Snow Hunters: A Novel (4 page)

The days were unchanging. They witnessed the arrival of more prisoners and more men carrying stretchers through the gates, their legs hidden in the tall grass and the wounded floating on their backs across the field. The guards rotating in the towers. The occasional storm of a helicopter and all the dust, and all of them looking up from where they had been working, watching the thing rise.

They stood in line for the food that was given to them in tin bowls and Yohan used his fingers to eat and tasted the salt and the dirt of his skin.

There were times when he fed Peng, who, in his exhaustion, was unable to leave the prisoner cabin, growing confused in his blindness as to where he was. Sometimes, in his half-sleep, he asked of his family or the farm Yohan had once lived on, or whether it was time to put on a show.

He watched Peng’s lips move and felt the tiredness of the day in his shoulders and his feet and from the barracks a fire was lit and some nights he heard singing as the light in the mountains faded.

They slept beside each other. He woke every hour to the sound of Peng scratching the bandages over his eyes and gently took his wrist until he stopped. Some nights the men in the cabin would also be awake and he listened to them speak of their homes, of food, the turning of their stomachs from hunger. Or the incomprehensible words of someone dreaming, a puzzle made of a phrase, of sounds, and the man within a maze.

He listened to other men cry and he knew that they were covering their mouths and he did nothing. He lay against the wall, his foot brushing someone’s head. He stared up at a hole in the ceiling where in the winters the snow would fall, once building a mound on someone’s stomach the size of a child’s palm.

He wondered what choice there was in what was remembered; and what was forgotten.

There were moments when it seemed possible that they would survive, that all of them would.

But there were also times when the hours slipped away and he no longer knew how many days had passed. When his mouth grew numb and he lost his sense of taste. When he could not stop shivering in the cold and Peng held him, his body cocooned in a blanket. He listened to the footsteps of the guards and watched the shadows they
cast into the cabin, circling the floor and the walls, this slow carousel that would not end. He pressed his forehead against the wall, straining to see a corner of a field, the web of a fence. He longed to listen to a song. To breathe deeply. He grabbed Peng, pushing his hands through what little there was of his hair, as though in search of something. He shouted, waking everyone, until he lost his voice. He ran in place, lifting his legs as high as he could, or turned in circles until he grew dizzy, a delirious energy in his fingers, Peng reaching into the dark and trying to calm him until the guards took him outside and beat him. He lay in the clearing, unable to rise, his body illuminated by the electric lights of the perimeter. He opened his eyes, in that brief moment, with two weapons pointed at him, and felt the unexpected joy of glimpsing the stars.

•  •  •

In the winters the wounded were sent to the textile mill. Broken windows were covered with wood and blankets. There had been tables and looms in the workspaces, long abandoned. Portable sewing machines were discovered in a closet.

Now there was a sea of beds. Birds nesting in the high rafters. A cup of medicine was passed from convalescent
to convalescent to reach a boy in the far corner, who lay still and turned his head to watch the slow procession of arms in the air. In the sunlight, against the frosted window glass, there was a wall of indecipherable drawings made by a sleepless hand.

They stood in a line, waiting for a doctor to check their health, their teeth, their eyes. They had been shoveling snow all day. A skin infection had begun near Peng’s wounds. Yohan watched a doctor feed him a pill and unravel the bandages.

While he was cleaning Peng’s face, a bird descended. It flew low over the beds, collecting stray hairs, and he heard laughter. He saw Peng tilt his head, grow alert. It circled, turned, and Peng remained motionless as it flew past him, this sudden movement beside his ear.

That winter Peng’s energy had begun to slow. He grew hesitant in his movements, and disoriented, forgetting where a building was. There were times when it took him a moment to respond.

He used to share with Yohan all the places he had seen, all his performances, keeping them distracted from the cold and their hunger. But the moments when they were reminded of their years as children had grown farther apart.

When he tried to clean Peng’s wounds, as the doctor told him to, rubbing a wet cloth over his face, Peng flicked his arm away.

Once, Yohan turned to find him gone, only to see him later crouched behind the cabins. He had unwrapped his bandages and was rocking on his heels, digging his fingernails into his head, a thin stream of blood following the line of his jaw.

—It itches, he said, his breath visible in the air, and Yohan reached for him, waiting for his body to calm.

One night they woke to find their shoulders pinned against the floor. Prisoners surrounded them. With the weight of three men on him, he watched Peng struggle as a pair of hands pushed down against his forehead. They ripped off his bandages. They inspected his dead eyes. They pressed their faces as close as they could to his and moved their fingers in front of him. Unable to understand what was happening, Peng’s head twitched. The fear centered on his lips.

They stripped him of his clothes. They found some food he had been hiding. They took everything.

There had been a wager to see if Peng was really blind.

He spent the morning in his coat and nothing else
until a guard, his amusement fading, found him a spare set of clothes. There were no spare boots and so they took turns wearing Yohan’s. He was given dressings to wrap over his feet. The rest he wrapped over his eyes.

Crossing a field that afternoon, Peng stopped. He looked out toward the mill.

He said, —I’m waiting for someone to die. For a dead man’s boots.

Then he dropped the bucket of water he had been carrying and pressed his hands against his face and his shoulders shook. In the field the water spread and froze. And Yohan, for a moment, was unable to move, looking down, shocked at the sudden appearance of their reflection.

•  •  •

A doctor once wrote Yohan’s name on a piece of paper, in English, with a pencil, and gave it to him, though whether that was how it was spelled the doctor did not know, he had guessed. Yohan slipped the paper into his shirt pocket and in the nights he would open it and stare at his name written in another language for the first time. And he would memorize the letters, saying each one in silence, extending the muscles of his tongue, his mouth even then forming shapes unfamiliar to him.

It was how he would spell his name; he would use those letters the doctor had imagined for him and call them his own.

All these faces he no longer remembered, just some of the parts. Where they had been and how they were wounded, whom he buried and who lived, all of them the years could not retain. They were now remnants. How he once watched a man bring a ladle of water to a friend’s cracked lips. How a man, naked in the winter, washed himself in a corner with the warmth of the used laundry water. Two men once attempted to escape, only to return the next day with their wrists bound. How one of them reached for the guard’s rifle and placed it into his mouth.

How clean were the eyes of the dead.

In that last year, long after Peng was gone, he was brought to a table where there was a basket of clothes and a sewing machine. And that doctor who had written his name showed him how to operate the machine and then headed toward the corner of the field tent to rest, sitting on a wooden chair with a book on his lap. In the warmer nights he slept there because it was easier, because there were not enough of them for the shifts.

And as Yohan mended whatever clothes he could, trying and starting over, the doctor read aloud from the
book so that the guards and the wounded could hear as well, and they all turned to him as he flipped the pages with his stained fingers.

In those times, in that vast tent in the field, there was only his voice, a steady wind, the whistle of glass, and a story.

I
n the fall, Yohan climbed to the top of the hill town. He passed the church where the road ended and crossed a sloped meadow, heading toward the tree on the ridge.

The tree was tall and had been shaped by the wind. Its branches were long and thick, extending out in one direction. Some nearly touched the ground.

He rested there, on the peak of the hill, and looked out at the distant lighthouse and the old plantation house to the north. Breakers approached a cliff. The wind was steady, consuming the noises, and he watched the town go about its day.

It was his second year here. He had grown accustomed
to the heat and the warmer seasons. His skin had darkened and his muscles had returned to him. He kept his hair short, walking with Kiyoshi to the barbershop every few weeks.

Earlier that day he had gone to the market in the large square overlooking the port. He walked through the aisles, passing the stalls, listening to the vendors and the shoppers converse and barter, translating what sentences he could in his mind, catching a phrase he did not yet understand and memorizing the sounds so that he could ask Kiyoshi about it later.

Craftsmen and toy makers sat on wicker chairs, fanning themselves with newspapers. They sold pottery and dolls and tapestries and wooden animals and toy boats of various sizes, lined up in rows, some of them as small as a pebble. He held the miniature rowboats, examined their craft, felt their lightness and their smoothness in his palm. He bent down and peered into their hollows as though expecting to find something there. He imagined each of them being placed into the sea, moving in separate directions. He thought how wonderful it would be to follow them.

The full height of the church spire rose above the ridge. He heard a door open and looked down into the town, over a stone wall where the old priest appeared,
followed by Peixe, who leaned on his cane as they walked through the garden behind the church. He understood that they were speaking about a Sunday service and a dinner, catching their fragmented conversation. Then they parted, the priest returning inside as the groundskeeper began to collect vegetables.

Peixe wore cotton trousers, an old shirt, and a vest. His hair was disheveled and there was a basket slung over his arm. In that first year in the town, they had only spoken a few words.

There had been a farmer who sometimes visited the camp, bartering with the soldiers. He lived in a farmhouse in the valley, far beyond the fences, and Yohan would look out at it from time to time, seeing the farmer at the door or outside, washing a window.

He never knew the man, did not know if he was married or had a family, or how his life had been altered during that war. He imagined the man was still there. Perhaps even the camp itself. He thought of all the doctors and soldiers and nurses forever moving along that field surrounded by high fences and towers, and he wondered what remained in those mountains.

From the ridge he watched Peixe for a while, in the afternoon stillness, the garden trees throwing shadows on him.

In the harbor, crates hung suspended in the air. Birds circled them. The sea was clear. It moved toward him and faded and he felt the time that had passed and his time here. He thought that he had made the best of it all, that he had worked and made a living, and he felt the contentment of that. He thought of what the years would bring, what sort of life was left in him.

It was then that he saw the children. There were two of them, a boy and a girl. They had appeared on the cliff beside the town. Now they were moving through the meadow, heading toward him.

Their clothes were almost identical. They both wore trousers that were too large for them, the hems rolled up to their shins and wet from the ocean. They wore white button-down shirts: the girl had folded her sleeves up to her elbows; the boy’s hung over his arms so that it appeared as though he were without hands, the pale fabric swinging by his hips as he followed the girl.

The boy had short, dark hair; the girl’s was long and pale and fell down her shoulders, reaching her waist. They were barefoot.

He knew them. Though he had not seen them in some time.

He watched as they slowed in front of him and approached
with shyness. He was sitting against the tree with his hands around his knees. They stopped and the boy looked somewhere behind Yohan’s shoulder as if expecting someone else to appear. The girl’s eyes were fixed on him but revealed nothing. The day was bright and the wind continued to come in from the sea.

He held up a bag. The girl tilted her head, as though considering the bag, then took it. Her arm vanished into the opening, her hand burrowing in the canvas. When it reappeared it held bread rolls, fruit, and strips of dried fish he had gotten at the market.

She handed the bag back to him. Then, standing there under the tree, the boy and the girl began to eat. He watched them bringing their hands to their lips and their mouths work the food and their eyes calm as they began to look around at the slope and the rooftops of the town, enjoying their meal, their shyness now gone, replaced by an ease, some kind of comfort, almost, though whether he was a part of that he did not know.