ブックタイトルeigo13

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eigo13

hardly see the water in the river.My husband did not come home that night and finally returned thefollowing evening. The next day we set off searching for our children together.The city was much more horrible than I had heard about and imagined. Itwas like a painting of hell.Shozo, the fourth grader at Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial HighSchool, stayed in Senda-machi and went out to work at a factory in Ohzu.The house he stayed at was also burned down and our aunt, who was single,was missing. We went to the factory where he worked. It was standing,unburned but partly damaged. However, we couldn’t find him. Instead, whatwe found there were several bags made of straw. Inside them were Buddhistalter fittings, catches of mosquito nets and a brass bar. We had no idea whatwould become of them later.I plodded with a stick in the blazing heat of the mid-summer sunthrough burned fields, feeling stifled. It was beyond my imagination. A horselay charred on the ground. A streetcar had stopped and it was burned,completely black. A young mother was dead with her child in her arms in awater tank. On the streets there were a lot of people squatting on the groundin pain and begging for water. When I passed by in the evening again, theywere all dead.There was a soldier piling up the dead bodies on the sides of the road,calling out to the people searching for their family or relatives, “Please comeand look carefully to see who they are before I clear their corpses.” However,they had changed so much that they were no longer recognizable. One daywe went to Ninoshima Island. I was so exhausted that I slept for the nexttwo days. Not taking his rest, my husband, however, went out every daysearching for our sons from Ohno all the way to Yoshida. Only once, I wasable to search for them for two consecutive days. We asked a farmer nearbyto let us have five cups of rice. And then, we set off with it. Luckily, we wereable to stay with a farmer at Tajihi in Asa-cho for a night.In spite of our desperate search in August and September, there was notrace of them. So, we visited the City Hall. A receptionist there expressed hersympathy and said, “I am so sorry your two sons are missing.” After a whileshe handed us a container a little larger than a Japanese teacup with a lid,on which was written “the bones of a 17-year-old boy and a 14-year-old boy”.Inside it, we found two pieces of bones. So, we brought them home with care.