The Mountain

by Paul Yoon

  It is odd that the brothers’ own shanty hasn’t been painted. It is bare, just the colors of the wood and the metal they have found for it. As though some personal seed of belief has escaped Emil. He can do what someone else wants but he can’t do the same for himself. Or perhaps he doesn’t know what he himself wants. Perhaps he wouldn’t know what to paint. Mikel understands that.

  Did you hear the explosion? Artur says.

  His brother doesn’t answer.

  Testing, Artur says, his mouth full of bread.

  Mikel imagines the life Emil once had. What his days were like. What kind of paintings he did. Whether there are paintings of his somewhere on a wall or in a vault or buried in a pile of other things forgotten. Or whether they were discarded or burned. He wonders if he will ever see one. He wonders what it means for someone to be a painter. What it takes for someone to stop doing the thing he has always done.

  Mikel has done nothing special. This doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t know if it should. It was a life. He moved with his parents. He harvested flowers with them. Worked the Basque farms. He was good at finding things his mother misplaced. A mirror. A brush. As a child he knelt by the river once, pointed, thought he had found the actual moon.

  Mikel is tired. He has done nothing today and yet he is tired. He watches as the brothers rest their heads against each other, grateful to be together again. The sudden physical intimacy tears something in Mikel. He looks down the path. He catches the dog moving in between shacks. The clatter of beads someone has hung outside their entrance. Calais in the distance and the curve of the moon. Briefly the smell of the coast. He never imagined he would live in northern France.

  He thanks them for the food and stands. Artur whistles as he leaves. Mikel turns, glimpsing the crushed can in the air, and reaches out to catch it.

  Good night, Mikel says. See you tomorrow, good night.

   •

  His shanty stands farther down the path. It has been painted blue, a blue that he cannot see in the evening. He lifts aside the wood plank he has been using for a door. There is very little inside. There are a few blankets, a deck of playing cards he had gotten from a tinker, when his parents had stopped to help the man fix a wheel. He had told his parents to pick whatever they wanted and they had let Mikel choose.

  He could have picked something useful to them—a pan, a ball of thread, winter socks—but he picked the cards. He had never seen their design before. They were from Germany. Some missionaries had brought them. The tinker didn’t know more than that, didn’t know if they were called anything different or what kind of games you played with them.

  In the shanty he lies down and opens the frayed case that still carries the cards. He looks at the illustrations of the drummers and the knights. He counts the cards knowing he is missing one, has been missing one for many years. He tries to make his list again of all the things he wouldn’t do. He listens to the people still awake in the shantytown. Someone’s radio.

  He should have picked something useful. When the tinker had asked. But he picked these cards and his parents didn’t mind. Didn’t mind even when they could have used those winter socks. They brought the cards wherever they went and invented their own games and rules of play. The Flying Horseshoe. The King of the Woods. The Divine Palace. The Horse and the Moon. They played when they could, the three of them.

  One evening on a flower farm in the southern French mountains he woke to find his parents had fallen asleep together sitting against the trunk of a tree. It was summer and beautiful and they had been delaying heading inside. Above them on a low branch hung a wind chime. His parents’ heads were bowed and their hands were trembling as though they were still picking flowers together. As though they were conversing in their dreams.

  These two people in his life who could be as private as a tunnel.

  They had been playing cards. Some had slipped from their fingers and scattered. So Mikel walked the field, looking for as many as he could in the grass. The wind chime clattered. He kept the melody in his periphery as he searched. He never found them all. When he returned he sat down near them, to be with them, and his father stirred. He knew it was him, not his mother. But Mikel didn’t turn. He didn’t know why but he didn’t turn. He stayed facing the farm and his father moved over to him, lay down, pressed his head in the space between Mikel’s shoulders, and fell back asleep there.

  He thought of how his father never did this again. Of the soft weight of his father on his back. He thought he would like to find that farm again. That field of flowers. That constant melody in the night air. Was it a fragment of a song?

  Mikel catches music coming from a distant shanty. Someone passes his door. And then someone else. Like the shadows of a carousel. And then there is nothing, only the spaces in the walls where the moonlight enters.

   •

  The next day a truck pulls up to the spot. It is an old military pickup truck though it could be anyone. In Calais they are everywhere, the abandoned American and British automobiles that civilians took for themselves. They are in the streets downtown, in the fields, along the river where Mikel is. They are painted over if paint is available or they are covered with tape or anything else, their disguise so crude and makeshift at times you wonder why they cover the markings at all. No one cares.

  On this truck, Sunshine Clearance is written on a piece of cardboard glued to the side of the door.

  There are only five on the bench. It is just before dawn and not everyone has arrived. But they all stand and approach. They haven’t seen the two men already on the flatbed. They were lying down, napping, but get up now to look around, their eyes taking in the river as though they have never seen it.

  Then a man rolls down the passenger-side window and points at Artur, who is the youngest.

  Can you walk? the man says.

  He doesn’t understand the question.

  Of course I can walk, Artur says.

  Distances. Slopes. Higher altitude. Good lungs?

  Artur flicks the cigarette he was smoking onto the road.

  Great, he says.

  The man seems to consider him. His accent.

  Russian?

  Romanian.

  Jew?

  Fuck if you care, Artur says, growing impatient.

  The man laughs. He looks over at the others. None of them can tell whom he is looking at because the man is wearing sunglasses. He is older and keeps the truck running.

  Today, you work until dark. But only half-day pay. Then if all goes okay you start again at dawn tomorrow. Full-day pay.

  Okay, Artur says.

  He reaches for the door but the man tells him to get in the back. The man studies the four remaining and points at Mikel.

  You, too.

  Mikel climbs in. The remaining three return to the bench and watch them go. They speed north along the river road and as they near the shantytown they pass the other men heading toward the bench. They recognize each other and wave. On the river a fishing vessel moves in the opposite direction. The moon is still out. The other two on the flatbed have gone back to sleep. Mikel smells wet leaves and urine. He helps Artur light a cigarette in the wind, both of them aware that the man never said what the work is. Then they are gone, past the shanties, farther into the countryside toward the mountains.

   •

  The day is starting and as the fog pulls away he sees more of the ruined landscape, the peaks and the bare slopes where trees have yet to grow again. He pulls up the collars of his coat as the wind grows louder. Artur doesn’t mind the wind. He leans back and shuts his eyes as though it is still summer.

  The truck turns onto a steep mountain road. The flatbed shakes and a metal tube slides out from underneath the tarp between them. Mikel lifts the corner but catches the man looking at them from the rearview. He recognizes what the tube is but doesn’t think of why it is there. He looks across at Artur and the other men but they all have their eyes closed, luxuriating now in the sudden morning light. F
or the first time he studies the faces of the two but he has never seen them before. They have beards and they dip their heads over the edge of the truck, exposing their pale throats.

  They enter a forest. The road narrows as they continue to climb. It grows dim again and then bright. They turn once more and follow a road that has the track marks of a tank still caked into the dirt. Someone has dropped sandbags to cover the holes in the road. A sign appears in both French and English but he doesn’t catch it. They pass another one. Two more. Now Mikel reads them. He leans over. So does Artur. They have yet to speak. They look at each other and then at the tarp by their feet and it is as though they are asking the other what to do but not knowing how.

  Up ahead, a tall mound of stones is blocking the road. The truck stops and the man tells them to pick up what is under the tarp and follow him. Mikel doesn’t have a watch but perhaps it has taken two hours to get here. The light is different here, in this forest. The tall trees severing daylight.

  As Artur lifts the tarp, Mikel looks back at the tank treads, something he hasn’t seen in a year. They are like fossils, the spines of dinosaurs. He thinks of the men he has seen over the years, sweeping the roads. There are six of them on the flatbed: metal detectors the Army had once used, old now, the grips frayed, the radios scratched up.

  He looks across the truck but the man with sunglasses and the other two have already vanished over the stone pile. He hears the man’s voice and he decides in that moment that he will run. He wants to but the man returns, showing them their payment and tells them to hurry. Artur jumps down. Artur doesn’t run. He climbs over the stones and then Mikel climbs, too, carrying two of the detectors and the radios, which are in canvas bags slung over his shoulder. There is a log just beyond, blocking the road again, and they are all waiting for him there.

  As Mikel approaches, he asks the man what the sign on the truck door means. Sunshine Clearance. He doesn’t understand.

  I think it’s funny, their new employer says, and takes a detector and a radio. We clear with a smile.

  The man smiles with great exaggeration.

  He tells them not to lift the coil but to keep it parallel to the ground. He shows them what sound they make through the radio, dropping a few nails and sweeping over them. He says all this very quickly and Mikel can tell Artur doesn’t understand everything. The man checks his watch and tosses them a bottle of talcum powder for their hands. The man is waiting for them to head in.

  Mikel knows now what happened to the tank. They can see it over the log farther down the forest road, under the bowing trees, emptied of itself and broken. Blood splatter is crusted on its shell, though he convinces himself it probably isn’t, that it is mud. A wind comes again. He thinks of the money and wants to step in but his body is unable to. His mouth has dried up. He holds his breath. The talcum feels like pinpricks on his fingertips. He understands what the sound was that he heard yesterday. He searches for a fresh crater. He cannot find it.

  Artur waits beside him. Mikel knows what they are about to do and he wants to go back to the bench on the river. To sit with the others. He wants this day to end. To walk back to his shanty. To start again tomorrow. He will find something else. He always has. He thinks if Artur ran right now he would, too. He thinks this, gripping the detector as a shadow traces the road. An airplane flies overhead.

  It’s simple, the man says, his voice softer and slower, as though he has done this many times before. They are only there to sweep and detect. That is all. Another team will come in for removal and clearance. He says words like this in a way that makes Mikel wonder if the man is a veteran, too.

  He will never see him again after today. He will never know a single thing about this man except he is the kind of person who thinks the words on his truck door are funny. Mikel doesn’t yet know that there is a market for undetonated mines in these years after the war. That there is a market for any weapon anyone can find. That you can make more money doing this than you ever had in your life.

  Years from now and far from here, Mikel will try to recall if he understood the insanity of the man who brought them to this forest. If he thought of this at all as they began to move across the two-kilometer road that was once used by loggers and miners and then later the Germans. If Mikel understood, it meant he didn’t care. Or it didn’t matter enough.

  Artur doesn’t run. Artur mutters a Romanian word and steps over the log first. Artur begins to sweep and the others follow. Mikel is the last to go. He still doesn’t believe he will even as he watches Artur move down the road, hears the man behind him say, Go.

  So Mikel steps in. He is over the log now. Past the signs. He takes another step and sweeps. He hears nothing. He has forgotten to turn the radio on. He stops to make sure it is buzzing and sweeps again, suddenly grateful for the powder that absorbs the moisture that has begun to seep from his palms.

  Another airplane flies overhead. The sound of it is shattering. It hooks his rib from the inside as though he is a fish and yanks. His legs clatter. The wind is so cold. He wants to scream. He thinks he will feel better if he screams. Perhaps in the momentary noise he does.

  He keeps track of Artur as though tethered to him. They are across from each other on the road, following the ditches. The others from the truck have already moved ahead of them. They have all been assigned areas, arbitrary distances the man decided on by pointing to a branch of a tree where the leaves have turned mustard colored. They are to start at the perimeter along the ditches and then circle in toward the center.

  Where has the man gone? He is perhaps behind them, waiting by the log. Mikel doesn’t turn. He looks down at his feet. At legs he believed were shaking but are still. As he moves forward he isn’t convinced he is sweeping but he is, he can see the coil gliding over the dirt and the grass. His own powdered fist. He passes an empty glass bottle in a ditch. A cluster of wildflowers. Then: the reflection of a small, bright object. He doesn’t wonder what it is. He thinks of a wristwatch his father used to wear. He wore it loose and Mikel would slip his fingers under the band whenever they walked together or slept in the freight car of a train as they traveled from one farm to another. The wristband was how his father taught him how to skate. They used to skate rivers in the winter, in the late night as people lit fires on the banks for them to see. The blue ice, their blue breaths, his fingers tucked under his father’s wristwatch as they glided.

  He thinks of rivers as he tracks Artur. Then trains. He would like to travel again. Perhaps it is time to move on, to somewhere else, wherever that may be. They never had a home. Home was a cart and two horses.

  He concentrates on the rhythm of the sweeping. He listens to the frequency of the radio and keeps going. He thinks only of the sweeping and the frequency. His breathing. The heavy sweeping. His palms begin to sweat. He calls for more talcum powder but the man doesn’t respond. He grips the handle harder and takes another step and another. Now he hears nothing in the cavern of the forest road. Nothing but his breathing.

  Artur and the man up ahead move along the perimeter toward the abandoned tank that is perhaps a year old, or older. Then Mikel sees the fresh crater. It is just beyond the tank: a pocket of dark, speckled earth. Artur sees it, too. And then Artur begins to cry. Mikel can hear him over the radio frequency. He can see Artur’s twisted face and sees that he is looking down the ditch on his side at something Mikel cannot make out.

  What is it? Mikel calls.

  The man up ahead stops and looks, too, though he keeps silent. Mikel doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t want to stop. He is afraid that if he does he will drop the equipment or fall or step out of the line he has been following. He keeps walking. He keeps walking and sweeping and he keeps looking at his feet. He leaves behind Artur, who is still crying, and he keeps moving. He thinks if he moves far enough away he will be back on the bench and this day will end. He hears Artur say, I don’t want to do this anymore.

  Farther in the distance there is a short, muted pop and its long
echo as the dirt of the forest road rises into the air, dimming the sky with particles of color. It is like a swarm of bees. It happens before he understands someone was standing there. That whoever it was has vanished.

  As he turns back toward Artur, who is still by that ditch, he sees another man drop his detector. And he hears shouting. And cursing. And then someone appears on the road, running, as he hears a new noise approaching him, covers his eyes, and feels, briefly, the sudden sway of trees.

   •

  Snowdrift has accumulated outside the hospital. New slopes have formed on the lawn. From the window Mikel watches an old woman take a tin tray and slide down a shallow hill, her legs in the air. She tumbles and rolls. Her gray hair unravels in the snow.

  He tries to place her among all the people who work here but she is too far and hidden by the collar of her coat. She lies there looking up, and Mikel follows her eyes. He sees nothing. Only the flat evenness of a thousand clouds.

  It is winter. January. He has watched the year pass learning how to walk again. Three months. Unaware of snow. Unaware of where he is. On this hill overlooking Calais and the sea. He wheeled himself out one day and stopped at the main doors, stunned by the height and the view. Construction cranes. The harbor. Ships and ferries sailing to and from England. He turned back in, not yet used to pushing himself with one hand.

  He has stayed away from the front doors since then. He keeps to the long ward, the curtains of privacy. The old bareness. The occasional sound of the old woman passing the window, sledding.

  He likes being alone. He tries to be alone here whenever he can. He wheels himself down the corridors and the other wings, exploring a building that survived shelling and mortar rounds seven years ago. All the dents in the walls. Strange mounds of powder that he thinks at first is snow only to see it is the dust of broken stones that have fallen. Windows are still waiting to be replaced. After the building was overrun it had turned into an outpost of some kind, because of its location on the hill. There are old German military maps on a shelf in an office with troop positions. He loves their intricacy: the draftsmanship and the detailed topography. He leans in, trying to remember if he was ever in one of those locations.