Snow Hunters: A Novel

by Yoon, Paul

  A path had been made among them and in the moonlight he watched a man on a mule pace through the settlement. Two women carried baskets into a shanty. At one entrance a pair of gray dogs lay side by side with their heads on their paws. A group of old men, with their hats hooked over their knees, smoked cigarettes.

  There was also a large tree in the field. Clothes of various colors hung on its branches, left to dry. Bia was standing under it. She was wearing a hat pulled low over her eyes. She unfurled a shirt and threw it over a branch.

  He climbed over the stone wall. Water hit the hulls of the small boats lined up along the shore. He could hear himself breathing, hear the beats of his heart starting to speed and then slow as he moved away from the beach and entered the settlement. It was as though someone, somewhere, were dreaming this and he had crossed into it without permission. Everything both familiar and foreign.

  A man on crutches walked past, nodding. A basket of dried fish was tied to his waist. Across the field, closer to the plantation house, he saw the figure of a juggler, his chin pointing at the sky. A group of children, sitting around him, were following his motions.

  Bia did not seem surprised to see him. He looked up at the clothes hanging above them in the tree, these shapes in the air like windows afloat. A house of fabric. Drops of water hit his wrist.

  Without speaking she led him away toward the plantation house. The man on the mule greeted her and as they passed she patted the animal on the neck. She spoke briefly with a girl, leaving her a folded shirt.

  Santi was sitting on a large blanket, watching them. Around him lay the bracelets, necklaces, and the long coiled rope they had woven. In the morning they would bring them to the market. They would sit all day, selling what they could.

  Not far from them the children had gathered in a circle. They were leaning back and clutching the grass. Some wore sweaters and others wore wool caps. Many of them were barefoot.

  The juggler stood at the center, throwing the children’s shoes into the air. He had a faded red scarf wrapped around his eyes. His shoulders were narrow and he wore a loose shirt that revealed his collarbones. His arms moved like wheels, without pause. The ends of his scarf swayed. His blinded face tilted toward the night clouds.

  Santi made room for them. In the moonlight a bruise revealed itself on his cheek. Yohan pretended not to notice. Instead he unwrapped a chocolate bar and shared it with them.

  He could feel the wet grass against his palms. The cool of the blanket on his ankles. He looked back toward the settlement. On the rooftop of a shanty stood a cluster of potted plants. From the ground a cat jumped the height and began to claw at the leaves. Someone was playing a French song on a gramophone.

  He did not know what time it was. It could have been midnight or even later. The night was clear and fell on the land. On occasion a car could be heard; but from here the town was invisible, blocked by headlands and cliffs.

  Yohan had tasted chocolate for the first time at the camp. It had been sent from America. A nurse rested the bar on the damp operating table, then cut it with a surgeon’s knife.

  She shared it with those in the field tent. Pieces the size of fingernails. He stood in the corner and placed a piece on his tongue and kept his lips pressed together, unused to the flavor, the sweetness. Watching the men on the cots and the other nurses do the same. All of them silent as though they each held a secret.

  The nurse had also given some to a boy who lived beyond the camp. In the days that followed Yohan would see him through the fences, standing in the fields, looking down at his shirt where there was a chocolate stain, which he licked. When the taste vanished he continued to lift the spot on his shirt and sniff. He did so long after the scent faded. Each time he grinned. Then he moved on to wherever he was going, heading into the woods with a kite strapped to his back.

  In the field, shoes rose high and descended. Up and down they went. There was applause and laughter. He heard the coast. Then a ship’s horn blew. The lights of a long vessel appeared at sea. It moved so slowly that he was not sure it was moving at all.

  Santi reached for another piece of chocolate and then he was gone, running across the settlement toward the beach. In the dark his body was barely visible. He found a high rock and from there he lifted his hands to form an imaginary spyglass, which he swiveled out toward the blinking lights of the vessel.

  —They work on the farms and in the mines, Bia said, looking out at the settlement and the beach fire. There are also fishermen and factory workers.

  Then she took his hand and smoothed his palm. She placed his hand on her lap, looked down, studied it. He saw a clarity in her eyes. With her index finger she traced the line that curved around the base of his thumb. The warmth of her skin surprised him.

  —You are going to live for a very long time, she said. There’s a split, however. You will come upon a great obstacle. You will go around it, see, where it forks near your wrist. It is your character. To go around. For a moment, here—she tapped his skin—you will live a different life.

  She spoke slowly so that he would understand. It was the first time she had spoken more than a few words to him. It seemed that she had described both a life sometime in the future and one he had already lived.

  He wanted her to go on, wanted her to continue speaking, to be surrounded by her voice, but she raised her eyes and he looked up to see the juggler leaning over them with a curious expression.

  Then the juggler frowned and tightened his mouth, brought a finger to his lips, and snatched Bia’s hat. All this while still blindfolded and without dropping a single thing.

  Bia, blushing, dropped Yohan’s hand. They both returned to watching the blindfolded juggler, who was now walking in circles with the shoes and the hat aloft, sometimes running and bending his body.

  The children cheered. An airplane appeared behind the mountain range. Clothes were collected from the tree and some more were placed there. Smoke from the fire rose above the field.

  The night grew colder. He watched the girl’s hat rise and fall, its brim spinning in the air.

  Santi was still standing on the high rock. Yohan followed the boy’s gaze out toward the blinking water. He waited, though what he was waiting for he was no longer sure of. His legs grew heavy, he felt his palms settle into the grass, and he imagined himself sinking, his body falling into the earth until the sea claimed him and there was nothing left, no evidence of him.

  He wondered who would notice his vanishing, who would miss him then.

  He watched the ends of the scarf swing behind the blindfolded juggler. He thought of forests. High canopies. A river. A hand on his elbow. Peng.

  He thought of new towns in the places he had been. New houses. New shops. Bicycles. Markets. Magic shows, theater, and children.

  Bia’s hat rose into the air.

  Before he left that night she leaned toward him so that their faces were almost touching. He felt her breath against his ear.

  She cupped her mouth and said, —He practices every afternoon. To keep him sharp. He used to be in the circus. Then he went to the war. And now he is blind. But he can still throw and catch. He tells me he does not need his eyes for this. He tells me, when he performs, everyone assumes he can see. So he wraps a scarf over his face and they are thrilled. He prefers it that way. The belief that he can see even when the show finishes and the audience has gone. He wants me to imagine this. It makes him happy. So that when we part today, I go this way and he goes that way. He enters his home and unties the scarf around his head and looks around and out the window. He rubs his eyes, squints from the light. I imagine this for him. In my dreams he takes all of us by the waist and throws us into the air. He lifts his arms and we rise. He watches us. And it is beautiful.

  7

  He had once played cards with the medics. He had been looking for Peng, wondering where he had wandered off to. It was the first summer, an early evening, and no one could sleep.

  In one of the hospital tents, thre
e men had gathered around a wooden crate. Peng was there. They were sitting together with their shirts unbuttoned, surrounded by candles, the small fires catching the mosquitoes.

  They motioned for Yohan. So he went under the tent and sat on one of the crates beside them. He watched them finish their game.

  Then someone asked if he and Peng wanted to play, too. The game was called poker, they said, and one of the medics taught them the suits.

  Peng held the playing cards. The bandages over his eyes were illuminated. When it was their turn he waited for Yohan to whisper into his ear what he held, the numbers and the shapes, the clovers and the portraits of kings.

  They did not play very well. They took too long and did not understand the game.

  Even so, in that candlelight, Peng clutched the cards and smiled. It was one of the few times Peng smiled at the camp and Yohan would remember it, wondering what private memory he was reliving on that summer night, behind the bandages; what moment or story there was for him in a handful of cards and their texture, the way he ran his fingertips over them as though he held something remarkable. As though for a brief instant, life in this prison camp, near the southern coast of this country, during wartime, had become a kind of wonder.

  Just as Yohan would sit with Santi and Bia one day in the market square, the three of them playing cards as they tried to sell bracelets and necklaces. How he paused, holding a three of diamonds, thinking of this night.

  Later, he and Peng were split up and Yohan looked over the shoulder of the medic named Lamont. Lamont asked which cards he should give up and Yohan pointed at one and the medic frowned and shook his head.

  Lamont had very pale hair that was curly and thick and he had freckles on his nose.

  —Snowmen, they called Yohan and Peng, because the Americans knew who they were.

  They had found them in the mountains, not far from the wreckage of a bomb, lying buried in the snow. They had found them because Yohan’s nose had been sticking up in the snow.

  —Like a fucking carrot, they said.

  And they had speared his nose with the butt of a rifle, assuming if he were alive, he would react. That sudden sound of bone cracking the air and Yohan screaming.

  He had been part of a patrol unit in the mountains that day. Among the men he and Peng had lived with, walked with, fought and slept beside, they were the only survivors of the bombing.

  He would not know how many days passed. He would wake momentarily to his body shaking on the bed of a truck, his wrists bound, a warmth spreading across his face, then the pain.

  And Peng beside him, his eyes already gone.

  The medics were all his age. He remembered being envious of their boots and the sound of the sleeping convalescents and the nurses pausing to view the card game.

  Two of the medics left that month. He did not know where they went. Or whether they lived. They each carried a large pack on their shoulders, heading toward the gate where a transport was waiting. They walked like old men, using their rifles as canes.

  —Snowman, they called to him, and waved from the fences.

  They had left their gramophone for the nurses. Benny Goodman filled the days and the nights.

  When it grew cold the wounded were moved into the abandoned mill. That December, boxes arrived filled with streamers, lights, and hats in the shape of cones.

  Lamont, the medic who stayed, walked by the beds, passing out the hats.

  —Yohan, a nurse called one late evening, swaying from the whiskey that had been sent as well.

  —Dance with me, she said.

  It was Christmas. Wood stoves burned on each end of the factory floor. She took his hand and led him outside. It had snowed and their boots dipped into it. All across the field the snow was lit from the brightness of electricity.

  They stood under a window so that they could hear the music. She had put on one of the hats, blue in color, and it sparkled. She put one on him as well. He had never danced before.

  She took his hands and placed them around her waist. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and stepped to the side, humming, and he followed her. She smelled of liquor and tiredness. She was wearing her uniform. Yohan wore a coat they had given him.

  Behind the factory windows a pastor read to the men. Missionaries carried trays of hot chocolate. A range of pointed colored hats appeared against the fogged glass. A few guards stood looking down at them. Her hat slid off as she rested her head against his chest and they danced in that field in the snow.

  All those days there was music. He could hear it as he waited for his meals or washed clothes. As he walked along the perimeter for exercise, Peng holding his elbow and counting steps. As he watched the doctors bend over the cots and as trucks arrived with more of the wounded. As he learned how to mend clothes. As he was taught how to garden. As he stood far in the field and dug into the earth, taking turns with the six available shovels while the others used pickaxes or buckets or even their hands, moving down the fresh slope. Their shoulders heaved. From across the distance men watched from their beds. And that faint melody, a song, came to them as the nurse he had danced with, that winter, lit a lantern and reached over the graves as it grew dark.

  8

  One night there was a power outage in the town. They headed to the rooftop. Kiyoshi carried a flashlight. They sat in their chairs and the tailor pointed the beam out toward the buildings. Birds had gathered on clotheslines and television antennas. There were no clouds. Everywhere candles began to fill the windows.

  There was a quiet in the evening, as if the electricity had taken sound with it. The beam of the lighthouse swept across the water. Musicians began to play in the square near the port and they listened to the melodies traveling up the hill.

  Their eyes adjusted to the dark. Even though it was warm Kiyoshi was wearing a sweater.

  —I’ve spent my life looking down and away, the tailor said, spreading his arms to form his imaginary worktable. I have not looked up enough.

  He leaned back against his chair and lifted his head.

  —What stars, he said, and laughed, gazing up at that vast canvas above them, Yohan astonished by how it was possible that it was the same sky through all their years, in countries across the sea. How the sky never changed, never appeared to grow old.

  From below came the rapid patter of footsteps. A trail of lights moved in the dark. When it grew closer he saw that it was a group of boys and girls, out past their curfew, heading down toward the harbor square.

  He wondered what it was about the dark of a town that made some stay indoors and others leave their homes, running through the narrow streets in sudden happiness. As if it were not the town they moved through but somewhere in their imaginations, their private castles.

  He did not know where Santi and Bia were this evening. He did not know if they always stayed in the settlement when they were here.

  —All over, Kiyoshi had said when he asked.

  Kiyoshi had offered the shop to them once but they shook their heads, hurrying away with the food he gave them. In the war Yohan had seen a child asleep under a tree with a sack filled with food tied around his wrist. Their footsteps woke him and the child reached for the sack first, then sat up, rubbed his eyes, looked at them, and yawned.

  The line of lights faded down the hill. Kiyoshi tugged on Yohan’s shirtsleeve.

  —Look, he said, and pointed toward the sea.

  Another light had appeared, a red star in the water. It was heading north. It was too dark, too far for them to see the shape of the vessel. Soon it vanished behind a building in front of them.

  In that moment Kiyoshi said, —Oh, and Yohan felt his arm brush against his, the arrival of a night wind, and the tailor was gone.

  At first he did not understand where Kiyoshi was. He looked back at the rooftop door but it was shut. Then he rushed to the rooftop’s edge.

  But he stopped. In his periphery he caught a flash of movement, the movement of erratic light in the air. He tur
ned toward the rooftops beside theirs, up the slope of the hill, and he saw him there, two buildings away, his figure like some bird tiptoeing along the edge of the concrete and the tiles, across roofs that were flat and some that were pitched, the flashlight swinging beside him and illuminating his ankles.

  He called to Kiyoshi several times, but by then the tailor was too far and could not hear him or was ignoring him.

  And so Yohan crossed the roof and stepped onto the edge of his neighbors’. He moved as fast as he could, extending his arms to the side and following the beam of the flashlight. It seemed to him that Kiyoshi moved faster, with an energy he had not seen in years, the man running, almost, accompanied by the sound of tiles shifting.

  Kiyoshi did not stop until he reached the last building before the church. If the old man was tired, he did not show it. The roof was flat and Yohan kneeled to rest, waiting for the pulsing in his legs to calm.

  From where they stood, not far from the church spire, they could see the entire coast. On a cliff the lighthouse stood against the sky, not functioning.

  —No light, Kiyoshi said.

  He raised his flashlight and began to turn it on and off.

  Soon the vessel appeared, drifting past the town. Kiyoshi swayed his arm. He continued clicking the flashlight on and off. In moments like these the lighthouse keeper hung lanterns, and Yohan could see them now and he wondered if Kiyoshi did, too.

  He said, —Kiyoshi, it’s all right, and touched his shoulder but the tailor did not respond. The ship had passed safely and was far away now.

  In the building across from them, in the floor below, a window was open. Candles illuminated the room. He caught the corner of a robe and then a woman appeared. Her gray hair, blond in the candlelight, touched her waist.

  A birdcage stood in the corner of the room. She approached it and leaned forward. She spoke and the bird twisted its head. Then she placed a blanket over the cage and Yohan watched as she stood there for some time, holding a hairbrush, staring at the draped fabric, her expression vague and the candlelight shifting across the room from a wind.