Beate looks at her father’s eyes in the picture. He seems surprised by something. His right hand is holding the camera like a weapon, barrel pointing upwards.
Beate rolls onto her back and stares at the ceiling. After a minute, she picks up the book again. She finds what she’s looking for; a story Nakata told her father about something he had witnessed in Hiroshima that had etched itself in his memory. A young artist had accosted Nakata outside the ruins of his house and told him what had happened to his family. Hermann Becht had published the story verbatim in Lens to commemorate the suffering caused by the atomic bomb. His daughter has read it many times, always wondering why that particular story had made her decide to go to Hiroshima.
“I was heavily burnt when I came round. My wife looked terrible too. Our children? I tried to call them. Was that my voice? I was croaking like a frog, unable to utter an intelligible word. I walked a few paces, stumbled over something. A man. I didn’t recognise him; he looked as if he had been roasted in an oven. To my great surprise, he was still alive. ‘Leave me, children,’ he whispered. ‘Run!’ The voice sounded like a dog barking but it was familiar all the same. Only then did I realise it was my father’s voice. But looking at him, I thought: no, it isn’t him, it can’t be. ‘Hurry!” he screamed in his dog voice. It is him, I thought. I ran to get water, but couldn’t find anything, just rubble, and acrid white dust covering everything. Everywhere I looked I saw fire and sooty smoke, and a red glow in the few houses that were still half standing, illuminating them from within like lanterns. I went back, looked at my father’s contorted face, his pain, the throes of death. No, I thought, it’s not him after all. At that moment, my wife tripped – not over an adult, but over the body of our youngest child Masaru, a baby scarcely two weeks old, swollen almost beyond recognition, distended by a force from within. Our infant son was the colour of fried liver. My wife was inconsolable. The blaze from the houses further down the street was getting closer. My wife tore at her hair, and to my horror, clumps of it came out in her hands. Her skin was covered in scorch marks that kept changing shape, abscesses bursting open, a dark, thick fluid oozing out. I dragged her away, screaming that our children must both be dead and that we would die soon too if we didn’t move quickly. She resisted, with a strength I didn’t know she had in her. In the rubble of our house she had spotted some paintbrushes and paint from my studio. The paint in the open pots had evaporated in the heat, but two of the pots were still closed. I saw her staring and stopped trying to pull her away. She had gone insane, there was no other explanation. I wanted to leave her behind. She grabbed my arm. Her voice trembled as she begged one last favour of me, a token of respect for Masaru, to wish him well before we left him behind. I did what she asked; it took me less than a minute. Out on the street, we noticed a stranger. He looked at us with a contorted smile, eyes as hard as marbles. He was taking pictures of the destruction. I don’t know why I approached him. I told him I’d painted a tribute to our divine emperor on the corpse of my youngest son, that I’d done it for my wife, but that I cursed the emperor myself. He nodded as if that was a matter of course, jerked his arm away and walked towards the blaze, to our house, where I saw him bend over the corpse of my dear, innocent Masaru… The camera clicked again and again, and while I knew it wasn’t possible, the sound rang in my ears like shots from a cannon …”
In her mind’s eye, Beate Becht pictures Satsuo Nakata walk through the rubble in the surreal light. The man bends over, peers at the dead, distended infant and takes photos from all sides. She looks at the reproduction of Nakata’s picture in Lens, then at the cover photo of the Japanese magazine. The two deformed babies are identical.
Beate wonders whether she’d be capable of such a thing, taking pictures of a tiny corpse in a place where death reigns supreme. How could Nakata have ignored the risk to his own life? What drove men like her father and his Japanese colleague to sacrifice their lives to bear witness, to testify? She’ll never understand. In the past months, she’s often wondered what she’s hoping to achieve with her new book project. Is she trying to expose the cruelty of the human race? Or exorcise her own ghosts?
She calls the project a homage to her father and it’s the reason for her stay in Hiroshima. Becht has collected her father’s unpublished photographs, ranging from his last pictures taken during the Gulf War in Baghdad, portraits of babies with AIDS in South Africa and child soldiers from Angola, to an astonishing series about the zeru zeru, Tanzanian albino children who are hunted down and murdered for their hair, skin and bones, which magicians grind to juju powders believed to turn any man into a sex god. Beate uses the material in collages, combining it with her own punk photos, in which her models – teetering on the balance between male and female – parade their hidden sexual fears and aggressions. She wants to end on a completely different note: a serene series on Hiroshima during the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Little Boy on August 6th. They’re planning a nocturnal procession with lanterns illuminating prayers for peace painted on huge silk banners. Beate is hoping it’ll be surreal, like a fairy-tale. She wants to stay in the city for the next couple of weeks, soak up the atmosphere, and then come back in August. A number of famous writers have agreed to contribute pieces on war and violence to her book. The project looks good on paper – her publisher leered at her when they signed the contract and waved his trademark silk handkerchief – but for some reason Beate has been feeling low for over six months. Her shrink, who charges ninety marks an hour, said something about an existential-artistic depression with symptoms of a deep-seated father complex. The brylcreamed psych licked his lips and rattled on about “affectivity issues” and “bisexual impulses”. He prescribed Clonazepan, Anafranil and Valium, but they didn’t seem to help. One minute she felt listless, the next overwrought. Patience and a new appointment. These things take time, her psychiatrist pointed out, especially with someone as sensitive as you. Beate takes another look at the baby on the magazine cover, and then at the picture Nakata took after Little Boy had fallen.
Twin brothers?
20
Chronology. The word haunts me. Have years of loneliness eroded my memory, or am I a person without chronology? “God is omnipresent, even in the smallest parts of himself.” Reizo’s pompous words have stuck in my mind for some reason. After all, my father was revered as a god by some. I don’t believe that a lack of chronology drives you mad. But with a mind like mine, a mind that wants to shine its light into every hidden corner of my being, what does it do?
“Revered as a god by some.” Easy to say, perhaps, but it’s only when you really think about the situation that you realise how weird it is. I took the veneration of my father for granted, but “some” didn’t refer to just anyone; they were men of high social standing. As a people, we adore secrets. We form underground brotherhoods that have tattooed a cult of complex rituals, mutual dependence, bloodlines and ethereal goals onto the map of our society. The Yuzonsha, the society of my father’s followers, is one such a brotherhood. I tried to listen in to one of their meetings in February 1994, a little over a year ago. I’ll never forget it. It marked an irreversible turning point in my life. Lying on a hard mattress, in this damp space that was never meant to be lived in, I relive the scene as if I’m sitting in the old Hashima cinema, watching it like a war film from long ago, with a cast of black-and-white characters I don’t know and can barely understand.