“After that, what is there to tell? Whatever you can imagine, happened. Like your general, the dwarf-bandit also claimed to love me. Still, when it was time for him to leave, he did not want to set me free. Instead, he donated me to the comfort station in New Guinea, where he was being sent, so that he would still have the pleasure of me. He said he was doing it to be together, even though he’d have to share me. He said this as if I would be touched at his sentiment, as if I would be flattered by his devotion.
“The men in New Guinea smelled of fire and blood, and when they took us they pounded us with the smell of tears, blood, and rancid sweat, and of never-going-home. Sometimes they wept in our arms, covering us in salt. Sometimes they beat us. There was one soldier who liked to pretend to set all the women free. ‘Go,’ he’d say. ‘Be free.’ But none of us ever dared. Until one day a woman who had newly arrived into our company took off running, barefoot in the sand. The soldier shot her in the back of the head, cleanly, one shot, and she flew forward with the force of it, straight onto her face. Afterward, we were made to clean up the mess she left, dragging away her body, dumping water on the sand until the deep red of her blood thinned to the palest pink.
“It was from this so-called comfort station that your general ‘rescued’ me. After the Japanese left and the Americans and Australians arrived, I saw him watching me for weeks, his face open with hunger. When he finally approached, he thought I spoke no English. He thought I wouldn’t understand when he said, ‘You beauty, I will make sure you are not wasted here.’ Then he put his sweating hand on the gash inside my thigh.
“In Chinese, I said to him, ‘At least the dwarf-bandit knew I was his prisoner. Let me tell you now I am not free. I feel no gratitude.’
“The general’s eyes lit up. The only words he recognized that I had spoken were free and gratitude, and his eyes shone at the thought that I was grateful. He was a fool. I thought his weakness would protect me, and no other man would be allowed to touch me. And yet, here we are. He has given me to you.”
AT THIS POINT in the story, my father paused and rubbed his arms. I noticed that the sky had darkened and that the wind was picking up. The hairs on my arm prickled, and I realized that my father must be cold.
“Shall we go in?” I asked, rising. My father nodded, and as I put my hands on the handles of his chair to wheel him back, he reached up and grasped my hand with his.
“How are you doing, Katherine?” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, despite the knot in my throat. “I’m fine.”
When we got back to my father’s hospital room, Linda hovered above him as the nurses eased him into bed and hooked him back up to his monitors right away. As we stood watching the green line rise and fall in time to the steady beep of his heart, I thought about how all we were at the end of the day could be reduced to a collection of electrical signals racing across our brains, precise chemical compounds flowing through our veins and organs. The processes of our bodies were so exact and measurable, while our bodies themselves were so messy.
“You’re so cold,” Linda said, touching my father’s hand and forehead. “Why did you stay out so long?”
“I’m fine,” my father said, smiling up at her. “Don’t worry.” He took a breath and turned to me. “Where did I leave off?”
“Shouldn’t you rest?” Linda interrupted. “You’ve worn yourself out. I wish you would take a nap.” She sounded both accusatory and possessive, and my first thought was that she was jealous. But then I looked more closely at her, at the way she stood protectively over my father, and I saw her hands tremble and her eyes water with tears, and I realized she was frightened.
“Dad, I think Linda’s right,” I said, nodding. “Maybe you can tell me the rest later.”
“No,” my father said. “I might as well tell it now. There isn’t too much left.”
“Okay,” I said. I scooted a chair next to his bed.
“Come,” he said, waving me closer. He took my hand and smiled.
“SO I WAS in Meiying’s hotel room,” my father began, “and I said, ‘I don’t want to lay a hand on you.’
“‘You’re lying,’ she said quietly. ‘Like everybody else.’
“‘It’s the truth,’ I insisted. I was so ashamed of the attraction I felt for her in that moment—I wanted to protect her, to shield her, it’s true, but I also wanted her for myself.
“‘I have no desire to touch you,’ I said. ‘I only came because I need someone to look after my baby, and the general said you might be interested.’ I found myself layering lie upon lie, trying to absolve the general, trying to absolve myself.
“‘You have a baby?’ Meiying said, and something shifted in her face when she said it. Her eyelids fluttered like a captured bird. I wanted desperately to win her over.
“‘Wait here,’ I said. Then I went up to my room, and Katherine, forgive me, but I woke you up and took you to her. And I swear, when she held you in her arms, something in her face softened. Something in the way she held her body shifted, as if the fight had gone completely out of it, as if it was suddenly at peace.”
My father’s voice had gone soft. Behind him, through the window, I saw that it was raining. “But she didn’t care about me,” I said.
“Of course she did.”
“Why did she never touch me when I got older, then, if she cared?” I asked. “Why did she leave?”
My father sighed deeply. “In the first few years, she wasn’t as sad as she became later. There were days and days where she would walk around, showing you things—the leaves on trees, the ants hiding beneath rocks, the sticks floating down the creek. She would laugh when you would laugh. She was smart and strong, and sometimes I watched her and could see the person she might have been if her life hadn’t happened the way it had. I was stupid enough to think that perhaps I would be able to help her recover.
“Her one request when she agreed to be your caretaker was that you would always be told that she was your mother. And I agreed. But I see now how it complicated things. It’s hard when you pretend something for the world not to come to believe it yourself. And you looked like our daughter, like you were made of part me and part her—it was so easy to pretend that it was true.
“But I wanted her, and she knew it. At first I slept on the couch in the living room, but after a few months she invited me back in to my bedroom. ‘Katherine is old enough to wonder now why her parents do not sleep together,’ your mother said. ‘I do not want her wondering why that is.’
“So that night I got into bed with her, wondering if the invitation signaled another kind of opening. But as soon as I was in, she turned her back on me, and slid as close to the edge of the bed, away from me, as she could go. From that night on I slept next to her, not touching her, wishing I was anywhere else. I felt so ashamed for what I wanted to do with her, and I was sure she sensed it from me. That was when her nightmares began full force. And they were terrifying—she would wake up screaming, but I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t comfort her. She wouldn’t let me, and I knew better than to try. This is when I began to realize that there was nothing left for us to give each other except pain.
“‘Waiting is worse than the thing itself,’ your mother said, but it felt like we were always waiting. Waiting for me to transgress and touch her: waiting for you to discover the truth. I felt as if I hurt her every day by wanting her, by loving her, as if everything about me was disgusting. Still, sometimes I wondered if she didn’t love me a little, too, if she didn’t want me to take her into my arms. And so one day I did.”
He paused.
“I didn’t force her, Katherine. I just took her into my arms and found that she was willing. She didn’t protest, she didn’t cry, she didn’t pull away. I admit I was uneasy, but I thought that we grew closer during those years. ‘You’re a good man,’ she said. ‘I am lucky to have found you.’ She never made contact on her own, she never leaned against me, but I thought her past constrained
her. If she’d ever said the word, if she’d ever said it hurt her, I swear I would have stopped. That’s why I didn’t see it coming. But when you neared the age that she had been when she was taken from her home, she said, ‘It is too much, I cannot bear it.’ And within a week, she was gone.”
At this point, my father took a deep breath, but before he could continue, Linda burst out weeping in her chair. They were loud, uncontrolled sobs, and my father reached out his hand to her and said, “My dear, my dear.” But she rose from her chair, her hand over her eyes, and left the room, still wailing. We could still hear her, walking away from us down the hall.
I was breathless with discomfort and grief for both my parents and found myself furious at Linda’s tears. Who was she to cry over this story? I felt she had usurped something that was mine, taking over something that wasn’t hers to have.
My voice was harsh when I said, “You haven’t told me yet who my real mother was. What happened to her? How did she die?”
I think I knew the answer before he said it. My father looked away. His eyes darted in the way they did when he was trying to avoid a confrontation or an answer. At last he said, “By the time you came to me, your real mother was already out of the picture.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Do you mean you aren’t my real father either? Where did I come from?”
The beeping on the monitor grew faster and faster, and the moment I noticed it, I knew I could not lose myself in this surge of emotion. “Your heartbeat’s getting faster,” I said. At the same moment a nurse came in, checked the monitor, looked at my father, and looked at me, and—saying nothing—stood and watched him for a while as his heart rate steadied.
“No excitement,” she said sternly, before she left.
I took a deep breath and looked out the window. So this man in front of me was not my father. So I was an orphan. “Never mind,” I said. “I understand.”
“I am sorry, Katherine,” my father said, and his voice was hoarse. “I should have told you long ago.”
“Where did I come from?” I asked.
“You came from an orphanage. And I’ll tell you the story. I’m not hiding things from you anymore. But I need you to know that no matter what, I am your father now.”
I wanted to say yes, I felt in my heart that he was, but I couldn’t give him the comfort. It wasn’t that I wished to punish him. It was just that to extend that comfort would have meant accepting it for myself, and that wasn’t something I’d learned yet to do.
“AS YOU KNOW, I was a soldier,” my father began. “And I shattered my arm in combat in the late summer of 1944. I fractured my neck and vertebrae, and shrapnel was embedded all over my body, most dangerously in my left kidney. At first when they brought me in, the medics thought I’d die, and then that they’d have to amputate my arm—but the officer whose life I’d saved during that battle was influential, and he insisted that they wait. There were many surgeries I don’t remember, and I was unconscious for weeks. But my injuries were bad enough that when I did awaken, I was told I’d never have to return to war, and I was sent instead to a hospital in the French countryside to recover.
“That was when I learned that my best friend, Tim, from boyhood had been killed in battle. And there was more bad news: my mother had died of a heart attack after learning of my injuries. My father was already dead. So I found myself alone. I do know what that’s like, Katherine—to be adrift in the world.
“As the days progressed, I made a habit of walking the grounds each morning. The hospital was not really a hospital, but the country estate of some French aristocrat. All around, the garden was in disarray, the flowers trampled by trucks full of incoming wounded, the shrubs knocked over on their sides. But sometimes when I’d walked far enough away, I would stand among the olive trees and catch a whiff of the sea that the breeze brought with it, and I’d imagine I was adventuring—trekking through Europe in the olden days.
“I went a little farther every day, and my doctors encouraged me to take these walks and bring back news of what I’d seen. They said it cheered them to see me doing so much better. There was an orphanage at the edge of the estate, though it wasn’t an orphanage, really, in the same way the hospital wasn’t really a hospital. It was a series of three large farmhouses that had been commandeered by a group of nuns who were looking over three or four dozen abandoned and orphaned children from the war. The children were of all ages—from an infant they had found naked in a field, when they guessed she was maybe eight weeks old, to a sixteen-year-old girl thin and shivering in a threadbare dress. She refused to wear anything else and was always plaiting and unplaiting her hair. All the same, it was a happier place than you might have thought: the children ran through the halls and the fields waving sticks and throwing stones, digging up snakes and chasing frogs. After my first visit, I went often, whittling toys and making kites from bits of wood and paper and rags.”
Here my father paused.
“You, Katherine,” he said, “were the youngest orphan. You were the infant the nuns had found in a field. A novice named Liliane, barely seventeen years old—hardly older than the oldest orphan, had gone for a walk when she tripped over something in the long grass. She caught herself with outstretched arms, bruising her shin against a rock and tearing her stockings.
“She sat up, touching herself all along her body, checking her limbs for injury. And then, she saw you. A baby. And strangeness upon strangeness, you were utterly quiet looking back at her, still as a hidden fawn.
“It was God who had led her to you, she said later. She gathered you up, wrapped you in her habit, and carried you home. From then on, you never cried, but you never smiled, either, and the other children called you the Baby Who Never Smiled. You were a mystery—a child with Chinese features dropped into France as if from the sky—and these children carried you around in their arms as if you were their plaything, a treasured toy, their only doll. They dressed you in their clothes, fed you their own rations.
“They watched you with great intensity and a simultaneous sort of bored impatience. They spent hours trying to teach you to sit up, to reach for them, to laugh—to grow into a child who could play with them, a child who could smile.
“As for me,” my father continued, “it was Liliane I noticed first, the novice who had found you. She was slender and wide-eyed, always hanging back and watching me with a soulful gaze. I had the sense she wanted something from me, and I wanted very much to discover what it was.
“But then the doctors announced that it was time for me to leave. I was well enough to travel, so a date was set, and a flight secured. When I went to the orphanage to say good-bye, we all cried. Oh, it was a terrible scene. The young children clung to my legs when I told them I’d be leaving and wouldn’t be coming back. They clutched my shirtsleeves in their hands, only letting go to wipe their eyes with the backs of their fists, begging me to stay.”
My father paused to touch his hand to his eyes, raising his old, injured arm, his hand shaking. I thought how young he must have been in the story he was telling.
“I told them I’d come back for them,” my father said, wiping his eyes and clearing his throat. “Nicole and Madeleine and Angelique, Matthieu and Pierre and Agnes. I remember all their names, every one. I promised I would look for them and find them when I returned. One of my great regrets, Katherine, is that I never did.
“In any case, Liliane came to me later and asked if she might have a word with me in private. So we walked together toward the outskirts of the property where no one could overhear us. I had no idea what she would say or what would happen next. When at the end of our walk we came to a large oak tree, Liliane took my arm and led me behind it.
“I was young and inexperienced and what I’d heard of French girls—even novice nuns—made me hopeful of what would happen next. I prepared myself to kiss her. But when I saw her only looking down at her hands, twisting them, I knew she had not brought me there to kiss.
�
�‘What did you want to say to me,’ I finally prompted her, gently, and she took a deep breath and asked, ‘Can you take a child with you when you go home? Just one?’
“It took a moment for me to understand she meant an orphan, not herself. ‘Take a child?’ I asked.
“‘Just one,’ she said. ‘Will you take the Baby Who Never Smiles? She needs you more than any of the rest.’
“‘I don’t think I can,’ I said, mind racing. ‘I have no job, no house, no wife.’
“‘None of that matters,’ she said. ‘When you could save her life.’ And then, ‘I will tell you a secret that I’ve told nobody else: not even the other nuns know.’”
Liliane’s Story
“I didn’t find the baby naked in a field. She was given to me. The day I brought her in it is true, I’d been in trouble with the other nuns, because the night before I’d disappeared for several hours. They assumed I’d been visiting a man, and they’d told me if it happened again they’d expel me from the order. But I hadn’t been meeting a man at all, but my sister. She’d traveled to me in greatest secrecy and told me to tell no one she was coming. Imagine my surprise when I met her in the garden shed, and she had in her arms a tiny, newborn baby.
“‘Natalie!’ I cried.
“‘Hush,’ my sister said. ‘She isn’t mine. She’s the baby of a German Jew and a Chinese man, both scholars. Our uncle Romain rented them the apartment next door to mine and told me never to speak to them, but when I heard the baby crying, I took them diapers and food. They were so grateful. They spoke passable French and told me they were trying to get to China where the Jewish girl would be safe. They were from Germany and had been trying to get there by way of Bulgaria, but somehow they’d ended up in Paris and found some friends who told them our uncle Romain might be able to help hide them.
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