Snow Hunters: A Novel (11 page)

The theater troupe never returned. He wondered if they had been traveling in the south, stuck there as so many were.

In the north, where they were, the Russians came.

They took the animals. He watched as the farmhouse, long complete by then, was pulled apart, growing smaller and shorter, its pieces laid across the field. The land had been cheap and he imagined that perhaps the shipbuilder had intended to spend his later years here. That a man who spent his days near water, in ports and harbors, had dreamed of its opposite. He recalled the corridors and
the rooms before they vanished, their grandeur and their emptiness. It had been a house for a king.

In its place a factory was built. With the other laborers he was hired to help in its construction. A settlement was created in a field not far from his house. He grew to be friendly with the workers who were from the nearby towns and who would, as the year went on, continue to travel with the military, building.

One night, returning to the house, he went into his father’s shed. He stared at the unsold pots and the vases on the shelves, at their shapes and their designs, the illustrations of landscapes. He wondered what would become of them. He reached for one, then hesitated. He thought of them staying here, untouched, through the seasons and the years. He thought of the ones people had purchased, scattered throughout the country. He imagined that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father’s hands. That they contained the heat of a kiln and a home that no longer existed. He wondered whether he would be able to recognize them if he saw them again.

He thought of the day they found an abandoned boat on the banks of the nearby river. He was a child then. To Yohan’s surprise his father lifted him, climbed into the boat, and began to row.

Halfway to the town he passed the paddle to him and Yohan mimicked his father’s movements. He felt tireless. They passed through the forest, past a man casting a net, its web unfurling over the long river. He stared down into the water, the sky in it and the world upside down, the bright trees slipping under him. And his father now lying there, resting his head on Yohan’s feet, sighing like some contented animal.

They left the boat in the town and walked home, laughing, this shared secret. Whose boat it was they never discovered. Whether it stayed near that town or whether someone else took it for a journey Yohan did not know.

Standing there, in his father’s shed, he knew that there had been, between them, affection and even tenderness. That his father had never been unkind. That in their silences there had been a form of love.

But he had never known him, had never been close to him in the way he witnessed other sons and their fathers.

Perhaps it would have been different if his mother had lived. Perhaps his father had once been someone else and a wife’s death had altered him.

Or perhaps his solitude was always there. He would often wonder about that.

But as he grew older he thought less of it, grew accustomed
to the days lived. Each day he climbed the hill, as he used to, and helped build the factory. He visited the town. The seasons passed. Then the years. His father a curtained room. His mother, too. This blank space in his life that he was unable to paint.

T
he summer he was nineteen, after his shift, he fell asleep one night at the teahouse. When he woke he found himself on the floor of a room with discolored walls and a single window. A cold bowl of soup lay beside his fingertips.

He fell asleep once more and when it grew dark he opened his eyes to find a girl kneeling beside him. She lifted a spoon to his lips. The taste of broth on his tongue. She smelled of sweat and tea and of something sweet like the smell of a pastry shop.

Her name was Suyon. She was the teahouse hostess. She was twenty-one years old.

She had recognized him.

—The farmhand’s boy, she said.

He began to stay with her. During the day he stood in a line at the factory, assembling lightbulbs of various shapes and sizes. Then in the evening he headed into the town and waited for her, peering through a window at the Soviets in their uniforms, playing cards at a corner table.

She was from a family of miners. One of her brothers still worked in the mountains and was gone most seasons.

On her nights off they did not leave the room she rented. He brought her lightbulbs that he stole and she collected them on a table as though they were flowers. She gave him a new shirt. Yohan wrapped a towel around his hands, poured boiling water into a ceramic bowl so that she could wash her hair. Then she washed his.

He liked to lay his head on her lap, look up at her upside down, her hair falling in lines over his face as she covered his ears with her palms.

He luxuriated in the newness of being touched. Of touching someone.

They slept beside each other on the floor. Her body curled into him. Once, when they were unable to sleep, she hung her blanket over the window and they chased
each other in that room in the dark, one of them searching while the other hid, the soles of their feet sliding against the old wood floor.

On another night he woke to find her dress hanging above him on a string, the fabric holding the shape of the girl as though she floated there. And as Suyon slept he reached up to touch it, feeling the thinness and the age of the silk, feeling the years contained there, wondering if those years were the girl’s or someone else’s.

Lying there, on those nights, she would speak to him. She told him about her youth. Her parents. Her brothers. She wiggled her toes in the moonlight and he did not know why but he copied her.

—They’re older, she said. Two of them. They used to carry me on their shoulders. They stole horses and I rode with them. They spied on the girls bathing in the river. Dared each other to descend the banks and touch their clothes. In the field we took turns cutting Father’s hair, and each other’s. Father worked in the mines first, then my brothers. I would head to the mountains and wait for them. In the evening we walked the road home, leading the oldest, who by then was unable to see in the dark. Night blindness. He was not yet thirty years old when there was an accident underground. He is the one I think
of the most. I am sitting on his shoulders and gripping his wrists. The light sound of his boots. The ash smell of his hair. This girl’s wish to touch the stars granted by a brother who couldn’t see them.

The surviving brother came home one morning. Yohan was pulled outside. He was pushed against the wall and the man struck him and struck him again.

Yohan fought back. He formed his hands into fists. He tucked in his shoulders and sought the impact of a body. He hit him as hard as he could. He struck the brother’s face and his chest and he fought.

But the brother was stronger. Yohan was dragged down the street, away from the town. He thought he heard clapping. A dog followed them. The taste of his blood already mixing with what remained of the taste of her.

He was left outside of the town. He crawled toward the shade of a tree. With the eye he could open he looked down at his hands. The sleeves of his new shirt. He had lost a shoe. His hair was covered in dirt and a drop of the man’s spit remained on his chin. He waited there to see if anyone would appear, whether Suyon would come looking for him.

He looked around him. The light was fading. A group
of factory workers were on their way to the hills. The dog roamed the grass. In the town a man was climbing a ladder, lighting the streetlamps.

Yohan leaned against the tree; the earth under him cooled. He stared at the flatness of the country and then the mountains. The factory workers were far along the road, their bodies growing smaller.

A military truck appeared. It was blaring a song on the radio and as it passed the men they began to dance. They stood in the middle of the road, in the last light, and they did not stop, even after the truck was gone and the song faded. They twisted their hips. They kicked the dust. His body numb, his face half-closed, Yohan was unaware of his foot tapping the ground.

•  •  •

He never saw her again. That fall he left with a group of workers. He was given wages, food, and housing. He traveled from town to city, working in rubber and munitions factories.

In 1949, when he was twenty, along with all of them, he was conscripted.

A year after that, when the war started, he crossed the border into the south, following a great mass of them
with their new boots and their weapons, their bodies like a thousand trees as the landscape, in a single step, changed forever.

In that ruined country he would move across that new architecture of rubble and debris and broken rooftops, lift a fallen door with his rifle, find a boy asleep on a mat.

He stopped, startled. It was as though he had discovered a palace. The child deep in dreams, surrounded by cups and pottery and fabrics and mirrors, dozens of them reflecting the sky and him.

He turned to see if the other men had noticed. He lowered the door, careful not to wake the boy, and left.

In those first months he thought often of the theater troupe, wondering where they had gone. He found a pair of marionettes hanging high up in the trees, their legs swinging as he walked under them. He passed the bombed remains of a theater where a dog lay beside a tin cup full of rainwater and a pile of costumes it had made for a bed.

Crossing a river, he caught two girls underwater, looking up at him, wide-eyed, their mouths as small as coins, as though they had willed themselves to be invisible. On the banks he left them what he could. A spare shoelace. Food and a pocketknife.

That year of ceaseless movement, continuing south. He traveled mostly on foot. Their helmets casting strange shadows. They searched abandoned homes, relishing the momentary freedom of resting in a room and looking out as though it were their own house. They navigated unrecognizable structures, collecting men who had been left behind.

His senses grew accustomed to the sudden lightning of ammunition. The gray dust that was everywhere. All the open windows and doors and the weather taking shape on the floors.

He saw a river catch on fire, stunned at how such a thing was possible. He found a foot sprouting from the earth, its toes splayed. Then the toes wilted. He was unsure if he had seen the movement. A trick of the mind, perhaps. A trick of shadow. They were moving quickly and he lost sight of it. A useless thought overwhelmed him: the nakedness of the foot and whether someone had taken the shoes.

On a cargo train one night he sat surrounded by other soldiers. The cold air filled with their coughing, the glow of cigarettes, and their breaths as they leaned against each other for warmth. There were wounded men in the car behind them and on occasion they could hear a muffled
scream over the engine noises as a medic attempted to operate while they traveled.

It was winter. The cars were missing their doors and he watched the dim stain of an airplane flying above the valley. The stars were endless. He listened to the wind and the sleeping men. He smelled the persistent smell of burning and stale blood that he was already used to. He felt his body grow heavy, lulled by the rhythm of the train.

He slipped in and out of dreams. Snow was falling.

Up ahead, in a long field, shapes appeared, caught in the moonlight. It was a family, perhaps, a man and a woman and their children, all of them standing in the snow above the wreckage of a town.

The man dipped into a collapsed rooftop as though he were swimming. His wife gathered her skirt against her thighs as she climbed a hill of rubble and white, the upturned bowl over her head swaying with her steps. Two boys appeared from the depths of a crater, their hands rising to grab the rim.

Pockets were filled. With what, Yohan was too far to see. They worked in silence, taking what they could. Their arms dipped into the wreckage, their hands aglow, crystallized, as if what they held were only snow.

For the first time in what seemed like years, Yohan thought of his father. Thought of the man with his hat the color of bark. How, during the first snow of the season, Yohan once saw him jump in the field in the evening, believing he was alone, some private joy as he clicked his ankles in the air, that hat shining like a star on his head.

He thought of how whatever fire his father had within him he had kept.

And he understood that he would never be able to hold all the years that had gone in their entirety. That those years would begin to loosen, break apart, slip away. That there would come a time when there was just a corner, a window, a smell, a gesture, a voice to gather and assemble.

The train continued through the valley. A soldier moved closer to him. He also had been staring out into the field at the family. His fingernails were covered in dried mud. There was vomit on his shirt and he leaned against his rifle in exhaustion.

They had not yet recognized each other. This young man who used to walk a country road with him in the evening, who once climbed houses, somersaulted, and voiced marionettes.

In a year they would be standing in an orange grove
with a patrol unit, frozen, watching a single goat on a ridge as a whistling filled the air and the land exploded, burying them.

On the train he lifted the blanket off his shoulder and offered Yohan half of it. Then he nodded toward the field, his eyes unblinking.

—Snow hunters, Peng said, and together they watched the scavenging family for as long as they could, the way they moved across the snow like acrobats, their bright forms growing smaller in the night as the train sped.

H
e often returned to the tree above the hill town. He went there in the mornings when it was still dark. He carried an empty shoulder bag and pushed his bicycle up the slope.

Through the years Yohan had begun to deliver newspapers. He followed his assigned route, reached into his bag, threw a paper against a door. He raced through the streets. When his path crossed with the others he clicked his flashlight and they signaled back.

They vanished as fast as they appeared. That hour filled with the sound of wheels on the cobblestone and
the blinking lights of the bicyclists spread out over the town and the coast until they faded, one by one.