In the fall, Yohan climbed to the top of the hill town. He passed the church where the road ended and crossed a sloped meadow, heading toward the tree on the ridge.
The tree was tall and had been shaped by the wind. Its branches were long and thick, extending out in one direction. Some nearly touched the ground.
He rested there, on the peak of the hill, and looked out at the distant lighthouse and the old plantation house to the north. Breakers approached a cliff. The wind was steady, consuming the noises, and he watched the town go about its day.
It was his second year here. He had grown accustomed to the heat and the warmer seasons. His skin had darkened and his muscles had returned to him. He kept his hair short, walking with Kiyoshi to the barbershop every few weeks.
Earlier that day he had gone to the market in the large square overlooking the port. He walked through the aisles, passing the stalls, listening to the vendors and the shoppers converse and barter, translating what sentences he could in his mind, catching a phrase he did not yet understand and memorizing the sounds so that he could ask Kiyoshi about it later.
Craftsmen and toy makers sat on wicker chairs, fanning themselves with newspapers. They sold pottery and dolls and tapestries and wooden animals and toy boats of various sizes, lined up in rows, some of them as small as a pebble. He held the miniature rowboats, examined their craft, felt their lightness and their smoothness in his palm. He bent down and peered into their hollows as though expecting to find something there. He imagined each of them being placed into the sea, moving in separate directions. He thought how wonderful it would be to follow them.
The full height of the church spire rose above the ridge. He heard a door open and looked down into the town, over a stone wall where the old priest appeared, followed by Peixe, who leaned on his cane as they walked through the garden behind the church. He understood that they were speaking about a Sunday service and a dinner, catching their fragmented conversation. Then they parted, the priest returning inside as the groundskeeper began to collect vegetables.
Peixe wore cotton trousers, an old shirt, and a vest. His hair was disheveled and there was a basket slung over his arm. In that first year in the town, they had only spoken a few words.
There had been a farmer who sometimes visited the camp, bartering with the soldiers. He lived in a farmhouse in the valley, far beyond the fences, and Yohan would look out at it from time to time, seeing the farmer at the door or outside, washing a window.
He never knew the man, did not know if he was married or had a family, or how his life had been altered during that war. He imagined the man was still there. Perhaps even the camp itself. He thought of all the doctors and soldiers and nurses forever moving along that field surrounded by high fences and towers, and he wondered what remained in those mountains.
From the ridge he watched Peixe for a while, in the afternoon stillness, the garden trees throwing shadows on him.
In the harbor, crates hung suspended in the air. Birds circled them. The sea was clear. It moved toward him and faded and he felt the time that had passed and his time here. He thought that he had made the best of it all, that he had worked and made a living, and he felt the contentment of that. He thought of what the years would bring, what sort of life was left in him.
It was then that he saw the children. There were two of them, a boy and a girl. They had appeared on the cliff beside the town. Now they were moving through the meadow, heading toward him.
Their clothes were almost identical. They both wore trousers that were too large for them, the hems rolled up to their shins and wet from the ocean. They wore white button-down shirts: the girl had folded her sleeves up to her elbows; the boy’s hung over his arms so that it appeared as though he were without hands, the pale fabric swinging by his hips as he followed the girl.
The boy had short, dark hair; the girl’s was long and pale and fell down her shoulders, reaching her waist. They were barefoot.
He knew them. Though he had not seen them in some time.
He watched as they slowed in front of him and approached with shyness. He was sitting against the tree with his hands around his knees. They stopped and the boy looked somewhere behind Yohan’s shoulder as if expecting someone else to appear. The girl’s eyes were fixed on him but revealed nothing. The day was bright and the wind continued to come in from the sea.
He held up a bag. The girl tilted her head, as though considering the bag, then took it. Her arm vanished into the opening, her hand burrowing in the canvas. When it reappeared it held bread rolls, fruit, and strips of dried fish he had gotten at the market.
She handed the bag back to him. Then, standing there under the tree, the boy and the girl began to eat. He watched them bringing their hands to their lips and their mouths work the food and their eyes calm as they began to look around at the slope and the rooftops of the town, enjoying their meal, their shyness now gone, replaced by an ease, some kind of comfort, almost, though whether he was a part of that he did not know.
The girl tucked her hair behind her ears. He could smell them, their clothes, their hair, and their breaths. They smelled of paint and the shore.
When they were finished they wiped their hands on their shirts and moved past him. They reached for a low limb in the tree. The boy raised a calloused foot. The girl hung in the air, swinging. Then they began to climb. Their bodies circled the tree like planets as they went higher, blocking the afternoon light.
In the middle of the tree they each took a branch and rested, dangling their legs above him. The boy faced the sea and the girl the farmlands and the distant mountains. They sat hidden among the branches; patches of their clothes were visible, the girl’s long hair, an ankle and a foot. One of them coughed and then they were quiet.
Now there was just the sound of the leaves. The boy lay down against a branch and Yohan, below them, extended his legs and leaned against the tree. He shut his eyes.
He heard the girl say, —Do you still have it?
She spoke in Portuguese, that language he was still learning. He hesitated, repeating her question in his mind.
Then, without looking at her, he nodded.
From the tree he heard laughter. Her quiet delight. He smiled. He used to think that he had dreamed them on that first day, the sailor pointing up toward the deck of a ship and handing him an umbrella.
It stood in the corner of his room, its fabric long dry from the last time it had rained.
He heard her sigh, the boy shift and settle.
Then she said his name. She said it slowly, taking her time with the syllables. She said it once. He kept his eyes closed. Her voice as he remembered it, that kite of sound settling into him. Then nothing more was said and they stayed for a while longer on that hill.
• • •
In those years they slipped in and out of his life.
He did not know where the children came from, whether they had been born here or had arrived from somewhere else. He knew only that some days they appeared and that there were also days when he did not see them at all. Sometimes they stayed in the town for a full year. Other times they stayed for a month or a season and no one knew when, or if, they would ever come back. But they always did.
He was unaware of where they went. And he wondered whether there were others in the far towns who knew them and had grown accustomed to them, even expected them, just as he began to.
At one time he thought that they were siblings or perhaps cousins. He did not know why he thought this except they were always together and moved through the town in a way that seemed as if they had been in each other’s life for a very long time.
In the town they were known as the beggar children, as all of them were, the young ones here who made their homes in the alleyways or in the settlement not far from the plantation house.
Most of the townspeople ignored them. The children preferred it this way. It was something they understood, and had been shaped by, their world entirely different from the communities already established in this town, in the docks, in the neighborhoods, the shops.
The girl was named Bia.
The boy was called Santi by those who knew him because he had been found at the church and spent his first years there, raised by Peixe. The groundskeeper would wrap the boy in a blanket, strap him onto his back, and work in the garden.
Even when Santi was older and no longer living there, he visited. And the two of them spent the night outdoors, Peixe setting out an extra plate for him, still cutting his food, and Santi allowing it.
He was small for his age. He wanted to be a sailor, though he had never learned to swim. Still, on most mornings and evenings he could be seen on the coast, watching the boats leave and return.
Santi was probably eight years old. Bia was perhaps seven years older. They were unsure of their age but seemed unbothered by it.
Some days Yohan met them by chance in the alleyways. At first they fled into the shadows or stood there caught in nervousness. But soon they grew used to him and he helped them search the trash bins, sifting through the bags to find objects they could keep or use to trade with the others: a comb, a picture frame, a pair of leather shoes Santi tried on, grinning, too large for him but clean and stylish.
Bia wrapped a handkerchief around him and he pretended it was a necktie. He wore the handkerchief and the shoes for days, walking along the beaches toward the settlement, pleased with himself and humming a song he had heard on the radio station.
The next time Yohan saw them they appeared with bruises on their faces and their arms. The boy was barefoot, the shoes and the handkerchief gone. They refused to meet Yohan’s eyes, both of them unwilling to speak of it. Buttons were missing on both of their shirts. Bia gathered her hair in her hands so that Kiyoshi could clean a scratch on her neck. They spent the afternoon in the alley beside the shop, avoiding the stares of the passersby while the tailor mended their clothes.
They did not visit the shop often. When they did, it was when it was empty and Kiyoshi would clap his hands, hurry across the room, and welcome them. He brought them food and offered them clean shirts and men’s trousers, which they rolled up to their shins, these spare clothes he had made or clothes that were abandoned by customers who had left the town years ago.
On a high shelf the tailor kept a cigar box where Santi stored the things he collected. Sometimes the boy sat in front of the shop and opened the box and revisited the objects—costume jewelry, a guitar pick, a stone—while Bia circled the narrow street on Kiyoshi’s bicycle. On the sidewalk lay some food the tailor had left for them, wrapped in newspaper. The boy would chase her around the street, carrying the foil wrapper of a chocolate bar, which held the sunlight as though his fingertips were on fire.
One time, in the afternoon, Santi came and stood in front of the tailor’s dummy. Yohan had been making tea. He parted the curtain. A moment before, Kiyoshi had gone to the market and the boy was alone in the shop.
Santi mouthed some words. He bit his lip. He formed his hands into fists and began to move his feet. Then he struck the dummy in the chest. It creaked and swayed on its pedestal. The noise of it and the dust from its skin filled the room. Then he struck it again. And again. Each time the dummy swayed farther, its shadow swinging across the floor. That heavy sound and the body spitting dust toward the ceiling.
Afterward, in exhaustion, he fell asleep under the dummy, fitting his body into the space and using a roll of fabric as a pillow until Bia came looking for him.
He began to fight with the other boys. They fought in the fields or in the alleyways or on the coast. Fought over food or the things they found. Cuts and scratches appeared on his hands and his face. Bia would grab the boy’s arm and yell at him, but on his face was a calm, as if he were not listening to the girl at all but was far away somewhere beyond the hill town.
Yohan did not know why Santi fought and whether or not he started it. He never asked.
Kiyoshi had known them almost all their lives. Around them he moved with eagerness and smiled often.
Years before Yohan came, Kiyoshi was resting in the meadow one afternoon. When he woke, a child stood above him.
—Hi, the child said. Are you my father?
Kiyoshi, still in a dream, could not speak.
The boy said, —That’s okay. Now we’re friends.
And he kneeled to hold the tailor’s hand for a moment before he left.
Santi used to approach the people of the town, asking them if they were his mother or father, the men and women looking down at him in either confusion or amusement or sadness as he lifted his hand for them to shake. In the port he followed the sailors around while Peixe looked for him in the town.
Once, he and another child had attempted to scale the church spire. The other one fell. Kiyoshi witnessed it. It was early evening. The forms of two children appeared in the sky. The first stars beside them. Then a sound, an exhalation and the clawing of fingernails against stone, and one of them falling. He thought they were ghosts.
He pushed through the crowd that had gathered around the fallen boy. The streetlamps had turned on. The boy was trying to move and Kiyoshi saw between the shadows of those standing that he could not, saw the effort manifested in the child’s blinking eyes.
Kiyoshi held him as a doctor cut his trousers. He leaned forward, smoothed the boy’s hair. He covered the boy’s ears. His eyes now quiet. His snot dripped onto Kiyoshi’s wrists. He had fixed his gaze on the knot of the tailor’s tie as if he had found something there.
Kiyoshi felt a hand on his back. He turned to find Santi hiding behind him, trembling. He had cut his palm while descending the spire and it stained the tailor’s shirt.
The boy lived but did not stay, leaving the town not long after. Kiyoshi would watch as Santi wandered the roads, his hand wrapped in a bandage, asking whether anyone had seen him.
The girl Yohan knew less of. She first appeared at the church looking for food. She helped Peixe with the chores, digging in the garden or cleaning the stained-glass windows or mopping the floors. She helped take care of Santi.
In the end he went with her. And Peixe, not wanting to fight with them, leaned against his cane and followed their departure as the two children headed toward the coastal road, this seed of restlessness they shared growing through the years.
She often rode Kiyoshi’s bicycle. And Yohan saw flashes of her, the length of her bright hair and the bicycle wheels between buildings, a reflection caught in a window. If there was music playing in the town, she searched for it, staying on the periphery of a crowd. Other times, in passing, he saw her sitting in an alley beside the narrow window of a basement music club. She leaned against the wall with her legs crossed. She hummed along with the musicians as she shut her eyes and swayed.
There were days when she would cling to Santi, her small hands wrapped around him as she pressed him against her. Sometimes she slept under the tree in the late afternoons, curled against the trunk as though she had arrived from a very long journey, a line of sweat following the curve of her spine.
Her skin was the color of the tiled rooftops.
He liked the way she said his name. In the town he did not hear it often. It sounded different from the way Kiyoshi said it or even the way he had heard it over the years. She said it with patience, taking her time, briefly holding each syllable before letting go.
—Yohan, she called from across the market or as she passed the shop, her hand in the air and a few people turning to look.