A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Read Online Free PDF Page A

hill. I checked my watch. It was 10.50 a.m. Yuko may already have been inside the cathedral. She had come to follow Shige’s Catholic faith and would often go there on her work break. The next tram would be along in fifteen minutes. I knew I would be late but also that she would wait for me. I remember I turned and saw a sign advertising tinned fruit in the window of the grocery store behind me. I wanted to buy some for Hideo and checked my ration book before heading into the shop. And so I was paying for a tin of mandarin oranges when a new light flooded our world. Those who dare to ask me how I survived pikadon are rewarded with the same answer: a sweet tooth. My humour unnerves them. The truth is less glib. Nagasaki saved me; its geography contained the power of the explosion to a third of the city, mostly the Urakami district and part of downtown. The harbour, the historic area and the centre were shielded by the higher ground around the river. While those beautiful hills, thick with green trees, nesting kites and outlying villages narrowed the bomb’s range, they also intensified its force. Although I was too high up, too far away, too sheltered within that dark grocery store, I was close enough to know what the end of existence sounds like.
    I had never heard such a noise before. It felt as if the world’s heart had exploded. Some would later describe it as a bang, but this was more than a door slamming on its hinges, or an oil truck thudding into a car. There can be no word for what we heard that day. There must never be. To give this sound a name might mean it could happen again. What word can capture the roar of every thunderstorm you might have heard, every avalanche and volcano and tsunami that you might have seen tear across the land, every city consumed by flames and waves and winds? Never find the language for such an agony of noise and the silence that followed.
    I was thrown backwards into a pile of wooden crates, a small window above the door shattered and sprayed shards across the shop, cracks ripped across the wall as if it were ice tapped by a hammer. The shopkeeper emerged from behind his counter, blood running from a gash above his eye. We stared at one another, too scared for some seconds to leave the sanctuary of the store. He held out his hand and I reached for him. We picked our way through the upended shelves and crates and those tins of fruit. We emerged into a cloud of red haze and heat, blinking in the dust that filled the air. This was pikadon: flash and bang. A new word for the new world that greeted us. The sky seemed to be on fire. A group of people had gathered at a clearing next to the laundryman’s shop. We joined them and looked down to what we could see of the city below, too confused to speak in those first moments. We must have known it to be a bomb, or bombs, but how could man alone do this? How could that be possible? A black fogclung to the ground but through breaks in its cover we saw an unimaginable sight. Urakami to the east of the river looked as if some god had stamped down on it, over and over again, kicked the debris away into the air and then moved on.
    What survivors saw differs in the telling. To some, the explosion was like a giant pulsating chrysanthemum, a thousand boiling clouds of purple and cream and pink, or it was a giant tree ablaze, shooting high into the sky, or yes, it was shaped like a mushroom, collapsing into itself and then rising away. I can’t tell you what I saw. I was looking to where the cathedral should have been. I could see the terraced hills behind where farmers had sliced into the land, but nothing else. When did I decide Yuko was dead? In that moment. At 11.03 or 11.04 a.m. I looked to Hideo’s school, about a mile away from the cathedral, and tried to make out the U-shape of the building. I turned to the shopkeeper and said, ‘My daughter and grandson are down there.’ His silence felt like an executioner’s