Snow Hunters: A Novel

by Yoon, Paul

  They sat high in the bleachers, Peixe insisting, and they looked out over the field and followed the bright glow of uniforms.

  Most of the people who had once lived in the settlement were gone. He knew that some of the fishermen had formed a village near a small bay but that was all. He did not know where the rest had gone, did not know whether they had stayed as a group or had scattered, moving across this country or even farther, across oceans.

  He thought of the blind juggler who tossed hats and shoes. He thought of a boy with an imaginary spyglass, facing the coast. A girl’s lips brushing his ear as she spoke. The touch of a hand against his own.

  He hoped that wherever they all were, their lives were how they wished it to be.

  A goal was scored. Peixe stood, lifting his cane and shouting, and Yohan joined him.

  In this way the days passed. Those days became years. Those years a life. In the evenings he climbed the old stairs into his room. Standing by the window, he pressed a cold washcloth against his neck. A fan spun. He listened to music coming from the nightclub. An airplane. The voice of the woman across the street.

  16

  One summer the bell above the shop door rang once and stopped. He had just opened the shop and it was empty. From his worktable he looked up.

  He saw a girl with a hand in the air, her fingers closing over the bell, muting the sound. She had a small nose and a pointed chin and her hair was pale and cut short like a boy’s.

  She was wearing a pair of sandals and a green dress that ended at her shins. The shoulder straps were thin but sturdy and there were buttons on the ends. He appreciated the simplicity of the design and the simplicity of her form there by the door, this shadowed pose, that arc of her arm and her on her tiptoes.

  He waited for her to say something, to explain herself, but she didn’t. She stood transfixed by the bell. Then she released it and pushed it with her fingertips, causing the ringing once more. Not once did her eyes leave the bell, as if she were waiting for it to fall. She brought both of her hands toward her ears.

  —Is it a bother? he finally said.

  He spoke in Portuguese.

  She shook her head. She pointed out the window. She said the other day she could hear it from the street. She said it sounded new. She liked the way the sound touched her skin.

  —Like this, she said, and shook her hands beside her head and made a buzzing noise with her lips.

  —Yes, he said, and laughed and she laughed, too.

  She had not moved from the door. The light was clear and strong outside and she was still a silhouette. Then she turned toward him and approached and they looked at each other for a moment.

  He lowered his head. When he glanced at her she was looking around at the boxes and the tables and the fabrics against the walls and the shirts wrapped in paper. He noticed a bracelet on her wrist; it was made of colored threads, old, simple, and elegant.

  She approached the tailor’s dummy and examined the stitches on its stomach. She looked beyond him toward the curtain. There was a familiarity to her that he could not place.

  —You’ve been here long? she said.

  She meant the shop. Her voice was quiet, deliberate. She stood beside the tailor’s dummy, facing the window with her hands behind her back. The air was still. Pedestrians walked by and their shadows cut through the shop.

  Her short hair was wet. It was the color of the morning and she smelled of the ocean.

  He shrugged, even though she could not see him. He did not know if nine years was a long time or not.

  She smiled, sliding her fingernails along her forearms.

  —It’s nice, she said, and he looked away again at the things she saw and the quiet and the light and he could not help but agree, it was nice at this hour and the many other hours and days; and he felt the pride of that, those words and this shop, and knew that he was blushing although he did not think she noticed, she was now looking up at the ceiling, at the small spider in the air.

  Beside the tailor’s dummy stood an umbrella, closed and leaning against the corner of the room. She picked it up and twirled it once in her hands.

  She smiled again.

  She said, —I’ll take it back now, and he looked at her, perplexed, and then he felt a weight on his tongue; then his heart.

  He sat there, stunned. He was unable to speak, unable to rise from his chair.

  She laughed.

  —Okay, she said. You keep it for a while longer.

  She returned the umbrella to its corner and looked at him once more. She was still smiling. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, studying him, waiting.

  —Yohan, she said, and in that moment he heard the remnant of a child’s voice that used to call his name.

  Before he could respond she abruptly turned and opened the door, the bell ringing as she returned to the sidewalk.

  He rushed outside. He was flooded by the heat and the daylight. He squinted, lifting a hand. But what had driven him slipped away and he stopped. A doubt had entered him. And he grew afraid, although what he was afraid of he was unsure.

  He remained by the shop window. A neighbor greeted him. He spotted the green of her dress against the pale of the buildings and watched as she moved in and out of the crowd and the sunlight. He followed the curve of her bare shoulders. The beat of her sandals on the cobblestone. Then she was gone.

  • • •

  He began to look for her but did not know where to begin, searching the town for someone he had not seen in five years. In some ways he did not know whom to look for, his mind returning to the girl she was. He visited Peixe in case he had seen her but the groundskeeper mentioned nothing and Yohan said nothing either, keeping her arrival within him.

  It seemed possible that he had been wrong, that there had been some kind of misunderstanding in the words she had said in the shop, that it was not her voice he had heard, that it was someone else.

  Then a few days later the bell rang, the door opened, and she stood in the same place as she did the first time. She kept silent and from his worktable he watched her.

  —Okay, she said, worrying her fingers as if she wanted to say something else or was waiting for him to say something.

  She looked around at the shop as she did before and hurried out the door.

  She did not visit again until the next day. This time she stayed. She was wearing her green dress and her sandals and she remained standing at a distance from him. She had combed her short hair. She fiddled with her bracelet and he wondered if she had woven it or had purchased it or whether someone had given it to her. Her movements in the shop were awkward, as though she was no longer used to small spaces. He brought her tea.

  That first week Bia never stayed long, her visits still unexpected. He never knew what to say when she came. He waited for her to tell him where she was staying but she didn’t. He waited for her to tell him what her life had been like these past five years.

  When he asked where she had been she replied, —All over, and said nothing else.

  It had always been like this. The hour passed in the only way they knew how. But now, in their reticence and their shyness, they were remembering each other. As if they were each a lens to hold and peer into.

  In this way an ease began to form around them.

  —I’ll see you soon, she always said, whenever they parted.

  He was never sure if he would see her the following the day or the week after or whether this was the last time.

  But she continued to come. Sometimes she visited in the mornings. Other times in the afternoons and there were also times when she waited outside until he noticed her in the window, leaning against Kiyoshi’s bicycle, which she had kept all these years.

  She was twenty-four now. And every day she sat where Kiyoshi once did, curled on the chair and drinking tea. If he had clothes to tailor, she let him work and watched the passing pedestrians.

  And although there were days when she seemed to be how he remember
ed her, she had become more confident and assured, he heard it when she spoke, that change in her voice now that she was older. When customers entered she greeted them, complimenting the women on the dresses they wore or the men on their suits, and they looked at her with curiosity, wondering who she was.

  They only ever saw each other in the shop. She shut her eyes against the sunlight, tilting her head to one side as she often did, a gesture he would grow accustomed to and then expect, and then love her for it, her body moving as though some part of her he had not yet seen was suddenly revealed.

  But there were also times when he was unable to move, unable to look at her, afraid he had been imagining this and that she wouldn’t be there. It seemed possible. And when he considered this an emptiness overwhelmed him, as if he were no longer here, that there was just this shell of a body bent over a table. And even as he continued to hear her behind him he felt a sadness, though for what he could not say. It seemed to have nothing to do with her at all but rather a fragment of some old thought.

  But she was there of course, she had not left. She stood by the far wall, holding her elbows and browsing the shelves as though she had entered a library.

  • • •

  Once, as he was hemming a pair of trousers, he heard her rummaging in the closet. Then it was silent and when he looked toward the back of the shop she was gone.

  She emerged from the kitchen a few minutes later, through the curtain, wearing a suit. It was gray, one Kiyoshi had made for him. She wore a hat with a short brim and it fell past her eyes. A dark blue necktie hung around her neck.

  —Help, she said.

  The jacket was large for her, its shoulders too wide, but he spun her around, admiring her. Holding her, he walked her toward the window and she stood there looking out, the hat tilted on her head. The passersby paused, waiting to see if she would move.

  She didn’t. She stayed there frozen in a pose. Later, she changed into a dress Yohan had made and returned to the window. The neighborhood children gathered on the street and waved their arms to distract her. Every so often she winked at them or leaned forward and shouted, —Boo! and they scattered in mock terror.

  She began to assist him. She came early, bringing fruit and cookies, and rushed across the room to make coffee, her bare feet light over the floor. She accompanied him on his deliveries, waiting on the sidewalk as he entered a building.

  At the shop she wrapped the tailored clothes and dusted the shelves, following the perimeter of the room. She stood by Yohan’s side with a notebook while he measured a man for a suit.

  When the shop was closed they spent hours listening to the radio, tuning in to a station that played French songs, Bia tapping her feet and mumbling along, practicing the language. Or they listened to the news, the murmur of a man’s voice filling the room as he spoke of the cities, other countries.

  Each day for an hour in the afternoon she sat in front of Kiyoshi’s sewing machine and Yohan would peer over her shoulder as she chewed on her tongue and practiced stitches on the spare pieces of fabric he had given her.

  He wondered what Kiyoshi would have thought of her there at his worktable. It had never occurred to him until recently that he had been the tailor’s first and only apprentice. And to this day he did not know why the man had taken him, did not know whether Kiyoshi had volunteered or whether he had accepted a proposal that had been offered.

  In that first year he woke one night to Kiyoshi shaking him, unaware that in his sleep he had been screaming. He was unable to focus; his eyes had lost clarity. His clothes were wet. Kiyoshi took him into his arms and lifted him. He drew water for a bath and brought the shop’s footstool and sat beside the tub, pouring the warm water over Yohan and scrubbing his back. He had sat in the water hugging his knees, unwilling to let go of Kiyoshi’s hand.

  He wondered if his life now would seem as far away as so many of the years did. It seemed impossible to him, watching her hunched over the table in her green dress, sewing.

  One day she brought him a roll of fabric, carrying it on her shoulder. Yohan held the door open as she pushed through the entrance, her body damp with sweat.

  —They were just throwing it away, she said. At the textile factory. It is new, no? The building. There’s more if you want. I could only carry one. Good stuff, no?

  She wiped her face with her forearms. She slapped the fabric and dust burst over her and she shrieked and Yohan, laughing, ran into the kitchen, soaking a hand towel under the faucet.

  When he returned she was sitting down. Standing above her, he wiped the dust from her skin. He started with her face and then moved the towel over her shoulders and her hands.

  They did not speak. He felt her watching him. Her fingers were calloused. Dirt was buried under her fingernails. He flattened her palms. With his index finger he followed the lines on her skin. She tilted her head and let him.

  Later that day he shut his eyes, enjoying the sun in the room. A shadow passed. He heard movement but kept his eyes closed. Slowly, she slipped her hand through his hair. She traced the outline of his crooked nose and the scar. She placed her lips against his eyelid. Then, releasing him, she moved to his other eye. The gesture was light, almost hesitant. He felt her breath on his forehead.

  How completely time could abandon someone. How far it could leap. He heard the bell chime and opened his eyes.

  17

  In the late evening she circled the street on her bicycle, a carousel moving in and out of the streetlights.

  —Yohan! she called, and he leaned out of his room, raised a finger to his lips, and hurried through the shop.

  She followed him past the curtain in the doorway and up the stairs. She had never been up here before. She paused by his room, her eyes exploring the space, and then she continued to follow the stairs, heading up to the rooftop.

  The night was clear and warm. He turned the chairs over and they sat beside each other, resting their feet on the rooftop’s edge. Somewhere a trumpet was playing.

  The world had softened, its edges vanishing. They found the few windows that were still lit. They pointed at one and then another, and they imagined lives. He imagined everyone that had been a part of his own behind each square, that they had always been there, in rooms not far from him.

  He heard Bia say, —Oh.

  Then the sound of something hitting the street. She lifted her feet and he saw that she was missing a sandal.

  They peered down over the roof. Her sandal lay on the sidewalk, caught in the glare of a streetlamp. They waited to see if anyone came but no one did. The street remained empty. They kept watching the sandal as though it would come to life.

  Her hands and her wrists hovered over the edge of the roof and he tried to recall whether that part of her had changed. He thought of the child that she was and tried to find her in the woman he saw now. He thought of her carrying Santi and the two of them sitting all day with patience at the market, selling their bracelets.

  And he thought of how it came to be that he was here on this rooftop in this town, in this country, with Bia, who had resurfaced into his life. He wondered if she had come here before and they had missed each other. And again he wondered what these past years had been like for her, what she had seen and what she had left, what she was expecting to find here by coming back, if she was expecting anything at all.

  They continued to lean against the rooftop’s edge. The air had cooled. Moonlight had settled on the rooftops of the town.

  —One morning I woke up, she said, and I remembered you. Just like that. Maybe you were in my dream.

  Her voice had slowed. She was staring at the few remaining window lights with her head resting on her hands. In the sky a small shadow flew over a television antenna.

  —Just like that, she said. All these years later. I remembered you standing there in the rain on the dock with a bag over your shoulder. And I remembered you looked very tired and sad with your old man’s suit and crooked nose and your short hair. And I rememb
ered giving the sailor my blue umbrella to give to you and you holding it, unsure of how to use it. And then you waved to the sailors who were unloading their cargo and you placed a hand to your chest as though you were praying or sighing or frightened. And I saw the days here. I saw Santi and Kiyoshi. And I saw you on that hill, waiting for me with a bicycle and a child’s coat. I thought of the war that you survived but that stayed in your voice and your steps. And I thought of those years that I had carried but had not seen in a long time.

  —So I stood. I ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of water. I combed my hair and dressed. Then I got on the bicycle and rode, wondering where you, Yohan, had gone.

  • • •

  Bia fell asleep on the rooftop that night. She slept on the chair, leaning against the edge of the roof. For a while he stayed with her and then he slipped his hands under her arms and lifted her.

  He crossed the rooftop. He carried her down the steps into the kitchen. He opened the door to the room there and laid her on the cot. He pulled a blanket over her but changed his mind. She was warm. He unclasped her sandal and placed it on the floor. She lay on her side, asleep, and he moved his hand over her hair, once, still unused to its short length.

  He hurried into the shop, passing her bicycle, and went outside to retrieve her other sandal.

  It was late, the street quiet. He stood there on the sidewalk and faced the tailor’s shop. In the window glass he could see the building behind him, its open balcony doors. Above that the moon.

  He looked down and saw himself. His reflection vague and his hand holding a sandal. He and his father used to cut each other’s hair. They used to scatter the clumps and the strands throughout the woods for the birds to use as nests.

  He thought of how long ago that was. How he used to believe nests became trees.

  18

  He woke the next day to find Kiyoshi’s room empty. The bed had been made, the sheets tucked, and the blanket folded. He leaned against the doorway. A fly circled the corner of the ceiling. He looked around at the nightstand, the photograph, the chest of clothes, and the slippers under the bed. He looked down at the mattress one more time to see if her shape was still visible.