A Winter for Two

The snow arrived at the station ahead of them.

Before dawn, the plaza of Brussels-Midi had turned white, and a short row of lamps glowed above the ticket gates like the heads of a few matches left out in the night. Han Yuan shifted the two canvas bags from his left shoulder to his right. They weren’t heavy. The heavy thing he hadn’t brought — the residence card pressed at the bottom of a drawer in his rented room, which as of today was nothing but a piece of waste paper.

Six years. It had taken him six years to turn that little card from “impossible” into “possible.” And then, on a snowy morning, he had left it in the drawer with his own hands.

Rosa came back from the ticket machine, scarf wrapped up to her chin, only her eyes showing. She held up the tickets toward him: to London, seven twenty.

Only on the train did he have time to look back. And memory ran in reverse of the way they had come.

Six winters ago, on his seventh day in Brussels, the last of his money was picked from his pocket behind the partition of a public toilet.

He never said where he came from. When people asked, he answered only: a very cold place, so cold it was like being forgotten outside the door. That winter was unusually long — longer than his mother’s winter. He was twenty-three, had followed the freight lines for the better part of a year, and had finally climbed out of a container truck of frozen fish to stand at the gates of the South Station, surrounded on all sides by words he couldn’t understand.

He had slept on the station benches, slept beneath the slide in a park. By the fourth day of hunger he crouched behind a restaurant’s back door, watching someone pour out a pot of leftover soup. The soup was still warm. He would remember, ever after, the whiteness of that bowl.

From the twelfth day he went door to door asking for work. He didn’t speak the local language, so he pointed at his hands, then at a sink. Eleven households shook their heads. The twelfth was deep in an alley, a place that cooked local home-style food, run by a small old man with a grizzled beard. The old man held his hands and studied them a long while — hands cracked open at the skin, but with clean fingernails.

“Come at six tomorrow.” He understood not one word the old man said, but the gesture — the hand waving him inside — he understood.

The work at the sink lasted him six years. The water in winter was icy; his hands turned white and wrinkled from soaking. He thought: white is fine, wrinkled is fine — so long as the days these hands earned belonged to him.

Rosa appeared in the third year. She came to help on weekends, and stood at the sink too. He had come from a very cold place, she from a very hot one; across the pool of water between them, one was steeped in winter, the other carried summer. She talked a lot. She told him the sea back home was green, that rain came the moment it wanted to and even soaked through you never felt cold. She’d stop halfway and ask: and where you’re from? Han Yuan thought about it and said: cold. She laughed. “Fine, then your winters are my responsibility from now on.”

After work she made a pot of very sweet soup — the taste of home, she said. Han Yuan wasn’t used to it. He drank three bowls.

In the spring of the fifth year, his residence card arrived. Four interviews, a stack of paperwork an inch thick; the night the card came, the old man opened a bottle of wine for him. He fell asleep after two glasses, talking in his mother tongue in his dreams, telling a joke, laughing out loud before the punchline.

That same spring, Rosa’s notice came down. His good news and her bad news, less than a month apart. She didn’t cry. She went on stacking a pile of plates into the cupboard, neat and square. That evening they sat by the canal, and neither of them mentioned the word “staying,” because every option had long since been talked to death. She pressed her forehead against her knees, and her shoulders shook a few times, without a sound. Han Yuan didn’t know how to comfort anyone, so he took off his jacket and laid it over her back. It carried his warmth. On that little warmth she slowly went quiet.

Rosa had pleaded with him in her heart many times: stay, forget about me. But looking at the man beside her, she knew saying it would be useless. He was someone who had lived in terror of the word “alone.”

After her rejection, she had tried every road. In the winter of the sixth year, a great-aunt in London found her a job — a restaurant willing to sponsor her work visa. Papers to submit, person to appear. What she’d been given was a train ticket and a “maybe.”

“Maybe is enough,” she said. “I can’t afford to wait for ‘certainly’ anymore.”

That night Han Yuan didn’t sleep. He could do the math clearly enough: stay, and next year would be a settled spring; go, and everything started over — a new city, a new queue, a new “maybe.” But watching Rosa asleep on the bed across from him, her brow furrowed even in sleep, like someone forever on the road, he suddenly understood: however settled a life alone might be, it wasn’t living.

The next day he went to say goodbye to the boss. The old man listened, silent for a long while, muttered a soft curse at the end, then turned into the back kitchen. After a time he came out again and pushed a paper packet into Han Yuan’s hands. Two loaves, fresh from the oven, burning hot.

“For the road.” Then the old man went back to his chopping, and the knife fell louder than usual.

The night before they left, Rosa asked him: are you afraid?

Han Yuan thought of his first year, of an old man in the park sitting on a bench feeding pigeons, bread broken into tiny pieces, fed so slowly. Crouching under the slide he had thought: that’s all a life is for, really — to have something to eat, somewhere to sleep, to do one small thing, and while doing it, not be afraid.

“We don’t want anything else,” he said. “We just want to live like people.”

Rosa didn’t answer. After a long while she reached over and took his hand. Her hand was very warm.

At seven twenty, the train left on time.

Brussels receded behind the window. Snow fell on the platform, on the rooftops, on the alleys they had walked for six years. Six years ago he had walked out of this station with empty pockets; today he was leaving from it, with someone beside him. Papers could be reissued, queues joined again, “maybes” earned back one by one.

Rosa fell asleep against his shoulder. She had been worrying the whole way — about the paperwork, about London’s rain — and worrying, she fell asleep, her breath warming half of his shoulder.

Han Yuan thought: once they were settled in London, he would buy a loaf of bread too, break it into tiny pieces, and feed the pigeons slowly.

The train ran northwest, and the snow grew lighter. A crack opened in the clouds, and light fell somewhere far away, like a home not yet reached — but surely, surely to be reached.

A winter for two is warmer than a summer alone.

(This story is adapted from true events; all names are pseudonyms.)