Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows

It was one of those friendships which quickly came to seem inevitable, and unbreakable. And then in a conversation of less than a minute, it ended.

They come increasingly to check on me, Konrad. My mother’s family name was Fuller. You know what that means. I can’t give them any other reason to think I have divided loyalties. Until the war ends, I’m staying away from all the Westerners in Nagasaki. But only until the war ends. After, after, Konrad, things will be as before.

If you had been in Germany, Joshua, you’d say to your Jewish friends: I’m sorry I can’t hide you in my attic, but come over for dinner when the Nazi government falls.

‘Why are you here?’

Yoshi looks up from the fan of cards in his hand.

‘I was at home when the sirens started. This is the nearest shelter.’ At Konrad’s raised eyebrow he adds, ‘I know. I’ve been going to the school house’s shelter these last few weeks. But with this New Bomb. I didn’t want to risk the extra minutes out in the open.’

‘So there are risks in the world greater than being associated with a German? That’s comforting. What New Bomb?’

Yoshi puts down his cards.

‘You haven’t heard? About Hiroshima? Three days ago?’

‘Three days? No one’s spoken to me in three days.’

In the shelter at Urakami, Hiroko is packed in so tightly between her neighbours she cannot even raise a hand to wipe the sweat damping her hairline. It hasn’t been so crowded in here since the early days of the air-raid sirens. What could have provoked the Chairman of the Neighbourhood Association into such a frenzy about rounding up everyone in his path and ordering them to the shelter? She exhales through her mouth and turns her head slightly towards the Chairman’s wife, who responds by turning quickly away from Hiroko. It is impossible to know if this is guilt or disdain.

The Chairman’s wife had been a close friend of Hiroko’s mother — she recalls the two of them giggling together over the newest edition of Sutairu , in the days before war brought an end to the magazine: no place in wartime Japan for a publication that advised women on the etiquette of wearing underwear with Western dresses. As she was dying, Hiroko’s mother had called the Chairman’s wife to her bedside with a single request: protect my husband against himself. There was even less place in wartime Japan for an iconoclastic artist than for magazines about modern girls. For a long time, the Chairman’s wife had carried out her promise, persuading her husband to regard Matsui Tanaka’s outbursts against the military and the Emperor as a symbol of a husband’s mourning that was so profound it had unhinged him. But in the spring, Matsui Tanaka had been walking past a neighbourhood house and saw the cherry blossom festooning it to commemorate the sacrifice of the fifteen-year-old boy who had died in a kamikaze attack. Without saying a word to Hiroko who was walking silently beside him Matsui Tanaka darted forward, pulling out a book of matches from the pocket of his trousers, and set fire to the cherry blossom.

Seconds later he lay bloodied on the ground, the dead boy’s father struggling against the neighbourhood men who had finally decided to restrain him, and Hiroko, bending down over her father, found herself pulled up by the Chairman’s wife.

‘Report him yourself,’ said the woman who had been like an aunt to her. ‘That advice is the only protection I can give you now.’

She hadn’t listened, of course — the privations of wartime may have loosened up her scruples, but not her loyalty — and the next day three things happened: the military police came to take her father to prison, where he stayed for over two weeks; the principal of the school where she taught German told her she was dismissed, there was no room in his school for the child of a traitor and no need for the students to learn a foreign language anyway (the principal’s body curling into itself as he spoke, as though he thought that if he occupied less space there wouldn’t be so much of him to despise); and when she returned home, the Chairman was waiting to tell her she had been conscripted to work at one of the munitions factories.

She wants now to signal to the Chairman’s wife that she knows the woman did her best, for so long; but in part she wants to signal this in order to shame her.

Someone new enters the shelter, and everyone else is squeezed back even further, though there is nothing but polite murmurs of apology to signal the indignity of being so closely pressed up to the armpits and groins of strangers. Hiroko finds herself moving back into a gap which has opened up from necessity rather than any physical possibility, and finds herself beside two boys. Thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. She knows them, these Nagasaki boys. Not these ones exactly, but she knows that look of them. She guesses the taller one with the arrogant tilt of the head is in the habit of wooing girls or catching the attention of young teachers with tales of the thoughts he knows he’ll have on his one-way flight into the bridge of a US carrier (soon, very soon, the youngest of the pilots are not much older than him), all the while implying that the female towards whom he’s leaning will be central to those final, heroic thoughts.

‘You’re lying,’ the shorter boy whispers.

The taller one shakes his head.

‘Those who were close, it stripped to the bone so they were just skeletons. The ones further away, it peeled off their skin, like grapes. And now that they have this New Bomb the Americans won’t stop until we’re all skeletons or grapes.’

‘Stop it,’ Hiroko says, in her teacher’s voice. ‘Stop telling these lies.’

‘They’re not. ’ the boy starts to say, but her raised eyebrow silences him.

One of her former students — Joseph — really had piloted his Ohka into a US carrier. He told her once that on the final flight he would take with him two pictures — one of his parents standing beneath a cherry tree, and one of Myrna Loy. A picture of Myrna Loy, she said, as you destroy a US warship? But he couldn’t see any irony in that. He was the neighbourhood boy whose death had propelled her father into burning the cherry blossom — perhaps he did it for her. The only way he knew of saying he understood her grief and fury, held inarticulate inside. She doesn’t know which she is more surprised by — the possibility that this could be true, or the fact that it hasn’t occurred to her earlier. Since her mother’s death she has taken to interpreting the silence from her father as an absence of anything worth communicating rather than an inability to form a new configuration with his daughter now his beloved wife is no longer around to serve as the voice to his thoughts.

‘Skeleton or grape?’ the tall boy whispers. She can smell the fetidness of stale breath.

Outside are air and trees and mountains. It’s worth any risk.

She shoulders her way forward, and all those who were polite in allowing more people in are outraged by her attempts to leave.

‘What are you doing. there’s no room. keep back, keep back. ’ An elbow collides with her ribs.

‘My father,’ she calls out. ‘I must find my father.’

Some of the women in the shelter start to make room for her to exit, lifting their children up in their arms.

A voice says, ‘Her father is Matsui Tanaka, the traitor,’ and there’s a ripple of unpleasantness around the shelter, more people making space for her but in a way that suggests they don’t want her here.

She doesn’t care. She is out now, gulping in the fresh air which almost seems cool by comparison.

She walks quickly to get away from the shelter, and then slows, aware of the emptiness around her. Under a pale-leafed tree she holds her arms up to be patterned with drifting spots of sun and shadow as the branches sway in a breeze that isn’t perceptible at ground-level. She glimpses her hands as she holds them up — blistered from the combination of factory work and bamboo-spear drills. This was not how she imagined twenty-one. Instead, she imagined Tokyo — Hiroko Tanaka in the big city, wearing dresses, leaving lipstick marks on wine glasses in jazz clubs, her hair cut just below the ear — single-handedly resurrecting the lifestyle of the ‘modern girl’ of the twenties whose spirit had lived on in Sutairu through the thirties.