Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [123]
After just a few minutes he heard his name called out by the receptionist.
He said, protesting, ‘Others are before me—’
‘You are a visitor; please go through. Dr Sato will see you now.’
Joe paused in the door of the surgery. The thin, grey-haired figure behind the desk rose and bowed.
‘Good morning. I hope you didn’t have to wait too long.’ A trace of American in the delivery.
Joe said, ‘I feel bad, coming in ahead of other people. You have a busy day.’
‘All days are busy, Pinkerton-san. We have unusual circumstances: my patients all suffer from the same sickness. Bomb poison, they call it; these are among the lucky survivors.’ He studied Joe for a moment, silver eyebrows raised questioningly. ‘What can I do for you?’
He felt guilty again: taking up a doctor’s time while outside the door, the urgent needs of the sick awaited attention.
‘I was told – I was hoping you could answer some questions about my mother. About Cho-Cho-san.’
Dr Sato’s pale hands shuffled papers on his desk. Questions about Cho-Cho. A lifeless girl carried in on a stretcher; his first experience of a botched suicide.
This was not the time to recall that day.
‘I knew Cho-Cho-san for many years.’
For a long time she had refused to speak to him except to answer medical enquiries: he formed part of the unwanted rescue team, ‘saving’ her from her desired end. Gradually she accepted that, welcome or not, a doctor was occasionally needed. Much later, he had become a friend.
There came a day when, formally, tentatively, he had suggested that if he ceased to be her doctor, he could offer her care and attention of a rather more personal nature. She responded impatiently: as a medical expert he was useful to her. As a friend, she valued him.
But as a husband? A shake of the head.
Recalling that day he said aloud, ‘Gankomono!’
Startled, Joe repeated, ‘Stubborn?’
Dr Sato, equally startled, said, ‘You understand Japanese. Ah. I meant the word in its positive use: your mother was . . . an independent spirit. I should have said she had dokuritsushin.’
He looked across the desk at Joe, searching for words that were safe to use.
‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘At the beginning she was fujin, an old-fashioned girl, she followed tradition. Later the traditionalists called her a troublemaker, one of those modern women, trying to be a man, as they put it, attending meetings, marching. But then she changed. Became a businesswoman. She was quite a figure.’
‘Did you like her?’ It was a loaded question.
The doctor frowned. ‘I do not like my patients. I offer them my skills.’
‘Suzuki tells me she died in the explosion.’
‘The blast, yes. It would have been instant.’
‘I keep hearing that. But how can you know?’
More shifting of papers on desktop. There were no right words here. The doctor gave Joe one of the long, steady looks his patients were familiar with.
‘I will avoid euphemism. The blast victims were extinguished. Literally consumed by the heat. Vaporised. As we have no verifiable evidence of an afterlife we cannot know their feelings but, scientifically, there would have been no time to suffer. She will have passed from life to nothingness faster than the human physiology can register.’
Outside the doctor’s surgery Suzuki waited in the rickshaw, her face closed. The day was not going as she had planned. After the debacle of her daughter’s revelation she had attempted not only an apology but an explanation: the Americans had been the enemy, the Americans had dropped the bomb, killed her friends and families of friends. Joe’s father was American.
‘Mayu decided to punish you. I am sorry.’
‘But she was telling the truth.’
‘Truth is shapeless. Like water, it can be different things to different people, it can bring life if you drink it or death if you drown. One truth will tell how a tea-house girl took an American sailor into her bed. There’s a truth in which an orphan child was sold by one man to another. There’s a truth in which a girl saw a golden man walking up the hill towards her