by Chaim Potok
Dancing adroitly among the ropes held taut by two of the girls, the third girl, her coat and skirt hiked above her knees, seemed to float over the ground. She danced with the wind in her face, her high cheeks flushed and her dark eyes shining.
The boy watched in a trance. The girls in our village did not play like that in front of boys. Fat Choo Kun once said only peasant girls played like that. Stockinged legs showing bare above the knees. In our village the girls never wore bathing suits or went swimming during the day. No matter how hot the air. Nor would Father or Mother. Only the barbarous Japanese and pale-skinned foreigners did such things, showing their flesh to strangers. On hot nights some girls would bathe in the pond outside the village where the trees overhung the bank and sometimes two or three in my chronological group would steal out to watch them. Naked in the dark night, pale and wonderfully beautiful with the soft blue starlight on their satiny skin. Whispering and giggling as they floated and kicked and swam about quietly in the still water. And one night fat Choo Kun without warning any of us suddenly coming out with the snarling hissing roar of a leopard, so real my skin turned cold and the hair on my head stood up, and the girls screamed and scrambled wildly for their clothes and fat Choo Kun could not stop laughing, not realizing he had frightened them away from the pond forever. Fat greasy stupid Choo Kun.
The boy sat watching the girl dancing among the ropes. He did not notice the sudden dying of the wind as though a door leading to the plain had been abruptly shut. The girl danced on a while longer and then another of the girls took her place and after a moment slipped on the snow and fell backward. They all laughed and the boy laughed too.
Suddenly coughing uncontrollably, the man staggered to his feet and disappeared into the shanty. The woman quickly went in after him, the baby’s head swinging forward and back with her movements. The boy could hear the man still loudly coughing inside the shanty.
He looked at the girl. She stood listening to the man coughing. The light had gone from her eyes and her face was stiff with fear. After a moment she followed the woman inside and the two other girls sauntered off.
The boy put more wood on the firepit in front of the shanty and then checked the fire in back. An odd smell hung in the air and he wondered what it might be and experienced a momentary dizziness and a sudden stabbing vision of the little dog licking at his wound.
Where are they? Haven’t they been gone a long time?
He shivered and squatted down by the fire. Lost in the dance of the flames, he thought he heard someone call his name.
He raised his eyes and saw only the girl sitting in the entrance to the nearby shanty. The man had stopped coughing and she sat now gazing open-mouthed at the cloud-filled sky.
The boy heard his name called again and got to his feet and saw the old man and the woman walking carefully toward the shanty with the bowls of rice. He went to the woman and took her arm and helped her into the shanty.
The smell was inside the shanty too.
For a while the man squatted near the fire, warming his hands. Then he put his long-stemmed pipe in his mouth and closed his eyes. The boy went to the rear of the shanty to add wood to the fire.
The woman was filling a pot with fire-softened snow when she noticed people standing about gazing silently into the distance. She turned her head and saw the smoke.
The dense jet-black greasy cloud boiled into the air from the distant point on the plain where the nearly perfect circle of hills parted abruptly to open out into a narrow pass that led through a pine forest and a valley to mountains hidden in mist. The black smoke climbed, churning, to the low-hanging snow clouds and, its passage blocked, curled in upon itself like a huge dark angry flower and then opened and spread wide and drifted slowly over the plain.
At first the smell was odd and startling. Those who, like the old man and the woman and the boy, were seeing and smelling it for the first time stared in disbelief: what on this plain could be giving off such an odor?
The boy had come to the front of the shanty and stood near the fire staring up at the cloud. He saw the man and woman in the nearby shanty staring up too, the girl next to them. The old man sucked on the pipe and the woman turned away and began to busy herself with the rice. Then she put down the bowl.
The smell had changed.
Suddenly acrid, the smell entered the mouth and throat and nostrils and washed across the mucous membranes and lingered, leaving behind a coating that could be tasted.
Some put their hands over their mouths and noses and others covered their faces with cloth but the stench could not be staved, it penetrated and remained long after the cloud had gone. It clung to the rice the old man ate and the brushwood the boy heaped on the fires and the quilts with which the woman covered herself in the afternoon, when, feeling a weight of fatigue, she lay down to rest.
By then the old man and the woman knew what had been burning. But they said nothing of it to the boy.
The old man sat covered in a quilt beside the woman inside the shanty and the boy stood near the entrance, which he had covered with a quilt, watching the girl, who was again playing the rope-skipping game with her two friends. How she skipped and danced over the ropes! She saw him watching her and hesitated a moment, then turned her back to him and went on with the game. After a while they tired of it and the girl went inside.
In the evening it began to snow.
All night it snowed and through much of the next day, forming drifts that buried some shanties and toppled others. Those who had died during the night were carried away in the morning through the snow. The food trucks did not come and the old man and the woman and the boy ate the rice balls the woman had prepared and stored from the ration of the day before. There was no black cloud that day, and no stench of iodine and roasting meat.
The old man and the boy rose early and struggled through the blowing snow and gathered brush and hauled it on their backs and stored it in the shanty. They let the fire in the back die, saving the brush for the fire in front. With the frayed rope and the piece of wire, the old man tied lengths of brush together into a kind of broom and he and the boy took turns using it to clear snow from the roof and the area around the firepit.
In the late afternoon the old man lay down to rest and the boy labored alone to keep the weight of the snow off the roof. He saw the girl trying to push snow away with her hands and he offered her the brush and she took it from him with a murmured thanks.
The next day the sun shone and the food trucks returned and at noon the black cloud boiled up again over the plain.
Later that day the old man walked through the snow to the adjacent shanty. In front of the narrow blanket-covered entrance, between two scarred and bent pieces of olive-green metal, he noisily cleared his throat. He waited a moment and again hawked and this time spat into the firepit. But the smell of the black cloud would not leave his mouth.
The blanket was drawn aside and the girl stood in the entrance, looking up at him out of frightened eyes.
“Tell your father a man wishes to speak with him.”
The girl disappeared. The blanket, frayed and moldy, fell back across the entrance.
Waiting, the old man heard a dry deep-chested cough from inside and thought: A man with such a cough does not live long. He stood before the entrance, shivering in the wind.
The blanket was again drawn aside, abruptly, this time by the man.
“I and my family live next to you,” said the old man.
“What do you want?” He had a hoarse, agitated voice. “I have nothing.”
“Do you have any tobacco?”
“I don’t smoke cigarettes.”
“For my pipe.”
“I have no tobacco, I told you I have nothing.”
The two men regarded each other for a long moment.
“Well, come inside,” the man said, and coughed.
The blanket slid shut behind the old man.
“Your fire is low,” he said.
“The w
oman is ill, and the girl is a child, how much can she gather?” He ordered the girl to add wood to the fire. “Not too much,” he said.
She slipped quietly from the shanty.
Dusty light filtered through a torn piece of dirty white cloth covering a narrow jagged tear in one of the metal walls. In a shadow-filled corner squatted the woman, holding the child in her arms, eyes lowered as the two men entered and sat down on the grimy blanket in the middle of the earthen floor.
The old man dimly made out the woman’s face: long, gaunt, ugly; a squat nose, thin cracked lips, a bony chin. A skeletal face on the man: high cheek-bones; deep irregular trenches crossing his forehead and webbing his eyes and cheeks; thin spittle-flecked lips. He wore a dark jacket and wadded white trousers, and sat with his hands under his thighs, shivering and coughing, surrounded by a nimbus of exhaustion.
The girl re-entered the shanty. The old man felt the wind carrying the stench to his nostrils. Silently the girl sat down next to the woman.
“I have other things besides tobacco,” the man said.
“For tobacco I have things to trade.”
“Then there is nothing to talk about.”
“What other things?”
“What have you to trade?”
“Pots. Bowls.”
“We have pots and bowls.” The man coughed. “Who can eat pots and bowls? Can I feed my family pots and bowls?”
“I have other things as well.”
“Tell me about your other things and I will tell you about mine.”
“In such a place a man must warm his bones,” said the old man after a moment.
“There are ways to fight off the demons of cold.”
“Where is your village?” asked the old man.
“Our village no longer exists. The fiends from the North burned it to ashes.”
A moaning sound rose from the woman. She sat rocking the baby and quietly sobbing. The girl put her hand on the woman’s arm. Then she closed her eyes.
“My ancestors were farmers to the tenth generation,” said the man. “There are four generations of graves. Once I had six children.” He coughed and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket. “Have you children?”
“We have the boy.”
“I see you together bringing the wood.”
“Ah.”
“It is difficult for the girl to bring wood.” He coughed. “For me it is not possible.”
A sudden start and cry from the child; soothing words from the woman. The girl, her head fallen forward upon her chest, had seemed asleep. But she stirred and raised her hand and softly stroked the child’s face.
“What did you farm?” asked the old man.
“Mostly rice. And millet, beans, and barley. I had also chickens and pigs.”
“The boy is a good boy. He is strong.”
They sat a while longer, talking. The old man got to his feet and the other rose too, coughing.
“Take with you a gift from my house,” the man said.
From a bundle of clothes and blankets he brought forth a bottle. The old man closed and opened his eyes and slowly nodded. He ran his tongue over his lips.
“Go in peace,” the man said, holding back a cough.
“In peace may we meet again,” said the old man.
Later that afternoon he sat in the dim shanty sucking on his empty pipe and drinking slowly from a bowl. Hunting black cock with Uncle in marshes and larch groves. Uncle shot a male bird. Snowstorms most of the day. He taught me how to use the gun and I tracked a hen through the marsh and caught her feeding on larch buds and shot her. This is from my nephew, Uncle bragged to those in the village hut that evening, holding high the hen. Young, but a good eye. Well, he said to me, well, a hunter or a farmer, what will you be? He owned a pony, some guns, and three bundles of this and that. That was all. Traveled around alone and now and then with his two sons. Hunting with rich Japanese and Russians and occasionally an American. Father was angry. A hunter! Disgraceful! We are six generations of farmers, not lowly hunters. You will not go anymore to visit your mother’s crazy brother.
He sucked on the empty pipe and refilled the bowl and drank some more.
The woman looked at him from the quilts where she was resting.
“Why do you do that now?”
“It is to drive away the smell.”
“This is not a time to become like the old carpenter.”
“Woman, I cannot endure the smell.”
She lay back on the quilts. Once the ghosts begin to destroy they harm the good as well as the bad.
“Where is the boy?” he asked after a while.
“Somewhere outside.”
“He should not go off alone.”
“You tell me the boy is not of our blood,” the woman said. “Why do you care where he goes?”
She closed her eyes and drew the top quilt over her face. The stench was deep inside the quilts and no matter how she turned or breathed it would not go away.
He walked with the wind in his face, treading carefully on the befouled snow and trying not to breathe deeply the reeking air. The wind blew the black smoke directly across the plain, driving it into people’s nostrils. Overhead the birds circled effortlessly on the wind and once in a while a helicopter burst across the sky, chopping at the air. A pall of exhaustion lay upon the plain. People huddled near fires: forlorn shadows in the chill sunlight. Only the young seemed still able to move about quickly.
Tears came to his eyes from the searing wind. He felt them on his cheeks. Everything here is frozen, why not the tears? Choo Kun said tears don’t freeze because they flow from a secret hot pool deep inside our bodies and are really liquid fire. His father told him that, Choo Kun said. His father is a poet and a scholar, Grandfather said, and did not utter anything so foolish. His father: hands bound and earth in his eyes. Liquid fire. Fat dumb Choo Kun. Earth now in the secret hot pool deep inside him.
Boys about his age roamed the plain in groups of four or five, silent and stealthy, like gray shadows. He avoided them. Near the gate to the American compound he saw young women huddling together and heard them calling to soldiers who stood behind the wire fence. He could not understand their words. How had they so quickly learned the language? Inside the compound soldiers wearing gloves and parkas with the hoods tight on their faces moved among huge olive-green machines and trucks. One of the girls laughed suddenly and stepped forward to the fence and threw open her coat and blouse. Loud noises burst from the soldiers.
The boy, his cheeks flaming, turned away.
He started back across the plain. A cloud covered the sun and he looked up. Heavy and gray, from the mountains in the North. More snow. If the trucks do not come tomorrow how will we eat? Walking and looking up at the cloud, he did not see the group of boys coming toward him and nearly ran into one of them.
They were quickly around him: five boys about his age. All his size and height save one, a tall scrawny boy with two missing front teeth, which gave his small thin mouth an odd cavernous appearance. He seemed to be their leader.
“Eyes in front, boy, not in the sky.” No anger or threat in his voice.
“Very sorry, I apologize.”
“What is your name?”
He told them.
“Where do you come from?”
He gave them the name of his village.
“You have your parents?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Lucky. We don’t have our parents. Parents dead.”
They stood around him silently in a wind that was now unrelenting with the absence of the sun.
“We see you looking around.”
“Is it wrong to look around?”
“You want to join us?”
“For what?”
They glanced at one another expressionlessly.
“You have something you want to trade?”
“No.”
“You want to steal something?”
“No.”
“If
you steal something and you want to trade, you come to us. Don’t go to nobody else. We give you the best trade. You hear?”
The boy did not respond.
“Hey, you understand? You hear?”
He nodded. There were tears in his eyes from the wind.
“I live over there.” He pointed to a shanty near the American compound. “Okay?”
What did that mean, okay?
“You have a sister?”
“What?”
“A sister.”
“No.”
“Too bad. You could make lots of money and get food.”
They stood looking at him in silence.
From their leader came a barely perceptible signal: a shrug, a quick motion of the hand. They hurried off and were gone.
He wiped his cheeks and eyes with the palms of his hands. Liquid fire. Fat greasy stupid Choo Kun.
The stench was out of the air. But it would be a while before it left his nose and tongue and throat.
He walked hurriedly back to the shanty, his eyes on the foul-crusted snow.
The woman squatted before the fire, preparing soup. In a twilight made duskier by the clouds that now covered the sky she seemed strangely insubstantial, a gray slow-moving apparition.
As the boy entered the shanty the snow began to fall.
The old man sat on the quilts, leaning back against the cart and sipping from a bowl. He squinted at the boy across the rim of the bowl and shivered.
“You were gone a long time.”
“I walked to the place of the foreigners.”
“Dangerous to go too far alone.” He sipped from the bowl. “Uncle said even a hunter should not go off too far alone. Is the smoke gone?”
“Yes.”
“I cannot endure the stink.”
The woman entered with the pot of rice soup.
“It is snowing. We will eat inside.”
“We need meat,” the old man said sullenly.
The woman did not respond and offered the rice to the ghosts of the mound. She heard clearly the cries of the ghosts alone on the plain in the wind and snow. Homeless, wandering.