Andropov's Cuckoo

Chapter 4

The journey from the hospital to the hospice was only a few kilometres, so didn’t take long in the large comfortable ambulance they provided. In fact, we left the hospital without warning at eleven a.m. and I was sitting in a large comfortable chair in the hospice grounds overlooking the beautiful marina in Marbella waiting for my lunch by noon.

Now, I realise that you have been waiting quite a while for me to get to the point of this book, I haven’t forgotten, although I can’t quite remember how long it’s been exactly, so when the nurse brought me my lunch, I asked about the machine again. She used her mobile to ring the desk, and assured me that it would be delivered within the hour. I smiled, thanked her and tucked into my boiled fish and salad, followed by yoghurt and tea again.

I like that sort of food, but I have always been easy to please in culinary matters as long as I’m not asked to eat junk food. In earlier days, I favoured Indian and then Thai food, but that is all but denied me now, as is cheese, my clear all-time favourite. I have always had a passion for cheese, fresh, crispy bread and red wine or beer, which are also very rare treats these days.

The food and the hour have both disappeared now, but the only change to my circumstances is that I feel sleepy. It’s the sea air probably. If they don’t bring me my new toy soon, I’ll be asleep again… dreaming about people from my youth, people perhaps long dead… Maybe, I should be as well, what useful purpose am I serving here? Eating and drinking and spending money, but to what end? Just to keep myself alive? No-one cares except the owners of the hospice, and that would soon stop if my money ran out, which it won’t… The dear old British government will see to that until I pop my clogs.

In a way though, I am being held back from my inevitable journey through yet another death and rebirth. I just can’t help thinking that my money would be better spent elsewhere. I’m drifting again, I sense it. I need to stay alive to tell you my story, which is not really my story because it is not about me, I know, I’ve told you that before, but I have known this story for most of my life. That’s why I’m keeping myself alive, not just for the sake of it.

If the truth be known, I am anxious to continue on to the next leg of my journey and have been for two years, seven months and fourteen days. I miss her so much, I could cry every time I think of her, tough old bastard that I think that I am… pretend that I am. Eventually, everyone believes the image and lets you get on with it… not realising that that’s the last thing you want them to do really. I’m just too scared to show my feelings, that’s the truth… but then most men are.

Well, it’s too late to change now… Maybe in the next life or the one after that. It’s a good job that infinity is so long, it gives you plenty of time to correct your failings and weaknesses and, Lord knows, I need it.

I’m getting a sudden, unexpected memory of Ricky, a boy from university. He was from Battersea and affected a Cockney accent. He tried to act like the c**k of the walk, but asked me to take him for an Indian curry one night because he’d never had one and wanted to impress a girl who said it was her favourite food. He got so drunk on red wine and beer that he fell face down in his Chicken Madras blowing bubbles! Ha, ha, ha… Good old days. A waiter and I cleaned him up and I took him home to his girlfriend, who had a houseful of nude photos of herself taken by her female flatmate.

I can’t remember the flatmate’s name, but she was Jewish and took me to bed that night with more red wine. I feel bad that I can’t remember her name, but Maria or Marsha seems to fit the face I see in my head. Strange, I haven’t thought about those three people for almost fifty years.

Excuse me, I must have drifted off. There is a note protruding from under my saucer: ‘Your Dictaphone is at reception. Please ring and it will be brought out to you’. I am as happy for you as for myself, dear reader, because now I will be able to fulfil my promise and you will be able to assess whether what I have been saying is true or not. Just a moment, please, while I make a call.

“Here you are, William. I took the liberty of putting it on charge while you were asleep. Have fun with it”, said the girl who delivered it.

“Yes, thank you, I will,” I replied cheerily, but thought ‘What a saucy mare!’ Some of the younger ones treat us all as if we’re senile. It drives me mad. It is true that some of us are totally doolally tap, but not all… not yet.

I played with the Nokia, turning it over in my hands looking for familiar features. It was a simple one, just what I wanted… could be voice-activated too. I was no stranger to modern technology, but another sudden thought came into my mind. I have written thousands of reports, but never written a biography. Read many, yes, but not written one. I can’t think how to start. Really! This is most annoying. I, we, have been waiting for the recorder for twenty-four hours and now I still can’t start!

I picked up my saucer to finish my tea, and a warm breeze blew the note down the lawn. I realise that the story I want to tell, her story, could not have taken place unless other events had happened first… Well, in that case, since you have indulged me thus far, I will push you a little further and take you back to the very beginning, as far as I am humanly able. The real beginning of this story is in yet another country, which found itself in very trying circumstances almost a decade before even I was born.

The woman I really want to tell you about went by many names, but she was born Natalya in Soviet Kazakhstan, although we will have to start in Japan with the Mizuki family. I have pieced their story together over the decades from various case notes which I was able to uncover in my professional life as a diplomat, and from things that I was told and overheard. So, with my fully-functioning, brand-new Dictaphone, I will now tell you about the first performers in our drama, Yui Mizuki and her family and hope that I don’t receive that third curtain call before we get to the end.

2 YUI MIZUKIMr. Hiroto Mizuki was working in a reserved occupation in the Ministry of Finance as a middle-ranking official in Tokyo by day, and as part of the Home Defence by night. In 1944, when he was twenty-seven, he was in love with a colleague who worked down the corridor from his office and he vowed to make her his wife, if they survived the current American onslaught. Hiroto and his girlfriend, Suzume, were from a similar social class, both Shinto, both revered Emperor Hirohito as a god, and were both convinced that it was not possible for Japan to lose the war – the greatest war that Japan had ever waged.

The first signs that they might be wrong were the disappearance of young men from the streets of their beloved, ancient capital, Tokyo, and it’s merciless fire-bombing by the Americans. On the night of March 9th, 1945, almost 700,000 incendiary bombs were dropped, killing 100,000 people, injuring 110,000 more and destroying forty percent of the city in the inferno which spread rapidly through the largely paper and bamboo buildings.

Suzume’s faith started to crumble as her nerves shattered. After another bad night of bombing on July 20th, when a huge pumpkin bomb – a forerunner of the atomic bombs to come – was dropped near her parents’ home where she also lived, she implored Hiroto to take her away. At a meeting in her home on July 21st, she could take it no longer, she told him on her bended knees. If he did not take her away very soon, she would either have to go alone or ‘take the only other honourable way out’. Her parents gave them their blessing and a hurried Shinto wedding ceremony was arranged.

“But where can we go?” asked Hiroto. “I have no clear idea what is happening here in our own country, but I think that the south is safer – anywhere away from Tokyo, which they seem intent on bombing flat, along with everyone in it”. Hiroto sipped his tea, pretending to be giving the matter his undivided consideration, in order to instil confidence into his terrified young fiancée. However, he hadn’t a clue, he could see only one option.

“My father and mother have a comfortable farm in the south,” he mused, “we could go there… They’ve hardly seen any fighting at all”.

“That’s fantastic!” replied Suzume beaming admiration at him. “Where is it, do tell us?”

“Well, if the trains were running, it is only about twelve hours away…” he said smiling, enjoying teasing his bride to be, “and if we had a car, and petrol of course, it is about nine hours away, but there are none of those things any longer… So, if you really want to go, it will take twelve to fourteen days to walk there. Do you still want to go?”

“With you by my side, my love, I don’t care if it takes a month, but where is it?”

“Ten miles north of Hiroshima. It’s beautiful and so quiet!” he replied. “We’ll be safe there, and my parents will be happy for us to stay with them. Will you come with us, future mother- and father-in-law?”

The old man looked at his wife.

“No, son. You take care of our daughter and have many children. Our Fate, good or bad, lies with the Reigning Emperor and his capital. We will stay here. Anyway, we couldn’t walk to Hiroshima even if we wanted to, it’s much to arduous for us”.

“We’ll come to visit you after the war is over and the trains are running again”, Suzume’s mother comforted her.

They worked the following four days, and then called in sick to ensure that they would get another month’s salary each and to give them time to sell Hiroto’s unnecessary belongings, get married and take their leave of Suzume’s family. Then, dressed as peasants in baggy clothes, with dishevelled hair and packs containing food concealed in a change of clothing, they set off to join the throng of refugees heading south for a quieter life on the morning of Friday July 27th.

Life on the road was hard, they had money concealed about their persons and food in their bags, but most others did not. They felt terribly heartless sitting away from the others, denying starving children food, because if they gave any away, they too would be begging soon. It would not have been so bad if there were shops along the way, but the movement of people along that grim and dusty road had been so heavy and so relentless for so long, that there was nothing left, and food was already scarce as it was because of the blockades and the bombing. All that could be seen as far as the eye could see were derelict farm houses and ravaged fields. There was no livestock, it had already been eaten, sold or hidden as future collateral. In it’s own way, walking through the countryside was even as depressing as staying in Tokyo, except that the air was cleaner. Cleaner, but not sweeter.