Snow Hunters: A Novel (14 page)

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

I
n 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 remembered 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.

H
e 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.

It was as though no one had stayed here at all. In the emptiness of the room he knew that she was gone again.

He left the shop, leaving the sign on the door how it was. It was a clear day. The stores were opening. Inside the bakery a line had already formed. Above him,
through the open balcony door, his neighbor watered plants while her husband turned the dial of a television.

He climbed the hill. He passed the church and entered the meadow, heading toward the ridge. He waited under the tree, scanning the coast and the farmlands where the horses were already grazing. The road was empty. He raised his hands above his eyes and kept waiting.

He did not hear the footsteps until they were near him. He turned to see Peixe breathing heavily from the climb. The man, dressed in a torn shirt, took his glasses off and wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

—There’s still some life in it, Peixe said, tapping his leg with his cane.

He took Peixe’s arm to help him sit but the groundskeeper shook his head. From his pocket he took out a spyglass.

—My mother’s, he said. She found it on the shore. Many years ago. A star in the sand, she called it. She picked it up and looked into it. She swiveled her body. In that circle she saw the silhouette of a man rowing toward her. A fisherman. She married him three months later.

—I used to stand here and use it to watch the camp, watch Kiyoshi tossing rocks into the air. Or look for my father. They fished along the coast. In the shallow water.
Shellfish. Sometimes I carry it with me all day. I don’t know why. Here. Try.

Yohan extended the spyglass and looked through the lens. He spotted seabirds on a tall boulder. The flag of the new hotel. The bright red of a T-shirt hanging on a rooftop clothesline.

Peixe tilted his head back and studied the tree.

—I have never climbed this tree, he said.

He rubbed his leg. He grinned. He took Yohan’s shoulder.

He said, —Help, and dropped his cane and leaned his weight against him.

Yohan, laughing, wrapped his arms around the man’s waist and lifted him as high as he could. Peixe reached for a branch. Yohan formed a step with his hands and soon the groundskeeper sat high in the tree.

Yohan picked up the cane and hooked it over a branch. He returned the spyglass and Peixe leaned back, shutting his eyes.

—Yohan, he said. Thank you. I’ll stay here for a while.

He didn’t know how Peixe would climb down. With his eyes still closed, Peixe tapped his arms.

—There’s still life in these, he said, and he waved and Yohan waved back.

He was halfway across the meadow when he heard again Peixe’s voice.

—Try the fishing village, he said.

A wind was blowing. In the distance, high up in the tree, he saw his friend raise the spyglass out toward the water.

•  •  •

He walked past the harbor and the ships, following the coastal road south. When he was away from the town he left the road and climbed down onto a beach. He continued along the sand, moving with the curve of the shore.

At the base of a high cliff there was a small bay and a cluster of homes beyond a grove. They were shanties and lean-tos with rooftops made of tin, thatch, and some scavenged tiles. Smoke rose from their thin flues.

Men and women appeared. They crossed through the grove and approached the dugout canoes on the beach. They passed him and some nodded as they leaned forward and gripped the canoes and pushed, the hulls cutting the sand.

Near the grove an open satchel was leaning against a log. He kneeled. A winter coat had been folded into it and he saw the worn collar and a frayed sleeve. The color
of the fabric had faded. He touched the coat and held the buttons with the anchors on them and he began to cry.

The villagers let him be. He wiped his face. He loosened his necktie and sat on the log beside the satchel.

Yohan spent the day there. He watched families head out into the sea while others returned. He listened to the swing of hinges, footsteps, and seabirds.

A man approached him, carrying a bundle of newspaper under his arm. He was tall and had long, pale hair. His hands were dark from ash. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, and offered the package to him. Inside there were six fish he had caught. Yohan shook his head, thanking him, and the man shrugged, placing the bundle into a basket.

In the afternoon, voices of children broke through the trees and they gathered around him, asking if he was the tailor and what he was doing here. They took turns examining his necktie and his jacket lying beside him.

A girl was carrying a soccer ball. Yohan took off his shoes and played soccer with the children on the beach. He ran. They chased him. They left a thousand footprints in the sand.

He helped a family build a fire. He returned to the log and shared his cigarettes with the villagers. A man, hesitating, brought him a shirt and a piece of string and
Yohan mended the tear. Then the man brought the clothes of his children and he mended those, too.

Toward the evening he saw a group of small dugout canoes approaching the bay. They came from the south, following the coast, scattered along the water.

Bia was among them. She was wearing a long-brimmed hat made of straw and had tied the skirt of her green dress around her legs. She paddled into the bay.

Around her, fishermen jumped into the water and pulled their canoes to shore. They carried their nets and their buckets of shellfish and climbed the beach toward their homes.

He approached her. He thought she would disembark as well but she stayed, sitting there in the boat as it rocked from the tide. The brim of her hat shaded her eyes so that he couldn’t tell where she was looking.

In that moment he wanted nothing more than to see her face.

—Well, come on then, she said, and lifted her hand.

For the first time he thought he heard an embarrassment in her voice. Suddenly she appeared small in the bay.

So he stepped into the water. He waded toward her and climbed into the canoe. He felt the cool and the damp of her hand as she guided him behind her.

His trousers were drenched. She smiled. She was holding a paddle made of tin and a broken broom handle. An empty bucket and a net lay beside her feet.

She tipped her hat back and paused, turning to him and looking down at her palms.

—Yohan, she said. I’m not very good at this.

She fell silent. The sounds of the village came to them and the girl with the soccer ball stood on the log and waited.

They left the bay, heading out into the ocean. It was not yet dusk, the daylight still bright on them and the water. He was sitting behind her and as they followed the coast toward the hill town, the long shadow of her hat swept her shoulders.

The heat of the day was replaced by a wind. He felt the push of the canoe. He watched the seawater drying on her back. The movement of her hands. The spread of the boat’s wake. The sea was calm and he dipped his fingers into it.

Nearing the harbor, he saw the town as he had that first time. All the ships and all the homes. A thousand windows. And he looked up at the top of the hill, where there was now a star in the tree. It hovered there in the leaves, blinking, and then he lost it.

He thought she would enter the harbor. Instead she continued to follow the coast where a boy was closing umbrellas, one by one, their white and red stripes vanishing.

—Bia, he said, leaning forward. Where is Santi?

But she did not respond, she kept moving, and he thought of rivers. He thought of the ones he had rested beside and traveled across and the ones that had taken the lives of men. He thought of the speed and the shapes of water.

And he said, —Bia. Stay this time.

And she paddled once and stopped. He grew still and as they drifted away from the town he watched the shape of her there, rising. She lifted her arms for balance. Then she made her way toward him, across the length of the canoe, as lights appeared and the evening started.

The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.

—YASUNARI KAWABATA

Thank you to my family, Ethan Rutherford, Nayon Cho, Russell Perreault, Don Lee, Michael Collier, Ann Patchett, Joan Silber, Kate Walbert, Hannah Tinti, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Lauren Groff, Caroline Casey, Jill Meyers, The National Book Foundation, The Bennington Writing Seminars, Sven Birkerts, Victoria Clausi, Dawn Dayton, Brian Morton, Amy Hempel, my dear Bret Anthony
Johnston, Simon & Schuster, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Wendy Sheanin, Andrea DeWerd, Tracey Guest, Jessica Zimmerman, Rebecca Marsh, Jackie Seow, Christopher Lin, Irene Kheradi, Gina DiMascia, Joy O’Meara, Loretta Denner, Jane Elias, Emily Graff, WME, Laura Bonner, Shaun Dolan.

To Marysue (and Thea), for the leap.

And to Bill, always, for the embrace.

Simon & Schuster

Reading Group Guide

Snow Hunters

Paul Yoon

A Conversation with Paul Yoon

You were born in New York City in 1980. How did you prepare to recreate the setting in postwar Brazil that your Korean protagonist, Yohan, inhabits in
Snow Hunters
?