At the stream, Yamada carefully knelt on a rock, cupped his two hands together, and drank from it. There were paw prints on the deep brown earth nearby; the animals of the forest also came here for water. Yamada remembered in a daze the times when he would have jumped at the opportunity to hunt those beasts. It seemed impossible now that he had once been strong enough to run, to chase, to kill. He had liked hunting, not as people like Hayashi or even Ito do with sensual pleasure, but because it was what he had to do to become a great man of the world. He contemplated the irony that he now was a nobody of the most forsaken corner of the world, unseen and unheard by anyone. No one would miss him, certainly not Mineko and perhaps not even Ito Atsuo. He pictured Ito holding court over a company of wealthy men, holding a glass of cognac and saying, “My oldest friend, General Yamada Genzo, died in the war. He was a true hero worthy of His Majesty. To his memory!” And immediately afterward, moving on to whatever topic he was truly interested in at the moment, whether it was a woman or a piece of art or a gold mine. That would be the last Ito ever talked about Yamada. He knew what kind of a person Ito was inside.
It seemed clear to Yamada that his life was of the smallest consequence imaginable.
The fine, salt-like snow was turning larger and more fierce. Yamada rose and started limping his way over to the glade. The thought of lingonberries wet his mouth and ripped his insides, but he had no strength to move any quicker. Every joint in his wretched body hurt, as if parts that didn’t fit together had been jammed in by force. Snow started falling thicker and getting into his eyes, so that he had to stop after every ten steps to wipe them away.
Still, he finally managed to get to the glade by midday. But once there, Yamada was disappointed to discover that so much of the berries and even leaves were gone since the last time. Deer, elk, or some other beasts had also visited the clearing for food. Yamada went from shrub to shrub, carefully examining each stem. In one or two of the plants, some shriveled-up berries were hidden beneath a layer of snow. He greedily put them in his mouth, and the sour-sweetness spread from his tongue and even summoned a tiny bit of warmth in his body.
He ate two handfuls of berries in about an hour, and turned back toward the cove. But he had gone only a few steps before realizing that everything looked different under a thick blanket of snow. All the markers he’d used to find his way in the forest were buried. He went twenty steps forward and then turned back for another ten steps, and repeated these circles while the snow continued to fall. He couldn’t stop shaking. He had never felt so cold for so long in his life.
He crouched down on the ground, too weak to keep walking. Once in that posture, he couldn’t resist the temptation to lie down. So he stretched himself out, the forest floor as the bed, and the falling snow as the blanket on top of him. It was strange how he finally felt warm and comfortable in this position. That’s when he thought of that image, so many years ago, when he found a man lying like this on the snow, in the mountains a thousand miles away. The corpse-like man, impossibly gaunt and in tattered clothes. He hadn’t realized then that his life would change because of that moment, but the inevitability of everything that had since come to pass overwhelmed him in waves of crystalline consciousness. The events had taken place at once rationally and irrationally, defying logic and arriving at the correct destination nonetheless. Even the most difficult question, the Why, seemed to dissolve cleanly in the sky.
“It all makes sense,” he whispered to himself, or perhaps merely thought. It was no longer clear if words could leave his throat, or just floated around inside his head. There was no one to hear if he’d actually made a sound. It didn’t matter; Yamada was finally at peace.
25
Republic
1945
IT WAS THE COLORFUL LIGHT FILTERING THROUGH THE STAINED GLASS ceiling that woke JungHo. He had been hiding in a safe house, an abandoned chapel that was kept from demolition simply due to negligence. Since it was supposed to be empty, JungHo had been careful not to make any noises or movements. He never went out, surviving only on food dropped off once a week by MyungBo’s servant.
He stood next to the clear-glass window, which was laced with a spiderweb crack around a bullet hole. The sky outside was the warm, energetic blue of a hot summer day. He put a finger through the bullet hole, the jagged edge cutting into his skin and drawing tiny droplets of blood. He inhaled deeply; there was something different in the air outside. His throat closed with longing. Like someone hypnotized, JungHo pulled on his clothes and walked out of the chapel.