Snow Hunters: A Novel (7 page)

He watched the ends of the scarf swing behind the blindfolded juggler. He thought of forests. High canopies. A river. A hand on his elbow. Peng.

He thought of new towns in the places he had been. New houses. New shops. Bicycles. Markets. Magic shows, theater, and children.

Bia’s hat rose into the air.

Before he left that night she leaned toward him so that their faces were almost touching. He felt her breath against his ear.

She cupped her mouth and said, —He practices every afternoon. To keep him sharp. He used to be in the circus. Then he went to the war. And now he is blind. But he can still throw and catch. He tells me he does not need his eyes for this. He tells me, when he performs, everyone assumes he can see. So he wraps a scarf over his face and they are thrilled. He prefers it that way. The belief that he can see even when the show finishes and the audience has gone. He wants me to imagine this. It makes him happy. So that when we part today, I go this way and he goes that way. He enters his home and unties the scarf around his head and looks around and out the window. He rubs his eyes, squints from the light. I imagine this for him. In my dreams he takes all of us by the waist and throws us into the air. He lifts his arms and we rise. He watches us. And it is beautiful.

H
e had once played cards with the medics. He had been looking for Peng, wondering where he had wandered off to. It was the first summer, an early evening, and no one could sleep.

In one of the hospital tents, three men had gathered around a wooden crate. Peng was there. They were sitting together with their shirts unbuttoned, surrounded by candles, the small fires catching the mosquitoes.

They motioned for Yohan. So he went under the tent and sat on one of the crates beside them. He watched them finish their game.

Then someone asked if he and Peng wanted to play,
too. The game was called poker, they said, and one of the medics taught them the suits.

Peng held the playing cards. The bandages over his eyes were illuminated. When it was their turn he waited for Yohan to whisper into his ear what he held, the numbers and the shapes, the clovers and the portraits of kings.

They did not play very well. They took too long and did not understand the game.

Even so, in that candlelight, Peng clutched the cards and smiled. It was one of the few times Peng smiled at the camp and Yohan would remember it, wondering what private memory he was reliving on that summer night, behind the bandages; what moment or story there was for him in a handful of cards and their texture, the way he ran his fingertips over them as though he held something remarkable. As though for a brief instant, life in this prison camp, near the southern coast of this country, during wartime, had become a kind of wonder.

Just as Yohan would sit with Santi and Bia one day in the market square, the three of them playing cards as they tried to sell bracelets and necklaces. How he paused, holding a three of diamonds, thinking of this night.

Later, he and Peng were split up and Yohan looked over the shoulder of the medic named Lamont. Lamont
asked which cards he should give up and Yohan pointed at one and the medic frowned and shook his head.

Lamont had very pale hair that was curly and thick and he had freckles on his nose.

—Snowmen, they called Yohan and Peng, because the Americans knew who they were.

They had found them in the mountains, not far from the wreckage of a bomb, lying buried in the snow. They had found them because Yohan’s nose had been sticking up in the snow.

—Like a fucking carrot, they said.

And they had speared his nose with the butt of a rifle, assuming if he were alive, he would react. That sudden sound of bone cracking the air and Yohan screaming.

He had been part of a patrol unit in the mountains that day. Among the men he and Peng had lived with, walked with, fought and slept beside, they were the only survivors of the bombing.

He would not know how many days passed. He would wake momentarily to his body shaking on the bed of a truck, his wrists bound, a warmth spreading across his face, then the pain.

And Peng beside him, his eyes already gone.

The medics were all his age. He remembered being
envious of their boots and the sound of the sleeping convalescents and the nurses pausing to view the card game.

Two of the medics left that month. He did not know where they went. Or whether they lived. They each carried a large pack on their shoulders, heading toward the gate where a transport was waiting. They walked like old men, using their rifles as canes.

—Snowman, they called to him, and waved from the fences.

They had left their gramophone for the nurses. Benny Goodman filled the days and the nights.

When it grew cold the wounded were moved into the abandoned mill. That December, boxes arrived filled with streamers, lights, and hats in the shape of cones.

Lamont, the medic who stayed, walked by the beds, passing out the hats.

—Yohan, a nurse called one late evening, swaying from the whiskey that had been sent as well.

—Dance with me, she said.

It was Christmas. Wood stoves burned on each end of the factory floor. She took his hand and led him outside. It had snowed and their boots dipped into it. All across the field the snow was lit from the brightness of electricity.

They stood under a window so that they could hear the music. She had put on one of the hats, blue in color, and it sparkled. She put one on him as well. He had never danced before.

She took his hands and placed them around her waist. Then she wrapped her arms around his neck and stepped to the side, humming, and he followed her. She smelled of liquor and tiredness. She was wearing her uniform. Yohan wore a coat they had given him.

Behind the factory windows a pastor read to the men. Missionaries carried trays of hot chocolate. A range of pointed colored hats appeared against the fogged glass. A few guards stood looking down at them. Her hat slid off as she rested her head against his chest and they danced in that field in the snow.

All those days there was music. He could hear it as he waited for his meals or washed clothes. As he walked along the perimeter for exercise, Peng holding his elbow and counting steps. As he watched the doctors bend over the cots and as trucks arrived with more of the wounded. As he learned how to mend clothes. As he was taught how to garden. As he stood far in the field and dug into the earth, taking turns with the six available shovels while the others used pickaxes or buckets or even their hands,
moving down the fresh slope. Their shoulders heaved. From across the distance men watched from their beds. And that faint melody, a song, came to them as the nurse he had danced with, that winter, lit a lantern and reached over the graves as it grew dark.

O
ne night there was a power outage in the town. They headed to the rooftop. Kiyoshi carried a flashlight. They sat in their chairs and the tailor pointed the beam out toward the buildings. Birds had gathered on clotheslines and television antennas. There were no clouds. Everywhere candles began to fill the windows.

There was a quiet in the evening, as if the electricity had taken sound with it. The beam of the lighthouse swept across the water. Musicians began to play in the square near the port and they listened to the melodies traveling up the hill.

Their eyes adjusted to the dark. Even though it was warm Kiyoshi was wearing a sweater.

—I’ve spent my life looking down and away, the tailor said, spreading his arms to form his imaginary worktable. I have not looked up enough.

He leaned back against his chair and lifted his head.

—What stars, he said, and laughed, gazing up at that vast canvas above them, Yohan astonished by how it was possible that it was the same sky through all their years, in countries across the sea. How the sky never changed, never appeared to grow old.

From below came the rapid patter of footsteps. A trail of lights moved in the dark. When it grew closer he saw that it was a group of boys and girls, out past their curfew, heading down toward the harbor square.

He wondered what it was about the dark of a town that made some stay indoors and others leave their homes, running through the narrow streets in sudden happiness. As if it were not the town they moved through but somewhere in their imaginations, their private castles.

He did not know where Santi and Bia were this evening. He did not know if they always stayed in the settlement when they were here.

—All over, Kiyoshi had said when he asked.

Kiyoshi had offered the shop to them once but they shook their heads, hurrying away with the food he gave them. In the war Yohan had seen a child asleep under a tree with a sack filled with food tied around his wrist. Their footsteps woke him and the child reached for the sack first, then sat up, rubbed his eyes, looked at them, and yawned.

The line of lights faded down the hill. Kiyoshi tugged on Yohan’s shirtsleeve.

—Look, he said, and pointed toward the sea.

Another light had appeared, a red star in the water. It was heading north. It was too dark, too far for them to see the shape of the vessel. Soon it vanished behind a building in front of them.

In that moment Kiyoshi said, —Oh, and Yohan felt his arm brush against his, the arrival of a night wind, and the tailor was gone.

At first he did not understand where Kiyoshi was. He looked back at the rooftop door but it was shut. Then he rushed to the rooftop’s edge.

But he stopped. In his periphery he caught a flash of movement, the movement of erratic light in the air. He turned toward the rooftops beside theirs, up the slope
of the hill, and he saw him there, two buildings away, his figure like some bird tiptoeing along the edge of the concrete and the tiles, across roofs that were flat and some that were pitched, the flashlight swinging beside him and illuminating his ankles.

He called to Kiyoshi several times, but by then the tailor was too far and could not hear him or was ignoring him.

And so Yohan crossed the roof and stepped onto the edge of his neighbors’. He moved as fast as he could, extending his arms to the side and following the beam of the flashlight. It seemed to him that Kiyoshi moved faster, with an energy he had not seen in years, the man running, almost, accompanied by the sound of tiles shifting.

Kiyoshi did not stop until he reached the last building before the church. If the old man was tired, he did not show it. The roof was flat and Yohan kneeled to rest, waiting for the pulsing in his legs to calm.

From where they stood, not far from the church spire, they could see the entire coast. On a cliff the lighthouse stood against the sky, not functioning.

—No light, Kiyoshi said.

He raised his flashlight and began to turn it on and off.

Soon the vessel appeared, drifting past the town. Kiyoshi swayed his arm. He continued clicking the flashlight on and off. In moments like these the lighthouse keeper hung lanterns, and Yohan could see them now and he wondered if Kiyoshi did, too.

He said, —Kiyoshi, it’s all right, and touched his shoulder but the tailor did not respond. The ship had passed safely and was far away now.

In the building across from them, in the floor below, a window was open. Candles illuminated the room. He caught the corner of a robe and then a woman appeared. Her gray hair, blond in the candlelight, touched her waist.

A birdcage stood in the corner of the room. She approached it and leaned forward. She spoke and the bird twisted its head. Then she placed a blanket over the cage and Yohan watched as she stood there for some time, holding a hairbrush, staring at the draped fabric, her expression vague and the candlelight shifting across the room from a wind.

The lighthouse returned, its generators humming as the beam flashed across the water. Kiyoshi lowered his arm and they stood there, on a stranger’s rooftop, looking out at the water as voices from the port reached them and other windows opened.

•  •  •

As the months went on Kiyoshi began to spend more time in his room. Yohan finished the work in the shop and then brought tea and sat beside him. He lay propped up on a pillow on his cot with a book and a thin blanket draped over him. He had grown thinner, his clothes a bit looser on him. But he was always awake when Yohan came, his energy still there, and they spoke of the day or about the book he was reading.

Yohan did not know why the man preferred his bedroom over the shop now. But he continued to cross the kitchen every evening, bringing tea and conversation. He kept the doorway open so that they could listen to the radio.

He stayed until Kiyoshi fell asleep. He pulled the book away from his fingers and placed it on the nightstand. He tucked Kiyoshi’s slippers under the cot. He dusted the suit jacket hanging from a nail on the wall. He watched Kiyoshi’s chest rise and fall. A fly landed on the old man’s wrist and Yohan swept it away.

The days grew busier. Yohan kept the store hours himself. Soon he worked into the night. He left the shutters open. There was the occasional shadow of a pedestrian or a child’s face against the window, looking in.

The neighborhood, and the town, grew accustomed to him alone; they understood that they would now be working with him.

Late one night Yohan was woken by a noise. He thought at first there were mice in the walls. It resembled a faint scratching sound, the movements of tiny bodies. The glow of a shop sign came in from the window. He heard the noise again. He realized it was coming from under the floor, from below. He rose and, as quietly as he could, descended the stairs.

The shop light was on. The shutters over the store windows were closed. Through a space in the curtain he could make out the tailor’s dummy in the center of the room.

A coat covered it. It was a child’s winter coat. It was made of wool, gray in color, double-breasted with wide lapels and dark buttons, like the ones the sailors wore.

Kiyoshi stood in front of it. Kiyoshi and the dummy were the same height. He was in his undershirt. His hair was tied back and wrapped in a bun and his glasses hung on a string around his neck.