Snow Hunters: A Novel (8 page)

Music came from the radio. He tilted his head and the light reflected the pin he was holding between his lips.

The old man stood still for some time. There were
long shadows on the floor. Then he took the pin from his mouth and reached for the shoulders of the coat. But his hands shook. He calmed them and stepped away. He put on his glasses. He tried again and his hands shook some more but he ignored it and reached for the coat.

Yohan followed the light reflecting against the pin, the way it fell from Kiyoshi’s fingers, the bright sliver spinning in the air before it hit the floor.

Kiyoshi kneeled and ran his palms along the wood. And then he began to cry, kneeling there with his head bowed and his shoulders shaking.

In the years to come, Yohan would think often of this night. Why he did not go to him. Why he stayed behind that curtain, watching all this through a narrow space. Why he turned soon after and returned to his room, where he lay on his mattress, unable to sleep.

But before he left a curious thing occurred. Kiyoshi wiped his face. He stood. He rested his head against the shoulders of the child’s coat. He shut his eyes and spoke, as though he were praying or confiding in someone, his face buried in an imaginary neck, his words directed at an imaginary ear.

The words were brief. It lasted a moment, no longer.

One evening a week later, the tailor fell asleep while
reading in bed. Yohan lifted the book from Kiyoshi’s hands. He left the room, carrying the tea he had brought.

Kiyoshi never woke. Yohan found him in the morning. He stood in the doorway, waiting, in case he was mistaken. He kneeled. He held the hand hanging over the cot’s edge. The hand was riddled with calluses, still warm. He reached for a strand of hair stuck to the old man’s lips and pulled it away.

He could hear his own breathing. The sound of the shop’s ceiling fan. The quiet static of an empty radio station. The echo of someone passing through the street. Then the teakettle whistled.

Kiyoshi was buried in the cemetery behind the church. Peixe dug the grave. All of his customers came. On the high ridge, under the tree, Yohan saw Santi and Bia looking down over the church walls.

He stayed in his room for the rest of that day. He approached the window, waiting for Santi and Bia to come, but they didn’t. He leaned against the wall and thought of this man whom he did not know but without whom he could not imagine the three years that had already passed. He thought of their days in the shop and their evenings on the rooftop and their shared, quiet laughter. He thought of the tailor’s kindness and felt it still.

In the corner stood the umbrella that was given to him a long time ago. He tilted it away from the wall until it found the window light, and he held it there, reminding himself to mend the tear in the blue canopy.

•  •  •

In the days that followed, Yohan slept less. As it grew dark he avoided his room and even the shop.

He took walks through the town. Some nights he visited the piers where dockworkers loaded cargo onto a ship. He listened to the musicians in the square. He watched couples sitting at outdoor tables under bright awnings. He looked into the windows of stores. He smelled the fleeting scent of torn fruit in a street gutter.

He moved through the alleyways, closing his eyes and navigating the dark with his hands against the brick walls. He found a small wooden handle to something, a magnifying glass or some child’s toy. He found a box of pencils. A model railroad car the length of his palm. He slipped them into his pockets.

Late one evening he was returning to the shop when he saw the door open. Night filled the room as he entered.

A shelf was broken, a vase shattered. Rolls of fabric
had tipped over and unraveled. The tailor’s dummy lay on the floor, a single cut down its chest, revealing tufts of gray.

He heard a noise and turned. In a corner shadow he saw the form of a man’s body. And then the man leapt and rushed at him, heading for the door, and Yohan stumbled and fell. He grasped at the man’s ankles. A forgotten stone turned within him. He lurched forward, grabbing the man’s shoulders. He pushed him against the door. He heard the drum of skin against glass and he threw him onto the ground.

Yohan moved on top of him. His hand formed into a fist. He pulled the thief’s head back and his throat shone and his lips parted like a fish’s. He saw now the face lying below him, unmoving in that light, and he saw that it was not a man but a boy, and Yohan heard his name.

He heard the boy say, —Leave me alone.

And, as if surfacing from water, he felt his body let go. The shop and the night noises from the streets returned to him. He attempted to stand but he couldn’t, the energy had left him, and he leaned back against the leg of a table and looked across at Santi on the ground.

The boy was lying beside the door. His shirt had torn and his nose was bleeding. Around him lay scattered the
things he had collected throughout the years and which Kiyoshi kept for him.

Santi sat up and began to gather the objects: a comb, a toothbrush, shoelaces, a pocket mirror. The lid of the cigar box was broken. Still he gathered whatever he could, kneeling there and placing them in the box.

Then he stopped. He looked around at the shop, at this room that belonged to a man he had known since he was a child. He looked at the ruined dummy, the fallen rolls of fabrics, the scattered pieces of a vase reflecting light.

—It’s all junk, Santi said, and he kept repeating those words, —It’s all junk, and he sunk to the ground and covered his face with his hands.

Yohan moved toward him. He stood. He lifted the boy, and the boy let him. He felt Santi’s thin arms around his neck. He felt the boy’s breathing slow. Smelled the sea on him. He stepped closer to the window and looked out and held him.

H
e did not see Santi for a long time afterward. He did not see Bia either. He took over the tailor’s shop. He worked in the mornings and the evenings and delivered clothes in the afternoons. He remained on the second floor and left Kiyoshi’s bedroom as it was. He kept the radio on. The shop thrived.

One afternoon he visited the church. The church bells were ringing through the town. He had finished mending a jacket belonging to Peixe. The stitching on the shoulders had been torn, the fabric long faded and discolored by the sun and the garden. He had folded the jacket, wrapped it in paper, and bound it with a piece of twine.

It was warmer than other days. The daylight bright against the buildings. A neighbor was washing the sidewalk in front of a store and the water sped down the cobblestone. As he climbed the hill a motorbike passed him, carrying an open crate of fish lying on their sides. Now and then someone waved or smiled and he returned their gestures.

In the church courtyard an old car was parked in the shade of a tree. There was also a bicycle leaning against the building, under a stained-glass window. The building’s walls were whitewashed, its heavy wooden doors the color of clay.

A stone wall surrounded the property and sometimes, after the church emptied, Bia and Santi would sit there and wait for Peixe to appear. And they would stay for a little while with the man who had known them the longest, sitting under the tree or helping him with the chores.

Yohan passed through the front gate. He walked around the side of the building, following a narrow stone path, ducking under the low branches and heading toward the back garden.

There, a brick cottage stood against the slope under the town’s ridge. It had once been a gardener’s shed,
which had been expanded and converted into a living space, a single room with low eaves and four windows, one on each wall. A wheelbarrow rested against one of the walls, as well as empty flowerpots stacked on top of each other.

The path led to the door. He knocked and stepped away. Under the trees there was a silence. He turned to look out at the garden, the rows of vegetables. Vines climbed the back of the church. Farther in the distance lay the headstones, the statues, and the small monuments of the cemetery.

He heard movement from inside the cottage. The door opened and Peixe stood within the doorframe, leaning against his cane and wearing trousers with suspenders over his shirt. A pair of reading glasses was tucked in his shirt pocket. He was taller than Yohan and thin. He had rolled up his sleeves and, like, Kiyoshi, his fingertips were stained by tobacco. He took Yohan’s hand and smiled.

—
Alfaiate
, he said, as he always did, greeting Yohan in that way, by his profession.

Yohan handed him the package. Behind the groundskeeper, daylight had found a corner of the one-room cottage. There was a single bureau, a chair, a bed, a small table with a half-eaten meal. A spyglass lay on a shelf.

He invited Yohan inside but then looked out at the day and changed his mind.

—Ah, Peixe said. Yes. It’s better outside.

He left the door open, holding the package under his arm the way Yohan had done. Kiyoshi had started the jacket and he did not know whether further alterations would be necessary.

Yohan asked Peixe to try it on but the groundskeeper waved his hand, ignoring him.

They stood on the path and faced the garden, Yohan looking over at a spot where two old tires lay on the ground, filled with fresh soil.

—I found them on the beach, he said. It would have been a waste.

Yohan nodded, imagining Peixe carrying the tires up the hill, his arms hooked through the holes.

—You understand that, no? Peixe said.

He hesitated, unsure what the groundskeeper had asked, and what to say, but before he could respond, Peixe said, —Kiyoshi.

In his eyes there was a kindness and a concern.

—You’d like to visit him, yes?

Yohan remained silent. He looked across at the headstones,
searching for the tailor’s. There had been little money saved. The church had paid for it.

On the wall inside the cottage he noticed a photograph. He recognized the old plantation house near the coast. In front of it stood a group of men and women and children. They were all Japanese except the two at the side of the photo, a slim woman and a small boy who leaned against a cane.

Peixe brought the photo out to him. With his thumb he wiped away the dust on the glass. He told him that after the landowner died and the house was abandoned, the property had been turned into a hospital for the mountain villages and for the factory workers who had been the victims of mechanical accidents.

It had also been a sanatorium for survivors of polio, he said, and tapped his cane.

—Then, he said, it became part of an internment camp during the Second World War.

He pointed at the people.

—For the Japanese, he said. Those shanties you see now were built then.

—A single place. One house. One piece of land. All the changes. All the lives it once held, however briefly.
The good that was there. Also, the discrimination. It is astonishing, yes?

The plantation house was no longer recognizable. But it was the people in the photograph who seemed far more different, the style of their clothes and something else he could not articulate. Their postures, their stillness. Or perhaps it was knowing that they were no longer of the age when the photographs were taken. That the moment had already gone by the time their images were captured. That people aged, second by second, leaving themselves behind.

He had never been photographed before. He did not know what he would look like, did not know how he would appear on those small pale squares people held and framed and shared.

He had once witnessed a young American wake from surgery and rise from his bed too quickly. His eyes, like Peng’s, were wrapped in bandages and, disoriented, he knocked a tray from a nurse’s hand. The iodine in the flying bottle stained the convalescent’s gauze and he screamed, flailed his arms, feeling that sudden wetness, pleading, —Not again. Please God, not again, as his body shook and his mouth twisted and in his blindness a dream returned to him of the land mine.

Yohan remembered the guard leaning against a tent pole, laughing. And he remembered he could not watch and he turned away, concentrating on the pile of clothes he had been mending, and he remembered the shame of that turning, of looking away. And he remembered the sound of that weeping soldier meeting the sound of the guard’s laughter and a doctor shouted, —Shut up, until the guard did not find it funny anymore and grew silent. Then there was just the convalescent, rocking his body and clutching his hands, his face like a ruined painting.

Yohan continued to study the photo. He scanned the faces. He paused at the man toward the end. He was thin and had strong cheekbones and thick eyebrows. His hair was short.

—Yes, Peixe said. Our tailor.

—He was in the Second World War, he continued. But you know this, yes? He was a physician. An army medic in Russia. The Far East. For Japan. I was young when he came. Defectors, the town called them. I saw the high fences being built. The soldiers. The families that were brought here by ship or by trucks. There were so many of them.

—My mother and I used to visit them. I would follow her along the coastal road and wait by the gates
as the men checked her bag. Then we were inside and soon people appeared from the shanties and the cabins. You see, she was a schoolteacher. She taught them the language, read to them, brought food. Kiyoshi was very young then. I remember his patience and his gentleness. The way he brought his ear toward me and adjusted his glasses when I wanted to speak. The way he clasped his hands together and circled his thumbs as he listened.

—There was a table there out in the field. On clear days the sun would hit the top and I could see dark stains, from blood, and I grew afraid and would not enter the camp. I thought the soldiers cut the men. And the women and the children. It was Kiyoshi who pointed at the fish they caught, bringing them to the table and even cooking one for me. He was patient. He never hurried. As though he had been to as many places as he ever needed to and that there were no more surprises.

Yohan looked away, his gaze moving across the garden until it focused on the vines on the church wall, crossing over one another and rising toward the eaves.