But look at you, she said to herself now, peering into a hand mirror to check the condition of her neck, which was tormenting her with its itchiness, the skin now scratched raw and almost bleeding. Look at this Sylvie Binet, with two bloodshot horrors for eyes, the fever-matted hair, the ghoulish pallor that would certainly frighten the younger children. But she wondered if she wanted to be cured. Ames once said that although an awful thing happened to her in youth she had pulled herself far past it, but in truth she wondered if she would ever possess the necessary strength. She often felt a great part of her had been fixed in time, that despite appearances she had been simply stuck in place, never quite getting anywhere. Maybe that’s why the children liked her; it wasn’t her bright, golden hair or even her obvious adoration of them but their instinctive sense that she was as vulnerable as they, as desperately keen for a lasting bond. That she had never quite grown up. She remembered her father telling her in Manchuria how this world was littered with those cut off in mid-bloom, all this wasted beauty and grace, and that it was their humble task to gather as many as they could and replant them. It didn’t matter that they were stomped and torn. That the soil was rocky and poor. She must be the sun and rain. As long as she kept vigilant, as long as they never gave up, the blooms could thrive again.
She was sure this was true of the children. But what of a person like her? Could one ever reroot her own long-trampled self? Or would you in perpetuity need someone to pick you up at certain intervals, pluck you from the slow rot of your being? It was a good thing that people buried themselves in mostly shallow graves. If she thought about her adult life, it was an existence of constant exertion and work, but also one marked serially by the compulsion to yield. And however miserable and dissolute she ended up, however wretched in that suspension of utter fall or erasure, there was an undeniable seam of what must be gratitude, too, a kind of relief in finding yet another path to giving herself over.
Hector was still angry with her. By the time Ames announced the news of their departure last week they had already ceased their trysts-during Ames’s last absence she had not shown up at Hector’s door-and he had stopped speaking to her as well, avoiding her, steering himself away from wherever she was and taking his steel pail full of tools to do some job or task in another part of the compound. After lights-out he had begun to head into Itaewon again, and if it showed in the clouds darkly shading his brow, in his unruly, unshorn hair that made him look even younger than he was, like a gruff teen, there was no change in his habit of working all through the day. He was almost out of work to do. She was not afraid that he would confront Ames, or tell him about them. Hector was the least of talkers. The nights they had spent together they hardly spoke, and at the end of only the second night he had told her, unprompted, that they shouldn’t have an affair. She didn’t know if that meant she shouldn’t come visit again.
Yet it had been an affair to her, for it wasn’t only the carnality she craved (which was as sharpened, as ardent, as she had ever known), but even more the easeful, inertial pull of the hours together afterward, as if they were floating on some quiet water instead of a bed. He’d drink his liquor and she’d bind her arm or thigh and soon they dissolved into each other in the tight well of his cot until she felt them become the pool itself, shedding all their mortal properties. It was a feeling akin to when she was a child and slept between her parents in a stifling hut in West Africa and the heat of their three bodies put her in a near-trance of fever that let her hear their blood coursing together like a wide, whispering river. In her dreams she became that bloody river running out far past the land and into the sea. For what had she witnessed daily from her earliest memory of their missions but the fragility of the body, every needless face of sickness and hunger, of merciless injury and death? Even then she imagined how she could make it so that the people they lived among could change form in waking life as she did in her sleep, somehow live without this living, and it was when she helped relieve Reverend Lum of his terrible pain that she saw a first kind way.
But she was at the end of her own ruinous clemency. She had to release herself. She must cease. When Ames left on his last brief overnight she found herself again at Hector’s door after midnight and saw the weak yellow lamplight through the slats and was about to push inside when she saw herself in the clutch of her kit and her hand began to shake, both in anticipation and in dread. The tremors subsided but then a hard knob rose in her chest and she could barely breathe; she had to walk back to her cottage by propping herself against the exterior walls of the dormitory, and once inside she dropped hard on her knees to the floor.
The next day after the midday meal Hector caught up with her in the kitchen and asked where she’d been and although the aunties spoke no English anyone could tell he was confused and hurt. She turned away from him and he trailed her across the yard and in an odd reaction that only drew more unwanted attention she broke and half-ran, feeling a tightness in her chest. He followed her to her cottage and without knocking stepped right inside and embraced her. His smell was gamey and sharp. She asked him please to go but he kissed her and she couldn’t help but kiss him as well but the door had drifted back open to the sight of some children in the central yard, paused in their games, and she panicked and pushed up hard at him. Her hand glanced him on the cheek, but he shrank from her as if she had smashed his face. He bolted from the cottage just as the sedan transporting Ames from his overnight drove through the gate. She couldn’t tell if Ames had seen him leaving.
It was only several evenings later that Ames asked if there had been something amiss or in need of fixing in the cottage, not mentioning Hector at all, and when she told him there wasn’t he nodded and didn’t pursue it. Later Ames came into her bed and wanted to make love and she must have surprised him with her intensity for he was as physical with her as he had ever been, so lost in the moment that he was unaware of his hand pressing her throat, nearly to the point of her losing consciousness. Yet she had not resisted him in the slightest. He seemed to know that he could do whatever he wished to her, that she would give herself over to any extent, and in the veil of perfect darkness he was not so much a man as a fury, this starved force that sought out every peccant part of her. He fell asleep half atop her in the single bed and by morning the one side of her was numb. He dressed quickly for the day and kissed her but wouldn’t meet her gaze; it was always like this after their lovemaking, from the very beginning, a pale light of shame in his eyes. Perhaps it had nothing to do with her but this time she felt the depth of all her lies. As if he sensed something awry Ames embraced her, and she held on to him. What would she be, without him? That afternoon, while he took the children on a hike, she removed her kit from its hiding place in the trunk beneath her bed and threw it in the fire, aware of the miserable hours ahead of her but knowing that they would be so for the very last time.
Ames now returned from breakfast with a bowl of beef broth for her. It was milky white, made as it was in the Korean style, shin-bones completely boiled down. She didn’t want it but he asked her to try some and she took a sip and then another, the soup dense and rich and salty. Her stomach felt calm and she sipped some more. But then something seized and turned and spit up in the washbasin next to her bed. Ames braced her as she gagged. She wiped her mouth, her burning eyes.
“I shouldn’t go tomorrow,” he said. “You’re not getting better.” He was scheduled to go on his final trip to visit two recently opened orphanages along the eastern coastline. It was a slow journey on the poor roads across the coastal mountain range and down along the peninsula, three full days to go out and return.
“I’ll be okay.”
“I don’t see how,” he said. “You look as if you’re dying.”
“I’m not dying.”
He looked down at his hands. “Do you want me to go?”
“Of course not,” she said. “We have so little time left. No one wants you to leave. The children as much as I.”
“I can hav
e Reverend Kim go in my place.”
“Do you truly think he can? Do you think he knows yet how an orphanage ought to be run?”
Ames didn’t answer. “Sometimes I wonder if he knows much besides conducting the liturgy.”
“And how to eat,” she said.
“He’s a champion eater, isn’t he!”
They laughed easily, the first time in a long while. Ames said: “He’s a good man, though. He’s smart, if a bit dreamy. He’ll learn.”
“I hope so,” she said. “But sometimes I worry. He never spends any extra time with the children. He has no natural feeling for how to be with them.”
“Perhaps sending him now would do him some good. Force him to connect.”
“That would be fine if we weren’t leaving, and you could go visit. But this is your last chance. Why should those children have to lose the benefit of your being there? Just because I’m not feeling well? I don’t want you to have to go anywhere, but should you take a chance with their welfare because you’re worried about me? I’d only feel worse, knowing they would be shortchanged.”
“I wish that you could come with me.”
“I will if you want.”
“How can you? Look at you. You have no strength. Besides, if you did come we’d be leaving Reverend Kim in charge.”
“The aunties and the children can handle him.”
“But of course Hector would be here.”
She would have wished for Ames not to say his name. But he went on: “You know, I’ve been thinking it might be best if he could stay around. I mean after we’ve gone. I know I’ve told him otherwise. But now I think I was wrong. Hector still doesn’t seem to know it, or perhaps he knows and doesn’t care, but he’s good for the children, in his own way.”
She nodded but was silent.
“I was thinking that perhaps it’s not so terrible, to have an adult around who’s not telling them what to do all day. Who’s not a preacher. I think I’ve been too strident about what I expect of them. Sometimes I think I’m not seeing who they are. They’re children, yes. But they’re not innocents, and maybe it’s not the worst thing to have someone like Hector around, who is obviously not so certain of his future. Who clearly struggles. But he works as hard as anyone I’ve ever seen and I know the children recognize that, too, and I wonder if that’s not better for them than any sermon from me.”
“You’ve only done wonders for them. Here and at all the other orphanages. No one could say anything otherwise. They love you.”
He clasped her cheek. “I have to teach now. Will you be all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll bring you something again at lunch.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “I can make myself tea. That’s all I need.”
“All right. Will you do something for me, dear?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I was hoping that you would speak to Hector. When you’re feeling better, I mean.”
“What about?”
“I’d like you to ask him to remain here, after we’re gone. I doubt my asking him would do any good. Don’t you think it would be best if he stayed on? I don’t know how I or Reverend Kim will find someone else who would know to do all the necessary things, before and after the winter comes. I think only you have any chance of convincing him.”
“He won’t listen to me.”
“Why not? He’s always thought so highly of you. Am I wrong?”
“We haven’t spoken very much of late.”
“I have noticed that,” he said, his wire spectacles still in his hand. The late-morning sun was streaming in from the window and brightly lighted the side of his face. He looked tired himself, worn down, and then oddly childlike, his sky-blue eyes appearing immense against the tight, drawn skin of his brow.
“Did something happen?” he muttered, looking down at his spectacles. “Did he offend you in some way?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
He waited, but she didn’t answer. Finally he pulled on his eyeglasses. She was sure he was going to say something difficult now, something irreparable and lasting, but he paused in mid-breath, literally swallowing the words. He reached for her then, and she shut her eyes, a flinch tensing her neck, but all she felt was his tender stroking of her hair.
“You should rest now,” he said, his own voice weary. He got up and put on his black suit jacket. “I’ll be back after lunch, to look in on you.”
“I’ll pack for you.”
“Just rest. I’ll do it. This is as good a time to learn as any. Because you were sick I had to help the three boys gather their things. We ended up simply stuffing what we could in each of their satchels. Nothing stayed folded. Jung wanted to bring his collection of rocks, Jin his live beetles. It was such a mess that Mrs. Stolz had to take everything out and start again, and I must admit I felt completely useless. You’ve spoiled me.”
“I’m the one who’s spoiled,” she said.
He leaned down and kissed her. “When I get back, I think we should tend to each other as much as we can. And do so right up to the time we settle down again in Spokane. Can we do that, dear? Can we promise each other?”
“Yes.”
They kissed and embraced again, but before he could leave she said, “I’ll talk to him, Ames. I’ll try.”
He nodded from the bedroom doorway. “I won’t expect that you can change his mind. I won’t expect anything.”
She was asleep when Ames departed the next morning, the driver from the church office in Seoul picking him up before dawn. She must have woken just as the sedan headed out beneath the arched gate and down the hill; in her dreams she heard the squeals of children but it must have been the car brakes and she had quickly risen but by the time she opened the front door of the cottage there was nothing in the frigid air except the lean, sweet perfume of motor exhaust. When it dissipated she felt even colder in her nightgown, the buildings about her barely discernible in the dim, rising light. Ribbed batons of clouds underpinned the sky. They would blow away soon. Ames had told her he wouldn’t rouse her and yet she still felt as if she had been abandoned. He had gone not a kilometer and she felt the loneliness already. Her body wasn’t frantic anymore but now felt instead like a forlorn hive, every chamber of her desiccated and empty. As if she were made of a thousand tiny tombs. Of course it was having been left now to her own devices that was most disturbing, making her wish that it was mid-morning already, with the Reverend Kim long arrived, the children bolting about with the aunties keeping after them, the pitch and shout of the day careening them all forward. She needed time to speed up. But there was no sound or light or movement, and rather than just turn back in and shut the door, she stepped in her bare feet onto the chilly ground. The shock of it made her gasp. But her mind was finally clearing and the cold air was bracing her and she didn’t want to sleep anymore despite her physical exhaustion, for she was sick of sleep, and she stepped forth in the darkness toward the dormitory, her thoughts alighting on the children.
She wiped her feet on the towels the aunties placed before each of the three inner doors in the small vestibule; the doors led to separate dorm rooms, one side for the boys and the other for the girls. The one in the middle led to the chapel Hector had built. The vestibule itself was filled with their shoes, which because they were donated were of an unusually wide variety, sneakers and sandals and dress shoes and boots. Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, everything made stony-looking in the weak blue light. And though she wanted now to peer in on June, missing the sight of her pretty, round face, a face so much more placid than her soul, she could not bear to speak anything of the coming days. For what could she have said to the girl? How could she ever console her? With the fact that she and Ames were not going to take any children at all? That she was finally as unfit to be a mother as she had been a wife, and even a mistress? That she was a bleeding heart and a coward, a person unfit, it turned out, to be herself? Their depa
rture was imminent and Ames had not mentioned the subject of adoption and she could not breathe a word of question. As far as she knew, the arrangements they made on arriving in Korea to adopt some to-be-determined number of children had not yet been canceled. But it was no matter; Reverend Kim had confirmed as much the other day, when he gave Ames an envelope with the tickets for the first flight to Japan. There were just two, as Ames had specified. They had always assumed that they would take four with them, or five, or ten, as many as they could. But now they would return childless, which, she could now begin to see, perhaps as Ames had already seen, was a mercy for all.
She slipped into the boys’ room. She had ventured into both rooms before on certain restless nights, the sight of slumbering children a calming medicine. Here, as in the girls’, they slept in rows broken in the center by a large potbellied coal stove that the children took turns feeding through the night. There was no central heating and in the heart of winter it was important to keep it hot because there was no insulation in these walls, but this time of year it didn’t matter so much and the stove was now barely warm to the touch. The air was heavy and dampened with the smell of their bodies, and of sleep, and at this preadolescent stage it was much the same scent as in the girls’ room and though Sylvie could see how it might be off-putting or unpleasant she didn’t mind the sour fatness of the smell, in fact half-adored it, like day-old cake. She was tempted to lie down for a moment in one of the three newly empty beds. Their sleep was hard, so deep as to appear almost deathly, though one of the older ones looked as if he were being beset by awful dreams, his face pinched up like an infant’s, his fists guarding his head.
“Mrs. Tanner?” said a voice behind her.
It was Min, leaned up on an elbow in his cot. Despite what had happened to his foot he had remained the target of pranks by the three boys who were adopted by the Stolzes. He was the only boy who used to come to the knitting group; he told her he wanted to make a present of scarves for whoever eventually adopted him. The boys kept teasing him and he stopped coming before he could finish, and Sylvie had had to complete the second one for him. But the teasing had still continued, particularly by the just-departed trio. Once she’d had to wash his hair, which was full of ants, as they’d dribbled some syrup in the lining of his cap. Hector made the boys help him shovel out the latrines as punishment.
The Surrendered Page 40