Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

There was a long silence. Xavier got to his feet and thanked the man. On his way to the door he turned and asked. “Is that what killed her. Burns from the oil?”

The man pursed his lips and heaved a deep sigh. “The police found a melted cigarette lighter next to what was left of her wheelchair.”

Another long silence. The blood had drained from Xavier’s face and he was about to leave when the counsellor stood up: “Can I ask you something? How did Anna end up in a wheelchair? She always refused to talk about it.”

My fear is an embarrassment. But it’s so immense it has me shaking uncontrollably from head to toe as if I had a fever. The same shadows and underground caverns that terrorised me as a child are pushing me to the edge of hysteria. The blindfold Reizo tied around my head has slipped a little. My hands are tied behind my back with what feels like a strip of rubber. I can see vague slivers of light and there’s a cold wind blowing down the corridor. I hear Reizo open the iron door. I’m afraid I might stumble and fall onto the rails. I can smell metal and the same putrid stench I noticed earlier, like rotting fish. I don’t understand how Reizo managed to overpower me since I’m stronger than him. I freeze at the idea. A paralysing electrical charge runs through my body.

“Keep moving.” He sounds irritated. I hang my head. He pulls at me, but I refuse to move, like a workhorse that’s decided it’s a donkey. He walks around me, pokes his pistol in my belly.

“Keep moving.”

I focus my head butt on his voice, pay no attention to the pistol or the fact that it might go off. I see stars. The blindfold has slipped even further and I can now see with one eye. Reizo has staggered backwards. His nose is bleeding. But he’s still on his feet and my hands are still tied behind my back. I race past him, but it’s hard to run. The head butt has left me dizzy. A wound above my exposed eye begins to bleed, making it even more difficult to see. The rails are glistening and in the distance I can see a light with a blue halo around it. I begin to tremble once again. A reflected metallic light on the tunnel wall is getting steadily closer. I stand between the rails. The questions that have plagued me all my life, the pain and the loneliness, the doubts and the inner turmoil, everything suddenly focuses on this moment. I want to die. I know it. Life has been a trial and there’s no escaping my father. How can I ever find a lover, ever start a family?

I stand on the rails. I feel nothing. The approaching light turns into a miniature sun. I bow my head. The blood in my eye shrouds everything in darkness, but I know that the darkness can be transformed at any moment into a flash of light. Something heavy hits me on the back and I fall to one side. Hands push me like a ragdoll against the tunnel wall. The pain in my limbs is so intense I can’t fight back.

Then: shuddering, a rush of air that evolves into a deafening trumpet blast, a passing tornado, the stench of warm metal. I lie still, overwhelmed by the power of the train that has missed us by a hair’s breadth.

His voice is close by, dark and nasal: “If you don’t want to know what I’m capable of, don’t try to hurt me.”

I already know what he’s capable of.

So what’s the deal with inspector Takeda, Adachi asks himself on his way to the police station. The doctor knows Takeda has always seen himself as an outsider and for that very reason he always played it by the book. Not anymore, Adachi suspects. He has heard plenty of rumours about Takeda’s infamous intuition , exaggerated no doubt during noisy police get-togethers in the city’s karaoke bars. Does his farfetched theory about the bank robbery and now that dead baby have anything to do with that intuition, or has Takeda been able to finally put together the pieces of some complex puzzle? It’s been one scandal after another of late: police bribery, even police involvement in bank robberies. The crisis has had some bizarre consequences: the pride post-war Japan achieved through its industrial superiority is slowly evaporating. And we can’t live without pride, Adachi thinks to himself. We’re losing the plot, especially the younger generation with their painted hair and their crazy underground culture. They’ve turned their back on us and our values. They forget how we did without after the war. They forget about the typhoid, the lice, and the obsessions: eat now , drink now , find shelter now . We tried to survive in spite of the diseases and the radioactive residue. The horrors we had to look at were beyond belief. Skeletons walked the streets and at night you could hear the dead, the blistering dead, weeping, vomiting, coughing, mumbling.

No wonder I enjoy a drink, thinks Adachi as he pulls into the car park in front of the police station. He looks up. It’s dark already and he imagines that he can see a tiny light far above his head that can unfold at any moment into a tempest of fire, scorching and devouring everything in its path.

The police doctor smiles as he informs the duty officer that he’s come to pick up a couple of documents. He takes the lift to the basement. His hands are sweaty, his forehead burning. How did that hanhan Takeda, that fucking half-breed, manage to turn my head with those crazy stories of his about wartime treasures so big that a senior police commissioner wasn’t even afraid to have one of his own inspectors eliminated just to keep a lid on things?

He makes his way to cold storage where they keep the corpses prior to post-mortem, opens box 23 and pulls back the sheet covering the body. The misshapen head of the baby found at the Peace Monument appears. Its eyelids are dried up and shrivelled by the cold and the corpse appears to stare at him in terror. Adachi examines the right heel and instinctively holds his breath.

A sign, Takeda had said. It might be a sign.

Of what?

Reizo has prepared every detail of my imprisonment here in the service area next to the metro tunnel. That means he’ll keep his word and come back for me. There’s a writing pad and some ballpoint pens on a chest I’m expected to use as a desk. My left hand has been handcuffed to a pipe. The place is damp and stinks of stagnant water. The metro workers use it to store replacement track, bolts and other material. It’s stacked up behind me on racks. When Reizo handcuffed me at gunpoint I could see his bruised and bloodied face at close quarters. His eyes sparkled, his movements were jerky. He didn’t seem to have much control over his body, but he was still rational about the situation, and that worried me. He left a battery operated desk lamp for me. The shadows here remind me of Hashima. If I look away from the light too long I begin to have trouble breathing. I’ve lived a life in the shadows and it looks as if I’m going to die in the shadows. What is life? You turn a corner and in the blink of an eye you’re face to face with death. Nothing prepares you and you can’t believe your time has come. Has my time come? The will to live is unfathomable. Moments ago I was thinking about suicide, now I can’t believe that this is the way I’m going to die. Reizo promised time and again that he would come back and let me go: “What else can I do? You’re my muse. I need you.” His mind is damaged, I’m sure of that, but I’m also convinced he’s a man of his word. He kept saying he wanted to integrate my life into his novel because it’s so “extraordinary and contradictory”.