Snow Hunters: A Novel (3 page)

The tailor delivered clothes as well throughout the town. But as the months passed he did so less often. Yohan took his place, carrying mended shirts and new dresses and suits and even gloves or a hat that needed repair, each wrapped in the tan paper and twine.

There was a bicycle at the shop but Yohan never used it. Instead he walked through the narrow streets and the alleyways. He stopped often, shying away from the passersby, searching for the numbers on the doors and looking up at the street signs, making sure that the words matched the ones on the slip of paper he held.

At first he stayed within the borders of the Japanese community. In doing so, day by day, he grew accustomed to his neighborhood and the people who lived nearby. Then, as the months passed and his energy returned to him, he began to venture farther into the town. He went from neighborhood to neighborhood, gradually, delivering clothes to older customers who had known Kiyoshi since he first came.

He passed structures he had never seen before: a gated mansion, fountains, and sculptures in gardens.
Others were familiar to him: a single-story cottage, the brick wall of someone’s property, the market squares.

He stood in front of the entrances to apartment buildings, unsure of whether to knock or press a buzzer. He climbed winding staircases and stopped at each landing to look out the slim windows. He waited in a foyer with his hands in his pockets, hiding his nervousness as the retired Portuguese attaché looked through a drawer to pay him.

Once a month he drank tea with a widow. For half an hour he sat in her living room on her expensive furniture as she spoke to him and he nodded, struggling, pretending to grasp what she said.

In these homes he looked discreetly around at the rooms, glancing at the cleanliness of the windows, his eyes falling upon a painting or a pet: a cat on a bookshelf, birds in cages, a pair of dogs lying under a table, lifting their ears on occasion to listen to the maid in the kitchen. If there was pottery on a shelf or a cabinet, a vase or a bowl, he lingered over it, studying the design before leaving.

He delivered clothes to the church as well. It was the highest building in that hill town, closest to the ridge, standing where the road ended and the fields began. He
remained by the gate until the groundskeeper appeared from the back, where he lived in a cottage not far from the cemetery.

He was called Peixe by the town because his family had been fishermen, though none were alive anymore. He had been the only one who never fished, never entered the water.

When he was a child he had suffered from polio. His mother, who had once been a customer of Kiyoshi’s, used to volunteer at the church and so he spent many of his days there, keeping her company, hiding under the pews.

He walked with a cane and there was a slow grace to his movements. He laughed easily. He was thirty-two years old and had been here all his life. His hair was dark and, like the tailor, he kept a pair of reading glasses in his shirt pocket.

They shook hands and Peixe invited him inside, as he always did, and Yohan smiled, bowing, and returned down the road.

The townspeople no longer expected the tailor but his young apprentice, as they began to call him, with both affection and curiosity. Sometimes he received tips. When he gave them to Kiyoshi, the man shook his head, pushing away Yohan’s hand.

He kept the money in a tin box he found in an alleyway one afternoon. On its lid there was an illustration of a woman in an apron carrying a baking tray, a mother, he supposed, with a blue ribbon tied around her hair and words above the image written in English. Every now and then, in his bedroom, he leaned over his desk and lifted the top of the box, smelling the cookies it had once contained.

He found many things in the alleys: a cup, a pocketknife, a shaving brush, a new handkerchief in its box. He stopped often in these narrow streets, a compulsion from childhood when he would search the town for things to barter with the peddlers who visited. He would climb the wheels of their carts and peer down at the treasure, searching for shoelaces, a ball, a knife.

But in those alleyways there were times when he found himself leaning against a wall, not knowing where he was. His hands moved as though he were tearing something. His eyes far away and gone.

It did not last long. It was as though the world he saw cracked, revealing memories he had forgotten. Those small stars. A girl sitting in an empty window frame in a destroyed town they were passing through. How she wiped the dirt off a pear wedge, showing the dark spaces
where her teeth had been. A man’s hat and a cane lay on the street below her. Peng picked them up, settling the hat on his head and twirling the cane. He gave Yohan his rifle. He then spread mud above his lips, furrowed his eyebrows, waved to her, and wobbled across the street without bending his knees like that funny man they had heard of named Charlie Chaplin.

He thought of those days with Peng, the two of them in their weather-stained uniforms and their helmets and their boots stuffed with newspaper and straw. Peng, that old friend who was three years older and taller than he was, with the odd thin stripe of gray in his hair since he was a child, like the mark of some animal. Even in the war he still moved like some dancer across the hills, ignoring the rain, agile and calm. And Yohan always close behind him, not once losing sight of the shape of Peng’s shoulders.

He thought of all the other men and women they had together seen wandering the country, sometimes with the companionship of animals, a slow-moving dog or a mule or once even a gray bird that an old man carried in a handkerchief. It had been injured from a bombing and Yohan remembered the man sitting on the road beside them as they rested, unraveling the handkerchief, delicately,
as his mouth chewed on a nut that someone had dropped on the street. Then he placed the chewed mash on his finger and fed the bird that could not fly though its body hummed; and he let Yohan place his hand on its breast and the soft pulse jolted him.

He wondered if the war there had truly ended. He did not know. There was no one to tell him so. There was the news on the radio but Kiyoshi never listened, preferring the stations with music instead, the orchestras.

And he wondered about the wars that had been fought here and he grew embarrassed because he did not know. They did not speak of such things. Nor did they speak of the war that had preceded this one, and he did not know if the tailor had fought in it. It was as though Kiyoshi and the shop had always been here.

Though they were together often, he shared little with Yohan. And he himself did not tell the tailor about his own years. And yet he found comfort in this absence of telling.

He learned about the tailor by what the old man pointed to, what his eyes fell on; by what he ate and how; by his knowledge of fabrics and by the way he avoided certain pedestrians and grinned at others.

From their reticence grew a kind of intimacy. Kiyoshi,
who could be seen through the shop window all day with his stooped shoulders, hemming a pair of trousers or replacing the buttons of a shirt. And Yohan across from him, working as well.

Once, Kiyoshi, without turning, asked him what he had found that day and Yohan, surprised, paused. From his jacket pocket he took out a cup someone had thrown away in an alley and Kiyoshi stood to examine it under the light.

—Ah, he said. Good, and then returned it to him.

He said nothing else. They continued to sew and stitch.

Later, they closed the shop together. They went through the day’s transactions and reminded each other that a shipment from overseas would arrive the next morning. They ate by their sewing machines, drinking tea and listening to the orchestra on the radio, and soon the tailor fell asleep on his chair.

As the old man slept Yohan continued to organize the fabrics on the shelves, looping thread over a spool and returning scissors and sewing needles to their boxes. He lowered the volume on the radio.

He approached the tailor’s dummy, bent forward, studied the shape of its chest, the flatness of its severed
arms and head. Wondering if it had been modeled on an actual person. The lights of the streetlamps and the store signs brightened the closed shutters.

His days passed in this way. He learned how to navigate the town. He began to learn the language, listening to the people on the streets and in the shop and to the commercials on the radio.

Sometimes, as they worked, Kiyoshi surprised him by saying aloud a Portuguese word. Yohan repeated it.
Alteração. Medir. Roupa.

Then, in the late evenings, alone in his room upstairs, Yohan lay on the mattress and spoke, turning a word or a phrase in his mouth as though it were a stone.
Dois. Sopa. Noite. A loja está fechada. A loja está fechada. Noite. Dois. Janela.

He placed his hands under his head and looked up at the water-stained ceiling, listening to his own voice, which sounded unfamiliar to him, and searching for the rhythm of that new language. He fell asleep with the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth.

On other nights, after closing the shop, he and Kiyoshi went up to the roof, bringing chairs, and shared a bottle of wine. They looked out over the hill town and at the movement on the streets and through the windows
of apartment buildings: a man on a rocking chair; a child staring back at them; a couple dancing in their bedroom under the relief of a ceiling fan.

There were often power outages in the town and on those nights they stayed on that roof in the dark, in the company of a distant trumpet or a guitar or the ticking of playing cards wedged into bicycle wheels.

They waited for their eyes to adjust, the candles to appear in the windows, then they spent that last hour of the day playing a game, the tailor placing a hand by his ear or pointing; and in Portuguese, Yohan would attempt to identify what they were listening to, or watching.

Once, they heard someone singing on the street. It was a birthday song. They waited for the song to end and then Kiyoshi, drinking his wine, asked when his birthday was. Yohan confessed that he could not remember.

The following week he woke to find a garment bag hanging on his door. He opened it. It was a new suit, made of light cotton, the color of sand. On a notecard, in Japanese, it said:
For another year
.

The suit fit him perfectly. He did not realize until later that afternoon that it was the day he had come to the shop for the first time.

And so he began to think of that day as when one
year turned into another. Kiyoshi seemed to as well. Each year he made Yohan an article of clothing, leaving it in his bedroom, a new pair of trousers or a shirt, sometimes both. Years from now, long after Kiyoshi was gone, he would be wearing the same clothes. He would sit beside his worktable in the evenings and mend the tears in the collars and the shirt cuffs himself. When exactly the old man made them he never discovered.

T
here were hundreds of them.

In the summers they wore what was left of their uniforms. In the winters they were given gray sweaters and coats.

They had chores and duties. They were sent to the field tents to carry the bodies of men who had been captured and who had not survived. That hour surrounded by the sound of scissors and liquid in cups and bowls and jars. The activity of flies. Men with untreated bullet wounds attempted to stay standing as they waited in a line. Men lay in the backs of trucks, their mouths pooling with the afternoon rain.

They were sent to an old textile mill at the edge of the camp where there was another ward. They were told to move the dead as quickly as possible because they needed the beds. If their clothes were salvageable, they were told to take those, too, along with the blankets, and they boiled them in large pots outside with the handle of a broken broom. They scrubbed the blood off mattresses. The clothes they hung on ropes that had been tied across the trees.

They picked root vegetables from a garden the Americans were attempting to cultivate. They carried the potatoes and the carrots and the radishes and the turnips to the cooks.

They worked all day, in silence, stopping only a few times to rest. They worked into the night. From across that distance Yohan could see a pair of silhouettes thrown against the curtain by a light, their bodies the size of the forest trees, their crooked limbs moving over the shape on the cot that bent and shook and went still.

That first week he vomited daily.

And every day, from the clearing, he watched as Peng walked a footpath with his hands raised, his eyes covered in dressings, learning the geography of the prison camp while a guard escorted him.

This young man who had been a part of his childhood and whom he had met again during wartime.

One winter evening, in a railroad car heading south, his face had been like all the faces, worn and unrecognizable. His eyes like all their eyes. Their shoulders bumped. And then he took his helmet off and the moonlight caught the gray stripe in his hair.

Yohan had nearly reached for it, as though it were the warmth of a fire, unraveled by the memory of a boy who used to appear in his town in a caravan, performing magic tricks in the market square, the elderly placing their palms on the boy’s head for luck.

As children, they had seen each other only a few times a year at most, and they had not thought of each other until that moment. And yet, on that night, on that train, they had embraced fiercely, unwilling to let go, laughing, waking the other men and almost losing their rifles, their legs swaying out the car into the air.

This momentary bridge. The wonder of a shared memory, returned. Of a place once theirs and a life that had already been lived.

A year later, that gray now gone and their heads shaved. And a town and its market square even farther away than it was. Each day, Peng, with bandages wrapped
over his eyes, took Yohan’s elbow and worked beside him, asking him about the distances from one building to another, from the graves to the garden, his mind growing accustomed to that new dark.