Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (shoe dog free ebook .txt) 📕

—Ridiculous! said Szilard angrily to the conductor. —He’s not even taking up a seat here!

But the conductor did not speak English and apparently had little interest in learning.

When Takashi was gone Ben was relieved. His ears were ringing, and Ann, distracted, had given up trying to read her book to gaze dreamily at the seat in front of her.

—Why don’t you take a nap, Leo? said Ann. —You didn’t sleep at all last night.

But Szilard scoffed, got up and set off after Takashi, bustling pompously down the aisle in the direction of the cheap seats.

—Quite a handful, isn’t he, said Oppenheimer as he sat down beside Ben, having lately crossed paths with Szilard on his way back from the smoking car.

Hiroshima was a nondescript city. Sitting in the back seat of the taxi with Ben beside her and Szilard in the front, rounding a curve and catching sight of a distant looming tower that Szilard claimed authoritatively was a rebuilt ruin known as Hiroshima castle, Ann was swiftly and decisively disappointed. She found herself in a dawning indifference to the trip, where she was, and this day, she felt a sense of waste and detachment, resignation to boredom.

She thought: After all that there is nothing much here.

Or there was plenty, a surfeit of normal shapes. The city was a dull continuum of buildings, roads and trees, in short a city like other cities. Nowhere was there a vast and yawning crater, nowhere a dismal military graveyard stretching out with its army of uniform stones that testified to an enormity of deadness.

In the fifteen minutes it took them to travel from the train station to the hotel she felt the mundane actually oppress her, the sameness of urban geography throb in her temples, on the tired end of an arc that had lifted and dropped her, halfway around the spinning globe, only to gaze dully at billboards and concrete, confronted with the same gray dirt you found in say Albuquerque or any other spreading and bland inhabitation.

She had not wanted to come here, but she realized as they cruised along the busy multilane road, compact cars buzzing behind, around and ahead of them in spurts of efficiency, that she had expected to find the confirmation of an expectation nonetheless. She had thought she would disembark from the plane into importance: a brooding and massive loss, a moment trapped forever in structures. She had thought she would find an architecture of grief, outrage, horror, a place that felt like a cry of shock, husky and shadowed aftermath, dark broadcast that this was the place, the place where the end had begun.

But Hiroshima was businesslike and had buried its past in normalcy. Where the bomb had been dropped was now a park with a deep, cement-lined canal that passed for what had once been the Motoyasu River, old trees, green manicured stretches of lawn. Small, grimy crafts advertised as “river pleasure boats” took tourists on rides past the “A-bomb dome” and the banks with their planted shrubs and fading impressions of pink blossoms.

Asked about it later, many of the atom bomb physicists said they did not regret the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Many of them were lucid and thoughtful in defense of the decision, and many were also staunch advocates of nonproliferation after the war. The eminent Manhattan Project physicist Hans Bethe, for instance, believed the decision to drop the first bomb had been the right one but also believed that Nagasaki was a crime and that the decision to use nuclear force should never be made again.

Hiroshima, he believed, should have remained a singularity.

Bethe, by all accounts a kind and considerate man, arrived at his belief that Hiroshima had been justified by using reason. He used reason both before the fact and after it, when nothing could be undone.

In the hotel lobby, scientists clustering around them, Ann and Ben studied their guidebook’s crude map and picked out a route to Ground Zero, which now housed a Peace Museum. The radioactive debris had been buried in soil, covered in grass and planted with trees, and the area had been renamed the “Peace Park.” They left the lobby and walked with the scientists a few paces ahead of them until finally they crossed a bridge, found themselves surrounded by monuments, and stood still.

None of them moved for a minute. Oppenheimer did not even reach for the pack of cigarettes in his inside breast pocket. They were standing on soft grass in a grove of widely spaced trees; over the tops of the trees they could see parking structures and other tall and graceless buildings, skirting the park, looming. Near them was a sculpture that looked like a rocket with a little girl standing on top of it, her arms raised. It was built in the middle of an expanse of pavement, and in front of it sat schoolchildren in dark blue uniforms, in perfectly straight lines, listening to their teacher. A booth near the foot of the statue was full of bright colors.

No one broke the silence, and cars passed until finally, in a quick shuffling movement from Szilard’s foot, there was the suggestion of restlessness. Slowly they walked toward the statue and the booth, its green and orange and yellow contents. The air was humid and still.

Ann noticed azaleas blooming here too, light pink and hot pink and white on the same bush.

—It does not look as though a bomb fell here, said Fermi as they walked.

—It was almost sixty years ago, Enrico, said Szilard. —You don’t think they’ve renovated? Get a clue.

She resented the azaleas. They were the ugliest flowers she’d ever seen, she said to herself, possibly the first ugly flowers she had ever seen. No: it was not the flowers that were ugly but the bushes they grew on, bulky and square. It was the bushes that made the flowers ugly.

—Cranes, said Szilard, as they approached, reading a sign.