The Surrendered

by Lee, Chang-rae

  "Do you have any children, Mr. Clines? Excuse me, I don't even know if you have a wife."

  "My wife died many years ago."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I have a daughter," Clines said. They were stopped at a long traffi c light. "She lives in Philadelphia."

  "What does she do?"

  "She and her husband are both clerks in a grocery store."

  "Do they have children?"

  "No."

  He was clearly hesitant to continue, but for some reason June felt like querying him.

  "You must see her fairly often, being nearby."

  "Only sometimes."

  "On holidays?"

  "No, not on holidays," he said, clearing his throat. The light changed and they proceeded for a few blocks in quiet. He was driving quite stiffly, with both hands firmly on the steering wheel, his head locked straight ahead. She was ready to drop the subject but then he said, "We haven't spoken in some time."

  "May I ask why?"

  "I don't know why, Mrs. Singer. Nothing bad ever happened between us. There's no animosity. In fact, I would like to leave her with a decent amount of money, whenever I go. If I didn't have her, I'd probably have retired already. But she would never know that. I would have to say we didn't talk too much. Even when she was young."

  "Do you think you should have?"

  "I doubt it would have made a difference. Neither of us is very talkative. But I truly don't know," he said, with a sudden heaviness that revealed his full age. "Do you think you should have done something differently?"

  "With Nicholas? No. I don't think so."

  Clines didn't say anything else, and although she knew she was likely sounding defensive or callous she let him drive on without explaining herself further. For she had indeed offered Nicholas everything she had been capable of giving, and more, even as she knew by the time he was three that it might somehow never be enough. Perhaps no matter what you did you could never love someone out of his nature, love someone out of his fate. Love, she had come to believe, had no such power.

  Was his nature hers? In the antiques business she had tried to be honest whenever possible, though with old furniture and objets d'art it was difficult to follow completely ethical practices. It was a structurally unreliable enterprise, if not, at times, downright chicane. For one 245

  C H A N G - R A E L E E

  could never really be sure of the provenance of a piece, no matter what anyone told you, whether well intentioned or not. She herself, especially in the beginning, had often paid more than she should have, from dealers and "original owners" alike. Certainly there were markers that you could look to on a piece of furniture--say, details of the drawer construction, the quality of the leg fluting--but ultimately those things could be contrived. Fakes abounded in every era, most of them poorly done, but there were always a few masterfully executed works. Of course, for the vast majority of non-auction-house items there was only the experienced eye and what one could say about them without simply lying or even sounding like a prevaricator. Authenticity ultimately lay in the story you could tell, a tale most effective when it was at once fanciful and mundane. You had to offer differing scales, unlikely modulations, though all based upon the firmest-seeming foundation. It turned out she was quite good at this, her upright bearing and careful, precise way of speaking enjoining her clients to trust both her and their own taste implicitly, and if over the years there were a few instances of suspicion or unhappiness, she never had any problems with the fi nal disposition concerning anything she had sold.

  Of course when she was young June had stolen things outright, too, but it had been a matter of survival, plain and simple, as with the old farmer's blanket, and dozens of other items and foodstuffs during the war and its aftermath. And yet, even after she was settled in the orphanage, where there was plenty of food, where there was shelter and safety, there were instances when she would steal things from the other children that could hardly benefit her, and only gave them great unhappiness. Certain sentimental objects drew her eye: a boy's prized marbles. A girl's silver bracelet, which had once been her mother's. A particularly egregious theft had been of a flimsy, creased photograph of a family, which she'd lifted from the back pocket of a sleeping boy. She had nothing against the boy, in fact he was sometimes friendly to her, while most of the others avoided her. Yet she waited three full days before giving it back. She watched him search frantically through his few things, comb the play yard and classrooms on his hands and knees, then could hear him crying one afternoon in the boys' quarters, blubbering to his dead parents, asking their forgiveness for losing his only image of them. She felt immense in her cruelty, but she told herself, too, that he ought to accept that they were forever gone, that he was actually cursed by having the picture, that he merely weakened himself by examining it all the time and depending on it as though it were his sole source of strength and faith.

  No one found out she had taken the photograph, nor about any of the things she'd stolen from the other children. She was suspected, naturally, but nothing was ever proven. The only time she was discovered was when she returned something she openly admitted to taking. It was a book of Sylvie Tanner's, one that she always kept on the stool that served as a nightstand beside her bed. June had asked her if she could be their helper, and perhaps because of her reputation as a problem child Sylvie had agreed, assigning June the task of sweeping and dusting their cottage as part of her orphanage chores. There were always other books in the stack, books borrowed for Sylvie every other week by Hector Brennan from the Eighth Army base in Seoul, but those would change and rotate, while the slim volume would remain, the only book, besides the Bible and a hymnal, they had brought with them from the States.

  June asked her to read it aloud to her but Sylvie said it was not like poetry, or a children's story, something to be enjoyed; it was an account of war, and she said that June didn't need to read about it. But June persisted, if only because she saw how Sylvie handled the book, with indeed a kind of enjoyment, a certain somber savoring. June would peer inside the bedroom when she was supposed to be dusting, or creep behind to the plot in back, and there would be Sylvie with the faded blue cloth-covered book in her clutch, often not even reading it, more keeping it close, her form characteristically folded up in a chair with it tucked against her chest, or propped beneath her chin. Whenever June was in the house alone she would steal into the room and try to read a page. It was difficult for her--she was otherwise reading mostly English primers then, though easily--and she realized it would take her hours simply to get past the preface and initial pages of historical background.

  So she took it, reading it in her spare late-afternoon hours in the cover of a natural bunker amid the hillside brush and weeds. When the account of the battle began the writing became clearer to her, the words sharpening and crystallizing and soon enough disappearing, the reading coming to her as easily as if she were viewing a picture show in a theater. What the author saw of the battle was horrifying, the grinding carnage of the cavalry charges, of the artillery rounds and chain-gun shot, the piles of sundered, crushed bodies and scattered human remains, the veritable rivers of blood, but it was in fact the days following that haunted him most. It was the unspeakable fate of the wounded that haunted him, their privation and "perfect torture" because of the grave lack of food and water and medical supplies, most of the caretakers being laypersons like himself or the local townsfolk, all willing to aid the survivors but frightfully incapable of doing so. All the churches in the area surrounding the town called Solferino were filled with miserable soldiers, the air of their sanctuaries fouled with the stench of the dead and dying.

  After a few days Sylvie Tanner asked her if she'd seen the book. June shook her head, wondering aloud if Hector had taken it back by accident with some other books to the base library. It was an uncharacteristically poor lie from her, as if she intended to make obvious her guilt, but it worked, in that Sylvie told her that if they could somehow get i
t back from the base, she might be willing to read and discuss it with her. The next day June slipped off to the half-buried rifl e-shell canister where she'd hidden it, brushed the dirt from its cover, and took it back to the cottage. Reverend Tanner recognized the book in her hands and asked what she was doing with it but Sylvie came in then from the small rear plot and exclaimed, "Oh, you sweet dear, you got it back for me!"

  Yet she still refused to read the book with June, who then begged her if they might read others together regularly, after her chores. Sylvie hesitated, surely worried about showing even more favor to her, but eventually agreed when confronted with what June could con trive of her face, when she required, blunting its hardened aspects to the rounded eyes and tender cheeks of any other girl her age, back to the waif she should have been. After June quickly completed the cleaning they'd sit up in her bed and read aloud to each other until it was time to join everyone else in preparing the tables for supper. June found that her usually constant feeling of hunger would magically subside--after the war and for the rest of her life it would never quite disappear (she was like a stray cat that way, always willing to eat, no matter the state of her belly, of course except now)--and she would have stayed with Mrs. Tanner all night if she let her, losing herself in the warm tuck of her side.

  Still, June kept reading the book to herself whenever she had a free moment; she couldn't help but imagine that it was Sylvie Tanner who was the witness and author of the book, as if she had seen with her own eyes the fi erce fighting and wretched wounded in the churches, had toiled to alleviate the suffering without the aid of medicines or clean bandages or food. There was an inscription on the book's title page, written in a handsome, flowing, old-fashioned hand, To our stead- fast daughter. May you be an angel of mercy, and it was Nicholas who once asked June, when he was seven or eight, what a "steadfast" person was, holding the very book in his hands. The blue cloth cover had been long burned away and the binding was crackly and exposed, though the inner pages were intact. Because of its fragile condition she kept it in a large jewelry box on her bureau.

  She heard herself tell him what Sylvie had said to her, almost to the word: "Someone who is firm in his person and beliefs, who brings to the world a constant heart."

  "Are you an angel of mercy?"

  "I would like to be one," she told him, realizing that of course he assumed the inscription was meant for her. "We should all try to be."

  He nodded, then gingerly placed the book back in the jewelry box. Sometimes she could tell that he had come in and inspected the book, tiny bits of charred paper left on the bureau top, and though she would have preferred his not handling it, and then taking such an interest in its harrowing, difficult content, she grew to see the activity as a strange kind of intimacy between them, a way to let him peek into her life and past without her having to tell him a thing. Then one day, when he was older, in sixth grade, he came into the kitchen with the book and asked whose it really was--he'd realized the illogic of the English inscription, when her parents had been Korean--and she told him it was a gift from a friend. A woman who had helped her when she was a girl but who died after the war.

  "What was her name?"

  She told him and though it could mean nothing to him the name seemed to spark his imagination as might a character in a story. "What happened to her?"

  "There was an accident."

  "What kind of accident?"

  "A fire."

  He didn't say anything to this. Nicholas, always very mindful of her emotions, did not push her on it. They sat in silence for a moment, and then he said, "Is that where you met my father?"

  "Where?"

  "Solferino."

  She shook her head. "I've not been there."

  "Do you know what's there now?"

  "I imagine there's a small town. I know there's a church."

  "I bet it's a special one," Nicholas said. "You think it's like in the book we have on the Vatican? Full of fancy stuff, like gold statues and paintings?"

  "You mean great treasure and riches? Maybe so."

  "We should go someday," he said excitedly. "Don't you think?"

  "Yes, we should," she answered, even if she had always imagined visiting the place by herself.

  "Could this be mine?" he asked her hopefully, holding the book.

  "I don't know if I can give it up just yet," she replied. "Even to you."

  But the expression on his face dampened and she quickly offered: "But how about I write something to you in it. How's that?"

  "Okay."

  He quickly ran and retrieved a pen for her and opened the book to the page with the inscription. She was composing her thoughts on what to write when the phone rang; on the other end was a wholesale dealer whose call she had been awaiting. Nicholas waited patiently but when she hung up she had to leave right away to get downtown, to inspect an estate lot and make a compelling bid before any others got there. Nicholas stayed home. When she returned a few hours later (having purchased most all of the estate) he had fallen asleep in front of the television, a half-eaten salami sandwich he had fixed for himself on his lap, and she gently roused and walked him to his bed. Only many years later, after putting him in a taxi to the airport for his big trip, did she suddenly remember that she had completely forgotten to inscribe the book for him that day. She may not have even looked at it since then. When she got back to the apartment, she went directly to her bedroom and saw that the book was gone from the jewelry box. She searched beneath the bed, in her closet, on the living room shelves, and then in Nicholas's room, still full of his things, poring through piles of his sketchbooks and records and posters (sure signs, she thought later, that he had planned to come back), but after going through everything and the rest of the apartment she was certain that he had taken it with him.

  How could he? At first she was shot through by pangs of confusion, then hurt, wounded as she was by his meager regard for her feelings, by his callous act of taking perhaps the one physical object in her life that had value. Her fury the next day reached a pitch so sharp that she pictured an accident in whatever city he was in, his bus rolling over, his hostel on fire, such that he would desperately try to phone her. But just as quickly a terrible guilt overcame her and she convinced herself that it was his own sentimentality, mixed up with his particular kind of secrecy and larcenous need, that had compelled him, and she came to see it instead as a kind of loving act, as though he'd stolen in and snipped a lock of her hair while she slept. Could it be that this was where her son had gone to hide? Her heart raced with the possibility. Her mind was beginning to fail along with her body, but she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it before. They surely must go to Solferino, too. She imagined Nicholas sitting at an outdoor cafe, waiting for her. Clines wouldn't like it, but she would explain to him on the plane that they could only stay briefly in Rome, long enough to rest a few hours before renting a car and driving north.

  A car horn wailed behind them, the driver leaning on it an extra few beats in a show of contempt for Clines's slow driving; he'd been honked at several times already on the trip over from Manhattan. The car behind them came alongside and the driver gave Clines the fi nger and then cut aggressively in front of him, just grazing their bumper.

  Clines swerved, losing control for an instant, the steering wheel playing jerkily as the car fishtailed wildly. June was sure they were going to crash. Somehow he steadied it but now he was driving even slower than before and when another car started honking he left the roadway at the next exit, even though it wasn't theirs. He drove for a few blocks before stopping, saying he needed to check his map, though it was clear he was shaken, his temple damp with perspiration.

  June held the side of her head and face; she'd been knocked lightly against the side window of the sedan but in her condition it was as if she'd been struck with a rod, her cheek feeling like a cracked glass. And suddenly a nausea was welling up from her belly, rising and pushing against her lungs, up into her throat.
r />   "Unlock the doors," she said weakly.

  "It's okay, Mrs. Singer. We'll be moving on now."

  "Please do it!"

  The power locks jumped and she practically leaped out of the car, stumbling a few feet away from the door and falling on one knee in a weedy patch of the shoulder. She vomited very little, just the small mug of roasted barley tea she'd made herself before Clines picked her up, her spit tasting metallic and bilious; she was glad it was dark enough that she couldn't make out the blood in the grass. She'd begun fl ushing the toilet at her shop with her eyes closed after she got sick in it, simply to avoid that wash of bright, wild color.

  "You're not well enough for this, Mrs. Singer," Clines said, helping her to her feet. "Let me take you back to your shop now."

  "No," she said firmly, but then had to lean into him to steady herself. His clothes smelled strongly of mildew and breath mints and she couldn't help but gag and heave again, though there was nothing left in her to come out. She wiped the spittle from the corners of her mouth.

  "We're not going back yet, do you hear me?"

  He nodded and helped her back into the car. He still seemed unsettled from the near accident and perhaps from her vehemence, too, and when they passed a diner she told him to turn around and he didn't even ask why. Once he parked she asked him to leave her in the car for a while and go inside and have a coffee, and when he said he was fi ne she was sharp-voiced again and he sullenly trooped inside and sat on a stool at the counter.

  She waited for him to order from the waitress before taking out a small black kit from her purse. Inside were the syringes and cotton balls and vials of alcohol and morphine that she'd received from Koenig's resident. The needle was short and tiny, as fi ne as a fi lament, the kind diabetics and addicts used, but it was important, the resident said, to insert and pull it straight out, to avoid bruising or causing herself more pain than necessary. But now, on her own, in this condition, her hands shook with the screeching pains in her lower back and belly and she could hardly unscrew the bottle of disinfectant, and then jabbed her finger trying to push the point through the rubber cap of the morphine vial. She gave up, simply chewing two more bitter pills instead; she gagged on them but forced herself to keep them down. She tossed the needle into the kit; its dwarf scale somehow scared her. She was afraid that if she kept trying, one of her visions would appear along with it, that child in a perfectly sized doctor's white coat whose mouth was too gaping and wide for his shrunken old-young face. Was it Nicholas? Was it her brother, Ji-Young? Koenig had warned her that she might experience hallucinations, and this one and others were accruing to her of late, apparitions that said little or nothing and seemed only to be awaiting her. She found herself speaking half-sentences to them, faint mutterings, beseeching them in a kindly, almost sycophantic tone she had never used for anyone, hoping that they might not wrench her away.