Taking Cover

We had two drills at Kittredge Elementary school that were created to foster conformity--rather than panic--the moment the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles. The drop drill was a monthly affair that was meant to catch us unawares, but somehow it always leaked out that we would have one. The teacher would ask for our attention. Then she would shout, "Drop!"

We were to dive beneath our wooden desks and curl into a fetal position, cradling our heads in our hands so as to stave off the flying ribbons of glass. We were to hold the position until she had completed the tour of the classroom, correcting the slackers who used the opportunity to giggle. Then she would say, "All clear" and we'd climb back into our seats, all a-twitter and ruddy faced.

The second drill was called "Take Cover" and was held at irregular intervals, yet we'd know it, too, was coming. The teacher would shout, "Take Cover" and we'd push our desks to the center of the classroom, then run for the nearest wall, where we'd lower the shades and cower beneath the windows, backs to the imaginary blast.

The drills may have satisfied the school district administrators but did little to palliate my fears. I knew better. I had seen television clips showing classrooms and buildings swept away by the atomic thunderclap, entire walls and windows converted to a river of plasma that blew across the darkened landscape. I had nightmares of turning into a flaming corpse or a widening stream of particles into thin air. Neighbors were buying and burying atomic fallout shelters in their yards, but not our family. I never asked.

When Soviet ships carrying missiles sailed into Cuban waters, my mother joined the millions who raided supermarket shelves for powdered milk, canned soup and vegetables, and bottled water. We were as ready as we could be, although we knew we were only kidding ourselves....

* * *

The bullet train from Tokyo rocked gently along the Kansai plain, passing through flooded rice fields and small villages, hurrying along the countryside where Mt. Fuji rose white-capped and majestic into the pale blue sky, stopping briefly at at dusk in Nagoya, then in Osaka with its garish animated billboards for Coca-Cola and Toshiba, then sweeping westward through the quiet night to Hiroshima Eki.

I was there to take a teaching job with Junichi-san and his language school. The school was located in a bustling section of the city on the third floor of an office building. The school offered English lessons by native speakers to school-aged Japanese children, to businessmen, and to senior citizens. Junichi-san was working a ploy where he kept a line of plates spinning in the air, hoping that his dreams would come true. To me, he reported having secured a government educational grant to pay my wages. To the government, where he was but applying for a grant, he said he had rounded up a native English speaker for his staff. If the timing worked out, he'd have the teacher and the money to pay him at the same time.

It did not. Junichi-san advised me that it would be preferable if I demonstrated gratitude for the opportunity, agreeing to work only a few part-time hours until the grant came in. Slim chance of my affording big city housing, the expensive food, and transportation on the few Yen I'd receive for teaching an hour or two a week.

To try me out while I mulled over his skimpy offer, Junichi-san said I could take the Gray Hairs class. These were senior citizens--mostly widows--who were looking to increase their cache by learning some English. It was like a sentence-quilting class for seniors. But these were special widows, survivors of the first atomic bomb dropped on a human population.

Though I was ashamed to ask, my curiosity won over and after class I asked a woman in a violet polka-dot dress and matching hat with a spray of white flowers if she would tell me about that day. My Japanese was poor--considerably poorer than her English, which was limited to salutations, dates, and numbers. But she did take a city map from her purse and pointed to the A-Bomb memorial with certain insistence, and I got the message.

Hiroshima is home to a historical castle and a heritage dating back to 1589 A.D. Nestled in the Piedmont of the Seto Inland Sea, it is ringed by the Chugoku mountains and forms a delta for three rivers. It had been a manufacturing city on the morning of August 6, 1945, which made her a prime military target. The parts and machinery built there could be put on barges and shipped out to sea, onwards to the war.

The museum is located in a lush park at ground zero, at the confluence of the Ota and Motoyasu. The bomb went off around 8:15 am and for days afterward, thousands of newly orphaned children wandered the streets of ruins, many of whom would die of leukemia over the next 20 years. The numbers of dead were staggering, numbing. But it was the drawings made by children on the museum walls that ripped my heart out: painted scenes of blood-red rivers choked with bodies, a ceiling beam thrust like some mad atomic spear into the chest of a mother as her child weeps at her feet. Flesh running like melted butter from limbs, shadows of human forms burned into the concrete.

After a while, I just couldn't take any more. I went in search of a florists shop, found a bouquet of white lilies, and brought it back to the grounds where I knelt at a memorial shaped like a blossoming nuclear cloud. It was easy to cry, but it sounds cheap and insufficient, or self-aggrandizing, to say so today.

I wasn't there very long when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was an elderly Japanese man with a trimmed gray mustache in a tidy suit and polished shoes, holding an umbrella over his shoulder. I stood up and looked him in the eye. You can study literature for decades and not find words.

But he knew. "War is over," he said.

* * *

Before I left Hiroshima forever, I took a day-trip to the shore. You can board a ferry for Miyajima Island. So-called Shine Island, Miyajima is renowned for its temples, gardens, and thousands of wild, red-assed baboons. The vermilion gate that stands at the entry is considered one of Japan's Three Essential Views--luring students and native vacationers here all year round. You pass beyond the gate and land in a paradise of bamboo forests, hidden courtyards, and melodic streams trickling through granite. School kids in their black and white uniforms pass happily between tall rows of bamboo. They stop and take your picture. "Look at the foreigner," one says, pointing, shouting the Japanese word for beard. Then off they go along the stream, around the bend and into the woods.

Suddenly you're hit with a powerful force. How quiet it is!

Some Kind of Sayonara

It was freezing cold and the December winds failed to diminish the air pollution that draped Tokyo with an acrid cloud. My English teaching connections had foundered; I had had months of frustrations speaking broken Japanese; and I was tired of wedging through crowds of commuters no matter when or where I went. So I found a Dutch travel agency near the Ginza and asked the well-scrubbed clerk in his gray muffler if he could find me a bargain flight in any direction. I told him, "I want off the rock."

He said I'd get the biggest bang for my travel dollar by taking a Pakistani Airlines flight to Athens. I asked if it would be warm, and he lied. I imagined myself baking away on the Mediterranean, seated at a cafe with a glass of brandy in my hand, my eyes sheltered against the blazing sun. The ticket, in 1979 dollars, cost $280. Not bad for a trip halfway around the world.

What the travel agent neglected to tell me--along with his false promises of sunshine and souvlaki--was that the flight would take 26 hours from gate to gate, with plenty of stops along the way. I took my ticket, gathered up my backpack from the apartment in western Tokyo, and hopped an express train to the airport.

Once airborne, I discovered that I was the only Caucasian aboard a flight of Japanese businessmen, Chinese nationals, and a handful of Pakistanis. The announcements were made in Japanese, English, and Punjabi. I snapped a few pictures of Mt. Fuji through the window and settled back. It was an old-generation Boeing 707 and it looked it. At one point, the overhead cases swung open and the oxygen masks dropped out. They swung like jellyfish all the way to Beijing.

In 1979, we had yet to formalize relations with China, so when we landed in Beijing, I was told to remain seated until escorted down the ramp. The terminal looked like an old railroad depot with richly polished hardwood beams and rows of wooden benches. The locals all wore blue or green quilted jackets and matching Mao caps. You had to look carefully to make out the gender. One couple necked surreptitiously beneath a stairwell. I tried to escape out into the countryside a few times and was brought back to the terminal under escort of armed guards who were astonishingly kind and courteous.

I converted Yen into Chinese Yuan, not knowing that it would not be accepted anywhere else I might be flying, and bought tins analgesic balm and cigars as gifts. When my flight was announced, I attempted to cash the Yuan into dollars and was told it was impossible. They actually held the jet on the runway while I pleaded unsuccessfully with the teller in his cage.

The second stop was in Rawalpindi--known today as Islamabad. At three in the morning, the runway was a dark strip between dusty fields, with a small concrete terminal at one end. The only thing you heard was the stirring of the wind and barking Pakistani dogs in the distance. If I had wanted warmer temperatures, I got what I asked for. It was stifling and muggy.

I would have four hours to wait and was forbidden to leave the building. You could only buy some kind of pickled vegetable, Coca Cola (which seemed to have four times the sugar content as the American brand), and small cakes dipped in honey. I pressed through a crowd of beggars to find a seat in the dark recesses of the hall, clutching my backpack in my arms as I lay back and tried to nap. That was impossible. Within minutes, dozens of beggars surrounded me, pawing at my pack, murmuring with an insistent rhythm which kept up unceasingly for four hours.

When we finally took off in the last dark hour before dawn, I was seated beside a Japanese businessman who had boarded in Rawalpindi. He was going to Athens and we traded precious little across the language barrier. The last fuel stop was in Damascus, where the flight attendant advised me to stay on the plane. An American Jew, I had nightmares of what would happen to me had I wandered off. An hour later, you could make out the whitecaps on the waves as we sped into the clouds.

Below, in the seas where Paris, Marcus Antonius, and Odysseus had sailed, tiny islands caught bright shards of morning light. When I finally walked out on the tarmac in Athens, I found that I needed a jacket. I didn't really mind. I was a gravely inexperienced globetrotter and only 25. I would share a cab with the Japanese businessman to Democracy Square and later that evening under the Mediterranean moon, I would sit in a cafe and sob with relief.