The Surrendered

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The Surrendered Page 31

by Chang-Rae Lee


  But soon they found the right road, and she retrieved the balled-up paper from the car floor, wincing as she reached for it, and then opened the map book and carefully smoothed the page out to go back in its spot. Her mood would swing erratically like this, depending on the changing matrix of the pain, the drugs in her system, or the periodic attacks of vertigo that seemed to be gaining in strength and frequency, and with it would ebb her energy and ability to reason. In the space of thirty minutes she might change their routing, or break down, or even lash out at him for driving too slowly. Every so often June tapped him to pull over at the next shoulder so she could shut her eyes for a minute and regain her equilibrium, or else so she could retch, yet time after time she’d emerge from the restroom and don her sunglasses and walk quickly back to the car like she was ready for another hundred kilometers and open the spiral map book to the connecting page.

  They had traveled up well past the foothills now and the road narrowed and began to curl severely about the hillsides. The roadway lacked guardrails and the exposed slopes fell away so steeply that June was shutting her eyes as Hector marked the hairpin loops. A local bus had closed in behind them and was riding their bumper; he was driving with her in mind and didn’t speed up, but soon enough June signaled him to stop. The road was too curvy and it was only after a few more switchbacks that he could turn off onto a gravel drive, pulling in a bit too fast. The driveway was even steeper than the road and the car bottomed out on the spine of the rutted path and he had to gun the throttle to get it moving. They slid perilously for a few feet, the front wheel stopping on the edge of the knee-deep rainwater ditch that was cut alongside. June promptly opened the door and leaned over and gagged, dry-heaving; the color in her face was wrong, perfectly metallic and dulled, and he simultaneously noticed through the trees the faded terra-cotta tiles of a roof and followed the road downward.

  “What are you doing?” June said, wiping her mouth. “I just need a moment. Then we can move on.”

  “We’re stopping for a while.”

  “I’m okay. Turn around now. Hector…”

  He didn’t reply, and for the first time in the few days they’d been together she didn’t overrule him. She had already closed her eyes, holding on to the door handle as they bumped fitfully down the hill, kicking up a trail of dust. The driveway suddenly ran out around the next turn, stopping mid-hill, two large boulders marking its end; the house sat another twenty or so meters farther down, at the end of a footpath.

  He helped June out of the car. She had trouble with the loose footing and he steadied her as they descended. When they reached the steeper footpath she lost her balance but he caught her before she fell, lifting her in his arms. She held on to him tightly, her hands slung around his neck. It stunned him, how she was hardly there; she was as light as a box kite. He felt uneasy, touching her. While they were briefly married he never touched her, except that final night before their agreed-upon separation, when she had plied him with more liquor after he’d come home from a night’s drinking and then later startled him from his dead man’s sleep, straddling him as he spasmed awake. She left their flat right then, leaving him with the feeling that he’d been not so much used as robbed.

  Now he carried her to the house, where she asked to be let down, but she didn’t make a move to stand and he realized she wished to recline. There was an old wooden bench tipped over in the high grass near the house and he righted it with his foot and laid her down. She was suffering, her knees tucked up into her chest. Her sandals had come off and her feet looked blanched and skeletal. The haze had dissipated and the late afternoon sunlight was still brilliant, if not hot, and Hector decided to check the house to see if she could rest where it was less bright.

  The cottage was perhaps a hundred years old, made of varied stones reset and remortared over the years, with a single square, shuttered-up window in the north wall speckled with dormant moss. The place was likely a hunter’s retreat, for there were ropes left hanging from a large tree nearby, for stringing up game. The short, scarred door was pad-locked but the screws played in the rotted wood of the jamb and with a few hard shakes he was able to free the rusted iron and push the door in. A faint smell of ash rose up from the darkness; someone had been there in the last few days. He opened the shutters of the windows and could now see the entirety of the space, a room roughly three meters by four meters: there was a hearth on the short wall and a rough-hewn table in the center with two stools, and a canvas cot topped with a sleeping bag. The plastered walls were hung with ancient threadbare tapestries that appeared they might crumble on touch. He unzipped the sleeping bag and it smelled of a person but not strongly and he went out and got June. He laid her down. She asked for her kit and he hiked back up to the car to retrieve it. But when he returned she was already asleep, her face pinched with hurt, mumbling like she was explaining something detailed and complicated and maybe unpleasant. Did she say the name Sylvie? He thought about giving her a shot anyway, to relieve her of course, but also in the hope of quieting her, so she wouldn’t make any such mention again, but he started a fire instead in the hearth, as the cottage was cool from being shuttered up.

  Soon enough, however, she was awake. “Where’s the car?”

  He nodded up the hill.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making some food.”

  He was filling a cast-iron pot with some ingredients he’d found. In a cabinet there was a stock of home-canned goods, jars of white beans and tomatoes and pickled meat and anchovies. There was also olive oil and bread crisps and several bottles of what looked like homemade wine, along with a canister of coarse salt.

  “I don’t want to eat.”

  “Well, I do.” He was hungry, not having had a real meal in days. He’d almost forgotten to eat, being with her.

  “We need to go,” she said, trying to sit up. “It’s probably only an hour to Siena. You can eat when we get there.”

  “You ought to rest.”

  “I’ve rested enough.”

  “You should rest more.”

  “Please don’t tell me what to do.”

  “Whatever you want. But I think you should stop for a while. Otherwise you’ll die. You’ll die before finding him.”

  His words gave her pause, and then she lay back down and watched him. While she was sleeping he had also found a small terrace garden carved out of the hillside a few steps below the cottage. It was overgrown and mostly gone to seed but there were some onions and carrots and an immense zucchini, and he’d cut these up with a knife he’d also found in the cabinet. The pot had a swivel handle, which he affixed to the hook above the fire. In it he fried the vegetables and then added the jarred beans and tomatoes and a little water. There was no plumbing in the cottage or well that he could find outside, and so he used the bottled water they were carrying in the car.

  Finally she said, “What are you making?”

  “I guess a stew. Does the smell bother you?”

  “It’s okay. Is it like what you used to make?”

  He didn’t know what she meant, but then the sight of her face staring at him suddenly jogged his memory.

  “Not really.”

  When he was in the army he did a stint at the base mess before his general soldiering, and at the orphanage he would make dinner for the children whenever he was able to get foodstuffs from the PX, this once every couple of weeks. The aunties usually prepared rice and a soup made from wild greens and potatoes and whatever meat they could manage, sometimes dumplings filled with bean threads and chives, but after a particularly successful trading session with the PX sergeant he’d make a “camper’s stew” of everything he hauled back-canned corn, green beans, Campbell’s tomato soup, frozen beef patties or hot dogs or Spam, egg noodles, and Tabasco; the kids went crazy for it, they’d yell Campus-too! not knowing what they were saying, and crowd too closely around the stockpots on the blazing outdoor cooker.

  The stew was much heavier and richer than what t
hey were accustomed to and a handful of the kids would eat too much too quickly and vomit, but then come back for another bowl anyway. June would stay on the periphery and wait until the clamor died down, and he remembered now how she’d insist he fill her bowl to its brim, keep pushing her hands up to him and say in her disarmingly good English, I am very hungry today. I want more. She was the best English-speaker among the kids, but employed it sparingly, and for her own ends, rarely willing to be a translator or advocate for anyone else. Unlike most of the other children, she was short-tempered and difficult and in certain lights insufferable but you never knew what horrors any of them had survived or witnessed or had to commit, and there was no use in judging. He’d comply and give her what she wanted, and she’d go off on her own and despite what she’d said eat her food with cold method, careful spoon by spoon, as though she were counting them for the next time.

  “Maybe I’ll try some,” she said. “It almost smells good. To me. You know what I mean.”

  “It’ll be ready soon.”

  “May I have some of that water?”

  There were no cups in the cottage, so he just gave her the glass bottle, but it was a full liter and a half and a bit too heavy for her and he had to help hold it up; she had some trouble drinking straight from the bottle and some went down her airway and she had a brief coughing fit before she could lie back down. When he was finished cooking he asked if she still wanted some and she nodded. He bore the hot pot over and placed it on a stool between them, pulling up the other for himself. There were no plates or bowls and only the one wooden spoon, and he offered it to her.

  “You eat,” she said. She was sitting up now, her narrow shoulders pinched forward, making her seem slighter still, folded in, like she was an image in the crease of a book. “I just want a taste anyway.”

  “You ought to go first, then.”

  He handed her a scant spoonful of it, its consistency more like a soup than a stew. She took it, chewing tentatively, and then had another, two large full spoons. She rapped the spoon on the edge of the pot and offered it to him.

  “You keep going,” he said.

  “We can share.”

  “You better eat while you want to,” he said. Then he added, “While you can.”

  She nodded, and had two more spoonfuls, though the final one seemed to stick in her throat. He had opened a bottle of the homemade wine, leaving the equivalent of fifty dollars in lire for it and the rest of the things he had opened, from the money she had had him change in Livorno. In fact she’d given him her bankroll to hold, twelve thousand dollars or so in traveler’s checks and cash, vastly more money than he’d ever seen at once. But he’d never cared about money and he would have likely traded a good deal of it for a corkscrew, if the cottage hadn’t had one. (Though he’d smashed open the tops of bottles before.) He found one, though, and his hands were calmed by the familiar heft of the bottle, and in one smooth continuous action he pulled the cork and brought it to his lips. The wine wasn’t wine at all but a very strong, clear brandy, harsh and chemical, like dry-cleaning fluid might taste, but it was right enough; he drank nearly a third of it in one slug. He sensed her watching him with hooded eyes, undoubtedly wondering whether he was that much better off than she.

  “You didn’t drink so much back then,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t have seen me.”

  “I did,” she said. “I sometimes followed you. You didn’t know, but I spied on you.”

  He took another long slug and tried not to think of what she might have witnessed, though not because it wouldn’t have been right for a young girl; he was simply shielding himself, for as much as the memory of Sylvie Tanner charged hotly through him, the picture of her milkhued throat only made him more wary, and then thirstier. He hadn’t drunk in more than a day, and if anything the craving in his body was the opposite of June’s: he wasn’t moving quite fast enough, he couldn’t feel any of that phantom speed, the easy gearing that the drink let him slip into, allowing him to gain a merciful distance from himself, which was the pathetic excuse of a creature he had come to be: loser-for-eternity, world-class self-pitier, tireless batterer of men and embodied doom of women, this now wholly bereft last man standing.

  June said, “I remember, just before the end, when Reverend Tanner was letting her have it. Telling her what a disgrace she had become.”

  “Where was I?”

  “You were gone for the day,” she said. “Maybe you had gone to the base, for supplies. It was morning and she was sitting in the patch of grass behind their cottage. She had missed breakfast again, and I had come to sweep and clean. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hair was messy and he was standing over her, so tall and high. He didn’t shout. But for some reason I was sure he was going to strike her. I had his glass paperweight in my hand and I was ready to hit him, if I had to. Of course he didn’t.”

  “He wasn’t like that,” Hector said.

  “No, he wasn’t,” June answered. “But he kept telling her how ashamed he was. How she was an embarrassment to herself, and to him. She just sat there, taking it. I was so angry.”

  How easily Hector could see June, more than thirty years removed, wielding some sharp crystal. And then Sylvie, in a cloak of miserable penitence that she was all too ready to don. Tanner had returned from another overnight trip to nothing different except that she was obviously sluggish, exhausted, moving about as if she were the one who had been on the road for a week. She was sleeping late some days, something that she would never have done before. Tanner had asked Hector twice if anything odd had happened, whether she had seemed ill, but he simply shook his head, not wishing to have to lie outright. After that first week of their arrival, the man had been nothing but fair to him. He wouldn’t apologize, but he didn’t need to have Tanner know, either, that she had spent the previous four nights in Hector’s bed, neither of them sleeping at all, he drinking and she drugging herself in alternation with their lovemaking, which for Hector was a revelation, this woman whose sexual hunger was both a plea and a hazard, like someone floundering in waves far from shore.

  “When you were spying on us. Were you in the storeroom?”

  “Yes.”

  His room was on the end of a long, low wood-framed building that was roofed with sheets of corrugated tin. It was a room much like this one, though half its size, with a single cot and a rusted metal shelf for his things but no window onto the dirt courtyard. It was never meant for habitation. Next to it was a general storeroom for the orphanage-study books and pencils, some canned foodstuffs, tools and rakes, Bibles, donated blankets and children’s clothes and shoes, square cans of kerosene. June described how she had crouched low against the shared wall, a wall that he himself had erected with materials on hand, salvaged studs and panels of pegboard that he covered with canvas. “There was a gap in the fabric on your side, down near the floor, and if I pressed my eye up I could see through the holes.”

  “We never knew.”

  “I was careful to be quiet.”

  “How many times were you there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He took a long drink, and then another. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” she said. But her eyes were enlivened, gleaming brightly against her sallow face, the last pools in a forsaken plain. “After she told me I couldn’t work in the house anymore, I wanted to hate her. But then she started seeing you and I could see a way, again.”

  “A way to what?”

  “To being with her always. Isn’t that what you wanted, too?”

  He didn’t answer, because of course it was true. Yet at the time he didn’t quite know it-he was too brutal and stupid, just a rig of flesh that selfishly craved and rebelled. He didn’t understand then how deeply he needed her, that he loved not just her sharp wants and carnality but how tightly bound up those were with her decency and beauty and goodness; she was exalted and flawed, someone who required as much grace and succor as she herself
readily offered, someone both he and June desperately needed, a mother and a lover and a kind of child, too. That first time they made love, when she opened the back door of the cottage for him, she had fallen upon him as if she’d thrown herself from a parapet, with the grave force of both will and surrender. She kissed him, bit him, wanted his fingers inside every part of her. She was more than thirty years gone now, though it could be a mere day, and he felt his heart suddenly unstitch, the wire twine instantly rusting, falling away, to reveal again the cold box, the great dark underworld of his guilt.

  “I’m so tired,” June said. She had a hand on her belly, not quite holding it, the way a pregnant woman might unconsciously take her own measure. She lay back down and slowly closed her eyes. With a long swig Hector finished the first bottle, its liquor still burning his throat. He had just opened the other bottle when she said, “I’ll sleep a little now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “No,” he said. He was already drinking deeply again, a broad, dry delta. “Maybe later.”

  “Will you stay here with me?”

  “Where else would I go?”

  “Just stay.”

  He nodded to her and waited until her breathing grew steady and more audible. He had become her sitter now. Like a child, she was acting as if his remaining within the scope of her reach and sight would somehow diminish his power or will to leave. And yet now her insistence seemed strangely valid, for he thought he needed to step outside the cottage to determine what he would do. In fact, in Livorno he had, at least temporarily, deserted her; for two hours he sat in the main station, waiting for the next train to Rome, until he finally returned to their room at the hotel and found her unable to get out of the tub. She’d been showering and had reached up to adjust the sprayer and lost her balance, slipping and falling hard on her side and back. Though she was in pain, nothing, miraculously, was broken-a folded towel on the tub edge had softened the impact-and the distress of the situation allowed them to avoid the question of where he had been. Her nakedness was unsettling, but only to Hector; she didn’t try at all to cover herself, either immediately or after he lifted her up, merely sitting on the bidet in a miserable daze. Her breasts were shrunken and lined and her scarred belly was partly distended to a shine, and the patch of hair between her legs, a thick, dark broom, was the sole indication that she was not even fifty years old. He had offered her the towel but she only held it in her hands, weakly wringing it, dabbing it against her face as if it were a precious furl of cloth.

 

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