It was after Grandfather found us that I started telling Mitsuo stories, which helped me pass those dark nights while everyone else was asleep. They forced the image of my dead parents from my imagination, if only temporarily, and the presence of the groaning mummies that lined the walls on either side of us. After the lights went down I would turn my head left to face Mitsuo and begin one of the tales I knew from our grandfather, who often had told us bedtime stories. At first I was not sure Mitsuo could hear me. He had not awakened since being brought here from the aid station, a few days after I had arrived. Every day the Japanese doctors saw us. Sometimes American doctors came, occasionally accompanied by men with cameras, who took pictures of us lying in our beds like drugged beasts.
When these people appeared, a wave of apprehension rolled from one end of the ward to the other. I knew only what we had been taught in school. That they were the people we had built the fire pits to protect the city against. That they were a soulless, mad and destructive race always to be feared and never to be trusted. Now they came to our bedsides with notepads and cameras, even sketchbooks, to record what they had done to us. When they touched my burns I was unable to maintain my silence, despite myself.
One morning an American leaned over my back and began to inspect my burns. I was an object of fascination. He spoke to the man beside him, another American. I could not understand their language. The first man touched my shoulder. I turned my head away. He lifted the light gauze that covered my wounds. That simple lifting motion sent violent spasms of pain racing through my body. I bit my lip until it bled - first because of the pain, then in anger - yet his hands continued. He spoke to his colleague with great calm. He did not stop what he was doing to me. Another man approached and began to make photographs.
Every night I promised myself not to cry again in their presence. Silence, apart from those shared stories, became my only escape. If I was hidden within it, they could not know me. Already I knew I would never acknowledge the pain I endured. I would feel it. Yes. It would forever hold me in its grip. But I would never submit willingly to these men. They were the people who had done this to me and my brother, the men who had killed my parents. Revealing my pain to them increased my humiliation, serving to tell them I had been defeated, just as they'd hoped I would be.
If the regular doctors ever told my grandfather of Mitsuo's prognosis he did not let on to me during his morning and afternoon visits. He would sit on my brother's bed, facing me, and we would speak, holding hands, until the nurses came and told him it was time for my morphine. Often he was allowed to stay for hours. He said Mitsuo was in a deep sleep, but surely would awake one day soon to join our bedside conversations. Although my brother was never able to open his eyes or speak, my grandfather told me that he understood what we were saying to him, and depended on us, and on me especially, because I was with him twenty-four hours a day and it might be lonely there inside his head.
One day I told him that I thought Mitsuo was getting better. "Grandfather," I said. "I know my little brother is healing."
He said he thought so, too.
"But it's true," I insisted. "I felt it in his hand. His hand moves for me. He understands things when I touch him."
"Yes," he said. "I know he does."
My grandfather took Mitsuo's right hand in his. He waited and closed his eyes, as if concentrating. "Ah, yes," he said. "I feel it now. He is telling us he loves us. We should both be strong."
I knew he did not believe me. But I knew it was true.
At the end of each visit Grandfather would lean over Mitsuo and gently kiss an unburned portion of his face goodbye. As he struggled to his feet I would ask him how his knees were without me at home to massage them like I used to. He would shake his head and say I should not be such a silly girl, I should worry instead about myself and Mitsuo. He would then bend down and kiss me, too.
After dark, when the ward was quiet, I could concentrate on my brother's sleeping fingers. We communicated by touch. That's why I held his hand between our beds. I sometimes felt him stir when I played with his fingers. No one ever knew that we stayed awake at night. Me in my way, Mitsuo in his. Because it was against the rules, I told no one but our grandfather. When the lights went out it was time to sleep, even if you weren't able to. We were not allowed to talk, and to my knowledge no one else did, though I was sure that many people in the ward were in the same sleepless condition. But it was always silent at night in that hospital, excepting the troubled moans that escaped someone's lips every so often. I never told any of the doctors or nurses that I whispered stories at night because I feared they would separate us if they knew I kept the both of us up. That was also why I never told them when his hand began to squeeze back.
The hand was one of the small areas on Mitsuo that had remained intact. It was warm, as a hand should be, and without the memory of that day burned into it, as had happened over the rest of his body. I spoke to him through that hand - his right, my left - and somehow I knew he listened through it. I could feel him listening. Sometimes, as I retold our grandfather's bedtime stories, his thumb pressed against mine. This simple act was for me as miraculous as if he'd opened his eyes and winked across the space between us. The joy it gave me was immeasurable. It was his sign, this small movement of his thumb, that he was here still and I was not alone. I believed he could answer me in this same way when I asked if I should tell him such-and-such story - for instance, did he like that one about the Mouse and the Rabbit? A faint pressure was all I needed to understand. A yes or a no. The hand had become his voice, as the stories had become our conversation. It was unburned and perfect, and I caressed it so he would not forget I was there in the sleepless hours before the sun came to the window.
In our ward the beds faced south, but because of the position I was forced to take I could not look across my bed and out the opposite window, only to my right or left. By turning my chin into my collarbone I was able to see one of the windows farther down on the opposite wall. In any case, our beds were very low to the wooden planks that constituted the floor, and the windows were placed very high on the wall facing us. As a result I could see only the sky, and not the broken ground that I knew moved off in every direction. Sometimes I waited for hours with my chin pushing into my collarbone, watching for a bird to fly past or a cloud to drift by. No airplanes passed through that small framed area. But when something moved across the sky I watched it eagerly. Clouds were frequent, and darkened as the autumn wore on, and in their plumes my mind found shapes and possibilities that delivered me far from thoughts of my dead mother and father, my crippled body and the stink and moaning of the place we were trapped in.
When there was nothing to be seen outside my window, I observed the simple and beautiful qualities of the light shining there. I studied its texture and brilliance - my head turned awkwardly, often painfully - with an intensity that surprised me. What I saw outside that window was mostly the light-blue sky of early fall. During those long days spent watching, I thought about our terrible circumstances and prayed we would all be well again. When the doctors or nurses attended to us I feigned greater interest in this view, or pretended that I was asleep, as I did not like looking at them.
I had seen many proud photographs of Grandfather, as a young man, at Tokyo Imperial University. In some of these he wore a lab coat not unlike the ones they wore at the hospital where my brother and I stayed. He had always told us of how he had devoted his life to saving people, though we did not know what he was saving them from when he told us his stories. What he told us was as unreal as the fairy tales he delivered after our mother tucked us into bed. What I saw around me was not like any of the stories we were familiar with. No healed bodies ever left this place. The dead were wheeled away at all hours of the day on that endlessly squeaking gurney. There was no use in trying to obscure their presence from the many children whose home this place had become. Death was now more common than life, and soon those lifeless forms wheeled along the single corridor splitting the ward in half did not matter to me either way. At least they were dead, I thought. My own unceasing pain erased any concern for those people. I did not care. There are things you get used to. There are things you learn not to see. I came to a point where I would not have cared if they all had died, and might not even have noticed them if somehow I'd been given the promise that my brother and I would leave this place together and alive. I am not proud of this. I would not know the truth of such a terrible confession had I not lived through that time. But early in my childhood I was forced to understand that there is no terror or pain greater than your own.
I soon learned to stop expecting the recoveries so reverently told in Grandfather's doctoring stories. But I did not give up hope entirely. There was still the possibility represented by my brother's tender thumb, and of our grandfather's fairy tales, though I did not relate these to Mitsuo for the same reason my grandfather told them to us. I was not interested in the wisdom they were meant to impart. On some level, I may have been aware of their good intentions, but I whispered those tales in my brother's ear because they helped us leave behind the world we were living in. It was only that.
Most often I became a beautiful shining light in the sky. I was the Moon Princess. I would begin my story at the point where the humble old farmer named Kazuo was hard at work, cutting bamboo in his grove. On that particular day he looked up and noticed a certain shoot from which glowed a bright light. It was like nothing he had ever seen before. When he cut the shoot with his sharp knife he was astonished to find a baby girl inside, a child of such beauty that tears sprang to his eyes. He took the girl home and showed his old wife what he had found, and the ancient, childless couple decided to keep the baby and name her Princess Moonlight because her face shone as brightly as the real moon in the night sky.
On subsequent trips to the bamboo grove the farmer discovered that his farm had become enchanted, for from every shoot he cut issued forth a wealth of pearls and gold coins. Soon the old couple was very rich. But in their humility they understood this new wealth must be spent on the Moon Princess. They brought to her the best teachers of ancient Japan. She learned to write beautiful haiku, to paint upon silk and to play all musical instruments. She learned every language of the world. Whatever the teachers presented her with, she mastered it with grace and speed. All the while she was as loving and committed a daughter as any parents could ever dream of.
As she grew into a young woman her beauty only increased. The dazzling light that emanated from her round face never dimmed, but on nights of a full moon she sat in her old father's bamboo garden and sighed as if homesick. Young men began to call at her door, each one rich and handsome, but she refused them all. Finally even the Emperor of Japan heard of the Moon Princess's extreme beauty and sent for her. But she refused to leave her mother and father, so the Emperor himself travelled to the bamboo garden to meet the young woman, angry that she had not heeded his demand. Yet once he saw her loveliness all his anger dissipated and he fell instantly in love and asked her to be his Queen.
"I cannot marry," she said, "not even you, Emperor, because I am not long for this world. Soon my true father will send for me and I will be gone!"
Naturally, the Emperor did not believe what the girl said, and when called away on affairs of state he had his soldiers surround the bamboo garden so no one might steal her away while he was gone. Nonetheless, not even five hundred of his Elite Guard could prevent what soon happened. On the night of the next full moon she wrote the Emperor a letter on a silk scarf: "My dear Emperor, I leave tonight. My true father has let me know that I will be quitting this place. I shall not see you again. Farewell."
Immediately the Emperor set out to stop her, but he did not arrive at the bamboo garden until late the following morning, for it was many leagues away. And even before he received the Princess's letter, a cloud that had obscured the moon settled in her bamboo garden and revealed itself to be a chariot of light driven by a man with luminous skin and dressed in shining robes.
"I have come," he said, "for the Princess Moonlight."
"You cannot take our beloved daughter away from us," her old father cried. "Please leave her. She is all we have. She is my heart and soul!"
When the old woman and man began to weep the Moon Princess cradled them each in her gentle arms, to comfort those who had been so kind all her life.
"It is not because I do not love you that I leave. I must return to my real father and assume my responsibilities as the Empress of the Moon. For many years he has protected you during the dark hours of the night, and when I leave I will always protect you just as he has done."
She kissed the old couple goodbye and climbed aboard the shining chariot, where she produced a jade bottle from the sleeve of her kimono and handed it to the old man, asking him to give this bottle to the Emperor, and to tell him he must drink of the potion so he might cease to grieve for her. Once she passed the bottle to him the chariot began to rise into the sky, growing brighter and brighter until a blinding flash erupted from the night and she was gone.
In the morning, the Emperor was heartbroken to find he had missed his beloved Moon Princess. When the old man offered him the message and the potion, the Emperor said, "I would rather grieve forever than forget the truest love of my life," and every night afterward, the heartsick Emperor would stare up into the sky at the full, round moon and see the beautiful face staring down at him through the darkness, present yet unattainable, guarding him and all in the bamboo garden just as she said she would.
I was usually able to sleep the few minutes between dawn and the nurse's first morning visit, and often was awakened by the sound of feet padding up the same aisle down which that laden gurney was pushed. Those of us who could take food were brought weak tea and a small portion of rice. I knew the nurse by her smell, which I remembered from life before - the smell of healthy skin, not charred like mine was now - and which never failed to remind me of what I had lost. She seemed somehow to have escaped what had befallen us. To occupy myself I sometimes imagined her at her home, unscathed, pitying us; but also grateful that this had not touched her family, happy that she had not had to make this particular sacrifice for her country. I grew to resent her, as I grew to resent all those who had not been touched by the same fire. She was clean and efficient, as fresh as lilacs growing in a pot of moist soil, and I resented her for the life that had not been taken away from her.
She was one of many who came and went. Their stern faces made me dream of healthy skin and naked peaches and warm rice while they swabbed my open wounds. They told me to hold still, to be strong. My mother had often demanded the same of me. I had understood this to mean, Be silent, put your thoughts elsewhere until this goes away. There will be better times. One day the pain will be gone. I tried to remember the pleasures we had enjoyed, but always those memories included my mother, and this made me sadder still.
Dreams floated through my mind like the clouds I watched drift past in the distance outside that window. I wondered where those dreams came from. When they were bad I knew the answer to that question well enough. They had come from here, from all around me. Yet dreams in which I could fly, or was unable to feel pain, in which only pleasant thoughts and sensations visited me - these dreams, strangely enough, unsettled me just as much as the others. I was anxious to discover their origins, so as to tap into some hidden well from which I might draw strength. And though I searched whatever memories were available to me - stories I'd heard from teachers at school, and popular stories and fables - I was unable to find their source and feared they might come only at their convenience and not when I needed them most.
The nurse would feed me and change the IV that dripped into Mitsuo's arm and take away the bedpans that we filled during the night. I watched the sores spread like mushrooms over my body, so quickly did they grow. I could hear the doctors' puzzlement. This type of burn was vastly different from the incendiary burns our doctors had been treating throughout the war. The left side of my face ballooned prodigiously. The Americans harvested live samples of the burgeoning secret life that populated our bodies like pink toadstools, then rushed them back, I imagined, to their laboratories for further study. One day one of them removed a small flap of skin from my shoulder and placed it in a glass dish. I did not feel its removal but watched with intense fear as the shining tongs pulled back the skin, peeling it away like a translucent layer of onion, tinged with a barely noticeable cloud of pink and yellow. It was dead, already no longer part of my body.
That these people were not in possession of the cure for what they had done to us never occurred to me. I had been taught that the slap should always be followed by the caress, the question always by the answer. But I soon learned that these men were as mystified by the sores on my body as our own doctors were. They hovered over us with the same sense of confusion and hesitancy, the same helpless embarrassment and pity and creeping disgust.
I woke up one morning and found Mitsuo's bed empty.
"Your brother died in the night," the lilac-smelling nurse told me. "I am sorry. Many people have died. You must remain strong."
I closed my eyes and attempted not to cry.
"Take your tea. You must keep your strength."
I did not know when or how he died. I had whispered to him all that previous night, because the pain had been too fierce for sleep, and I had not been able to push from my imagination the picture of my mother lying dead in the street, her beautiful legs twisted and burned. I decided my voice could soothe him. This was the only good I could bring into the world. Comforting my brother.
His hand had sometimes failed to respond to my voice, but that was not unusual. Maybe I had fallen asleep for brief periods, I thought, and dropped my hand away from his. I did not remember his hand growing cold. I did not remember anything like this. This could not be true, I decided. He had simply been transferred to a new hospital. That happened often enough.
Of course I knew the nurse would not have made such a mistake. There could be no error. My brother had died and I was alone here now. Behind my closed eyes the river's current rose at my knees. That day returned to me, the image of that dark object emerging from the belly of the distant aircraft, as if some flying bird-monster was giving birth to its dumb offspring, a wingless fledgling bird that would fall stupidly to the ground below and explode its body over the land.
I had never required the existence of a guilty party to understand the deaths my parents suffered that terrible day, never considered their passing as anything more than pointless and random. I sought no villain, needed no culprit. This was our lot, as it had been the lot of my ancestors. We had been taught to accept death as an inevitable consequence of life, and of the war our Emperor had declared just and right. Like so many lives of that time, ours had been shaped by a faceless violence; I understood that, and did not feel, beyond a slow-burning hatred for the American doctors and photographers who tormented us, any desire to cast blame.
Even by that age I believed I comprehended the true meaning of war. Imagine! Experience had taught us to expect hardship and pain. I mourned the loss of my parents, yes. But their deaths fell within a knowledge that had been drummed into my bones from birth. My grandfather, and the history of my people, helped me understand their fates.
My brother's death was different, though, because he had had no life to speak of. Like me, he had survived the day of the bomb, yet it was the bomb, or its lingering effects, that killed him; it was the secret poison that had claimed his life. But why had it not claimed mine? This was the question I was forced to contend with. This was why, from that day on, I dreamed his death over and over again. My child's imagination gave the sickness that had invaded his body a human form, because in no other way could I understand what had taken his life. The poison was too mysterious to me, this new sickness that grew lumps on his body, and thinned his blood to water. I gave it a masked face and dark gloves and heavy boots as it approached that night it came for him. My memories insisted I was awake for his death and watched his agony breathlessly. In my imagination I witnessed a thousand times the terrible violence it brought down upon his wasted body. A thousand times I heard his small lungs struggling to call out through his last breaths. "Sister," he cried, "why don't you help me?"
But I did not help him. Frozen by fear, I could not help him. I believed its grip would catch me, too. I feared the unknown poison in his veins might choke from my body what little life remained inside me.
"Please," he said. I heard his heavy breaths. The sheet that had covered him fell to the floor.
Then he began to whimper, and his cries trailed off, and I was alone. Those boots I had created in my mind moved down the center of the floor toward the exit - hollow, wooden steps that sounded in my head for years after. I did not reach across the aisle to check for Mitsuo's hand as I usually did. Instead I lay still and listened in the dark.
(c) Dennis Bock 2001