Question 7, page 2
I wasn’t sure what my book was about. I may have said something about love, which had the virtue of not being untrue and being so broad as to be meaningless. She raised a hand to her mouth and politely laughed behind it. I sensed that for her Sanyo-Onoda City and love were not ideas that naturally ran in tandem. She smiled again and repeated her original question: so why was I in Sanyo-Onoda City?
To our side a few steps away, Kenji Y—, now very drunk, was bellowing out a karaoke love ballad into a microphone. No one was listening. Perhaps that was the point of the hostess bar, I thought. You sang your heart out and no one noticed, you talked from the bottom of your heart and no one listened.
I looked back at her. I said that I was visiting the place where my father once worked as a slave labourer.
She looked up at me with her dreamy anime eyes and blinked. Still smiling, she said, ‘What is slave labourer?’
13
She kept smiling, fixed as if in a rictus. For that matter, the whole world felt fixed in a rictus, and me with it. As if we both were now in a kabuki performance I smiled back and kept smiling and she kept smiling and I kept smiling and it was hard to believe, or think, as I felt all the sadness in the world fill me at that moment: for Mr Sato leaning into me, for my father, for the smiling Japanese hostess with anime eyes, for everyone in that overly warm bar and in the world that brutally cold, wet night.
I thought of Kenji Y—’s grandfather alone in his rude hut in the mountains unable to find words, as I was now unable to find words that might express any of it. Kenji’s grandfather had been walking with ghosts. Perhaps, like me, he was already becoming one himself before he died, inhabiting a world that had no knowledge nor desire to know what had happened. Somewhere there was a real world where all that passed continued to exist. But it was not here, and strangely that seemed at once a relief and a horror. Nothing I said could be heard nor anything I saw seen, and together, Kenji Y—’s grandfather and me, we kept staring into time, knowing only what had happened was always happening and would never stop happening.
I looked into that young woman’s eyes.
‘Nothing important,’ I said.
There was a tap on my shoulder. It was Kenji Y—. Did I want to sing something?
14
It could be argued that science was inexorably heading towards the discovery of nuclear fission and therefore the invention of the atomic bomb and thus Hiroshima. But nothing is ever inevitable, least of all the atomic bomb in the mid-twentieth century, a project which, as one of its key theorists, Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, noted, would only happen if someone could turn a country into a single workshop devoted to that task.
At a high-level Nazi conference on 4 June 1942 Niels Bohr’s former student, the brilliant German physicist Werner Heisenberg, spoke of a bomb no bigger than a pineapple capable of destroying a city. But after, when Albert Speer questioned Heisenberg, he found the physicist’s answers ‘by no means encouraging . . . The technical prerequisites for production would take years to develop, two years at the earliest, even provided the program was given maximum support.’
Speer reported back to Hitler.
‘Hitler had sometime spoken about the possibility of an atom bomb, but the idea quite obviously strained his intellectual capacity. He was also unable to grasp the revolutionary nature of nuclear physics. In the twenty-two-hundred recorded points of my conferences with Hitler,’ Speer continued in his exhaustive, exhausting manner, ‘nuclear fission comes up only once, and then is mentioned with extreme brevity. Hitler did sometimes comment on its prospects, but what I told him of conferences with the physicists confirmed his view that there was not much profit in the matter.’
When Hitler heard that Heisenberg had not given any final answer to Speer’s question as to whether nuclear fission could be kept under control he was ‘not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star’.
By the time Heisenberg was describing the possibility of pineapple-size atomic bombs, the war was turning against the Nazis in Russia, and any project needed to be able to promise certainty of benefit. Because Hitler remained convinced he would defeat both the Soviet Union and Britain by 1943, there was a standing rule that only weaponry that could be battle-ready within an eighteen-month window be supported. Presented with the possibility of an atom bomb, Germany turned away from it, believing it would take too long to develop, particularly when the result—an atom bomb that actually worked—was by no means guaranteed.
After the Nazis abandoned research on the bomb, they devoted limited resources to developing a ‘uranium motor’, which would become known in the US as a nuclear reactor. They failed in this also. At war’s end the leading German nuclear scientists were nevertheless captured and put in an English manor house near Cambridge to discover what they did and didn’t know. Treated as guests and shown every courtesy, they were unaware that all the bedrooms and living rooms had been bugged. Shortly before dinner on 6 August 1945 they were told that an atom bomb had been built and exploded by the Allies over Hiroshima.
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At first the German scientists were disbelieving that the backward, vulgar Americans could accomplish what German civilisation could not. As more confirmations were made, though, their disdain transformed into anger then, finally, a virtuous horror—not without its own self-serving hypocrisy—that such a weapon would be created, the use of which as civilised men they found disgusting and abhorrent.
Their conversations continued: a confusion of professional affront soothed by moral grandstanding, attempts to tease out whether they were building the bomb for the sake of the motherland or for the sake of Nazism, or, for that matter, whether they had ever been serious about building a bomb at all.
The German scientists’ doubts about the project, their own abilities, and their very intentions grew as their misgivings and sheer bewilderment multiplied. Could they have built the bomb? Would they have built the bomb? Had they ever even intended to build the bomb? Was their failure failure or was their failure a unique form of passive resistance? Was their failure their failure or was it their unspoken triumph—or was it, after all, the fault of their leaders?
Paul Harteck (physical chemist): We might have succeeded if the highest authorities had said, ‘We are prepared to sacrifice everything.’
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (physicist): In our case even the scientists said it couldn’t be done.
Erich Bagge (physicist): That’s not true. You were there yourself at that conference in Berlin. I think it was on 8 September that everyone was asked—Geiger, Bothe, and you, Harteck, were there too, and everyone said that it must be done at once. Someone said, ‘Of course it is an open question whether one ought to do a thing like that.’ Thereupon Bothe got up and said, ‘Gentlemen, it must be done.’ Then Geiger got up and said, ‘If there is the slightest chance that it is possible—it must be done.’ That was on 8 September ’39 . . .2
16
Perhaps the only country capable of inventing and producing a workable bomb in the mid-twentieth century was the only country that could manage such a massive diversion of its economy—the United States of America. Over the course of the war, under the auspices of the highly secret Manhattan Project, it turned much of its resources—the equivalent of what was flowing into the car industry at the time in terms of investment, the labour of more than half a million workers and the genius of thousands of scientists—into a single workshop with a single goal: the creation of the atom bomb.
‘Bomb away!’ said Thomas Ferebee at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945, releasing a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima. The B-29’s bomb bay doors fell open and an atom bomb codenamed Little Boy dropped out of its belly, triggering an intricate sequence of successive tripwires, electrical plugs, timers, barometric fuses and altimeters. Forty-three seconds later, at 1900 feet above ground level, a final circuit closed and four silk powder bags each containing two pounds of cordite were detonated by a tiny explosion that in turn initiated the largest man-made explosion in human history. And then the four silk powder bags were no more than vapour and energy along with the 60,000 Japanese souls ascending with them to heaven.
That’s life.
17
I say 60,000 souls because that was the initial figure put on the initial dead. But no one knows how many people died in that instant or subsequently. Everyone who has sought to quantify how many people died at Hiroshima has qualified their estimate by admitting it is impossible to know how many people died at Hiroshima. As well as 60,000 dead another official estimate says 80,000 dead and another official estimate says 140,000 dead and all three estimates are authoritative and all are heavily qualified and in truth no one actually knows. Nor does anyone agree on why the war ended. No one agrees on why the war started either. No one agrees, no one knows, and all that can be said with absolute certainty is that soaring as pure energy and vaporised fragments towards the heavens that morning amidst animals, buildings, road signs, carts, cars, trams, so many numberless human beings and so much assorted detritus of daily living were four silk powder bags.
What remains of Hiroshima that day are only questions.
Do possibly more corpses tomorrow justify possibly fewer corpses today? We pretend to have the answers to this sort of thing. We pretend we know. We pretend there is a moral calculus in war. We pretend so many things. In war, though, not even simple arithmetic is possible. In recent times we have become prisoners of the idea that life is infinitely measurable, that all human wanting and torment and laughter, all hate and all love, can be reduced to that contemporary word metrics. That there is, in other words, an answer for all things that can be found in numbers.
But the elusiveness of those innumerable unknown souls on that blue morning defies measurement and mocks metrics. They exist outside of numbers. Chekhov believed that the role of literature was not to provide answers but only to ask the necessary questions. One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical:
Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?3
Who?
You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?
That’s question 7.
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Who loves longer?
Though written for money at the very start of his career, question 7 is in many ways the archetypal Chekhov story in just two sentences. Like so much of what Chekhov wrote, question 7 is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world, a superficial world, a frozen world of appearances, beneath which an entirely different world surges as if a wild river that at any moment might drown us. A woman ignored at dinner tables, a chorus girl betrayed, a man who deludes himself he is happier in the country, a womaniser who pretends to himself that he is not falling in love, a grieving cab man who tries to tell each of his fares his son has just died only to be ignored, and who ends up finding the only one who has time to listen is his horse; so much falsity beneath which we discover only in the last paragraphs, or sometimes even the last sentence, the truth of these people and through them of life itself.
Virtue and morality are stripped away to reveal cruelty and wickedness while cruelty and wickedness, in turn, are stripped away to reveal kindness and goodness. As in life, we are shocked. There is something sacrilegious about Chekhov, something shocking in his gentle, unassuming stories, so seemingly plain, that finally refuse to accept the logic of this world and always surprise us by revealing another world that we recognise as the real world in which we live.
Who loves longer? Chekhov’s genius lay in never presuming to give the answer. Of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Chekhov merely said it framed the questions correctly. Each of us has a public life and private life. But beyond both is a secret life that baffles us. Perhaps the only reply that can be made to Hiroshima is to ask question 7. If it is a question that can never be answered, it is still the question we must keep asking, if only in order to understand that life is never binary, nor reducible to cant or code, but a mystery we at best apprehend. In Chekhov’s stories, the only fools are those with answers.
19
The US only did what it did creating the atom bomb because a man called Leo Szilard, haunted by questions, persuaded its president it should and then helped make the impossible possible. And Leo Szilard only did what he did because he had once read a novel. The novel was written out of a terror of love and it terrified Leo Szilard and entranced him in equal measure until it became his destiny. The novel was written by H. G. Wells.
20
H. G. Wells looked up from the book he was reading at the woman who had just entered the room. She was even younger than he had been led to believe. The book was a discourse on the latest discoveries about radium by Frederick Soddy. The ideas in it physically excited Wells in a manner akin to sex which he also found exciting and, when he thought about it, it had to be said more so. Except he did not think so when he thought about it objectively, that is to say scientifically, that is to say rationally, for at such times he found his thoughts, normally so clear, so assured and confident, would grow oddly muddy, equally bewildered and bewildering on such matters, as the knots of feeling, rather than unravelling through reason, only pulled tighter.
In his life he slept with whom he wished, feeling not that he was unfaithful to his wife but rather, as he explained to her, that he was faithful to his philosophy. After all, it was 1912. In his thoughts Wells sought to square sexual freedom with rationality and social utility. He was developing a theory of the ‘lover-shadow’ to explain his actions as a necessary social good and perhaps the very basis of society, but it never seemed to quite get beyond some muddled conceptions. In his dreams he walked on ice in glass-soled shoes with predictable results.
Still, he felt, with some pride, that he had never allowed sex to dominate his scientific curiosities, his politico-social urges, or his sense of obligation. Yet nor would he suppress sex, suppression being anathema to him. He did what he pleased, freed, he felt, by vocation, from the prohibitions that fell on the lawyer, doctor and schoolteacher. He supposed most other men had as much or more drive, but less outlet. He had begun to ask himself, ‘Why not?’ Hearing no answer in the negative, he did as he pleased. He couldn’t ever quite explain it satisfactorily but then who ever had? He liked to fuck and he could and so he did. Perhaps there was more to it; he spent hours failing to work out what that might be, while the truth was women made him quiver like a fish and the one now smiling at him from the sitting room door—top teeth slightly prominent in her gypsy face and her bottom somewhat more prominent in a blue silk hobble skirt—electrified him. She was a question mark he intended to answer.
21
The young woman standing before him was Cicely Fairfield, a failed actress who had only recently taken up journalism. She struck a dishevelled and disreputable pose. She found it to her advantage but within a few years she would drop it, coming to believe that in old age it was seen to prefigure only death. And the young woman intended to live: long, largely, making her mark in her own way.
Cicely Fairfield was revelling in a moment of metamorphosis. She affected a world weariness far beyond her years. To help the effect along she had stolen for her nom de plume the name of a character from a fashionable Ibsen play—a prototype New Woman, an alpha female adventuress, with a Christian name as old as the Bible and a surname as unwavering as a lodestone. Within a year of adopting it she had found a distinctive voice as a writer, a sting and charm enlivened by the gift for sometimes surreal metaphors, a talent that decades later would see her celebrated as the most important ‘woman writer’ in the English language.
She discovered very early that her chief strength as a writer was that she wrote as she felt, whereas most writers only write as others think. Along with her new name she stole from Ibsen the thoroughly non-English idea that ideas make the world spin around, and saved herself from the hubris of this fancy by having no original ideas of her own but only a gift for a certain ferocity of observation about those who did.
Fittingly, she began her new career with book reviews, a perfect place to leapfrog to an elevated position on the shoulders of the famous she sat on and shat on. Her reviews were enlivened by a passing acquaintanceship with the writings of a newly fashionable philosopher called Friedrich Nietzsche, thrilling more to the vigour of the German’s prose than engaging with his thought. Befitting her new androgynous persona as a feminist Ubermensch, she took from Nietzsche a literary absolutism she made her personal style. If her literary judgements were not always of the first order, choosing to praise the inconsequential and now forgotten, the fierce sting and wild daring were most on display, most telling and most winning, when she went hunting for the biggest names to bring down. Her scandalous attacks delighted readers and were making her famous.
The young woman sensed she had arrived at one of those cusps of time where history creaks and cracks like a glacier calving an iceberg. She was the voice of the New defining itself by revealing the Old as ripe for mockery and derision. If not an original game she gave it a new edge by virtue of her sex and the dexterity of her attacks, as pointed as a poisoned dart. The times were hers, and when she turned her gaze on the time traveller, future’s prophet himself, Mr H. G. Wells, she humiliated him for having been only ever about the past.
