Once the Shore (6 page)

He told them he lived in Udo. He was fishing. For leisure. “And the boat?” the translator said, his voice hollow through the speaker. “That’s your boat?”

“Yes.”

The man lowered the speaker and spoke to whom Bey assumed was the captain. The others continued to aim their guns at him.

The translator and two soldiers were going to board. The boat floated closer and the three of them hiked their legs up over the rails and stepped onto the trawler’s deck. They wore black boots, laced up. He had never seen boots before. And the men: they were tall and their skin was peeling around the bridge of their noses; their eyes appeared bored, although their hands were alert, gripping their weapons.

The translator approached Bey. “There are smugglers,” he said. “From the mainland to Solla. Do you know anything about this?”

Bey shook his head. He lived in Udo, he repeated, not Solla.

“Yes, you’ve said that.”

The Americans searched the boat. They wanted to know where his fishing equipment was. In the cabin, he said, in the closet. He took a step forward but was pulled back by a hand. The translator’s fingers were warm and he felt each finger against his skin. He hadn’t started yet, he called to the men now searching the cabin. He hadn’t caught anything. He heard the clinking of tin.

“You’re heading east,” the translator said. “Toward Japan.”

“Not that far,” Bey said. “Far enough for quiet.”

He heard steps, a shifting. The rattle of their weapons clanging. He felt the breath of the mainlander behind him and judged the distance between his own body and the man’s rifle. He thought: if he heard the groans of a door he would go for the gun. He concentrated on how he would move his arms and his hands. He would use his elbow on the man first. He did not think of the men with the weapons as large as swordfish. He thought of a single man and a single weapon and shut his eyes. He waited for the door. He thought he would never know whether their son had survived, and he bit his lip and
tasted the blood and breathed through his nose and convinced himself that he was forty years younger, with the strength of a bull. He formed a question and repeated it in his mind: What are these things you drop from the sky?

No sound came; the door remained shut. The soldiers returned to the deck, carrying a small tin box, which reflected the sun. They opened it, revealing the remaining squid.

“They want to know whether they can have one,” the translator said.

“Of course,” Bey said.

“Protein,” the translator said. “They’re lacking.”

The two soldiers lifted a squid and raised it like a flag so that the others on the boat could see. Then they climbed back over to their boat. The translator followed them, but with one leg over the rails, he paused to look at Bey. He seemed amused. He said, “Old man, you are far away from home.”

And then, as fast as they had appeared on the horizon, the patrol boat departed, leaving a wake that caused Bey’s trawler to tilt. He steadied himself against the outside of the cabin wall. They sped away and the guns swiveled and angled up toward the sky. In the distance, under the light of the sun, he watched them tear the flesh of the squid and open their mouths and taste. One of them shook his head and spat a tentacle overboard. What remained uneaten the men tossed as well, flinging their arms, and the limp pieces arced up into air and fell and then vanished.

Although it seemed like less, it had been two years since Bey and his son had walked to the river to repaint the boat. It was the end of the war and Karo had returned bearing gifts in the form of unopened paint canisters. He had found them in a trash receptacle on the docks of a port on an eastern island, where he had spent the majority of the years, imprisoned. He had refused to fight for Japan. In a cave they took their time, inserting splinters underneath his fingernails, letting him bleed.

When he was set free and the prison camp abandoned, he took the canisters of paint, unaware of the color it contained. Altogether they had six tins, each carrying about two liters of paint, and they placed them on a wheelbarrow and pushed them along the trail that led to the river.

The Americans had by then occupied the island although in their village their presence remained unfelt, save for the occasional MPs that passed through in their Jeeps. They kept their distance, however, and it was as though there were two villages within one, brushing against each other on occasion. There were reports of violence in the central areas of the island but here the villagers’ lives remained unchanged.

It was morning. The day was fine and the winds were slow. The trawler lay up on the riverbank, the same as when they saw it last. They had waited weeks to make sure no one took it. Far from the ocean it looked ancient and awkward, its paint dull and faded, chipped in some places to reveal rust. It had been
his son’s idea to claim it. They would take trips. They would take his mother.

With a knife they pried open the tins, anxious and eager to see the mysterious color. They had agreed that whatever it was they would use it. White, Karo had guessed. Green, his father said. Like the leaves. They bet a jug of wine. They squatted and huddled over the tins.

What they saw was white, a pool of milk. Bey was not surprised. He reached for his son and patted his arm. He said, “Sailor, you were correct,” and he loved him and saw how much he had physically changed: his thinness, his eyes deeper and heavier; his fingers, the nails discolored, some of them still re-growing.

Karo never spoke of it. “We’ve missed years,” was all he said. “But no longer.” And Bey accepted this, as he accepted the seasons.

His son rolled up his shirt sleeve and, with his hand formed in a fist, dipped his arm into the paint canister. The paint leaked out onto the grass, and it engulfed his forearm just below the elbow. Slowly, he rotated his arm. Soon, dark lines began to spiral within the milk white and the lines grew thicker and the white faded, folding, until the paint turned blue, dark, the color of winter. He then lifted his arm and the paint dripped down his skin and his knuckles like dozens of rivers falling into the sea.

The project took several days. Throughout it all Karo
painted with a blue arm. Sometimes he pressed his hand against the hull and from a distance Bey was unable to distinguish between the limb and the steel and his son said, “Father, I have lost a hand, I have lost an arm, I am slowly turning into this boat,” and he laughed but Bey did not, although he smiled and let him know that he had heard. He watched daylight bend behind the trees and the current retreat and Karo fade. The following morning he was returning to the sea, to earn his living.

They did not see him again for six weeks. When he returned, he taught Bey the functions of the trawler and pointed to certain areas of the boat and named them as though they were countries. They could have stayed there all day and evening. It was what Bey wanted. But Karo grew restless. “Next time,” he always said, patting his father’s shoulder. “Next time.” And Bey watched from the boat as his son headed to the village, where his mother was expecting him.

They were not often seen together, the three of them. He was either with his father by the river or with his mother in the village. During meals, Bey and Soni spoke to him and not to each other. Bey did not know what they spoke of when she was alone with him. Marriage, perhaps. His unwillingness. Whatever words they exchanged with Karo they each took and kept private.

For every visit he promised to take them out to sea, on the trawler, but he never did. He kept promising. His work in the fishing crews lasted longer, sometimes for entire seasons.

One evening, when Bey and Soni were alone, he wondered out loud when their son would return and she responded, “It is nice to hear your voice again.”

He almost hit her for that. The thought occurred to him, of swinging his hand across her face, of his flesh against hers. He was unable to look at her, shocked and afraid. He heard her undo the braid of her hair.

He left her and sat on the steps of his house, facing the trees. In the mountains behind the village, the engine of a truck groaned. The pigs shifted in the pen. Moonlight settled over the barley fields. The sky was clear and vast and the stars were pulsing like beacons. He had lived here for all his years. It was a life. There was love he was capable of and love that was desired. His wife he had stopped knowing. His son, it seemed, was gone before he could know him. He wondered then where all the lost things in this world lay. And who, if anyone, ever found them.

 

They had been at sea for three hours when the first of the debris began to float by them. They were small pieces of wood, some of them trailed by shreds of fabric. Over the starboard rails Bey and Soni watched them bob and hit the hull before they were swallowed by a wave only to resurface and approach once more.

Bey had waited until the patrol boat was no longer visible in all directions before entering the cabin. He found Soni,
however, already standing in the room. They faced each other, in silence, as the trawler swayed, brushing water.

“You told me to wait,” she said. “Until I heard nothing. That’s what I did. And then I opened the door.”

“Like we had planned,” he said.

She reached to touch his arm and they stayed that way for some time. She said, “It is good to hear your voice.” She gripped his hand and he led her to the deck where she returned to sitting close to the bow, watching the albatross hover over them.

Before long the birds faded up beyond the clouds and the island appeared along the horizon, flat and dark. It seemed at first to remain in a fixed distance from them. Soon, though, as if they had somehow unlocked what held it, the land approached at a steady pace and they were able to distinguish the forest canopy. Rising above it, like great balloons, was smoke. Soon they smelled it, too, the scent of burning as the winds pushed against them. By Bey’s guess, they were perhaps three kilometers away.

He gripped the rails and held his breath. It was far worse than his imagination had allowed. The sea, all at once, was speckled with debris. They surrounded the trawler, like cracked and splitting glaciers. He listened for his heart. He concentrated on its rhythm and told himself to slow.

Later, he would attempt to recall what it was exactly that caused his wife to jump overboard. He remembered she
stepped onto the rails and he rushed to her. He held her arm, said, “Soni,” and she looked at him with an expression that was unrecognizable, one he had never seen. It was hatred, he thought, and she swung at him and he felt her knuckles against the side of his face and he let go and she was no longer there.

What was it? He wasn’t sure. It could have been the island growing larger, the sensation of rushing they both felt. It could have been the evidence of destruction around them: the pieces of wood, the amount increasing the closer they approached the coast, some as long as the trawler. It could have been the clothes, a shirt, a straw sandal. Or perhaps it was the limbs they saw, a severed leg bent at the knee, two arms with their hands clenched together, the muscles still straining. The sea shining copper.

And Soni now in it. He saw her for an instant. Her white shirt spread across the water’s surface as she swam away from him. He heard her breathing and then cough and he shouted but she did not listen.

Dense clouds of smoke surrounded the trawler. The air grew thick and warm, the sun fading within it. Bey’s vision dimmed. She was gone. He cut the engine. He called for her. He heard the colliding of floating debris. He called again: “Soni.” He stood there waiting and it was as though the inside of his body were escaping. He saw the world as gray and vast and impenetrable and he clawed at his chest and looked for the color blue. He thought of painting and stars and distances and
what lay buried and he envisioned them on a map, positioned as continents he would never visit.

The winds grew stronger. And the smoke, for a moment, dissipated. It revealed the island, its blackened trees. On the beach lay the remains of masts and keels like the spines of ancient creatures.

And below him there was his wife. She was kneeling atop a piece of wood the size of a door, its edges shredded. She grasped the trawler’s ladder for balance. She was drenched, her clothes revealing a body loosened by age, all her years contained in the folds and the pigment of her skin, like the inside of a tree. She knelt there and the water licked her knees. In her eyes he saw clarity. She motioned for him.

Slowly, Bey descended the ladder. His toes touched the damp wood and he felt Soni’s hand press against his back to guide him. When he was settled, she pushed away. The wood tilted and then gained control of their weight and the waves and they were soon adrift among the wreckage. They kneeled and paddled with their hands, and their fingers turned cold and numb. They worked in silence. They kept low and remained under the haze of smoke. When a body passed them, they reached for the man. Some they held by the feet, others by the arms, neck, or hair. Whatever was closest. They picked them as if for harvest. The tide took them out to sea. Their breathing grew heavy. And, with all their effort, they pulled the floating men closer and lifted their still faces out of the water.