The Mountain

Stories

Paul Yoon

• Publisher: S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501154102
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In "a spectacular display of intelligence and feeling" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review), Paul Yoon's collection of short stories ranges throughout the world—from the Hudson Valley to the Russian Far East—across periods of time after World War II, hailed as a "genuine work of art...tough and elegant and true" ( The Boston Globe ). In The Mountain, award-winning and acclaimed author Paul Yoon reveals his subtle, ethereal, and strikingly observant style with six thematically linked stories, taking place across several continents and time periods and populated with characters who are connected by their traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace in their futures. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds (from a sanatorium in the Hudson Valley to an inn in the Russian far east) they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence, big and small, spiritual and corporeal. A morphine-addicted nurse wanders through the decimated French countryside in search of purpose; a dissatisfied wife sporadically takes a train across Spain with a much younger man in the wake of a building explosion; a lost young woman emigrates from Korea to Shanghai, where she aimlessly works in a camera sweat shop, trying fruitlessly to outrun the ghosts of her past. In this "fantastic collection" ( Los Angeles Times ), "Paul Yoon's dazzling use of wordplay, pacing, and the quiet authenticity of his characters…makes him one of the most evocative writers working today" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review). With The Mountain, "Yoon proves himself a literary alchemist, transforming tragedy into beauty with deft reminders of our universal connections…Joining such luminaries as Jhumpa Lahiri, Junot Díaz, and Alice Munro, Yoon has undoubtedly earned membership in the exclusive coterie of today's finest writers of the short form" ( Library Journal, starred review).

STILL A FIRE

Mikel, 1947–48

He waits with the others.

He finds a small space on the already crowded bench that faces the river and when there is the sound of an engine he turns and focuses on the distant headlights or the dust rising from the dirt road. Otherwise he watches the tugboats pulling shipping containers toward the Calais harbor while some of the men shout at the pilots, asking if they are hiring. They blow into their hands. They pace. They throw pebbles at the ships, though no one ever throws far enough to hit them.

Once, a sailor came out, spun a few times on the deck, and launched a small package in their direction. It was the size of a grenade and one of the men had reached for Mikel’s hand, terrified as it landed on the lower bank. Mikel let go and went to retrieve it. It was a pack of cigarettes with a note wrapped around it telling them to go fuck themselves. They smoked the pack that day.

Mikel is the youngest of them. Twenty-four. He also stays the longest. If no one comes the older ones give up and return to the shantytown. A few of them move on, following the river toward the city, hoping to find work there or on the way. There is a new automobile factory down the road and sometimes it is possible to find a temporary job there, working a line or mopping the floors after hours.

In the past two years Mikel has worked for farms regrowing flowers and grains and for companies hired to sift through the rubble of what had been city blocks. He has carried boxes and furniture for the families returning to their homes or moving somewhere else. He has even carried their children, the parents too tired to lift anything. Sometimes a man drives up to the bench and wants company, and Mikel watches as one or two shrug, agree on a price, open the door, and go in.

What wouldn’t he do? In the night, distracted by hunger and unable to sleep, he makes a list, or tries to. It seems important to him, to try to know what he wouldn’t do. He thinks he is the kind of person who would enter the car of a man and keep him company. He never does but perhaps he will one day. He thinks this, turns over, and holds his breath as though he wants to swallow the thought.

It was the dogs he couldn’t stomach. When he collected rubble in the city blocks. He will all his life think of them, the dogs. The starving ones that had entered a pile for shelter. Too weak to move as the workers picked them up with the debris and bricks and threw the animals away into the trucks.

That day Mikel collapsed and vomited. Perhaps he blacked out, he wasn’t sure, only that the workers left him there and moved on. When he looked up he was alone. He was beside a broken wall where someone had painted a tree with lipstick.

•

He waits until the evening and then he walks home. He is with his neighbor Artur, a Romanian, and they follow the river west away from the city and toward the mountains. It is growing dark but there are still the bright lights of the factories across the water, bright enough to illuminate this side of the bank. Three stars have appeared, above. They stumble upon an American C-ration can on the dirt road. Artur picks it up, shakes it beside his ear. They are still sold on the black market and there are a few crumbs of a biscuit left on the bottom. Artur licks his finger and presses down. He offers half of the remaining crumbs to Mikel.

Mikel regrets it at once because he grows aware of his hunger. He knows Artur feels this, too, because he crushes the can and kicks it toward Mikel. So they begin kicking the can back and forth to distract themselves as they walk. When a car passes they pick it up and hide it as though it were something valuable. Then they try to wave the car down for a ride, though no one ever stops. Still they try every time, the headlights sweeping over their bodies.

They keep walking and playing. Artur balances the can on his foot before shooting it back over. But Mikel misses, and Artur raises his arms and runs briefly in a circle. Mikel retrieves the can and chases him. It feels good to keep moving like this in the cold as it grows darker.

When they catch their breaths, Artur says, I think they’re testing.

They are talking about the explosion they heard earlier that day. Or the faint trail of it. A few claps of thunder from somewhere in the mountains. Though they knew enough to know it wasn’t thunder.

Testing for what? Mikel says.

For the next one, Artur says. The next conflict. To be better.

Mikel kicks the can back. He thinks it’s from the miners. They resumed coal mining farther south and some of the men have gotten steady work there, moving to the temporary cabins that have been built for them, bringing their families if they have families. He envies them, envies the solidness of their days. He envies their families.

Artur is younger than he is. He speaks with a heavy accent. In a year he has discovered little about him. It is how they all live in the shantytown. They know only a few facts about each other. It isn’t conscious; it is, he thinks, a resigned exhaustion after the years that have gone. They survived. What else is there to say? There is little they want to talk about that doesn’t have to do with today. They don’t even want to talk about tomorrow.

He knows Artur was infantry and that he has a younger brother and that the brother is sick. Artur works to support both of them.

There were days in the past year Mikel has told a perspective employer to hire Artur instead, walking away and returning to the bench. And he is uncertain if that is something he should be doing when it is difficult to find work every day, and he is uncertain whether Artur at all cares. But they are the only people in Mikel’s life, so he does it anyway.

They are approaching the shantytown now. In the dark they can make out the bare lightbulbs strung up in the shacks and along the eaves of the tin roofs. The bulbs create severe shadows everywhere, a person’s silhouette drifting like a ghost along the paths. Artur picks up the crushed can and they enter the field, smelling food being boiled, hearing dogs and the noise of a radio over the hum of the power generator.

Artur’s brother is in the distance, sweeping litter with a broom. They know it is him because he is the tallest of them and the one with the poorest posture. Emil cannot work but he does what he can among the shanties, helping anyone who needs it.

Though Artur has never confirmed this, there is a rumor that in Romania, Emil had been a painter. Perhaps it isn’t true. Perhaps the rumor started because he collects canisters of paint from the nearby landfill in the valley.

In France, building-repair projects have created a wealth of discarded paint. So there are days when Emil appears on the paths, pushing a cart with a pyramid of tin canisters. If an occupant wants him to, Emil will paint their shacks in whatever color he found. He has painted over a dozen shacks already, some in stripes, some in solids or geometric patterns, so that during the day there are bright shapes scattered in the long field.

Emil waves as they approach and they join him outside where there is a bench he has made out of wood planks and empty paint canisters. None of them have brought back food tonight. Or money. But they have tea and the stale pastries Artur found the other day in the city, watching a baker throw away everything he didn’t sell. Thinking this insane, Artur took as much as he could, stuffing bread and pastries into his pockets, in his excitement forgetting that some were filled with cream and fruit. They burst on his way home, ruining his clothes.

How much Emil had laughed. Mikel, too, when he heard.

They eat what is left and laugh again and even in the cold they remain outside, talking about the day.

Artur’s brother seems both aware of Mikel’s presence and unaware of him. Mikel has never heard the man speak. Emil is a giant who can vanish at any moment, whenever he wishes. On occasion he brushes some dirt off of Artur’s shoulder or looks out into the lighted evening at the flicker of a bat. A dog appears, chasing a rodent or following the scent of food. When the dog finds its way to them Emil leans forward and feeds it the leftover bread.

Mikel wonders what illness the brother has. He knows it is something in the head. There are days when Emil never goes outside. Other days when all he does is stay outside, heading to the landfill. He has watched Emil help others but he has also watched him swing a piece of wood at people he doesn’t know, people who aren’t from here scavenging—swung and lunged at them in a way that made Mikel stop from approaching him.

It is odd that the brothers’ own shanty hasn’t been painted. It is bare, just the colors of the wood and the metal they have found for it. As though some personal seed of belief has escaped Emil. He can do what someone else wants but he can’t do the same for himself. Or perhaps he doesn’t know what he himself wants. Perhaps he wouldn’t know what to paint. Mikel understands that.

Did you hear the explosion? Artur says.

His brother doesn’t answer.

Testing, Artur says, his mouth full of bread.

Mikel imagines the life Emil once had. What his days were like. What kind of paintings he did. Whether there are paintings of his somewhere on a wall or in a vault or buried in a pile of other things forgotten. Or whether they were discarded or burned. He wonders if he will ever see one. He wonders what it means for someone to be a painter. What it takes for someone to stop doing the thing he has always done.

Mikel has done nothing special. This doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t know if it should. It was a life. He moved with his parents. He harvested flowers with them. Worked the Basque farms. He was good at finding things his mother misplaced. A mirror. A brush. As a child he knelt by the river once, pointed, thought he had found the actual moon.

Mikel is tired. He has done nothing today and yet he is tired. He watches as the brothers rest their heads against each other, grateful to be together again. The sudden physical intimacy tears something in Mikel. He looks down the path. He catches the dog moving in between shacks. The clatter of beads someone has hung outside their entrance. Calais in the distance and the curve of the moon. Briefly the smell of the coast. He never imagined he would live in northern France.

He thanks them for the food and stands. Artur whistles as he leaves. Mikel turns, glimpsing the crushed can in the air, and reaches out to catch it.

Good night, Mikel says. See you tomorrow, good night.

•

His shanty stands farther down the path. It has been painted blue, a blue that he cannot see in the evening. He lifts aside the wood plank he has been using for a door. There is very little inside. There are a few blankets, a deck of playing cards he had gotten from a tinker, when his parents had stopped to help the man fix a wheel. He had told his parents to pick whatever they wanted and they had let Mikel choose.

He could have picked something useful to them—a pan, a ball of thread, winter socks—but he picked the cards. He had never seen their design before. They were from Germany. Some missionaries had brought them. The tinker didn’t know more than that, didn’t know if they were called anything different or what kind of games you played with them.

In the shanty he lies down and opens the frayed case that still carries the cards. He looks at the illustrations of the drummers and the knights. He counts the cards knowing he is missing one, has been missing one for many years. He tries to make his list again of all the things he wouldn’t do. He listens to the people still awake in the shantytown. Someone’s radio.

He should have picked something useful. When the tinker had asked. But he picked these cards and his parents didn’t mind. Didn’t mind even when they could have used those winter socks. They brought the cards wherever they went and invented their own games and rules of play. The Flying Horseshoe. The King of the Woods. The Divine Palace. The Horse and the Moon. They played when they could, the three of them.

One evening on a flower farm in the southern French mountains he woke to find his parents had fallen asleep together sitting against the trunk of a tree. It was summer and beautiful and they had been delaying heading inside. Above them on a low branch hung a wind chime. His parents’ heads were bowed and their hands were trembling as though they were still picking flowers together. As though they were conversing in their dreams.

These two people in his life who could be as private as a tunnel.

They had been playing cards. Some had slipped from their fingers and scattered. So Mikel walked the field, looking for as many as he could in the grass. The wind chime clattered. He kept the melody in his periphery as he searched. He never found them all. When he returned he sat down near them, to be with them, and his father stirred. He knew it was him, not his mother. But Mikel didn’t turn. He didn’t know why but he didn’t turn. He stayed facing the farm and his father moved over to him, lay down, pressed his head in the space between Mikel’s shoulders, and fell back asleep there.

He thought of how his father never did this again. Of the soft weight of his father on his back. He thought he would like to find that farm again. That field of flowers. That constant melody in the night air. Was it a fragment of a song?

Mikel catches music coming from a distant shanty. Someone passes his door. And then someone else. Like the shadows of a carousel. And then there is nothing, only the spaces in the walls where the moonlight enters.

•

The next day a truck pulls up to the spot. It is an old military pickup truck though it could be anyone. In Calais they are everywhere, the abandoned American and British automobiles that civilians took for themselves. They are in the streets downtown, in the fields, along the river where Mikel is. They are painted over if paint is available or they are covered with tape or anything else, their disguise so crude and makeshift at times you wonder why they cover the markings at all. No one cares.

On this truck, Sunshine Clearance is written on a piece of cardboard glued to the side of the door.

There are only five on the bench. It is just before dawn and not everyone has arrived. But they all stand and approach. They haven’t seen the two men already on the flatbed. They were lying down, napping, but get up now to look around, their eyes taking in the river as though they have never seen it.

Then a man rolls down the passenger-side window and points at Artur, who is the youngest.

Can you walk? the man says.

He doesn’t understand the question.

Of course I can walk, Artur says.

Distances. Slopes. Higher altitude. Good lungs?

Artur flicks the cigarette he was smoking onto the road.

Great...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• A Willow and the Moon
• Still a Fire
• Galicia
• Vladivostok Station
• The Mountain
• Milner Field
• Author’s Note
• About the Author
• Copyright