I strolled into the forbidden zone, just so I could say I had done it. The interpreter took a cautious step or two behind me, then stopped. The driver sat with the windows rolled up. Every time I looked at him, he anxiously started his engine. Should I have insisted that he continue into the involuntary evacuation zone? My dosimeter had not registered any recent increase; regarding gamma rays the situation seemed safe enough, and perhaps this story would have been more dramatic had I been pushier, but then again perhaps not, for what would we have seen but more empty houses, and then quake and tsunami damage, and then the reactor, which drone photographs in the newspaper made clear resembled any number of muddy construction sites? I think the driver would have done it if I had asked; as for my loyal, courageous interpreter, she said simply, “I will follow you.” Perhaps she and I should have suited up with respirators, yellow kitchen gloves, and all the rest of it, and then walked toward Plant Number One. Honestly, I lacked the ruthlessness to ask it of her. Or I could have set out by myself, leaving the two of them to wait for me there. Why didn’t I do that? Perhaps I was afraid and didn’t admit it to myself; but I believe I simply couldn’t see the point.
The birds were singing, the plants were growing, and the trees were coming into flower. It was very warm now. Moss grew on a wall, and in the deserted houses the curtains were all drawn. If you can, try to see those curtained houses and the shadows on their silver-ringed roof tiles, the blue flowers in someone’s backyard, which like the other lawns there still appeared decently trimmed, probably due to the coolness of the season. At the side of another house, a few potted houseplants had begun to wither, but the others still looked perfect. Perhaps more people had returned home from Big Palette than was generally imagined.
Behind an outer door, an inner sliding partition was wide open. We called and called, but no one answered. I informed the checkpoint police, since last night’s taxi driver had remarked that burglars had begun to take advantage of the evacuation.
In the shade of an old wooden house, several bicycles leaned neatly beside clean shovels. A line of sandbags, perhaps tsunami protection, followed the house around the corner.
What is there to say about this place, morning-shadowed and birdsonged, the meter at 2.7 millirems, the shadows of power wires gently dancing across the ribbed concrete facade of a workshop, a small black beetle crawling on a sandbag?
From the main checkpoint a bus emerged, then a truck, then three cars, the police waving them all through with their white-gloved hands before they reclosed the barrier and these vehicles all headed back in the direction of Koriyama. Then a man on a motorcycle approached them from our side.
“Unless your purpose is very strong I cannot allow you,” a policeman told him.
“But I have a brother inside. Can I go another way?”
“You may be able to advance and go a little farther,” said the policeman.
So the motorcyclist proceeded to the unmanned checkpoint that the interpreter and I had breached. Later the taxi driver, who had spoken with him, remarked that this fellow had complained of a burning, tingling sensation, which of course is one of the first symptoms of massive radiation exposure. Perhaps it was psychosomatic, or he had some sort of allergic reaction; nobody we asked in Koriyama, even at Big Palette, had heard of anybody getting radiation sickness.
Then the driver summoned us. He had discovered an actual inhabitant: bearded and graying, with a very red workingman’s face, in a blue slicker and cap; he must have been about fifty. He wore green gloves and a mask and green boots. The metal grating of the Showa Shell service station was only half raised. He stooped just outside, hosing down a patch of pavement. He worked unceasingly while he spoke with us. He would not allow us into his house next door, in whose second-story window the drapes parted for an instant and a lovely feminine hand flickered, folding a towel over the curtain rod; this wife or daughter must have been doing laundry indoors. The drapes closed again. The workingman said, “This is the stay-at-home area. This is my area. We’ll leave soon. There’s a cat we left to stay inside, and we felt so sad not to let it out. I’m the head of the fire department here, so I come back every day, and every day I check the radiation level at the village office. Today is 0.38 millisieverts. On the seventeenth, everyone evacuated. .”39He worked on, never stopping until I made him a present of my best respirator, at which point he paused to bow deeply, then hurried back to work.
With the cool wind still at my back and the sound of the brook louder than almost anything else, I inspected a very young bird on the grass, rust on a guardrail, manicured pines, then gazed over blank empty pavement. I went up one more driveway and rang the bell. The chimes echoed on and on; the door was locked.
For some reason, what I remember most is the bicycles leaning neatly up against the empty houses that shaded them.
Every time I looked at him, the driver eagerly started the engine. He reminded me of the forlorn boy who must stand on the snowy sidewalk just outside the hot springs near Sendai, ready to bow if any guest comes in. Finally I asked how he was. “I’m not really concerned,” he said, “but somehow I feel uneasy.”
“What makes you the most uneasy?”
“I see the cars but no people.”
Taking pity on him, I told him to commence our return, driving very slowly down the smooth pavement to the fork of highways 399 and 36, and then as the road began to rise back up into the hills, but long before we reached Mr. Sato’s home, I made the driver stop again, for I now perceived one more chance to accomplish my journalistic vulture-swoop, for here again was human life — namely, a middle-aged couple wearing those nearly useless paper masks over their mouths and striding out of their house and down the gravel driveway to their separate cars. I rushed to halt them, and the interpreter bowed with her best politeness, requesting the favor of five minutes, just five minutes, but the wife said, “We don’t have time. This is the first occasion that we have checked our home since we evacuated to Tochigi.” “How long ago was that?” Shedding all remnants of that celebrated Tohoku patience and politeness, she cried, “We don’t have time; we don’t have time!”—at which they ran into their cars without bowing goodbye, the man sweating around his mask, and drove off at nearly reckless speed, up Highway 399 toward Koriyama and then Tochigi.
The driver remarked that they seemed afraid.
Reascending Highway 399, terraces and plum blossoms, my wrists stinging strangely, no doubt simply from sunburn or that potassium iodide, we proceeded toward Koriyama; now we descended the mountainside, a brown stream glinting white in the sun, at which time the dosimeter reading increased to 2.8 millirems. I said nothing. Looking into the rearview mirror, I saw the sad bewildered fear in the driver’s eyes.
“My eyes have been pretty watery for the last two or three days,” he said. “Is it related to the radiation?”
This gentle, stolid rule-follower, who had been born in a traditional thatched-roof house and who was proud of his eighty-six-year-old mother’s health, who had prepared the receipt for me in advance and therefore firmly refused payment for the extra two hours that my loitering had required — never mind the hazardous-duty bonus I tried to give him (he did take a fraction of it) — he struck me as one of those innocents so useful to authority everywhere. I asked him whether he knew what radiation was, and he said, “I don’t know. Does it evaporate? Is it a liquid?”
“Should Tepco be punished?” I inquired.