Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

The young man opens his eyes. He still looks in a bad way, but he speaks to the young woman in Japanese. Their conversation is agitated. The Japanese girl lifts her hand to her mouth. Beate reacts: flash, flash, flash.

The boy shakes his head, apparently incredulous. The girl races to the driver’s side of the bus, yanks open the door and climbs in.

Beate asks the young man what the hell is going on. He stares at her, runs his fingers mechanically through his blonde hair.

“Come!” the girl shouts. She beckons Beate “To hospital!”

The boy starts to move. “They put a poisonous jellyfish on my chest,” he repeats in English. “It stung me. I could die.”

“Come!”

My father had gone to the mainland. I wanted to show Crow the place where he spent most of his time reading and hatching his plans. We had gone up to the eagle’s nest. There was something absent about Crow that day, as if he had forgotten something very important. I talked. He turned his back to me, rested his foot on the stone rampart that encircled Hashima and looked out across the sea. “You look like a pirate heading out into the briny deep,” I said. He wasn’t the same as before. I felt that I was making a fool of myself. He looked back at me and grinned, but I could still see his remoteness. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do, Mitsuko,” he said, as if he’d made a decision. In the couple of months that we had grown closer to one another the boy had changed. There was strength in his shoulders and the fluff on his upper lip had darkened. A desire to conquer twinkled in his eye, a need to show the world what he was made of.

“Later, perhaps, the two of us,” I said bluntly. I noticed him pull back his head slightly, but didn’t have the time to think about what it might mean. He was a little flustered, told me he had been selected to get some experience in one of my father’s smuggling organisations. He had to go to China, wasn’t sure for how long. When he came back he would no longer be a novice, fit only for unloading crates. His enthusiasm increased as he spoke. The wind played with my skirts. I felt ridiculous. I hadn’t put on a furisode that day, the classical kimono my father insisted I wore, but a dress. For him. Instead of looking at me he just stared out to sea, longing to leave, to be far from here.

“What about me?” The words were out before I was aware of it.

He seemed surprised. “We stay friends. I’m coming back.”

“When?”

Now he seemed shy. Or didn’t he understand? Had it taken him this long to realise what he had done to me?

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you think about me when…?” The lump in my throat took over. Sadness engulfed me.

“What do you mean, Mitsuko?” He had the cheek to ask me what I meant. Did he want to push the knife in even deeper? I moved closer. We stood eye to eye. He opened his arms, laughed, and shouted: “How could I stay away? Crow always comes back! And when he does he’ll have a present with him, a present just for you from China, caw, caw!”

He flapped his arms wildly and laughed, laughed. A shadow flew over him; it was as if a giant crow had crashed down on him. I covered my head with my arms. A scream, swallowed in an instant by the wind.

He was already tiny, like a doll, when I leaned over the balustrade and watched him fall to the rocks below, his arms and legs flailing. The caw of a mocking crow filled my ears. I turned, could hardly believe my eyes. The Lord of Lies had tossed my only chance of love into the sea.

My father stared at me. His eyes absorbed the light.

“Are you the one who brought the patient in?”

The senior doctor at Funairi Hospital doesn’t speak the same standard of English as the young doctor who checked Beate in at the reception. He’s standing several meters behind his boss now. Beate nods. She’s cross. She and the girl called Yori brought the young Belgian in over an hour ago. He had been rambling and was unable to stand up without support. They had helped him out of the van and walked him into the hospital. His body was warm and feverish. Yori disappeared at the reception. She had muttered something, but Beate couldn’t remember what. She presumed she had gone to the toilet. Beate was angry because she was having a hard time explaining to the triage nurse that the boy was in a very bad way. She was so frustrated it took a while before she realised that Yori had cleared off. Luckily the triage nurse finally got the message and called a doctor who could speak English. The boy was in a wheelchair by this time and seemed to be only half conscious. The doctor checked his temperature and pulse. He asked Beate if he had taken drugs. She tried to make it clear that she didn’t know him, that she’d found him near the river, that there was a Japanese girl with them who did seem to know him, but that she had disappeared. It dawned on her as she spoke that her story didn’t add up and that she could be accused of having stolen the van with the demon painting: “The Japanese girl said he had been stung by a poisonous jellyfish. Funakondji, or something?”

“You mean Irukandji?”

Beate sighed. “Could be. A jellyfish. Poisonous. I didn’t believe him. I told you: there was a girl, a Japanese girl…”

Less than a minute later, the young Belgian was on a gurney being wheeled at top speed into emergency.

“You’re the one who brought the patient in,” the senior doctor repeats. Perhaps that’s the only English he can manage?

“Yes, anyone would have done the same,” says Beate. She’s aware that she sounds grumpy. “I told you… there was a girl with us who clearly knew the guy. It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m just a tourist. Can I go now?” The senior doctor and his assistant exchange a few words, seem nervous. The young doctor steps forward and makes a shallow bow. His English is much more acceptable: “The police have already been informed, madam. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for them.”

The clouds hung low and dark over my father’s boat. We were at sea, heading in the direction of Takahama from Hashima Island. It was June 13th 1994. I’ll never forget it. The rising sun was doing its best to tear holes in the clouds creating pools of dazzling white light. I was holding on to the rails and my knuckles were white too. That morning, the day after Crow fell over the balustrade, my father forced me to get into the boat. I hadn’t slept a wink that night, felt dizzy and lightheaded, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Crow was like a long forgotten dream that returns to haunt you from time to time in fragments.

An elderly disciple was at the helm, his gaze fixed on the horizon. The waves seemed viscous and metallic. The morning sun etched swathes of Hashima black. The concrete wall surrounding the island varied in height. From this distance Hashima looked just like Gunkan, the giant warship with which the island is always compared. My father appeared from the cabin and pointed one of his unnaturally long fingers towards the island.

“What do you think? That I like living there?” He turned to look at me, a movement that always reminded me of a salamander twisting its supple neck. His black eyes were like glass. “Someone with my blood? My lineage? Locked up on an island everyone thinks is abandoned, a forgotten rubbish dump in the middle of the sea?”