The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  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 flushed 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 flanks 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 figure 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. She 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 finally 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.

  If she thought about it, hadn’t they been preparing her for such a day for as long as she could remember? Hers was an education that was perhaps not intentional but certainly thorough. They had traveled all over the world and rarely ever visited a cultural site like a museum or palace or castle but instead went to hospitals and soup kitchens, to shelters and cemeteries, to every notable memorial or monument to the wronged and righteous dead. Early in her memories they often visited churches and cathedrals, but those visits became more and more infrequent as their humanitarian work increased. Just before coming to China they had been in Italy, and even there, with chapels around every corner, they didn’t bother, except of course for the one they’d planned the journey around, a church that was not a church at all. Though they led prayers and carried the Bible and still believed in God (she thought), they seemed to have lost all zeal for proselytizing, and her father had even begun asking the missionaries to identify him and her mother to the locals not as a minister and his wife but as teachers from the Red Cross, to which they’d officially signed on that summer while in transit through Europe. Just as Reverend Lum did, the missionaries would naturally ask why and the Binets would simply say they wished “to work unimpeded,” and though puzzled, and even insulted, the missionaries would never refuse two such experienced hands.

  Her mother told her that sometimes the local people would not accept the full help they needed if they thought something was expected of them in return, especially if it went against their traditional beliefs. “No one should have to make a choice,” she said. This was of course good and right. They were always good and right. But was their steady distancing from the Church a sign that they’d found the final circle of their life’s passion, one that seemed to be steadily shrinking as it grew in intensity, with room enough only for two? She’d thought as she grew older that they would begin to include her in their work and all its attendant joys and dangers. Her mother had been talking to her more and more about living in Seattle, and Sylvie had begun picturing the cozy, pretty house they might live in overlooking the lake, but then her mother kept talking about Aunt Lizzie and how excited she would be to see Sylvie again, and she realized that her parents were firming the ground for a different scenario altogether, one they had planned for all along.

  But in Italy that had seemed far in the future, when she’d go to college back in the States. For now they were inseparable. They’d made a trip to a town in Lombardy called Solferino, whose blood-soaked ground had compelled the bloom of the Red Cross. They had planned to join in the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the infamous battle that had taken place there, a pilgrimage her parents had been talking of for years.

  It began as a mostly dull and enervating journey for Sylvie and her parents both: the incessant heat and airlessness of the third-class train cars rolling slowly eastward along the Côte d’Azur after the draining ferry crossing from North Africa to Spain, all of them suffering stomach distress and motion sickness, and when they trekked across the northern lowlands of Italy, the biting gnats and flies. To save the little money they had (money was a worldly curse), they did not break up the trip by disembarking in Nice or Milan to restore themselves in a decent hotel, but rather used the occasional two-hour waits between trains to find a rooming house near the station that would allow them to bathe for a few francs or lire, and for her father to shave. They were gypsies of mercy, her mother would remind her, and didn’t require a proper bed.

  So they slept on the trains, eating butter sandwiches bought from hawkers (her mother would toss the slick cured ham from the panini to the crows, for the Binets were the rare vegetarians, whenever they could help it), reading the Red Cross founder’s account of the battle and aftermath to each other aloud, to remind them of their purpose. They still packed a Bible among their things but read it less and less, returning instead to their Marx and Zola and old pamphlets of Debs, for already by then they had become missionaries of action, a Socialist streak rising in them, which would ultimately draw them to northern China. When they finally reached Mantova her father hired a car to drive them up to Sol
ferino, but it broke down climbing the hill to the village and they had to go the rest of way on foot in the already burning late-morning sun, her father and the driver each carrying two pieces of luggage, her mother’s skirt as soiled as a charwoman’s as she lost her footing on the dirt road, though of course it did not concern her. For they were here, very close now; they were on the last part of the march.

  The church was built on a ridge that rose up in the heart of the village. From the albergo they could easily see it standing majestically up at the end of a rising allée of young cypress trees. They checked into their room and to Sylvie’s surprise her father announced that instead of seeing it right away they should close the curtains and lie down for a few hours, that they were here now and should rest and rejuvenate. Of course they all knew that they had missed the commemoration ceremony by a day, having been delayed at length, first in Paris and then at the French-Italian border.

  But it was a most welcome sleep, even in the lumpy, malodorous bed, which after the hard, cracked-leather seats of the trains seemed to Sylvie a lair of pure goose down. When her parents woke her five hours later it seemed as if she had slumbered for a week, and could have slumbered on for another. But their hunger overwhelmed them. The innkeeper’s wife kindly fixed them an early supper of fried zucchini flowers and a pasta, its creamy egg sauce with peas so rich and satisfying they ate even all the bits of salty pancetta, which none of them mentioned. Afterward the innkeeper opened the one-room “museum of battle” across the road for them, which was mostly just a packed storeroom. It was full of bayonets and muskets and cannonballs and ornate, brightly colored uniforms with tufted headgear and avian epaulets pinned up on the walls, some of them rent and torn and blotted black with dried blood. There were a dozen framed maps and the innkeeper offered them a lengthy disquisition (translated, as he went, by her father) on the various arrays of the Austrian and French forces, a timeline of the early skirmishes and major advances, and the location of the most brutal battles, many of which were fought on and around this very foothill. There were so many dead that they were piled up in carts and buried wherever they could be buried, singly and in groups and in mass numbers. After the fighting, many more died of their wounds and were buried in the same fashion, residents of all the neighboring towns laboring to inter them as quickly as they could to ward off disease. It took weeks. The stench was historic. The rats grew to the size of small dogs. By the end, every able-bodied man and woman and strong-enough child had become, of necessity, a gravedigger. Years later, when the church was erected, the bones from the known mass graves were exhumed and cleaned and arrayed inside, transforming it into a sacred reliquary of the dead.

  The innkeeper finally led them up the hill to the church. It was nearly six o’clock but still very hot, and although the incline was not exceedingly steep, to Sylvie it seemed a hike up a great mountain. She was lethargic with her fully laden belly, and the radiant heat of the pebbled ground and the battle museum room had sickened her, its smell of iron and moldering linen clinging to her like an iniquitous dust, this promise of doom. Halfway up she felt her mouth water terribly and she vomited at the side of the wide path. Though her mother said they should go back to the albergo, Sylvie told her that they could keep going up. She did not wish to disappoint them. At the top they stood before the church doors, the façade lighted golden by the low sun, its lines plain and almost severe, before stepping inside. The shift from brightness to shade momentarily veiled their vision. Like any church it was hushed and still, but here all breath seemed to pause. And then their sight returned and her mother loudly gasped, gripping her husband’s arm. The innkeeper stood apart from them, saying not a word. Sylvie didn’t understand. She looked up at the white marble altar and plain wooden cross and recognized them to be like any other, but the unusual, lovely filigree of the walls of the chancel drew her forward. And then she heard them, as if she were on the stage peering out at the audience of a macabre opera house, the coally voids of countless eyes speaking to her all at once.

  Look at us, they said to her, in a single voice. We were never divine.

  SYLVIE FELT THE PANE of the window buzz; it was the rumble of vehicles approaching the front gate. There was a horn blast and then another and when she looked outside she saw her father and Reverend Lum coming out from the dining room, walking across the courtyard as they buttoned up their overcoats. Tom Harris and Mr. Li followed them. The wives peered out from the dining room window, and her mother, on seeing Sylvie across the courtyard in their quarters, motioned for her to stay inside. Sylvie couldn’t see what they could see, as the sleeping quarters were on the same side as the main gate, and when the men disappeared from her view she couldn’t help but step outside herself.

  There were two vehicles idling on the other side of the wrought-iron gate, a beat-up black sedan and a covered truck. Reverend Lum was talking to the driver of the sedan, a young soldier in uniform who kept trying to present some papers to him through the bars. Reverend Lum spoke Japanese, and though she couldn’t understand what they were saying it was clear enough that Lum was being stubborn, and even high-handed, shoving the papers back whenever the soldier tried to push them through to him. The soldier was very young and despite his heavy clothing he looked as though he could slip between the black iron bars. It was surprising that he wasn’t getting angry or irritated, which was perhaps an indication of his youth, or else he was cowed because Lum had unbuttoned his coat to show his minister’s garb-a modest number of the Japanese were devout Christians. The soldier soon gave up and went back inside the car with the papers. The car jostled slightly but nothing could be seen as their view through the windshield was obscured by the sun’s reflection. For a moment it even seemed they might back up and drive away. But then an officer emerged from the back of the car with the papers rolled up in his hand, and he gestured with them for Reverend Lum to approach the gate. Sylvie’s father and Harris and Mr. Li stepped forward with him.

  By this time her mother was beside her but she was no longer tugging at Sylvie to go back inside. The officer was certainly young as well but had the drawn, placid expression of a seasoned soldier. Sylvie recognized him as one of the officers who had come the week before to question the men. The officer ungloved his hand and offered it to Reverend Lum, who refused him. The officer half-chuckled and threw his arms wide, as if to ask what else he could do, and Lum finally relented, slowly extending his hand through the bars. When they shook, the officer leaned in close against the gate and whispered something to Lum, and Sylvie was confused when the reverend began to dip down on one knee opposite the officer, her mother now desperately trying to pull her away. It sounded as if Lum were humming, huffing now in singsong, and when her father and the others rushed forward to him as he was pinned against the bars he cried out in Mandarin, Oh, please stop!

  The sound was as clean and fine-grained as a calligraphy brush being snapped in two. Lum collapsed and fell back on the frozen ground, shouting and moaning horribly as he cradled his wrist. The officer had forced it back against the iron bar until it broke. While her father and Li tried to calm him, Tom Harris began shouting at the Japanese officer about the treatment of noncombatants, how he would report this incident to the U.S. consulate, but the officer stood impassively through the epithets, staring at him as blankly as if he were deaf. He then motioned to the gate lock and, when Harris refused, unholstered his pistol in a smooth, swift movement and leveled it at his head. Sylvie’s father cried, “That’s enough!” and rose and quickly unlocked the gate. From the back of the truck four rifle-bearing soldiers jumped out and walked through with the Japanese officer into the mission’s courtyard. The vehicles rolled slowly in behind them, the hard strum of the engines reverberating loudly in the small courtyard. Li and Harris had helped Reverend Lum to his feet and Betty Harris met them and they brought him back inside the dining room. Sylvie was hustled in by her mother right after them, Li and Harris immediately heading back outside.

  Mrs. Lum was
shrieking while Betty Harris attended to her husband, who sat jittering in a chair, his arm lying dead still on the table as if it were independent of the rest of him. It was a terrible ordeal simply to remove his overcoat, and at several points Lum fainted from the pain. Betty Harris tried to bind his wrist while he was out but he roused and screamed and involuntarily swung at her with his good hand. The wrist of the other hand was broken back and played freely with a gruesome range. When he finally looked at it he gagged and then vomited onto the floor. All the while Betty Harris was crying and Sylvie’s mother was teary as well as she tried to calm Mrs. Lum. But Sylvie herself was quiet. She could not quite speak or move. She had seen much suffering in her parents’ travels, but it was suffering caused by deprivation, hungry and sick children or adults hobbled and disfigured by chronic or untreated disease. Once, in Port Loko District, in Sierra Leone, they had come across the hacked body of a homicide victim (murdered, her parents were later told, by a neighboring tribe), and it was the first time she had witnessed intentional cruelty and violence, but never directed against someone in the position of her parents, and all she could do was stand stiffly by the window, unconsciously gripping her own wrist so tightly that later, before sleep, there was still a rawness ringing her skin.

  Her gaze was now drawn outside by raised voices in the courtyard. The three men were talking to the Japanese officer, their puffs of breath quickly dissipating in the cold air. They were speaking English to the officer, her father insisting that he reconsider. The officer looked as if he understood, but he turned away and her father reached out to him and a soldier stepped between them and shoved him back with the side of his rifle. Her father stumbled, but Li caught and steadied him before he fell. Tom Harris was yelling again, but the officer ignored him completely and shouted orders to the rest of the soldiers, perhaps two dozen of them in all. They began unloading their gear, hopping out of the large truck and passing down rucksacks and crates.