"Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you" - Walt Whitman
Recently I was appointed to the position of a chief editor of The Life magazine website and immediately the chef of our department uncharged me with a business trip abroad. Not that much my salary has changed, yet the brunt of the responsibility for writing the new, namely gee-whiz texts fell on my shoulders. Anyway, I have no chance to turn down the offer, so I just accepted the decision without much surprise. That morning I landed at the airport and went up to Hiroshima to have an interview with someone called Chizu. Probably, it was a so-called "burnout effect" that I felt - no interest in whatever I did during the working hours - and the same it was, while I was waiting in the café for a woman who had called me a couple of days before that. From the moment I lifted the handset, her voice was interrupted from time to time by some hissing sounds, so I did not get anything right she tried to tell me. When I was on my way there that afternoon, the images from the filmed chronicles of the blasted off the map city were instinctively compared along with displaced its modern landscapes with overcrowded boulevards and the vivacity of everyday household routines. "Nothing will grow here for 75 years", - these earlier somewhere read in the newspaper words volleyed through my mind. Indeed, it is flourishing and peaceful, has risen from the ashes like an Eternal City. In my opinion, there are some places in the world, which do not dare to disappear; otherwise, the sovereign plans of the structured universe will be shipwrecked.
-Excuse me, are you Mrs. Blanche? - the figure of an old Japanese come out from under the ground. I am a little bit taken aback with, as it seems to me, the puzzled look on my face that proved that she caught me unawares. - Have I scared you? Sorry for that, - said the woman with a strong accent, though with a tender smile on her round lips.
-Yes, I am a journalist of a British online journal. Do not mind me, Mrs. Kasumi. Nice to meet you! Sit down, please. -1 gestured for her to take a seat in front of me.
This short old lady looked very outwardly calm what proved once again the conventional rule of the Japanese - "tatemae" over "honne", which means "public face" should hide your true desires. Moreover, I had a gut subconsciously feeling that this person will pour out her heart to me in its own way, but how exactly, I did not know yet. All her appearance of gentleness along with traditional solemnity of the previous generations, who still bear in mind the old regimes, showed a human being who has been struggling with something inside her for ages. She laid her tiny, snow-white palms on the table and spoke to me almost whispering after I ordered some tea and biscuits for us:
-Mrs. Blanche, I am ninety years old and almost all my life I cannot get rid of the burden of my memories. I am getting older and older every day, my mind gets weaker, and therefore I would like to tell the story of my life, - enunciate she clearly after a while. - Everything is left after August 6 is this photo of my sister Hotaru. She was a seven-year child when she became blind after a single look at the nuclear blast. - The woman held out a hand with a shabby, black-and-white shot of a girl. Yes, her eyes were as wax-lined, eyeballs were hidden under the veil forever. The most heartbreaking feature of Hotaru's portrait was scared and uncomprehending, sideward glance which scotches you with the flame from inside.
-She died a couple of years after that; the symptoms of radiation sickness began to display: her gums and nose were bleeding, hair almost fell out, in addition skin cancer made rapid strides. My mother did not want to recall those darkest days of her life, that is why I tried my best to overpower these frightening images and follow my mum's lead. By the way, my sister's name means "firefly". Is not it that sarcastic, is it? Time passed, but I am still the same. Like a river, I change my shores, though inside of my mind I stand hopelessly stagnant. "Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way".
I did not know what to say. To be honest, I did not expect something like that at all. My plans were quite down-to-earth - to write a column, giving a brief overview about the 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombing and that is it. Chizu was silent while I was overthinking the memories she shared with me. By this token, the child with thick black, like a helmet, hair and embarrassed facial expression willfully took hold of me.
-Sometimes, she comes to my nightly dreams and asks to switch on the light, but I cannot find any lantern or even a few matches. Then, she starts crying and disappears in the darkness. - This revelation reminded me somehow Kawabata's lines: -A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned".
-My doctor recommended me to share my own account of all that events what happened in 1945 and what I have experienced throughout my life. Moreover, if I am not mistaken, you also have Japanese origin, don't you? - She slightly arched her eyebrows, waiting for the answer, she was aware of.
-Yes, you are right. My ancestors left Japan for The United Kingdom in the 1930- ies. - answered I, lowering my eyes like a guilty child in front of the parent.
After the hours of talking, I noticed some changes in her posture and mimics - it seemed to me, I have succeeded in purifying her heart - Chizu Kasumi left the meeting with the warmth of an acquaintance of mine.
Eventually, I posted that article with the attached photo of blind Hotaru and was praised with an additional week to my vacation. I did not see the old woman after that, but her words somehow were already curved in my soul forever. A week ago I received an e-mail, in which Chizu's daughter informed me of her mother's death. The message ended up with the words of Chizu:"... she came and finally brought a lantern with her. Thousands of fireflies are guiding us".
23/06/21
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