Snow Hunters: A Novel Read online

  He took off his suit jacket. He left the window and stood under the lightbulb, examining it. He flipped the switch and it began to flicker and he turned it off. He reached up to tighten it into the socket and tried it again. Then he sat on the mattress. It was hard and a corner was torn. His shirt stank of seawater and fish. Or perhaps it was his skin or his hair.

  His tiredness returned to him and he settled into the bed. He shut his eyes. Through the open window he could hear the tapping of the rain and voices and a car and then a ship’s horn. A single chime of a church bell. A door opening. A song on the radio. The steady punches of a sewing machine. He heard aircraft and the dust spraying from trucks and the wind against the tents but it was faint and calm and he did not mind. He was riding a bicycle. He felt a hand on the small of his back. Someone familiar spoke to him and he said, —I can go a little longer, and he lifted a shovel and sank it into the earth. A group of children whistled and clapped. And then he was running his hands through a girl’s hair and she took his wrist and they moved through a corridor where rows of dresses hung from the ceiling. Those dresses turned into the sea.

  When he woke it was dark. The lights from the town had entered the room, the furniture casting shadows. In the far corner, beside the door, a man sat on the desk chair, facing him.

  Yohan froze, startled. Then his eyes adjusted and he saw that it was his suit jacket. He did not remember placing it there. He rose, smelling the bowl of soup that was still warm on the desk. Beside it lay an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes.

  The fluorescent lights of a store began to blink and the room lit bright and then dimmed. He watched his shadow on the wall behind him appear and fade. The room was thick with warmth. A breeze came and he took off his shirt.

  He was not yet used to the heat of this country. It was summer here and he wondered if there existed a different season for every corner of this world in this moment and the moments to come. Whether if you traveled fast and far enough you could witness a year passing in a single journey.

  Across the street, a woman stood on a second-floor balcony, looking down. She wore a pale dress that revealed her thin arms, and her dark hair hung down across her shoulders. A motorbike paused below her, its engine running. The man was looking up. Together they spoke in a language Yohan did not yet know but would learn and he concentrated on the soft cadence, again trying to remember the words and phrases the sailors had taught him.

  And then his eyes scanned the landscape, consuming it.

  He would learn the streets and the buildings of this hill town that resembled the old shell of some creature. And he would know the people who moved within it.

  He lifted his suit jacket, examining the shoulders and the sleeves. He tried it on. It was no longer too large for him; the shoulders had been altered, the sleeves, too.

  The beam of the lighthouse swept across the harbor. In the sea there were stars. Millions of them, reflected in the water’s surface. The rain had stopped.

  2

  From that day on he woke early. Kiyoshi waited for him in the kitchen, where he boiled water for tea. Then they took their cups and the teapot and passed through the curtain into the shop.

  The tailor had moved the worktables toward each wall so that they worked with their backs facing each other. At the camp Yohan had used a machine with a hand crank; in the shop there were treadles and he was at first unaccustomed to the movement of his foot.

  Kiyoshi gave him fabric to practice on. He spent those first days adjusting his body to that foreign rhythm, his foot in constant motion as his hands pushed the cloth forward. On occasion Kiyoshi stood behind him, peering over his shoulder, though Yohan did not look up.

  On the wall in front of him, on a shelf, there were packages wrapped in tan paper and twine. The tailor reached for one and placed it on his own table until the bell above the door chimed and a customer entered. They talked for a moment, pleasantries, and then Kiyoshi handed the person the package.

  Yohan would not know until later that they were unlabeled and he would be impressed by the tailor’s memory of who wore what.

  In the town they lived on the outskirts of a Japanese community. Most of their customers were their neighbors and the diplomats who visited from Tokyo, ordering their suits every season or bringing in their old ones for them to mend and widen.

  Every so often a man appeared from elsewhere in the town, lured by Kiyoshi’s prices, a lawyer or landowners or men who worked in the government offices. They talked often, unused to keeping still, and Yohan would remain silent, unable to understand them, catching only a few words as the tailor measured them.

  He always stood to the side: measuring tapes draped over his neck and a pencil and a notepad in his shirt pocket. Sometimes children pressed their foreheads against the windows and watched. They made faces and waved and Yohan waved back.

  Other days the farmers came, asking Kiyoshi to mend a shirt or a pair of trousers, paying with grains and vegetables. There were also wives who came for dresses, women who, upon meeting Yohan for the first time, said, —Oh my, where did you find him? And they flirted with him and asked if he could measure them, lifting their arms and tilting their waists.

  He blushed as Kiyoshi translated for him and laughed, lighting the women’s cigarettes. They liked him even more because Yohan did not answer them when they asked about his crooked nose and the thin scar across the bridge.

  They were not always in the shop. The tailor took him to the port where twice a season a ship arrived from Japan with fabrics and silks. Some days he found the crew who had brought him here, and it made him happy to see them. The older one asked about the umbrella and grinned. Yohan still had it, still used it, and the sailor laughed because it was a lady’s umbrella, he said.

  The crew placed the fabrics on a dolly, and they said their good-byes and Yohan pushed the dolly over the cobblestone and up the hill as Kiyoshi walked behind him, pausing at times to view the displays of a shop window.

  The tailor delivered clothes as well throughout the town. But as the months passed he did so less often. Yohan took his place, carrying mended shirts and new dresses and suits and even gloves or a hat that needed repair, each wrapped in the tan paper and twine.

  There was a bicycle at the shop but Yohan never used it. Instead he walked through the narrow streets and the alleyways. He stopped often, shying away from the passersby, searching for the numbers on the doors and looking up at the street signs, making sure that the words matched the ones on the slip of paper he held.

  At first he stayed within the borders of the Japanese community. In doing so, day by day, he grew accustomed to his neighborhood and the people who lived nearby. Then, as the months passed and his energy returned to him, he began to venture farther into the town. He went from neighborhood to neighborhood, gradually, delivering clothes to older customers who had known Kiyoshi since he first came.

  He passed structures he had never seen before: a gated mansion, fountains, and sculptures in gardens. Others were familiar to him: a single-story cottage, the brick wall of someone’s property, the market squares.

  He stood in front of the entrances to apartment buildings, unsure of whether to knock or press a buzzer. He climbed winding staircases and stopped at each landing to look out the slim windows. He waited in a foyer with his hands in his pockets, hiding his nervousness as the retired Portuguese attaché looked through a drawer to pay him.

  Once a month he drank tea with a widow. For half an hour he sat in her living room on her expensive furniture as she spoke to him and he nodded, struggling, pretending to grasp what she said.

  In these homes he looked discreetly around at the rooms, glancing at the cleanliness of the windows, his eyes falling upon a painting or a pet: a cat on a bookshelf, birds in cages, a pair of dogs lying under a table, lifting their ears on occasion to listen to the maid in the kitchen. If there was pottery on a shelf or a cabinet, a vase or a bowl, he lingered over it, studying the design before leaving.


  He delivered clothes to the church as well. It was the highest building in that hill town, closest to the ridge, standing where the road ended and the fields began. He remained by the gate until the groundskeeper appeared from the back, where he lived in a cottage not far from the cemetery.

  He was called Peixe by the town because his family had been fishermen, though none were alive anymore. He had been the only one who never fished, never entered the water.

  When he was a child he had suffered from polio. His mother, who had once been a customer of Kiyoshi’s, used to volunteer at the church and so he spent many of his days there, keeping her company, hiding under the pews.

  He walked with a cane and there was a slow grace to his movements. He laughed easily. He was thirty-two years old and had been here all his life. His hair was dark and, like the tailor, he kept a pair of reading glasses in his shirt pocket.

  They shook hands and Peixe invited him inside, as he always did, and Yohan smiled, bowing, and returned down the road.

  The townspeople no longer expected the tailor but his young apprentice, as they began to call him, with both affection and curiosity. Sometimes he received tips. When he gave them to Kiyoshi, the man shook his head, pushing away Yohan’s hand.

  He kept the money in a tin box he found in an alleyway one afternoon. On its lid there was an illustration of a woman in an apron carrying a baking tray, a mother, he supposed, with a blue ribbon tied around her hair and words above the image written in English. Every now and then, in his bedroom, he leaned over his desk and lifted the top of the box, smelling the cookies it had once contained.

  He found many things in the alleys: a cup, a pocketknife, a shaving brush, a new handkerchief in its box. He stopped often in these narrow streets, a compulsion from childhood when he would search the town for things to barter with the peddlers who visited. He would climb the wheels of their carts and peer down at the treasure, searching for shoelaces, a ball, a knife.

  But in those alleyways there were times when he found himself leaning against a wall, not knowing where he was. His hands moved as though he were tearing something. His eyes far away and gone.

  It did not last long. It was as though the world he saw cracked, revealing memories he had forgotten. Those small stars. A girl sitting in an empty window frame in a destroyed town they were passing through. How she wiped the dirt off a pear wedge, showing the dark spaces where her teeth had been. A man’s hat and a cane lay on the street below her. Peng picked them up, settling the hat on his head and twirling the cane. He gave Yohan his rifle. He then spread mud above his lips, furrowed his eyebrows, waved to her, and wobbled across the street without bending his knees like that funny man they had heard of named Charlie Chaplin.

  He thought of those days with Peng, the two of them in their weather-stained uniforms and their helmets and their boots stuffed with newspaper and straw. Peng, that old friend who was three years older and taller than he was, with the odd thin stripe of gray in his hair since he was a child, like the mark of some animal. Even in the war he still moved like some dancer across the hills, ignoring the rain, agile and calm. And Yohan always close behind him, not once losing sight of the shape of Peng’s shoulders.

  He thought of all the other men and women they had together seen wandering the country, sometimes with the companionship of animals, a slow-moving dog or a mule or once even a gray bird that an old man carried in a handkerchief. It had been injured from a bombing and Yohan remembered the man sitting on the road beside them as they rested, unraveling the handkerchief, delicately, as his mouth chewed on a nut that someone had dropped on the street. Then he placed the chewed mash on his finger and fed the bird that could not fly though its body hummed; and he let Yohan place his hand on its breast and the soft pulse jolted him.

  He wondered if the war there had truly ended. He did not know. There was no one to tell him so. There was the news on the radio but Kiyoshi never listened, preferring the stations with music instead, the orchestras.

  And he wondered about the wars that had been fought here and he grew embarrassed because he did not know. They did not speak of such things. Nor did they speak of the war that had preceded this one, and he did not know if the tailor had fought in it. It was as though Kiyoshi and the shop had always been here.

  Though they were together often, he shared little with Yohan. And he himself did not tell the tailor about his own years. And yet he found comfort in this absence of telling.

  He learned about the tailor by what the old man pointed to, what his eyes fell on; by what he ate and how; by his knowledge of fabrics and by the way he avoided certain pedestrians and grinned at others.

  From their reticence grew a kind of intimacy. Kiyoshi, who could be seen through the shop window all day with his stooped shoulders, hemming a pair of trousers or replacing the buttons of a shirt. And Yohan across from him, working as well.

  Once, Kiyoshi, without turning, asked him what he had found that day and Yohan, surprised, paused. From his jacket pocket he took out a cup someone had thrown away in an alley and Kiyoshi stood to examine it under the light.

  —Ah, he said. Good, and then returned it to him.

  He said nothing else. They continued to sew and stitch.

  Later, they closed the shop together. They went through the day’s transactions and reminded each other that a shipment from overseas would arrive the next morning. They ate by their sewing machines, drinking tea and listening to the orchestra on the radio, and soon the tailor fell asleep on his chair.

  As the old man slept Yohan continued to organize the fabrics on the shelves, looping thread over a spool and returning scissors and sewing needles to their boxes. He lowered the volume on the radio.

  He approached the tailor’s dummy, bent forward, studied the shape of its chest, the flatness of its severed arms and head. Wondering if it had been modeled on an actual person. The lights of the streetlamps and the store signs brightened the closed shutters.

  His days passed in this way. He learned how to navigate the town. He began to learn the language, listening to the people on the streets and in the shop and to the commercials on the radio.

  Sometimes, as they worked, Kiyoshi surprised him by saying aloud a Portuguese word. Yohan repeated it. Alteração. Medir. Roupa.

  Then, in the late evenings, alone in his room upstairs, Yohan lay on the mattress and spoke, turning a word or a phrase in his mouth as though it were a stone. Dois. Sopa. Noite. A loja está fechada. A loja está fechada. Noite. Dois. Janela.

  He placed his hands under his head and looked up at the water-stained ceiling, listening to his own voice, which sounded unfamiliar to him, and searching for the rhythm of that new language. He fell asleep with the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth.

  On other nights, after closing the shop, he and Kiyoshi went up to the roof, bringing chairs, and shared a bottle of wine. They looked out over the hill town and at the movement on the streets and through the windows of apartment buildings: a man on a rocking chair; a child staring back at them; a couple dancing in their bedroom under the relief of a ceiling fan.

  There were often power outages in the town and on those nights they stayed on that roof in the dark, in the company of a distant trumpet or a guitar or the ticking of playing cards wedged into bicycle wheels.

  They waited for their eyes to adjust, the candles to appear in the windows, then they spent that last hour of the day playing a game, the tailor placing a hand by his ear or pointing; and in Portuguese, Yohan would attempt to identify what they were listening to, or watching.

  Once, they heard someone singing on the street. It was a birthday song. They waited for the song to end and then Kiyoshi, drinking his wine, asked when his birthday was. Yohan confessed that he could not remember.

  The following week he woke to find a garment bag hanging on his door. He opened it. It was a new suit, made of light cotton, the color of sand. On a notecard, in Japanese, it said: For another year.

 
The suit fit him perfectly. He did not realize until later that afternoon that it was the day he had come to the shop for the first time.

  And so he began to think of that day as when one year turned into another. Kiyoshi seemed to as well. Each year he made Yohan an article of clothing, leaving it in his bedroom, a new pair of trousers or a shirt, sometimes both. Years from now, long after Kiyoshi was gone, he would be wearing the same clothes. He would sit beside his worktable in the evenings and mend the tears in the collars and the shirt cuffs himself. When exactly the old man made them he never discovered.

  3

  There were hundreds of them.

  In the summers they wore what was left of their uniforms. In the winters they were given gray sweaters and coats.

  They had chores and duties. They were sent to the field tents to carry the bodies of men who had been captured and who had not survived. That hour surrounded by the sound of scissors and liquid in cups and bowls and jars. The activity of flies. Men with untreated bullet wounds attempted to stay standing as they waited in a line. Men lay in the backs of trucks, their mouths pooling with the afternoon rain.

  They were sent to an old textile mill at the edge of the camp where there was another ward. They were told to move the dead as quickly as possible because they needed the beds. If their clothes were salvageable, they were told to take those, too, along with the blankets, and they boiled them in large pots outside with the handle of a broken broom. They scrubbed the blood off mattresses. The clothes they hung on ropes that had been tied across the trees.

  They picked root vegetables from a garden the Americans were attempting to cultivate. They carried the potatoes and the carrots and the radishes and the turnips to the cooks.

  They worked all day, in silence, stopping only a few times to rest. They worked into the night. From across that distance Yohan could see a pair of silhouettes thrown against the curtain by a light, their bodies the size of the forest trees, their crooked limbs moving over the shape on the cot that bent and shook and went still.