room. On inn stationery he began to write. Struggling to find words, at first he seemed to have to squeeze them out of the tip of the ball-point pen.
Slowly, so gradually he was only vaguely aware it was happening, the words started to flow. Then they were streaming out. In an effort to keep up with what he was reliving as if it were happening for the first time, his handwriting became scarcely legible. Gobs of language were pouring from his brain. As he went on at a breathless pace, his history became the words.
#
It's been three days since through binoculars I watched the launch flying the ensign of the Rising Sun pull alongside the Missouri, our sister ship. We were anchored so close I was able to see with my naked eye a corps of Japanese diplomats climb the ladder that had been dropped for them, march across the quarterdeck to where General Mac Arthur, Admiral Nimitz, and a cluster of army and navy brass stood waiting, and salute. Wearing swallowtail coats and top hats, the Japanese looked so much like a troop of clowns in mock full dress I could scarcely believe that they were the enemy, that I was witnessing a historical drama. As were all those on every ship anchored in Tokyo Bay, all our guns were loaded and primed, just in case. Pearl Harbor had proved that for the Japanese deceit was a cardinal virtue. Apparently they'd abandoned that modus operandi and were meekly surrendering.
As the ceremony proceeded, I imagined what lay ahead for the Japanese leaders. It would be no comedy. They'd strung themselves a necklace of atrocities, with which in the name of justice we, the victors, would choke them black
.
Crammed with the liberty party I'm part of, one of the first to set foot on Japanese soil after the surrender, the landing craft makes for waterside Yokohama. As I scramble up the remains of a series of docks, I come on stacks of rifles, evidence of total capitulation. Ahead of me there is no city, only devastation and debris. The charred earth is pocked with craters in every direction. As I move away from the waterfront, I see that pieces of tin, wood and cardboard cover the larger craters.
Without the least idea of where I'm heading, I break off from a couple of shipmates and keep walking beyond what I conjecture is the ruin of the center of the city. I'm surprised that I'm only shocked, not afraid. The few Japanese who appear veer off when they see me. It's silent as death. As I go on, the size and material of the debris lead me to believe I'm now passing through a residential section. Suddenly, close to my feet, a piece of tin slides. The skull of a skeleton rises from a crater. Brown wrapping paper covers the face of the skull. Rags hang on the bones.
I guess the ears on the skull have heard my footsteps in the silence of the upper world. Is this assemblage of bones living in that pit alone? I wonder. Might it be the head of a family of skeletons? Down there at this very instant might whatever of strength and breath is left be forsaking another such creature? Might it even be that the one I'm face to face with is inhabiting this grave-home with what already has become its own remains? Hot as the cloudless morning is, I shiver.
The creature confronting me casts the foreshortened shadow of a stickman. All at once I become aware its bony hand is extending a figurine to me, insistently. Hesitating, I make myself accept it, taking care not to touch the proffering claw. While I stand holding the figurine, two twiglike fingers form a V. It can't be Churchill's celebrated sign for victory, that's certain. The fingers touch, then move away from bloodless lips. Spreading its five fingers wide, the skeleton raises its other claw, like a policeman stopping traffic. The porcelain figurine feels cool.