Snow Hunters: A Novel (10 page)

It had become morning, the town the color of a fading fire. A fog was climbing the hill, following him. He was walking, pushing the bicycle up the streets that were still quiet. His breathing was calm as he passed the tailor’s shop and continued up the road.

At the church a light had been turned on, illuminating a stained-glass window. He entered the meadow, making his way toward the tree.

There, on that hill, he rested. People began appearing from windows, checking the weather. He could hear the carts heading toward the markets. Behind him, in the fields, mules and cattle were already grazing.

There was just one road that moved across the land, vanishing into the mountains. He had never been to those mountains or beyond them, did not know how far this road extended, whether it continued unbroken through the country.

On a far slope he noticed the shape of someone clothed in white and carrying a basket, picking mushrooms.

He still felt awake. He held his breath and then exhaled. In that moment it seemed as though there was nothing more to know.

When he turned to face the town he saw a figure walking the promontory. He stood under the tree and followed the person’s approach. Raindrops fell from the tree onto his raincoat and the mud around him. The fog was thick and the figure slipped in and out of it, heading toward him, growing clearer in the gray light.

It was Bia. She wore a long-brimmed hat and she was carrying a rucksack. She crossed the meadow and climbed the hill. Her boots were stained with mud and the hem of her trousers was wet.

He had not seen her for some time. She stood opposite him, the two of them under the tree. She had tucked her hair under her hat, revealing a pale line around her neck where a necklace had been.

He looked behind her to see if anyone else was coming. A large ship retreated from the harbor.

—He’s gone, Bia said. He left.

He asked to where. She shrugged. She didn’t know. She adjusted the straps of her rucksack and smiled.

—He’ll come back, she said.

He asked if she was leaving, too. Where she was going.

—North, she said.

She looked down at her boots and kicked each heel against the other, loosening the mud.

—A different kind of winter, she said.

He remained silent. He opened his bag. He took out the food he had brought with him, wrapped in newspapers, and handed it to her.

Then he lifted the child’s coat, unfolding it. He held it up for her to see and he took Bia’s arm and slipped it into the sleeve. Then the other.

When it was on her he smoothed the collar and checked the buttons. It fit her shoulders though it was a bit short for her; the hem fell above her waist and the cuffs revealed her wrists. Still, Yohan buttoned the coat and Bia blushed, avoiding his eyes.

He did not know what to say. She was examining the buttons on the coat and smiling. They had anchors on them.

—Will you be gone long? he said.

She did not respond. She approached the bicycle. She tilted it away from the tree, gripping its handlebars, waiting for his permission. He nodded.

—Yohan, she said. I’ll see you.

She turned and entered the fields that led to the mountains.

He remained under the tree. He watched as she made her way along the country road. A mule approached her and she paused, lifted her palm, and went on, pushing the bicycle and avoiding the puddles.

He thought of Santi in front of the tailor’s dummy with his fists raised. His face like a knot. His arms like spears. He thought of the parents the boy could not remember. The boy on the shore and the ships he followed. His quiet violence.

He imagined the tailor as a young man and his journey here, crossing an ocean on a slow-moving ship as he himself did. He wondered whether Kiyoshi had been wearing a uniform. Whether there had been a family and where they were. What the man had fled from, if he had fled at all. What the man had let go of and whether it was possible to regain anything, to search and find it once more. Whether there was someone far from here who remembered him.

He thought of these years as another life within the one he had. As though it were a thing he was able to carry. A small box. A handkerchief. A stone. He did not understand how a life could vanish. How that was even possible. How it could close in an instant before you could reach inside one last time, touch someone’s hand one last
time. How there would come a day when no one would wonder about the life he had before this one.

She was far away. He could see the shape of her shoulders as she approached the mountains. The child’s coat and the spokes of the wheels catching a corner of daylight.

He held his arms. Water continued to fall from the tree.

He was now alone. It had been almost four years since he had first seen her on the deck of a ship. The girl looking for a boat and the kindness of a sailor to show Santi the coast. The gift of an umbrella in the morning rain. The tail of a scarf high in the air, and the boy following as she began to run.

She grew fainter. She kept going.

H
e used to wake early, before the light of morning, and climb the hill beside his home. From there he could see a distant farmhouse with its half-built chimney. This unfinished structure of wood and stones. Six windows like pockets of water.

On some days, if he waited long enough, a candle flame appeared behind one of the windows. This was followed by the ringing of a bell.

Then the men and the women came out of the woods. They were young. There were children as well, some of them on their own and others on the shoulders or the backs of their fathers and their mothers.

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.