Andropov's Cuckoo

Chapter 5

One of the happiest moments of the day was ticking another twenty-four hours off, and the saddest moments were having to walk around the corpses of those who had died in their tracks. Often fights would break out for the deceased person’s possessions, even his or her clothes and the body would be left naked to rot in the road, or it would be kicked into a ditch alongside it, if it smelled too bad. It was summer and hot, so it didn’t take long for the flies and their baby maggots to start their gruesome work. They walked mostly at night because it was cooler, but that increased the risk of tripping over the rotting, dead bodies on the unlit roads. The smell of a putrid corpse was no warning as they were everywhere. They tried to keep reminding themselves that it was less than two weeks out of the rest of their lives together.

After eleven days on the road, they were near to Hiroshima.

“Come, Suzume, it’s eight o’clock, let’s have the last of our food. We can be at the farm in eight more hours. If we had a phone, we could tell Mum to expect us for tea. That would give her the shock of her life! Come on, let’s see if we can see the city from here”.

He helped her scramble up a small hillock by the roadside, and they sat down. She looked around to check whether anyone was watching before pulling a small parcel from under her clothing.

“We have a little rice from yesterday, my dear, and one last tin of fish. Can you see anything from over there?”

“No, not really… I’m not sure, the morning mist, you know? Come on, move over here, if the sun warms it up, it may clear soon and we may catch a glimpse”.

Suzume moved over to the south side of the top of the mound and they sat down. Hiroto looked at his watch.

“Hmm, eight ten, Dad’ll be shouting at the field hands now calling them lazy so-and-so’s and Mum will be cooking and cleaning and scolding the maid for her slovenliness. Some things never change, do they, dear, despite all the mayhem, life still goes on?”

She emptied the fish out over the rice and put the cloth on the grass between them

“Tuck in,” she said, “bon appétit…” as Hiroto took a tiny portion of fish and rice with his chopsticks, he heard his wife ask, “Look at that, Hiroto, whatever can it be? It’s very frightening”.

“What is it, my dear?” he asked looking up. His mouth dropped wide open as a huge cloud, the shape of a mushroom, but the size of a mountain grew before them. They instinctively hugged each other in fear just in time to miss the flash, but they could not escape the wind. First, the makeshift plate with it’s small offering of food was blown away, and then the couple were blown over backwards down the north slope of the mound. They rolled down into the smelly, fetid water of the irrigation ditch at the bottom near the road, but it probably saved their lives.

As they tumbled down they caught glimpses of their fellow travellers being blown about and knocked down like skittles. They were the lucky ones, bits of broken wood, bamboo poles and even small rocks were being fired at those still standing as if from a blunderbuss. They didn’t remain on their feet for long and all the time the wind sounded as if it were escaping from Hell itself, hot, fierce, strong and angry.

Then it was over… and an eerie silence reigned, for a moment, just long enough to pick up your head and wonder what had happened and look around at the devastation. Then the wind came back from where it had gone, but not all of it returned… it was less fierce, less hot and less angry, as if it were ashamed of the havoc it had wrought.

As the ringing in their ears eased, they could hear screams of pain and fear from people lying in the road or wandering along it aimless. Some were naked other were wearing rags. Many were wounded with poles or sticks poking out of them like Spanish bulls in a ring. Others were blind… many of them were blind, they were bumping into one another, falling into the ditches along the road and tripping over the bodies that were either too lifeless or too frightened to get up.

Suzume opened her eyes and screamed. She yanked her thumb from the thing she had been hanging on to for some kind of stability – the open mouth of a long-dead body. The corpses in the ditch had been revealed when the water was either blown away or evaporated, probably both. The other arm was around Hiroto, he scooped her up in his arms and took her to the top of the mound. Cautiously at first, but the tempest seemed to have passed. She was shivering, in danger going into shock, but there was nothing he could do except talk to her.

“Wha… wha… what kind of a Devil was that, Hiroto?” she stammered, her eyes as wide as saucers.

“I don’t know, my dear. Perhaps a munitions factory exploded – sabotage, bombing or an accident. Don’t worry about that now. Have a drink of water”. He took a flask from inside his robe and held it to her lips as she was trying to clean imaginary bits of rotten flesh from her thumb on the grass.

“Did you see what I had my hand in?”

“Try not think about it, my dearest”, he admonished tipping a few drops of water onto her thumb and drying it in his clothing. “Let’s take a little rest, then we’ll continue and get away from these sad, awful people”.

In fact, those who could stand up were already wandering off in all directions except theirs, but some just walked until they fell and stayed put, crying like babies.

An hour later, the road was pretty clear of southbound travellers, and the traffic from the south was starting to increase. Most of those walking, which was not many, were in the same sorry state that they had already seen, but there were a few cars and buses, few of which were still trying to avoid the people in the road whether they were dead or alive.

“Stay here, Suzume, I must find out what happened. Take this”, he said handing her his Home Defence Type 14, 8-shot Nambu semi-automatic pistol. I’ll remain within sight, I just want to stop a car and ask what that cloud was”.

“Please, don’t be long, I don’t like this place. The Kami are angry here and very powerful. Please hurry”.

“I will my dear, don’t worry, but I have to know… my parents… you understand?”

She did, and acknowledged that he had to leave her a while.

The vehicles heading north were not travelling quickly because of all the dead bodies on the road, some of which were badly mangled by the traffic with puddles of brains and intestines every few yards. However, nobody wanted to stop to talk to him either. Eventually, an army officer did stop and wound down his window, but held Hiroto at gun point.

He was a terrified young man, but he was not the officer he was pretending to be. He had an officer’s pistol, a Nambu just like his own, and a lieutenant’s cap on his head, but a private’s uniform.

“Don’t try anything”, he ordered, “I’m not afraid to use this, you know?”

“No, I’m sure you’re not. I won’t come any closer. I am unarmed and mean you no harm. I just need to know what just happened. My parents live down there…”

“I doubt that they do any longer, sir. Nobody’s alive down there… the whole of bloody Hiroshima has disappeared… there’s just miles and miles of nothing… nothing at all, just ash and wisps of smoke and dead bodies… even more than this!” he said waving his pistol at the road. This is a bloody children’s picnic compared to back there”.

“What was it? Did a munitions factory or an ammo depot go up?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen an exploding bomb make a cloud like that before or kill so many people. Whatever did that is fiendish, and so’s the person who made it”.

“Are you sure there’s nothing left?”

“Nothing at all for twenty miles outside the city, sir, now I have to be going. Good luck, sir!”

“Wait… wait, can my wife and I come with you. We live in Tokyo… we can give you money when we arrive at my wife’s parents’ house… We were coming down to visit my own parents who live… lived just outside Hiroshima”, he beckoned his wife to join him and she scrambled down the hill. “There doesn’t seem much point in going on now and we’ve been walking for ten or eleven days. Here she is, it would be a great comfort to her, if we could ride some of the way with you”.

“OK, hop in, but hurry I want to put all this as far behind me as quickly as I can. She’s got a full tank, so she should get us most of the way, although I’m not sure where I’m going yet, just as far from this madhouse as I can get”.

They got back to Tokyo on the 9th, just as it was announced that another, even larger atom bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki. Within a week Emperor Hirohito had capitulated and the rape, pillage and plundering of Japan began in earnest.

The Mizukis moved in with Suzume’s parents as Hiroto’s place was no more and a homeless family had squatted the ground. He didn’t have the heart to turn them away, when he had a real roof over his head. Then they returned to work on Monday 13th as if nothing had happened, but they only did that because of the money and the stability it gave them in their topsy-turvy lives. However, something had indeed changed and quite fundamentally so.

The Mizukis couldn’t believe how stupid they had been to put so much blind faith in their so-called god-king, and they never wanted to see a war again. They found themselves drawn to the Communist Party of Japan as much by the phrases it used, like: ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ as by the horror and the disappointment Hirohito’s folly had inflicted upon them, and the senseless atrocities that the American soldiers were committing every day.

Four years to the day after the end of the war in Japan, on August 14th, 1949, Suzume gave birth to a girl, whom they called Yui. They brought her up to behave like other Japanese girls, and her grandparents taught her Shinto, but her parents taught her Communist ethics, and showed her that the official explanation for events in the paper was never the only one, and often not even the correct one.

However, they kept all that ‘non-traditional’ Japanese side of their life secret, because the Mizukis had learned to trust no-one but their local Communist Party leaders. Life was very different in those early years after the war as the Mizuki family’s fortunes changed with MacArthur’s whims, though the CPJ looked after it’s own with donations from Mother Russia and the Mizukis held good jobs. They were doing far better than most.

They rewarded their political benefactors with snippets of information, which were sent back to Moscow.

In 1967, Yui was accepted into Tokyo university to study languages - English, Russian and Chinese – her favourite subjects and her father put her name down for a job at the Ministry. They had three years to amass enough money to pay the necessary bribe for the job, but they were not concerned about that. They only wanted her to be able to move to the Foreign Office with an option to sit the examinations for the Diplomatic Service.