by Paul Yoon
One day he forgets that Karine is with him when he folds a few and tucks them under his lap. She takes the maps from him and he thinks she has confiscated them. But when she returns him to his bed, Karine slips the maps beneath his mattress.
How little space she takes. He never notices her there until she is. He never hears her or feels the bed shift.
Karine is the volunteer who has been taking care of him. The hospital has run out of uniforms, so she wears an International Red Cross armband. Mikel knows nothing about her. Only that she visits him every morning and keeps him company. In those early months he keeps staring at her hands.
He lifts his arm that is missing a hand and thinks he survived five years of a war with only the graze of a bullet across his shoulder. He thinks about whether his hand is still there somewhere on that mountain road, buried, or scavenged by birds. He can still feel the fingers, catches them touching his thigh in a dream.
He keeps hearing a wind chime.
When the pain becomes unbearable in his hips and his back Karine punches him with morphine. And then, checking to make sure no one is looking, she inserts the needle into her own arm.
She presses her finger to her lips.
Our secret, Karine says.
•
He discovers later that she is from the Belgian border. That she is twenty-seven, a few years older than him, and has been working in ICRC hospitals for the past year. She mends tears in her clothes with sutures. Some days she wears lipstick. She always smells of the harbor.
You must try, she always says, helping him into the wheelchair and then, as the months go on, helping him with the crutch.
She walks with him. She talks. Even if he doesn’t. He wants to be alone but there is an ease to her he feels himself gravitating toward. This exhausted nurse who has become his one line to the outside.
She talks about the winter and Calais. The new factories. Someone who keeps stealing the flowers in the garden. The lipstick she confesses she steals from a lady in the market. She shows him roof tiles no one can identify, so they keep them in a pile in a room. She shows him the maps. His legs tire and she holds him up and brings him into a room where there is a piano. She settles him onto the bench. She reaches over him and plays a scale, a melody.
Ah! It wasn’t a wind chime. It was you.
She looks at him, confused. His first laughter.
One night he wakes to find his blanket disturbed and he thinks it was Karine. But when she appears she tells him someone came to visit him today. He doesn’t understand. He is in a lake of morphine, afloat.
A man, Karine says. I don’t know his name. Very tall. Mute? He didn’t speak. He sat for a while and left.
When the morphine leaves him, even in his pain, he limps over to the hospital exit, looking down the hill road. For three days he stays by the window, looking out farther inland but Emil doesn’t come again.
Mikel feels himself growing stronger. He practices walking and climbing the steps at the far end of the hospital with a crutch. He climbs to the top and down and to the top again. He has never been up here before. It is a wide hallway with oil paintings on the walls. There is one of a traveler leaving his home. Another of a distant pale tree. He stops at a still life. His mouth waters at a peach. A pear.
Karine shows him where she has been staying. She takes him farther down the hallway and opens the door. It is a tiny room that was once used for storage. It has a narrow window and on the floor there is a sea of blankets. He cannot explain why but he doubts that anyone else knows she is sleeping here.
You can stay here for a while, she says, unbuttoning the top of her shirt and heading in.
They will only do this a few times.
They sit on the floor, leaning against a wall. She shuts the door with her foot. She takes out a syringe and offers some to him and then gives herself the rest. She takes his arm, wraps it over her shoulder as she lies down on his lap.
Does this hurt?
He feels nothing. He is looking up at the square of light on the wall. He wants to bury his face in her hair but he can no longer move. Pinned against the wall is one of the maps they have stolen. He hasn’t seen it before. There is a red circle in an area near the border to Spain. She has drawn it there, near the Pyrenees and the Basque country. It shocks him. He is suddenly cold, his body hollow.
Remember, she says. That is my mother’s home.
Your home?
Remember.
He concentrates on the red circle and the valley. He thinks of a tree and that wind chime and a farm they once worked for and his parents asleep.
Karine, he says, touching her head. Can you play cards?
Cards?
His tongue is heavy. His body gone. Her eyes still as glass.
He had been just outside the blast radius that day. Of the second mine. It wasn’t the shrapnel that entered the right side of him, taking his hand and shattering his leg and his pelvis. It was Artur’s body. The doctors were unable to collect all of the fragments. They didn’t tell him this at first. Later, they thought he would want to know. That there was the right to know. And to explain the nerve damage and the pain that would for the rest of his life, now and then, flare in his hips. Mikel would never be able to bend his knee all the way. Because Artur was in there. They asked if he understood.
This was the first month. He wasn’t walking yet. In the bed he remained motionless, thinking that he had become a coffin. Then he grabbed a scalpel from the tin tray and began slicing the sutures along the side of his body, reopening the healing skin and screaming while the attendants tried to sedate him. Through the months of morphine he forgot Artur’s name and for a time even his own.
•
Mikel is discharged at the end of February. The ICRC gives him the crutch he has been using and some spare clothes they have managed to find. There isn’t a coat but they say it will be spring soon as though they are in charge of the weather. They say a bus will come and take him downtown if he wishes. And that they are sorry that they need the bed.
That is all they say. The staff who treated him. Most of them are French but some of them are Canadian and British and they have been here since the end of the war. They look as emptied out as he feels and they speak little French, and Mikel doesn’t know English, so they all stand and smile and wish each other luck in different languages.
He has nothing else. He leans against the crutch and walks out of the hospital down through the courtyard and the garden where there is still snow. He looks for Karine but she isn’t around. He looks for the old woman who slid down the lawn behind the building, but she isn’t around either. Did he imagine her? There are only reflections in the windows. He almost slips on ice but regains his balance and keeps moving down toward the gate.
The street is empty. He is standing against the wall by the street, shivering. In the distance, smoke rises from chimneys. New store awnings, brightly colored, have gone up. Farther, there are dots of movement on a boardwalk. He follows the winding route of a person on a bicycle, the way the person speeds and cuts the corners. He used to do that. He had forgotten. That he was once good at riding a bicycle. How is it possible to forget this? It occurs to him that he will never ride one again. And that he no longer trusts himself. He can think of a field of flowers or a great tree but he isn’t sure anymore what that means to him.
He hears the engine of an automobile. He thinks it is the bus. It isn’t. It is an American car, a Ford, old and rusted, and as it slows in front of him he is choked by a sudden fear. He holds his breath. He doesn’t want the window to roll down. He wants to run. Gripping his crutch, he is about to turn back toward the hospital when Mikel hears his name.
Karine is in the car, clutching the wheel with a cigarette between her fingers. He didn’t know she owned a car.
I don’t, she says, but doesn’t say anything more.
He tucks himself into the passenger seat, throws the crutch in the back, and she drives down the hill into the
city. He isn’t expecting the bumps and the gaps the car drives over. He senses the tide of pain, braces for it. Karine notices. She slows. When he is comfortable again he leans back and stares through the car window at the crowded sidewalks and the new stores.
So much is new in Calais. There is architecture he has never seen before, taller buildings. They drive along the water. They pass the ships in the port and the market where steam rises from the stalls of the vendors. Hot teas and soup. Then farther down: shelves of pottery, crates of wine and fish. He looks for a lady selling lipstick. He sees a child in a coat trying to sell kites. He thinks he recognizes a sanitation worker and thinks of the dogs.
He and Karine haven’t spoken. She asks if there is anywhere he wants to stop or go. She tells him there is a ship heading to England today. She knows the crew. She points to a far dock as though she has already planned this.
We can go together, she says.
She doesn’t look at him. She has grown shy.
We can leave, she says. We can start again.
Keep driving, he says.
•
She drives. He watches as she circles the city and then after an hour he tells her where to turn. They cross a bridge. They turn onto the river road. He hasn’t been here in months. The lights of all the factories are on. He sees a hangar with new cars.
Karine accelerates, driving past the bench. He doesn’t say anything. He turns and sees the men there, their breaths in the air as they throw stones against the frozen river. She keeps going until the land flattens and the shantytown appears. The sky is featureless, all gray. He reaches for her arm. She veers away from the road and stops.
You live there? she says.
He doesn’t respond. The snow is slow to melt out here. She keeps the car running and the windows begin to fog.
Would you like me to go with you?
No, he says. I’m okay.
She leans over him and opens the glove compartment. There is a tin box with an ampoule of clear liquid and a syringe. It isn’t labeled. She asks if he wants some but he shakes his head.
It isn’t too late, she says. For the ship. England.
He will always think of her like this, in a car, before she fills the syringe. Before she leans back against the seat and her smile fades. The movement of her shoulder. The words ship and England.
I’ll wait, she says, already a world away from him.
He is caught by a wind when he opens the car door. He climbs down the slope, his shoes and the crutch sinking in the snow. It takes him longer but he doesn’t stop and soon he is approaching the first shanties. Snowmen with twigs for arms stand on the paths. The same dog runs over to him. He greets the animal, feeling happy for a moment before it bounds away. The shantytown looks the same to him but if people recognize him as he heads down the paths they don’t show it. He doesn’t recognize anyone. Somebody waves but it is courtesy.
He heads to Artur and Emil’s place first. He feels his heart as he does. He knocks. But Emil isn’t there. He moves on, farther down, anxious for the blue of the shanty that was his to appear. When it does he knows at once that there is someone in it. He can smell food being cooked. A broth. Then, through a gap, a piece of clothing. Someone’s hand. He steps up and knocks. The same piece of wood is being used as a door.
An old woman answers. Yes? She is wearing a heavy wool sweater and a hat and behind her legs, peering at him, are two children. He recognizes his blankets. Mikel is about to reach for them and say that he lives here but hesitates. He smells the warm soup and looks at the three of them and does nothing.
I left a bag here, he says instead. A long time ago. I was wondering if it’s still here.
The woman grins. She is missing a tooth. He doesn’t know why but it makes him think of his hand. He hides his arm.
No, the woman says. It’s not here, but it’s over there. The bag. He kept it for you.
She points back toward Artur and Emil’s shanty.
He’s still here?
Yes, of course, she says. He’s at the landfill. He collects paint. Even in this weather. Did you know? He’s a painter. We have a painter here.
She seems delighted by this. She asks if he wants to come in and wait here.
You can have some soup, she says.
The children have been playing with marbles. They set the marbles up, flick their fingers, and he watches as one shoots across the narrow floor and hits his shoe. He notices them looking at his arm as he leaves the marble there, thanks the woman, and steps away.
He returns to the other shanty, thinks he will wait out front by the bench, but then opens the door. Inside, on a string, are a few clothes hanging in the air. A pile of blankets are folded carefully and stacked in a corner beside a pair of spare boots. On a shelf is an unopened pack of chocolate and a tin cup with a razor. He goes to the boots, realizing they aren’t spare ones but Artur’s. They’re smaller. He begins to see more of Artur there. A smaller shirt. A smaller pair of gloves.
Mikel finds his bag hanging on the wall. It is a small canvas shoulder bag he found in a ditch years ago. He opens it, finds his comb, his toothbrush, and an inch of toothpaste, near frozen from the cold. His playing cards are there, too, wrapped in a pair of socks. It is all there.
He wonders what Emil has been doing with it. If he wanted Mikel to have it he would have returned it to him when he visited. If Emil was the one who visited.
Mikel leaves the bag hanging on the wall and returns outside. It is now late in the afternoon and the temperature is dropping. The wind has come back. He looks up wondering if it will snow again. He walks to the center of the path and tries to spot the landfill behind the field. He considers waiting. He thinks he should wait but no one appears in the distance.
He wonders where he will go.
Mikel leaves the shanties and walks back to the road. Karine is still there. The car is still there. The engine is running. He opens the driver’s-side door. Her head is tilted back, her mouth is parted, and the used syringe lies between her fingers. The small cloud of her breath rises up toward the car ceiling.
He places the back of his hand against her neck. He is mindful of the cold but he wants to touch her one more time. She seems younger to him then, much younger than she is. He wonders if he will ever see her again. He imagines a future where this seems possible. This woman who has taken care of him. This one remaining thread in his life.
He thinks of turning the engine off but he doesn’t want her to freeze. It is difficult to see the distant ridges. Even the river. He hears a train. A far riverboat.
All day he has been carrying Karine’s map folded in his back pocket. Looking for her before he left, he had gone up to her room and saw it there. He takes it out now and is about to place it in the car but changes his mind and tucks it back into his pocket.
Mikel returns to the road. As he leaves, the wind comes down, changing the shapes of the snowdrifts again.
Karine, 1948
She wakes to an impossible distance.
From that tunnel she has slipped into for a year, Karine struggles to find where she is. She searches for something to hold in that far perspective. She clings to a muted, steady wind. Then becomes aware that it is not wind. She breaks her gaze away. It seems to take an hour to look down, to reach for the ignition. She tries and gives up. She drops, sinks, feels a bright warmth, and stays a little longer.
When she opens her eyes again a man is looking down at her through the window. He has lifted a gloved hand toward the glass. A tin canister of some kind is under his arm. Karine smiles. He opens the door, asks if she is all right, and she reaches for him. She can’t remember the last time someone asked her that.
He turns the car engine off. He came because the car fumes were visible from the field. As he leans over she can smell paint on him, and the ice in his beard claws her cheek, jolting her awake for a moment.
He is the tallest man she has ever seen. Still holding the canister, he lifts her with his free arm
and without any effort flings her over his shoulder. He carries her like a sack as he walks down the slope into the shantytown. She senses the sway of her body as though it is not her own. It tickles her, and she laughs. She hears him release the canister and sees it hit the snow like a bomb, and she keeps her eyes on it for as long as she can as he walks down a lane.
The world is upside down. Shanties. Doors. If the man speaks to anyone she cannot hear. It is only the wind now. And then, surprising her, a wind chime. She wants to follow the noise but he turns, lowering her, and she is through a door into a room.
She watches as he buries her in blankets. She wonders why, she isn’t cold. I’m not cold, she says, unaware that she doesn’t say this out loud and that she is trembling. She is comfortable and settles into the fabrics as the man lights a small, contained fire in the middle of the room and smoke begins to rise toward a gap in the tin roof where there is a circle of evening.
•
Her first days without the morphine he keeps her in the shanty, buried in blankets as she vacillates between shaking from the cold and sweating so much she believes in her delirium that a new season has arrived. She wants to rip her clothes away but the man holds her, wiping away her sweat. She sweats and yet her teeth clatter. She ruins her clothes, feels the wetness in her pants and all over.
Then the burning begins. The flames in the shanty fire have somehow leapt into her. She screams as it cooks her from the inside and then it turns into ice that she is convinced she must break to get her blood to work again. She hits her arms. She rakes her fingernails over them. She doesn’t stop until all the ice has broken.
Five days this goes on. She bleeds all over a blanket from her scratching and the man tries to protect her wrists with torn pieces of a shirt. He heats soup if he has it or boils rice or even soaks stale bread in hot water, forming dumplings the size of pebbles for her to swallow. She is always vomiting. She tries to flee, crawling half out of the shanty, and begs a frightened woman for morphine. He cleans the floor. He wraps more pieces of torn clothes around her limbs. He never leaves.
