A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding Read Online Free PDF

blade wet from the kill. Eventually he said, ‘You should go home, wait for them.’ How could I go home? How could I wait for them not to return? I was a mile away from the edge of the bomb’s reach. ‘If I walk, I can get to the school in under an hour.’ The shopkeeper looked at me, suspicious. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Don’t go.’ I shook my head, refusing to accept his judgement. Instead I ran down the hill toward Urakami. At first the world seemed normal; the buildings, the banks, the street stalls, they were familiar. But then I entered a landscape so alien my nightmares could not have dreamed such terror.
    Should I speak of the horrors that I saw? They still seem so unreal to me. The tombs of the city’s cemeteries had been blown open and the dead walked among us. Shards of glass carpeted the ground and barefoot children ran over these splinters, their feet shredded and bleeding. Some had strange patterns etched on their exposed skin. There was a man with a broken jaw held in a silent scream. I passed a woman who was sitting on the ground trying to breastfeed her baby. The woman held the bloody rags covering her child up to me. ‘Help my son, he won’t feed.’ All hope was lost for the child. Rain started to fall, gritty and black. Much later I would learn this was what made my gums bleed and clumps of hair fall out in the days that followed. An old man stumbled out of a house and held a broom aloft. ‘Crush the enemy,’ he shouted over and over again. The nearer I drew to the school the less human the creatures left alive became. Their flesh was black or red raw, like the skin of a ripe pomegranate, their feet were bare. Shoes had melted into the asphalt, still hot underfoot. A woman ran past, naked to the waist, her skin dragging behind her like a cape. Faces were swollen horribly by burns. The smell of burnt flesh and charcoal choked my nostrils. Other wounded people lay where they had fallen. One girl, about five years old, sat in the dirt, her left foot gone. ‘Water,’ she called out, but to my shame I did not stop.
    Everything seemed to be burning or burnt. The hemp trees were alight and a charred body hung from one of the electricity poles. The heat from some of the fires was so fierce, I had to find other routes, doubling back, trying to find a way through the flames. What to say of thebaked street car, the tram tracks twisted up into the sky, the charcoal statues inside? The carcass of a horse lay on the ground, as delicate as a burnt log. Yet more bodies were floating on the surface of the river. They must have run there to cool their scorched skin. I felt as if the world had been turned inside out. This had to be hell. Finally, I reached the gates of the school.
    A blast had punched holes through the main building and fire had taken hold of what was left. Little of the smashed outhouses remained. The playground was littered with children who must have fallen as they played. I looked upon these blackened forms and thought Hideo surely to be dead then. Other people, parents presumably, searched with me. None of the bodies seemed alive, but perhaps I made a mistake? I don’t remember a boy with a burnt face; I’m sure I don’t. I shouted Hideo’s name and I thought maybe he had run to one of the shelters the teachers had been building. I walked beside the rice fields and came across another charred lump and beside those remains was a magnifying glass, warped by heat, and then what looked like a necklace dipped in fire. Identity tags. I rubbed clear the black grime with my fingers. His name. Hideo Watanabe. My grandson. This happened. This I did not imagine. Deranged with hope I thought just for a moment he too had survived. I screamed into air-raid shelters already full of those who had crawled there to die, but no one answered to his name. I ran back to the schoolyard and knew I could not leave. To go would mean he was