Fireflies (28 page)

A vein in my temple began to pulse. I remembered the glow of Ward's cigar in the train carriage, his crinkling face as I unburdened myself to him. My fierce, wounded sense of self-pity, my intense desire for forgiveness.

“He help you write that piece, Hal? Or was it just spiritual encouragement?”

Are you still bothered by what you did up there, Lynch?
I remembered the look of sympathy in his eyes behind the wide spectacles as I'd bowed my head, like a boy in a confessional box.

The big hand on my shoulder, as I told him about my trip to Hiroshima.
You know I'm proud of you, don't you Hal?
That profound feeling of solace. As if he was a priest, granting me absolution from my sins.

“You've been a sap, Lynch, a first-class fucking sap,” Ohara spat. “Radiation disease. They'll give you the Order of fucking Lenin. Thought you were a hotshot, Lynch? Or did you know you were taking pictures for Joe Stalin?”

Wanderly paused, looked at me, then continued.

“I'm going to be frank with you, Hal. You're an intelligent man. Mark Ward is a Stalinist agent. That's a simple statement of fact. Now. There's another war coming soon, Hal. Did you know that? Sad, but true. In fact, it's already begun. There will soon be a time when we will need a strong Japan, Hal, when we will need this country on America's side. This kind of thing could tip the balance. That's why Ward is here. He's no teacher, and he's certainly no librarian. You've been made a fool of, Hal. You can see that now. Bad people have taken advantage of your weaknesses to damage our position. We'd like to give you a chance to show us whose side you're really on.”

Ohara moved from my chair and went to the other side of the table. The room was almost entirely dark now, the map on the wall obscured. Wanderly leaned forward.

“Tell us about Ward, Hal. He's your friend isn't he? He trusts you. He confides in you.”

“What are you asking me, gentlemen?”

“Hal, he's been using you. Don't you see that? You don't owe him a thing.”

“Where are the fucking negatives, Hal?”

Ohara's words reverberated in the darkness. Wanderly smiled thinly, his fingers drumming the manila envelope. I felt a sudden flash of unexpected advantage, like a poker player whose opponents inadvertently reveal the weakness of their hand. I pictured Dutch handing me the envelope. My trumps. Hidden in a cigar box, under the floorboard of the room in a downtown saloon.

“Negatives?”

“Fuck off, Hal!” bellowed Ohara. “You know what we're talking about!”

I leaned slowly back in the chair, holding his gaze.

“What are you asking me, gentlemen?” I repeated.

Wanderly tapped the envelope, the smile lingering on his face. “We're asking you to consider your position, Hal. Your future.”

A thrill of incipient victory flashed through me. I slowly shook my head.

After a long pause, Wanderly sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well.”

He replaced the outlying documents in the dossier and closed it carefully.

“The
New Mexico
is leaving for San Francisco in two days, Lieutenant. You'll be on it.”

I tried not to smile as I pictured the ticket in my jacket pocket. I imagined the moment, six months from now. Standing on the dock at Oakland. Watching the ship steam beneath the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The passengers coming down the gangplank. Satsuko pausing, her dark eyes searching the crowd.

“You can't take the girl, Lynch.”

My heart jolted.

Ohara's face was hidden in the shadows. “Sure,” he said. “We know all about her.”

Another photograph was placed on the desk. Satsuko and I, squinting in the spring sunshine outside the Senso Temple.
Smile!

Eugene. Just the kind of bright, callow boy that Intelligence loved to employ. Ambitious. Venal. Naive.
They started it, didn't they, Hal?

I remembered his sudden stated desire to see something of the world; his unexpected passion for journalism. His nocturnal visit to the newsroom, the night of my return from Hiroshima. The look on his face, as he saw me come into the office the next day, like that of a whipped dog.

“Pretty girl,” Ohara said.

I swallowed. “The
Exclusion Act
won't last six months.”

Wanderly placed a square sheet on the table. I glanced down. The paper was covered with Japanese writing, unintelligible stamps.

“Going to tell what that is?”

Wanderly picked up the sheet, and drew his finger across the ideograms at the top.

“‘Recreation and Amusement Association,'” he read. “How do you like that?”

“You know they register their whores here in Japan, Lynch?” Ohara said. “They're a bureaucratic bunch.”

My stomach quivered, my senses suddenly alert. Wanderly stared at me over his spectacles.

“Not the kind of girl we want in America, Hal. Sorry.”

“Undesirable is what they call it, Lynch.”

“Tend to be crawling with all manner of disease and such. The rules are very clear. She won't make it past immigration. Not now. Not ever.”

A hollow pit opened up in my stomach. Just as I had felt every night, as our plane had lurched from the end of the airstrip, pitching just yards above the churning indigo waves. As I stared at the words and stamps, the green ink blotting into the cheap fabric of the paper, I pictured Satsuko, sitting on the bench by Asakusa Pond, pulling her shawl around her.
An undesirable.

Ohara was gazing steadily at me. “They'll never let her in, Lynch. I will personally make damned sure of that. And you will never come back to Japan, as long as I am here.”

“Let's make this easy, Hal,” sighed Wanderly. “Give us the negatives. Forget about Hiroshima. Forget about the war. Go back to your nice saloon. Make an honest woman of her. You can take that sheet away with you if you like. Start again from scratch.”

I pictured her, helpless in my arms, as we'd stood in the ruins of her house. Clinging onto me, burying her face in my chest. The intensity of that feeling — as if we were the only two people left on earth.

I picked up the sheet and rubbed the rough paper between my fingertips.

“Why don't you start again, Hal. Make a new life from all this ruin.”

A soft explosion came from somewhere far away. The men's voices seemed to spiral around me in the darkness.

“What's it going to be, Lynch?”

“There's another war soon coming, Hal. Sad but true. Whose side are you on?”

“You need to make a decision, Lynch. Them or us. What's it going to be?”

34

THE FLOWERS OF EDO

(SATSUKO)

I waited at Asakusa Pond for what seemed like hours as the rain drummed upon my umbrella and dripped into puddles by my feet. The water soaked through my sandals and into my socks until they were quite saturated. Men walked past my bench, their sly faces lit by glowing cigarette ends as they leered at me from the darkness.

The night was cindery and bleak and I remembered a neighbourhood fairy tale my mother had once told me, about the tap-dancing girls from the Casino Folies, whose ghosts still danced upon the roof of the building, long after it had been closed down. It was just the kind of story she had loved.

Time passed, and I looked at the little wristwatch that Hal had bought me. It was getting late. I began to wonder whether I had made our arrangement quite clear, whether I'd told Hal the correct time and place. I remembered the scent of his cedary cologne, the starched cotton and the swell of his back as I'd clumsily buttoned his shirt that morning. I saw his room in my mind's eye; the pigskin suitcase and the locked typewriter case. A stab of panic went through me. Was he planning to leave? What if he'd already gone? Sailed away for America, without so much as a goodbye?

I tried to recall the times that we'd spoken those past weeks. There had been the joke about taking me to America, of course, but nothing had really been said after that; certainly nothing had been decided one way or another. As far as I knew, I could still just be his Japanese plaything, a temporary mistress. I felt a pang of ridiculous jealousy as I imagined a wife back home. She would be beautiful, I thought, charming, like Ingrid Bergman. With a deep sense of humiliation, I remembered the rash letter I had posted to Michiko, blithely declaring that I'd soon be off to California to take up my new life in the sun. My stomach knotted.

What an idiot I'd been.

I hoped fervently that the letter hadn't arrived, that it had been lost in the post before reaching her studio.

What a stupid, ignorant girl.

Why had I thought he was any different to the other Americans? What vanity had let me flatter myself that I was any different myself? I was just one more girl amongst thousands. I clutched my swollen stomach, picturing myself from above, a pregnant, unmarried woman, sitting in the rain in a soaking kimono, waiting . . . 

A thud of footsteps came from the arched wooden bridge. Hal was stumbling toward me in the rain. As he came closer, I almost screamed. His trousers were ripped along the seam, dark and wet, and buttons were torn from his shirt. He looked at me desperately as I reached up to embrace him, pushing my fingers through his soaking hair, pulling his wet body against me.

“Have you been robbed?” I asked him urgently, cringing as I imagined some brutal gang of ex-soldiers, beating him. “Are you hurt?”

He stood motionless as I buried my face in his chest. I held him for a long moment. Then I realized that he wasn't responding. Something was wrong. I stepped back and looked at him. His eyes were downcast, and his arms hung loosely from his sides. Finally, he lifted his head and gazed at me. He placed his hands upon my shoulders, with a gentle, almost tender motion.

“Hal-san,” I murmured. “What is it?”

His mouth twisted into a terrible smile. Rain dripped down from his hair onto his cheeks.

I somehow knew that something dreadful had happened, something final and irrevocable. A hard lump rose into my throat as I pictured the hours I'd spent in Mrs. Ishino's parlour room that afternoon, as she brushed my hair and softly spoke to me, as if soothing a jittery horse. I'd imagined Hal and I, sitting on this bench in the last of the evening sunlight, his face crinkling, his deep blue eyes filling with wonder as I told him about our baby that was growing inside me. This wasn't how I'd imagined it. No, this wasn't it at all.

He was shaking his head. Over and over, he was shaking his head.

He took my hand. Barely able to swallow, I let him lead me through the park to the battered arcade where we sheltered beneath the eaves of an overhanging stall.

He swept the water out of his hair with one hand, attempting to wring the rain from his dripping jacket. He patted his pockets for his cigarettes, and finally lit one with his metal lighter. His fingers were trembling. Then he turned to me with a terrible smile.

“Well, Satsuko,” he said. “I'm going home.”

Rain tapped on the wooden roof as I looked up at him. With my heart in my mouth, I held a hand up to his cheek.

He stared at me.

A sharp image came into my mind. The day of the surrender, as we'd all knelt down in the gravel of the factory yard, the cicadas whirring, the hot sun on our backs, listening to the emperor's speech. I remembered how, just for a second, my heart had leaped when I thought his Imperial Majesty had said that Japan had won the war; before Mr. Ogura's sudden groan, his pounding fist in the dust.

“Take me,” I whispered. “Please.”

He started to laugh. He took my hand, kneading and squeezing my palm. His laugh became wilder, and suddenly, he dropped my hand and slammed his fist against the wooden shutter of the stall. I leaped with a shriek as it rattled in its frame. He put his head in his hands.

Rain was falling all around us, making patterns in the wide puddles in the gravel path. His clothes were saturated, his face hidden away. A wave of hatred and revulsion suddenly clawed its way through my heart.

Mrs. Ishino had been wrong, after all. I had been right. He was just another American, like all the others.

“I'm so sorry,” he was whispering, pitifully.

So sorry
. I felt a cold sense of calm. He would go. I would stay. “Okay.” I felt a sudden urge to batter his face with my fists. Instead, I leaned down and grasped him under the arm.

“Get up.”

He tried to clutch my hand again, but I slapped him away. Slowly he faced me, dripping in the darkness.

“You,” I said, pointing. “Come.”

I stalked away beneath the scaffold of the Treasure House Gate and into the precincts of Senso Temple. The hem of my kimono was heavy and wet. Stray dogs lurked by the ginkgo stumps and darted around the stacks of timber that lay soaking in the yard.

The rain blew in fine, blustery clouds. At the far side of the shrine, I paused until I heard the American trudging behind me. He was calling out my name. I waited until he was a dozen paces behind me, and then turned sharply down Umamichi Street.

~ ~ ~

The patch of earth was overgrown with tall, wild grasses and littered with saturated lumps of charred wood and broken brick. Ghostly walls seemed to hang around me as I stood and imagined the eel tank, the rows of tables. Up above, the overhanging wooden balcony where we used to sit in the summer as the smell of broiling food floated up in the air. The room where Hiroshi and I used to fall asleep to the sound of the shop sign, creaking like a frog in the summer rain.

The American was standing behind me. I pointed at the black, abandoned earth.

“Here,” I said, in Japanese. “My house.”

He nodded, a muscle trembling in his forehead. He tried to put his hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away.

I sprinkled my fingers in the air.

“Your planes,” I said. “Fire.”

A strange look came over his face, and he slowly squatted down. He looked up into the sky, as if he could see them now, roaring in over Tokyo.

I remembered the first vibration on the horizon, the air quivering like the struck string of a shamisen. The American was weeping, crying like a child left alone in the dark, and I hated him then, and I was glad, because I had never wished to hate anything as much before in my life.

~ ~ ~

The high wind came from the west, batting at the paper lanterns along the alley and rattling the wooden shutters of the shops. The last thing my mother did that night was to feed a few pinches of crumbled rice cracker to the goldfish that she kept in a bowl in the family alcove and which she insisted was a lucky charm against fire.

I woke around midnight to a dull thudding. The roar of the American planes in the sky grew louder and louder until it sounded like a continuous peal of thunder. Then the house was shaking and Hiroshi and I sat up in bed, the room flickering with shadows. Outside the window the sky was as bright as day, filled with whirling orange flame.

Just then, there was a flash and a trail of blue sparks shot across the room. I screamed and leaped out of bed, pulling Hiroshi with me as he struggled to put on his padded air-defence helmet. Together we tumbled down the stairs to go to the underground shelter, but it was already too late. Outside the house, the world was like a glowing orange playground, the wind blowing fiercely hot as incendiary bombs pelted down from the sky. Our screaming neighbours filled the street, dashing wildly to and fro, some with coats over their heads, others trying to throw hopeless buckets of water at the incendiaries as they landed. Mrs. Oka stumbled out of her house carrying her cedar buckets of pickles; the bran was bubbling with heat and smeared along their sides.

I heard my mother's voice calling my name and I looked up: she was leaning over our balcony in her nightclothes, screaming at us to get away.

“Hurry, Mother!” I shouted back at her. “Please hurry!”

I stood there clinging onto Hiroshi's hand as great gusts of hot wind blew around us. A tongue of blue flame was crawling up the eaves to the roof. I screamed at my mother: “Jump, Mother, please jump down!”

She dashed inside, wasting precious seconds, before she finally emerged in a loose blue kimono. The roof of our house suddenly crumpled behind her in a shower of sparks.

Most of the street was on fire now, the flames crackling in great swirls, the heat terribly intense as the fire ate away at the buildings. My mother was in the street now, waving at us. Just then there was a blinding flash behind her. Heat blasted toward us. The store beyond ours that sold cooking oil had exploded. I felt my eyelashes crinkle away and I looked up with streaming eyes. My mother was running toward us, screaming. Her kimono was a sheet of flame and her beautiful hair was a dancing halo of fire. She tottered forward, still holding out her arms, then collapsed onto the ground a short distance in front of us, writhing as the flames devoured her.

People were running past us now screaming, “We're going to die!”

Hiroshi started shouting, refusing to move as I tried to drag him along the street.

“Come on!” I shrieked.

“Father's pot!” he shouted. “I promised him! I need to go back!”

“It's too late!”

Flaming beams crashed around us in showers of blazing sparks. The sky exploded with shells that spurted flame and hissing blue tendrils like blazing morning glory. People were running helplessly toward the Kamiarai Bridge, and we were swept along with them, past the police station and Fuji Elementary School. The shelters at the side of the public market were full of panicked people who pushed away the newcomers, shouting that there was no room left. As we approached the Yoshiwara canal, fireballs began to pelt down from the sky and thick, smoking wind gusted along so strongly that it almost swept me off my feet. We were in hell.

Through the cloud of whirling smoke, I saw that the buildings on the other side of the canal were on fire, red flame belching from inside the windows. The dark water was alive with dashing reflections, bobbing with people who had jumped in, steam rising from its surface. I held Hiroshi's hand, and together we leaped from the concrete bank, splashing down into the scalding water. When we came to the surface, he cried out. His face was yellow as we looked up at the burning buildings on the bank.

“Father!” he started to shriek. “I promised him!”

“Come back!”

I scrabbled for Hiroshi's fingers in the water, but he plunged over and seized hold of the iron ladder that led up to the bank. He clambered up, crouching down as he approached the flames. He turned back to face me, silhouetted by fire.

“Stay there, Satsuko!” he shouted. “I'll come back! I promise!”

It was madness. Overhead, the entire sky was filled with thundering silver planes, so low now that I could see the figures of the pilots behind the glass noses.

“Hiroshi!” I screamed, but he started sprinting along the bank, straight toward the firestorm.

A sharp whistle came from above, and there was a deafening explosion. The water swept up in a great scalding wave. The chemical works along the canal had exploded. The sky turned phosphorus white as I splashed forward and desperately tried to hoist myself up out of the boiling water onto the ladder. The iron rail was scorching and the metal stuck to the skin of my hands. I wrenched them away in agony, the skin tearing away, sticking there like flapping cloth as I rolled onto the bank. People were crawling around me on all fours, their faces black, their clothes all burned away. Blazing timbers crashed into the water behind me and whirling figures screamed in pain as incendiaries pelted the water. I desperately searched for Hiroshi. There was nothing but fire. To the side of the street I saw an irrigation ditch and I crawled blindly toward it. A rushing cloud of black smoke blew toward me, and then the ground disappeared beneath me, and I was tumbling down the steep banks to the bottom.

~ ~ ~

The American was hunched over on the ground, rocking back and forth. I knelt down and wrenched his hand away from his face. It was wet with tears. I forced him to look at me.

“Why?” I asked. “Why?”

His lip trembled as he raised a hand to my face, but again, I struck it away.

“I'm so sorry —” he whispered.

I stood up. “You go. I stay. Okay.”

Leaving him in the wet earth, I strode away, past the ruined houses, along the incinerated alley. I heard a strangled noise behind me, half sob, half shout, but I didn't look back.

Asakusa Market was bustling with people and I walked on until I reached a group of low stalls. There, ignoring the looks brought about by my sodden clothes and tangled hair, I ordered a glass of shochu from the ugly stallholder and drank it down in one before ordering another. The rough liquor burned in my belly, and I drank another glass, and another, before stumbling along the alleys in the direction of Matsugaya, then Inaricho. Without knowing how, I found myself climbing the metal steps of the bridge overlooking the mass of shimmering train tracks that snaked out of Ueno Station.