The Surrendered

by Lee, Chang-rae

  Sylvie's father nodded to her from across the table when he saw her ribs were as scoured clean as the rest. She had worried her parents for as long as she could recall because she rarely ate very much, but lately she was feeling hungry, even famished, and not simply due to the diminishing rations. She was almost fourteen and her body was at last changing, even if she was still too slim. Her hips had widened and her chest was welling out and there was a rougher hand to the surface of her skin, Like chamois instead of silk, her mother pronounced, in her typically clear-eyed style. As she took after her mother, Sylvie wasn't ashamed or embarrassed, not even by the less pleasing difference in her hair, especially the tufts others couldn't see, the new coarseness and musk beneath her arms and elsewhere. Maybe she did not fully feel like a woman because she wasn't yet sure what being one was, or meant, but she was certain that her girlhood had passed, or if it hadn't passed, that it was something only barely remaining, like a baby's blanket finally worn through to a web of threads. Besides, Sylvie knew she could not afford to be a child anymore. With the fighting, their life was becoming too dangerous and real. Her parents had been talking about her leaving with the Harrises, who were departing in several days for Shanghai, and then going on to Hong Kong, from there embarking on the long sea journey to Honolulu and finally Seattle, where they and the Binets were from. Sylvie's aunt lived there, too, and offered a place for her to stay until her parents returned in the spring. They had each tried to speak to her about it in an idle, casual way, bringing up the idea as if it were merely a choice between summer camps, but Sylvie was old enough to know that her parents were not in the least casual or idle about anything. They were people who took seriously every action and effort, brooking high risks if necessary, for it was all in the service of what they saw as the most urgent calling in this life: educating children, feeding the poor, ameliorating suffering. Throughout her childhood they traveled from destitute place to destitute place, from the Amazon to West Africa and now to Asia, and although she always felt their love for her, she could feel cast apart from them as well, set just outside the tight centripetal force of their labors, the impassioned orbit of their work. She was rarely if ever out of their sight but she often felt eclipsed by the boundless, grinding need of the foreground, and in certain moments she was sure that she was the loneliest child on earth.

  And yet her admiration for them never waned. If anything, it had only deepened as she had grown older, as her shame at her own selfishness and self-pity seemed monstrously childish in the face of her parents' unstinting efforts. They had come to this village twenty-fi ve kilometers outside of Changchung to revitalize an old church school, which, like every other mission they had helped run, was also becoming a de facto health clinic and agricultural center and, of course, soup kitchen. In five months the enrollment had doubled, even some wellto-do merchant families from the city now sending their children daily for schooling. Yet as the fighting escalated, it was also becoming a sanctuary; just a few days earlier her father--against the protests of Reverend Lum--had taken in and treated a pair of haggard, lightly wounded Chinese soldiers who said they were being pursued by the Japanese but might well have been deserters. Either way, it could bring trouble to them, Lum argued, but her father was nothing if not calmly pragmatic in such moments. He saw everything in its most essential human terms. "They're simply scared and hungry," he said to Lum and the rest. "And ultimately, we know, through no cause of their own. So how can we turn them away?"

  Nothing had happened, neither side coming to search for them, and the two soldiers had slipped away the next evening under cover of darkness, each given a two-day bundle of rations. But Reverend Lum and Tom Harris were still concerned that such occurrences would only become more frequent and more dangerous, aside from taxing their dwindling resources, and after the helpers and their children fi nished eating and were excused the discussion around the table was about how the school should continue if and when full-scale war broke out. Reverend Lum and Harris were in favor of closing the gates to any combatants. They wanted to negotiate with both Japanese and Chinese officials to get them to recognize the school as a neutral zone.

  "It'll be safer if you can stay out of this thing completely," Tom Harris said, his large hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea. He was about the same age as Francis, in his early fifties, not a minister but a second-career aid worker who was an expert in agricultural practices and irrigation. His wife, Betty, was a nurse practitioner, and during the last few months they had traveled northern Asia, immunizing children in remote villages against smallpox. "Or else, if they won't let you be, then just close the school and all get out now. Don't you remember what happened to that Lutheran missionary school in the Congo in 'twenty-nine? It was right smack in the middle of a brutal tribal war, and ended up being used by both factions. The head of the mission wanted the place to be an open refuge but in the end he was distrusted by all and they tore everything to pieces."

  "What happened to the head of the mission?" Reverend Lum asked.

  "Please, Tom," his wife said to him. "Sylvie's parents don't want her to hear about such things."

  "That's all right, Betty," her father said. "We don't try to shield her from what goes on. Anyway, she's old enough now. Aren't you, sweetie?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "Nobody was spared," Harris said, looking away from Sylvie. "And they don't use guns in the Congo. They don't just shoot people. I'll leave it at that, for everyone's sake."

  "This isn't Africa," Mrs. Lum said.

  "Oh no? I keep hearing about certain things up north. How the Japanese wiped a few villages off the map. Eradicated every last soul."

  "That's a rumor they themselves spread to scare us," she answered.

  "I heard it was just one remote village the Japanese wanted for a base, and that all the people agreed to be relocated and work in a boot factory near Harbin. So what's the truth? What should we believe?"

  "That this is effectively a war zone," Harris replied. "Whether declared or not. Something is different now. What I see and hear is that there's no protection here for anyone. Including foreigners."

  There was a moment of silence before Jane Binet spoke up. Sylvie caught a certain glimmer in her eyes and she could anticipate what her mother was going to say. "I think if you're right, Tom, then we need to keep the mission and school open for as long as we can. I don't know if that means coming to some agreement with a certain side or not. You and Francis and Reverend Lum must decide on that. But whatever it is, it has to allow us to stay on here until the very last possible hour. The last possible minute. Because all of us can imagine what it will be like for these children and their families when the war does come."

  "The problem is determining what that last minute is," Tom Harris said, but not forcefully, for of course he knew it was pointless to argue. He and his wife had been stationed in the same place or area with Sylvie's parents several times, and like all the other aid workers and missionaries who had worked with them, they came to understand that the Binets were not out in the forsaken regions of the world for the usual constellation of reasons, for the glory of God and Samaritanism, or as some mode of escape or adventure or self-trial. They were not ultimately sentimental people, being rarely ruled by their hearts, even as they were genuinely loving and caring to their charges. They were two people who over the years had honed themselves into ideal instruments of mercy, and like any such instruments the greatest sin was to be only half used.

  "I see there are some moon cakes to be had," her father said brightly, breaking the mood. They each got a quarter-cake, Sylvie eating hers in a single mouthful as the others slowly nibbled. Both her parents offered theirs to her but she refused, despite how its greasy sweetness made her insides leap. She was not some needy child. Li, the young Latin and math teacher, nudged her with his elbow and silently offered his to her but she refused him as well. A month ago she would not have taken it for the reason that others might sense how infatuated she was with him. Bu
t now she did not care anymore what the others might see. For she was infatuated, and had been practically from the moment he arrived. He had a lovely English accent and when he asked her during their private Latin lesson to translate a passage from the Gallic Wars, he would address her as Miss Binet, like some proper suitor in a novel. He was not much taller than she and although several years removed from university he could easily be mistaken for a high schooler, with his lithe, smooth-skinned build. He had the habit of adjusting his round silver-framed spectacles with both hands, delicately propping them higher on his unusually prominent nose. He pomaded his thick, coal-black hair with an English ointment that smelled of sweetened almonds, like marzipan. One day back in the late summer she had seen him shirtless when he helped her father bear large buckets of well water for the children's baths, the wiry bands of his arms and shoulders and neck tensing with the effort. He had noticed her watching and waved to her and she had felt something drop from the top of her chest to the bottom. Now beneath the table he opened her hand and tucked the small wedge of cake into her palm but she could only feel the brief graze of his fingers on her knuckles and while they resumed talking she gently pressed the cake into a damp, doughy mass, focusing now on his gift to her and her chance to eat it. Only after the conversation turned again to how best to engage the Japanese and Chinese authorities was she excused from the table, and she walked across the frozen ground of the courtyard to the room she shared with her parents. In the unheated room she let her fingers curl open, uncupping the tiny lode of heat. She ate slowly this time, simply letting her mouth dissolve the cake rather than chewing or swallowing, running the tip of her tongue on the creases of her palm to get every last tinge of the lard. The sweetness warmed her, despite the frigidity of the room. She unbuttoned her coat, unwound her scarf. In fact she felt overheated of late, when her parents and the others seemed to have developed a waxen rime from the unceasing bitter temperatures. Even Benjamin Li could seem to stiffen in his movements. Her changing body had become a perfectly efficient generator, somehow able to turn any meager morsel into a sustained heat. In the absence of fuel it ran anyway, heedless of her spells of dizziness and great thirst and a waving ache in her joints, in her bones. Worst of all was the abraded sensation, the feeling as if her insides were in perpetual friction, flaring and rebelling against her body. Every night now in her cot, on her side of the folding painted screen her parents had borrowed from the Lums for some privacy in their shared room, she'd cast aside the many layers of rough woolen blankets and pull up her nightgown to her throat and let the piercing air check her until every ember seemed finally to succumb and she was as ashen as the moonlight painted her. She shivered terribly in her nakedness and gripped the side bars of the cot until her hands grew numb, and one morning her mother told her while brushing her hair that one's body was never wrong and though she'd said it before, just as cryptically, Sylvie finally understood what she meant. For hadn't she let go, too, stunning herself to another state of waking with her frozen hands? As with everything else, she learned this, too, from her parents. For as long as her memory served she'd listened to them making love (their living quarters were necessarily humble and cramped wherever they went) and she'd peered through her arms at their caresses and then her mother's willowy body shifting above her father, tapping out even before it happened the rhythmic tick of the bed frame and the beautiful breathing by which she would slumber.

  Out in the courtyard she saw that Benjamin Li had stepped out to smoke. She waved to him through the window but the brightness of the sun in the clear skies must have obscured her and he didn't notice her. She was glad that he didn't; now she could watch him freely. He pulled a cigarette from his etched silver case and lightly tapped it three times, as he always did. None of the other adults smoked and he was somewhat bashful about it and always went outside even though no one would have objected, especially in this weather. He didn't seem aware that he smoked with a rakish stance, his coat collar raised, shielding the match flame from the wind with his hands and narrowing his eyes as he inhaled. When they first started their Latin lessons when he arrived in the summer, he often blew rings for her, though the other day she had suddenly felt it was too childish and didn't reach out and poke through them, instead letting them dissipate on their own. He'd seemed almost hurt, if only for a moment. His Chinese name was Ping-Wo but everyone called him Benjamin, the name he'd chosen for himself while studying in England, after Disraeli. Sylvie only recently began calling him by his given name, asking him a question with the address during one of their lessons. He'd paused before answering but said nothing and resumed without mention or pause the next times she said his name.

  She knew it was because he was afraid she might tell her parents what had happened one evening two weeks ago, when he returned from a dinner in Changchung. Of course she would never speak a word of it, for it would ruin everything, even if what had occurred was not his doing but hers and hers alone. No one would believe that, she knew. She didn't wish the cloud of her telling to loom above him and yet she did nothing to make it dissipate, preferring to act as if nothing real had happened except in the darkened theater of her thoughts. The light there was hushed and orangine and within it she'd been waiting in her cot for the sound of the horse, and when she heard the slow chocking of hooves against the frozen ground she put on her coat over her nightgown and told her parents, who were reading, that she was going to use the outhouse. Instead she ran to the stables that once housed five horses but now held only one, which the Lums used for transportation and sometimes to plow the garden or hitch the wagon to for hauling firewood or coal.

  When she got there he was unbuckling the saddle and even through the heavy screen of the worked horse's scent she could smell the smoky whiskey on his breath. He drank sometimes with Tom Harris but he looked different now in the lamplight, his face and neck fl ushed and his eyes searching and distant as he patted the black mane of the animal. He startled at her presence but before he could speak she rushed up and embraced him, reaching with both arms inside his unbuttoned topcoat. He didn't move, but didn't push her away, either; and when her hands slipped down below the line of his belt and onto his fl anks he didn't protest, his body tensing under her hands. She craned her face to try to meet his but he wouldn't look at her and kept his eyes shut, and not knowing what else to do she gripped more tightly at his thighs, at his backside; she felt like an obtuse child trying to fi gure a puzzle or lock, fraught with a dizzying conflation of ignorance and desire and self-rage. But suddenly he pressed her close with an almost frightening force and beneath his gabardine trousers something rose up against her hip and seemingly without volition her hand met it, instantly understanding the necessary meter that became its own reason and only ceased with his momentary, almost pained, shuddering. All the while she was peppering his neck with kisses but he turned her away without even looking at her and struggled off, muttering only Good night. Afterward he had avoided her for several days, even canceling two lessons, but then when they resumed the tutorials it was as if nothing had happened and he was exactly himself again, friendly and bright.

  Benjamin finished his cigarette and went back inside. She was resolved that later on, perhaps even tonight, she would go to him in his quarters and once again press herself against him. That it might bring him some misery as well as pleasure only girded her, made her feel more mature and confident. She was sure that inside she was much older than her years and that Benjamin Li was in fact younger than his, for despite his intelligence and learning he was evidently inexperienced as far as women were concerned (once Sylvie asked him if he had had a girlfriend at university and he blurted out to her, before he could think twice, that he'd never had one). The moment in the stable would be their secret and she was certain that whatever he eventually wished to do to her she would comply, and wholly.

  Her other self-promise was that she would not depart with the Harrises if her parents stayed behind. She could not allow such a thing to happen. Sh
e would simply refuse, as adamantly as her parents would refuse to leave a mission before they believed their work was done. (She was mostly sure it was not about leaving Mr. Li, even if the prospect of never seeing him again made her nauseous with grief.) She was old enough that she understood now how best to confront her parents. She would reveal how like them she truly was. The three of them had lived through dangerous circumstances before, and if none had yet been during an actual war, then it seemed ever more vital that they not be separated now, with its specter so near. Without her presence they'd press on despite any dangers, willfully ignore their own safety to do their work. In Sierra Leone, when she was nine, they had left her at a mission of French nuns to trek with food and medicine to a settlement caught in the middle of a tribal war. Four native men accompanied them. They planned to be away for a week but had been gone almost two when the nuns started praying hourly for their return. Then there were rumors of a massacre in the very hills where they had gone. Sylvie herself was certain that they were dead. When they did fi nally arrive in the middle of the night it was with only two of the men; the others had been killed protecting them, her parents and the others barely able to escape. Her mother and father woke her with their tearful embraces and had her sleep between them that night, but in the morning she could see in their eyes that although devastated they were as resolved as ever, if not more so, and she knew that they would do the same again one day, risk leaving her an orphan if it meant saving a score of the ever-inexhaustible number.