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Authors: Paul Yoon

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BOOK: Once the Shore
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During the monsoon season, when the thatch of the roof whistled from the leaking winds and the floors shook, Karo learned to walk across the house, with care, as an old man would. First he touched Soni, who was attempting to boil rice, and then he returned and touched Bey on the top of his head. Back and forth he went like this. After the winds calmed and the house settled the child ventured to the window and looked outside in awe, as if they were somewhere else.
In the winters Bey carried him on his back to watch the sea at dusk. When it darkened they witnessed the constellations appear, one by one, and the child held on to his father’s ears and leaned back as far as he could, swinging his braided hair. His breath puffed above them. He asked his father what kind of fish swam among the stars.
They were happiest then.
Karo grew to love the sea. And distances. When he was old enough, he joined a fishing crew. Soni wanted him to stay. To help with the fields. He would be at sea for weeks, months. Bey wished the same though he did not voice his concerns.
He left at the age of fifteen on a ship with mud-colored sails. Bey and Soni stood on the riverbank to watch him depart. Their son waved until the ship disappeared around a bend. They stayed there, standing, long after the ship’s wake faded and the lanterns began to glow through the trees.
From that moment on, they would see him when time allowed it. And all the days that had gone so quickly, slowed and lengthened. Both Bey and Soni’s parents passed away. It was the two of them now; and in each other’s company grew the overwhelming reminder of absence.
Bey began to remain in the fields long after sunset, unwilling to return home. On some evenings Soni ate alone. While she slept, he took walks through the forest. Beside the river he imagined the limbs of trees as the masts of ships. He smelled the night water, light and cool. As the years progressed he walked farther. To the coast. There he undressed and swam into the sea, to the spot where the moon lay reflected.
Afloat, he recalled the treasure hunt and the single gift they had not discovered. He wondered what it was and where it now lay. He wondered whether an animal had taken the gift for its own purposes or whether it was still there, buried, or high up in a tree.
There were now days when it seemed that all his life he had been looking. As though he could not account for all the years gone, as though he could not yet claim those years as his own.
In the Pacific, a war had begun. And his son lived within it.
And Bey bathed in the luminous dark of the coast, scrubbing his back and soaking his hair and his beard. He stood upright to clean his chest. In his sadness he opened his mouth up toward the metallic stars and waited for one to fall.
The trawler lacked navigation equipment so he used a compass and a map Karo had given him on his fiftieth birthday. He had never seen a map so intricate before. The ones he had grown accustomed to were approximations, errors corrected over them again and again, revised by fishermen, a palimpsest created on rice paper, the islands unnamed. The one he held now had been drawn by a Dutch mapmaker, bought at a port on the mainland. It was well-proportioned and colored, the outlines of all the Pacific islands in bright green, each one named, though that mattered less. Unable to read, he guessed at their identities through their shapes. Here was Solla, one of the largest. And north, there, a portion of the mainland. In the east lay Japan; it was how he imagined the crescent moon might appear if one were to ever see it up close: flawed and ravaged.
Bey folded the map and stood beside the starboard rails, watching the sun distance itself from its reflection against the waves. The albatross hovered above him. The boat’s low hum reverberated against the soles of his bare feet. He slipped his fingers through his beard as if sifting through sand. To his left, on deck, his wife sat and braided her hair.
He went into the cabin to retrieve a tin box and then filled a cup with cold barley tea from a bucket. The boat rocked against a wave and he steadied himself against the wall, discolored from the humidity. He returned outside and Soni took the cup with both her hands, bowing her head to thank him. He sat beside her and opened the lid of the box.
Inside there were dried squid, flattened, in the shape of spears, stacked on top of each other and the color of dust. Bey lifted one out of the tin and tore it in half, giving one side to Soni. They pulled off the tentacles, one by one, and ate in silence. It tasted sweet at first, then bitter, its texture elastic.
The winds were heavy and smelled of salt. He watched as she dipped her fingers into the tea and then pressed them against her chapped lips. In this gesture he saw how she had aged, as if she were shrinking each and every day. He was, too—perhaps they would be whittled to the size of a pocket. He thought of death in this way. A diminishing.
After some time, she said, “Do you think there are many?”
Twenty boats, the salt peddler had said. Moored along the coasts. How many men were on them was hard to tell. The hulls and the masts split, consumed by a deafening fire, and he imagined the men flung up to the clouds, as though a sea creature had spit them out.
She said it again: “Do you think there are many?”
As many as our village, he wanted to say, but did not. He told her he was uncertain and she accepted it, taking comfort in his statement, for uncertainty was what pulled them toward an island they had never seen before.
“He could have been inland,” she said, more to herself as she continued to look out at the sea. There wasn’t another boat in sight or the sound of a plane again, the roar, which was a sound that encompassed and paralyzed and forewarned.
There was instead the blue of peace, the logic of seabirds.
It was possible. He could have been inland. Bey thought it as well. Who would not? Karo was prone to wandering. He liked to dock and see the town where he and his fellow crewmembers delivered fish. He brought back stories and souvenirs for his parents: some fruit, simply because it had grown elsewhere; woven bracelets for his mother, one she wore now, made from a strip of tanned leather; for Bey, a bamboo cane that he hung up on a hook, refusing to use it.
They began to call him sailor and waited for him along the river when he returned. “Sailor, what land have you seen?” they joked with him as he disembarked from his boat. “What gifts do you bring?” And he would say, “I have come from the stars, Mother, I have seen the planets.” He bowed and they embraced him, his hair smelling of foreign coasts and Bey touched his son’s face and pulled on the young man’s beard, thick and dark.
He had grown taller than both of them. There was about him a calm, as though he took with him the flat surface of the sea in late afternoon and wore it like a coat.
Sitting beside Soni, Bey inhaled the air, breathing deeply. They would arrive soon, he kept telling himself. But stillness turned into immobility. It seemed the boat had stopped altogether, with equal parts of the ocean in all directions. He stood and walked up to the helm. No, they were moving,
albeit slowly, and they were on course. He listened to the boat’s engine. They were traveling as fast as it could go. He descended again. He thought of his son’s calm and hoped it had remained with him until the very end. He kicked the floor of the deck. Soni didn’t turn; or perhaps she did. It did not seem to matter.
The cabin windows were stained with dirt. Bey wrapped an old shirt of his around a stick and then plunged it into the ocean. His muscles strained as he lifted the stick, the old shirt darker and dripping. He wrung it. He worked methodically, like someone who had dipped a shirt into the sea a thousand times before. And then with the shirt he wiped the windows, all of them, leaving streaked arcs. When he finished he squinted at his reflection. He lifted his hands up close to his eyes, close enough so that he could see the lines of his palms. He had lately found himself doing this often, guessing the distance of his hands to his face and wondering whether it was lessening. There were times when he thought he was losing his vision. He stared at his palms and saw the geography there, the rivers and the roads and the paths. He stretched his fingers. Between them he saw blue.
The night before he had spent hours attempting to recall his son, to distinguish his face. It was vague to him, out of focus. Bey lay on a worn blanket on the floor, which he halved so that a part of it could cover his body. Soni lay beside him. The room smelled of sesame oil. The window was open and he
heard the wind. He shut his eyes; opened them. The light of evening splayed through the window. He could not clarify. He could not recall the last thing they spoke of, some final words.
At first he did not want Soni to go with him. She persisted. He urged her not to come. She called him selfish, a coward. She stood in the corner of the kitchen, her eyes ablaze like some demon. She made a fist and hit her stomach, saying, “He is mine,” and they fought because fighting did not require thought.
Afterward, she lay in the corner of the bedroom and pressed the side of her face against the wall and said, “Karo, I am listening to your heart. I am listening to the sea. And I am scared.” Bey was across the room, looking up at the thatched roof that seemed to spread until he saw a vast network of hands extending. Karo’s hands were thick and scarred and calloused from the nets, from the war, and they were always cold and always beautiful.
 
On the lip of the horizon a dark object in the shape of a thumbnail rose against the sky. Soni saw it first. She stood and leaned over the rails of the deck, as though she thought the boat could go faster by her doing so. She resembled an eager child in this position. “Hurry,” she called to Bey, and although it was impossible for the boat to go any faster, it did seem that their speed was increasing. The island grew taller and wider until its shape began to morph, sharp angles appearing
that could have been trees or the back of a mountain. But the longer Bey concentrated on the image he grew more certain that it wasn’t their destination. Perhaps it was a surfacing whale, swimming toward them.
But no, it was not a whale. Less fluid, less mobile. The shape of it was now fixed. It moved while being still. It shone metallic under the sun, which was now directly above them. A drop of sweat caught in Bey’s eyelashes and he blinked, wiping his forehead. When he looked up again he saw what it was and he felt a tightening and the beat of his heart and he grew afraid.
“Seek cover,” he told his wife.
He took her by the shoulders. Gripping the rails, she walked with care against the urgency of his palms. “Bey,” she said. “Don’t hold so tight.” They exchanged a brief smile and he relaxed his grip.
In the cabin, underneath a mat, lay a door leading down into a storage compartment below the floor, a small room he never used. He lifted open the door and a stale, humid scent enveloped them. He held her hand as she descended and only when she was fully lowered did he let go.
Daylight stopped at the edge of the entrance. Soni’s face was shadowed and her eyes were bright, like the eyes of the hares in the island’s mountains. “You stay until you hear me say your name,” he told her. “Or you stay until you hear nothing. You wait for the engines to fade.” He said all this as though he were speaking from afar.
“Bey,” she said. “I will be fine.” She lifted her hand and waved. He pushed the door and watched whatever light was down there close like a shell. She was still waving. He replaced the mat. He looked about the cabin once more. He checked the closet that held his son’s spare fishing gear, which he had never used. With the cup he took some of the barley tea and poured it over the net and the pole.
The engine he heard was much louder than his trawler; it sounded as if a crowd were clapping, sharp and rapid. He stepped out onto the deck.
The patrol boat was American. He noticed the colors and the design of the small flag folding in the wind. The boat, still rumbling, slowed as it approached the trawler. A soldier sat astern on a chair. In front of him was a long barreled rifle on a stand which the soldier panned, back and forth, across the length of the trawler, until it settled on Bey. Another gun stood at the bow, manned by a boy, it seemed, the chair larger than the width of his shoulders and chest. Bey counted the visible men: six.
He cut the engine. He placed his hands on the rails, where they could be seen. The patrol boat turned so that its port side ran parallel to Bey’s starboard. There were words painted white onto the side. The two boats were five, six meters within each other. He could see the men’s faces now, their flushed skin, their thick forearms. One of the men, however, was a mainlander, young, perhaps in his thirties. Through a megaphone
he spoke in their language, translating the Americans’ words.
They wanted to know where he resided. What his purpose was in the seas. His destination. How long he expected to be out here.
Bey ran his fingers through his beard. Where his bare feet touched the deck seemed fragile, unstable, as though the floor would soon collapse. He concentrated on Soni’s silence, willed it, and wondered whether her eyes were open or shut. He looked down to see that he was on his toes, straining. He answered them with brevity, attempting to mask his island’s dialect as much as he could.
BOOK: Once the Shore
13.52Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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