Snow Hunters: A Novel (12 page)

On those mornings he was tired and yet awake. His body sluggish and yet alert. The heat had already started. He hung his damp shirt on a branch and lay down on the ridge, pulling his hat over his eyes, feeling the grass against him.

He waited for daylight, the familiar shapes of the town to distinguish themselves, the gray and the blue of the water. On a far beach where a hotel had been built, umbrellas stood closed and scattered along the sand.

He turned. He tipped his hat back and looked inland. He lay there resting his chin against his hands, facing the distance where there were now fences alongside the road. There were also two farmhouses at the base of the mountains. Smoke began to rise out of their chimneys.

Then the horses appeared. Bays and roans crossing the grass and grazing in the paddocks. He counted them, as he had begun to do.

Some mornings one or two of them jumped the fence and wandered the road until a farmhand or a truck driver noticed. Once, they climbed the hill and gathered on the ridge where Yohan was, gazing out across the rooftops
and the sea. And the town woke to them, their long shadows on the slope.

And still there were days when the farm children appeared, sleepy-eyed, looking for the hand who gave them rope to repair. He watched the man tie one end to the children’s boots and they sat in the field with their legs extended, undoing the braids and rebraiding them. Their fingers moving like birds.

It was full daylight now. The mountains were visible, the road empty.

He stood. He reached for his shirt. He slung his bag over his shoulder and pushed the bicycle down the meadow, heading into the town.

At the gates of the church he waved toward the cottage where he knew Peixe was writing. He passed the stores, smelling coffee and the ovens of the bakery. He could hear voices from a high window. Between two buildings there was the glimpse of the coast where a group of dugout canoes were spread out across the water.

At the tailor’s shop he unlocked the door, the bell chiming, and pushed the bicycle across the room, storing it in the room where Kiyoshi once slept. He boiled water for coffee and ate a piece of bread with butter. He
showered and changed into a suit, tying the tie in front of a mirror he had hung behind his bedroom door.

He returned to the shop, lifting the shutters. The room filled with daylight. He flipped the sign on the window. He picked lint off the shoulders of the tailor’s dummy. At his desk he looked at his schedule book. He lifted a suit from a rack and placed it on his worktable. He turned the ceiling fan on and sat down.

It was the first months of 1963. He was thirty-four years old. In the town the day began and Yohan worked, undoing the seams of the fabric.

•  •  •

Little in the world of the tailor’s shop had changed. All the tools and the machines, the threads and the scissors and the needles, remained the way Kiyoshi had organized them. Fabrics were stored on the shelves and in the drawers by material and color. The worktables stood in the same places, though the one on the left wall had gone untouched. The red curtain hung at the back of the shop, swaying when he propped the shop door open on the warmest days. He boiled water with the same kettle, drank from the same cups. On the second floor the room
across from his was still used for storage, the wooden crates filled with spare supplies.

There were new customers now, new storeowners and new wives and husbands and new styles for dresses and suits, but there were also the people who had come to the shop for over a decade. He delivered clothes to the woman with the pet bird, listening as she had conversations with her dead husband. Children whose church outfits he used to tailor were older now but they came, as did a government man who had retired five years before.

There were the farmers, too, appearing with their shirts tucked into a clean pair of pants and their boots polished and their hair combed for a night in the town, bringing their young sons and daughters who pressed their faces against the windows of the pastry shop. They waited in the kitchen with their mother, drinking soda while the father, in his politeness, remained outdoors.

When he was finished Yohan crossed the street and bought the children cups of avocado cream and a bag of coconut cookies. The father wiped his palm against his shirt and shook Yohan’s hand and then the family continued into the town, browsing the storefront windows.

In these years he had become fluent in Portuguese.
He now understood how the words were shaped and pronounced, it was no longer an effort, and he conversed with the townspeople, asking them about their days and their families and commenting on the weather. He joked with his customers. He visited the barbershop and traded gossip.

He spent more time exploring the neighborhoods beyond his own, handing out advertisements he had written for the shop.

With a package of clothes under his arm he was often seen throughout the entire town and the harbor. He was recognized and greeted, though no one ever used his name.

—It is the tailor, they all said, as though he had been here always.

His friend, the sailor, had passed away two years before. The ship had docked one day and the sailor was not there. The others, younger, shook their heads.

—I’m sorry, they said, giving him papers to sign and unloading his fabrics.

And Yohan was unable to control the shaking of his body as he hauled his supplies up the street, refusing to rest and wipe his face and ignoring the people who had stopped on the sidewalk, confused, until someone rushed over to help.

He no longer ordered supplies from Japan. He now worked with a textile mill north of the town.

But he still wore the clothes Kiyoshi had made for him, mending them when a collar was frayed or a button came loose.

That old tailor whom he often missed. There were days when he paused in his work and listened, waiting for a noise, the sound of movement behind him: the quiet hum of another sewing machine, a chair adjusting, the patter of slippers or the flare of matches.

He heard nothing but his own machine and the street and yet he stayed still, waiting.

One time the scent of the old man appeared in the air: some combination of tobacco and citrus and soap. It was fleeting yet he was certain he had smelled it, but he did not know where it had come from, whether it had been someone at the window or from the shop itself, as though a part of the man remained in the tables, in the air of the boxes, in the fabrics themselves.

He looked toward the door and recalled the day he had entered the shop for the first time: the ping of a bell, Kiyoshi’s slow movements.

It was true that they had never spoken much to each other. So it surprised him that there were times when all
he remembered was Kiyoshi’s voice. It reminded Yohan of fall in the country where he was born and where he had spent his first twenty years, the dry wind and all the leaves falling from the mountains into the town. Kiyoshi, whose voice, when he spoke, sounded like leaves spinning in the air.

There were days when he believed there was nothing more to come. That there was nothing else. He had arrived and he had stayed. He had made a life. He had entered the future.

And in these hours, in this silence, the shop seemed larger to him, as though each night as he slept the floors extended, the walls grew; they carried with them the lives they once had as trees, some quiet tremor he could not detect.

He thought: he lived in a forest. He would wake one day to see branches in the spaces. The shadows of foliage, ivy. The tailor’s dummy standing in the corner, rooted into the earth.

He continued to sleep in the room above the shop. The woman he had seen on his first night here, on the balcony across the street, had married. Sometimes it happened that they looked outside from their windows at the same time and they waved to each other.

They had once attempted to share a clothesline to hang their laundry but someone stole their shirts, though how they did so, at this height, Yohan still did not know. It had been a fanciful experiment but they had shared that rope, briefly, and sometimes he liked to imagine it still there.

Now across that space they had conversations, asking each other about their days, about when it would rain. And once she asked in a loud voice, for the town to hear, how she could make her ugly husband more like Yohan. Then the husband appeared by the window and lifted her and she screamed in delight as he took her into a curtained room.

In this room there was still the desk and the chair. A single lightbulb and the mattress on the floor. The cookie tin and the teacup he had found long ago.

On some nights when the shop was closed he entered the tailor’s room. It took him a year to return here. Whatever Kiyoshi had left remained. His slippers lay under the cot. His shirts were hanging in a narrow closet. There was the single nail on the wall. The chest full of clothes.

On the nightstand there was a stack of books. Sometimes he flipped through them. They were adventure stories. They were written in Japanese but he had begun to forget some words so he could not read all of them.

He lay on the cot with a book on his chest. He looked up at the wall where he had hung the photograph of Kiyoshi in front of the plantation house during the Second World War. Peixe had given it to him.

He wondered, as he often did, what life the tailor had led before this one. He thought of Kiyoshi as a young man and saw the youth of his face and saw a family and then saw him in uniform, his hands stitching a wound on the stomach of a boy in the Russian Far East.

On those nights he thought of the sailor, too. Of his wife and children. He wondered if they still lived in a coastal village in Japan and whether the wife still worked at a hotel.

He had written a letter to her once, not long after the sailor passed away. He never sent it. It lay now in the tin cookie box in his room, on top of the business card and the letter of employment he had carried with him nine years ago.

In Kiyoshi’s room he placed the book back on the nightstand. Then he stood and made the bed, flattening the blanket, erasing the shape of his body.

P
eixe was forty-one years old now. They had begun to see more of each other. A pair of reading glasses stayed around his neck at all times, tied with Yohan’s packaging twine. His hair was graying and he liked to joke about it.

He said, —
Alfaiate
, you’re looking at your future self, and he laughed as they walked the rows of his garden, watering the plants and the vegetables, tossing fertilizer onto the soil.

For his birthday one year Yohan bought him a new cane. Its handle had been carved in the shape of a boat. Pleased, Peixe twirled it and even attempted a dance in the garden. Then he pretended it was a sword and lunged
at Yohan, who ducked and picked up a branch, and, like children, they dueled until they heard the priest shouting and they looked down at the trampled tomatoes.

As he aged, Peixe had become more youthful. One night Yohan was woken by a loud noise at his window. He saw Peixe standing in the street, leaning on his cane and throwing rocks at him.

Peixe was dressed in a suit. He had never seen him in a suit before. It was the color of the beach and the fashion was many years old. A flower was tucked into his lapel.

He called to Yohan to dress himself.

—And bring me a tie, he said, and Yohan did, appearing outside a few minutes later, tying it for him under a streetlamp.

Peixe slid his arm around Yohan’s and led him down the hill.

He was taken to a nightclub. The hostess seemed to know Peixe, showing them to a table that had been reserved. They ordered cocktails and faced a small stage where a jazz band performed with a singer who wore a slim blue dress and swayed her hips.

They stayed all night. A woman approached them and Peixe took her in his arms and settled her on his lap. Another woman appeared and took Yohan’s wrist and before
he understood what was happening he was on the dance floor, the woman with her arms around him and smelling of perfume and her lips painted. She moved into him and he felt her hips against his as he held her waist and they circled the dimly lit floor.

He searched the woman’s eyes, trying to remember if they had met before.

She said, —You can’t dance, and he said, —No, and smiled, and she tilted her head back and laughed and her neck shone in the nightclub lights.

She told him to follow and took the lead.

They spent the evening and the early morning together, the girl teaching him how to dance, his jacket collecting a strand of her hair.

Her name was Ana. She had moved here from Brasília a few months before. Her mother was Spanish and her father Portuguese. She was twenty-seven years old and was a schoolteacher. It was the first time she had been to the nightclub as well. It was also the first time she had worn lipstick.

For a month there was a romance. She would wait until it was late in the night, when Yohan’s neighbors were already sleeping, and slip into the shop. He would take her upstairs and they would spend what remained of
the night in that room with its low ceiling, Ana tilting her head as she went to him.

She drank coffee and liked to brush her hair. She wrapped spare fabrics over her body and he sometimes carried her up and down the house, visiting the rooms.

He made her a dress. He measured her body. He fell asleep with his ear against her belly button, listening to her breathing, feeling the energy of her. This chamber inside her skin.

They told no one of each other. And there were moments when he thought the months would go on like this. But they didn’t. He was never sure why. Just that whatever had contained them faded. They both understood this without saying so. It had been short-lived, a flare.

He used to see her on occasion in the market or on the street. They would wave and ask how the other was getting along. They would wish each other well and move on, she walking in one direction, he in another. And he would think fondly of those days with her.

Then came a day when they passed each other without stopping. Perhaps it had been unintentional. Perhaps they had been busy or had grown shy of each other. But the moment, as he shut his eyes and fell asleep, receded
so that by morning he wasn’t sure whether it had ever happened.