Hiroshima in the Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

museum, a distant time. We are the only visitors in the Museum of Tolerance, the only two being moved from room to room through life-sized, too-real sets of the Holocaust, an audio narrative telling us what is happening now—to the Jews we are today, during this enforced, hour-long tour, this programmed exhibit from which there is no way to turn back.

    We have been given name cards, each with an alter ego, a Holocaust survivor or victim, though we won’t find out which until the doors to the last room have closed.
    It is 1999, I am in Los Angeles to promote my first book and my mother has joined me, gaily and repeatedly chattering about flying from Honolulu to meet me “in the middle.” It’s unusual for my mother to travel alone, odd that she would want to sleep in the same hotel bed. At the time, I thought it was just her excitement about my novel, which she’d come to see as her own, based on her life story, though it wasn’t. Now, one museum to another, remembering my mother’s face hovering in the dark replica of the gas chambers, I wonder if she had a different impulse that she left unspoken—if she could feel menace in the words that were already spilling out of her head, the thoughts she couldn’t access, even the small acts she had performed then lost track of—and she’d been trying to create new memories, just in case. In hindsight, my mother seemed anxious, and we both were cold in the rooms that turned inevitably into stone walls and death. When we were finally released into the light of Los Angeles to plug our name cards into the waiting machines, we found neither one of us had been spared.
    Now, I cannot shake the vision of the card in my mother’s hand, or, rather, the hand itself, how veined it was, and thin. I cannot shake the shame that the memory I created, even inadvertently since neither of us knew anything about the Museum of Tolerance except that it was walking distance from the hotel, was one of shepherding my mother unsuccessfully past death. My mother died in the Museum
of Tolerance, and if I did too, if everyone will, it is still a punch in the gut. My mother died. Is dying.
    It is a question of time, and time is the question. How does one spend it? When does the part about living your life to the fullest begin to shift into just making do, and then into suffering, and how do any of us know where we are in this process? When I first found out about my mother’s illness, I wanted to leave my life and go home to sit vigil with her. I didn’t. She said she was fine, didn’t want to have to “entertain” visitors; she wanted to hear the news of the world, the news of my growing young family. She let me imagine I was pleasing her by taking active, almost frantic care of my children, instead of avoiding the pain, the boredom, the anger, that came with waiting for death.
    Of course, death is not on the current docket. Death is a melodrama. It is erosion we are dealing with. Already, my mother is not who she was. I can measure that by my father’s words, “Sometimes she makes more sense than I do,” which come more frequently, and ring more hollow. They safeguard all her flashes of wit and wisdom.
    But with every passing day, there is less of her.
     
    THE HIROSHIMA PEACE MUSEUM is almost empty in the heat of this weekday. It is as if history itself has become a tomb best forgotten. I know this can’t be true, that busloads of schoolchildren and tourists must visit all the time, and that today they just happen to be touring pop art instead. As I walk down a long corridor, a bridge, to the west building, the silence around me heightens my feeling of dislocation
and niggles at my growing belief that this whole Japan trip was a bad idea. Brian is unexpectedly moody. I have been in Hiroshima almost a week, and the fact that I’ve been unable to report progress—no discoveries, no interviews, not even a home yet—has him at a loss. What have I traded this time for, these twelve days we