by Yoon, Paul
They were members of a theater troupe and they crossed the field, a long line of them wearing old gray shirts and caps and scarves wrapped around their necks.
It was the end of summer. He lay on his stomach, hidden in the grass, and watched as a man appeared at the farmhouse door.
This was his father. He was tall and had tied his hair back with a piece of string. He was the farmhand. And the house was being restored for a landowner whom they never saw, a Japanese man who was a shipbuilder living in Nagasaki.
He gave the troupe buckets and rags, which they slung over their shoulders. Then they surrounded the house.
And under the few stars that remained, against the mountains that were still dark, Yohan watched as the troupe washed the walls and the windows. A few crouched in the grass and some climbed ladders. And still others climbed onto each other to reach the high corners.
He followed the troupe’s paths as they circled this structure that resembled to him a shipwrecked vessel. With his father a few of them worked on the chimney with ropes bound to their waists, and the morning was suddenly filled with the echo of hammers as they hung suspended in that low sky, orbiting the rooftop. He watched them part, vanish, then come back together again. Specks of cloth floated in that early light.
This was over fifteen years ago, during the Second World War. Yohan was twelve. And one of the children, high in the air, was Peng, that boy with the gray stripe in his hair, although they would not meet until they were older.
Later, the troupe received food for their work and returned to the woods. They camped there, staying for a week, and then they moved on to the next town, returning again for another season.
They traveled the country. In the towns they performed plays and acrobatics and magic. Sometimes, in the nights, his father would drink at the teahouse and Yohan was allowed to remain outside on the sidewalk, looking through the spaces in the crowd at the performance in the square.
He watched the limbs of marionettes rise and fall. The reflection of a blade. Ribbons of color moving across a stage. A man who opened his coat and all of a sudden a dozen birds emerged from his waist, caught in flight by strings tied to his belt.
He listened to the great tragedies. The love stories.
He clapped when the townspeople clapped.
Then his father found him and they returned home, the sound of the performers fading as they left the town, following the main road, his eyes adjusting from the fires of the lanterns to the dark. He walked as slowly as he could, listening, an energy contained within him that he held until his father fell asleep and then he returned outside, climbing the hill once more to wait for the troupe to return from the town.
Some nights his father allowed the troupe to practice in the fields; and from the hill Yohan followed their leaping bodies bright from a bonfire. On other nights the children played soccer or took turns riding bicycles. They called down for him. They were quick in the moonlight. Their voices faint.
In the summers, lightning bugs surrounded the land. Hundreds of them blinking in the air as Yohan and the children pedaled through the field or chased a ball. And sometimes even his father would join them, clapping when a goal was scored.
He was surprised by his father’s kindness toward them. Around them he revealed a playfulness Yohan would only see a few times in the man’s life. He was well into his forties when Yohan was born and he was a solitary man, unused to company, who knew little about children. With a wife who did not survive the birth, he had raised Yohan alone.
Their house was a single room at the edge of the property, closest to the town. They had a mule. A garden.
Yohan knew nothing then of the geography of those years before he left. It wouldn’t be until long afterward, a world away, pausing before a map in a store in the hill town, that he would understand how close he had lived to the Sea of Japan and the Russian border.
He had never gone to the ocean. There was a time when he could not imagine farther than a range of mountains. He was unaware that there were ships the size of islands.
It was assumed that he would one day take over his father’s work. And when he was old enough he helped care for the land. But for the most part they kept to themselves. Within the boundary of the farm they made their own routes. His father at the barn and Yohan in the hills. His father checking on the farmhouse and Yohan in the garden.
Every evening they ate together and then his father would return outside, to spend a few hours in the shed that stood behind their house. It had been converted into a studio, for his father was an amateur potter, having taken up the hobby when he was young.
On those evenings Yohan could hear the rotations of the kick wheel as he swept the floor of the house or lingered on the road, wondering if the theater troupe had returned from their travels. There were days when, in the fever of the cold, his father worked all night, the smoke of the kiln fire rising past the trees, higher than the smoke of the house’s chimney.
And Yohan would find him asleep on the floor, the morning light scaling his clay-covered body. He brought a bucket of water for him and some food, and if it was still early, he took off his father’s boots and placed a blanket over him, staying there until the man woke.
On some afternoons he helped his father carry his pots and vases into the town, where he sold them in the market. And for a few hours they sat on a blanket, sometimes bartering for supplies or for food they didn’t eat often.
In the market there were craftsmen and peddlers, fishmongers and butchers, Japanese soldiers from the military base, the town doctor with his shoulders stooped from the bag he always carried. These lives that all seemed unknowable and closed as though oceans surrounded each of them.
Most days they returned home with much of what they had brought. But there was also the day when his father had sold everything.
He could only recall it ever happening once: his father helping the old woman who had bought the last two vases, the man’s happiness and the lightness of his feet as he walked down the main street. And he remembered his father waving to him from the distance and the boxes, held by strings, rising and falling like miniature houses in his hands.
He was sixteen when his father passed away. One spring morning, not long after the farmhouse was complete, his father was returning home from the hills but never made it, collapsing into the grass. The man was sixty years old.
In the months that followed, Yohan began to care for the farm himself, for an owner he had only met once in his life. He fed the animals. He maintained the renovated farmhouse. He gardened. He went into the town for supplies.
Some nights he stayed, joining the crowd to watch the theater troupe perform in the square.
Afterward, he accompanied them back to the hills, walking beside Peng, whom he knew by then and who was nineteen years old, wanting to ask him about a play they had performed but too shy to.
Instead, Peng’s father, with his thick hands, patted him on the back of his neck and spoke to him of the farmhouse and how Yohan’s father was missed and then they all fell silent, listening to the rhythm of their slow footsteps on the country road, the troupe’s costumes catching a thousand reflections.
That year news arrived that Japan had surrendered. Then came the news that Korea had been divided, a border running along its torso.
The theater troupe never returned. He wondered if they had been traveling in the south, stuck there as so many were.
In the north, where they were, the Russians came.
They took the animals. He watched as the farmhouse, long complete by then, was pulled apart, growing smaller and shorter, its pieces laid across the field. The land had been cheap and he imagined that perhaps the shipbuilder had intended to spend his later years here. That a man who spent his days near water, in ports and harbors, had dreamed of its opposite. He recalled the corridors and the rooms before they vanished, their grandeur and their emptiness. It had been a house for a king.
In its place a factory was built
. With the other laborers he was hired to help in its construction. A settlement was created in a field not far from his house. He grew to be friendly with the workers who were from the nearby towns and who would, as the year went on, continue to travel with the military, building.
One night, returning to the house, he went into his father’s shed. He stared at the unsold pots and the vases on the shelves, at their shapes and their designs, the illustrations of landscapes. He wondered what would become of them. He reached for one, then hesitated. He thought of them staying here, untouched, through the seasons and the years. He thought of the ones people had purchased, scattered throughout the country. He imagined that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father’s hands. That they contained the heat of a kiln and a home that no longer existed. He wondered whether he would be able to recognize them if he saw them again.
He thought of the day they found an abandoned boat on the banks of the nearby river. He was a child then. To Yohan’s surprise his father lifted him, climbed into the boat, and began to row.
Halfway to the town he passed the paddle to him and Yohan mimicked his father’s movements. He felt tireless. They passed through the forest, past a man casting a net, its web unfurling over the long river. He stared down into the water, the sky in it and the world upside down, the bright trees slipping under him. And his father now lying there, resting his head on Yohan’s feet, sighing like some contented animal.
They left the boat in the town and walked home, laughing, this shared secret. Whose boat it was they never discovered. Whether it stayed near that town or whether someone else took it for a journey Yohan did not know.
Standing there, in his father’s shed, he knew that there had been, between them, affection and even tenderness. That his father had never been unkind. That in their silences there had been a form of love.
But he had never known him, had never been close to him in the way he witnessed other sons and their fathers.
Perhaps it would have been different if his mother had lived. Perhaps his father had once been someone else and a wife’s death had altered him.
Or perhaps his solitude was always there. He would often wonder about that.
But as he grew older he thought less of it, grew accustomed to the days lived. Each day he climbed the hill, as he used to, and helped build the factory. He visited the town. The seasons passed. Then the years. His father a curtained room. His mother, too. This blank space in his life that he was unable to paint.
13
The summer he was nineteen, after his shift, he fell asleep one night at the teahouse. When he woke he found himself on the floor of a room with discolored walls and a single window. A cold bowl of soup lay beside his fingertips.
He fell asleep once more and when it grew dark he opened his eyes to find a girl kneeling beside him. She lifted a spoon to his lips. The taste of broth on his tongue. She smelled of sweat and tea and of something sweet like the smell of a pastry shop.
Her name was Suyon. She was the teahouse hostess. She was twenty-one years old.
She had recognized him.
—The farmhand’s boy, she said.
He began to stay with her. During the day he stood in a line at the factory, assembling lightbulbs of various shapes and sizes. Then in the evening he headed into the town and waited for her, peering through a window at the Soviets in their uniforms, playing cards at a corner table.
She was from a family of miners. One of her brothers still worked in the mountains and was gone most seasons.
On her nights off they did not leave the room she rented. He brought her lightbulbs that he stole and she collected them on a table as though they were flowers. She gave him a new shirt. Yohan wrapped a towel around his hands, poured boiling water into a ceramic bowl so that she could wash her hair. Then she washed his.
He liked to lay his head on her lap, look up at her upside down, her hair falling in lines over his face as she covered his ears with her palms.
He luxuriated in the newness of being touched. Of touching someone.
They slept beside each other on the floor. Her body curled into him. Once, when they were unable to sleep, she hung her blanket over the window and they chased each other in that room in the dark, one of them searching while the other hid, the soles of their feet sliding against the old wood floor.
On another night he woke to find her dress hanging above him on a string, the fabric holding the shape of the girl as though she floated there. And as Suyon slept he reached up to touch it, feeling the thinness and the age of the silk, feeling the years contained there, wondering if those years were the girl’s or someone else’s.
Lying there, on those nights, she would speak to him. She told him about her youth. Her parents. Her brothers. She wiggled her toes in the moonlight and he did not know why but he copied her.
—They’re older, she said. Two of them. They used to carry me on their shoulders. They stole horses and I rode with them. They spied on the girls bathing in the river. Dared each other to descend the banks and touch their clothes. In the field we took turns cutting Father’s hair, and each other’s. Father worked in the mines first, then my brothers. I would head to the mountains and wait for them. In the evening we walked the road home, leading the oldest, who by then was unable to see in the dark. Night blindness. He was not yet thirty years old when there was an accident underground. He is the one I think of the most. I am sitting on his shoulders and gripping his wrists. The light sound of his boots. The ash smell of his hair. This girl’s wish to touch the stars granted by a brother who couldn’t see them.
The surviving brother came home one morning. Yohan was pulled outside. He was pushed against the wall and the man struck him and struck him again.
Yohan fought back. He formed his hands into fists. He tucked in his shoulders and sought the impact of a body. He hit him as hard as he could. He struck the brother’s face and his chest and he fought.
But the brother was stronger. Yohan was dragged down the street, away from the town. He thought he heard clapping. A dog followed them. The taste of his blood already mixing with what remained of the taste of her.
He was left outside of the town. He crawled toward the shade of a tree. With the eye he could open he looked down at his hands. The sleeves of his new shirt. He had lost a shoe. His hair was covered in dirt and a drop of the man’s spit remained on his chin. He waited there to see if anyone would appear, whether Suyon would come looking for him.
He looked around him. The light was fading. A group of factory workers were on their way to the hills. The dog roamed the grass. In the town a man was climbing a ladder, lighting the streetlamps.
Yohan leaned against the tree; the earth under him cooled. He stared at the flatness of the country and then the mountains. The factory workers were far along the road, their bodies growing smaller.
A military truck appeared. It was blaring a song on the radio and as it passed the men they began to dance. They stood in the middle of the road, in the last light, and they did not stop, even after the truck was gone and the song faded. They twisted their hips. They kicked the dust. His body numb, his face half-closed, Yohan was unaware of his foot tapping the ground.
• • •
He never saw her again. That fall he left with a group of workers. He was given wages, food, and housing. He traveled from town to city, working in rubber and munitions factories.
In 1949, when he was twenty, along with all of them, he was conscripted.
A year after that, when the war started, he crossed the border into the south, following a great mass of them with their new boots and their weapons, their bodies like a thousand trees as the landscape, in a single step, changed forever.
In that ruined country he would move across that new architecture of rubble and debris and broken rooftops, lift a fallen door with his rifle, find a boy asleep on a mat.
He stopped, startled. It was as though he had discovered a palace. The child deep in
dreams, surrounded by cups and pottery and fabrics and mirrors, dozens of them reflecting the sky and him.
He turned to see if the other men had noticed. He lowered the door, careful not to wake the boy, and left.
In those first months he thought often of the theater troupe, wondering where they had gone. He found a pair of marionettes hanging high up in the trees, their legs swinging as he walked under them. He passed the bombed remains of a theater where a dog lay beside a tin cup full of rainwater and a pile of costumes it had made for a bed.
Crossing a river, he caught two girls underwater, looking up at him, wide-eyed, their mouths as small as coins, as though they had willed themselves to be invisible. On the banks he left them what he could. A spare shoelace. Food and a pocketknife.
That year of ceaseless movement, continuing south. He traveled mostly on foot. Their helmets casting strange shadows. They searched abandoned homes, relishing the momentary freedom of resting in a room and looking out as though it were their own house. They navigated unrecognizable structures, collecting men who had been left behind.
His senses grew accustomed to the sudden lightning of ammunition. The gray dust that was everywhere. All the open windows and doors and the weather taking shape on the floors.
He saw a river catch on fire, stunned at how such a thing was possible. He found a foot sprouting from the earth, its toes splayed. Then the toes wilted. He was unsure if he had seen the movement. A trick of the mind, perhaps. A trick of shadow. They were moving quickly and he lost sight of it. A useless thought overwhelmed him: the nakedness of the foot and whether someone had taken the shoes.
On a cargo train one night he sat surrounded by other soldiers. The cold air filled with their coughing, the glow of cigarettes, and their breaths as they leaned against each other for warmth. There were wounded men in the car behind them and on occasion they could hear a muffled scream over the engine noises as a medic attempted to operate while they traveled.
It was winter. The cars were missing their doors and he watched the dim stain of an airplane flying above the valley. The stars were endless. He listened to the wind and the sleeping men. He smelled the persistent smell of burning and stale blood that he was already used to. He felt his body grow heavy, lulled by the rhythm of the train.
