The Heat of the Sun

There was a song by Buck Owens about a man who left his heart with a girl made in Japan. The driver repeated it remorselessly.
    The three days we spent in Hiroshima were – or were meant to be – the most important part of our itinerary. Dutifully, we trailed through exhibitions, stood through ceremonies, sat
through speeches, and made speeches of our own, but the blankness in me remained. I was grateful for the kindness of our Japanese hosts, who treated me with a solicitude I felt I hardly
deserved.
    On the morning of August 6, at the commemoration of the bombing, I did my best to be moved by Peace Memorial Park, with its cenotaph and surmounting arch. Standing between a blissful Schneider
Kipfer and the ostentatiously sobbing Arwin Janis Quirk, I gazed across the pool and lush gardens to the old Industrial Promotion Hall across the river, one of the few buildings left standing after
the bombing, with the skeleton frame of its shattered dome. This is life. This is death. This is what men do , the dome seemed to say, but I did not want to hear.
    There is a torch in the park called the Flame of Peace. It always burns.
    ‘An eternal flame,’ I said, when our Japanese lady guide had explained it to us the day before.
    She shook her head. ‘No, not eternal. When the last atomic weapon is destroyed, the flame shall be extinguished.’
    The ceremony wore on. Voices spoke in Japanese and English, reciting familiar facts, but still I felt only numb: the destructive power of so many thousands of tons of TNT, the radioactive
fireball, the heat so searing that only shadows of some of the dead remained, branded on the rubble like photographic negatives. I breathed slowly, as if I were sleeping. We build our memorials and
make our speeches: what else are we to do? What had happened in this place was too great to comprehend, let alone allay. Had it been inevitable? It was no act of God: men had made decisions, bent
their inventive arts towards this end, and this had happened. It is what men do: we kill one another, and invent our reasons why.
    I looked away from the impassive arch and the faces all around me: towards the trees that stirred a little on a scented breeze; towards the blue, cloudless sky to which, forty years before, an
indifferent gravity had reached up and pulled down the sun. Birds sang in the trees, and the speaker quoted lines from a thirteenth-century text: ‘ Ceaselessly, the river flows and yet the
water is never the same, while in the still pools the shifting foam gathers and is gone, never staying for a moment. Even so is man and his habitation .’
    That evening I excused myself from a banquet and rested in my hotel room. There was something comforting in the anonymous plush decor. I could have been anywhere: Atlanta, Buenos Aires, Cairo,
Delhi...
    Next morning the movie-star Greyhound took us to Nagasaki. It was an afterthought of sorts, if a necessary one. Our mission was accomplished: the main business over, the main photographs taken,
the main quotations recorded by reporters. I wished I could go home at once. I was weary of solemn, useless words; weary of floral tributes; weary of Earl Rogers and Chip Striker with their
aggressive voices and confident simple certainties and competing never-resting efforts to go to bed with Arwin Janis Quirk.
    When we reached Nagasaki I announced, to the consternation of our hosts, that I would attend only the memorial service on the morning of August 9. I pleaded tiredness and was believed; I was an
old man, and frail – but not so frail as I made out. Liberated from a conference on nuclear weapons, I set out to explore the city.
    Nagasaki had not been destroyed so thoroughly as Hiroshima. Hills and valleys had confined the worst of the blast to the north, where the harbour narrows into the river. Around the harbour, much
of the old city I had known could still be made out, like scraps of a collage, papered over here and there with many a recent addition.
    Renting a cab to drive me around, I surprised the driver by saying I had no wish to see Hypocentre Park or the Peace Statue or the Atomic Bomb Museum. I visited temples and browsed in stores. I
looked at the view from Inasa-yama, across the harbour and over the sea. Whether my purpose was clear to me from the first, I cannot say. Can our intentions grow in us unknown, deep in our minds,
before we become aware of them? Mine revealed itself to me with no surge of insight; I felt no surprise,