The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  Benjamin experimentally loosened the handkerchief on the boy’s thigh, and the bleeding didn’t start up again. The skin still had color in it, so he wasn’t out of blood—which happened sometimes. Benjamin realized he’d been holding his breath, and let it go. The boy’s face, distorted by pain, relaxed slightly. Benjamin wrapped the leg in the clean cotton gauze from his satchel and fashioned a crutch out of a fallen tree limb. He cut a notch in one end of a branch with his knife and set a short crossbar at the top, to go under the boy’s arm, then wrapped twine from a roll in his pocket around the crossbar to secure it.

  Benjamin knew some of the local dialect, thanks to a rare mushroom his father had found in China. Small, brown, and nonpoisonous, it stimulated the part of the brain that acquires language. Chewing a small dried piece of the mushroom dramatically increased the speed at which they had learned the villagers’ language. It gave them a heightened linguistic focus.

  Benjamin asked if his patient could walk. The boy nodded, standing with the aid of the crutch, and Benjamin moved on to the next casualty. A man his father’s age had taken a bullet to the temple. His family would bury him before the animals found him, if he had family.

  Benjamin followed the sound of a moan to a lean man in his twenties, shot in the chest. Air was coming through his wound with a sucking sound. Benjamin cleaned the blood away as well as he could, and applied some of the blue paste to the edges. Then he placed a square of thin, transparent plastic over the hole. He taped the square at the top and the two sides, leaving the bottom edge free, to create a valve. When the man breathed in, he sucked the plastic into the hole, sealing it so that air couldn’t come in that way.

  Benjamin was leaning over the next casualty, another teenager, who seemed to have taken a lot of shrapnel on the right side of the body, when he heard a metallic click near his left ear.

  He turned to see the man holding the gun. It was a Vietminh officer, who told him to put his hands on his head. Benjamin obeyed. He could hear his father saying irritably in English, “You must let me finish treating this man,” and then repeating the sentence in the local dialect, using the familiar, arrogant form of you that the soldiers had used. But the Vietminh clearly didn’t feel there was anything they must do, at least not under orders from this Englishman.

  The man with the gun gave Benjamin a shove in the back. With a regretful glance, Benjamin left the kid with the shrapnel bleeding on the ground.

  CHAPTER 12

  Homecoming

  Jin Lo wandered the streets of her city. It was early morning, on a hazy gray day. An old man with white hair swept the sidewalk in front of a teashop. Had he lived here when she was a child, when the invading army came? Or had he been a soldier, away at war, seeing different horrors?

  A striped cat stepped out of an alleyway and looked directly at Jin Lo. Its yellow eyes held hers until she was almost upon it. Then it darted away, into the shadows.

  She’d had a cat of her own once, when she was eight, a black cat with a white spot on his nose and an unfortunate tendency to drool when happy. He left wet spots on her sleeve when he purred in her arms. But he was a very good hunter, and brought home mice, which he left outside the front door as offerings. When the soldiers came, he vanished. She sometimes had fantasies that he had been out hunting all this time, that he had grown huge, and could break the necks of the soldiers with one swift bite, and leave them at the door.

  Or perhaps her cat had stayed away out of shame, because he had been able to do nothing to protect his family.

  Or perhaps a stray bullet or a cruel and gratuitous swipe of a bayonet had ended him. But that she could hardly believe. Her cat had been too quick and nimble, too savvy and wary to linger near the soldiers.

  When the soldiers came, Jin Lo’s father ordered her into a wooden trunk near the door to hide. She didn’t understand what was happening. But she had hidden in that trunk before, playing “eluding the cat” with her friends, when the object was to hide while someone searched. So she climbed in, sank down, and let her father close the lid over her head.

  Then he opened the trunk again and tried to make her small brother get in, but her brother had screamed, and would have given both children away. Her mother took him into her arms. The lid closed, and that was the last time Jin Lo saw them alive. She carried the picture with her: her wailing brother, her mother shushing him, and her father looking afraid as she had never seen him afraid before.

  She had stayed in the trunk, silent. Many times she had wanted to climb out, to protect her brother from anyone who might try to hurt him, but then she remembered the look of fear on her father’s face.

  After a while it was quiet. She crept out of the trunk in the dark, making no sound. She had always been good at “eluding the cat”: silent and clever. She stepped outside and saw dark, still forms on the ground. She didn’t want to look, wouldn’t look. That couldn’t be her father, who had always made her feel so safe. That couldn’t be her mother, the most beautiful woman on the block. But her eye fell on a small hand sticking out from beneath the body of their next-door neighbor, old Mrs. Hsu. It looked as if Mrs. Hsu had been trying to shield the little boy.

  Jin Lo had taken the small hand and tugged, imagining her brother gasping for air when she pulled him free. He would be afraid, but he would be happy to see his sister. His lip would tremble, and she would whisper reassurances and quiet him.

  She pushed at Mrs. Hsu’s body and wrenched her brother free. But the boy didn’t tremble into tears, and he didn’t reach for his sister with his fat, soft arms. A single bullet had gone through both of them. The Japanese are efficient, her father would have said.

  Jin Lo let go of her brother’s tiny hand and ran as fast as she could for the Safety Zone. Her father had told her to go to the Red Cross Hospital if she was ever alone.

  She ran past more dark shapes and knew them to be the bodies of her neighbors and friends. Somewhere she heard crying, but still Jin Lo ran. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, sucking in the cold wind, which already had the taste of death in it. She would not be so foolish as to make a noise.

  She reached the hospital, joined the nurses, and helped them all through the night. It was easy to tend a terrible wound if you had no heart. It didn’t make your stomach turn, or your eyes melt into tears. The nurses whispered that the American missionary, the Reverend Magee, had been out filming with a camera. He was making a record so the world would know. In the morning she reported her story to Magee himself, and she didn’t cry.

  Sometimes, when she told the story later, it was she who had crawled out from under the body of Mrs. Hsu, unhurt, as she had hoped her brother would do. It was not so much that she was ashamed of hiding in the trunk. She knew that she had only been an eight-year-old girl, and she would have died at her family’s side if she had tried to protect them. It would have been a kind of loyalty, but a futile kind. The reason she changed the story was that it made it a story, one she had control over, even as the heart of it stayed true. Her family had been killed, and she had survived. It was intolerable. But less so if she could change it, alter it, and move the details around.

  Now that she had returned to her city, her feet took her to the street where she had grown up. She had not seen the place since she ran away to the Red Cross Hospital. Her feet moved more slowly. Many of the houses looked lived in, cared for, with small gardens in front, though there were no flowers now that it was winter.

  A man was painting the front door of a house meticulously, as if the smooth brushstrokes were the most important thing in the world. A woman, visible in a backyard, hung white sheets on a line. Jin Lo’s feet carried her on, against her will.

  Then she stopped in front of a small, unpainted house. Its brown, dead garden grew only weeds. A window was cracked, and the gate hung off its hinge. She pushed the gate open, and it creaked. The front door gave when she pushed. There was no furniture inside the house. It had all been carried away. The wooden trunk she had hidden in was
gone. A layer of dust covered the floor, and she left footprints in it. She looked at the tiny room she had shared with her baby brother, and at her parents’ room, and at the kitchen where they had eaten their meals. She heard her father saying something sardonic, her mother saying something gentle, her brother squealing with delight. And then her legs seemed to collapse beneath her, and she sat cross-legged in the dust on the kitchen floor.

  “I’m here,” she said to the empty air. “I’m back. Please talk to me.”

  CHAPTER 13

  First Do No Harm

  The first thing Benjamin saw when they took the blindfold off was the oilcloth that had protected the Pharmacopoeia, thrown in a heap on the ground. One of the soldiers held the heavy book and flipped through the fragile, valuable pages with impatience, unable to read the Greek or Latin. Benjamin was about to say something, but then he saw a woman whose stomach had been cut open. She was alive, kneeling and begging for help in a low, persistent voice that had been lost among all the other voices in the settlement. It was the only thing he could hear, now that he could see her. His hands were bound behind his back.

  His father, beside him, was speaking insistently to the Vietminh officers in the local dialect, then switching to French, which had been the language of authority in the country: “You must untie my hands. Let me help her. Laissez moi l’aider.”

  “It is a punishment,” one of the soldiers said.

  “For what?”

  “Eating rice that was meant for seed.”

  “And for this you cut her open?” his father asked.

  “It is fitting. Too many people need food.”

  “She’ll die.”

  “We all will die, without food.”

  “Please let me help her.”

  “We need you inside.”

  The men pushed them both across the dusty courtyard and into a wooden building. Benjamin wondered if the woman had been shown to them on purpose, as a warning of what might happen to them. But then he wondered if such brutality was so ordinary that their captors had simply taken off their blindfolds as soon as they reached the settlement, forgetting that there was anything disturbing there to see. He feared it was the second possibility—the soldiers had been thoughtless. That seemed worse than any threat. And they had the Pharmacopoeia. Would they destroy it? Keep it? All paper was valuable in the villages, as toilet paper, but he decided not to think about that.

  It was dark inside the small building, and Benjamin’s eyes took some time to adjust. There was a smell of bodies and also a smoky smell. The soldiers were respectfully silent, shuffling their feet nervously. In the middle of the room was a cot, and on the cot lay a man. He seemed to stare at Benjamin and his father without seeing, and he shook with chills. His high forehead shone with sweat.

  “How long has he been in a fever?” Benjamin’s father asked.

  “Three days,” said their guard.

  “Does he hallucinate?”

  The guard looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps.”

  “How is his vision?”

  “Not good.”

  “He’s your leader?”

  “Our general.”

  “If I cure him, you let me tend to the woman.”

  There was a pause. “If you do not cure him, we kill you.”

  Benjamin’s father switched to French again. “Il a le neuropaludisme. Il mourra sans traitement.”

  Neuropaludisme was cerebral malaria. Benjamin looked at the sick general, who should be in a bucket of ice right now. His brains were being cooked by the fever as they talked.

  “Alors traitez-le!” the soldier said: So treat him.

  “Et puis la femme,” Benjamin’s father insisted.

  The man waved a hand in impatience, as if they were bargaining for the life of a fly, not a woman. “Oui,” he said. “D’accord.”

  “Déliez nous.”

  Their hands were untied as he asked, and Benjamin’s father knelt beside the general and reached for his bony wrist to take his pulse.

  It occurred to Benjamin that his father might pretend to try to rescue the general, but instead let him die. It was the best thing he could do, to remove this man who had killed and enslaved innocent people.

  But his father wasn’t capable of killing a man while seeming to save him. His job was to heal, and he was stubborn in his principles. Murdering a man, even a dangerous and destructive man, would be impossible for him. And he had made his deal for the woman’s life.

  So they set about saving a villain. His father carefully laid out the contents of his knapsack, and asked for clean, boiled water. The men brought a tin cup, and he measured drops from a bottle into it. “Barbaric,” he muttered, almost to himself—he was still thinking of the woman, Benjamin knew. “The barbarity of it, Benjamin.”

  He helped the glassy-eyed general drink from the cup, then let his head down carefully on the pillow. He dampened a cloth and laid it over the man’s sweating forehead. Then he took the man’s listless hand and studied the fingernails. “You told me three days,” he said to the soldiers in their dialect. “He’s been sick much longer.”

  The men looked at each other. “Yes,” one said. “The fever comes and goes.”

  “You have ice?”

  “No.”

  Benjamin’s father pressed on the general’s abdomen, feeling for the edges of the liver, for the spleen. He seemed very much like a doctor, and Benjamin knew the men thought he was one. If they knew he was really a London apothecary, what would they say? “Let him sleep,” he finally said. “I want to see the woman now.”

  The soldiers looked unsure, but he had such confidence and authority that no one dared to stop him as he moved toward the door. Benjamin followed, trying to look half as steady as his father did.

  At the last moment, one of their captors stepped in their way. “You must stay until the general is well.”

  “My son will stay,” his father said. “And I will return.”

  All eyes in the dim room turned to Benjamin, who hesitated, then went back to the bedside of the feverish man. He kneeled where his father had been. The men seemed to weigh the question of whether to allow a teenage replacement at the bedside of their leader, but then let his father pass.

  The light outside was dazzling. The door closed and it was dim again. The remaining men looked at Benjamin, as if expecting him to do something medical, so he picked up the sick man’s wrist. The pulse was thready and racing, and the skin felt like tissue paper over sticks for bones. His father was right; the man had been sick a long time. His mind would never be the same. He set the hand gently back on the cot, wondering what terrible things it had done.

  He heard his father’s voice issuing orders outside, and then he heard a woman’s wail. There was silence in the hut. The wail turned to soft sobbing. How many stitches would the gaping hole in her belly require? The blue paste was effective in healing wounds quickly, but he had never seen it applied to anything so drastic.

  The sounds from outside became indecipherable, and Benjamin fell into a kind of stupor as he waited. He was roused from it by his father calling, “Benjamin!”

  He scrambled up and pushed past the startled men. As a group they were afraid. No one wanted to be the one to seize him. He got outside and blinked in the sunlight. The woman had been taken into the shade. His father, hands bloody to the elbow, was scattering something in the dust of the clearing.

  “The book!” his father said.

  The Pharmacopoeia lay discarded on the ground. Benjamin ran to wrap it up in the oilcloth, and tucked it under his arm, but by then the soldiers had surrounded them. Their faces were grim and their guns raised. One stepped forward. “You will stay until the general recovers. Vous resterez.”

  Benjamin’s father ignored the French command. “We must go. Evil spirits are coming to punish you for your deeds. You think no one sees. But the spirits see.”

  Benjamin saw something out of the corner of his eye: a phantom shape, like a shadow, in human for
m. He stepped back with a cold jolt of fear. Then he saw another. The figures surrounded the clearing, swaying, reaching out with ghostly gray arms. His father turned and walked away from the soldiers, straight toward the ghosts.

  “Arrêtez!” one of the soldiers said. “N’allez pas! Stop!”

  But his father kept walking. After a paralyzed moment, Benjamin followed, carrying the book. He waited for a shot to ring out, but none did. They passed the old woman, her stomach bandaged and her body unnaturally still. They were walking right toward the phantoms. Benjamin heard a mournful, moaning sound. Was it a sound his father had created, or was someone howling in fear? The ghost figures reached out, mouths wide.

  His father said, “Walk right through them.”

  Benjamin had to close his eyes, afraid he would feel the cold phantom fingers on his throat. He smelled something sharp and metallic, and then they were out of the clearing. They walked a hundred yards from the village. When they were out of sight in a bamboo grove, his father led him off the trail, smoothing and arranging the greenery behind them to cover their path. They hid under the wide, sheltering leaves of a Hopea odorata tree. After a few minutes, the soldiers mastered their fear and came running down the path in pursuit.

  Hidden beneath the odorata leaves, Benjamin held the Pharmacopoeia on his lap. “Did you save the woman?” he whispered.

  His father frowned. “She might live.”

  “And the ghosts? I thought you didn’t like to encourage superstition. Evil spirits and all that.”

  The muscle in his father’s eye jumped. He said, “I don’t. But sometimes you work with what you have.”

  CHAPTER 14

  YES or NO

  Benjamin and his father spent the next two nights in one of the ruined villages, in an unburned hut. It was safer there than in the inhabited villages because it wasn’t likely to be attacked.