She nodded, feeling as though he were bestowing on her an eternal prize, and she already knew that she could never give it away. Beneath all the layers of her clothing her heart was bursting, and, unbuttoning her coat, she asked him if he would pin it on her. As the pin backing the medal was rusty, he did so with care, looping it through her sweater so as not to injure her, but just as he enclosed it she pressed his hand against her chest and momentarily held it there. He pulled away his hand. He looked slightly mortified but her expression was such that he smiled at her and then gave her a quick, deep embrace, her face buried in the rough wool of his coat. They were quiet then. They shared another cigarette. They stood close together but not touching and smoked without talking but in Sylvie’s mind she was already leaning against him with her temple tucked in his neck, her arm locked in his, two people in the shadow of a long-mourned departure. Maybe they were even lovers. She was sure that if he asked her in the freezing vestibule to remove her hat and coat and sweaters and skirt and every other underlay of her clothes that she would do as instructed, with whatever his fancied flourish or speed, hew to the exact line of his wishes until she was all but bared.
The door opened and Tom Harris came in from the courtyard with an armed soldier, the chill rushing in behind them. She and Benjamin let them through and followed and when they entered the classroom Betty Harris jumped up to hug him, shouting, “Oh, Tom! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said, embracing her. “I’m fine.” He turned to Sylvie’s father. “He wants to talk to you now, Francis.”
“What does he want?” Mrs. Lum asked. “How was he able to speak to you?”
“He speaks English well,” Harris answered. “He asked what I knew about those incidents, especially the killing of the officer.”
“What did you tell him?” her father asked.
“What could I? I told him I knew nothing about it, that we had just arrived here at the mission then. But he didn’t believe me and threatened me with this goon, but then in the middle of arguing about it he suddenly stopped the interrogation.”
The soldier barked something and Francis held up his hand to indicate himself and they went across the courtyard. But he was only interrogated for about ten minutes before he returned, saying the questions were the same as Harris had been asked: When did he arrive in the area? In what capacity? With whose resources? Had he ever served in uniform? Where was he on the dates of the bombings and the night the Japanese officer was assassinated in the restaurant in Changchung?
The guard took Benjamin next. As he was being escorted away, Sylvie ran up and hugged him. She took him-and herself-by surprise, but he warmly embraced her in return and assured her that everything would be fine. He didn’t seem self-conscious or concerned that the others were watching. After he left she sat beside her mother, who brushed her hair as she did every morning and night. But this morning Sylvie felt a strange electric tinge at the nape of her neck as the brush tugged at her hair, redolent and oily from having gone unwashed for a week; she sensed her mother was looking at her differently, taking another measure of the line of her features, as if she suddenly possessed someone else’s eyes. Was she imagining what a young man, say, Benjamin Li, would desirously see and linger upon in her daughter? Surely it was an unseemly thought in this circumstance, and yet Sylvie closed her own eyes and nurtured the sensation as it flared down the back of her neck and spine, substituting the brush for a caressing hand, the hand for a cheek, the cheek for the most ravenous mouth, the exhilaration quelled only by the renewed murmurings of Reverend Lum, whose ruined wrist was coming fully awake; the morphine was wearing off. It was the very last dose: from now on he would be in his own body. And yet it was Mrs. Lum who was now crying, very softly and to herself, as if already feeling what her husband would soon have to endure. Sylvie’s mother and Betty Harris had been consoling her but didn’t try to do so now; there was nothing else to say or do. Soon enough his murmurs turned into shuddering, bellowing moans, the terrible sounds seeming to come less from his throat than from the body itself, as if immense sections of earth were shifting deep within a cave.
“What the hell is taking so long?” Harris said. He was standing at the window, staring grimly across the courtyard. It had been nearly an hour since Benjamin had gone.
“Sit tight, Tom,” her father said. “He’ll come back soon. And all this will be over.”
“You think so? I’m beginning to wonder. What day was that officer killed? Early last week, wasn’t it? Wasn’t Benjamin away then, at least one night?”
“I don’t think so,” Francis said. “He was here. He ate supper with us as usual.”
“But he was away a good part of the day, in Changchung, right? And he was away those other days last month?”
“What if he was?” Jane spoke up. “It’s his business what he does.”
Harris checked to see if the sentry outside was within earshot, then said in a lowered voice: “But what if his business is endangering the rest of us? Look at poor Reverend Lum over there. I think we all know Li’s Communist sympathies run pretty deep. Even if he is a British citizen, I’m sure the Japanese didn’t have to do too much snooping around to get wind of him.”
“What did you say about him when you were questioned?” Jane asked.
“Nothing. But it would be no big news to me if he had some involvement in that business. I wouldn’t blame him. Whether he’s with the Communists or Kuomintang, here’s a young Chinese man with patriotic feeling, and he’s going to be fine with the Japanese taking over his country? I’d think he was with the resistance, wouldn’t you? But I’m telling you, I won’t abide the rest of us being imprisoned here because of him, whatever the reason. He can’t use us as some cover or shield. I’ll say that right to Benjamin, when he returns. I think all of us should.”
“He’s not using anyone!” Sylvie stood up and said, the force of her own voice surprising her. But it lifted her, too. She was angry and yet practically on the verge of tears. “He’s just a teacher!”
Harris was about to respond but then kept quiet, clearly deciding not to bother arguing with her. He drifted back toward the window, looking out again for any signs. Her father took her by the shoulders to calm her. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You should try to sleep now, okay? Get some rest.”
“What’s going to happen to Benjamin?”
“I don’t know,” he said, glancing at the Lums. The reverend was in great distress. “We’ll just have to wait. Right now we have to get Reverend Lum out of here, somehow. But nothing’s wrong yet, as far as Benjamin is concerned.”
But as the time kept passing it grew ever clearer that something was indeed going wrong. No one was saying anything, and only Harris was watching the covered window. But there was nothing to see or hear except the winds. Soon the skies clouded over and it began to snow, the flurries flying sideways across the courtyard of the mission. The air had grown damp and heavy and crept inside the dining room, the coal stove burning just hotly enough to keep the temperature inside bearable. The only benefit was that the cold seemed to help blunt Reverend Lum’s pain. Tom Harris also made him drink from the gin he always brought along with him on his travels. Lum at first choked on it, as he didn’t normally drink, but in his tortured delirium and desperation to anesthetize himself he was able to sip down a good quarter of the bottle; he was curled up with it as he lay his head in his wife’s lap, his breathing audible but controlled, only crying out every few minutes or so rather than constantly, which was a mercy to them all.
It was a mercy to Sylvie especially, for even with each small groan her own wrist ached in empathy. She had tried to sit with him and Mrs. Lum but he was so distressed and disassociated that he hardly appeared to recognize her. Then his cries made her picture Benjamin sitting vulnerably before the Japanese officer; what would he do to Benjamin, given the brutality he’d shown Reverend Lum, if he in fact suspected he was part of some resistance group? Despite the possibility, she was still
furious at Tom Harris for ever stating it aloud, as if its very airing were somehow accelerating Benjamin toward a similar fate. She resolved that she would not divulge anything about Benjamin or anyone else, including Harris. Never betray a word. It didn’t matter that she knew nothing to betray. She’d flashed with pride when her mother had challenged Harris, and like her mother and father she would display humility and strength of will and undying fidelity to a righteous cause, no matter the duress.
“People are coming out,” Harris said from his position at the window. “It’s a bunch of them.”
“Is Benjamin with them?” Francis said.
“Yes,” Harris said, his voice suddenly grim. “He’s with them.”
Before Sylvie could get to the window the outside door of the vestibule opened and closed and then a rush of freezing air preceded the entrance of armed men. The officer came in after them, followed by several others. They were all bundled for the weather-all but one of them, who wore almost no clothing at all. Clad only in his dull gray undershorts, he was immediately pushed down on his knees before them. It was Benjamin Li. A sharp gasp went up in the room but Sylvie had not cried out, though now it was not from self-control; she simply could not quite breathe. For a long time afterward, for the rest of her years in fact, her grasp of that day would function more as an ill fantasy than a memory, a dark figment she could screen for the purpose of self-torment, letting herself view it over and over until it became a kind of homily, a saying in pictures, until she lost herself within it completely.
His hands were tied behind his back. He seemed only half conscious, barely able to stay kneeling as she shivered with cold. He had been badly beaten, his shoulders and neck lashed with welts. Small angry pocks peppered his chest: he’d been burned with cigarettes. His face was gruesomely battered, one eye swollen completely shut. Blood had flowed and congealed in a branching stream from a gash in his head. He could not, or would not, look up. The soldiers, oddly, now leveled their weapons on the missionaries.
“This man has confessed to his own crimes,” the officer said to them. His English voice was softer than his Japanese, its tone almost decorous, genteel. “Yet he refuses to speak further about his comrades.”
“There’s nothing he can say about us,” Tom Harris told him. “We have nothing to do with what’s happened. We’re innocent.”
“I know this,” the officer said. “I am talking about his comrades in the province. He is not a British subject at all but a Kuomintang agent. Yet no matter what we do to him he won’t answer. So I have brought him here.”
The officer stepped toward the Lums and went down on one knee. He took Reverend Lum’s broken wrist gingerly in his hand and as Mrs. Lum began to titter in fear he asked Benjamin to tell him what he wished to know. Benjamin shook his head, surprising them all that he could even hear anymore. The officer repeated himself and Benjamin once again refused. The officer then barked angrily in Japanese and through his blood-spittled mouth Benjamin gasped, “No!” and the officer stood up abruptly, still gripping the reverend’s wrist.
The shriek from Lum burst like an explosion; for an instant it seemed to rend the room with its flash, and then there was nothing. Sylvie’s father rushed to him after the officer got up but there was nothing to Reverend Lum; his heart had stopped. He was dead. The officer unholstered his revolver and spoke again to Benjamin, asking him to name his compatriots. He was now peering down at Mrs. Lum, who was unable to notice or care; she was wailing and clawing at her own eyes and hair and at her husband’s chest, kissing the back of his lifeless hand. Harris was hollering to Benjamin that he should tell the officer what he knew, but he turned his face away.
“Speak now and I will let the rest of these people go,” the officer told him. “It is my promise.”
Benjamin bent his head lower, averting his good eye.
“Will you not?”
“Tell him, you fucking bastard!” Harris cried.
“Forgive me,” Benjamin mumbled in Mandarin, unable to look at any of them.
The officer said, “Open your eyes. All of you,” and then, without a word of warning, he shot Mrs. Lum in the head. She fell heavily over her husband’s body. Part of her face was missing, the wound a mass of jammy, out-turned flesh. She stared into space as if she were about to say certain words to the rest of them: Help me. In the shock of the moment they were numbed pliant as the soldiers lined them up on their knees. And like others in such circumstances who are all too aware of their fate, they were remarkably docile and quiet in their array; even Harris simply clasped hands with his wife, who was breathing fitfully, her lungs stifled by fear. The Binets had Sylvie lodged tightly between them, her mother whispering to her not to look up, not to move. Sylvie could not have moved anyway. She could not have stirred herself a hair. Her father, however, was staring fiercely now at Benjamin.
“I can see all of you had fondness for this fellow, from the way you are regarding him now,” the officer said to her father, noticing his attention. “He has surprised you. But I know this man. We met today, but I know him well enough. He is not so special. You should know that he would do the same to me, if I were in his place. He would do the same to any of you.”
The officer stepped before her father and motioned for him to rise. “You are a Samaritan, yes? That’s why you are out here in this miserable place, helping miserable people. You even bring your family! And during a period of conflict! It is admirable work, I am sure, but it has also led you to this. Now you can see this man has decided that your lives are not worth those of his coconspirators. Or the sake of his already futile cause.”
While he spoke, the officer opened the cylinder of his revolver and let the bullets fall out into his hand. He slipped one back into a chamber and closed the cylinder, rotating it so that the single cartridge would be the next to fire.
“This man is very willing to die. In fact he is already dead. He has obviously chosen the same for all of you, and it is why I have not bothered to compel him further by simply beating or torturing him. I fear he will never talk. I am becoming curious, however, about something else.”
It was then that he placed his revolver in her father’s hand. The soldiers around them nervously rustled about and locked and bolted their rifles.
“Would you shoot him now? Would you kill him, for the deaths he has already caused?”
Francis held the gun in his palm as if it were a lump of coal. He had never handled a weapon, though the officer could not have known it. During the First World War he had been a conscientious objector, but rather than go to prison or expatriate he served as a medic. He’d been wounded several times and almost killed by a shell in the Meuse-Argonne in eastern France, in the last months of the war; it was the bloody fall campaign of General Pershing, when he lost 120,000 of his men. Francis never spoke of that time to his wife or daughter but it was why he had trouble sleeping at night, partly from dreams of the wounded he could not reach and then for the searing pains in his back, from still-embedded bits of shrapnel.
“You committed these murders,” Francis said, speaking quietly but clearly. “You are determining the moral choices here. Not he.”
“Moral choices!” The officer chuckled. “Well said! But to be philosophical about it, I could say this man set those choices in motion. And before him, many others. Yet now the rest of us, soldiers or missionaries or bystanders, we must endure the consequences. We must act out the remainder as best we can, according to our roles.”
With his boot the officer shoved Benjamin forward onto his belly. He then fitted the gun into her father’s hand, pressing the stock to his palm, hooking his finger into the trigger. “You have a single round. If you kill him there will be no reason to hold the rest of you. Otherwise we will keep on.”
Benjamin craned up his battered face and nodded weakly to Francis; he tried to say something but his words were barely audible. He kept nodding even as he lay prostrate, grinding his temple into the rough floorboards, as if he were
offering sanction.
“Shoot him!” Harris said. “For goodness’ sakes, Francis! He’s nothing. He’s less than nothing. End this now!”
And yet Francis could not quite move. He couldn’t aim or even raise his arm. When he finally held out the pistol for the officer to take back from him, Jane whispered, “Oh, my love.” Her eyes were shimmering. Sylvie was crying as well, suddenly remembering now what her mother always told her, that mercy was the only true deliverance. There was nothing more exaltedly human, more beautiful to behold. And a great searing rush of love seemed at once to cleave her and bind her back up, a love for her father and her mother and then, too, for Benjamin Li, despite what had happened, whom she could see only as her father just did, as the one wanting for mercy most of all. It was finished, even the officer could realize that, there was nothing else to be done but to cease the madness, to acknowledge this horrid interlude was done.
But suddenly Harris cried, “Damn it, let me!” and rushed to take the gun himself. The officer shouted and the soldier guarding Harris wheeled and bashed him in the ear with his rifle stock. Harris fell down, his eyes rolling up in his head. He lay dazed, his jaw broken, the hinge on one side seemingly loosed within his skin. Betty screamed and leaped for him toward the soldier and in pure reaction he struck her, too, in the forehead, knocking her completely unconscious. In the way she fell her skirt rode up her legs, revealing the soft jut of her backside where it met her bared thigh. The garter straps were unfastened, her rent stockings fallen down to her knees. Her plain undergarment glowed marble-white. The guard stood over her, transfixed, and was reaching down to touch her when the officer barked at him in Japanese and the guard stepped back. The officer regarded Betty Harris, measuring her exposed body with his gaze only, before cinching down her skirt to cover her. But then he looked long at Jane Binet, and to Sylvie, and before everything would end, it was then that the madness commenced once again.
The Surrendered Page 21