自考英語綜合二下冊(cè)課文 lesson 4

Lesson Four

　　Text

　　Zero Hour: Forty-Three Seconds over Hiroshima Peter Goldman

　　On a brilliant summer's morning in 1945,

　　Kaz Tanaka looked up into the sky over Hiroshima

　　and saw the beginning of the end of her world.

　　She was 18 then, and her mind was filled with teenage things.

　　She had wakened with a slight fever,

　　just bothersome enough to keep her home from her job in a war plant.

　　But she felt well enough to be up and about;

　　her father had asked her to water a tree in front of their house.

　　She ran across the courtyard and let herself out the front gate.

　　A girlfriend was standing across the street.

　　Kaz waved, and the two were gossiping happily

　　when they heard the drone of a B-29 bomber six miles up.

　　It was a minute or so before 8: 15.

　　The plane did not frighten Kaz.

　　For one thing,Hiroshima had gone almost untouched by the air war.

　　For another, Kaz had been born in California,

　　and although her father had returned to Japan while she was still in diapers

　　she liked to tell people she was the American in the family.

　　She even felt a kind of distant kinship with the B-29s

　　that flew regularly overhead, bound north for Tokyo and other targets.

　　She waved at the plane."Hi, angel!" she called.

　　A white spot appeared in the sky,

　　as small and innocent looking as a scrap of paper.

　　It was falling away from the plane,drifting down toward them.

　　The journey took seconds.

　　The air exploded in blinding light and color,

　　the rays shooting outward as in a child's drawing of the sun,

　　and Kaz was flung to the ground so violently

　　that her two front teeth broke off;she had sunk into unconsciousness.

　　Kaz's father had been out back tending the vegetables,in his undershorts.

　　When he came staggering out of the garden,

　　blood was running from his nose and mouth.

　　By the next day the exposed parts of his body would turn a chocolate brown.

　　What had been the finest house in the neighborhood came crashing down.

　　Kaz had herself been hit in the back by the flying timber.

　　She felt nothing.People were only shapes in dense, gray fog of dust and ash.

　　A mushroom cloud towered seven miles over the remains of the city,

　　the signature of a terrifying new age.Kaz never saw it.

　　She was inside it Kaz Tanaka had wakened in a frightening new world

　　a world whose dominant sound was a silence broken only by the cries of the dying

　　The very air seemed hostile,

　　so thick with dust and ash that she could barely see.

　　She found her girl friend next to her.

　　"What happened?" they both blurted at once.

　　There were no answers;no one knew."Are you hurt?" Kaz asked.

　　"No, I can get up,"her girlfriend answered."Thank heaven!" Kaz said.

　　She struggled to her own feet then,

　　and took her first steps onto the ruin of her life.

　　That life had been a comfortable one,

　　wanting in nothing not,at least,until the war.

　　Kaz's father had been born to a family of some wealthand social position

　　in Hiroshima,

　　and had migrated to America in the early 1920s in the spirit of adventure,

　　not of need or flight;he never intended to stay.

　　He moved back to Hiroshima at 40;

　　it was expected of him as the sole male heir to their name.

　　But he brought his American baby girl with him,

　　and a lifestyle flavored with American ways.

　　The house he built was a spacious one.

　　There was a courtyard in front of the place and two gardens in back,

　　one to provide vegetables,

　　one to delight the eye in the formal Japanese fashion.

　　One of the two livin rooms was American,with easy chairs instead of tatami,

 

　　and so were the kitchen and bathroom fittings.

　　Dinner was Japanese,the family sitting on the floor in the traditional way.

　　Breakfast was American pancakes or bacon and eggs,

　　taken at the kitchen table.

　　When the news came that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor,

　　Kaz's father retired to his garden and stayed all day,

　　shaking his head and refusing to speak to anyone.

　　But he could not shut the war out of the sheltered world

　　he had built for himself and his family.

　　His children went to the factories part time.

　　Food was short; his vegetable garden became less a hobby than a necessity,

　　helping feed not only his own household but his neighbors as well.

　　What remained of the life he had made was blown to bits though his home

　　was more than a mile from the hypocenter.

　　He was working on the side facing zero,

　　and had the front of his body burnt.

　　His flesh, when Kaz touched him, had the soft feel of a boiled tomato.

　　Kaz was anxiously waiting for the return of another member of her family

　　when a tall figure appeared where the gate had been.

　　"He's back!" she shotted; her brother,at six feet,

　　towered over most Japanese men and she knew at a glimpse that it was he.

　　But when she drew closer, she could barely recognize him through his wounds.

　　His school had fallen down around him.

　　He had struggled to a first aid station.

　　They had splashed some medicine on the wounds

　　tied them with a bandage and sent him on his way.

　　For a moment, he stood swaying at the ruins of the gate.

　　Kaz stared at him.

　　Later, when night fell Kaz and her brother made for the mountains;

　　a friend from Kaz's factory lived in a village on a hill

　　behind the city and had offered to take them in.

　　It was midnight by the time they found her place.

　　Kaz looked back.The city was on fire.

　　She was seized with fear, not for herself,but for her parents.

　　She left her brother behind,

　　and was running down the hillside toward the flames.

　　The streets were filled with the dead and the barely living.

　　She kept on running,knowing only that she had to be home

　　Kaz's family had been luckier than most.

　　Her father had to lie outdoors on a tatami with his bums,

　　and her brother's wounds refused to close.

　　But they had at least survived,

　　and they began, painfully, to rebuild their lives.

　　They had two wells for water and an uncle who livedon an island

　　off the coast brought them a great sack of food every week.

　　Kaz's father found a carpenter willing to raise a new house

　　out of the wreckage of the old in exchange for whatever wood was left over.

　　The house more nearly resembled a hovel.

　　Kaz could see the first snowflakes of winter

　　through cracks between the boards on the roof.

　　By the standards of Hiroshima after the bomb,it was a mansion.

　　In time the visible wounds healed.

　　The burns on Kaz's father's chest

　　left scars which looked like maps of Japan and America,

　　side by side the way they ought to be,

　　and when the subject of the bomb came up he resisted blaming anyone.

　　"The war," he would say, "is finished.

　　"But as the others were recovering,

　　Kaz had fallen illwith all the symptoms of radiation sickness.

　　The disease was one of the frightening aftershocks of the bomb;

　　the scientists in Los Alamos were surprised by its extent

　　they thought the blast would do most of the killing.

　　Kaz felt as if she was dying. She ran a fever.

　　She felt sick and dizzy, almost drunk.

　　Her gums and her bowels were bleeding.She looked like a ghost.

　　"I'm next," she thought matter of factly;

 

　　she was an 18 year old girl waiting her turn to die.

　　On the first day of 1946,

　　Kaz's mother was determined that Kaz would spend at least a bit of it on her feet

　　It was an old superstition among the Japanese

　　that a person would spend the entire yearas he or she spent New Year's Day.

　　A neighbor helped.

　　They got her outside,and propped her upright for a few minutes.

　　The medicine worked better than anything in the doctor's bag,

　　since the only known treatment for radiation sickness was rest

　　As winter gave way to spring and spring to summer, Kaz began to mend.

　　The illness had not really left her;

　　it had gone into hiding,instead,

　　and  the physical and mental after effects

　　of August 6, 1945would trouble Kaz all the rest of her life.