by Paul Yoon
Hours later, I felt the shock of the ocean ahead of me—the bright expanse of it, the glass.
I lost the family. When morning came they left, jumping off into a high grass meadow where there were horses, and entered their new life.
I kept going. I wasn’t yet used to being alone.
Eventually, the train stopped at a depot somewhere in the late night, and I snuck away into the country. I followed the moon. I found a tall maple where I sat down and, for the first time, wept.
IV.
Years later, I returned to the sanatorium.
I walked from the town. I started early in the morning, following the trail up the mountain. It was the end of summer. It was beautiful to see the valley and the colors and the fog that was moving over everything.
I wasn’t sure what to expect. I thought someone would be there. Some old hope. But I found it still abandoned. Windowpanes were broken and the paint of the structure had peeled away long ago. There were three rocking chairs left on the rotting porch. They were close together, facing the lake, which held the reflection of clouds, the water breaking from a bird. In the courtyard, a bicycle wheel was lying in the fountain. I could smell the wet, undisturbed earth.
The entrance doors seemed the only thing that looked as how I remembered them: ancient, mythical. Doors for giants. I pushed and, to my surprise, they opened, creaking loudly, a burst of stale, cold air escaping. From a hole in the high ceiling, feathers fell down the height of four stories, past the bones of a chandelier.
I wandered the halls. In the rooms, some of the cots were still made with clean linen; others had old evidence of squatters. There were clothes in drawers, crosses on the walls. I found a spinning top, like the one I used to have as a child. Daguerreotypes of people I didn’t recognize. The sun came through the windows, reflecting off the metal trays on the tables. The cabinets were empty, all the drugs and medicine gone.
I ended up on the top floor, where the ceiling followed the shape of the mansard roof. I liked that floor best when I was a child, with its strange angles and the rows of beds like some orphanage in a story. It would grow unbearably hot and no one actually slept up there in the summers, so it was ours, I thought, mine and Theo’s, some private place we claimed.
Through the dormer windows there was a view below of the house where Theo and his father used to live. The grounds surrounding the house still looked as they had when I was young, and I was happy. I had survived the war. I was here.
I leaned down. I lifted the loose plank under one of the beds. I reached in.
My fingers caught something cold, and I pulled it back up and held it to the light. My mother’s piano key, worn from the years and her playing, which I pocketed before I went outside.
•
I still thought of it as Theo’s house, though of course it hadn’t been for a very long time. None of his things, or his father’s things, were there anymore but there was a bed, a long table in the kitchen, framed maps on the walls, and some books on the shelves—things I assumed had belonged to the other physicians who had lived here after.
Mice had nibbled at the large rug on the floor. I dragged it to the porch and beat the dust from it. I swept the floor. I straightened the maps on the walls. I had brought some food with me from the town—a loaf of bread, sardine tins, cheese, tomatoes—it was plenty for a few days.
I wondered who had stayed here through the years. I flipped through the books. Some of them fell apart in my hands, and I collected the pages and tucked them in again. I had planned on visiting my own house, but the hours passed. I pulled the sheets from a convalescent’s room and came back and made the bed.
That night I slept in Theo’s house for the first time, thinking I would begin in the main building tomorrow, collect the broken glass and the trays, fix the rocking chairs. I dreamed of Theo’s father. We were in London together in an empty factory without walls. He was wearing his doctor’s coat and giving me a tour. In his arms, he was carrying lightbulbs, and I knew they were for the chandelier. Then something far in the city collapsed, and I opened my eyes.
•
One day, a young woman and a boy appeared on the mountain. I hadn’t seen them come up. They were standing on the lawn, holding hands and looking out at the open valley. I wondered if they were lost. It was late in the afternoon. The woman was wearing a long-brimmed hat and carrying a long canister of some kind. She was perhaps in her twenties. The boy was about five. I watched from the door as they crossed over to the lake. Leaves had begun to fall into the water. She let the boy walk over to the small dock, beside the rowboat, and he studied his reflection.
The woman saw me and waved, so I made my way out to her. The other day, scraping the walls, I had fallen off the ladder and wrenched my knee. It was better now but I was moving a bit slowly and she met me halfway.
We shook hands. She introduced herself as Elsa Marie Loze and I immediately recognized the family name. She was Henry’s daughter. She had been on a trip, on her way back to Montreal, when she remembered her father had been a patient here.
She looked around and behind me at the building.
And this is Tom, she said.
Hi, Tom, I said, and the boy buried his head against his mother’s legs.
Do you live here? Elsa Marie said.
Just for a little while, I said.
Like a caretaker? she said.
Yes, I said. Something like that.
Shadows had begun to extend across the lawn. I could hear a wind passing through the high leaves. She opened the canister she had been carrying.
He became a painter, you know, she said. My father. A decent one. A museum was interested in his work, so I brought some down with me. Here. Come look.
We went to the car and carried the rest to the house. She rolled them out for me on the kitchen table. I made her tea while Tom explored, studying the maps on the walls and playing with the spinning top I had found. He fell asleep in the chair by the fire, holding an opened book and wearing his mother’s hat.
The paintings were mostly of Montreal. The quays and the water in winter. A pastry shop on rue Saint-Jacques. A pair of children’s boots over a telephone wire. Others he had done from memory. The mountain lake. The two children from a theater troupe who had appeared at the sanatorium one summer—they had gotten lost, showing up on the mountain in the evening in their costumes, like a dream, the girl with her face painted and the boy with wings.
I stopped at a portrait of a young girl in a concert hall, playing the piano.
That is Joséphine Belgard, she said.
I didn’t respond. I waited to see if she would say anything more. I stared at the painting, not wanting to ever look up.
Here was something I learned that day: Henry Loze knew who she was. He had always known. When he was younger his parents had taken him to see her perform. She had gone to Canada before heading to New York. She was going to be a star. The next Chopin. Hands like birds. Hands that would, a lifetime later, lift him into a bathtub on his first day here and wash his body.
What made someone give up a life and start another? What made my mother stay in New York? What did she think she was stepping toward? She chose my father and the shape of a life she could have never imagined. For many years I was sure she regretted it. But perhaps this was untrue.
The light in the room was falling. Elsa Marie checked her watch and said that she had to go, that she should get on the road. She asked if there was a restaurant in the town.
I said there was. I asked where she was staying.
Staying? she said, looking across at the boy. We’re driving. Canada, tonight.
She said Tom loved the road.
We’ve been all over, she said. Just him and me. My one, true man.
She bent down, lifted her hat, and picked him up so that his head rested on her shoulder, and she carried him like that as I opened the door. I brought her hat and the paintings for her. We made our way to the front of the main building wh
ere she had parked.
I want to ask you something, she said. Before we go. Do you know which room was Henry’s?
Yes, I said, and pointed to a window on the first floor, facing the lake.
The sun was now moving behind the ridge. She climbed up to the porch. Carefully, with the boy still asleep on her, she peered through the broken window.
You were in the war? she said.
I said I was.
She pointed at my knee and said, Will you be all right?
I will be all right, I said.
She stood back up. But then, changing her mind, she sat down on one of the rocking chairs, still carrying Tom.
Maybe I’ll rest for a moment, she said, and sighed.
She looked tired. I could see the fatigue in the way she carried the boy or maybe it was something else I couldn’t articulate. She looked lovely, sitting there against the last of the daylight, and I wondered where she had been and what her years had been like.
I wondered when Henry died. What he was like as a father. Where all our time had gone.
It was getting cold. I gave her my coat, which she draped over the two of them, and she rocked once, in the chair, and settled. So I sat with her.
Look at that, she said.
She had turned toward the lake. The rowboat had become untethered and was now drifting away. I saw it move as though it were being pulled by a long string, going farther and fading.
I watched until I couldn’t see it anymore.
Then Elsa Marie, holding her boy, closed her eyes, and the day ended, and there was only the water in the night.
STILL A FIRE
Mikel, 1947–48
He waits with the others.
He finds a small space on the already crowded bench that faces the river and when there is the sound of an engine he turns and focuses on the distant headlights or the dust rising from the dirt road. Otherwise he watches the tugboats pulling shipping containers toward the Calais harbor while some of the men shout at the pilots, asking if they are hiring. They blow into their hands. They pace. They throw pebbles at the ships, though no one ever throws far enough to hit them.
Once, a sailor came out, spun a few times on the deck, and launched a small package in their direction. It was the size of a grenade and one of the men had reached for Mikel’s hand, terrified as it landed on the lower bank. Mikel let go and went to retrieve it. It was a pack of cigarettes with a note wrapped around it telling them to go fuck themselves. They smoked the pack that day.
Mikel is the youngest of them. Twenty-four. He also stays the longest. If no one comes the older ones give up and return to the shantytown. A few of them move on, following the river toward the city, hoping to find work there or on the way. There is a new automobile factory down the road and sometimes it is possible to find a temporary job there, working a line or mopping the floors after hours.
In the past two years Mikel has worked for farms regrowing flowers and grains and for companies hired to sift through the rubble of what had been city blocks. He has carried boxes and furniture for the families returning to their homes or moving somewhere else. He has even carried their children, the parents too tired to lift anything. Sometimes a man drives up to the bench and wants company, and Mikel watches as one or two shrug, agree on a price, open the door, and go in.
What wouldn’t he do? In the night, distracted by hunger and unable to sleep, he makes a list, or tries to. It seems important to him, to try to know what he wouldn’t do. He thinks he is the kind of person who would enter the car of a man and keep him company. He never does but perhaps he will one day. He thinks this, turns over, and holds his breath as though he wants to swallow the thought.
It was the dogs he couldn’t stomach. When he collected rubble in the city blocks. He will all his life think of them, the dogs. The starving ones that had entered a pile for shelter. Too weak to move as the workers picked them up with the debris and bricks and threw the animals away into the trucks.
That day Mikel collapsed and vomited. Perhaps he blacked out, he wasn’t sure, only that the workers left him there and moved on. When he looked up he was alone. He was beside a broken wall where someone had painted a tree with lipstick.
•
He waits until the evening and then he walks home. He is with his neighbor Artur, a Romanian, and they follow the river west away from the city and toward the mountains. It is growing dark but there are still the bright lights of the factories across the water, bright enough to illuminate this side of the bank. Three stars have appeared, above. They stumble upon an American C-ration can on the dirt road. Artur picks it up, shakes it beside his ear. They are still sold on the black market and there are a few crumbs of a biscuit left on the bottom. Artur licks his finger and presses down. He offers half of the remaining crumbs to Mikel.
Mikel regrets it at once because he grows aware of his hunger. He knows Artur feels this, too, because he crushes the can and kicks it toward Mikel. So they begin kicking the can back and forth to distract themselves as they walk. When a car passes they pick it up and hide it as though it were something valuable. Then they try to wave the car down for a ride, though no one ever stops. Still they try every time, the headlights sweeping over their bodies.
They keep walking and playing. Artur balances the can on his foot before shooting it back over. But Mikel misses, and Artur raises his arms and runs briefly in a circle. Mikel retrieves the can and chases him. It feels good to keep moving like this in the cold as it grows darker.
When they catch their breaths, Artur says, I think they’re testing.
They are talking about the explosion they heard earlier that day. Or the faint trail of it. A few claps of thunder from somewhere in the mountains. Though they knew enough to know it wasn’t thunder.
Testing for what? Mikel says.
For the next one, Artur says. The next conflict. To be better.
Mikel kicks the can back. He thinks it’s from the miners. They resumed coal mining farther south and some of the men have gotten steady work there, moving to the temporary cabins that have been built for them, bringing their families if they have families. He envies them, envies the solidness of their days. He envies their families.
Artur is younger than he is. He speaks with a heavy accent. In a year he has discovered little about him. It is how they all live in the shantytown. They know only a few facts about each other. It isn’t conscious; it is, he thinks, a resigned exhaustion after the years that have gone. They survived. What else is there to say? There is little they want to talk about that doesn’t have to do with today. They don’t even want to talk about tomorrow.
He knows Artur was infantry and that he has a younger brother and that the brother is sick. Artur works to support both of them.
There were days in the past year Mikel has told a perspective employer to hire Artur instead, walking away and returning to the bench. And he is uncertain if that is something he should be doing when it is difficult to find work every day, and he is uncertain whether Artur at all cares. But they are the only people in Mikel’s life, so he does it anyway.
They are approaching the shantytown now. In the dark they can make out the bare lightbulbs strung up in the shacks and along the eaves of the tin roofs. The bulbs create severe shadows everywhere, a person’s silhouette drifting like a ghost along the paths. Artur picks up the crushed can and they enter the field, smelling food being boiled, hearing dogs and the noise of a radio over the hum of the power generator.
Artur’s brother is in the distance, sweeping litter with a broom. They know it is him because he is the tallest of them and the one with the poorest posture. Emil cannot work but he does what he can among the shanties, helping anyone who needs it.
Though Artur has never confirmed this, there is a rumor that in Romania, Emil had been a painter. Perhaps it isn’t true. Perhaps the rumor started because he collects canisters of paint from the nearby landfill in the valley.
In France, building-repair project
s have created a wealth of discarded paint. So there are days when Emil appears on the paths, pushing a cart with a pyramid of tin canisters. If an occupant wants him to, Emil will paint their shacks in whatever color he found. He has painted over a dozen shacks already, some in stripes, some in solids or geometric patterns, so that during the day there are bright shapes scattered in the long field.
Emil waves as they approach and they join him outside where there is a bench he has made out of wood planks and empty paint canisters. None of them have brought back food tonight. Or money. But they have tea and the stale pastries Artur found the other day in the city, watching a baker throw away everything he didn’t sell. Thinking this insane, Artur took as much as he could, stuffing bread and pastries into his pockets, in his excitement forgetting that some were filled with cream and fruit. They burst on his way home, ruining his clothes.
How much Emil had laughed. Mikel, too, when he heard.
They eat what is left and laugh again and even in the cold they remain outside, talking about the day.
Artur’s brother seems both aware of Mikel’s presence and unaware of him. Mikel has never heard the man speak. Emil is a giant who can vanish at any moment, whenever he wishes. On occasion he brushes some dirt off of Artur’s shoulder or looks out into the lighted evening at the flicker of a bat. A dog appears, chasing a rodent or following the scent of food. When the dog finds its way to them Emil leans forward and feeds it the leftover bread.
Mikel wonders what illness the brother has. He knows it is something in the head. There are days when Emil never goes outside. Other days when all he does is stay outside, heading to the landfill. He has watched Emil help others but he has also watched him swing a piece of wood at people he doesn’t know, people who aren’t from here scavenging—swung and lunged at them in a way that made Mikel stop from approaching him.
