Bob van Laerhoven - Return to Hiroshima

Xavier Douterloigne still has problems with his balance. They told him to be patient, that it would get better. He might never be the same as he was, but after such a lengthy period of recovery he has to be grateful he’s alive. He looks back at his stay in hospital as one of life’s lessons. It gave him time to think things over, but more than anything else to dream. His calm exterior still conceals a sense of guilt, a desire to return to a childlike state of grace. Xavier is now aware that he has to realise his own grace.

He’s taking a stroll in Hiroshima’s Hijiyama Park. He’s in no hurry. Every step is filled with hesitation, as if he’s walking on unstable ground. He has a better eye for detail than before. The Yamazakura cherry blossom trees have yet to bloom, but their buds are already visible. Xavier makes his way to the tenth tree, standing neatly in the row, exactly as it was more than ten years ago. He sits at the foot of the tree and closes his eyes.

Xavier and Anna buried the time capsule in Hijiyama Park on Anna’s eleventh birthday. They were in the southern part of the park, surrounded by the pink of fluttering Yamazakura cherry blossoms, when they popped the tin box in a hole in the ground at the foot of the tenth tree, which extended its branches above them like a fan. Anna had a serious expression on her face. She always believed wholeheartedly in the things she did. Xavier was different. He felt a little giggly, but he was still impressed by the importance of the moment.

“Why here, on holiday, Anna? Why not in Tokyo?” Xavier didn’t tell her that he planned to dig up the capsule once in a while to look inside and to play with the toy car he had contributed to the box’s contents. They had filled the box with Anna’s poems, Xavier’s most cherished model car – a Porsche 956K Hockenheim –, a lock of each other’s hair, an old medal that once belonged to their mother, and a pen belonging to their father.

“Because this is the City of Peace and love,” said Anna, still serious. She gestured towards Hiroshima to their left below the park.

“It’s also the city of death,” said Xavier. He had read it somewhere. Xavier pictured death as a long journey over stormy oceans filled with monsters and the like.

“Don’t be so pig-headed,” said his sister. That’s what she always said when she wanted to get her way. “Say after me, Xavier: this time capsule seals our love as brother and sister. In ten years time we will dig it up again and still love one another.” Xavier felt slightly embarrassed and lowered his gaze, but he repeated his sister’s words nonetheless.

“As brother and sister we will do everything to make each other happy,” Anna continued. ‘Everything’ sounded like an awful lot to Xavier. Anna was eleven, a year older than him, and sometimes a little bossy in his eyes. But Xavier still looked up to her, her quick-wittedness, the way she brushed her hair, stuck out her chin, and then, out of the blue, without warning, her fears at night when she had a bad dream and asked if Xavier would get in beside her. When he did, the world suddenly seemed much smaller, as if they were in a space ship on a long journey to a world more beautiful than Earth.

They dug with their hands; the soil was sticky. When they were finished stamping the soil flat again, Anna looked at her brother – still serious –, took him by the arms and kissed him on both cheeks. At that moment a cloud of butterflies flew out of a nearby cherry blossom tree and surrounded their heads in pastel coloured wings and feelers. Anna and Xavier followed the swarm as it nestled in another tree. “They’re our witnesses,” said Anna. It was as if a large wheel had turned in Xavier’s head; a vague and nameless feeling filled his chest. “Now we have a secret,” Anna continued. “Our life will never be the same again.”

“ Shoganai,” said Xavier. He wasn’t exactly sure why he said what he did. It was a word he had borrowed from the adults who surrounded him.

Sitting under the tree in Hijiyama Park, Xavier Douterloigne decides that when people ask him back in Belgium how it happened he’ll answer them. He’ll tell them how Anna ended up in a wheelchair and later committed suicide. He’ll tell them why he thinks it’s his fault, although the law sees it differently. He’s determined to do it, but the thought of it weighs heavy in his stomach. He had the same feeling the day Anna predicted her own death years earlier in the war cemetery in Ypres.

“Gently sloping, traditional, provincial farm land.” Anna Douterloigne giggled. She could always see the funny side of things, whatever the situation, in spite of the fact that she was the type of girl who liked to collect signatures to put an end to dolphin hunting and the like. When Xavier wanted to tease her, he called her “engaged” in a tone that made it sound like a venereal disease. It was a blustery day, June 1983, and there was a hint of summer madness in the air. Anna called it A Day of Mischief . Such a beautiful, mysterious expression; especially now, as they sat together in Tyne Cot Cemetery. She had completely changed in the preceding two years, in the way only girls could. She was fourteen, but she tried to convince Xavier that she’d been in cafés in Ypres during the holidays where you had to be sixteen. Anna stuck out her chest and took an exaggeratedly deep breath. “Où sont maman et papa?” she drawled in French.

“Over there, nosing around in the family’s history, with a horde of Japs in their wake.” Xavier wanted to sound macho, intent on not falling behind too far when compared with Anna.

Anna sighed and straightened her blazer. “Father always has to play the diplomat and impress the mayor… even on holiday.” She laughs. “Let it please the lord mayor of Ypres…” The Japanese delegation listened enthralled to her father as he explained the region’s wartime history in another part of the cemetery.

“I’ve heard we won’t be staying in Tokyo,” she continued.

“What do you mean? Are we moving back to Flanders?”

Anna looked at Xavier as if he was the village idiot in need of a moment of mental clarity. Her mother had helped her to put on make-up that morning. She seemed so adult that Xavier had the feeling he had to brace himself. Xavier had a preference for the things Anna called traditional . That was also the way he liked to dress. Anne called him her “little professor”, although he was head and shoulders taller than her. In Anna’s eyes he was “the perfect diplomat’s son”. Anna was extravagant, a magnificent bird of paradise. She often dressed in a way that made her mother choke with laughter while at the same time dramatically touching her heart as if she would die at the spot. Adolescents bent on confrontation aren’t likely to find understanding parents anything but boring, but in the Douterloigne household most issues were solved with a smile and a little humour.

“I wouldn’t mind moving back to Flanders,” Xavier continued in response to his sister’s silence.

“I would have preferred a few years somewhere else,” said Anna, “in another country. Like the daughter of father’s predecessor we met back in Japan. What was her name again? Amélie, wasn’t it. She was mad! What was her surname?”

“Nothomb,” said Xavier obligingly.

“That’s right. Amélie Nothomb. She complained nonstop that she had lived in too many different countries, but I quite like the idea.” Anna looked up at the deep blue sky that set the white gravestones of Tyne Cot Cemetery in sharp relief and gave the treetops a burnished sheen. She pointed to her parents. “But we shouldn’t forget that they aren’t getting any younger. They want to be near their family.” She laughed. “Jung says that parents become totems to their children.”