The Mountain

by Paul Yoon

  They weren’t there for very long, less than an hour. They ended on the top floor. It was a large room that had been painted a shade of yellow. One side of it was all glass and the sun was coming through. The entire city and the surrounding woods were visible: the winding streets, the spires of the cathedral, people walking the length of the city wall.

  Behind her, clothes were hanging on racks. There were dozens of them. Shirts, pants, dresses, and sweaters, all of them organized by color. Félix examined them, taking notes on a clipboard. She wondered if there was an order for how they arranged the colors. She was about to ask but then Félix told her that he had to step out for a moment. He said that he’d be back. That Camila would be here.

  He said, Okay?

  Okay, Antje said, and watched him go.

  They were now alone, Antje by the windows and Camila by the racks. Antje followed Camila’s reflection moving across the room, her heels tapping the shiny floor.

  Why don’t you try something?

  Antje laughed. She lifted a hand and shook her head.

  Camila stopped at the end of the rack. Please, she said. She pointed to the clothes. Pick something. She was holding her smile.

  The room appeared much smaller suddenly. Antje approached and browsed the clothes, moving from color to color until she reached a blue dress in a middle rack. She hesitated. It looked like the one from the television clip, sleeveless and long. The skirt swayed as she lifted it.

  Perfect, Camila said, taking it from her.

  She waited for Camila to show her where to change, to point to a door but she stood very still by the racks, holding the dress for her and watching.

  Please, she said again, and gestured for her to go on.

  The evening light had settled on the trees; it shone through the room and now on her skin as she took off her clothes. She kept glancing at Camila, whose face was expressionless. Then she carried the dress and stood in the middle of the room. The sun felt good on her naked body. She turned. It touched her neck and her chest and her stomach and it felt good. She opened her eyes. Below her, a car was leaving the factory, a guard lifting the gate. She thought the guard looked up. She thought it would bother her. She stayed by the window and stepped into the dress and she heard Camila’s steps echo in the room, smelled her perfume, and felt the woman’s fingers zipping her up.

  Camila turned her around; she lifted Antje’s hand and spun her. She took out an eyeliner pen. She said, Keep still, and drew around Antje’s eyes. She told Antje to blink. She darkened and shaded. She put on lipstick and blush. She took out a pocket mirror and held it up.

  Gorgeous, Camila said, and Antje smiled at her painted face in the tiny circle.

   •

  She kept the dress. She wore it that evening, stuffing her clothes into her handbag as she and Félix left the factory for the city. They had dinner in a square that had a tall water fountain, strings of lights, and live music. She wanted him to order for her. He ordered mussels and shrimp and ham and wine, and they ate with their fingers and tore off pieces of thick bread.

  He didn’t believe how long her hair was. She undid the braid and showed him.

  She liked watching him eat. He was unaware of the crumbs on his chin, the oil on his lips. Mathis wiped his mouth after every bite. She noticed this when they first met and it hadn’t changed. She found herself reaching for her phone but stopped herself. The audience clapped after a song and she clapped, too.

  As it began to grow dark, Félix took her up to the wall. They walked the city perimeter, peering down at the old buildings and the bright neon signs of the stores. She imagined again how it once was, the forests and the river, the pockets of villages and farms. She asked Félix what Galicia meant. He didn’t know. He heard it was Celtic. He heard it had to do with milk. Or the hills.

  She said that for someone who enjoyed history he wasn’t very helpful.

  He grew embarrassed and she touched his face and slipped her arm around his. She almost tripped on the path and leaned into him. They were slightly drunk. The first stars appeared. They circled the city as it transitioned into nighttime. On the wall there was a poster protesting the bombing; another, farther on, in support of it, RESISTENCIA GALEGA spray-painted on the stone.

  Félix was from Madrid. He was twenty-four years old, the same age as when she came to Spain. The clothing company was his family’s. Next season he would travel to Morocco, to a factory there. It was a way to see the world.

  Listening, it occurred to her that he and Camila were lovers. Or had been. Antje had no proof of this but felt certain all the same. She thought they made a pretty pair. She repeated the words a pretty pair to herself and wondered what Félix’s parents were like. How much they saw each other. She had only met Mathis’s parents once, at their wedding. They seemed tired to her, resigned to their child’s foreign life.

  She liked the feel of her arm around Félix’s. The way she settled into him like a lock. This young man whom she had only known for a day.

  A dog crossed their path, jumping onto the edge of the wall as though it were a racecourse. He looked like Rofo. They watched as he passed them, jumped once more, and went down the steps of the wall and out of the city toward the high-rise buildings. Lights were coming from a distance, reaching the sky and shifting.

  Come on, she said.

  She tried to follow the dog but lost him. She followed the strange lights in the sky. Félix caught up to her. They entered a maze of sidewalks and climbed a pedestrian bridge over a highway, heading out into the country. She forgot what time it was, whether it was early or late. She was suddenly filled with energy. She was on an unpaved road and she kept walking.

  Antje, Félix said, and she ignored him.

  The distant beat of music reached her. She heard her name again and she couldn’t recall if she had ever told Félix her name. She thought of the day she opened the hotel room door to find Mathis sitting on the edge of the bed. The bowl of seashells. His solitude. How it made her feel like someone else. How she knew in that moment that what was broken had already existed long before they had met. How it was still with her now, here.

  The music grew louder. The grass brushed against her skirt. A long breeze. Félix still behind her. She reached the ridge and stopped. A stone mansion stood in the far distance, without a roof, with broken walls. Ancient. Lights spilled from inside, across the grounds and into the air. A DJ was on a platform wearing headphones and leaning over turntables and a laptop. Hundreds of dancers surrounded him. They were all wearing bracelets and necklaces that glowed, jumping and spinning, their arms reaching into the air.

  She went down and made her way through the crowd. She lost Félix. She climbed over what had been a wall to a room. She thought she saw Camila, reached for her, but it was someone else, someone much older. She watched a boy’s body moving as though he were tied by strings. And in the shifting light she saw that there were other rooms and halls, the remnants of them extending across the field, all of them filled, and Antje danced and stepped farther in.

   •

  What could it have been? What had Félix offered her? She had known so clearly that morning; she had been so sure. Later, watching him from across a hotel room, their clothes damp from sweat and their bodies still carrying the energy of that field, she kept waiting for it to return, wanting it to, like a thing she could grasp and swallow. Paint herself with. Then in the morning, as he slept, Antje changed back into her clothes, hung the dress in the closet, and left his room, shutting the door.

  She never saw him again. She went to the rail station and took the first train heading east. Lugo and its city walls slipped away from view. She sat by a window and thought of Mathis, wondering if he was in a town like the one she had been in, if he was alone. She tried calling him. She counted the rings. When it prompted her to leave a message, she began to talk, telling him where she was, where she had been, unaware that she was speaking in German.

  The train crossed the country. Antj
e slept. Dreamed. She swallowed a ball of thread and the ball exploded quietly inside of her. She felt a great relief that she had contained it. In the weeks after they had lost the child, Mathis had come to her, lying on top of her, and she had let him for a while; and then it grew unbearable and she struck him and pushed.

  He didn’t touch her again, not that night or the night after, and the days went on but she was never able to tell him that it wasn’t the child she was thinking of but the desert where her mother had been, the desert and the man approaching her mother’s Humvee, his hands in the air, all their lives strapped across his torso.

  She lived long enough to drag someone out of the wreckage. Her mother without her legs. Her mother the engineer.

  In that last year Antje mostly saw her through a computer. On the screen she was always under a tent in the desert as though she were on holiday. The video often froze, and it was just her mother’s voice and her frozen image, caught with her eyes closed.

  I can still see you, her mother always said. Keep moving.

   •

  She returned to San Sebastián in the evening. It was as if she had been gone for a long time and no time at all. She breathed in the night air outside the station. A policeman and his dog were making their rounds, the dog sniffing the parked cars and Mathis’s motorbike, which was where she left it.

  She was heading toward the bike when a shadow frightened her. Convinced that she was hallucinating, she went still and then trembled as a monster took shape under a streetlamp. It had black eyes, pale skin, and horns, but as it approached she saw that it was a costume, and the person came up to her and bowed.

  She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman inside, young or old. The person lit sparklers and offered her one. She held it and watched as the person left and joined a group of others that had appeared, all of them wearing different costumes and waving sparklers. She thought she heard German. And then, later, other languages.

  In the distance, the city had changed. She didn’t see until now. There were banners hanging above the streets. New lights. A summer festival had begun.

  When the sparkler dimmed, she started the motorbike and pulled out of the station. She had yet to reach Mathis; she didn’t know if he was home. At the station exit, she slowed. Traffic was moving across the bridge over the Urumea.

  Antje waited for an opening.

  VLADIVOSTOK STATION

  On my way home today I saw someone in the field, someone I once knew. I was coming down the road from a hill and saw him from a distance. Yet I knew it was him, even from afar and after so long. It was as though he had always been there, still as a tree. Kostya, with the weight of an old grief on his shoulders.

  I headed down. He made his way across the field. And then he was there, in front of me, older now, with gray in his hair, but the same to me.

  Misha, he said. Hello. Can I walk with you?

  I was trying to recall the last time I had seen him or heard his voice. How long it had been. He had spoken to me in Russian. I wondered what he had been doing out here. It was quickly growing dark. And cold. He seemed tired but restless. There was no one else, not in the field or on the road.

  So we walked. Kostya fell into step with me. I followed the road, passing under the old linden trees that we used to ride under with a bicycle, me on the seat and Kostya pedaling. If he noticed me looking at him he didn’t seem to mind. He placed his hands into his jacket pockets. It was a hunting jacket that was too large for him.

  You still have that bag, Kostya said.

  I lifted the bag I was carrying. It was a leather tool bag that had been my grandfather’s. He had bought it from a tinker the day he was released from the camp, not knowing what it was for. He just wanted something of his own, he said.

  I used it every day. I packed my lunch and a book. If it was light outside, I walked home reading, something I knew I should never do but did.

  A motorbike almost hit me once. I felt the rush of air and the whisper of the motorcyclist’s arm as I tumbled into the field. As the engine noise faded, I saw the dim shape of a plane fly above me and thought of Kostya. It was the last time, I realized now, I had thought of him.

  Here, I said. You can carry it for me.

  Kostya laughed. Still the same laugh. It was nice to hear it. He took the bag from me and we continued down the road through the fields.

  The evening came. We smelled the cattle farm. We had been told the winter was coming earlier this year but there was no wind tonight and the sky was open, full of stars.

  I was heading to the railway, Kostya said. When I saw you. I was heading to the mill.

  We called it the mill because it was once a facility for wool, but it was now a maintenance station, for the Trans-Siberian and the local lines, and I worked there. I had worked there for years. I repaired the insides of the train cars. I ripped out the old seats and bolted in new ones. I checked the safety windows, the luggage compartments. I found the things passengers dropped into the crevices—money, house keys, the backs of earrings—and I brought them to the lost and found. Because of my leg I had to rest often, but I had been there the longest and they let me work alone and at my own pace.

  Sometimes I stayed on the trains I repaired and went a few stops with the conductors. I liked trying the new chairs. I liked watching the country pass. When I was a child my mother used to take me as far as Vladivostok but I never went that far now. I didn’t want my father to worry.

  Our home was three hours north, at the start of the valley. I lived in my father’s inn. This was in Primorski Krai. The Maritime Territory. My grandparents had moved here. Kostya’s had as well. They were all Korean refugees from the Second World War. They had come from the Pacific, from Sakhalin Island, where they had been forced to work in a Japanese labor camp.

  After the war, when they were released, there was nowhere to go, nothing for them to return to, so they settled here, in the Far East. They found work and started families of their own.

  Kostya used to work in the nearby rice fields with his father. But when his father died, he came to help at the inn my father started. It was a busy time for us. It was beautiful country, and people visited or passed through. We helped guests with their luggage or vacuumed the lobby. We cleaned the rooms together. Sometimes Kostya would notice me rubbing my leg and he would say, Misha, go rest on the bed, and he would finish for me, all the while talking about a book he was reading, an adventure story, a hunt.

  He liked books. When she could, my mother would bring one back from the city for him. Then he would vanish for hours and I would go looking for him. I would walk through the fields surrounding the town, through the high grass, until I felt something enclose my ankle like the soft mouth of a dog. I was expecting it and yet it always startled me. I slipped down and there he was, sitting there with the book on his lap. So I stayed with him.

  Kostya who always slowed for me.

   •

  For a while there had been no lights along the landscape, but now we could see the distant windows of the farms and, as we headed into the valley, the town.

  He asked how the leg was, and I said, Good. It’s better now.

  It was how we met as children. He had made fun of the way I walked.

  Suddenly, there was a noise. Kostya stopped. He could always hear the planes before I did. I caught the quick shape of it flying over in the dark. I tried to make out Kostya’s expression but there was just his head tilted and his eyes under the evening. He was still carrying my bag.

  A military base was nearby. They often did their practice runs in the evening. I knew this because Kostya had flown with them. I saw very little of him then. He would come back during a furlough but that was all. I wasn’t supposed to know where he was but I knew, knew that everyone on the base was in Chechnya during those years. The seasons grew slower and for extra pay I started working at the maintenance station.

  When Kostya came home, he stopped flying planes. I thought he would come work with
me at the station but he stayed at the inn, cleaning the rooms. He didn’t seem to mind that there were fewer guests, less to do. I would come home sometimes to find him cleaning a tub, trying to remove a stain that was many years old. Kostya, I would say. It’s good enough. And he would smile and nod, put the cleaning supplies away, and head to his room.

  I wondered now whether my father was worrying about me. I wondered where Kostya was sleeping tonight. He had yet to mention his house. I didn’t want him to see it. But we were approaching the split in the road. If we went straight we would go down a slope farther into the valley and enter the town. The road on the left was more narrow and still unpaved, with a sign that directed travelers to a small lake.

  I took my bag from him. I said, Kostya, where are you staying? Let’s go to the inn.

  But Kostya ignored me and turned onto the dirt road. So I followed him. It was the one road that had remained unchanged since we were children, except for the lamps that now shone on the path and the surrounding grass. We used to play soccer here. Or I would try.

  The lake appeared. It was the only moment tonight when Kostya walked faster than I could. I let him. He kept slipping in and out of the light of the road lamps. I could see the reflection of the mountain in the water.

  We were nearing three houses that stood behind a line of trees. Kostya had been born in the middle one. I thought he would enter the short pathway toward the front door, but he simply paused and looked across at his old house and the two others, keeping his distance.

  None of their lights were on. The houses had been empty and in disrepair for a while now. The roofs were broken by the winters. Sleeping bags and empty bottles littered the front lawns. Kids used the houses for parties. From the town, I could catch their flashlights in the trees or the smoke of a bonfire. Hear their music, the bottles they broke.

  Kostya walked into the field toward the lake. He found an overturned canoe with a crack in its hull. He brushed the dirt and the weeds away and sat down. I sat beside him, rubbing a knot in my leg.