Free The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard Page A

to say owt about shop. If tha dustn'
    want." They had stared, like children playing to see who will blink first. Unbearable, her understanding; her lack of understanding.) The naval lieutenant, who was not all bad, had been in Japan.
    "It's an American show. You can do nothing without a permit from MacArthur." He gave an inevitable, obscene example. "They treat us worse than Japs. They're in the driver's seat now, and we're on the skids."
    On the wall there was a framed photograph of an artless king in naval dress. Even a king might be regretted now he was on the skids. Chinese servants were carrying trays, not yet apprised of change. The girl on the sofa said in her Mancunian voice, "And I say he couldn't run a pie-stall." She was speaking of the prime minister.
    The lieutenant told Ted Tice, "Unless you have a girl." Ted turned back to him. "I'm saying, don't get pushed into a lot of cultured pearls."
    Because of minesweeping, they were all day in the Inland Sea.
    The islands were irruptions, each fringed with the single file of lean trees leaning. At home, even the wildest coast had established itself with slow insistence, but these islands were fragments of a cata-clysm. Ted had never seen so red a dawn, or villages of straws. Little boats like wrapping paper flapped on alluvial waves, and a young Englishman looked down over a railing into faces stigmatized with the cartoon image of enemy.
    At the port, hulks lay about like rotting whales. There were blitzed docks and, in the harbour basin, the upturned keel of a ship capsized at launching. On the pier, the erstwhile enemy, dressed in the colour called fatigue, pulled on ropes and uttered the cries by which a ship is docked. One of the ship's officers said, "You'll be going over the hill." The slopes above the port of Kure were terraced gold and green, there were red valleys of azalea. It was early in June. "Not that way, it's the other direction." And Ted Tice pronounced, like a lesson, the name of his destination:
    "Hiroshima."
    It was like riding in state—the jeep being open, and khaki with authority. There were the bombed docks and ruined avenues of the port, and then the hillside grotto of a destroyed railway tunnel. The officer beside the driver was pointing out, "Here there was, apparently there used to be, you wouldn't credit it now." He said, "111
    fill you in as we go." Along the back of the front seat his heavy, extended arm was energized yet not quite human, like a turgid fire-hose. His name was Captain Girling.
    They were descending to a vast ground without horizon, and at first there were small unfinished houses everywhere. Unweathered timbers were being ribbed into rooms, roofs were being woven slat on smarting slat. Men and women were bearing loads, were walking planks, were strung up against a hot tin sky. The jeep slowed beside a new-laid tramline. Where rails and road diverged, a youth leaned from the tram door to spit on them, and withdrew.
    "If I could get at him," the officer said. "If only." This man was literally decorated, wearing the ribbons of many medals. He had a scar, just a line, as if a pillow had creased his sleeping cheek. This Captain Girling saw the flaw on Ted Tice's eyeball without looking into his eyes. In the back seat of the jeep they were showing, like children, what they had got—the cameras and watches and little radios with which the enemy had nearly won.
    In the past, the demolition of a city exposed contours of the earth.
    Modern cities do not allow this. The land has been levelled earlier, to make the city; then the city goes, leaving a blank. In this case, a river amazed with irrelevant naturalness. A single monument, defabricated girders of an abolished dome, presided like a vacant cranium or a hollowing out of the great globe itself: Saint Peter's, in some eternal city of nightmare.

    A catastrophe of which no one would ever say, the Will of God.
    It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction.
    He