The dyer of Hiroshima | Page12

It was in the late eighties. The dyer on the way home was a thin Japanese, almost whitish-skinned, perfectionist with the cleanliness of all the clothes that he wore. One day, surprisingly, after twenty years spent behind the counter, he told me that he was retiring and returning to Japan. In his smiling eyes, nothing strange was noticed, he was as always.

I have never seen a person in the cleaner help him, neither his family nor his employee. He worked alone, in silence. He said that he had a permanent visa, but that he did not need it anymore. The place did not belong to him and he used his savings to buy from time to time a bottle of sake or to pay a woman.

The place had another name, but half hidden behind a door, I saw a small sign that said Hiroshima. The only thing he confessed to me before leaving, was that he was about to die and that they wanted to receive him as one of the last survivors. By the time the bomb was dropped, most of the remaining people were out of the killing area where she fell.

The dry cleaner sent a letter to the Government of Japan where he reminded them that he was a survivor of the blast center point and that he wanted to die in his homeland. I did not lie. He sent his papers and from Tokyo he was recognized as living at that time in the city and appearing as missing. They sent him an open ticket in first clbad. He did not tell them that the doctor gave him a maximum of three months of life.

Then he started crying, but put a bonsai that he kept as a treasure to water him with his own tears. That calmed him down. Seeing my interest, this curiosity to know the intimacy of others that gnaws the Argentines, began to tell me their story: it was the first time I told it to anyone and I, except for a casual client, was an absolute stranger.

So began his story. It was early in the morning, around 8:30 pm of the hot summer of 1945, and the family was reunited for breakfast, when she heard the sound of American planes and a late warning, such as he later learned of it, because the Japanese authorities did not believe that they were going to bomb civilian cities without any military regiment: there were none in that city. More than a war operation, almost over, it was a warning of terror and fear to the rest of the country's population to remind them of their bad behavior and the future that awaited them.

Akemi, his name was in his country, he realized that he had to flee with his wife and two children as soon as possible, running away towards the countryside or the bay. I did not know that they were going to bomb the city and that this time the target would be the civilian population, but they were living in their central area and were waiting at any time for the arrival of American troops or Soviet (if Russia had already declared war) listening with anguish to the bombing of neighboring cities. He had served in the army, but because of a lung injury, they brought him back. He had been there for a few days and had blessed his chance to save his people.

They snuck out, the sun already looked like a huge egg and the heat was intense. He searched for the last time, he did not know that, the beautiful face of Ena (gift of God), his wife, his almond eyes barely curved, the roundness of his small bads that he was tired of 'to kiss; her lips wet and wide (rare in a Japanese woman, but she came from a distant island in the center of the Pacific that produced this kind of beauty), her small size, her almost perfect legs where two tiny feet were throwing a dash of An eye whose fingers and nails hardly seemed to be. Her fertilized belly had protected her two children in her hot cave with walls that looked like porcelain.

I had a two year old little girl and a five year old boy who also cried in fear. They were his life. To the little boy (Daiki) whom they had called like that because since his birth, they saw him courage and strength, he taught baseball, a gift of American economic and sport domination, and the boy took the little stick with which he played by squeezing it by hand. right to strike the first American paratrooper or deceased aviator and break his head. His eyes were the largest in the family and did not need artificial light to see at night. At the time his father was working, he was expecting his business to come out with him and his bat to chase away the rats and tadpoles that abounded there. With the war, food was scarce and the father's pension could no longer feed them all. That's why, now that he was retired from the military, Akemi used his war rifle to hunt all kinds of animals, even lost and abandoned cats and dogs. who, in the hands of Ena, constituted a gift for the family's stomach.

His youngest daughter was his treasure, he did not treat her like a doll, he placed it on his lap and caressed his silky, long hair, his wife had taught him how to make braids or a tail, and when he wanted him to be a little girl. she had a different appearance, he resorted to it. She did not have a face as beautiful as his wife's, she looked more like her thin, stubborn face and her ears were rather big, that's why it was called Rini (rabbit). Unlike his son, he was talkative like his mother and the stories he told him as he grew up, his questions about this or that detail were missing. He was as intelligent or smarter than his mother, which would make her a day smarter than himself, that Ena surpbaded.

"Hiroshima is located in a delta, with seven streams cutting it in six islands like in a small Venice," said the dyer, changing his conversation, no doubt to appease his own pain. We lived near one of them and learned to swim there.

He believed that the sea was the only way out of Japan and that they had to flee from any disaster.

At that breakfast, which in the end was not the case, Rini asked him why the sun only rose in the east, why such a powerful being could not change his mind and be surprised to leave the other side, so sometimes they had it in the morning and the others in the afternoons, to better use the day and read stories when they got up or before going to bed under the sun who touched them. Soon, a similar sun would show them how powerful he could be.

They walked a few steps, well glued and kissed, nothing in their hands. Suddenly they heard the explosion and did not know anything else. At dusk, when Akemi got up with the bonsai still in his hand and that his documents, which he still had in his trousers pocket, also intact, did not see his family around him, there was had only three shadows on the floor next to him. but none was his. He shouted their names, called them again and again unnecessarily and had no answer. Then he fainted and when he woke up, he ran over the scorched earth and the debris until he reached the seashore. There, he found a miraculously surviving small boat abandoned with the oars intact and began to row. A large cargo ship caught him, his occupants informed him that he was coming from a distant village and when he pbaded nearby, a big explosion had occurred. blinded and he could not continue to paddle. They believed in it, boarded the ship and continued to run in no vehicles by sea and land until a few years later they came to the antipodes of Buenos Aires, where they became a dyer thanks to the help of his compatriots who dominated there.

Now, Akemi cursed his name (early morning beauty), but that was the last thing he said to me. He was desperate to see Ena, Rini and Daiki again, they had waited too long. He knew that for this to happen, he had to die from the effects of the same explosion, even if that could not be the case at the same time.