Return to Hiroshima by Bob van Laerhoven

Author:Bob van Laerhoven
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crime Wave Press
Published: 2010-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

63

Hiroshima – metro service tunnel – Mitsuko and Reizo – evening, March 14th 1995

Reizo has prepared every detail of my imprisonment here in the service area next to the metro tunnel. That means he’ll keep his word and come back for me. There’s a writing pad and some ballpoint pens on a chest I’m expected to use as a desk. My left hand has been handcuffed to a pipe. The place is damp and stinks of stagnant water. The metro workers use it to store replacement track, bolts and other material. It’s stacked up behind me on racks. When Reizo handcuffed me at gunpoint I could see his bruised and bloodied face at close quarters. His eyes sparkled, his movements were jerky. He didn’t seem to have much control over his body, but he was still rational about the situation, and that worried me. He left a battery operated desk lamp for me. The shadows here remind me of Hashima. If I look away from the light too long I begin to have trouble breathing. I’ve lived a life in the shadows and it looks as if I’m going to die in the shadows. What is life? You turn a corner and in the blink of an eye you’re face to face with death. Nothing prepares you and you can’t believe your time has come. Has my time come? The will to live is unfathomable. Moments ago I was thinking about suicide, now I can’t believe that this is the way I’m going to die. Reizo promised time and again that he would come back and let me go: “What else can I do? You’re my muse. I need you.” His mind is damaged, I’m sure of that, but I’m also convinced he’s a man of his word. He kept saying he wanted to integrate my life into his novel because it’s so “extraordinary and contradictory”.

Where did he get this obsession? When we meet people with this level of insanity we’re inclined to back off. We find it hard to believe, blame it on something else: voices, possession, schizophrenia, evil spirits, but never the person in front of us. He’s just a toy in the hands of a power we name at random and never fully understand, although we recognise echoes of it in our own mind.

When he was standing at the door Reizo said with apparent indifference: “Start with your earliest memories on Hashima. Can you still remember?” His face was as contradictory as my life: a swollen and bloody nose, at once brutal and childlike.

“A piece of open ground between the ruins,” I said. “I emerged from the rubble and saw what looked like a black carpet, but it was moving. I didn’t understand at first, then I realised it was a bunch of crows. They flew off as I approached. Their cawing and fluttering wings filled my world. They skimmed past me. I saw their eyes, sparkling with a strange and sinister light. I’ve never been so afraid in all my life.

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