The Ash Garden Read online

  The Ash Garden

  Dennis Bock

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Emiko

  A Bowl of Light, 1945–46

  Port Elizabeth, 1995

  Emiko

  Journeys, 1938–1957

  Spring 1995

  Emiko

  The Parting Gift

  Emiko

  Echoes

  Emiko

  Acknowledgements

  An Interview with Dennis Bock

  The Facts Behind the Fiction

  Recommended Reading

  Also By Dennis Bock

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  for my mother and father

  Epigraph

  What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.

  Goethe, Faust

  Prologue

  The Bantai Bridge

  AUGUST 6, 1945

  One morning toward the end of the summer they burned away my face, my little brother and I were playing on the bank of the river that flowed past the eastern edge of our old neighbourhood, on the grassy floodplain that had been my people’s home and misery for centuries. It was there I used to draw mud pictures on Mitsuo’s back with a wide-edged cherry switch, which I hid in a nearby hickory bush when it was time to go home. I liked its shape and how it felt in my hand, like a fine pen or paintbrush. I scooped up mud from the bank and shaped it into pictures of all sorts: trees, fishes, animals. The day my parents were killed I’d decided to paint my grandfather’s face. I had turned six just a few weeks earlier. Mitsuo, my little brother, was only four years old and three months.

  I enjoyed the way the black mud quivered like a fat pudding and glistened in the clear morning sunshine as I held it up to my face. When I fingered the first dab to apply to the cotton of his white shirt, I felt a child’s pleasure in making such a mess, which we were always punished for; but I was also excited to be able to create something almost beautiful from this thick smelly puddle. Whenever my brother squirmed I threatened to call off our game and march him home. I knew he liked getting dirty, and enjoyed the tickle of my stick on his back. Sometimes he tried to guess what I was drawing there between his shoulder blades. I knew this because his fidgeting stopped and he was silent, concentrating with all his energy on the image I held in my imagination. It was as if he were looking with my own eyes at the drawing emerging before me. But today he was impatient. At first he was unable to follow in his mind’s eye the lines of the cherry switch. Something had made him anxious, I thought. After a few minutes, though, I settled him down and my grandfather’s old wrinkled face began to take shape in earnest.

  I did not choose to draw my grandfather for any particular reason. Of course I had seen him earlier that morning, as I did every day. His face was fresh in my mind, I suppose. And so, with a dab and a blob here and there and a simple sweeping circle, accurately placed, the old round mouth slowly appeared. Next I added his crooked teeth. I drew the eyes closed and tufts of hair sprouting from the top of his head. At the sides, below the small pits of my brother’s underarms, I placed the floppy, exaggerated version of the ears we often teased our grandfather about.

  As a whole the portrait bore at best a crude resemblance, perhaps recognizable to those who knew him, perhaps not. But it did look like a face, and that was good enough for me. I continued to bend and scoop mud from the bank and apply it, with increasing delicacy and accuracy, to my brother’s back. To capture the shading under the eyes and his light mustache, I employed a thinner paste, which I made by letting less water drain from between my fingers before touching it to the cotton shirt. During this lighter dabbing, Mitsuo began to giggle and shift again. I stopped and told him in a stern voice to hold still. He knew he had to listen, because I was his older sister. When we were away from our parents I made the rules.

  That’s when we heard the plane. We both looked up at the same time. It was still very high in the air and a good distance away, trailing a white plume of smoke in its wake. I knew that this was a B-chan and that we should run home, as we had been told often enough. But it was farther off than the other planes that regularly flew high above our city on their way to and from the war. We waited for some time, watching in a sort of excited trance. Water swirled about my ankles. I marvelled as a dark round object, like a bloated body with dark skin, was released from the plane’s belly.

  Mud slid from the cup of my hand and plopped at my ankle into the river and was carried away by the rushing water. The falling man seemed in no great rush to join us down here, as if enjoying, while he could, a beautiful and rare glimpse of the world below. I saw a second plane then, and a third, both farther away than the first and headed in the opposite direction. I turned back to the falling body and imagined it landing with a thud. I imagined people gathering around, reaching out to feel the foreign skin, the broad nose so unlike the small nose on my own face. I imagined how the circle would part when the authorities arrived to take him away. I hoped that he was a spy and that he would be caught and punished for the bad things I had seen happen since the war began, what it had turned my father into.

  I stepped deeper into the river, almost to the knees, and began to rinse the mud from my arms and legs. “Mitsuo,” I called, “come into the water. It’s time to leave.”

  It was my responsibility to get my brother home whenever we saw planes that were not ours. But Mitsuo ignored me. His back was turned. That recently painted face glared back at me. I knew what my brother was thinking. Sometimes we played a game when we saw our own planes above us. We imagined that they flew over Hiroshima in order to drop sweets and toys and puzzles, and when they passed beyond the horizon our job was to set to finding them, often believing that if we wished hard enough the falling parcels might drift in our direction. That’s what he was doing now, I thought, hoping for this strange dark package to drop somewhere in our neighbourhood.

  “Come here now,” I ordered. I had just about finished washing the mud off my hands and arms. “That’s just a game, you know. There are no toys up there. That’s the wrong sort of plane.” But he seemed content to ignore me, despite the fact he must do as his older sister said. He licked his lips, still watching the strange object fall. I saw his eyes—then his whole body—turn away from the scene that had interrupted our morning game. The glint of a smooth stone had stolen away his attention. It glistened at his knees in the brilliant morning sun, and suddenly it began to glow and the stone rose up from its mud pocket, which in an instant turned hard-baked and grey, and then I could not breathe and my mouth became a desert and the air jumped alive with objects that never had flown before.

  Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University

  AUGUST 6, 1995

  1

  Anton Böll especially liked the smell of the place. The lecture hall was finished with dark wood and the sweating bodies of the assembled there that day coaxed a sweetness from the worn oak panelling and bookshelves. Through the window overlooking Amsterdam Avenue the mid-afternoon sun entered the room and warmed the left side of his slight, wilting frame. He lifted his eyes from the small typed script laid before him on the deeply grained surface of the lectern, then glanced up at the ceiling fan thumping slowly above his audience, and as he began to speak Anton Böll observed the many particles swirling in the disturbed air and the light slanting through the tall, church-like windows.

  At the back of the hall a late arrival pushed open the door. Anton waited, adjusting his glasses. The woman took the first seat in the last row. A chair leg scraped against the floor.

  Silence. Then he began:

/>   “Fifty years ago, my colleagues and I gathered around a radio in Robert Oppenheimer’s office, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, waiting for official confirmation of what, for all of us there, had been a life-long dream.” The authority carried in his words was heightened by his thick accent.

  He straightened his back, paused a moment and conceded, “And as we all know, dreams sometimes become nightmares.”

  Anton Böll, Professor Emeritus, knew how to capture his audience’s attention. After years of public speaking he had found that a slight hint of contrition at the beginning of such an address helped to prepare the point about to be made. He’d been a pillar at the Niels Bohr Memorial Lecture Series, most often held at Columbia and the New School, but also, for a number of years, at NYU, since participating in the Pugwash Conference in Nova Scotia thirty-eight years earlier. He was an old hand, a polished performer. At seventy-seven, he was practically as old as the various lecture halls he brought his message to; and even to those who knew neither him nor his work and reputation, it was easy enough to see, listening to one of his talks, that he was a man with a particular and unforgiving point, which was that the nightmare, terrible as it had been, would always be overshadowed by the majesty of the dream.

  “The pivotal event of the twentieth century continues to resonate today,” he said, “regardless of race and nationality, age and ideology. We have one and all been touched by this nightmare. Permit me now, however, to comment on the nature and necessity of the dream in relation to its darker brother.”

  Come August he liked to keep his eye on things down here in New York. In private conversations he said he wanted to ensure that the truth was being told, and considered his participation part of his duty to those who could not defend themselves, or the time they had spent in the world, doing the things which had won them such distinction. These people generally did not have names. Some were dead colleagues, whom he never mentioned directly in any of his talks or lectures or conversations. They were not specific people, really, nor were people the point. The focus, more accurately, was on the ideas these people had represented and fought for in their living years, which he still held dearly and even desperately to his heart. So every August he guaranteed himself a room at the Gramercy Park Hotel and mounted from there his defence against those whose peculiar and highly personalized sense of the world would rewrite the history he had seen, lived through, and helped shape.

  He saw the faithful relating of this pivotal event and the circumstances that led to it as his last responsibility to those men, to those ideas, to himself. We must not forget the context of a world at war with itself, he often said. We must remember what we were up against. He almost always kept his tone civil and, he thought, balanced. His was generally meant to be a formal presentation. Let the young ones rant and rave. On those occasions in the sober, well-lit halls of NYU and Columbia and the New School he spoke convincingly to the gatherings of academics, many of them his contemporaries. He wore a suit and tie, correct shoes, even a flower in his lapel. Uniformly reverent, he never failed to mention the victims. Most important on such an occasion, he would say. He would not tolerate the suggestion that those involved had worked in isolation from the ethical concerns surrounding this new science. These were hard decisions, made by studious and good men mindful of their responsibilities to mankind. Yes, in a perfect world it could have been otherwise, only in a perfect world. . . .

  When Emiko Amai approached after the conclusion of his address at Columbia that afternoon, he felt, if only for a moment, the wavering of life-long convictions. He did not have to look twice to know who she was. He knew her scar as if it were his own. He knew also that convincing her of anything would be difficult, and that his opportunities were no longer so numerous. At fifty-six, she was old now herself. He saw it in her face. He felt it in the weakening in his heart.

  He might choose to listen politely to her criticism, more likely her damnation, which he knew was her right to cast, for it was clear she was not a woman who had come in support of his ideas. He knew her by reputation and by the sign that marked her, that unusual and other-worldly sheen on the left side of her face, which he well knew suggested skin grafting. He knew its shape, imprinted there between her eye and jaw like a map of some rugged, dreadful country. He had seen it many times before, always from afar. But now, from this close vantage point, he saw the wreckage that had once been there, and the skilled touch of the surgeons’ hands.

  He was no stranger to this sort of ambush, which was not uncommon during these hot and emotional summer days. He’d been sought out often enough to know he had to prepare in advance for whatever words came: war criminal, butcher, mass murderer. He had learned to hold his tongue. To offer the silent respect each of his accusers deserved, without, of course, ceding a single point. Sympathy and understanding was one thing; emotional blackmail and sensational tirades was quite another. He would not budge. His testimony did not deny the pain that had been caused. He had no intention of minimizing or forgetting the brutality of that single blinding Monday morning. He was not an animal. Yet cold hard fact must remain just that: cold, hard, scientific.

  Now he braced himself to hear this very accusation, and from this woman.

  He had seen many such children—adults now—over the course of his New York memorial visits. Many dozens of men and women arrived from Japan every summer, sickly and scarred and often close to death, their numbers diminishing with each consecutive August, to gather in front of the United Nations and make their presence known. But he did not confuse this woman with the other Japanese he had seen earlier that day. She was well dressed, in a style clearly more Western than Oriental. She moved differently, too, more fluid, easier in her body. Hers were not the stiff, deferential limbs and abrupt kinetic statements of the type of victim he had come to know in his many years among these people. She was easily his height, if not an inch taller, and thin. Her hair, cut to the shoulders, showed streaks of grey.

  Emiko Amai offered a hand. Anton Böll took it.

  The lecture hall was emptying.

  “I’m interested in hearing more of what you said up there tonight,” she said. Her English was better than his own, wholly unaccented, which pleased him.

  “Yes?” Having seen her work, he knew she would be unwilling to listen for very long to his ideas of necessary evil and historical context. But at the same time, wasn’t she his perfect audience?

  “I’m sure my father would have said the same thing. That such a decision, any decision, is justified in the heat of war. What befalls the aggressor, and so on. He thought like that, too. Of course, his was an older generation. But we’ve evolved since then, I think.”

  He waited for the assault to begin—war criminal, crime against humanity—as he studied her face. “We must remember,” he said, with rote precision, “that for many it’s next to impossible to view such a necessity in its proper context.”

  She nodded. “I understand. Yes, that’s why I wanted to talk to you.” She pulled a card from a pocket.

  He accepted it and reached for his glasses, angling the card to catch the light from the window. Yellow Crane Films. “I see,” he said. “You would like to film part of the Bohr Lecture Series?”

  “No. I’d like to talk to you about your role in the making of the bomb. I’m preparing a documentary. In the documentary the interviews will be less formal, less rehearsed.”

  “You might need a Ouija board,” he said. “Most of us are dead.”

  She smiled. “Of course. I know that.”

  “Nuclear madness, I imagine? Is that the point?”

  “No. I don’t begin with themes. I begin with time and place and event. Themes reveal themselves later, if at all.”

  He nodded his head, then removed his glasses and placed them in his breast pocket. “I see. Nothing but the truth.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

 
He took her elbow and led her towards the hallway, like a gentleman scholar proceeding to his next lecture. Their footsteps echoed.

  “I’ve talked to dozens of people,” she said, “all somehow involved, in their own way.”

  “And you come to me.” He smiled. “I should be flattered.”

  He examined the card when he got back to the hotel. He had not stopped thinking about the meeting this Japanese woman had proposed. Now he considered if he wanted to talk to her as badly as that. She’d solicited his point of view; that, in itself, was surprising. But once you give your words to people like this, you don’t know what might happen. Your words can be brutalized. Ironically laid over tortured images of burnt babies and vacant eyes. Something short of historical accuracy, although highly sensational. This was nothing like the cold, hard facts he required. Yet she had offered him a point of entry—and time was running out. At least he would have her ear for the time it took to complete what she had in mind. He knew she might manipulate what was said in the hope of somehow offering to the world a portrait of the man she thought he was, but the truth of his words would stay with her.