by Paul Yoon
He is at times Mikel. Other times he is her brother. Other times Karine believes she is at the hospital and this man is a doctor. In the last days, when the nausea and the vomiting begin to recede, when she begins to surface, she feels grateful for him and keeps calling him The Doctor.
She no longer shakes. She feels her blood again. She is aware that she has slept. She tastes. Touches. She is dressed in clothes that aren’t hers. A man’s clothes. She is in a room with a hole in the ceiling where the weather and light funnel down.
Karine gets up. She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and steps outside for the first time in six days, walks up and down the lanes of the shantytown, surrounded by her own breath in the cold. Alone, she watches a man appear from the distant landfill, pushing a cart.
You don’t have to go, the man says, and she wonders if it is the first time he has spoken to her—she tries to remember, searching for any recognition of his voice, which is calm, shy.
That night she leaves the shanty again. He doesn’t follow her. She can see him watching through the open entrance. She crosses into the sloped field toward the main road. There is a low moon beyond. The car is no longer there, the tracks covered in fresh snow. Wrapping the blanket tighter over her, she looks toward the city and then in the opposite direction, deeper into the country.
•
Karine doesn’t go. Not right away. Winter passes for her in the shantytown with him. She learns his name. She walks with him every day to the landfill and they collect whatever they can. Food. Paint. Insulation. She accompanies him through the shanties and as he stands to the side she asks if someone needs anything done.
Emil will do whatever they ask. Fix a roof. Build a new door. She helps him plug in holes in walls with pieces of wood or sometimes pieces of a tire. They chop wood or pile sheets of galvanized metal to sell or barter with. They collect snow in buckets and melt it.
They are paid with food, utensils, and trinkets. Someone gives her a music sheet and she holds it for a while, stilled by a note of memory.
They learn nothing about each other, the way she has learned nothing about so many people she has encountered over the years. She isn’t even sure if half the time the Romanian understands what she is saying. But in the shantytown they are always together, sharing everything they find or earn, and every evening he turns so they sleep feet to head around the small fire.
Some days Emil is weak the way she was weak, when it feels as though he has lost himself in a private fortress, and as her energy returns to her, she takes care of him instead. She cooks for him. She wraps him in blankets. She kisses him. She tastes the chalk of his tongue and runs her hands across his stomach. Sometimes she does it quickly and other times she teases him a little, drawing the pleasure out for him, and listens to the gentle whimper of his voice and feels his own hands on her as shadows pass over them.
In the nights when she cannot sleep she thinks of Mikel. Not of the time she spent with him as much as the first time she saw him, the way he had walked in. The truck had left him at the gate and sped away. The only survivor. His body splattered with that intimate color. How he kept asking for a handkerchief.
There’s something on my face, he said to her as she ran to him.
His mind unaware that he was walking with a shattered leg and a broken pelvis. That his hand was gone and that he was reaching for her with nothing.
•
She doesn’t tell him that there are days in the landfill when she searches for needles. Ampoules. If Karine ever finds one she would probably break it with her teeth and drink it. She begins to distract herself by talking about other things, finding that old desire for other lives she lived before this one.
She tells Emil that her father took care of horses near the Belgian border. That her mother was born at the opposite end of the country, near Spain, on a farm that once cultivated flowers. Poppies and lavender. That her brother used to wake her in the morning by sneaking outside and leaning through her open window like some ghost.
She says all this and wants him to understand the intimacy of memory, a person’s history. She wants him to care, knowing secretly that it is for herself that she shares all this. To convince herself that she has a history, that one exists.
He never says anything back. It is as though he hasn’t heard. He takes her hands and together they walk over the hills of debris and the garbage as though they are the last people on this earth and he cannot be more content.
One day she asks this man whom she has lived with for over a month what he was before all this. Where he is from. If he knew Mikel. She asks him whose clothes she is wearing, knowing they are too small to be his own.
He grows angry. He shakes his fists and tightens his mouth and she doesn’t know why until he says, Before all this? He mocks the way she said this. As though the before was better, he says, his voice different now, louder than she is used to.
When he hits her, once, he is as surprised as she is. She sees it on his face. The way it falls in shame. She approaches him, ignoring the circle of heat pulsing on the side of her face. She isn’t angry. She tells him she isn’t. She takes his hands, not expecting him to hit her again, but he does, striking her in the same spot and as she bends over, stunned, he grabs her shoulders and pushes her down the landfill. She tumbles, spins, feels a cold bright snap against her head. Blinded by a dizziness, she thinks she is vomiting. Before she can focus and rise he is on her and has pinned her down. She hears the crush of a metal can as he lies on top of her and struggles with her clothes. Cold air hits her torso.
You don’t have to go, he says, the way he said it the first time, and he keeps saying it as she twirls her fingers around something beside her hip that has the texture of hair.
There is a wetness dripping down the side of her face and she has to shut one of her eyes. She lets go. Fumbles. Tries again. She finds something to grip. The weight of him presses into her. Karine screams. She swings. Feels the ping of impact, the shock of it traveling up her wrist. She thinks he will shout or cry in pain the way the convalescents did at the hospital but he doesn’t. He rolls to his side and looks up at the sky as though unsure of what has just happened.
When she stands she almost trips on her pants that are twisted around her ankles. She falls on her knees over him and swings down, overwhelmed by a fury she is unaware existed within her. Or was unaware could escape her. She swings with whatever it is she is holding and she swings down again, listening to him shouting now and screaming until she realizes he isn’t saying anything at all but that it is her own voice. It was always her own voice.
She stops. She looks down. His ruined face. A bubble of air forms around his ripped lips. She cannot see his eyes. There is pulp in one of his sockets. He no longer has a nose. She stumbles back.
Emil moves. He is still alive. He tries to stand but he can’t, so he crawls away from her, limb by limb, sinking farther into the camouflage of the landfill.
•
It is the last time she ever sees him. Karine waits for him in the shanty for a day. She takes the bag hanging on a nail on the wall. In the bag is a deck of cards, a comb, and a near-empty tube of toothpaste. She packs clothes, a pocket mirror, and the sheet of music. She heads out toward the main road. Her boots sink in the field where there are still islands of snow.
She walks, away from the city, as cars pass. Trucks pass. No one stops. She keeps walking, farther into the countryside as the light begins to dim. She walks to warm herself. She thinks of heat.
At the end of the day, Karine hears a train.
Her body is stiff and sore but she runs toward the tracks as the train rushes by her and she sees the women and the men in the last freight car that is missing a door, and she grips the hand that is reaching down for her and is pulled up.
The train continues south. She stays awake with the moon, the long, broken fields. Damage from old fires. Through the evening more passengers disembark and others get on. From the edge of the car sh
e follows the distant approach of two children, hurrying. She helps them up. All these people still returning, even now, to what remains of their homes or going somewhere else, to start again, settle somewhere new.
The train rattles and shakes. The woman behind Karine has been holding her so that she doesn’t fall. This stranger who reached for her as soon as the train began to turn.
She will never know what this woman looks like. Whether she is old or young or her own age. To her the person will forever be only the shape and the pressure of an embrace. Red dirt under a thumbnail. A woven bracelet that carries a strand of hair.
All night they travel like this. Then Karine unlocks the arms of the woman, jumps, and enters the first moment of the morning.
•
Karine avoids Paris and stays to the northern coast. And then in the following days she begins to head south, down the western side of the country toward Bordeaux. She hops more train cars. She catches lifts on the back of pickup trucks with aid workers or migrants heading to a vineyard or other farms to earn some money.
Horses gallop after a truck she is on. It is as though she has never seen a horse before. She is stunned by them. For two beats she is convinced her father will appear. There are mounds of fresh dirt in the paddock. Covered holes from mortar rounds and other artillery fire. She watches as the horses still avoid those spots, leaping over them or going around as they chase after the truck until they are blocked by a fence.
April, far from the harvesting season, but a vineyard needs help racking. So for a few days Karine works in the labyrinthine cellars, siphoning wine from one barrel to another, leaving the sediment behind.
She is surprised a vineyard has survived. It is managed by an elderly couple and on occasion, as she works, she can see them from the high, narrow windows in the cellar. She stops working and follows them, from window to window, past the other workers who ignore her. She catches the sight of the couple’s boots and the matching gait of their walk and as they move toward a hill she sees them whole, their carefulness and yet their energy as the man picks weeds from the grass and the woman claps, startling some birds she doesn’t want disturbing the garden.
They pay little but they offer meals and shelter. She eats cheese and bread and olives and wine. The flavors and the richness of it all almost makes her cry. She tries to control herself, eating slowly, and avoids the eyes of everyone else as they gather in the barn, by the cots, where they will sleep. Metal drums stand scattered around the floor, filled with wood they can burn if they are cold in the night.
She lies on a cot beside a woman who talks in her dreams. Still hungry, Karine sucks on her fingertips, tasting the salt of the olives and the tannins of the fermenting wine. She thinks if a vineyard has survived then somewhere in this country there is still a field of poppies and lavender.
Wood cracks and falls apart in the drums. Someone coughs into a bale of hay.
When I am scared, I think of that, the dreamer beside her says.
•
She keeps going. She heads south, riding in the back of more cars and walking. At an inn, she walks in, checks the calendar on the wall, steals a pencil, and starts to record the dates on the back of the music sheet.
On a warm night in May, Karine finds a tree to rest under and falls asleep, listening to the wind, covered in the sway of shadows.
She wakes to the sound of an engine. Then the engine turning off. Still lying under the tree, Karine watches as a man unzips his trousers by the road and urinates. He is smoking a cigarette and he squints from the smoke and the sun.
Hearing the stream of urine, she is suddenly freezing. She shivers. She can’t feel her body. In her drowsiness she tries to remember the night before in case it is some reaction to morphine. But no, she hasn’t touched it. She is just cold, sleeping outdoors, and as she gets up the man sees her and shouts.
Mierda, he says, quickly zipping up his pants and spitting out his cigarette.
Karine, warming herself under the sun, approaches him. The Spaniard is blushing and refuses to look at her. He is wearing a Basque beret, and she wonders if he was in the Resistance, a maquisard, like Mikel. She recalls slipping a beret on him once at the hospital, thinking he would want it but he didn’t, he threw it back into the room where they saved the clothes of the dead to use.
The car the Spaniard is leaning on has the cloth flag of the ICRC cross on the door. There is a Red Cross armband on him, too. For a moment she believes she is wearing hers but then remembers.
She hasn’t yet noticed the two others in the car. A man and a woman. The window rolls down. The other man could be Spanish, too, but begins to speak in English. So he is an American. He is asking if she is all right, though she isn’t quite certain. He mimics shivering and wraps his arms around himself. The woman beside him laughs. Karine hasn’t spoken English in a long time. Her mind reaches for some words.
Can I come with you? she says.
Not sure you want to go that far, the American says.
He looks like a Spaniard to her. There is something about him she cannot place, pin down. The woman who laughed has yet to speak but she is wearing an armband, too. She leans across the man and says, We’re on our way to the border. You can come with us as far as you need to.
She says all this in French. Karine reaches for the front car door but the Spaniard stops her.
Your bag, he says.
I’m sorry, the French woman says.
Karine opens her bag for the man to inspect. He shakes the C rations she bought a week ago and asks her about the playing cards and the music sheet. She doesn’t answer. He taps her arms. She can sense him regaining his pride as he grins like a boy and slowly runs his hands over her. She doesn’t move. He lets her in, and they go.
The American’s name is Oliver. The French woman is named Camille. They say they are aid workers but they have no supplies. She thinks the truck is too small to carry much but perhaps they are a part of a larger group. They say they are heading into the Basque country and Spain. Koldo, the driver, is their guide.
Karine’s wrist itches. Perhaps something bit her while she slept. But the car is pleasant and she leans back in the seat and looks up at the light in the cypresses.
Koldo asks where she wants to go.
She says, Le Sen.
They are between Bordeaux and Bergerac and by her guess they are only two hours away.
She has yet to decide whether she trusts everyone in the car or no one.
Koldo knows the town. He says, Okay.
•
It takes four. It takes all day. They roll down the window and smoke cigarettes. It is an old Peugeot, low to the road, and she feels every bump and the shake of the axles as they navigate craters and fallen trees and sometimes the road not even there, indistinguishable from the field. The bridge they believe existed over the Garonne was blown and no one has yet to rebuild it. They drive over wood planks that cover a narrow, dirt lane, and one of the planks caves, swallowing the corner of the car. Oliver, Camille, and Karine get out and attempt to push the car out.
As she helps, Karine looks down and catches, in the hole below, the remains of a horse, an eye looking back. Oliver sees it, too. They keep pushing until the car finds traction again and speeds down the lane for a short while. Koldo waves his cigarette in the air and honks. She looks at the horse one more time. Two airplanes fly by, their long shadows moving over the hills.
In Le Sen, they find an inn. They are the only ones there. It is on the corner of the short, cobblestone street that is the center of the town, and she wonders if her mother walked these streets as a child, whether the inn was there, what on this street was here when she was. She knows only the town’s name from her memory. It was her mother’s nearest town.
She is restless. The aid workers are starving and eat at the café connected to the inn. No one else is there. The innkeeper arrives and tends the bar. There is dried meat on the menu and they order all of it, plus three carafes of win
e, and they eat while Koldo makes jokes about the day and the drive.
They are all tired and Karine stands, approaches the café windows. The sky is clear, nearing dark. The streets are empty except for a boy who is kicking a ball around. Some lights are on and she hears the faint murmur of a radio. There is little evidence of a war here. Or little she can see. One of the lucky towns, she thinks, and then wonders what that even means.
Across the room, Koldo has found a portable record player at the bar and pesters the innkeeper to play some records the Germans have left behind. It is American music. Ella Fitzgerald. It reminds her of the hospital. An American nurse who used to scat to an imagined song after every surgery, shutting her eyes, shaking her hands, and pretending to stand in front of a microphone in the corner of the room, someone’s blood still on her arms.
Koldo approaches Camille, a cigarette stuck to his lips. There is always a cigarette stuck to his lips. She will remember this. He shakes his hips. Camille reaches for his beret and puts it on her and they dance, a little drunk, maybe a lot, and the bartender smiles and Oliver drinks his wine, watching. She watches Oliver and believes that a year ago she would have approached him at this moment, sat down, or danced with him.
She should stop drinking wine. She feels the sudden desire to be in the slipstream of morphine. Surprised at how fast it always hits her. She takes out another cigarette from Koldo’s pack. The boy from outside is now peering in, his hands raised to the windowpane, the ball tucked under his arm. She waves but he backs away and runs down the street, away from the town.
Was her mother ever in this café, smoking? Did she ever sit beside someone at a table? Did she ever smoke? She never spoke of her life here. Only the flowers. Or perhaps she did. Karine wants to build a narrative. Or remember a lost one. But she can’t imagine her mother as a girl, not yet.
