Free Snow Hunters: A Novel by Paul Yoon Page A

pocket. He was taller than Yohan and thin. He had rolled up his sleeves and, like, Kiyoshi, his fingertips were stained by tobacco. He took Yohan’s hand and smiled.
    — Alfaiate , he said, as he always did, greeting Yohan in that way, by his profession.
    Yohan handed him the package. Behind the groundskeeper, daylight had found a corner of the one-room cottage. There was a single bureau, a chair, a bed, a small table with a half-eaten meal. A spyglass lay on a shelf.
    He invited Yohan inside but then looked out at the day and changed his mind.
    —Ah, Peixe said. Yes. It’s better outside.
    He left the door open, holding the package under his arm the way Yohan had done. Kiyoshi had started the jacket and he did not know whether further alterations would be necessary.
    Yohan asked Peixe to try it on but the groundskeeper waved his hand, ignoring him.
    They stood on the path and faced the garden, Yohan looking over at a spot where two old tires lay on the ground, filled with fresh soil.
    —I found them on the beach, he said. It would have been a waste.
    Yohan nodded, imagining Peixe carrying the tires up the hill, his arms hooked through the holes.
    —You understand that, no? Peixe said.
    He hesitated, unsure what the groundskeeper had asked, and what to say, but before he could respond, Peixe said, —Kiyoshi.
    In his eyes there was a kindness and a concern.
    —You’d like to visit him, yes?
    Yohan remained silent. He looked across at the headstones,searching for the tailor’s. There had been little money saved. The church had paid for it.
    On the wall inside the cottage he noticed a photograph. He recognized the old plantation house near the coast. In front of it stood a group of men and women and children. They were all Japanese except the two at the side of the photo, a slim woman and a small boy who leaned against a cane.
    Peixe brought the photo out to him. With his thumb he wiped away the dust on the glass. He told him that after the landowner died and the house was abandoned, the property had been turned into a hospital for the mountain villages and for the factory workers who had been the victims of mechanical accidents.
    It had also been a sanatorium for survivors of polio, he said, and tapped his cane.
    —Then, he said, it became part of an internment camp during the Second World War.
    He pointed at the people.
    —For the Japanese, he said. Those shanties you see now were built then.
    —A single place. One house. One piece of land. All the changes. All the lives it once held, however briefly.The good that was there. Also, the discrimination. It is astonishing, yes?
    The plantation house was no longer recognizable. But it was the people in the photograph who seemed far more different, the style of their clothes and something else he could not articulate. Their postures, their stillness. Or perhaps it was knowing that they were no longer of the age when the photographs were taken. That the moment had already gone by the time their images were captured. That people aged, second by second, leaving themselves behind.
    He had never been photographed before. He did not know what he would look like, did not know how he would appear on those small pale squares people held and framed and shared.
    He had once witnessed a young American wake from surgery and rise from his bed too quickly. His eyes, like Peng’s, were wrapped in bandages and, disoriented, he knocked a tray from a nurse’s hand. The iodine in the flying bottle stained the convalescent’s gauze and he screamed, flailed his arms, feeling that sudden wetness, pleading, —Not again. Please God, not again, as his body shook and his mouth twisted and in his blindness a dream returned to him of the land mine.
    Yohan remembered the guard leaning against a tent pole, laughing. And he remembered he could not watch and he turned away, concentrating on the pile of clothes he had been mending, and he remembered the shame of that turning, of looking away. And he