by Paul Yoon
“He never did that again. But sometimes, we would lose sight of him for an hour or so, though we never knew where he went. It was like there were paths around the property only he knew about. We got used to it. He did his work. He always did his work. He set broken bones and gave shots and listened to everything we said. The farmers lying there would look at him, wondering where he had come from, trying to hide their surprise when he spoke back to them in French. He could suture faster than I could. We used to race using grapefruits, threading the needle across the skin. Yves would pick one up from the fruit bowl, about to eat it, and we could hear his shouts as thread dangled from it like it was some creature or a kite. He hated when we did that.”
The photo was still on the table beside the recorder. Khit picked it up again, studying the three of them on the seawall, Alisak looking slightly away.
It was then Marta said that Yves had an old Honda motorbike. Alisak didn’t know about it until Yves opened the shed one day and asked if he wanted to fix it up. He had to order the parts from Karawek, who picked them up for him in Marseille. But Alisak did it. He fixed the bike right up and, she admitted, it surprised her. She knew so little of what he knew, what he was good at, what his history was other than he had come to them needing help, that he could work at a hospital, and that sometimes he cooked for them. It was like he was slowly revealing himself. Or gathering back things he had forgotten. Now there was this bike.
“He used to stay up at nights with me,” Marta said. “Mostly, he listened as I talked. He liked hearing how I hopped trains and hitchhiked all the way down from the north. Which was true. Eighteen years old. Thinking I would eventually hit southern Spain and go farther.”
Khit wanted to know why she left home. When Marta didn’t respond, she said, “Did you know Alisak would leave?”
Marta replied that except that first night, there were no hints. She woke up one morning and he was gone. Late summer. They tried looking for him. Karawek, too. For a month, they tried. But it was up to him, wasn’t it? They weren’t forcing him to stay. They thought he took the bike until she saw it back in the shed. He had polished it, had left it for them. Full tank.
“Did you ever drive it?” Khit said.
“Yes. Not Yves. But sometimes I took it out, yes.”
“Where did you think Alisak went?”
She thought he might have hitchhiked to the coast. Then maybe headed toward Marseille. Or caught a ride with migrant workers into Spain.
“I asked you earlier if you wanted to know if Alisak got better,” Marta said. “I don’t think that’s quite what I wanted to say. If you are looking for a reason why he left when he did, I can’t give you one. If you want to know if he was happy here, I don’t know that either. Alisak did his work, as I said. He made us happy. He made me happy.”
“You were in love with him.”
“I think so. Yes. Once, a very long time ago. In the months before he left, we used to drive out together on the bike, the two of us. The last time we did this, we parked on the coast and climbed over the seawall. It was calm. Really bright. The water was silver. We were the only ones. Here is what I remember: He asked if I could teach him how to swim. I always forgot he didn’t really know how. So we took off our clothes and went into the water. It was impossibly calm but we stayed where it was shallow. I held him as he floated on his back and then he flipped over and again I held him. He kept his chin above the surface and tried a few strokes. I remember his arms and his legs moving, and I remember the water and the empty, quiet night, and his breathing. And then we didn’t speak. And that is my last memory of him.”
* * *
It was dark now. Marta turned on the lights as Khit changed tapes again. Rather than coming back to the table right away, Marta stayed by the light switch, considering Khit again from across the room.
“Did Alisak ever play?” Khit said. She was referring to the piano.
Marta said he never did. But that it was nice. When Khit played those notes earlier. Hearing them in this room. It was like a voice she had forgotten about. She wasn’t expecting Khit to do that when she first came in. Yves had played.
“I confess I didn’t know what to expect when Karawek called,” Marta said.
Karawek had long ago stopped doing what she did, but she lived in the same apartment in Marseille from those years. Marta could shut her eyes and still see the geography of it. The tiles and the balcony. The room with stacks of paintings and a dent in the wall from when a man had entered in the middle of the night, shoved Karawek against that wall, and began screaming at her that she didn’t take him where he needed to go. That he was utterly alone.
“He hit her so hard,” Marta said, “her head broke plaster.”
“What happened then?”
“She always carried a knife. So do I.” Marta reached down into her boot and placed a knife beside Khit’s tape recorder. Then for the first time Marta laughed and returned to the table. “This is my mother’s. From her war. My father’s war. And Yves’s brother’s war. If I was short with you when you came, I apologize. I had not thought about Alisak in a long time. Does that disappoint you?”
Khit didn’t answer. Out the window, against the night, flashlights appeared, moving high along the mountain slope. She thought of the dog. And what Philip would think of a house by a mountain.
“You said it’s just you now,” Khit said. “Did you ever think of going back? To where you grew up?”
“This is all I know anymore,” Marta said.
“You never told me why your father, the policeman, is famous,” Khit said.
“It’s not something he wanted to be famous for.”
“What happened?”
“When I was a child, a young woman was found hanging from a tree with a black hood over her face. This was farther down in the valley. Her shoes were found neatly placed together underneath on the grass, the ankles touching, straight toes. My parents knew the girl. She was from a family who bred horses. She was fourteen. It was terrible. I have little memory of this; I was too young, and my parents didn’t talk to me about it until I was older, but it was terrible. It changed everything. The valley spent years forgetting a war and then this happened. And then it got worse. A month later, another girl was found hanging from a tree, hood over her face, wrists bound behind her. Shoes set underneath. Now it became a nightmare.”
“Your father was on the case,” Khit said.
Marta nodded. The mountain communities there were small. Smaller than villages. They gave her father jurisdiction of all of them, and he worked the case. He was the senior. He was Maquis, in the Resistance, during the war. He was actually from the Spanish side of the Basque country, but he was Maquis. All the villages, she said, they respected him for that. So they made him a detective. He got a partner, and together they worked the case for a year. It took a year.
“I told you,” Khit said. “A year is a long time.”
“My mother didn’t see him throughout the investigation,” Marta said. “If he came home, it wasn’t him she was seeing. She had never known him during the war, but she thought it must have been that person she was seeing. He hardly spoke. She said once he seemed dangerous. Not to anyone in particular, not to her, but that there seemed to be an element of danger to him suddenly, as if he would explode if she touched him. It almost ruined them. She used to also say she wouldn’t know what she would have done without me to care for. But I don’t believe a word of that. I think my mother was drunk that whole year, and he knew and didn’t care.”
“Did it happen again?” Khit said.
“Within that year, it happened two more times,” Marta said. “Always the black hood and the wrists bound behind her. The shoes. I’m sure the papers called the man—it was a man—something clever, but I don’t remember anymore. I’m sure the valley didn’t call him anything clever. It was their life. Girls, daughters, were seen less, so little at times some people thought they had been caught by this man only to realize their par
ents were keeping them locked up in their farms. It was a nightmare.”
“But he was caught,” Khit said. “The killer.”
“Eventually, yes.”
It was because of a cigarette brand, Marta told her. The man smoked an older brand, before the war, that was hard to purchase in the area. He left a bit of it near the last hanging girl. So it started there.
“And your father became famous in the area for it. For catching him.”
“Here is what broke my father’s heart,” Marta said. “It was a fellow Maquis. He didn’t know him, but it turned out it was someone who had been in the Resistance during the Second World War. Same as my father. Running up and down this border here between France and Spain, fighting the Germans. A man my father’s age. He was reliving a memory. Or mimicking it. During the war, as he passed through a village somewhere, he had seen a girl hanging from a tree with a wooden sign hanging around her neck with Judin written on it. The difference was that the ones he killed were from various places and backgrounds, no connection. All he cared about was that it was a girl.”
Marta wrapped her shawl tightly over her shoulders. She said her father stopped working not long after. He took up gardening and renovated their house. He bought a bicycle and joined her mother on trips into the village.
“You’re tired,” Marta said, and leaned forward, almost touching the recorder. “So am I. I’m not used to keeping still like this. Or talking for so long. I’ve done nothing this evening but talk. Let’s take you over. You get to stay here before the chaos of Midsummer.”
They stood together, and Khit collected her bag. For a moment, they stayed by the door, as though they were both not yet sure they wanted to leave the room. Then Marta pointed out the window and mentioned that for Midsummer they lit a fire on the mountain above them. And then other fires were lit across the peaks in the Pyrenees all the way to where she was from. So every year, she called her father, waking him, and told him to look out the window at the fire, she was waving. And she didn’t know if he was listening or caught in some dream. She never asked what he dreamed about. She remembered great happiness as a child. But there was also a tremendous sadness over there. It never left. She knew it was still there. She knew when she heard her father’s voice that it was still there.
“And here?” Khit said.
“You might think this is silly,” Marta said, stepping outside. “But I never arrange my shoes anymore. When I take them off, I toss them on the ground and leave them how they are. Pointing in different directions. Far apart from each other.”
She was set up on the bottom bunk in the corner of the barn. There were others on the far side. There was a door to a kitchen and along one wall was a long communal dining table where a bright lightbulb was hanging, casting shadows.
A bird had gotten in. Or perhaps it lived here. It moved from rafter to rafter, as though getting used to her. She could hear the sound of its flight. And then voices from across the barn. A woman brought coffee to the table. She was holding a headlamp to look at a map spread out in front of her.
This was the first time Khit had left New York since she immigrated. She was thinking of that. And how the day she met the parents who would end up taking care of her, Khit had gone to the creek near the camp. She remembered the casualness of the meeting, of them walking down and the woman asking if Khit would like her hair washed. How far away she seemed then from the camp. So Khit had entered the water, bent down, and felt the woman touching her head for the first time.
The bird swooped low over the table, and as the woman ducked, the corner of the map lifted slightly.
Restless, Khit stepped outside. In front of the barn, she lit one of Marta’s cigarettes. The smoke enveloped her and went pale and floated up. In the moonlight, she could make out the house on the small hill with one window light on. She could make out the outline of the bench and the tree.
There were days when her parents and her son were the only things that made her want to live a life. There were also days when she was convinced it would all go away, that she would come home one day to find that they weren’t there, that they had never been there. And then there were times, not many anymore, but still there, some faint echo, when she didn’t want to go home at all. That it felt possible to stay away, and away from them, to keep going from one route to another for the rest of her life. And she didn’t know why she felt that.
Something brushed her legs. She looked down to find Marta’s dog beside her, leaning against her and wagging its tail. She then felt the weight of the tape recorder in her back pocket. It had her last cassette. She pulled the recorder out, brought it to her lips, and turned it back on. She spoke her son’s name into the microphone and then said, “I don’t think you’ll ever listen to this, but I hope one day you do,” and rewound the tape.
And so, listening to the last tape, Khit walked around the barn, the dog following, past the coiled hose toward the shed. She opened its door as quietly as she could and turned on the light. She approached the tarp, lifted it up, and examined the motorbike. A moth flew in. She leaned against the seat a little as the dog sniffed the wheels and studied the moth.
When she came back outside, more flashlights were gliding across the mountain. Holding the recorder, still hearing her own voice, and Marta’s voice, Khit sat down on the grass, crossed her legs, the dog with her, and watched the night in the fields.
* * *
Tape #4
[ *A cough. A chair shifts.*
Is that really your son’s?
Yes. I had to buy it for him for a school project. The assignment was to carry it around with him on a walk and record noises. And then he would try to identify what he had recorded. I went with him. Or, rather, he went with me. We walked around Poughkeepsie and to a park in the Hudson Valley.
Did he identity everything?
I don’t remember. I forgot to listen to the recording. He did that on his own. It was so expensive. The machine. I was angry at myself that I had bought it. That the school had asked me to. It is difficult sometimes, as I said, depending on the season.
Do you miss him?
Philip? Yes. Of course. He doesn’t know I took it. I took it from his room. The recorder and the blank tapes in his drawer.
How much does he know?
He knows I am here. I told him I had to meet someone from when I was a child. I think he was more interested in the idea of me as a child.
Do you think that is enough?
Enough?
What you told him. To share a life. To call it that. A shared life. Is it honest?
You never married or had children… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.
The truth? I feel most like myself when I’m alone. I’m not sure whom I get that from, if I get it from anyone at all.
You never told me very much about your mother.
She was a nurse in Calais. During the war. Then she settled down on a farm in a village called Sem, where she eventually lived with my father. She was a morphine addict, from the hospital she used to work in. She had good years and bad years. I loved her. I think because most of all she survived. She kept surviving. Even survived that year of such sadness in that area. It never stopped her from riding a bicycle every day to the village to have a few drinks at the inn and listen to their old record player. Papa hated that she did that. Because of what was happening around us. All those killings. She would say, What would a crazy person want with me? and pedal off. She liked jazz and she gardened. She had friends, many friends. Spanish friends, American friends, French friends. I’m convinced they were all spies. They all seemed to know each other from those years after the war and I think they formed a kind of family, sharing information. When she was younger they liked to visit her. I remember the house always with a guest from somewhere. Always the music and the food and their talking. I remember their names, I loved their names: Oliver, Camille, Mikel. The men with their mustaches. The one with a bad limp. Camille, who always smelled wond
erful. Like grass after rain. In the mornings, a sleepy spy would stumble out of a room, yawning and rubbing their eyes, surprised to see me, the child, awake and staring up at them. Mama, she died peacefully, in her sleep.
You miss her.
I miss them all. I miss them all because we never understand how quickly they go, yes? I miss Papa, whom I never see anymore and who has very few years left. I miss everyone who used to work here. I miss Yves, who was like a father to me, a second father. And you here today, tonight, I miss Alisak the most. He was the hesitant one. We had a problem with water, once. The city was working on a pipe. I watched him take out all the bowls in the house and line them up in the closest field because it was about to shower. It did shower, hard, but what I remember is how he held the bowls close to him as though they were flowers. Bright flowers. All that rain and color in the field… You never told me what happened to Prany.
Prany… yes. He was caught. Three months after he bought me safe passage into Thailand. He was in a van, on his way to give a messenger on the Mekong supplies to bring across the river. A pastor, I recall. A Christian. I don’t remember the man’s name, but I remember him bringing up food, mostly. Medicine, gasoline. And me always knowing it was from Prany. Sometimes, Prany would hide a small gift for me in one of the boxes. Something from the house, from one of those pouches. How I loved that. How I always waited. Until the day the pastor didn’t show up when he was supposed to. Eventually, the van was found ransacked and abandoned on the side of the road. Prany and the doctor—his name was Vang—were charged with the murder of the interrogator and they were executed. They knew Auntie would be at the camp. They sent her Prany’s head tied up in a blanket. They had caught the pastor, you see, but they had let him go. They let him go so that he could carry the head back across himself. They probably followed him up to the Thai border but there was nothing they could do after he was across. Maybe they didn’t even care about Auntie anymore after this. I think they just wanted to see this man with a severed head on his back, crossing a river, climbing up the mountain…