Memory Wall

by Anthony Doerr

  We stand on opposite sides of the kitchen island. Pop colors with oil pastels at the table. She asks, “What are you going as?”

  “You actually think I’d go to that party?” I imagine the boyfriend, waiting for her at his condo: He’ll dress up as a vampire, maybe, or an axe-murderer, something involving fake blood.

  “Let me see a letter,” she says.

  “Maybe you should get going,” I say.

  “Just show me one letter. Christ. He’s my son, too.”

  I bring her one from August. I know what it says: I think of Grandpop out there in the mud, carrying a full load, the hills lit with artillery. I want to ask him: Grandpop, were you scared? Did you take a single minute for granted?

  She looks up. “You’re not going to let me see a new one?”

  “That is a new one.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Davis.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  She shakes her head and swears. Pop makes small blue circles, slowly filling the body of a cartoon jack-o’-lantern.

  “You know,” she says, “this little bleeding-martyr thing you’re doing is wearing me out.”

  They’re real estate agents, my wife and he. I found them in the worst, most hackneyed way: in his Chevy Tahoe, in the parking lot of the Sun Valley Lodge. I was driving past and saw her truck (next to his) and thought I’d stop to ask what she wanted for dinner.

  She moved out the next week. That was in July. Our son still doesn’t know.

  Mom & Dad: Today I was in the fore bunker when a flock of gulls—a thousand of them at least—came wheeling out of the mist, so low I could see individual feathers in their wings. It took a couple of minutes for them to pass over me. Maybe it was the diarrhea pills, or the silence of the morning, but I felt invisible out there, like a ghost, those birds sailing over me like they’ve probably sailed over this spot for millions of years, their eyes registering me as no more important than a stump, a patch of dirt. I thought: They are more involved in the world than I will ever be.

  It’s snowing now, back at the garrison, and everything is gray and dismal. Behind me, toward Seoul, I can see a line of taillights fading all the way down the highway.

  I buy him books on birds and Asian mammals and wrap them in Christmas paper and ship them out. At night I dream: tiger tracks in the snow—a thousand birds spilling over trees. Asiatic bears, Amur leopards. Above and to both sides is thick netting. I wake thinking: We are all animals, pacing a hallway, sea-to-sea.

  On Thanksgiving I go out after Pop is tucked in and walk the cold, brilliant road over the saddle toward the Big Wood Condos where she and the boyfriend live. His place is on the first floor, backed against the sage, and I leave the road and climb well above it until I can descend through the darkness and peer through his patio door.

  They’re around a big table with some others: his family maybe. He’s wearing a cashmere vest. She waves a wineglass as she talks. Her pants are shiny and gold; I’ve never seen them before. On the counter behind them sits a ravaged turkey.

  He says something, she throws back her face and laughs, laughing hard and genuine, and I watch them a bit longer before I retreat, back through the moonlight, the way I came.

  Mom, Dad: There are rumors again that the North has made a bomb. Everyone is a little more tense, dropping things, yelling at each other. From Gamma Post I used to watch the skyline of Kaesong through a range finder—I could see the roof of a temple, three smokestacks, one cement building. Roads winding in and out. But nothing: no one. No smoke lifting from the stacks, no cars winding up the roads.

  Ahn comes to see me in the field clinic and asks why I am here and I say because I have parasites in my intestines, and he says, no, why in Korea. I think a bit and then say to serve my country. He groans and shakes his head. He says he’s here because he has to give three years of service or they’ll kill him.

  The first Saturday in December I strap Pop into snowshoes and we go up into the hills with a treesaw and a plastic toboggan. The snow is already deep in places and Pop founders a bit but he does well: His heart is as strong as ever. Halfway up the valley below Proctor Mountain, high above the golf course mansions, we find a tree that is about right and I clear the snow from its base and cut it down.

  Later, as I drag it home through the snow, the toboggan tips on a slope and the tree rolls off. I turn, but before I can even take a step, Pop has gone to his knees and wrestled it back onto the sled and lashed it down with a piece of cord he must have had in his coat pocket. As if he understood—as if he, too, didn’t want to see this one particular tradition fail.

  I’m in the crawlspace going through boxes when I realize she has taken all the ornaments.

  On the tenth of December I get this:

  Dad: Yesterday morning I was out of my cot, looking out the window, when two cranes came soaring out of the DMZ, as silent as gods. They were maybe forty feet away when one hit a communication wire and went down, cartwheeling. I couldn’t believe how fast it fell. The wires shook and trembled. The sound was like a bundle of sticks getting crushed. The bird lay there on the pavement squirming a bit.

  I watched it for maybe three minutes and it didn’t stop squirming and no one came by. Finally I pulled on my boots and went out.

  The crane was maybe five feet tall. Its beak was working back and forth, like it was chewing, but the top portion no longer matched up with the bottom portion. I think part of it was paralyzed because its legs didn’t move.

  Its partner flapped down from a tree and watched me from a Dumpster like some ancient white monk. I crouched over the wounded one for maybe five minutes. It was working its huge beak and its eyes were panicking and only one Jeep passed in all that time and the other bird just watched me from the Dumpster.

  You’ll think I’m crazy but I picked the crane up. It weighed more than you’d think a bird would, maybe twenty pounds. I was worried it would fight but it just lay limp in my arms, watching me. It smelled like the rice paddies do here, like slugs and snails. I carried it across the road, past the first post and to Ahn, who was just finishing his watch in Delta Tower. “Ahn,” I said, “what can I do with this?” But he just looked at the bird and looked at me and would not touch it. While we were standing there the crane died—its eye stopped moving, and I could feel something go out of it. Ahn looked at me a minute, and opened the gate and without quite knowing what I was doing, I carried the bird out past the wire into the DMZ.

  I stopped maybe three hundred yards out, beneath a scrubby patch of oak. There are mines all over the place that far out and I couldn’t bring my feet to go any farther. Across the way the forest was still and dark.

  The ground was frozen, but if you want to dig a hole, I guess, you can always dig one. I set the crane in and kicked dirt over it and covered it up.

  Unauthorized Absence, AWOL, I know. I was so scared of mines that after I got it buried I didn’t move much. It was cold. I watched the blank face of the forest to the North.

  The ROK came after me about twenty minutes later. They had dogs. I am lucky, I guess, that they didn’t shoot. There was a lot of shouting and rifle-cocking and writing things down on clipboards. I don’t know what will happen: They say court martial but the Doc tells me not to sweat it. As I write now the loudspeakers start up, metallic and loud. I miss Idaho; I miss mom.

  I dial the only number I have for Camp Red Cloud, in Uijongbu, South Korea, and a night sergeant tells me to wait and comes back and says I should try next week sometime. I stare at our wispy, illegal tree in the corner; it is already losing needles. I take one of Pop’s coloring books, a Christmas one, and cut out the pictures he has finished. A blue reindeer, an orange Joseph, a green infant Jesus: all meticulously colored. With tape I fix them to the branches: shepherds there, Mary here. I give Jesus the top.

  The next afternoon I get this:

  Dad: Do you remember Grandpop’s job at the tree farm? Near Boardman? All those poplars. I remember driving the service roads with him on a four
-wheeler. What was I, seven? Grandpop drove fast, acre after acre of poplars going past on both sides, and I remember that as I looked down the rows, for a half-second I could see all the way to the back of the farm, maybe a mile deep, to a pocket of light—like a distant grove, almost imaginary—and it would flash each time at the end of every row, long lines of white trunks whisking by between, and that light repeating at the back, like one of those flip-books where you flip the pages and make a horse look like it’s running.

  They have IVs in my arms. The diarrhea is awful; I can feel everything flowing out. Giardia lamblia, Doc tells me. When it gets very bad it’s a feeling like watching those poplars of Grandpop’s rush past, and that light at the end repeating like that.

  There won’t be a court martial, anything like that. Word is they’ll send me home. Ahn will be okay, too—his sergeant likes birds.

  It is a day before the solstice, and just after dark, when the phone rings and my son is on the other end. Already I can feel the tears starting, somewhere in the backs of my eyes. “Day after tomorrow,” he says, and all I can think of is Christmas morning, and his mother, how she used to sit on the stairs, looking down at the tree, waiting for us to wake up so we could start in on the gifts.

  “About Mom,” I say, but he has already hung up. Upstairs I get the shoebox of letters and tie it shut with ribbon. I put Pop in his coat and gloves, and together we leave the house and climb toward the saddle.

  The snow falls softly, just enough to carry a little light in it. Pop climbs steadily, stepping in my footprints.

  At the Big Wood Condos we walk to the end of the first floor. I listen a moment—it is quiet—and leave the shoebox at the door.

  Then we turn, climb back to the saddle, and make the top of the hill, our breath standing out in front of us. From there we can see the lights of Ketchum below: the dark spread of the golf course, the Christmas lights along the fence into town, the headlights of snowcats roving the flanks of the ski mountain, packing the snow in—and the town itself, twinkling in the valley, the little roof of our house small among the snowy rooftops, and all the mountains of Idaho beyond it. Somewhere, above it all, our boy is crossing over the ocean, coming home.

  Village 113

  THE DAM

  The Village Director stands under an umbrella with the façade of the Government House dripping behind him. The sky is a threadbare curtain of silver. “It’s true,” he says. “We’ve been slated for submergence. Property will be compensated. Moving expenses will be provided. We have eleven months.” Below him, on the bottom stair, his daughters hug their knees. Men shuffle in their slickers and murmur. A dozen gulls float past, calling to one another.

  On project maps, amidst tangles of contour lines, the village is circled with a red submergence halo scarcely bigger than a speck of dust. Its only label is a number.

  One-one-three, one-thirteen, one plus one plus three is five. The fortune-teller crouches in her stall and shakes pollen across a field of numbers. “I see selfishness,” she says. “I see recompense. The chalice of ecstasy. The end of the world.”

  Far-off cousins from other river towns, already relocated, send letters testifying to the good life. Real schools, worthwhile clinics, furnaces, refrigerators, karaoke machines. Resettlement districts have everything the villages do not. Electricity is available twenty-four hours a day. Red meat is everywhere. You will leapfrog half a century, they write.

  The Village Director donates kegs; there’s a festival. Generators rumble on the wharf and lights burn in the trees and occasionally a bulb bursts and villagers cheer as smoke ascends from the branches.

  The dam commission tacks photos of resettlement districts to the walls of the Government House—two girls ride swings, pigtails flying; models in khaki lean on leather furniture and laugh. The river bottled, a caption says, the nation fed. Why wait? Farmers on their way back from market pause, rest their empty baskets across their shoulders, and stare.

  QUESTIONS

  Teacher Ke shakes his cane at passersby; his coat is a rag, his house a shed. He has lived through two wars and a cultural purge and the Winter of Eating Weeds. Even to the oldest villagers Teacher Ke is old: no family, no teeth. He reads three languages; he has been in the gorges, they say, longer than the rocks.

  “They spread a truckload of soil in the desert and call it farmland? They take our river and give us bus tickets?”

  The seed keeper keeps her head down. She thinks of her garden, the broad heads of cabbages, the spreading squash. She thinks of the seeds in her shop: pepper seeds, cream and white; kurrat seeds, black as obsidian. Seeds in jars, seeds in funnels, seeds smaller than snowflakes.

  “Aren’t you betrayed?” the schoolteacher calls after her. “Aren’t you angry?”

  OCTOBER

  Blades of light slip between clouds; the air smells of flying leaves, rain, and gravel. Farmers drag out their wagons for harvest. Orchardists stare gray-eyed down their rows of trees.

  The dam has been whispered about for years: an end to flooding in the lower reaches, clean power for the city. Broken lines, solid lines, a spring at the center of every village—wasn’t all this foretold in the oldest stories? The rivers will rise to cover the earth, the seas will bloom, mountains become islands; the word is the water and the earth is the well. Everything rotates back to itself. In the temple such phrases are carved above the windows.

  The seed keeper ascends the staircases, past women yoked with firewood, past the porters in their newspaper hats, past the benches and ginkgo trees in the Park of Heroes, onto the trails above the village. Soon forest closes around her: the smell of pine needles, the roar of air. Above are cliffs, tombs, caves walled in with mud.

  Here, a thousand years ago, monks lashed themselves to boulders. Here a hunter stood motionless sixteen winters until his toes became roots and his fingers twigs.

  Her legs are heavy with blood. Below, through branches, she can see a hundred huddled rooftops. Beyond them is the river: its big, sleek bend, its green and restless face.

  LI QING

  After midnight the seed keeper’s only son appears in her doorway. He wears huge eyeglasses; a gold-papered cigarette is pinched between his lips.

  He lives two hundred miles downriver in the city and she has not seen him in four years. His forehead is shinier than she remembers and his eyes are damp and rimmed with pink. In one hand he extends a single white peony.

  “Li Qing.”

  “Mother.”

  He’s forty-four. Stray hairs float behind his ears. Above his collar his throat looks as if it is made of soft, pale dough.

  She puts the peony in a jar and serves him noodles with ginger and leeks. He eats carefully and delicately. When he finishes he sips tea with his back completely straight.

  “First-rate,” he says.

  Outside a dog barks and falls quiet and the air in the room is warm and still. The bottles and sachets and packets of seeds are crowded around the table and their odor—a smell like oiled wood—is suddenly very strong.

  “You’ve come back,” she says.

  “For a week.”

  A pyramid of sugar cubes rises slowly in front of him. The lines in his forehead, the sheen on his ears—in his nervous, pale fingers she sees his boyhood fingers; where his big, round chin tucks in against his throat, she sees his chin as a newborn—blood whispering down through the years.

  She says, “Those are new glasses.”

  He nods and pushes them higher on his nose. “Some of the other guards, they make fun. They say: ‘Don’t make spectacles of yourself, Li Qing,’ and laugh and laugh.”

  She smiles. Out on the river a barge sounds its horn. “You can sleep here,” she says, but her son is already shaking his head.

  SURVEY

  All the next day Li Qing walks the staircases talking to villagers and writing numbers in a pad. Surveying, he says. Assessing. Children trail him and collect the butts of his cigarettes and examine the gold paper.

 
Again he does not appear in her doorway until close to midnight; again he eats like an aging prince. She finds imperfections she didn’t notice the day before: a fraying button thread, a missed patch of whiskers. His glasses are cloudy with smudges. A grain of rice clings to his lower lip and she has to restrain herself from brushing it free.

  “I’m walking around,” he says, “and I’m wondering: How many plants—how much of the structure of this village—came from your seeds? The rice stubble, the fields of potatoes. The beans and lettuce the farmers bring to market, their very muscles. All from your seeds.”

  “Some people still keep their own seeds. In the old days there was not even a need for a seed keeper. Every family stored and traded their own.”

  “I mean it as a compliment.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  He jogs a pencil up and down in his shirt pocket. The lantern is twinned in his glasses. When he was a boy he would fall asleep with a math book beneath his cheek. Even then his hair was the color of shadows and his pencils were cratered with teethmarks. She marvels at how having her son at her table can be a deep pleasure and at the same time a thorn in her heart.

  The lantern sputters. He lights a cigarette.

  “You are here to see how we feel about the dam,” she says. “No one cares. They only want to know who will get the biggest resettlement check.”

  His index finger makes small circles on the table. “And you? Do you care?”

  Out the window a rectangle of paper, a letter, or a page of a book, spins past, blowing up the street and hurtling out over the roof toward the river. She thinks of her mother, cleaving melons with her knife—the wet, shining rind, the sound of yielding as the hemispheres came apart. She thinks of water closing over the backs of the two stone lions in the Park of Heroes. She does not answer.