Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [121]
There was a pause.
How do you ask the big question – the one too raw, too important, to be incorporated into the pattern of an emotional reunion? It would, Joe felt, be very un-Japanese to blurt it out, splintering the veneer that overlay the cracks in the social façade.
He said, blurting it out, ‘She died, didn’t she.’
The platform was deserted now and shadowy, their two figures caught in a shaft of sunlight. A breeze, sweeping the track, caught up scraps of waste paper and sent them whirling in the air like dancing butterflies.
‘It may comfort you to know that it happened in the moment of the blast. She would not have suffered.’
Would not have suffered? He stared down at her.
She took his arm, as though to prevent him leaving. ‘When you see the house, you will understand.’
A cycle rickshaw took them through town, past collapsed and flattened buildings, breached walls and doors that opened on to the emptiness of vanished rooms. The road climbed, leaving the harbour behind.
The natural amphitheatre of the town lay below them now. He could see the shell of the Catholic church standing, blackened, insubstantial, like a sketch for a solid structure, its toppled dome half buried in the ground. A stone bridge spanned the river, its arches reflected in the water like spectacles. Compared with the wasteland of Tokyo, Nagasaki was still recognisably a city.
Suzuki glanced up and caught him staring at the scene, and for a moment she saw it through his eyes: almost, it seemed, Nagasaki had got off lightly. She felt a need to set the record straight.
‘Certain buildings, made from concrete and steel, withstood the blast, some protected by the hillside. Traditional dwellings of wood disappeared. Neighbourhoods for a mile around the explosion were completely destroyed. Consumed.’
She touched his arm and pointed to the tall wooden telephone poles that lined the street: he saw that they were scorched on the side facing the explosion.
‘Fifty thousand people died that day. Many more, later. Even now it continues: diseased, they sicken.’
The rickshaw creaked on, uphill. Again Suzuki touched Joe’s arm, and pointed to a crumbling stone tower set back from the road. Burnt and warped, almost liquefied into its surroundings, a clock face, the twisted hands standing at 11.02.
‘The moment of the explosion.’
Later she would tell him how it had been, that day, when she came back.
Settling the girls in their temporary home away from town, further down the coast, she had heard the far-off sound of a plane. She went to the door and looked up, shielding her eyes: the sky was overcast but in a parting of the clouds she saw a distant shape like a dark fish hovering. There was a flash, a glare, brighter than any lightning and then the thunder, a sound so deep it unsettled the ground beneath her feet like the tremor of an earthquake. There was a shift in the air, an onrushing. Then silence.
When Suzuki reached the outskirts, at first she could see nothing, the smoke and the fires too thick. But the boiling wind that hurled people and animals into the air like toys did one thing: it lifted the smoke. And then she saw that the whole area was strewn with corpses and the near-dead. Bodies clogged the river, some flung by the force of the explosion, others who had crawled into the water to try to quench the burning that split and blistered their skin, only to drown. The living stumbled unsteadily through the rubble, reaching out as though blinded; naked, their hair and clothes aflame. Liquid dripped from their hands, as if they had emerged from the river. Puzzlingly, they appeared to be draped in rags. Then she saw that what looked like rags were strips of shredded skin, fluttering from their arms. The liquid dripping from their hands was blood.
She would tell Joey none of this; she was not sure she could speak the words. He could read about it in books. Books were already being written, dissertations prepared; artists would paint pictures. The cycle rickshaw was climbing higher, slowly zigzagging towards the house Suzuki had shared