Snow Hunters: A Novel (9 page)

He asked if there had been a family. Peixe shook his head. He did not know. If there was, the tailor never spoke of them.

—He used to juggle for us. It’s true. He would tell me
to choose a stone and my mother would choose another one and so on and we watched as the objects moved in a circle just above Kiyoshi’s head, then they went higher, and higher, the circle thinning, and his back bending backward in that long field beside the water. You’re still in the air, he always said, and it made me laugh.

—I think he wanted to convince my mother and me that he was happy there. That all of them were. All these men and women who had come here to start new lives. It would not happen for years.

—These days I think that Kiyoshi was a little in love with my mother. And that she was a little in love with him. I don’t know if this is true. I will never know. And I cannot explain why but it makes me happy imagining this.

He waited for Peixe to go on but he didn’t. From the street came the sound of a passing cart.

—Yes, well, Peixe said, and took out his wallet.

When Yohan refused, he sighed.

—Do you think I’m charity? he said, and, —Why?

Peixe did not wait for a response. Instead he slipped the money into Yohan’s shirt pocket, thanked him, and waved his hand across the small plot of land.

—One day, he said, you will come help me with this.

—Yes, Yohan said, and the groundskeeper left, leaning against his cane, the paper package still under his arm.

The wind pushed the cottage door back and forth. In the garden, Peixe began to pick weeds, reaching down, and the glasses in his shirt pocket almost fell, catching the low sun in the trees.

T
hey were loaded onto the bed of a truck and taken into the surrounding forest. It was the only time he left the borders of the camp. All through the day he felled trees, the guards gathered on a high riverbank above them. They would use the wood to build additional shelters and for fire.

They were given time to rest and they went into the river. Some of them bathed while others sat in the cool water or washed their faces and their necks.

It was their second year at the camp. Yohan immersed himself, holding his breath, feeling the current pass over him. The life of it.

Peng lay beside him. His body submerged, the dirt on the bandages over his eyes began to loosen. They had been holding on to a boulder. Earlier, they had been speaking of the river in Yohan’s town, how in the warm seasons they had gone swimming there. All the children did, entire groups of them navigating the slow current and one another as though they were each a ship.

Yohan spoke of that one time a girl surfaced, unmoving, her back to the sky and the delayed confusion and then the shouting.

Peng asked whether Yohan had known who the girl was. Yohan could not remember.

—Was I there? Peng said.

In the water they faced each other for a moment, the two of them holding their breaths and the sun on them and their bodies afloat. Yohan smiled. Then he shut his eyes.

He would never know when Peng let go. Just that when Yohan looked again beside him he was no longer there.

It happened too quickly. On the banks a guard shouted but Peng remained motionless as he caught the current and floated away, moving faster now with the river.

Two guards started to run, following the banks. Peng grew smaller.

He would always wonder whether Peng heard the shouting. Perhaps he had been daydreaming. Perhaps he had fallen asleep. Perhaps he was aware of what was happening and no longer cared.

He was twenty-six years old. This young man whom he had first seen as a boy in front of an audience, on the shoulders of his father, leaping into the sky. Peng, who once sat on a tree stump in the woods, exhausted, his rifle between his legs, the crescent shape of an orange rind in his mouth and his face frozen in a smile.

On that first day at the camp, he had reached into the air and found Yohan’s wrist. He asked where they were, what was happening. They were suddenly surrounded by men and a foreign language. A helicopter deafened the morning. Yohan felt the bandaged face against his shoulder. He held Peng’s hand as he looked out at a field of barracks and cabins, an old mill and tents, a graveyard and a garden.

That afternoon in the forest there were four rifle shots and the sounds echoed across the river. In the distance, water sprayed into the air.

It was the last he saw of him. In the madness of those seconds, while everyone around him rushed to the high banks, he was unable to move, standing there, his body
rooted in the moving water and all the noise like light against him.

He had done nothing. He had held his breath. He had clasped his hands as though in prayer and he had followed the paleness of his friend’s skin in the current.

A week after that, while washing a uniform, he tore it and, startled, he looked down at the wrecked fabric in his hands and wept.

•  •  •

He stayed at the camp for almost a year after the war ended. Most of the prisoners had gone. The field hospital remained active, the doctors and the nurses staying, tending to the remaining Americans and the surviving prisoners. By then they had grown accustomed to Yohan and he assisted them, carrying trays of washcloths and dressings, a bucket of water and a ladle.

The guards no longer watched him. He was free to walk the grounds whenever he wanted. He had the cabin to himself in the evenings. He was unused to the silence and the size. He slept where he always did, in the corner. He was given extra blankets if he needed them.

Some nights he stayed outside, watching the field and the distant farmhouse where a single light burned behind
a window. Other nights he walked to the mill, played cards with the men.

One day, in a field tent, he brought out a sewing machine from under a table. He began to mend old and torn and discarded clothes. It was no longer necessary. It was something to do. He rubbed his nose, feeling its crookedness, the bump there. He concentrated on the movement of the work. It came naturally to him.

He worked all day, alone in that tent, finding whatever clothes he could. He washed them as well. Then those still stationed there began to approach him, giving him the shirts they wore.

The worst of the winter had passed. The land was gray.

On Yohan’s last day he walked to the edge of the camp. He slipped his fingers through the fence. He could hear a peddler’s bell somewhere in the mountains. He heard footsteps. He turned to see the medic, Lamont, approaching him.

—Snowman, the medic said, and stood there behind Yohan with curiosity.

There used to be a kite somewhere in the trees. That nameless boy who was given chocolate by a nurse would call to the prisoners, —Hey, mister! and then run the
meadow. The ball of twine he held unraveled, the kite aloft over his shoulders.

Almost always the kite tangled itself at the edge of the woods. And the boy, with patience, would climb the tree and they would all watch, the guards, too, as he vanished into the high foliage.

In that moment it seemed that they all held their breaths, wondering where the boy had gone. But then a hand would appear between the leaves and the camp cheered.

He never knew where the boy lived. He stayed for one season, then traveled farther south, he supposed.

The boy was short. He had lost the use of one of his hands. It hung by his side, bent at the wrist, forever in a halfhearted fist. A mine perhaps. Still, he climbed trees with speed and dexterity, using his thighs and his good arm.

In the end the kite tore, suffering its last crash into the trees. The sound of the tear could be heard in the camp. Men paused in their work and turned. They laughed and hollered and clapped.

The boy approached the base of the tree. He placed a hand above his eyes and raised his head. The tip of a tree branch had pierced one of the wings.

Yohan, expecting the boy to climb the tree once more, waited. But he didn’t.

In the months that followed, the kite stayed in the tree. It stayed in the weeks of rain and it stayed as leaves began to fall. The paper darkened and changed form. And then the snow dusted it, brightening it once more, and in the nights it shone like a moon in the trees.

Yohan used to look out at it from time to time, like some coast he was waiting for. Then, as the winter deepened, he no longer did.

He searched for it now but couldn’t find it. It had been almost three years since he had woken to his wrists bound and his body shaking from the movements of a truck. This man Lamont who was from Virginia peering down at him, grinning and raising his thumbs.

They stood beside the fence. Lamont turned to him as though about to speak. Then, following Yohan’s eyes, he looked up.

T
hree months after Kiyoshi’s death, Yohan found the child’s coat the tailor had been working on. It had been placed in the chest in the corner of the old man’s room. It lay with many other clothes. They were clothes of all sizes and had never been worn.

He carried the coat to the shop and lifted it to the light. It was not yet finished. It was missing a lining and buttons and the cuffs needed to be hemmed but he admired the construction of it and its shape.

Whose it was he did not know. He draped it over the tailor’s dummy, where it remained visible through the window.

All that week he asked each customer who entered the shop. He asked the people to whom he delivered clothes. He asked them whether they could ask others.

—Are you missing clothes? he said.

They shook their heads. It seemed that it did not belong to anyone. Or at least anyone here in this town.

One afternoon he approached the windows. A group of children had gathered in front of the pastry store. The church bell rang.

Two hours remained before the shop closed; but he turned over the sign on the door. He took the child’s coat and laid it over his worktable. He undid the knot of his tie and rolled up his shirt cuffs. He lifted the sewing machine aside.

He worked with patience. He had not worked without the machine in some time. It pleased him to return to it, the work, the movement of his fingers. He lost himself in it.

The day passed and moved into evening. On occasion a shadow appeared: a woman pressed her hand against the window; a man knocked and called to him. He ignored them, increasing the volume on the radio.

When he finished he hung the coat on a rack and sat
looking at it. He saw the shape of the arms and the shoulders as if a child floated there.

He did not know what time it was. Outside, it was dark and the streets empty.

He stood and began to pace the shop. He was not tired. He made himself some tea. He organized the fabrics and rolled the measuring tapes. He climbed the stairs and headed to his room, thinking sleep would come to him if he lay down. Instead he stayed by the window in the dark, looking out at the hill town.

Soon, it began to rain. It fell across the streets and the harbor. He opened the window. The rain hit the tiles of the rooftops, erasing the town noises. He pushed his hand out into the air and felt the cold drops catch his skin.

He was suddenly aware that there was no one else in the house. That there would be no one downstairs when he woke.

He stayed beside the window in his room with its sloped ceiling. He did not sleep. A store sign flickered, throwing its light against the walls of the room. The night passed.

In that hour before dawn he returned downstairs to the shop. He took one of Kiyoshi’s leather bags and
placed the child’s coat in it. He put on a raincoat. In the corner he found Kiyoshi’s bicycle. He unlocked the shop door and pushed the bicycle outside.

Though the rain had stopped, the air was now cool. He could smell the wet cobblestone and dirt. Streetlamps were still glowing.

He pushed the bicycle down the street for a while. He hesitated. There was no one. He swung his leg over the seat. He began to pedal slowly, circling the street, passing the tailor’s shop a few times. Then he began to pedal faster and when he reached the start of the street he turned.

He went down the slope of the hill, following the roads, going faster now past the shuttered stores and the cafés. He arrived at the port and turned again and when he reached the coastal road he sped.

A field of stars opened above him. The breath of sky. A path of lights on the ocean’s surface; and the hill town to his left, all its windows like a blurred image as though another ocean were there, another body of water, draped across the high slope.

The coastal road was empty and bright. He shut his eyes. He leaned back, straightened his legs, and listened to the bicycle wheels. When the bicycle slowed he bent forward and pedaled.

Back and forth he went like this. Toward the settlement, the flashing lighthouse and the northern cities, and then back toward the piers. His chin pointed up, his body stretched against the moonlight. He was smiling.

He could hear the waves pushing toward the coast and he did not want the sound to end. It seemed to him the night would go on, that it would always be dark, the town forever lit by the muted glow of electricity. That it would be a world of nights alone.

He felt a lightness in his chest and breathed the cool air; he could taste it almost, it tasted old and rich as though it had traveled a very long way to reach him, as though he could taste the years it contained. And he felt those years and the land that it had traveled across and the people it had passed; and he thought of how it entered him and how he held it now, within him.

He shut his eyes once more and he thought of others and of times before this one.

He slowed, approaching the settlement. Through the coastal trees he could make out the shanties in the field and the broken rooftop of the plantation house. There were rowboats and canoes in a small bay, bobbing as the water approached and receded. He caught movement in the trees, the thin smoke from a chimney. Fishermen
began to appear from the shanties and factory workers headed toward the road.

He stayed a little longer and then he adjusted the bag over his shoulder and returned to the town.