The Surrendered

by Lee, Chang-rae

  Ah, thank you, thank you.

  Thank you, Mrs. Singer!

  After closing up the hunter's cottage they went back up to the car. She lost her footing on a stone while walking up the steep driveway and Hector offered to carry her up and although it wasn't really necessary she let him. He lifted her easily, his arms girding her fragile spine, her fragile knees, and as her hand curled around his taut neck she drew herself close. She let her cheek lean on his shoulder and neck. He smelled grassy and sharp and there was a denser scent rising from under his shirt, like of a worked horse, and she wondered how long it had been since she'd been this close to a man. It had been David, of course, but he was admittedly overattentive to his hygiene and regularly used her body lotions and powders, and as he was remarkably smooth of skin and hairless (especially for a Jew, as he pointed out to her more than once) she would sometimes imagine when embracing him that it was a woman in her bed. Before David it was Nicholas, during his adolescence, when the air of his small bedroom was fetid and gymlike with soiled socks and clothes, and she'd briefly hold her breath on entering, and sometimes even when Nicholas hugged her. She didn't feel guilty at the time--what guilt had she felt at all, in those days?--but the regret was now keen and though it would have been fitting for Hector to repel her it was nothing like punishment at all, quite the >opposite rather, and now a welling arose low enough in her belly that she could almost believe it was not a pang of the illness.

  "I'm sorry you had to sleep in the car," she said to him. He was driving them slowly about the switchbacks of the wooded hillsides, braking and accelerating gently enough to minimize the tug of the turns.

  "When I woke up I realized there was no place for you to sleep."

  "I was only in the car for an hour or two."

  "You were awake the whole night? What were you doing?"

  "Nothing."

  "You weren't drinking more?"

  "I'm always doing that."

  "You weren't thinking about driving off ?"

  He didn't answer her.

  She said, "You must be tired, anyway. I shouldn't have woken you."

  "I'm okay," he said.

  And to look at him was to see that he was okay, at least on the surface, the only difference this morning being that he hadn't shaved. Besides the drinking, it seemed to be his only habitual practice. He had shaved every morning they had been together (at least when they were housed in regular lodgings), which struck her as odd for a man who otherwise appeared willfully ensconced in a life so down in the mouth. But strangely enough the shadow of a day's growth on his face made him seem only more respectable, not less, for in the new, still-creased denim shirt he'd changed into (one of a half-dozen she'd bought him on landing at the airport), he could easily be one of David's squarejawed colleagues at a country home on the weekend, driving to the hardware store for a pet project in the yard.

  "It must have been cold last night."

  "A little."

  "Tonight you'll have a decent room."

  He nodded.

  "I decided something, while you were cleaning up."

  "Okay."

  "After we find Nicholas, I want to go directly on to Solferino. For all we know he could be there right now. But wherever he is, I want to go there quickly. Even if it's late in the day."

  "It could take five or six hours from Siena, judging from the map."

  "I don't care. I feel stronger now, but you're right." She took a breath. "I'm going to die soon."

  "I said you'd die if you didn't rest."

  "I know what you said. I know what you were thinking, too. So this is my wish. When he's with us we'll start right away. We can't lose any time. I know you have doubts about finding him. I can see it in your face. But I know we will find him, and once we do he'll come with us."

  "And if he doesn't want to?"

  "He can't say no to me. Not the way I am. If he tries, I want you to persuade him."

  "Me?"

  "He won't say no to you."

  "He won't give a damn about me."

  "I don't mean that way."

  "What? What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to make sure he comes with us. Will you do that for me, Hector?"

  "You want me to threaten him? Handle him?"

  "I want him to be with me. If I had to, and could grab him and hold on to him myself, I would. But I don't have any strength left. I have money but I can no longer exert myself. I have no strength at all. You're my body now. You'll be my limbs. It's best for both of us if you just do what I want. As I told you, my attorney in New York will expect to hear from you after all this. After I'm gone. Or wherever you are, you can call him and he'll wire what I've set aside for you. Then you'll be able to do what you really wish."

  "And what's that?"

  "You really want to know what I think?"

  "Sure."

  "To go bury yourself for good."

  Hector drove on in silence. She didn't care that he was cross at her. He was not here for the money, or for her, maybe not even for himself, if "for himself " meant the usual reasons a person did anything: some principle, or necessity, or pleasure, or the avoidance of displeasure, pain. June had not thought it as a girl, for back then she was even more fixed in her purpose than she was now--to survive, always survive--but she had come to see over the last several days that he was a being who completely lacked desire. Clearly he had had deep feeling for Dora, but she was gone and now it seemed he had fallen back into an existence most familiar to him, which he wore like a grotty old cap. He wanted nothing. He yearned for nothing. Even his drinking was just marking the time, a busyness of the hands, the mouth. He hardly seemed to care whether he was living or dead. At moments this infuriated her, given how she herself was gripping the edge of the precipice; it made her want to push him out of the car and take the wheel. If anything, she thought, he was here to wallow in the memory of Sylvie Tanner, to punish himself over her, which she knew would also be her tightest lashing, her darkest charm, and keep him longer at her side. She had plenty to punish herself with, too, but she was focused on Nicholas. She was becoming afraid that he might resist seeing her. Even refuse. It was perhaps mad, but she pictured how if Hector had to corral him, forcibly hold the boy down, she might decide to stick him with her syringe, in order to calm him down. Certainly Nicholas would have to accept them as the best option: either she and Hector would arrest him or the authorities would. And while they journeyed to Solferino together in the back of the car, she would tell him the things she had been meaning to tell him, since the day he left for Europe: that she was sorry for her selfishness during his childhood, her focus too narrow to include even him; that she thought him vastly talented; that his sensitivity was not, as she might have led him to believe, a weakness, but could be turned into strength, of which his stubborn distance from her was a sure sign; that she forgave him for taking her book on Solferino and that he should forgive her, if he could, if not now, then someday. Lastly, she would tell him that she had always loved him, despite her meager capacity to show it, that if she could will herself eternal life it would be wholly spent at his side.

  All this was true, all this was true.

  And yet Sylvie Tanner, too, was ruling the weather of her mind, like an incipient mass of stormy air; she felt disturbances and shifts, the invisible whorls of a presence, even the taste of her own tongue different in her mouth. She had to close her eyes now, as it seemed Hector was speeding up. She had long thought her love for the woman was dissipated, and had been for years, hardly a memory arising. But it was messy; love was the question that had confounded her most in life. With "loved ones"--with a mother and father, sisters and a brother, with a son--one always began with love and proceeded from there, and through time and happenstance saw it broadened, or shored up, or else steadily assailed, wrecked, and torn down. But for June it had not been exactly so; her secret feeling was that the opposite was true. Even before they had all perished, or vanished, she had had a hear
t that craved more readily than it accepted, she could look upon the face of a beloved with no ill reason or malice and in an instant cleave herself from the bond. It was an effortlessly monstrous ability, as if she could simply pluck from her heel a spur called love, her own cool blood the quickest antidote.

  And yet with certain unknown others, she had given herself over too deeply, perhaps a half-dozen times, with both men and women. This in the years between Nicholas's leaving and before meeting David, when her solitude was almost too perfect and she craved to be touched. It was never more than the act, though there would always be some prelude. It was this way with a woman named Stephanie, whom she knew for the length of a weekend antiques conference and would never see again. She had had no intent to meet anyone, but at a booth she met this beautiful, striking woman of Spanish descent with pale skin and a full, swollen-looking mouth, and somehow the reedy timbre of the woman's voice and her lithe, narrow-shouldered physique rendered June blind with purpose.

  For two days she went about seducing the woman not with her body or character or any of the usual wiles but a furious and open desire. She kept touching her arm, brushing against her when they sat together, telling her how lovely she was, applying a constant, pressuring want that had the effect of cutting off all other avenues, all other possibilities; she would force her to relent. In the end, as if by her design, the poor riled woman finally led them from the exhibition hall past fire doors into the back concrete stairwell of the hotel, where they roughly kissed and groped each other before going up to the hotel room, their grunts echoing downward and upward in the dimly lighted well as though they were toiling in a catacomb.

  I T H A D B E E N L I K E T H A T at the orphanage. After the Tanners first arrived, June had actually suffered what seemed a weeklong walking illness, hunched over like one of the older aunties, swallowing back a sour burning in her throat. She might not eat much for a day, or two, then would gorge herself until she could hardly breathe, her stomach feeling like it would burst. Of course once Sylvie and June got to know each other and June started cleaning the cottage for her it eventually went away, but for a while a certain effect lingered, a mild nausea just before she knew she would be with her, the same before any imminent parting: she'd feel she was going to retch, her mouth filling with spit as she ran off. Then, one day, she caught a glimpse of Sylvie changing out of some soiled blue jeans into a skirt before dinner, her long fl anks chapped pink from the rough fabric, the smooth knobs of her knees almost showing through her diaphanous skin, and June, her chest burning, finally understood her discomfort might be the expression of a desire.

  She sometimes wondered, naturally enough, if Sylvie could ever have a similar feeling for her. It was pure innocence, of course; she could never link her emotions with the depraved carnality she'd witnessed during the war, for she was a child again in the woman's presence, and she gave herself over to whatever Sylvie asked of her, even when she said that they should not spend so much time together, for the sake of the other children. June didn't care a whit for the others but had agreed without hesitation or question. Still, she couldn't help constantly testing the woman:

  "Would you have played with me when you were a girl?"

  "Of course! We always do things together, don't we?"

  "But would you have liked me, if you were just one of us?"

  "Don't be silly."

  "But would you?"

  "Yes."

  "Say it again."

  "Yes! Yes!"

  June never fully believed her, though it hardly mattered. That she and Sylvie were together each day, that she could work in their house from after studies until bedtime, that she could always be within arm's reach, this was the world for her, her only extravagance and riches. And it was reciprocated; even in the face of Reverend Tanner, who showed a growing antipathy to her presence, sometimes hardly even greeting her, Sylvie never minded her staying an extra hour, or two. And although it was true that Sylvie was no longer mentioning adopting her and taking her to America, June was sure that it was Sylvie's way of respectfully allowing her husband to sit with the prospect, that he needed more time with the idea of having a child who wasn't his own. She knew about their fertility troubles, if only from having stolen peeks at Sylvie's leather-bound diaries, a collection of which she kept in a trunk beneath her bed. They were dated from the early 1930s and came all the way up to their arrival here, recounting her travels with her missionary parents and her adolescent and university days in Seattle and then her marriage to Ames Tanner. Sylvie had become pregnant a number of times but they had given up trying some years ago and June could begin to understand what they were doing in Korea, certain there must be reasons besides goodness and charity for them to have come to a place as awful as this. They could not possibly be there only to give of themselves. They were hoping for something, too, and in the tireless device of her mind she was fi guring how she could give them what they wished. It was finally within her power. For the best thing about the orphanage for June was not ultimately its offer of food or shelter or schooling but that it was a world unto itself, though in a manageable scale, a world she could now exert herself upon, remake as she required.

  So she resolved herself to be disciplined and not bring up anymore the question of her adoption. She would patiently wait. Her bond with Sylvie was not just of a mother and daughter but that of comrades who by the curse of war had been sentenced to be alone. The one omission in the diaries, she noticed, was any mention of Sylvie's parents' deaths. Sylvie had already told her they had died in Manchuria, where they were missionaries in a place much like New Hope, and June imagined Sylvie to have been orphaned like herself, cast out on a solitary road, compelled to make her way back to life by the force of her own tireless will. There were many years separating them, of course, this again would be a question of waiting out time, and she saw herself in their resumed lives as Sylvie's secretary and housekeeper, her girl-in-waiting, her handmaiden, someone she could use and count on at any moment of the day or night. She would be indispensable to her, and in return Sylvie would envelop her with her passion and grace, guide her through her education to her own womanhood, when June would not marry unless she had Sylvie's blessing, indeed perhaps never abide anyone else as closely, as purely. June knew the depth of her own feelings, for it didn't please her at all to see how deadened the Tanners' marriage had become. She could hardly bear Sylvie's unhappiness. No one else could know, as she did, how they were so wanly self-encapsulated, how they rarely touched each other anymore, not even a hand on the arm, the briefest embrace. They spoke to each other warmly enough while out on the orphanage grounds but in the house they seemed caught in their own cold amber, June stripping their separate beds once weekly, the sheets redolent of nothing but sleep. Yet she couldn't help but feel sorry for Reverend Tanner as well. Late one afternoon, while he was writing letters at his desk and she was in the back room making up his wife's bed--Sylvie was helping Hector with the last of the digging for the new sewer--Tanner called her name. She assumed she'd misheard him but he called again.

  "June, would you come here, please?"

  She came out holding a dusting rag lightly dampened with lamp oil and began wiping the top of the rolltop desk.

  "That's all right, June," he said, motioning for her to stop. "I didn't mean that. Please sit down."

  He'd never offered her such a courtesy before, and she was hesitant to take it.

  "You don't have to sit," he said, taking off his bifocals. The sleeves of his white shirt were crisply ironed, the fabric against the mottled skin of his wrists as papery as the stiff white linen garments the dead were clothed in.

  "How old are you, June?"

  "Fourteen."

  "You've been here since the end of the war, haven't you?"

  "Yes."

  "It's fine here, but it's not a home, is it?"

  She didn't answer.

  "I wonder: Do you know what you'd like to be when you're an adult? Would you like to have
your own family?"

  She nodded, not because she definitely wanted one or had even considered it, but because she was sure that was what he wanted to hear.

  "Mrs. Tanner and I would have enjoyed our own family, too. We weren't graced in that way. But we have all of you now, and we're very pleased. I value being here, among all of you."

  "Yes."

  "Mrs. Tanner thinks a great deal of you. You know this, obviously. She admires your intelligence and spirit. Your resolve. Do you understand what that is?"

  "She says I don't like to give up."