Snow Hunters: A Novel

by Yoon, Paul

  Even when Santi was older and no longer living there, he visited. And the two of them spent the night outdoors, Peixe setting out an extra plate for him, still cutting his food, and Santi allowing it.

  He was small for his age. He wanted to be a sailor, though he had never learned to swim. Still, on most mornings and evenings he could be seen on the coast, watching the boats leave and return.

  Santi was probably eight years old. Bia was perhaps seven years older. They were unsure of their age but seemed unbothered by it.

  Some days Yohan met them by chance in the alleyways. At first they fled into the shadows or stood there caught in nervousness. But soon they grew used to him and he helped them search the trash bins, sifting through the bags to find objects they could keep or use to trade with the others: a comb, a picture frame, a pair of leather shoes Santi tried on, grinning, too large for him but clean and stylish.

  Bia wrapped a handkerchief around him and he pretended it was a necktie. He wore the handkerchief and the shoes for days, walking along the beaches toward the settlement, pleased with himself and humming a song he had heard on the radio station.

  The next time Yohan saw them they appeared with bruises on their faces and their arms. The boy was barefoot, the shoes and the handkerchief gone. They refused to meet Yohan’s eyes, both of them unwilling to speak of it. Buttons were missing on both of their shirts. Bia gathered her hair in her hands so that Kiyoshi could clean a scratch on her neck. They spent the afternoon in the alley beside the shop, avoiding the stares of the passersby while the tailor mended their clothes.

  They did not visit the shop often. When they did, it was when it was empty and Kiyoshi would clap his hands, hurry across the room, and welcome them. He brought them food and offered them clean shirts and men’s trousers, which they rolled up to their shins, these spare clothes he had made or clothes that were abandoned by customers who had left the town years ago.

  On a high shelf the tailor kept a cigar box where Santi stored the things he collected. Sometimes the boy sat in front of the shop and opened the box and revisited the objects—costume jewelry, a guitar pick, a stone—while Bia circled the narrow street on Kiyoshi’s bicycle. On the sidewalk lay some food the tailor had left for them, wrapped in newspaper. The boy would chase her around the street, carrying the foil wrapper of a chocolate bar, which held the sunlight as though his fingertips were on fire.

  One time, in the afternoon, Santi came and stood in front of the tailor’s dummy. Yohan had been making tea. He parted the curtain. A moment before, Kiyoshi had gone to the market and the boy was alone in the shop.

  Santi mouthed some words. He bit his lip. He formed his hands into fists and began to move his feet. Then he struck the dummy in the chest. It creaked and swayed on its pedestal. The noise of it and the dust from its skin filled the room. Then he struck it again. And again. Each time the dummy swayed farther, its shadow swinging across the floor. That heavy sound and the body spitting dust toward the ceiling.

  Afterward, in exhaustion, he fell asleep under the dummy, fitting his body into the space and using a roll of fabric as a pillow until Bia came looking for him.

  He began to fight with the other boys. They fought in the fields or in the alleyways or on the coast. Fought over food or the things they found. Cuts and scratches appeared on his hands and his face. Bia would grab the boy’s arm and yell at him, but on his face was a calm, as if he were not listening to the girl at all but was far away somewhere beyond the hill town.

  Yohan did not know why Santi fought and whether or not he started it. He never asked.

  Kiyoshi had known them almost all their lives. Around them he moved with eagerness and smiled often.

  Years before Yohan came, Kiyoshi was resting in the meadow one afternoon. When he woke, a child stood above him.

  —Hi, the child said. Are you my father?

  Kiyoshi, still in a dream, could not speak.

  The boy said, —That’s okay. Now we’re friends.

  And he kneeled to hold the tailor’s hand for a moment before he left.

  Santi used to approach the people of the town, asking them if they were his mother or father, the men and women looking down at him in either confusion or amusement or sadness as he lifted his hand for them to shake. In the port he followed the sailors around while Peixe looked for him in the town.

  Once, he and another child had attempted to scale the church spire. The other one fell. Kiyoshi witnessed it. It was early evening. The forms of two children appeared in the sky. The first stars beside them. Then a sound, an exhalation and the clawing of fingernails against stone, and one of them falling. He thought they were ghosts.

  He pushed through the crowd that had gathered around the fallen boy. The streetlamps had turned on. The boy was trying to move and Kiyoshi saw between the shadows of those standing that he could not, saw the effort manifested in the child’s blinking eyes.

  Kiyoshi held him as a doctor cut his trousers. He leaned forward, smoothed the boy’s hair. He covered the boy’s ears. His eyes now quiet. His snot dripped onto Kiyoshi’s wrists. He had fixed his gaze on the knot of the tailor’s tie as if he had found something there.

  Kiyoshi felt a hand on his back. He turned to find Santi hiding behind him, trembling. He had cut his palm while descending the spire and it stained the tailor’s shirt.

  The boy lived but did not stay, leaving the town not long after. Kiyoshi would watch as Santi wandered the roads, his hand wrapped in a bandage, asking whether anyone had seen him.

  The girl Yohan knew less of. She first appeared at the church looking for food. She helped Peixe with the chores, digging in the garden or cleaning the stained-glass windows or mopping the floors. She helped take care of Santi.

  In the end he went with her. And Peixe, not wanting to fight with them, leaned against his cane and followed their departure as the two children headed toward the coastal road, this seed of restlessness they shared growing through the years.

  She often rode Kiyoshi’s bicycle. And Yohan saw flashes of her, the length of her bright hair and the bicycle wheels between buildings, a reflection caught in a window. If there was music playing in the town, she searched for it, staying on the periphery of a crowd. Other times, in passing, he saw her sitting in an alley beside the narrow window of a basement music club. She leaned against the wall with her legs crossed. She hummed along with the musicians as she shut her eyes and swayed.

  There were days when she would cling to Santi, her small hands wrapped around him as she pressed him against her. Sometimes she slept under the tree in the late afternoons, curled against the trunk as though she had arrived from a very long journey, a line of sweat following the curve of her spine.

  Her skin was the color of the tiled rooftops.

  He liked the way she said his name. In the town he did not hear it often. It sounded different from the way Kiyoshi said it or even the way he had heard it over the years. She said it with patience, taking her time, briefly holding each syllable before letting go.

  —Yohan, she called from across the market or as she passed the shop, her hand in the air and a few people turning to look.

  5

  They became a part of his days, Santi and Bia, just as their coming and going did. During some months he did not see them for weeks. Then they suddenly appeared in the town as if they had never left.

  Yohan kept busy at the shop, measuring the men for their new suits, making alterations and adjustments. He now knew who wore what. When they came for their clothes he was able to hand them over before they spoke. He knew most of the neighborhoods now, knew the names of the streets, and he continued to make deliveries.

  He grew more familiar with the language. He began to converse with the market vendors, asking them about the fish and the fruit they sold. He ran errands for Kiyoshi, stepping out to the pharmacy to purchase soap or to a Japanese restaurant to pick up dinner.

  Every few weeks he and Kiyoshi went to an Italian barber whom the tailor
had known for years. Kiyoshi would never get a haircut. Instead he sat in the corner and exchanged town gossip with the man while Yohan’s hair was trimmed and he was given a shave.

  They spoke in Portuguese and he listened as they discussed the ongoing love affair between a waitress and a dockworker. There was also the woman with a pet bird who had a habit of talking to her dead husband when she believed no one could hear. A boardinghouse near the port was in fact a brothel.

  Later, taking a walk, he asked Kiyoshi about the words he had not understood, and the tailor translated them for him in Japanese, grinning.

  In the winter of 1956, a week of cold weather began. They kept their windows closed, Yohan’s body no longer used to it. He and Kiyoshi wore sweaters. He had not worn one since the war. It took him a day to grow accustomed to the weight on his shoulders and his arms. Neighbors brought in coats they had long ago placed in storage, asking for a new lining, a new button.

  One afternoon it took effort for Kiyoshi to rise from his chair. All that morning he had paused in his work and stared at his hands.

  He retired early and remained in his room. That evening when Yohan brought him tea he saw the man lying there with his arms raised toward the ceiling. He continued to stare at his hands. It was as though they were not his at all, as though he no longer recognized them.

  —It’s all right, the old man said. It’s just a cold. I’ll sleep for a little while.

  Yohan called the doctor. He was young and dressed in one of Kiyoshi’s suits. Through the space in the curtains Yohan could see him sitting beside Kiyoshi’s bed, a stethoscope placed against the tailor’s chest.

  —There’s nothing wrong with him, he told Yohan later, the two of them standing in the shop.

  After he left, Kiyoshi sat down at his table and began to work. Then he paused and lifted his head, staring at the wall in front of him.

  He said, —You didn’t need to do that, and returned to the shirt he was mending.

  Whatever it was gradually left him, day by day, though there were remnants: he slept more, waking up later. It was Yohan who opened the shop now. And although the old man continued to care for his customers and measure them without delay, it took him longer to complete an article of clothing.

  On a Sunday when the shop was closed, Yohan spent an afternoon at the harbor. It was quieter than the other days. There was the occasional whistle of a machine. The sound of bottles and ice being spread over fish. He passed stacks of empty crates. He looked up at the vessels in the sunlight, scanning the names on the bows in all the various languages until he arrived at the last pier to the south.

  He heard his name. A short man with a graying beard waved and approached him. They stood facing each other and the man laughed, admiring Yohan’s sweater.

  —Wanting to go back out onto the water? the sailor said.

  They embraced. A year had passed since they had last seen each other. He was startled by how much the man had aged: the wrinkles around his eyes, his thinning hair, the slight stoop as he walked.

  —It’s just me now, the sailor said, pointing at the crew who was beginning to unload the vessel’s cargo, all of whom Yohan had never seen before.

  They spoke Korean. He had not heard or spoken it in a year. It took him a moment to find certain words.

  One of the men had died, a crane accident. The rest had changed jobs and crews, moving to other routes and crossing the Pacific toward the western United States.

  He patted Yohan on the shoulder.

  —But you, he said. You will stay.

  And he laughed again and looked back toward the ship where a man was sliding crates down a plank.

  —Ah, he said. Yours.

  They moved down the pier where there were two shipments of textiles from Tokyo and Osaka. He did not leave right away. He sat on one of the crates, facing the sea, and the sailor sat on the other. The water was blue and gray and broke as the birds dove.

  The sailor had been living on the southern coast of Japan all these years, joining a cousin, a migrant worker who had gone there before the war. The sailor had two sons and a daughter. His wife, a Japanese woman, worked at a hotel now, washing linen.

  —It’s new, he said. The hotel. It’s ruined her hands.

  He raised his palms in the air.

  He did not see her often. They exchanged letters when they could, the wife writing to his next destination. Sometimes, when she knew he would be stopping in Brazil, she sent a letter to Yohan’s shop because he had offered.

  He would carry it to the docks and the sailor would read the letter aloud to Yohan, who imagined the small house in the coastal village: how each day the sailor’s wife followed the road down to the beach where the hotel stood. She carried a lunch box and a parasol for shade. The children went to school and then returned home to his wife’s mother. Some days the hotel was empty but still she cleaned the rooms and made the beds. Lifting sheets the color of ivory and that color everywhere. A thousand empty tents.

  But a letter had not come to the shop this time. He did not have to tell the sailor, who knew already because Yohan had not given him anything.

  —I will see them soon, he said, and watched a small boat leave the harbor.

  When he did not go on, Yohan looked at him, searching the man’s eyes, and waited.

  The sailor said, —Nothing. I have not heard news of your town.

  He did not say anything more. Yohan knew what he meant. He stayed a while longer but they did not speak much, as though they had both said what they needed to say. The sailor mentioned Korea, about the southeastern port that he docked at, the one from which Yohan had embarked, but that was all.

  He wondered how different that port looked now, whether there were new buildings and new ships, whether it was busier, but he did not ask. He shivered; he wrapped his arms around his stomach. He had once stood in the cold among ships that were like towers. Then the Americans escorting him pointed to a distant vessel where silhouettes moved across the high deck under a sky of long clouds.

  How long ago that was now. How long ago was his own exhaustion and the exhaustion of the men escorting him, their bloodshot eyes and their helmets and the reek of iodine and gunpowder that they all carried and seemed to take years to erase. There were days even now when he could still smell it, and that evening on the coast did not seem so far away then.

  For a moment, he was still that man, a boy, in that country, in that harbor, with his back to the years that had happened and unsure of whether those years would follow him into the sea. He remembered the uncontrollable shaking of his body. The pause on the gangplank and himself above the water as though suspended between the coast and the ship.

  He remembered the sailor standing beside him as they entered the harbor here that early morning. He had lit a cigarette and the two of them watched as the other ships unloaded their cargo and the peddlers walked back and forth along the docks, carrying boxes strapped over their necks, selling stationery and pornography.

  —Yohan, the sailor had said. Stay here. Stay for a long time.

  The day dimmed and the dock lights flared. In the distance, beyond the piers, he recognized Kiyoshi’s bicycle and then Bia riding it. She circled the market square, bumping over the cobblestone, and then pedaled past the crates and the men. A scarf covered her hair. Santi was seated on the bicycle, holding her waist.

  The bike tottered and for a moment it seemed as though Bia was on the verge of losing her balance. Yohan found himself standing. But she regained control and continued on, laughing. Dockworkers shook their heads and then returned to their work.

  Whether they saw him he could not tell.

  —They’ve grown, the sailor said.

  Santi leaned back, his legs in the air as she pedaled past the men and headed toward the boardwalk. When they lost her in a far crowd, Yohan offered the sailor a room to spend the night, as he always did, but the sailor refused, as he always did.

  —Next time, the sailor said, and they parted wa
ys, Yohan pushing the crates up the hill on a dolly, and the sailor returning to the ship, to his cabin, where there was a narrow bed, photographs, his wife’s letters, a ceramic dolphin his children had given him, two coins a shipmate once placed on his pillow, years ago.

  6

  From his window that evening he saw the shape of someone riding a bicycle through the town. There was a flashlight on the handlebars and he followed the errant star as it swayed down the slope and faded along the coast.

  He left the shop. He passed the church and entered the meadow. He continued to walk away from the town, moving under the open sky, until the land narrowed and formed a promontory high above the sea. He took the path beside it, descending the cliff.

  The brightness of the low moon was everywhere. For a moment he was disoriented. He squinted, shielding his eyes with a hand. He was on a beach north of the harbor, the sand gleaming and unbroken. The shadow of an animal, a dog perhaps, retreated into a thicket. A piece of torn paper twirled past him.

  In the distance, farther up the beach, a fire was burning. He could distinguish the silhouettes of people in the darkness: some were sitting with blankets over their shoulders; others were standing. A girl lifted her arms and stretched, her body a blade against the light of the fire, a leaping fish.

  He felt the softness of the sand, its give. The water blinked from the nearby lighthouse as he moved along the shoreline. He heard conversations. The calm of the night hours.

  He kept walking. He found the old plantation house on the coast. It stood in a long field, beyond a stone wall. In the evening light it looked as if it had just been built. But as he approached he noticed its dilapidated architecture, the wood-covered windows, the sinking porch, a portion of its rooftop gone.

  Nearby, shanties stood in rows. They were short and squat with steel roofs that reflected the evening light. Some of them were without windows. Others had the space for a door but there was none, the entrances covered in heavy blankets.