Touched by the Bomb

Sarah Smith

For the Ozawa family of Nagasaki
d. August 9, 1945

Last week I buried my only child and I may have asked his murderer to the funeral.

Eddie was burned to death on a highway outside Loring, on an icy road up north in Maine. But in Arlington, it was spring. The gun-salute crashing over my boy’s grave shook cherry blossoms from the trees. Across the black soil, through the light fog, they drifted like a message from Akiko. I thought of Akiko and graves.

In the middle of the service, I saw her walking across the misty grass toward me. She was old and unexpectedly elegant, a Japanese matron in a black suit and pearls. In my good black bereaved-mother purse, I put my hand on Dad’s old Service pistol.

I’m crazy, I thought. Johnny Latimer was crazy. Akiko couldn’t have done what he said she did.

But I stood by Eddie’s grave, my hand in my purse where the gun was, and waited for her.

oOo

Forty years ago, just after the Second World War, my family was stationed in Japan. The year I was six, my family took in a Japanese girl named Akiko, and I made up a horror story about her.

I was the only child. We lived in a house in what had been somebody’s rice field, across from a graveyard. Dad was Air Force and spent most of his time in the city, where most of the fathers were doing rebuilding work; but American families with young kids lived out in the country, miles from Hiroshima.

The Air Force base where we went to school had its smells of chalk and linoleum and soap. The American car that drove us back and forth smelled like gas and upholstery cleaner, good solid Eisenhower-era American smells. But in the country, Japan was foreign, fantastic. Every morning I woke up to the soba man ringing his bicycle bell, calling “So-ba, soooo-ba,” with the tin box of fresh tofu in water strapped to his handlebars; I loved the smell of tofu, like edible daffodils. In the spring, when the cherry blossoms fell, the clay roads gave off an earthy smell like bare feet. The misty cemetery by our house was cool and dark, crushed grass and memorial pillars under old willows.

But the new cemetery down the road was crowded and noisy, like a market, full of laundry soap and rice, shoyu and cooking oil, because people lived there.

Thousands of people had survived Hiroshima. In old family tombs shaped like stone houses, four feet long and three feet high—a space smaller than under a table, where even a small Japanese grownup couldn’t lie down straight—whole families were living.

I was part of a gang, I suppose you’d call it, of mostly Japanese kids who hung around the cemeteries. We started by eating the rice and the little blood tangerines, the mikans, that were left as offerings on the graves, but we were kids and hungry, and pretty soon we started stealing from the families. We’d sweep down on an old lady cooking a tiny piece of fish over her coal hibachi and snatch it away from her, or overturn a rice pot and run away laughing with handfuls of the stiff glutinous stuff, hot enough to burn your palms and fingers; then, behind some memorial stele covered with Japanese writing, we’d stuff it into our mouths, giggling. And being a big strong American kid, I stole and ate more than anyone else. Our thin little Japanese friends licked their burnt palms until not a rice grain was left, and the old lady cried when we stole her fish.

Our crime spree couldn’t have lasted too long. I was caught with some caramels I had lifted from a stand in the village. Mom decided I needed to be watched—because she didn’t want me to get sick. Rural Japan then was still very much a Third World country. The nauseatingly sweet-smelling honey-buckets went right from the privies to the vegetable fields; the sparrows came down and fed on the fields; and in the market, the roast sparrows and the unwashed vegetables and the fish from Hiroshima Bay all ended up on the same unwashed wooden stands together. At the American school, we American kids drank our cartons of milk and ate our peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder Bread imported from the States, while our mothers listened to lectures about hookworm. We were supposed to eat only things that came from the PX.

So Mother hired a Japanese girl to watch me, one of those who lived in the new cemetery.

There were three kinds of young women in Japan in those days. Rural girls still wore the kimono, covered their mouths when they laughed, and never talked to Westerners. Bar girls had red lipstick, curled hair and boyfriends. In between were the shy, pretty Japanese girls who had begun to go Western. Akiko was the third kind, whom the base mothers agreed was the only kind worth bothering with. She wore a tiny nickel cross on a chain around her neck, a gift from the Catholic sisters who had taught her; she spoke halting, French-accented English. She wore Western clothes, modest neck-high dresses or sweaters and skirts, but no fingernail polish on her clean square nails and almost no lipstick; this disappointed me, because at six I was fascinated by makeup. Mother approved, though.

“Akiko is a treasure,” Mother said to one of her bridge friends. “Such a pretty girl, but she’s not one of that kind.” I didn’t know what that kind meant, but Mother’s half-whisper said it was something terrible.

In our family photos, Akiko looks sixteen and still a schoolgirl. I remember her as very large, standing protectively over me at ­the corner of some busy street, holding my hand before we crossed together. She took me everywhere. In a crowd at a festival, she held me up to see a gilded shrine bouncing by on the shoulders of chanting Shinto worshippers. In a street market, she bought me painted paper kites, wooden shuttlecocks with the faces of demons, and tin trains that ticked around sharp tin tracks. She made me endless paper dolls and we drew and colored and cut out clothes for them together: girl dolls and boys, paper families. At the playground by our American school, she stood in a crowd with all the other Japanese girls, her arms tucked into the wide floppy sleeves of the cloth coat Mother had given her, waiting for hour on hour while her American child played. She was eager to spoil me and I loved her for it.

But my Japanese friends were afraid of her.

My best friend from the cemetery, Tamiko, was one of a few lucky Japanese children who attended the American school. She knew no more English than I knew Japanese and sat in class hour after hour with her fingers folded, but it seemed somehow important to her parents that she was there, the same way it was important to my parents that Akiko wore her Western clothes and her Christian cross.

After school she and I would go outside and play jacks or swing, things that could be done without knowing each other’s language. But whenever Akiko came over toward us, Tami retreated to the edge of the swing set or the sandbox until she left.

“Akiko hibak’sha,” Tami said.

“Akiko’s nice, she buys me toys. Come on—” I tugged my friend’s arm, but she pulled back.

“Akiko hibak’sha.” Tami looked at my Akiko like the other characters in Dracula looked at Bela Lugosi. As if she were a monster.

“What’s hibakusha?” I asked my mother that evening. I liked the effect of bad words, and hoped it was one, or at least something scary, but didn’t want to be blamed. I added hastily, “Tami called Akiko hibakusha.”

“Don’t you ever use that word, Annie dear, it’s hurtful to Akiko.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means,” my mother hesitated, “someone who lived in the city.”

“Tami lived in the city,” I objected.

“Tami’s family lived on the perimeter.” My mother’s voice took on the low strained tone she used for grown-up words like cancer. “Akiko-san’s house was in the city center.”

She hesitated and a moment later added, “It means touched by the bomb.”

oOo

Akiko’s first victim was Johnny Latimer.

Johnny was one of the psychologists who descended on Hiroshima after the war, a tall, blond, straight-arrow Baptist from the plains of Iowa who’d come to help fix the greatest trauma the world had ever known. His job was studying trauma in survivors, and he loved his work. He did everything right, learned Japanese, really cared for his patients, and if he was just a little bit excited that Hiroshima had come along when Johnny Latimer was ready to write papers about trauma, he wasn’t obvious about it.

Johnny fell hard for Akiko.

Every day he would wander by the playground and talk to her while she waited for us. Because he was easily a foot taller than she was, he’d have to bend down in a funny way and we children would laugh. Little dark-haired Akiko would smile up at tall blond Johnny, her hands tucked in the sleeves of my mother’s cloth coat. Even I, six years old, could see how pretty she was then; she looked like a flower.

One night Akiko told me secretly that Johnny had applied to marry her under the War Brides Act. I started crying because Akiko was going to go away, and then she started crying too. We had to console ourselves by remembering that we would be together again in the United States (which I thought of as small, about the size of Shikoku or maybe even city-sized, since almost everyone at the base seemed to have known each other in the States). Akiko made my favorite paper doll a Shinto wedding costume out of real cloth, red and gold brocade pasted onto a paper backing. The two of us spent hours looking at the pictures in Japanese bride magazines.

The other Japanese girls who worked at the base drew away from Akiko when they knew she was going to be married. Even I saw it. Now she waited for me away from their chattering crowd at the playground. I asked my mother about it.

“Because she is—touched by the bomb—the other girls don’t think she should marry or have any family. But don’t talk about it, Annie dear.”

One spring day not long after, Johnny took Akiko and me to the beach.

On our way we passed the city. From far away, behind the cherry-blossom trees, we saw the acres of blackened rubble and the skeleton dome of the Industry Promotion Hall. Johnny drove blithely past on the new highway, teaching us to sing “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” not mentioning the city outside our windows: something not for me, like eating Morinaga caramels, something not even to notice.

“Tell me about when you lived in the city, Akiko,” I said.

Johnny said, “No, don’t.”

Akiko didn’t sing or look at the cherry trees with all their pink blossoms, only stared out the window as we drove past the city.

We went to one of the long sandy dune beaches on the Inland Sea. It was a thundery day, the sky full of dark clouds and the light intense, lemony, and hot; Johnny’s green Studebaker looked painted in neon. With my tin pail and shovel, I dug holes and looked for crabs under the rocks. Akiko played with me, and then Johnny asked Akiko to take a walk with him into the dunes. I kept playing at the edge of the tide.

After awhile I realized that, except for a Japanese family packing up their picnic some distance away, I was all alone on the beach.

I had an understanding, somehow, that I was to stay on the beach and not go into the dunes after Akiko and Johnny; but I followed them. The dunes were high and difficult to climb. I climbed the first ridge of dune and saw nothing, slid down into the hollow between them. My sweaty legs and feet were covered with blackish sand. The sand rose up out of the hollow in all directions, dark, and there was no stone or blade of grass, only myself alone. Thirsty, I climbed and slid and climbed again; got to the top of yet another ridge; and saw them.

Below me, with their clothes off, Akiko and Johnny were on a blanket, fighting. I had never seen such grownup fury. They both seemed caught in their fight as though they had to do it. He was on top of her and he was really hurting her. She was under him, not struggling to get away, but her face was as pale and set as when we had been driving in the car past the city. There was sand in her pretty hair. His face was red, he yelled too as if she had hurt him and arched away from her, but she wrapped her legs around him to hold him, to keep him meshed in the misery of whatever they were doing. I saw her hand helpless on his shoulder, exactly the same short-fingered square-nailed hand that held mine in the street market. I lost my footing on the sand and slid backward, back out of sight of them, to the bottom of the dune, and I didn’t dare climb up again. I sat crying silently at the bottom of the hill because my Akiko was unhappy and because I had liked Johnny.

I sat underneath the beach umbrella until they came back. The next day, Johnny’s skin was as red and tender as my fingers had been when I had stolen hot rice. Mother called it sunburn but I knew better. It was something that had happened to him because of what I had seen on the dunes.

After their “fight,” in my six-year-old wisdom, I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t get married; but it was for a sad reason. Johnny’s sister in the United States got polio and he had to go home. He was supposed to come back when his sister was better, but he wrote that she died. Then he wrote that both his mother and his father were sick. Finally he didn’t write at all.

Akiko put her bride magazines away.

oOo

I saw that pale, set expression on Akiko’s face again when she looked at Lizard Doyle; and that was when I began to make up my horror story.

Lizard Doyle was a half-bald man whom nobody liked. He had a nice wife and two nice daughters, who went home for a visit not long after Johnny went back to the States; and as soon as they were gone, Major Doyle went after Akiko.

He was an important man on the base, and usually he didn’t spend time on the playground even when his daughters were playing there. But for a week or so he stayed at the playground for a few minutes at a time, talking with Akiko; and then Akiko wouldn’t be there for an hour or more. I had to keep playing on the swings and in the sandbox, pretending that she was there waiting for me. After an hour or so, Akiko would come back with that look on her face, that same quiet, set, expressionless look.

In July, as Mrs. Doyle and her two nice daughters were coming back to Hiroshima, their plane crashed in the Philippine Sea, and Lizard Doyle didn’t even have their bodies to take home.

oOo

I was six, just discovering Nancy Drew, and I liked mystery in real life the way I liked fingernail polish, for decoration. I’d only known two people whose family members had died, and they were both connected with Akiko. Even I knew better than to tell adults about this, but I decided, just the way that Akiko had­ bought me kites and made me paper dolls, she was now providing me with a real Nancy Drew mystery of my own.

I wondered how soon she’d kill again.

For her third victim she chose a man named Royce Sentry, and it was a real scandal on base because he’d been involved in the making of the bomb. Even Mother couldn’t understand why Akiko would get involved with a man from the Los Alamos project.

Royce Sentry was a short, funny, cowboy-looking engineer who wore a big turquoise belt buckle and was always joking about how big his slide rule was. I took a great interest in Royce Sentry. I wanted to know whether he had any little girls or boys, how many brothers and sisters he had, and where his parents lived. He had a huge family on a farm in Illinois. Pleased, I sat back and waited for something bad to happen.

I waited all the time that Royce Sentry applied for marriage with Akiko under the War Brides Act, all the time that Akiko happily looked through bride magazines and had her white Christian gown and her red Shinto kimono made, and every day before their marriage. Even the day of their Christian wedding, when the base commander escorted Akiko down the aisle and gave her away to Royce, I expected some last-minute horrible news.

Nothing happened at all, and they went off to the States.

oOo

That was forty years ago.

My family went home to the States too. I grew up, got married out of high school, got a messy divorce that I’ve never regretted, and raised my boy alone. I have a legal secretary business and Eddie and I did all right.

I never saw Hiroshima. I never have seen it, never even any of those documentaries. I heard things, burned steel, human shadows, but it never sounded like the part of Japan I knew in my childhood and I never wanted to be an expert. Hiroshima wasn’t even the worst bombing in Japan—that was Yokohama, conventional—but because of the reaction people who’ve never been there had to the name of the city, I used to tell people we lived near Nagoya.

Eddie went into the Air Force like his dad and mine, and this May he would have got married to a nice girl named Rebecca Robinson. Saturday night a week ago, he and Becky were driving down the highway and an eighteen-year-old kid with a six-pack of Bud and a rusty Ford pickup slammed into them and killed them both.

Tuesday afternoon, Johnny Latimer called me, and told me what he­ thought Akiko had been doing all these years. He knew about the Sentrys. “She’s a monster,” Johnny said. He gave me Royce Sentry’s phone number.

And hers.

I called her and asked her to the funeral.

“Come sit down on this bench,” I said to Akiko when the service was over, and we both sat down by the edge of the walkway, fifty feet or so from where a man with a little yellow cemetery backhoe was waiting to fill Eddie’s grave. I had my hand inside my good black leather purse. I must have looked as though I was about to reach for my handkerchief.

“I am so sorry,” Akiko said. She still had her trace of accent. I took a good look at her: over sixty but still beautiful; her short, waved black hair was touched with gray. The black suit was linen and the pearls were real, big ones, with the fancy Mikimoto clasp. I wondered who had paid for them. She had the look of a woman who still dresses for men. She didn’t have a wedding ring. I looked straight at her face and saw what I hadn’t seen for forty years, the pale, set, expressionless face of Akiko who had stared out the window at Hiroshima.

I opened my purse and let her see inside, where my hand was resting on the rough sawcut grip of the old Air Force pistol.

And then I told her the story I had made up forty years before, the one I had remembered when Johnny spoke to me.

“I talked to Johnny Latimer last Tuesday,” I said. “His sister died, then both his parents. He decided to marry a girl back home and then she died too. He thinks you did it all.”

Her expression didn’t change; she folded her hands in her lap. They were exactly the hands I remembered, short-fingered with clean square nails, the hands that had held mine crossing the street, the hands she had tucked into the sleeves of Mother’s coat. That made it harder.

“I phoned Royce Sentry in Illinois. He divorced you in 1957. By that time four of his brothers and sisters had died, three of their children. His last brother has got throat cancer now and Royce is the only other one of the family left alive.

“After the divorce, you married one of Royce’s Project friends and you moved to California. Lizard Doyle saw you there—I called him too. Your new husband’s family was dying off,” I said.

She sat looking at the gun.

“Tell me it’s just a story,” I said. “Or do it to me too. I can’t live without Eddie.”

She was supposed to tell me I was crazy. She was supposed to be a monster and kill me. None of that happened. We two women sat on the bench, a middle-aged legal secretary from Connecticut and an elegant Japanese woman almost in old age.

“Why my boy?” I burst out. The way poor Johnny Latimer had yelled out at me, “Why’d she kill my sister?” Why’d it have to happen to me and mine? Eddie was an Eagle Scout, and for my birthday one year he made me a board mounted with fourteen different types of knots. “After he got sick one Saturday night in high school, he never drank more than one beer. He was just about to get married.” He wasn’t supposed to die. I wished he’d been a biker, spent every night in bars, and got some girl in trouble, rather than this. “He was innocent.”

Akiko pressed her full lips together slightly, the way she had looked at the black rubble of Hiroshima. Across the field of white stones, the little yellow tractor waited to bury my boy, and finally I heard the grinding of its gears and the quiet scrape of its shovel.

“Did Dad do anything—? Some evening when Mom was at a bridge party and I was in bed?”

Akiko looked at me and let herself blink once, as if she had never thought it might be that simple. “How innocent we are,” she said. “As if death is kind and fair, like a responsible person.”

She didn’t look at the gun again, but sat beside me with her quiet, set face. She didn’t try to convince me I was wrong or crazy from grief. She didn’t ask me why I had called her, after forty years, and why I had brought a gun with me.

She sat there in the silence with me, in the white misty rows of graves, and let me ask Why my boy, as if Akiko who had held my hand across the street and provided me with a Nancy Drew mystery could still give me clues. If she had been a monster, like Johnny had thought, she would have given me an answer. But all she had was the expression on her face, which wasn’t some glare like a monster that killed everyone her victims loved. I had seen the same face in my mirror after the police awakened me. My own face made me cry.

Can you control it? I wanted to ask her—as if a sixteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirl would know how to do anything to a soldier’s people thousands of miles away. And it came to me she couldn’t, she had loved Johnny and Royce the way she probably loved the man who’d paid for those pearls. The way, all that time ago, she’d loved me.

“Are you afraid?” I asked. I was afraid.

“Of being caught?” she asked, and for a moment her face was tired, an old woman’s. “Of the bomb?”

I slipped my hand out of my purse and snapped the catch closed, holding it shut with my two closed fists.

“Tell me about Hiroshima,” I said.

And she told me about the countryside I remembered. She talked about Hinamatsuri dolls, the gilded Shinto shrines, the taste of rice and caramels. She took a snapshot out of her purse (it was a good black leather purse, like mine). All I could see was a picnic at a beach, gestures with blurred faces: a young mother holding up a baby, a boy making a face, a woman serving food, a man holding up a bottle of beer. He was in the uniform of the Imperial Japanese Army; he’d probably been back on leave after burning Philippine villages or chasing civilians through Burma. The reasons why Akiko’s father should have died were as strong as the reasons why Eddie should have lived. She talked about fishing on Hiroshima Bay with her father and about the soba-man’s bicycle coming down her street in the early morning. I remembered.

“Thank you for coming,” I told Akiko. “You’ve helped me.”

We shook hands. I watched her walk away across the grass toward her black car.

I still don’t know how she does it any more than she does. I don’t have to know.

Tomorrow I’m going to see an eighteen-year-old boy arraigned for drunk driving and manslaughter. His name is Terry Cogswell, a senior at Loring AFB high school. He never drank much except for that one night. He’s a good athlete and had a scholarship to U of Maine next year. Probably, once he gets out of this, he’ll still go to college, have a career, get married.

He has five brothers and sisters. He has a girlfriend.

I don’t hate him, I understand him, and that’s good, because he reminds me a lot of Eddie, and of me. He’s innocent.

Tomorrow, at the courthouse, I’m going to touch his arm or look into his eyes, nothing more than that, and I’m going to tell him one fact. I will be the one to tell him this fact, I will be responsible for this fact. It will come from me and from Akiko, from that family in the photograph, from Eddie and Becky, from the lost city of Hiroshima, from all of us, the victims and the monsters. There is no innocence. There is no safety. Some people may think so, but not you, never any more you.

You have been touched by the bomb.

Remember.

Live.

The End

Copyright © 1995 by Sarah Smith

First published: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 1995