The Surrendered

by Chang-Rae Lee

  “Do you think we should have had Nicholas come with us?” she said, now lying on her side, her head propped on two pillows.

  He peered into her eyes to see what she was thinking or could possibly be hoping for now. But there was only flatness in her gaze, an unfocused stare, as though she were looking upon a shape more looming than defined. What she believed or wanted to believe, he couldn’t tell anymore.

  He said, “It’s better that he stayed back in Siena.”

  “Yes. You’re probably right. What would he do here? Except I was thinking just now that perhaps he might have wanted to spend more time with you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think he took to me much.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “It wasn’t hard.”

  “Did you take to him?”

  He didn’t answer, for although it was obvious how she hoped he would reply, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything good about “Nicholas.” In fact, this renewed mention of the fellow was making his chest pound, his fists ache. On the road he had scolded himself for not beating him to within an inch of his life. And now he wished that he could have met the other Nicholas, her true son, and his, if even for just a few minutes, not for any longing or want of a bond but simply so he could say something that wouldn’t be such a burning, raging utterance. To simply greet the boy. So he pictured the old school photograph of Nicholas, the color washed out, yellowed, his long hair parted in the middle, framing an expression that was more a question than a statement, as though he were waiting for some long-hoped-for instruction.

  “Maybe I could have,” he said. “But it would have taken a long time.”

  “Doesn’t everything?”

  He nodded, startled by this seeming flash of lucidity. He had unpacked the rest of her clothes and put them into the armoire and begun emptying his own small satchel when he saw the book that he’d forced Nick Crump to hand over to him in Siena. He couldn’t bear to handle it and had immediately thrust it beneath his clothes. But earlier, at a rest stop, while she was napping, he couldn’t help himself and had peered once more into the book. It was the same, except that the cloth of its cover had been burned away, its pages made brittle by the trauma. He noticed two inscriptions on the title page. The first, to Sylvie, he recognized from all those years before; the second was in a different hand, the ink newer: To Nicholas, my dearest wayfarer. May you find great treasure and riches. He was confused as to how June had come to possess it, whether it had been singed in the terrible fire, and how, if so, it had ever survived. But like a promise of ill reckoning, the scent of smoke that rose up from its binding quickly quashed his questions and he had pushed it back into his bag.

  Now he gave the thin volume over to her, the thing literally falling apart in his hands. When June took it he could see her fingers straining against it, as if she wanted to press it back to life. She opened the book and turned its first pages to a photograph of the author, a young-looking man with muttonchops and a gold watch chain on his suit vest. Opposite was the title page, twice inscribed, as he’d seen, and June seemed to linger on the handwriting, her expression one of confusion. Finally she caressed the page as if it were the cheek of an infant. With hardly any difficulty she stood up before the large window, her hands braced against the wide marble sill. In the framed vista the church at the top of the hill gleamed in the late-afternoon sun, the rising gravel path darkly ribbed with the long shadows of the cypress trees, and though it must have been the first time she’d seen it her eyes only narrowed coldly while taking its measure, her gaze no pilgrim’s.

  “I didn’t mean for him to be alone in the world,” she said. “Not forever, anyway. I thought it would be good for him to get away from me. Not to depend on me. But I haven’t asked you. Was he still angry with me? I mean to say, did it seem to you that he had forgiven me?”

  “Forgiven you for what?”

  “I told you,” she said, wrapping the book with her arms. She looked strong all of a sudden, her posture as straight as when she was a child, her chin forward, elevated. That orphan girl, carved from rock. For a long second, when she turned back to look at him, she appeared as if she might not be ill at all.

  “Didn’t I? When he was injured in England while riding. After the hospital called. I waited until I got a postcard from him. In the end it was okay but I keep asking myself why I didn’t try to reach him right away. I wanted to talk to him so much. I wanted to see him. It had been many years. I could have told him I’d fly right over and be with him. But for some reason I just passed the hours. I opened the shop the next day. I went to dinner by myself. For two weeks I didn’t sleep. Then his postcard came and after that the nice letters, and it seemed that he cared about me again, but I’ve been thinking it was only because he was angry for so long that he ended up being kind. Do you think that can happen? Do you think that’s what happened to my son?”

  She then stepped back from the window and sat down on the bed, her head heavy and bent, all the girding of the prior moment now fled from her body. She set the book aside on the bed beside her. He asked her if she wanted to change now into the special clothes.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I can leave if you like.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice suddenly sinking. “I don’t know.”

  She began to cry, which took them both by surprise. She was weak enough that it hardly seemed to be crying at all, more as though she was having trouble breathing, her meager tears barely wetting her cheeks. But he had never seen her cry, not at the orphanage, not once since, and the sight broke open a fear in his chest: here, about to perish, was surely the strongest person he had ever known. She wiped her face roughly with her palm. “Give me another shot now, okay? I want a little more time, without it hurting so much.”

  “I gave you one just two hours ago.”

  “I’d like another.”

  He obliged, another heavy dose. Hector drifted into an armchair across the room, trying to avert his gaze. He could have loaded up another half-dozen syringes and instantly extinguished her but he couldn’t help but think that she might somehow come back for him if he did, in a malign form, hound him for eternity for cheating her of even a few hours.

  “I’m sorry, Hector. But I think now I want to rest.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave you alone.”

  “But just for a little while. I don’t want to fall asleep for too long. I can’t let this day pass. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything tomorrow. Where will you be?”

  “Downstairs, I guess.”

  “Would you come for me in an hour? We’ll go up to the church then.”

  “Okay.”

  “Would you bring me back something?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Something to eat.”

  “You’re hungry?”

  “I don’t know if I can really eat anything. But I want to try.”

  “I can bring something. What do you want?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want this to be the last feeling I have.”

  He went to close the curtains but she told him to leave them drawn open, so the room would stay awash in the light. It was good light, being reflected light, as it was now late in the day, all of it fully drenching the room, the tops of the trees and the terra-cotta roofs and stuccoed buildings illuminated by the strong, low sun, the color of their lower halves in the warm penumbra glowing in a muted scale, the white church atop the rise of land as brilliant as a lodestar. “Just an hour, Hector. Don’t let me sleep any longer. You’ll remember to come back up? Won’t you?”

  “You think I wouldn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, the shot having settled deep into her now. From her loosened posture he could see that it had already met and quelled the harshest pain. She was almost herself again.


  “I know you must hate me,” she said. Her eyes were narrowed.

  “You do, don’t you? You’re the only person in the world who knows anything about me now, and I don’t want you to hate me.”

  “I said in the car I didn’t.”

  “Even after everything I told you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m not going to talk about this anymore.”

  “Please just say it again.”

  “I already did.”

  “Please say it, Hector, please!”

  “What do you want?” he shouted. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

  “I don’t want this!” she shouted back, slapping at her own shriveled, wasted thighs. Her face was a cracked, broken mask. “Not this! Maybe you wouldn’t care if this were happening to you! Maybe you never cared whether you lived or not. But I do!”

  He was about to tell her she would rot in hell when he realized he was arguing with a woman who had in almost every way disappeared. She immediately said she was sorry, trying to follow him to the door in her feeble hobble, and she might have caught him had he not leaned forward in the last quarter of a second, half-bolting onto the landing and down the steep steps of the tower; he was a world-class sprinter, at such distances. As he rounded the corner he caught sight of her ruined silhouette, halted at the end of the landing with her hands outstretched like a flightless bird, her desperate apologies echoing down the stone well of the tower after him, and though he felt ashamed for the velocity of this easy escape he kept going, his rage making him want to punish her.

  Downstairs, in the bar that doubled as the hotel lobby, he slumped at a corner table. The young manager came over and asked if he wanted something and Hector didn’t answer and the manager suggested a beer. After serving him the bottle, the manager stole glances at him as he stacked cups on the coffee machine, as did an older German-speaking couple sharing a plate of cheese and salami and a carafe of white wine. The couple had been just sitting down when he carried June into the hotel, and the fleshy, ruddy-cheeked woman now regarded Hector with kindly eyes and a sympathetic purse to her mouth that made him helplessly think of Dora. He drank from his beer but after a sip he put it down, despite the fact that his insides were crying out; for once in his life he didn’t want to douse the parchedness, that driest, coldest flame. He wanted his own sentence, for all his deeds and non-deeds, for every instance when he had failed. For when had he not? If he were truly eternal, as his father Jackie madly fantasized, the sum of his persistence had so far only added up to failure. Failure grand and total. Ask Dora what she thought. Ask Patricia Cahill. Ask the Chinese boy soldier if Hector had done right by him. Ask Winnie Vogler about the collateral calamity he had wrought. Ask the Reverend Ames Tanner if his end was the one he had envisioned for himself. Ask them all if Hector had been their right attendant fate.

  His failing found expression now in even the small measures, too, like the fact that he couldn’t quite summon the hatred even June assumed he should have for her. In the car, in her delirium, or perhaps under its cover, she told him what she had done. Yes, she had caused the fatal fire. Yet in his own way he had stoked it, too, with his rank, blinding want, and he had always believed that it should have been he who never emerged.

  On that last night, Sylvie had begged him to let her be. Why had he not heeded her? Why hadn’t he simply stayed in his room? Once the fire started, surely he would have rushed inside the dormitory first and gotten them all out. He’d been drinking all evening, sitting in his dim room with a bottle of harsh Japanese-brand scotch whiskey, feeding his accelerating thoughts, which alternated between wanting to flay Sylvie with harangues, with the lowliest of sentimental entreaties, with self-pitying rants and outright attacks, and trying to figure out how he might lovingly convince her to stay on. To love him back. But he was useless at romance. He had no profound or pretty words. He thought she had made up her mind on the day they had all collected leaves around the orphanage, when she had followed him into the chapel. Afterward they left the chapel and headed in different directions but she met up with him as he had asked, about one hundred meters along the most southerly trail, where there was an obscuring thicket of woods. They didn’t make love but had still fallen upon each other in a primed, overdesperate state and in a matter of minutes they had clawed and tasted one another with the privation of ghouls. They had hardly undressed, and yet later, when he was bathing, he could feel the tines of her fingernails striping his back, his neck, his thighs. He’d done the same to her but with his mouth, his ravenous teeth, biting her wherever she pointed to herself, as if they were playing some curious grade school game. She had gasped with each snap, tears filling her eyes, then pointed again. It was then that Hector was sure that he had won, mishoping, misreading her erotic fervor for a deeper devotion; for he was too young and ignorant to know that she was not acting or dissembling but rather offering herself to his pure and towering want, surrendering to his great keen need, which to her was as lovely as he.

  It was already midnight when he finished the bottle and went to her cottage, knowing that the next day Tanner would be back. He and Sylvie had not yet made love while her husband was presently away, his carrying her after she twisted her knee in the soccer game the first time he’d time touched her since the brief, furious moment in the woods. Simply holding her was an alert of his craving but a kind of anchoring, too, how he needed the literal burden of her to offset the hateful, numb condition of his being. His unassailable body. And as he went around to the back of the cottage he realized how vulnerable he felt whenever she was close, as though he were at last mortally subject, as prone as the next. His heart a boy’s, brimful and shaking. Yet he knew, too, though he was still resisting it, that it was already finished between them, or that it had never truly begun, and it was this dire feeling that pushed him to try to be with her again. The window shade was down and when he tried the door it was locked and he rapped at it harder and harder until the sound was loud enough to rouse the children across the way. She opened the door and let him in. Her knee was still just as he had wrapped it and she limped away without even looking at him.

  “Does it still hurt a lot?” he asked her, following her to the bed.

  “Not anymore,” she said wearily, her head bowed. He knelt before her and took her knee in one hand and her calf in the other, gently and carefully testing the joint. She winced with its play. “It’ll be fine. Please go now. Please.”

  “I said I would come.”

  “I asked you not to,” she said, pushing off his hands.

  “So you don’t want to see me anymore?”

  “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “He’ll be back tomorrow!” Hector cried, the instant thunder in his voice surprising even him.

  She was silent. “Please, Hector. You can’t be here now.”

  “Why? Because you’ve changed your mind?”

  “I’ve never changed my mind. Not about you. It was never a question of that.”

  “Then what was it a question of? Would you tell me? Because I’m stupid. I’m confused. Are you in love again with your husband?”

  “I’ve always loved him,” she murmured.

  “You’ve always loved him,” he scorned her. “I guess you were loving him right from the beginning. I guess you were thinking about how you loved him when you were fucking me on this bed. You’ve thought about him so much that every time he goes away you come around to wherever I am.”

  “I didn’t come to you tonight,” she said.

  “It’s because you’re strong,” he said. He was standing now, glowering as he angled his words sharply down at her. Had he not had a voice he might have actually struck her. “You don’t pace around your room like an animal in a cage. But I’m an animal that’s too awake. Before you showed up I didn’t care one way or the other about anything. But now here I am, waiting to be petted and fed. Told how much I’m loved. Here,”
he said, holding his open palms before her. “What if I need comforting? What if I need some ministering to? What will you do for me, Mrs. Tanner?”

  She didn’t move. She was silently crying, the tears running down her face. Her natural paleness was warmed in the honeyed lamplight, her brow and cheeks a vital, gleaming shade, and as much as he was raging he couldn’t help but see that she had never appeared as lovely to him as now. Which only made him burn. “You won’t help me?” he said. “You won’t come to my aid? It’s okay. You do me good just like that. I’ve told you some of the things I’ve done and so you know that I’m not a good man. I’m an awful person, by any account. But looking at you makes me feel better about myself. You know why? Because you’re like me. You’re frail and selfish, but you’re reckless, too. You’re a whore for love. Hope is your drug. To me that adds up to a pretty sorry religion.”

  Sylvie didn’t answer. But a different color had now risen in her face. She said, “My mother once told me something. I never quite understood her, but I think I do now. She said there was a surplus of benevolence in this world. Of loving mercy. Surely too much of it went begging. But it was worse, she said, when it was misspent. Because then it was no good at all.”

  “I don’t care if it is,” he said, fiercely gripping her shoulders. “Misspend it on me.”

  She took his hands then and had them cup her face, blot her eyes. She turned them over and kissed his palms. She kissed his fingers and his wrists. He kissed her madly in return and began pulling off her robe but she said not here and so they made their way slowly across the yard to his room, Hector bracing her. Once inside they made love. Or a kind of love. He was overwrought. It was as if the entire army of him had fallen upon her, overrunning her in waves, the breakneck charge of a thousand faceless troops. He kept waiting for her to try to slow him, or tilt against him with equal fervor, with the disquieting roughness he craved from her, but even as she mirrored him and was strong enough it was as if she drifted outside of herself and was watching them from across the room. After a short while he was done. He got up and pulled on a pair of trousers, a mountain of shame in his gut. She lay in silence on the cramped cot, her back to him. Then she rose and put on her robe. She was looking for her slippers but he told her that she had come barefoot. He asked her not to go but when she opened the door he didn’t try to bar her.