Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [114]
His head was throbbing, his mouth was dry. He filled a glass with water and drank thirstily. He put down the empty glass and looked around the kitchen as though taking an inventory, touching a mug, a cooking pan, ordinary objects that offered the safety of familiarity. A fork was a fork; these things did not change.
‘I didn’t know I was Japanese until Roosevelt told me I was. But in Italy I felt things were different: we were all GIs. together, no them and us. We were part of the whole.’
‘You’re heroes.’
‘But they don’t serve us in the corner store. Forget the Purple Hearts. What’s a hero? Someone who goes in even if he knows he’ll be killed? Isn’t that a bit Japanese? A bit kamikaze?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s courage. Don’t put yourself down.’
She noticed he was washing his hands, vigorously, under the running tap, rubbing hard, as though to scrub off the skin. He reached for a kitchen knife, tested the sharp tip against the flesh of his hand, pressing it till the blood welled. He dropped the knife on the worktop and let cold water run over his hand, dripping red into the white sink.
‘My guts are twisting up, Nance, I get the feeling I’m being pulled apart. There was a time in history when men were disembowelled, hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, horses dragged bits of their bodies in different directions . . .
‘I’m an American, right? I’m also one of those who won’t be served in the hardware store down the street; there’s no room for my sort in those rooming houses with the sign in the window.’
He opened the refrigerator door. The brightly lit interior was filled with food: meat, tomatoes, bread, a jar of jelly, peanut butter. Shelves of plenty. Distractedly he opened and closed the door several times.
‘Remember when I was a kid I used to ask: does the light go out when you close the door? You used to tell me it did, but I was never sure. People smile at you but when they close their doors do they switch off the smile? You can never know.
‘I should never have volunteered. The Stars and Stripes crap? I should’ve stuck in Tule, behind the barbed wire. Where aliens belong. Some of the guys in the battalion who came home early, they couldn’t see their folks right away, you know why? Because their parents were still in detention.’
In the silence he listened to the sound of car wheels going past, the swishing of tyres on wet tarmac.
They had not spoken of Cho-Cho, skirting the subject as though avoiding an open wound. Now he was casting about for words.
‘Nagasaki,’ he began. When the troops first heard about Hiroshima they were puzzled. A bomb. One bomb? They had dropped thousands on Tokyo. Then it became clear that this was not just a bomb, it was a weapon like no other. The statistics were presented reassuringly: they spoke of factories flattened, steelworks, railroads destroyed; the enemy’s war machine obliterated.
Three days later the jokily named Fat Man burst its steel belly over Nagasaki. A plutonium bomb. Again the official announcements spoke of factories flattened, Mitsubishi steel-works pulverised. The troops listened to Truman on the army radio, the mild voice, neutral words: docks, factories, railroads, communications . . .
At the time Joe heard nothing of people burning like torches, bleeding, dying. The details emerged later, slipping past MacArthur’s censors, smuggled out by the typewriter-toting press the general hated, what he called a fifth column undermining their own countrymen.
What Joe heard at the time and what he learned afterwards had melded in his head, numbing him. Misinformation overload. The atomic plague. The plague ‘his’ people had visited on ‘his’ people. And somewhere in there, among the obliterated, or the surviving, was a mother he could no longer visualise.
He said, ‘I can’t stay here.’
*
Nancy had heard nothing since the long-ago letter and the snapshot of the woman with pale hands