Chang-rae Lee

by The Surrendered (v5)

  FIVE Yongin, South Korea, 1953 HECTOR BEGAN WORKING at the orphanage soon after the armistice, in June. He had been given his separation from the army for “a pattern of discreditable conduct” that included charges of chronic fighting, trading in contraband, and assaulting an officer. The fighting he was certainly guilty of, but the other charges were debatable, the black-market dealing a case of his being an unwitting courier for a friend, and then the one of striking an officer outside a bar in Itaewon completely bogus; there was a wild scrum of drunken servicemen and Hector pushed a lieutenant who was kicking an already passed-out grunt and the officer tripped back over someone else, his face clanging against the rim of an empty fuel drum. The officer was badly gashed and nearly lost his ear, and it was only due to the resolve of his idealistic army lawyer that Hector received a bad-conduct discharge and not six months in the brig. Hector decided to look up a Korean preacher he knew, a Reverend Hong, who eventually arranged his papers so that he could stay on in the country. Hong ran an orphanage an hour’s drive south of Seoul and had once offered Hector a job there as a general handyman. They’d met, by chance, when Hector had defended him, coming upon the reverend being mugged in an alleyway of Seoul. Some street kids had beaten him with their fists and bamboo sticks, one of them trying to strip him of his briefcase, his billfold, even his shoes. Hector had to punch the biggest kid when he waved a knife before they would all scatter. After the reverend gathered and composed himself he asked if Hector wanted a job, which Hector immediately declined. But after the discharge Hector remembered the orphanage’s name, New Hope. He hitched a ride part of the way but walked the last half with just a satchel of his things and the clothes on his back and, of course, a starving girl named June marking him in the near distance like a dusty little moon. They had arrived at the orphanage like this, in tandem but separate, and soon enough both found a place there. They would have likely remained in their respective orbits and never drawn closer to each other had an American couple not arrived in late summer, a reverend and his wife. When the Tanners first arrived, Hector was out gathering firewood with a crew of boys. He liked working at the orphanage, being in the clean, sweet air of the valley and fixing and making things with his hands. The grounds of the orphanage were set on a low and wide plateau amid steeper, higher hills and mountains that ranged across much of the country. The land was a lesson in hills, one right after the next. The orphanage itself comprised two old, long dormitory buildings (a former stable, a granary), a cottage, and a new building that had been built by an army unit that held a kitchen and classrooms that doubled as mess halls. The structures, laid out in an L, bounded a dirt field where the children played soccer and other games. Reverend Hong played with them all the time, but Hector knew only American football and always declined. In truth, he tried not to spend much time with the orphanage children, even though he enjoyed their company; he admired these children especially but he was wary of getting to know any one of them too well, to get close to them, to be relied upon as a friend. By definition they were hard-luck cases (and often worse) and in the time that he was in Korea he had witnessed enough acute examples of wartime suffering and misery on the roadside and in the villages and in the red-lanterned parlors that he couldn’t help but see cast over them an altogether different shadow, with the conflict being over: for who could bear the idea of any misfortune befalling them now? The hills of the valley had been nearly cleared during the war for fire fuel, or else blasted clean, and once a week he led a group of boys to collect loose kindling and branches. Each time they had to go farther to get the same load. That day was seasonably hot but there was a drying breeze coming from the north and the boys were especially playful and energetic as they combed the hillsides. As usual there was little wood to be gathered to start but before hiking the steep hill to the next valley he let the older ones organize a game of Capture the Flag. They had enough wood back at the orphanage anyway, not even counting a recent shipment of coal, and as winter was still a long way off, it didn’t much matter what they gathered now. Hector watched them for a while, and when the boys of one side kept losing and cried for him to help them, he finally joined in. To be fair to the other team, he carried the smallest boy, Min, on his back and ran about that way. Min was not the youngest but he was undersized from severe malnourishment during the war. Reverend Hong had found him sitting slumped in an alleyway of Seoul, barely conscious, near skeletal, pocked with insect stings and rat bites. With a month of regular eating he was growing again, but the other boys still made fun of him for being tiny and weak, and then because he was smart. With Min on his back, Hector ran easily, and after a few furious end rushes they won, Min shouting and waving the rag that was the other team’s flag. Hector made sure to win the next game again, the boys crying foul, Min chattering at them from his perch. A small, rocky stream cut through the ground of their play, and afterward they all knelt and drank from it, splashing the cool water on their necks and faces, the boys recounting how the game had gone, teasing and taunting one another with grown-up bravado and bluster. It could have been any summer afternoon back in Ilion, and for a moment Hector forgot who they were and where he was, until he noticed Min idly upturning stones along the bank. The boy was hunting for insects and worms, and when he caught a large water bug in his fingers he seemed to inspect it, not with curiosity but a long, knowing gaze. Hector watched as he brought it to his lips but then stopped just short, quelling a certain habit. Hector called them all then and got them up and moving again. In the next valley they found a stand of trees tucked back in a shady ravine and Hector was glad that he’d brought along an ax. He set the boys to gathering kindling while he worked on a dead tree. Its thick trunk had been cleaved by lightning. He chopped at it steadily but the ax head was dulled and whenever he struck a dense spot or knot it jumped back at him violently. The tree still had most of its limbs and as he got closer to felling it he kept ordering the boys to move back, which they did, but soon enough they had gathered around him again and were begging for a try. He let some of the older boys take a few swings each and then he took up the ax again and worked steadily, gradually losing himself in the exertion, in the rhythm, the muted chuck s of the blows, and by the time he was near done he was sweating like a draft horse, his hands raw and abraded but alive. Finally he dropped the ax and pushed; the tree groaned once and then cracked and fell in a sudden threshing of dry leaves and dust. The boys cheered him and themselves, clambering upon it as if they’d brought down big game, raising their arms in triumph, with even Hector chiming in. No one noticed that Min had picked up the ax and was swinging at a root; Min gave it a couple of good hits, but on the third try he slipped and lost his balance and missed and the blade came down on his foot. He screamed as if he were dying. Hector was immediately on him, his own heart bolting, but he couldn’t get Min to move: the heavy blade had gone straight through his foot and was stuck in the wide root below. Hector took the boy’s face in his hands and told him he would count to three but immediately pinched the boy’s ear as hard as he could while pulling out the ax head. Min cried out once more and fainted. The worn canvas sneaker welled instantly with blood. Hector took off his T-shirt but was afraid of removing the sneaker and so bound it all up as tightly as he could. He put Min on his back and ran, trying not to jostle the boy too much, ordering all the boys to sprint ahead and alert Reverend Hong to what had happened. But they had marched a half hour here and he knew he would have hills to cross on the return. Soon Min was awake again and moaning and crying softly, and to his own surprise Hector began singing the chorus of a song that his mother often sang to try to put him to sleep, an Irish famine-era ballad called “The Fields of Athenry”: Low lie the fields of Athenry, Where once we watched the small free birds fly. Our love was on the wing. We had dreams and songs to sing. It’s so lonely round the fields of Athenry. He got Min to hum along and for a while it was as though they were a young father and son on a Sunday hike as they ascended the hillside, making music together in a
sentimental key. But it was warm, and with Hector sweating and shirtless the boy began to lose his grip; twice he nearly fell off and Hector had to slow down. Soon he was crying and the sopped bandage was dripping blood again and after a while the boy’s frame went limp around him and Hector realized he was drifting in and out. He was losing too much blood. Hector laid him down and tried to rebind the bandage, but when he loosened it the blood only seeped out faster, so he tied it up as tightly as Min could bear. “Ah, ah!” he moaned sharply, the pain sapping him. He began to cry weakly again. “It hurts, Hector. It hurts.” “I’m sorry,” Hector replied, breathless, “I know.” But Hector didn’t know. It was amazing, but through all the battles and firefights and skirmishes, he’d never been seriously injured: he’d been knifed and shot, even hit by shrapnel, but they were always superficial strikes, glancing off him as if he were shielded by the harder steel of some mysterious fortune, the only drafts of his blood drawn by the nurses for the blood and plasma reserves, or else coming from his bloodied noses after the tussles outside bars and whorehouses. Then his wounds always healed with miraculous swiftness, as if his corporal self existed apart from everything else in a bounding, lapsing time. And in the same way that he could not feel true drunkenness he felt no true pain, either, just the cold report of impact, his nerves disconnected from the necessary region of his mind, if never quite his heart. Looking at Min, he felt a dense, sharp lump knocking in his chest; he knew if he didn’t get him to a hospital soon the boy might die. So he lifted him over his shoulder and set his head low and started to run, run as fast as he could bearing fifty pounds of child, trying not to remember how he’d futilely done the same for a soldier with his foot blown off by an errant friendly shell, applying a tourniquet and ferrying him back to the HQ only for the medic to declare him dead after discovering a perfect half-dollar-sized hole in the back of his head. When he appeared in the central yard the entire orphanage descended on him, Reverend Hong and the kitchen aunties and all forty or so children, even June, who like Hector typically kept her own company, leaning against the corner of the dormitory building, watching all with her sullen glare. But she was right up front now. Hector put Min down gently, the boy’s eyes half open, his mouth slack. His foot was a bright, sopping mass. Hector was shirtless and slick with sweat and smeared blood, one pant leg soaked crimson all the way down to the cuff. Reverend Hong, ever-suffering Hector, made a great pained face of resignation but said nothing. Sterner of expression was the thin, bespectacled American kneeling beside him, square of jaw and formally dressed in a black woolen suit. He was in his mid-forties, the minister from the States they’d been expecting for several days now. The man immediately began working on the boy, carefully removing the bloody bandage of the shirt and the sneaker to reveal that the ax blade had cleaved off his smallest three toes. He picked the little nubs out as if they were stones and gave them to Hong, who gingerly wrapped them in a handkerchief. But Min was awake now, wailing on seeing his own foot and the horror in the onlookers’ eyes. “Have you got it yet?” Tanner called sharply up into the air. “We need it now!” “Here it is,” a woman’s voice answered. “It was in my bag.” It was Tanner’s wife. She appeared above the gathered mass and passed him a first-aid kit over the children crowded about him. In the strong sun her wheat-colored hair and pale skin shone almost too fiercely for Hector’s eyes, her face obscured by the brightness. Tanner opened the kit and from a smaller metal case lined with slotted rubber he removed a syrette of morphine and without warning stuck the boy behind the knee, leaving it in for less than a full second; the boy’s size apparently made the anesthesia dangerous. Min gasped but then went slack in his limbs, his fists slowly opening. Meanwhile Tanner was completely focused on the task, sweating heavily in his tie and suit jacket but not bothering to remove them while he re-dressed the foot. His hands were unhesitating and this seemed to calm the boy and everyone else. While Tanner attended to Min, Reverend Hong directed the taxi driver who had just brought the Tanners to retrieve his own bags from his cottage and load them into the car. The Tanners had come to take over for Reverend Hong, who was tasked by the church offices in Seoul to go to America to begin making contacts for future adoptions of the children. Hong motioned to Hector, for a word. Hong was ten years older than he, in his mid-thirties, but with his slight, short frame he appeared almost adolescent beside Hector’s broad bulk. And yet Hector seemed callow and shrunken before him now, his head dipped down as Hong spoke quietly to him in his fluent, quite formal English. Hong knew Hector had been considering leaving as well, but he reminded him again how much the orphanage needed his labors, asking him to promise to stay on until he returned from his trip to the States. “Will you do so?” “I don’t know.” “No one blames you for this. I am sure the boy will be all right. Reverend Tanner and I will take him to the hospital at the base, and then I must go on directly to the airport. Reverend Tanner will return and administrate the orphanage. You will help him and his wife, Hector, the same way you help me. Agreed?” Hector didn’t answer. Hong clapped him on the arm and said he hoped he would do the right thing. Hector didn’t want to lie to him, for the reverend had always treated him with an everyday decency. He’d wait until they were gone and go back to Seoul tomorrow, to one of the rooming houses in Itaewon, where he could blend back in again among his kind, to whom he could do only superficial harm. Meanwhile, Tanner had lifted Min in his arms and laid him out on the backseat of the taxi. He told his wife he would likely be back later tonight, and said he was sure she would be all right; there was no room for her in the car. She answered there was nothing for him to worry about, that he should just take care of the boy, waving him off with a smile. Tanner got in beside Min, and Hong went around to sit up front. Reverend Hong waved goodbye to everyone and shouted, “I shall return!” and the whole camp bid them off as the driver accelerated down the dirt road, kicking up a dusty reddish cloud. Hector immediately went to his quarters at the far end of the orphanage’s supply building. Soon after he came to the orphanage Hong let him convert part of the storage room for his quarters, framing out a door on the rear, hillside face of the building, but not bothering with a window. Inside it was still and hot, with the only light coming through splits and cracks in the single-sheath panels of the walls. He stripped off his bloodied trousers and found his hands were caked with dirt and blood. Outside he’d rigged a simple gravity shower, a round tin wash-tub that he had affixed to the roof eave and fitted with a short length of pipe and a hose bib. Of course it would be useless in freezing weather, but he had no other private spot to wash himself. He washed only his hands at first, but then decided to clean the rest of himself. The water was tepid but fresh, for he’d filled it that morning, and he let it run freely, not bothering to save it for another day. As he scrubbed his forearms and chest and legs with the bar of green laundry soap he wondered if Min was crying again in pain in the back of the taxi, or else gone that ill shade of gray. The thought of a small coffin being lowered into a hole at the orphanage graveyard made him shiver. It was a grave that he should have to dig, but he was sure he couldn’t do it; he’d dug scores of graves during the war, and a few afterward, but he couldn’t bear to dig this one. His flanks were smudged with dried blood and he scrubbed them harshly until they were raw, doing the same everywhere else the boy had marked him with blood, now using an old hairbrush (as he had learned to do after a long day of handling bodies after a battle) against his skin until the last of the water ran out. As he reached for the towel he caught a flash of reflected light disappearing around the corner. He thought at first it had been a falling leaf or a bird but there on the ground was his torn, blood-soaked shirt. He peered around the building and saw the children running and playing in the central yard of the compound and the aunties observing them from the shade of their lean-to but then just beyond them the new reverend’s wife stepping quickly up the stoop of Hong’s cottage. The rest of the afternoon he worked, waiting for Reverend Tanner to return with Min. He stacked the
kindling and filled five-gallon water cans from the well and ferried them in twos to the dormitories and the women in the kitchen; from around the buildings he cleared high weeds and dead leaves and brush, to lessen the fire danger; he patched a leaky spot in the dormitory roof; and he began digging a deep, narrow trench for a permanent run of pipe that would finally connect the outhouse to a small pond-sized cesspool he’d been digging for the last month. The water plumbing was already in. By the time dusk fell he had trenched five meters (it was in fact a lot, given the hard-packed, rocky soil), and the children were eating their supper at the tables outside with the kitchen aunties. He asked one of the aunties if the new reverend’s wife had come out yet from the cottage and she shook her head and mumbled something that he didn’t understand. He had learned enough Korean for basic communication but could rarely comprehend past the first phrase. He asked her to repeat herself and she said it was no matter, saying the woman was probably tired and that he should not bother her. He said he wouldn’t bother her, but the auntie drifted away without hearing him. She and the other aunties liked him well enough and certainly appreciated his help fetching firewood and water, but he’d always sensed that their enthusiasm for him was limited, that they’d learned certain lessons from the war and that he, as a former GI, could only ever be provisionally trusted. If anything, they’d warmed to him because of Reverend Hong’s obviously sanguine feelings for him, which was another reason why he thought he should be leaving now. But he never finished packing his satchel, instead emptying it and hanging it up over the exposed rafter, his guilt over Min at least the primary reason, though he kept checking the cottage door from wherever he was working for any sign of her. When night fell, candlelight briefly illuminated the front window of the cottage. Hector was sitting out front of the supply room, leaning back against the support post on a cut-down stool, drinking steadily from a bottle of warm whiskey. Reverend Tanner and Min had still not returned. The candlelight went out and for the rest of the bottle he waited for the panes to be lit again, to catch a glimpse of her moving through the rooms. But there was nothing. The more he drank the more restless he grew, his limbs bristling with the inaction, aching to push back against the calm. He got the Willys to start and drove it fast into Itaewon, his knuckles alive with anticipation. He went to a bar where no one would know him and proceeded on his typical late-night program, his modus bibendi (as his father, Jackie, liked to say), casually winning enough money in drinking contests (the first always leading to another, and another) to more than pay for his tab at night’s end. But one of his earlier opponents, a thick-lipped, sour-faced sergeant who watched him submerge all comers, decided he was a trickster or a hustler and called him out as he left, and Hector, wide-eyed as a full moon, let the drunken, angry sergeant swing wildly at him before stepping in close to trade blows. Without any grappling or pushing they struck each other, locked toe to toe, for a good three minutes. The man had surprising strength but he soon flagged, and then the contest tipped, as it always did. It was cruel of Hector, surely, for he knew it would have to come to this, the sergeant soon just another ambulant dreamer, held up only by the alley wall, his thick lips split top and bottom and petaled out horribly into four. Hector’s last blow was simply to nudge him sideways, the man crumpling down slowly to the gutter, set forth now on that bruised, booze-soaked slumber that never quite mollifies. Hector went on to a rooming house where the proprietress knew to have two women from the adjoining brothel sent to his room. It was how he preferred it, never hiring just one if he could afford two, a satisfaction and habit that had grown out of those first ministrations with his older sister’s girlfriends, though on this night it was a craving not so much libidinous as a want of continuous labors, an intense need for usage on his body. But when they stripped for him he could see they were girls, and young ones—hardly sixteen, if that—and rather than send them back down to someone else, he just had them lie with him in the bed. It was four a.m. and they were tired, too. He had not been so valiant in the past but his heart was sodden with the unhappy sights of the day, and though he had no desire to go home to the States he realized he ought to leave Korea soon. It was true he had little sentiment left for his ex-comrades—he could bait any poor bastard like the sergeant into a harsh and probably undeserved realm of pain—but seeing for three long years these destitute people and their children serve as handmaidens in their own wrecked house had finally begun to vanquish him. It had not seemed a problem at first, for it was nothing compared to what he had witnessed in the war, but he sensed that he was being replaced, cell by cell, with bits of stone. Even in regard to Min his guilt was as much conception as feeling. And he still wanted that feeling, at least for the natives. In the morning the girls stood above him in their too-colorful dresses and the older one politely asked him if he would pay them extra for staying the night, which he did, knowing that they would otherwise get docked of their pay, or even beaten. When Hector got back to the orphanage in mid-morning, Reverend Tanner was conducting the Sunday service beneath the pavilion in the central yard; it was where everyone gathered and ate in the warm weather. He parked the Willys in its spot just inside the arched gate and walked in. They were singing a minor-key hymn and his heart sank in fear that they were doing so for Min, but then he spotted a pair of crutches at the end of the front row, Min sitting up straight and bright-faced, his mouth wide with song. His foot was heavily bandaged. Tanner’s wife sat next to him, focused intently on her husband at the head of the congregation, singing, too, with the enthusiasm of a preacher’s wife. When they were done, Tanner addressed them. He was very much at ease and spoke Korean quite well, as he’d worked in Pusan the last year of the war. He had told them, as Hong had before, how he had come to oversee the orphanage as well as tour the many other church-affiliated orphanages around the country, to observe conditions and allocate resources as well as to teach classes, and also, of course, arrange for adoptions. But then he was humorous in recounting what had happened on coming back from the hospital, telling how Min somehow convinced the taxi driver to let him take the wheel for a little bit, which nearly led to their skidding off the road. There was a hearty laugh and Tanner prompted Min, who hopped up on his crutches, grinning and waving his hands, and then took a deep bow. There was rousing applause and shouting and anyone could see that Tanner had already begun to win them over. He continued, not with a Bible lesson but with a talk about his background as a physician and how he had come to his faith after his own miraculous recovery from an otherwise fatal blood poisoning. “It happened soon after Mrs. Tanner and I were married.” He spoke to them as if in confidence, as though they were all his intimates and he was confessing to them. “Our life together was just beginning. But after I became deathly ill, I felt powerless and insignificant. I was afraid. I was no longer the arrogant doctor who had always believed in the boundless possibility and reach of the human mind. I realized my conceits and accepted at that moment not only death but the grace of an Almighty Spirit. I refused further treatment and bid my parents and my dear wife, Sylvie, goodbye. I was no longer fearful, only sad for leaving my beloved wife and parents and for being so willfully blind. I shut my eyes and fell into what all believed was my final sleep, but two days later I awoke, my fever broken. My limbs were weak, but gone were the terrible shaking and pain. But this was not what struck me. It was my mind, yes, but altogether recast, my thoughts suddenly as clear as the water of the deepest, purest spring. I knew then that I had been living only half a life, and thus not a life at all, that all of my worldly knowledge and expertise and efforts were useful and valuable but only as a living devotion to the mercy of God and His Eternal Love. I had been delivered, as I hope you will be delivered, into a glorious new life.” As he spoke, Hector caught his wife’s eye a few times but she looked away whenever he did, her gaze returning straight to her husband as if to a beacon shining out from a dark shoreline. Tanner clearly was aware of him as well but didn’t break at all in his speaking or gestures, even after
Hector turned to go to his room. He had been a vessel for plenty of religious talk throughout his life, and in recent months from Hong as well (the good reverend would come and share a whiskey with him and read the Gospels aloud), and although he was not yet a believer, he was becoming a willing subject himself, someone who had indeed begun ceding his life, too, if arranging a very different surrender. For the first week, Hector steered clear of the new reverend and his wife; he worked on the immediate grounds in the early mornings and during congregations and meals, saving any fieldwork for when they might be about. He couldn’t help but pause, as everyone did, whenever he caught a glimpse of Sylvie Tanner, her hair as it fell against the grave paleness of her shoulders glowing as vibrantly as anything he had seen since being in this desolated country. She was near forty, the creases at her eyes and mouth just now insinuating themselves for good, the first white wisps ashing the hair at her temples. There was the tiniest downward lag at the corners of her eyes, which he thought gave her an almost Egyptian sadness. The children adored her, the girls especially, floating about her like hungry bees around a tall, straight flower. She had introduced herself briefly to him as he ate alone after everyone else had finished, but he felt Tanner’s obvious disdain and didn’t allow himself to approach or speak to her. She seemed too mature and complete and happy, and this easy perfection, besides her loveliness, made him all the more shy and grimy-feeling and compelled him to drive the Willys into Seoul each night and enact the depravities Tanner saw in him. One morning Hector was scraping old paint from the side of the main dormitory to ready it for a new coat when Reverend Tanner suddenly appeared and surprised him, asking if he could help. Hector nodded and handed him a scraper and they worked together for an hour. Tanner had spoken to him several times about work projects and such but it was the first instance that they’d stood this close to each other for more than a brief moment. Tanner didn’t pretend that he was solely there to work, immediately asking Hector when he had arrived in Korea and where he had been during the war. He asked if he’d seen action and Hector told him only that he’d been in Graves Registration. Without prompting, Tanner spoke about himself, saying he was from Buffalo but had studied medicine and later divinity in Chicago and was now based in the Seattle offices of the Northwestern Synod of the Presbyterian Church. When he found out where Hector was from, his eyes lit up. “I was actually near there once, as a boy. I swam with my cousins in the Erie Canal. When they opened a lock upstream we jumped off one of the bridges and rode the current down and then hitched a ride on whatever boat was heading back. You must have done that a thousand times.” “I didn’t swim much,” Hector said. “I never liked the water.” “I remember now. That was some of the foulest water I’ve ever seen. All sorts of things floating in it.” “Yeah,” Hector said, seeing again the blackness inside his father’s gaping mouth. “That’s right.” “Will you be going back?” “To Ilion? No.” “Then to somewhere else in the States?” “I don’t know.” “You must be having a time of it here in Korea,” Tanner said. “Like most of the servicemen.” “I’m not in the service anymore.” “Yes, I know that. I suppose I meant all you young men.” Hector didn’t respond, keeping focused on the task. Tanner didn’t press him and they worked steadily with their scrapers on the long section of wall, working from opposite ends and moving toward the center. Soon enough flecks of white paint dusted them from head to toe, the two men looking as if they’d shoveled out an ash pit. Tanner took to the work with ease. He was still wearing his minister’s gray shirt and white collar and in the gaining heat he perspired heavily. But he wasn’t laboring. He was athletic and rangy and he clearly welcomed the renewed physical activity after his extended travels; back in Seattle he sculled his one-man shell every morning on Lake Union. He was twenty years older than Hector—some thinning showed in an otherwise full head of hair—but there was otherwise an animation and sturdiness about his constitution that was not unlike the younger man’s, though unlike Hector’s, Tanner’s was drawn as much from the force of his will as from an innate, brute vigor: his obviously steel self-belief primary still, despite the story of his miraculous recovery. Tanner reached the midpoint of the wall even before Hector, whose efforts ticked by as always at a constant, unremitting meter. Tanner stepped back, removing his wire spectacles and wiping his brow with his sleeve. “From your surname I assume your family is Catholic?” “My dad. My mother was lapsed. They’re both gone now.” “I’m sorry to hear that.” “Yeah.” “And what about you? Do you consider yourself Catholic?” “I’m nothing.” “Surely you must have been christened.” Hector nodded. “I was just curious. It’s not important, but I suppose I was wondering how much time you’d spent in church.” “Why’s that?” “Again, it’s not material, but I want to ask if you would be able to construct a chapel for us. The outdoor pavilion is perfectly fine now, but I don’t see how it will be useful come winter. Had Reverend Hong any such plans, about what to do?” “If he did, he didn’t tell me about them.” “I’m glad we’re talking about it, then. I was thinking that perhaps you could build a small chapel, just one big enough to house all of us.” “I doubt I could get the lumber to build anything but a shed.” “What about converting a space?” “There’s really nothing that would work, except maybe the main classroom.” “No, that won’t do,” Tanner said. “I feel strongly that if possible we should have a chapel that’s just a chapel. Where we solely hold prayer services and read Scripture and sing our hymns. Nothing else, no classes or eating. It doesn’t have to look churchlike. A room with benches is all we would require. Nothing large. The closer we are, the better.” Hector pictured the big Catholic church in Albany where they went for Easter, and then the one on West Street in Ilion where his father would regularly take him and his sisters on Sunday mornings, and sometimes for the Vigil on Saturday afternoons. It was massive and impressive to his boy’s eyes, built from blocks of granite and with a medieval-style tower, and within its soaring buttressed wooden ceiling above the nave, the supports and walls were clad in a limestone that shone brilliantly in the daytime from the light that streamed in through three high, narrow stained-glass windows over the main entrance. It was a very long structure with dozens of rows of burnished mahogany pews. On certain stifling summer days the air would be unbearable and his father would often doze off for a while, and if they were sitting toward the back Hector could slip beneath the pew in front and lie down on the cool stone floor until just before the sermon was over. There was a separate small chapel off the nave, devoted to the Annunciation, and Hector was surprised how well he could recall it now, the narrow space like a miniaturized chapel with its smaller altar and cross and off to the side a statue of a remarkably beautiful Irish-faced Mary, who could have been one of his wild sisters. “There’s the vestibule between the girls’ and boys’ sleeping rooms,” he told Tanner. “I think it was open space between the buildings that was enclosed at some point. I wouldn’t have to do much except maybe install a woodstove, if I can find one. I suppose I could salvage enough boards from the base for some pews.” “Yes, that sounds fine. That might just hold all of us.” “Not me.” “Have you not attended any of the services here?” “No.” “And Reverend Hong never minded?” “I do jobs here. He knew that.” “Well, you should know it’s likely he won’t be returning in three months. He’s done a good job and the Church will be asking him to go to Minnesota after his time in Seattle, to help begin a new ministry. He doesn’t know this yet. A good number of the children, from all our orphanages around Korea, will be adopted into families there.” “Are you telling me I ought to get going? Because I’ll move on whenever you like.” “I wasn’t suggesting that.” Tanner said. “Of course, it’s up to you. However, I would ask you to stay on for a while. There’s clearly much work to be done around the property before the weather turns. Reverend Hong went over it with me, particularly the refurbishing of the kitchen and the new septic tank, as well as patching the roofs of all the structures. And now this chapel. I’d ask you to
see these projects through, if not for me, then for Reverend Hong. For the children.” He looked directly into Hector’s eyes. “May I be frank with you? All right, then. Although I’ve only been here a week I will tell you directly that I think your presence otherwise is detrimental to the children. I took the liberty of interviewing some of the staff aunties. Please don’t blame them, but I was quite forceful in my queries. Again, I have nothing against you, personally. Your life is your own, and I didn’t come to Korea to mold your habits or your character. But I am certain that the children don’t need to see you return every morning after long nights in town. Or be so aware of your public drinking. Or your obvious indifference to our assembly and worship. So I disagree with Reverend Hong when he says that because the children are accustomed to you there should be no concern. They are rootless in every regard, and this may be their last chance for a new beginning, and so why would I wish any influences on them that weren’t wholly benevolent? Do you think I should?” “No.” “So you can understand. You agree.” Hector didn’t disagree. “Good. I want to say now, too, that in my view everything is conditional. My hope is that from this point on I’ll be persuaded otherwise. You’re a very young man, with your entire life ahead of you. I don’t know what happened to you before or during the war, or what you think this life now holds for you. But I would say you have the posture of someone awaiting the inevitable. Or even inviting it. I am sure that there is no worse sin than the one a man can perpetrate on himself.” For the next few weeks Hector kept fast to his work. It wasn’t to try to impress Tanner or alter any of his views. He didn’t like the last thing the reverend had said about him, but there, too, he couldn’t quite do anything but agree: indeed, he was waiting for the inevitable. He was looking for something to befall him, to strike him down; he was a man clambering to the top of a hill in a lightning storm, waving an iron rod. But for Hector the skies blew always empty, broke open vast and blue. So he threw himself into the labor. He wanted the rack of heavy toil, not as discipline or punishment but as cover, a way to erase himself. He patched the older roofs in the afternoons. Only the small schoolhouse roof was solid and sturdy, having been constructed by an army ordinance battalion a year earlier, at the end of the war, but the rest of the buildings dated from the 1920s and were converted farming structures, rickety swaybacked buildings meant for housing livestock and chickens. He spent the hottest part of the day on the clay tiles, clearing everyone out from beneath the roof he was working on, in case of collapse. In the intense late-August heat the orphanage grounds were deserted, the rest of the populace staying inside for their studies, or else resting or doing chores under the tent or the meager tree shade on the edges of the compound. The sun was relentless, its rays like sheets of fiery glass cascading down to shred him, but he welcomed the burn on his shoulders and back as he stepped about on the creaky structure. He felt nimble and insignificant, an ant at labor, but an ant alone, drifted far off from its brethren. At meals he took his bowl of rice and soup back to his quarters, drinking his PX whiskey in private as well. He had stopped going into Seoul. He mostly avoided the children. With the excuse of what had happened to Min he disbanded the firewood detail, doing the gathering himself. It was not that he felt chastised or shamed by what Tanner had said so much as alerted to an idea about himself that had begun to haunt him: that he was a bane on otherwise decent people, somehow instantly embodying the exact cast of their most profane weakness. He inspired only homely acts of Eros. Hadn’t it been that way with Patricia Cahill, voracious for his physicality as she was going mad over the lost corpse of her husband? And with his good-hearted but ever-needful father, Jackie, whose sodden drift down the Erie Canal found its source from the same? And so in regard to the children Tanner was of course right: there was no good reason to allow a figure like him within their view. Each one had surely witnessed enough depravity and death to last all their days. And while most of them were now gleeful and antic like any other children, kidding with him more easily than he did with them, he sensed that a few of the quieter ones, like June, the girl who had followed him here from the road, could see through his surface to the potential disaster lodged in every cell of him. At the army base he was able to find an old stove and collect enough boards and plywood to make four benches for the space between the dorm rooms. He would have to wait to make the four others they would need. It was too narrow for a middle aisle, so the benches would have to stretch almost to the side walls to be able to seat all the children. Unlike the roof work, it was more meticulous than strenuous, but he found himself drawn to it anyway, saving the very end of each day for the job. With a hacksaw he cut out from the plywood sheets that would form the ends, at first plain square supports for the long boards of the benches. But after the first one, he decided to cut a simple curve along the top edge; the squared-off ones, veneered in a light-hued pine, looked too much like the ends of little coffin boxes for his comfort. Because it was plywood it was difficult to plane the edge without badly splintering the sheet, so he used a sanding block instead to null the roughness. He would sit outside his quarters working the edges in the twilight, the smell of the wood a little miracle of freshness, of released former life, and he didn’t care if some of its dust drifted into his tin mug of whiskey. Even though all this was due to Reverend Tanner’s wishes, and he could never care in the least about anyone’s worship or God, Hector didn’t like the idea of the children having to sit outside in the cold during services, which were far lengthier with Tanner than with Reverend Hong. He knew the cold in Korea, at least in the mountains in the far north, how it seeped into you and then resided with an unrelenting grip so that you felt colder than even the frigid air of the foxhole or dugout, like a chunk of ice at the bottom. During a slow retreat the first winter of the war he had seen two girls curled up and nested by the side of the road, their unblemished faces and bare hands and feet the color of ash. No doubt someone had taken their shoes. He’d waved another GI from the Graves Unit over and they had to pry them up from the frozen mud with shovels, bearing them in one piece to a spot behind some sagebrush like museum workers moving a sculpture. But the ground was rock hard, and so instead of a burial they draped them with a blanket, the edges pinned with stones. Of course it was useless—the blanket would soon be taken, the bodies scavenged by birds and animals—but he thought they ought to be covered and allowed, at least for a while, to sleep a dignified measure in private, undisturbed. After he finished all the end pieces, he cut out notches for the long boards, which he had sanded as well, and then nailed two-by-fours underneath for the cross-bracing to support blocks in the middle. The back-less benches were somewhat crude, for he was no artisan, but he had skill enough from a summer job as a carpenter’s assistant to construct them to sit sturdily and in balance. He had intended to stain them, but he could get only free paint (no primer) from the base quartermaster and the paint came only in gray, flat, mute gray, and after the first swath the lifeless hue stopped his hand. “It looks all right to me,” he heard behind him. It was Sylvie Tanner. She wore a billowy cotton dress, the points of her shoulders shiny in the sun. Like everyone else, she had seen him outside building the pews but until now was one of the few people at the orphanage who had yet to come up and make some comment about his work. “I think it’s a good color.” “You must like rain clouds,” he mumbled. “Or battleships.” “Maybe rain clouds,” she said, taking the wide brush from him. She dipped it into the can and dabbed the excess from both sides on the inside rim and added three strokes to his, painting a section the width of the board. Her motions were lengthy, voluminous, almost flamboyant. “There. You see, it’s not so bad.” “I doubt your husband will like it.” “Why do you say that?” “He’s not a fan of me. I don’t care, but I’m just saying.” “I know you don’t care,” she said, surprising him. Her eyes, which she visored with her hand, were remarkably large and dark, even in the daylight, her pupils seeming to push out nearly all the sea green around them. He was trying not to look at her, b
ut he kept failing. “Besides, I wouldn’t be so sure. He admires all the work you’ve been doing, this project especially. As do I.” “You want to paint some more?” “Would you mind?” He told her to keep the brush. He went to find another in the storeroom, and when he finally returned with one she was nearly finished with a first coat. They moved on to the others, and soon they were done and ready to go back to the first bench she’d painted. But it wasn’t yet dry enough for its second coat, so she asked if she could see the work he’d done so far in the vestibule. He had already brought in the salvaged stove, now situated in the rear corner, and shifted and reframed the facing doors of the girls’ and boys’ rooms to be closer to the main entrance so that they wouldn’t be impeded by the benches once they were installed. He had taken apart a pair of broom closets to make as much room as possible and the space was starkly bare. The wooden walls, formerly the exterior of the separate structures, had been long weathered to a dark, silvery sheen. “It’s dark in here even with the door open,” Sylvie said. “If we were to hold a service now we’d have to use oil lamps, or candles.” “This wasn’t meant to be anything but another storage room. And a windbreak.” “What do you think we should do?” He didn’t know, but he felt as though he suddenly did care, if only because she was here, away from everyone else, within his reach. She said, still holding her brush, “How much paint do you have?” “There’s plenty. But it’s all that same color.” She looked about for a moment, then took some broad swipes at the wall, down and then up. She stepped back. “You know, I think that will be fine.” “It’s going to look like a concrete box in here.” “Maybe not,” she said. “We’ll see. But do you mind? It’s a lot more work for you. I can help, if you like. In fact I should, since I’m putting you up to it.” “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You can do what you want.” “Then I’ll help,” she said brightly. They were standing near where the altar would be. Painted or not, this would be like no other house of God he’d ever seen. Above them there was no ceiling, and the bare rafters were strung with cobwebs and pocked by old hornet’s nests. It was quite warm inside and though they were both marked with the pungent oil paint he could still glean faint notes of her, her sweet sweat, the soft, palmy oil of her hair. He could smell himself, too, and it was not good, this dried animal reek, this lower-order tone, but she didn’t seem to mind being this close to him. He had the strange compulsion of wanting to pick her up, to see her high in the cathedral; maybe he was a Catholic after all. But the little light there was flickered and the lanky silhouette of Reverend Tanner appeared in the frame of the main doorway. “There you are,” Tanner pronounced, though not quite sounding as if he was surprised. “I saw the benches out by the storeroom.” “Don’t they look good to you?” Sylvie asked. “Indeed, they do,” Tanner said. He cuffed her waist and leaned to kiss her but she warded him off by flaring her brush, her paintsplotched hands. “We’ve decided we’ll be painting in here, too.” “Is that right?” he answered her, though he was looking at Hector. “Yes,” she said. “We think the same color as the benches.” “Well, I’m sure that will be fine,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll lend a hand as well.” “Yes,” Sylvie added enthusiastically. “We can all work together.” “Listen,” Hector said. “I really don’t need any help.” “It’s a lot more than painting a few benches,” Tanner said. “It’s still not a big job.” “Don’t be silly,” Sylvie said. “Anyway, that’s not the point.” “I’m not being silly,” he told her, with an edge that seemed to deflate her. “It’s not a big job, and if you want me to do it, I will. Look, I better get a second coat on those now.” He held out his hand to Sylvie and she handed him the brush. Outside, the benches were dry and he pried open a fresh can of paint and stirred it and began applying a second coat, not looking up. He didn’t see when the Tanners left the vestibule. It bothered him that her enthusiasm didn’t seem to wane when her husband appeared. But who was he, to care about such a thing? He was being a child. As he painted he was surprised at how tense his hands were, not realizing until it was too late how fiercely he was pushing the brush against the surface, enough so that he marred the first coat beneath. He had ruined all of the first pew, and a good part of the second, before painting the others properly. He had to wait until the first two were completely dried before stripping them down and starting all over again. FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS he tried to steer clear of her. It was easy to avoid Tanner, who was busy giving sermons and teaching history and math and regularly leaving on day trips to tour and inspect other orphanages. Sylvie was busy herself, teaching English and sewing and sometimes helping the aunties with the cooking. She worked along with the children in the large gardens of the orphanage, harvesting the last of the summer peppers and tomatoes and preparing the plots for lettuces and cabbage. But she would appear in the most casual of manners, coming around to where he was working bearing a glass of iced barley tea or skillet corn bread, invite him to come down from the searing rooftop and try what she’d made. He hadn’t yet started painting the chapel. Or at dusk, if he had forgotten because of working straight since dawn, she might knock on his door with a supper tray. She never came to him alone, for June accompanied her now almost everywhere. He’d hardly meet Sylvie’s eyes and nod and take the tray inside. She’d go away with the girl’s hand in her own, arms swinging easefully as if they were sisters. Sylvie had originally taken her up because June could not play with the other children without a resulting argument or fight, her counterpart invariably ending up the more injured party. June was moody and aggressive and when she wished could be unrelentingly cruel, as harsh to the youngest ones as she was to those nearer her age. Her main chore at the orphanage was to help the aunties with the laundry, and she once made a boy who chronically wet himself take off his underpants after an accident and wear them on his head. She would often bully other girls when she found them too girlish or weak, especially when it came to standing up to the boys. Hector himself had broken up several of her fights—the last one found her crouched in the middle of a gang of the oldest boys, who were taking turns punching and kicking her, shouting at her to go away, that she was ruining the orphanage. She was trouble enough that Reverend Hong had quietly attempted to place her in another orphanage, or in a job-training program. And yet because he knew there was only misery and degradation in store for most family-less girls, he had at last decided he must try to keep her on even after she turned sixteen, to delay her entry back into the world for as long as possible. But after Sylvie took an interest in her, she visibly softened; before, she was always quiet and kept to herself when not fighting, but now she sometimes helped the smaller girls carry the clean folded laundry back to the dormitories, or worked extra hours in the garden, and was particularly helpful in translating for Sylvie and the students during English classes, where she was easily the best speaker. Soon she was working a couple of hours each day in the Tanners’ quarters, sweeping and dusting and making the beds. There was always some group of children naturally clinging about Sylvie, but in the off-hours, well after supper or very early in the morning, when only Hector might catch sight of them, it was always just June who was with her, the two of them sitting on the stoop gently brushing each other’s hair, or else coolly whispering to each other like a pair of thieves. One afternoon he saw Sylvie reading a book while he was clearing the underbrush as preparation to trench the new sewage pipe. She sat on a large rock that overlooked the lowland where he would install the septic piping and field. June was not with her. Reverend Tanner and the aunties had taken most all of the children, including June, on a trip to a waterfall and swimming hole. They had been gone all morning. When Sylvie saw him pause in his work she quickly waved to him, but then returned to her reading. He had no pretext for doing so and didn’t know what he would say, but he dropped the machete and hiked up to her. When he said hello she stood up and simply replied, “Hello there,” and to his relief didn’t ask what he wanted. She simply shut her book without marking the page and put it down on the rock. It was a sl
im blue volume that he’d seen her often reading and not always sequentially, as though she had read it many times over and could pick it up anywhere. “I see you’ve started to dig for the pipe,” she said. She peered down the line he’d freshly cleared of brush, which easily ran over fifty meters. “Are you actually going to do the whole job by hand? Isn’t there a machine Ames can get to help you with it?” “Not out here. It would cost too much, besides.” “I’m sure you’re right.” “You could help me.” “I thought you never needed help with anything.” He didn’t answer. “Well, I’m glad you changed your mind.” “It’s not going to be easy work. Not like the painting. The ground is mostly stone, and where it’s not stone, it’s hard-packed clay. Or maybe it’s all the same thing.” “That almost sounds like a koan.” “A what?” “A koan. It’s a kind of a riddle, but one you keep saying to yourself. Buddhists use them to focus the mind.” “You won’t want to focus, for work like this.” She smiled at him. “I do feel like doing something difficult. Something strenuous. It’s been awfully quiet today. And, frankly, you look kind of lonely down there.” “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m sure you are. Shall we try it, then?” “Okay.” They went down to the head of the trench that he’d begun earlier. He had a pickax and shovel with him and held them out to her. “Your choice.” She took the shovel and followed him down to the mouth of the trench; they would work from the empty new cesspool back up the slope. He hopped down into it and gestured for her to step clear, and he began working it, raising the pickax directly over his head and hammering it down on the dry, rocky ground. Once he warmed up he kept a steady cadence, the muted tremors of the blows lifting them imperceptibly off their feet. After he’d broken up a meter or so Sylvie stepped down and shoveled out the loosened earth and rock. The pile was denser than she expected and she had some trouble at first. Hector went to help but she told him she was fine and she speared furiously at the gravelly dirt. After she cleared it they switched, alternating several times until during her turn she suddenly stopped shoveling. She turned up her hands; several blisters had welled up on the pads of her palms and on one hand an especially large, angry blister bridged the space between her thumb and index finger. Hector told her she should stop and she nodded, but instead of going back to her cottage for a bandage she simply pinched the mass until it broke. She picked up the shovel again, wincing as she hefted it, and attacked the pile as before. She didn’t complain or hold back. They worked for the better part of an hour in the high afternoon heat, the sweat completely soaking through Hector’s denim work shirt. Sylvie was flushed about the neck and cheeks, the delicate tendrils of her hair matted to her temples. The fabric of her blouse was a gauzy linen and with the angle of the sun he could see clearly her tan-colored brassiere and the dark nook of her arm and the smooth line of her torso as it led down to the spur of her high hip. She cleared as much as he loosened and they would each unconsciously extend their turn slightly and Hector finally had to tell her she should quit for the day when he saw the condition of her hands, several new blisters split open on each, the loose skin shredded and curled back to reveal the raw underlayers of her palms. She might not have agreed, but they heard the heaving clatter of a big diesel motor in the distance; it was the old transport truck the children had piled into this morning. “I should go,” she said, pushing him the handle of the shovel. For a second he was sure she was going to lean up and kiss him on the cheek, but she simply touched his arm and then hurried up the gentle slope. When she just reached the top he saw that in her haste she had left her book on a nearby rock, but he didn’t call out, letting her disappear past the buildings to greet the children and her husband. Sylvie worked herself hard every day. Reverend Tanner was on the road for a good part of each day, making visits to Seoul and other orphanages, and she was tireless in his stead, teaching and leading services and gardening and playing with the children until suppertime, when she’d disappear into the cottage without having eaten. The kitchen aunties whispered comments to one another about how she was losing weight and looking ragged. She’s going to get sick, one said. He expects too much of her, another replied. But there’s so much to do! Can you blame him if he has a big heart? His heart is big enough for everyone but his wife. It was a hard-edged statement but once said it seemed true enough: Tanner was by any definition an admirable man, but one could see how his utter devotion to his missions—which obviously Sylvie had given herself over to completely—might leave none of their passions unspent. He wondered if this was the reason they didn’t have their own children, or if they now slept together at all. She had indeed grown thinner with the change in diet and the constant work, but it had seemed to Hector that there was a certain weathering in her eyes from the very first day, this eroded sheen. Hector had begun to linger outside his quarters, waiting for her to come out for a while before her husband returned in the mid-evenings. But she didn’t, never emerging until dawn. Whenever he worked on the trenching he kept checking the crest of the hillside for her. He kept on with the digging now, alternating between the pick and the shovel himself, loosening as much of the rocky earth as possible so that for long stretches he could toil in the belief that there was something of her sloughing off on him, this phantom print of her hand. Before bringing it back to her that evening he had done the same with her book, pressing its rough pages against his cheek, smelling the tattered cloth cover, the nook of the spine. It was titled A Memory of Solferino, a translation from the original French. The author was a man named J. H. Dunant, a young French-Swiss banker who was traveling in northern Italy, a “mere tourist,” as he described himself, when he happened upon a massive conflict fought near a tiny hill town called Solferino. Hector flipped through the volume but it was dry and airless in the beginning, thick with names of foreign places and generals, and he was going to put it down when he came upon a passage well inside the book. It was the author’s account of the aftermath of a battle between two immense armies totaling 300,000 men, fought on the 24th of June, 1859, one army comprising the allies of France and the other the allies of Austria; the scene was a description of the wounded, crowded among scores of others in a church: With faces black with the flies that swarmed about their wounds, men gazed around them, wild-eyed and helpless. Others were no more than a worm-ridden, inextricable compound of coat and shirt and flesh and blood. Many were shuddering at the thought of being devoured by the worms, which they thought they could see coming out of their bodies (whereas they really came from the myriads of flies which infested the air). There was one poor man, completely disfigured, with a broken jaw and his swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth. He was tossing and trying to get up. I moistened his dry lips and hardened tongue, took a handful of lint and dipped it in the bucket they were carrying behind me, and squeezed the water from this improvised sponge into the deformed opening that had been his mouth. Another wretched man had had a part of his face—nose, lips, and chin—taken off by a sabre cut. He could not speak, and lay, half-blind, making heart-rending signs with his hands and uttering guttural sounds to attract attention. I gave him a drink and poured a little fresh water on his bleeding face. A third, with his skull gaping wide open, was dying, spitting out his brains on the stone floor. His companions in suffering kicked him out of their way, as he blocked the passage. I was able to shelter him for the last moments of his life, and I laid a handkerchief over his poor head, which still just moved. Hector stopped reading, placing the book on the footlocker that served as his bedside table; he would not look at it again before returning it. He poured himself a teacup of whiskey, though ended up not drinking it. The descriptions matched any number of his memories from the war, and as much as they pained him—an icy clawing at his lungs, puncturing his breath—the feeling soon gave way to a numbing pause. It was a pause not of reflection or reckoning but of a pure self-erasure in which he felt that he had died, or, better, had never existed; that as such he had not had an effect on anything or anyone, going either forward or back; that he had, for a moment,
completely disappeared. The solace of this state might have compelled him to read further if not for his deepening curiosity about the book’s owner, this stubborn, jade-eyed woman, quietly fierce and persistent and yet also clearly fragile. Perhaps even infirm. A book was a book, but it was another thing to keep a particular one close, and then one such as this, and he couldn’t help but wonder what private rigor or calamity of hers this tale of woe was shadowing, keeping vigil over. He waited until Tanner had departed again to return it; the reverend had gone off to Seoul, for a dinner meeting with some other clergy. Just after Sylvie left the children for the aunties to take care of for the rest of the evening he went to the cottage. He knocked on the door and called inside. He knocked again. When there was no response he stepped inside, calling “Mrs. Tanner.” The cottage was a three-room railroad flat, with a front sitting room and a rudimentary kitchen with a washbasin and tub in the middle and at the rear a small bedroom with a window and back door. He had often sat with Reverend Hong in the front room and he was surprised to see that a single cot had been brought in and jammed in the corner, with a proper double bed in the bedroom. The rear door was slightly ajar and when he pulled it in he saw her sitting in a chair in the tiny weed-choked plot with her head down in her lap, like she’d been ill. The sky was a curdled mass of high clouds lit in their bellies by the dusky light, the top of her white blouse aglow like dying coals, cooler blue beneath. She was wearing khaki trousers, but she was oddly barefoot. “Are you okay?” he said. She startled with the sound of his voice. “My goodness, you scared me.” “Sorry.” “It’s all right,” she said, catching her breath. Her eyes were glassy, shimmering as she looked up at him. But she hadn’t been crying. In fact she now smiled, with a strangely easy languor. “You have my book.” He gave it to her. She pressed it in her lap and thanked him. It was somehow difficult for him to meet her eyes. Her pupils were so small that the gray-green of her irises seemed as large as coat buttons. “You left very quickly.” “Did I?” she said absently. She was now leaning back in the chair like she was near-paralyzed, her wide, pretty mouth slightly hanging open. “Maybe I did. I don’t know why I feel I should be ready and present whenever he comes back. Ames isn’t at all needy, that way, but I want him to see me when he returns, even if he doesn’t care and he’s constantly coming and going anyway. I didn’t even know he was going into Seoul for dinner.” “Is he coming back tonight?” “Later, yes,” she said. “Did you look at the book?” “No,” he answered, though not exactly sure why. “I’m glad. There’s no reason for you to read it,” she said. “Why’s that?” “It’s about a battle. Someone who was a soldier doesn’t need to know any more about that.” “And you do?” She was silent for a moment, running her hand over the book’s cover. “Maybe, yes. Like most people, I have my own problems and get wrapped up in things. Everything seems so important. But despite the signs, sometimes I forget what’s happened all around us here. The enormity of it. The cause of all this.” “You should have been a soldier,” he said to her. “Then you’d be dying to forget.” Her eyes flashed at him, which at first he took as edged with anger but then realized instead was a disarmed recognition, as if he’d poked through some hard wall. But then she went back to the way she was before, slack again, and she seemed to be washed over by a wave of dizziness and nausea. He asked if she needed to lie down. “Okay.” He had to help her to her feet, pulling on both hands, and for a moment she teetered and leaned into him as they went inside. She walked as if the floor were pliant. She passed the bed in the bedroom and when they reached the front room she lay down on her side on the cot in the corner. “I left the book out there. Again.” “I’ll get it.” “Listen, Hector,” she said. He liked the way she said his name, with a faintly Spanish inflection. Not so hard, or Aegean. “I’m so terribly thirsty. Would you get me some water, too?” Out in the back there was a pump and he let the water run until it was very cold before filling the mug. He picked up the book on the way and when he got back to the front her arms were turbaned about her eyes. He watched her for a long moment. “Mrs. Tanner,” he finally said, if too softly. She didn’t stir. He didn’t try to rouse her. He understood now what was the matter with her; he’d seen her kind back in Seoul. Most all of the servicemen and ex-servicemen like himself, and the aid workers and newly arriving businessmen, preferred the scores of lounges and bars, but there were a few places for those who had acquired a special taste, from a stint, say, in Shanghai or Rangoon, or from the treatment of an injury. He examined her closely now, her wrists and her arms, and was surprised to see them unblemished. Perhaps he was wrong. But her leg slipped over the edge of the cot and when he lifted her cool ankle to set it right he could see them, a perfect line, a dozen tiny healed marks tattooing the nook of her heel, the last one still weeping a pin-dot of red.