SEVEN Manchuria, Lunar New Year’s Day, 1934 “WHAT A GRAND FEAST THIS IS,” Sylvie’s father said. “Let us pray.” Everyone at the long table clasped hands and her father led them in their praises and thanksgiving. Her mother had sewn two old draperies together to make a pretty tablecloth and the Chinese minister’s wife had prepared the midday dinner with local helpers who worked at the missionary school. It was a true feast, especially in light of the times. There was brown rice and sour pickled cabbage and preserved duck eggs and candied black beans. Some moon cakes for dessert. But the dish everyone was waiting for was the stewed pork ribs Reverend Lum’s wife had just brought to the table in a large earthenware casserole. She had the village butcher slaughter their last pig and had every other part of it salt-packed as a provision for the winter but had decided to make a special New Year’s dish with the ribs, vowing that the Japanese would never taste them. A battalion fighting the Communist Chinese forces had swept through this part of the province months before but some elements were now filtering back through the territory, ransacking and sometimes taking over farms and houses and killing anyone who resisted. Some officers on horseback had come inside the gates last week to inspect the school and its grounds, questioning each of the men separately about his background and purpose here. They left, assuring them no interference, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before they returned. It was a crowded table: Sylvie and her parents, the Binets, Francis and Jane; the Lums; a visiting aid-worker couple named Harris; and sitting beside her a young bachelor named Li, who had arrived in the summer soon after the Binets and who taught Latin and mathematics. He was a Chinese from Hong Kong but had studied classics at the university in Manchester. He held a British passport. Jammed in at the far end of the table were a few local families whose mothers worked as helpers at the school, and two orphaned children. Normally the helpers didn’t eat with the missionaries, but their families were fatherless (the men either conscripted or killed in action) and Francis Binet had insisted that they be included for the New Year’s meal. They passed around the other dishes but Mrs. Lum doled out the ribs, everyone receiving exactly five bite-sized sections. Conditions at the school were normally spartan, but with the constant state of war (though it was not formally a war yet, despite having begun in 1931), there was less and less to purchase from the purveyors in Changchung, and for a month now they were surely undernourished, though never close to starving. The most pressing problem, however, was not hunger but the cold. Even as they ate, elbow to elbow on the benches of the small dining room, it was as if they were outside in the weather. They were certainly dressed so, with overcoats and hats and even gloves. It had snowed furiously earlier in the month but since then the skies had been swept clear by a piercing arctic wind that left everything frozen and desiccated. Although it was just past noon now, and the sun was shining from its low perch in the sky, it was barely fifteen degrees Fahrenheit and perhaps just above freezing inside. There was a small coal stove in the room but Reverend Lum and Francis Binet decided not to light it, hoping all the bodies in the small room would produce enough comforting warmth. They had to conserve what little coal they had left, as both Chinese factions and the Japanese colonial forces were depleting most of the available supply; it was still the heart of the winter, nearly two whole months left of it at least, and no one had spoken a word about how they would make it through without some profound happening or change. As the diners ate, puffs of steam rose up from their mouths. People weren’t talking very much as they sat hunched over their small plates, trying to keep warm. Everyone ate the ribs first, for they cooled almost instantly on the frigid plates, the drops of fat congealing into opaque disks that floated on the thin dark sauce. Not a drop of it went to waste. Sylvie didn’t favor pork, but the fatty, gristly meat made her mouth gush so much her tongue almost ached and she had to quell the urge to try to swallow a section of bone whole, for how delicious it was. Instead she chewed off any nubs of soft cartilage from the ends and when she was done placed the bones on a plate being passed back around to Mrs. Lum, who said she was going to make a soup out of them for the next day. Sylvie’s father nodded to her from across the table when he saw her ribs were as scoured clean as the rest. She had worried her parents for as long as she could recall because she rarely ate very much, but lately she was feeling hungry, even famished, and not simply due to the diminishing rations. She was almost fourteen and her body was at last changing, even if she was still too slim. Her hips had widened and her chest was welling out and there was a rougher hand to the surface of her skin, Like chamois instead of silk, her mother pronounced, in her typically clear-eyed style. As she took after her mother, Sylvie wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed, not even by the less pleasing difference in her hair, especially the tufts others couldn’t see, the new coarseness and musk beneath her arms and elsewhere. Maybe she did not fully feel like a woman because she wasn’t yet sure what being one was, or meant, but she was certain that her girlhood had passed, or if it hadn’t passed, that it was something only barely remaining, like a baby’s blanket finally worn through to a web of threads. Besides, Sylvie knew she could not afford to be a child anymore. With the fighting, their life was becoming too dangerous and real. Her parents had been talking about her leaving with the Harrises, who were departing in several days for Shanghai, and then going on to Hong Kong, from there embarking on the long sea journey to Honolulu and finally Seattle, where they and the Binets were from. Sylvie’s aunt lived there, too, and offered a place for her to stay until her parents returned in the spring. They had each tried to speak to her about it in an idle, casual way, bringing up the idea as if it were merely a choice between summer camps, but Sylvie was old enough to know that her parents were not in the least casual or idle about anything. They were people who took seriously every action and effort, brooking high risks if necessary, for it was all in the service of what they saw as the most urgent calling in this life: educating children, feeding the poor, ameliorating suffering. Throughout her childhood they traveled from destitute place to destitute place, from the Amazon to West Africa and now to Asia, and although she always felt their love for her, she could feel cast apart from them as well, set just outside the tight centripetal force of their labors, the impassioned orbit of their work. She was rarely if ever out of their sight but she often felt eclipsed by the boundless, grinding need of the foreground, and in certain moments she was sure that she was the loneliest child on earth. And yet her admiration for them never waned. If anything, it had only deepened as she had grown older, as her shame at her own selfishness and self-pity seemed monstrously childish in the face of her parents’ unstinting efforts. They had come to this village twenty-five kilometers outside of Changchung to revitalize an old church school, which, like every other mission they had helped run, was also becoming a de facto health clinic and agricultural center and, of course, soup kitchen. In five months the enrollment had doubled, even some well-to-do merchant families from the city now sending their children daily for schooling. Yet as the fighting escalated, it was also becoming a sanctuary; just a few days earlier her father—against the protests of Reverend Lum—had taken in and treated a pair of haggard, lightly wounded Chinese soldiers who said they were being pursued by the Japanese but might well have been deserters. Either way, it could bring trouble to them, Lum argued, but her father was nothing if not calmly pragmatic in such moments. He saw everything in its most essential human terms. “They’re simply scared and hungry,” he said to Lum and the rest. “And ultimately, we know, through no cause of their own. So how can we turn them away?” Nothing had happened, neither side coming to search for them, and the two soldiers had slipped away the next evening under cover of darkness, each given a two-day bundle of rations. But Reverend Lum and Tom Harris were still concerned that such occurrences would only become more frequent and more dangerous, aside from taxing their dwindling resources, and after the helpers and their children finished eating and were excused the discussion around t
he table was about how the school should continue if and when full-scale war broke out. Reverend Lum and Harris were in favor of closing the gates to any combatants. They wanted to negotiate with both Japanese and Chinese officials to get them to recognize the school as a neutral zone. “It’ll be safer if you can stay out of this thing completely,” Tom Harris said, his large hands wrapped around a cup of hot tea. He was about the same age as Francis, in his early fifties, not a minister but a second-career aid worker who was an expert in agricultural practices and irrigation. His wife, Betty, was a nurse practitioner, and during the last few months they had traveled northern Asia, immunizing children in remote villages against smallpox. “Or else, if they won’t let you be, then just close the school and all get out now. Don’t you remember what happened to that Lutheran missionary school in the Congo in ’twenty-nine? It was right smack in the middle of a brutal tribal war, and ended up being used by both factions. The head of the mission wanted the place to be an open refuge but in the end he was distrusted by all and they tore everything to pieces.” “What happened to the head of the mission?” Reverend Lum asked. “Please, Tom,” his wife said to him. “Sylvie’s parents don’t want her to hear about such things.” “That’s all right, Betty,” her father said. “We don’t try to shield her from what goes on. Anyway, she’s old enough now. Aren’t you, sweetie?” “Yes, I am.” “Nobody was spared,” Harris said, looking away from Sylvie. “And they don’t use guns in the Congo. They don’t just shoot people. I’ll leave it at that, for everyone’s sake.” “This isn’t Africa,” Mrs. Lum said. “Oh no? I keep hearing about certain things up north. How the Japanese wiped a few villages off the map. Eradicated every last soul.” “That’s a rumor they themselves spread to scare us,” she answered. “I heard it was just one remote village the Japanese wanted for a base, and that all the people agreed to be relocated and work in a boot factory near Harbin. So what’s the truth? What should we believe?” “That this is effectively a war zone,” Harris replied. “Whether declared or not. Something is different now. What I see and hear is that there’s no protection here for anyone. Including foreigners.” There was a moment of silence before Jane Binet spoke up. Sylvie caught a certain glimmer in her eyes and she could anticipate what her mother was going to say. “I think if you’re right, Tom, then we need to keep the mission and school open for as long as we can. I don’t know if that means coming to some agreement with a certain side or not. You and Francis and Reverend Lum must decide on that. But whatever it is, it has to allow us to stay on here until the very last possible hour. The last possible minute. Because all of us can imagine what it will be like for these children and their families when the war does come.” “The problem is determining what that last minute is,” Tom Harris said, but not forcefully, for of course he knew it was pointless to argue. He and his wife had been stationed in the same place or area with Sylvie’s parents several times, and like all the other aid workers and missionaries who had worked with them, they came to understand that the Binets were not out in the forsaken regions of the world for the usual constellation of reasons, for the glory of God and Samaritanism, or as some mode of escape or adventure or self-trial. They were not ultimately sentimental people, being rarely ruled by their hearts, even as they were genuinely loving and caring to their charges. They were two people who over the years had honed themselves into ideal instruments of mercy, and like any such instruments the greatest sin was to be only half used. “I see there are some moon cakes to be had,” her father said brightly, breaking the mood. They each got a quarter-cake, Sylvie eating hers in a single mouthful as the others slowly nibbled. Both her parents offered theirs to her but she refused, despite how its greasy sweetness made her insides leap. She was not some needy child. Li, the young Latin and math teacher, nudged her with his elbow and silently offered his to her but she refused him as well. A month ago she would not have taken it for the reason that others might sense how infatuated she was with him. But now she did not care anymore what the others might see. For she was infatuated, and had been practically from the moment he arrived. He had a lovely English accent and when he asked her during their private Latin lesson to translate a passage from the Gallic Wars, he would address her as Miss Binet, like some proper suitor in a novel. He was not much taller than she and although several years removed from university he could easily be mistaken for a high schooler, with his lithe, smooth-skinned build. He had the habit of adjusting his round silver-framed spectacles with both hands, delicately propping them higher on his unusually prominent nose. He pomaded his thick, coal-black hair with an English ointment that smelled of sweetened almonds, like marzipan. One day back in the late summer she had seen him shirtless when he helped her father bear large buckets of well water for the children’s baths, the wiry bands of his arms and shoulders and neck tensing with the effort. He had noticed her watching and waved to her and she had felt something drop from the top of her chest to the bottom. Now beneath the table he opened her hand and tucked the small wedge of cake into her palm but she could only feel the brief graze of his fingers on her knuckles and while they resumed talking she gently pressed the cake into a damp, doughy mass, focusing now on his gift to her and her chance to eat it. Only after the conversation turned again to how best to engage the Japanese and Chinese authorities was she excused from the table, and she walked across the frozen ground of the courtyard to the room she shared with her parents. In the unheated room she let her fingers curl open, uncupping the tiny lode of heat. She ate slowly this time, simply letting her mouth dissolve the cake rather than chewing or swallowing, running the tip of her tongue on the creases of her palm to get every last tinge of the lard. The sweetness warmed her, despite the frigidity of the room. She unbuttoned her coat, unwound her scarf. In fact she felt overheated of late, when her parents and the others seemed to have developed a waxen rime from the unceasing bitter temperatures. Even Benjamin Li could seem to stiffen in his movements. Her changing body had become a perfectly efficient generator, somehow able to turn any meager morsel into a sustained heat. In the absence of fuel it ran anyway, heedless of her spells of dizziness and great thirst and a waving ache in her joints, in her bones. Worst of all was the abraded sensation, the feeling as if her insides were in perpetual friction, flaring and rebelling against her body. Every night now in her cot, on her side of the folding painted screen her parents had borrowed from the Lums for some privacy in their shared room, she’d cast aside the many layers of rough woolen blankets and pull up her nightgown to her throat and let the piercing air check her until every ember seemed finally to succumb and she was as ashen as the moonlight painted her. She shivered terribly in her nakedness and gripped the side bars of the cot until her hands grew numb, and one morning her mother told her while brushing her hair that one’s body was never wrong and though she’d said it before, just as cryptically, Sylvie finally understood what she meant. For hadn’t she let go, too, stunning herself to another state of waking with her frozen hands? As with everything else, she learned this, too, from her parents. For as long as her memory served she’d listened to them making love (their living quarters were necessarily humble and cramped wherever they went) and she’d peered through her arms at their caresses and then her mother’s willowy body shifting above her father, tapping out even before it happened the rhythmic tick of the bed frame and the beautiful breathing by which she would slumber. Out in the courtyard she saw that Benjamin Li had stepped out to smoke. She waved to him through the window but the brightness of the sun in the clear skies must have obscured her and he didn’t notice her. She was glad that he didn’t; now she could watch him freely. He pulled a cigarette from his etched silver case and lightly tapped it three times, as he always did. None of the other adults smoked and he was somewhat bashful about it and always went outside even though no one would have objected, especially in this weather. He didn’t seem aware that he smoked with a rakish stance, his coat collar raised, shielding the match flame from the wind with his
hands and narrowing his eyes as he inhaled. When they first started their Latin lessons when he arrived in the summer, he often blew rings for her, though the other day she had suddenly felt it was too childish and didn’t reach out and poke through them, instead letting them dissipate on their own. He’d seemed almost hurt, if only for a moment. His Chinese name was Ping-Wo but everyone called him Benjamin, the name he’d chosen for himself while studying in England, after Disraeli. Sylvie only recently began calling him by his given name, asking him a question with the address during one of their lessons. He’d paused before answering but said nothing and resumed without mention or pause the next times she said his name. She knew it was because he was afraid she might tell her parents what had happened one evening two weeks ago, when he returned from a dinner in Changchung. Of course she would never speak a word of it, for it would ruin everything, even if what had occurred was not his doing but hers and hers alone. No one would believe that, she knew. She didn’t wish the cloud of her telling to loom above him and yet she did nothing to make it dissipate, preferring to act as if nothing real had happened except in the darkened theater of her thoughts. The light there was hushed and orangine and within it she’d been waiting in her cot for the sound of the horse, and when she heard the slow chocking of hooves against the frozen ground she put on her coat over her nightgown and told her parents, who were reading, that she was going to use the outhouse. Instead she ran to the stables that once housed five horses but now held only one, which the Lums used for transportation and sometimes to plow the garden or hitch the wagon to for hauling firewood or coal. When she got there he was unbuckling the saddle and even through the heavy screen of the worked horse’s scent she could smell the smoky whiskey on his breath. He drank sometimes with Tom Harris but he looked different now in the lamplight, his face and neck flushed and his eyes searching and distant as he patted the black mane of the animal. He startled at her presence but before he could speak she rushed up and embraced him, reaching with both arms inside his unbuttoned topcoat. He didn’t move, but didn’t push her away, either; and when her hands slipped down below the line of his belt and onto his flanks he didn’t protest, his body tensing under her hands. She craned her face to try to meet his but he wouldn’t look at her and kept his eyes shut, and not knowing what else to do she gripped more tightly at his thighs, at his backside; she felt like an obtuse child trying to figure a puzzle or lock, fraught with a dizzying conflation of ignorance and desire and self-rage. But suddenly he pressed her close with an almost frightening force and beneath his gabardine trousers something rose up against her hip and seemingly without volition her hand met it, instantly understanding the necessary meter that became its own reason and only ceased with his momentary, almost pained, shuddering. All the while she was peppering his neck with kisses but he turned her away without even looking at her and struggled off, muttering only Good night. Afterward he had avoided her for several days, even canceling two lessons, but then when they resumed the tutorials it was as if nothing had happened and he was exactly himself again, friendly and bright. Benjamin finished his cigarette and went back inside. She was resolved that later on, perhaps even tonight, she would go to him in his quarters and once again press herself against him. That it might bring him some misery as well as pleasure only girded her, made her feel more mature and confident. She was sure that inside she was much older than her years and that Benjamin Li was in fact younger than his, for despite his intelligence and learning he was evidently inexperienced as far as women were concerned (once Sylvie asked him if he had had a girlfriend at university and he blurted out to her, before he could think twice, that he’d never had one). The moment in the stable would be their secret and she was certain that whatever he eventually wished to do to her she would comply, and wholly. Her other self-promise was that she would not depart with the Harrises if her parents stayed behind. She could not allow such a thing to happen. She would simply refuse, as adamantly as her parents would refuse to leave a mission before they believed their work was done. (She was mostly sure it was not about leaving Mr. Li, even if the prospect of never seeing him again made her nauseous with grief.) She was old enough that she understood now how best to confront her parents. She would reveal how like them she truly was. The three of them had lived through dangerous circumstances before, and if none had yet been during an actual war, then it seemed ever more vital that they not be separated now, with its specter so near. Without her presence they’d press on despite any dangers, willfully ignore their own safety to do their work. In Sierra Leone, when she was nine, they had left her at a mission of French nuns to trek with food and medicine to a settlement caught in the middle of a tribal war. Four native men accompanied them. They planned to be away for a week but had been gone almost two when the nuns started praying hourly for their return. Then there were rumors of a massacre in the very hills where they had gone. Sylvie herself was certain that they were dead. When they did finally arrive in the middle of the night it was with only two of the men; the others had been killed protecting them, her parents and the others barely able to escape. Her mother and father woke her with their tearful embraces and had her sleep between them that night, but in the morning she could see in their eyes that although devastated they were as resolved as ever, if not more so, and she knew that they would do the same again one day, risk leaving her an orphan if it meant saving a score of the ever-inexhaustible number. If she thought about it, hadn’t they been preparing her for such a day for as long as she could remember? Hers was an education that was perhaps not intentional but certainly thorough. They had traveled all over the world and rarely ever visited a cultural site like a museum or palace or castle but instead went to hospitals and soup kitchens, to shelters and cemeteries, to every notable memorial or monument to the wronged and righteous dead. Early in her memories they often visited churches and cathedrals, but those visits became more and more infrequent as their humanitarian work increased. Just before coming to China they had been in Italy, and even there, with chapels around every corner, they didn’t bother, except of course for the one they’d planned the journey around, a church that was not a church at all. Though they led prayers and carried the Bible and still believed in God (she thought), they seemed to have lost all zeal for proselytizing, and her father had even begun asking the missionaries to identify him and her mother to the locals not as a minister and his wife but as teachers from the Red Cross, to which they’d officially signed on that summer while in transit through Europe. Just as Reverend Lum did, the missionaries would naturally ask why and the Binets would simply say they wished “to work unimpeded,” and though puzzled, and even insulted, the missionaries would never refuse two such experienced hands. Her mother told her that sometimes the local people would not accept the full help they needed if they thought something was expected of them in return, especially if it went against their traditional beliefs. “No one should have to make a choice,” she said. This was of course good and right. They were always good and right. But was their steady distancing from the Church a sign that they’d found the final circle of their life’s passion, one that seemed to be steadily shrinking as it grew in intensity, with room enough only for two? She’d thought as she grew older that they would begin to include her in their work and all its attendant joys and dangers. Her mother had been talking to her more and more about living in Seattle, and Sylvie had begun picturing the cozy, pretty house they might live in overlooking the lake, but then her mother kept talking about Aunt Lizzie and how excited she would be to see Sylvie again, and she realized that her parents were firming the ground for a different scenario altogether, one they had planned for all along. But in Italy that had seemed far in the future, when she’d go to college back in the States. For now they were inseparable. They’d made a trip to a town in Lombardy called Solferino, whose blood-soaked ground had compelled the bloom of the Red Cross. They had planned to join in the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the infamous battle that had
taken place there, a pilgrimage her parents had been talking of for years. It began as a mostly dull and enervating journey for Sylvie and her parents both: the incessant heat and airlessness of the third-class train cars rolling slowly eastward along the Côte d’Azur after the draining ferry crossing from North Africa to Spain, all of them suffering stomach distress and motion sickness, and when they trekked across the northern lowlands of Italy, the biting gnats and flies. To save the little money they had (money was a worldly curse), they did not break up the trip by disembarking in Nice or Milan to restore themselves in a decent hotel, but rather used the occasional two-hour waits between trains to find a rooming house near the station that would allow them to bathe for a few francs or lire, and for her father to shave. They were gypsies of mercy, her mother would remind her, and didn’t require a proper bed. So they slept on the trains, eating butter sandwiches bought from hawkers (her mother would toss the slick cured ham from the panini to the crows, for the Binets were the rare vegetarians, whenever they could help it), reading the Red Cross founder’s account of the battle and aftermath to each other aloud, to remind them of their purpose. They still packed a Bible among their things but read it less and less, returning instead to their Marx and Zola and old pamphlets of Debs, for already by then they had become missionaries of action, a Socialist streak rising in them, which would ultimately draw them to northern China. When they finally reached Mantova her father hired a car to drive them up to Solferino, but it broke down climbing the hill to the village and they had to go the rest of way on foot in the already burning late-morning sun, her father and the driver each carrying two pieces of luggage, her mother’s skirt as soiled as a charwoman’s as she lost her footing on the dirt road, though of course it did not concern her. For they were here, very close now; they were on the last part of the march. The church was built on a ridge that rose up in the heart of the village. From the albergo they could easily see it standing majestically up at the end of a rising allée of young cypress trees. They checked into their room and to Sylvie’s surprise her father announced that instead of seeing it right away they should close the curtains and lie down for a few hours, that they were here now and should rest and rejuvenate. Of course they all knew that they had missed the commemoration ceremony by a day, having been delayed at length, first in Paris and then at the French-Italian border. But it was a most welcome sleep, even in the lumpy, malodorous bed, which after the hard, cracked-leather seats of the trains seemed to Sylvie a lair of pure goose down. When her parents woke her five hours later it seemed as if she had slumbered for a week, and could have slumbered on for another. But their hunger overwhelmed them. The innkeeper’s wife kindly fixed them an early supper of fried zucchini flowers and a pasta, its creamy egg sauce with peas so rich and satisfying they ate even all the bits of salty pancetta, which none of them mentioned. Afterward the innkeeper opened the one-room “museum of battle” across the road for them, which was mostly just a packed storeroom. It was full of bayonets and muskets and cannonballs and ornate, brightly colored uniforms with tufted headgear and avian epaulets pinned up on the walls, some of them rent and torn and blotted black with dried blood. There were a dozen framed maps and the innkeeper offered them a lengthy disquisition (translated, as he went, by her father) on the various arrays of the Austrian and French forces, a timeline of the early skirmishes and major advances, and the location of the most brutal battles, many of which were fought on and around this very foothill. There were so many dead that they were piled up in carts and buried wherever they could be buried, singly and in groups and in mass numbers. After the fighting, many more died of their wounds and were buried in the same fashion, residents of all the neighboring towns laboring to inter them as quickly as they could to ward off disease. It took weeks. The stench was historic. The rats grew to the size of small dogs. By the end, every able-bodied man and woman and strong-enough child had become, of necessity, a gravedigger. Years later, when the church was erected, the bones from the known mass graves were exhumed and cleaned and arrayed inside, transforming it into a sacred reliquary of the dead. The innkeeper finally led them up the hill to the church. It was nearly six o’clock but still very hot, and although the incline was not exceedingly steep, to Sylvie it seemed a hike up a great mountain. She was lethargic with her fully laden belly, and the radiant heat of the pebbled ground and the battle museum room had sickened her, its smell of iron and moldering linen clinging to her like an iniquitous dust, this promise of doom. Halfway up she felt her mouth water terribly and she vomited at the side of the wide path. Though her mother said they should go back to the albergo, Sylvie told her that they could keep going up. She did not wish to disappoint them. At the top they stood before the church doors, the façade lighted golden by the low sun, its lines plain and almost severe, before stepping inside. The shift from brightness to shade momentarily veiled their vision. Like any church it was hushed and still, but here all breath seemed to pause. And then their sight returned and her mother loudly gasped, gripping her husband’s arm. The innkeeper stood apart from them, saying not a word. Sylvie didn’t understand. She looked up at the white marble altar and plain wooden cross and recognized them to be like any other, but the unusual, lovely filigree of the walls of the chancel drew her forward. And then she heard them, as if she were on the stage peering out at the audience of a macabre opera house, the coally voids of countless eyes speaking to her all at once. Look at us, they said to her, in a single voice. We were never divine. SYLVIE FELT THE PANE of the window buzz; it was the rumble of vehicles approaching the front gate. There was a horn blast and then another and when she looked outside she saw her father and Reverend Lum coming out from the dining room, walking across the courtyard as they buttoned up their overcoats. Tom Harris and Mr. Li followed them. The wives peered out from the dining room window, and her mother, on seeing Sylvie across the courtyard in their quarters, motioned for her to stay inside. Sylvie couldn’t see what they could see, as the sleeping quarters were on the same side as the main gate, and when the men disappeared from her view she couldn’t help but step outside herself. There were two vehicles idling on the other side of the wrought-iron gate, a beat-up black sedan and a covered truck. Reverend Lum was talking to the driver of the sedan, a young soldier in uniform who kept trying to present some papers to him through the bars. Reverend Lum spoke Japanese, and though she couldn’t understand what they were saying it was clear enough that Lum was being stubborn, and even high-handed, shoving the papers back whenever the soldier tried to push them through to him. The soldier was very young and despite his heavy clothing he looked as though he could slip between the black iron bars. It was surprising that he wasn’t getting angry or irritated, which was perhaps an indication of his youth, or else he was cowed because Lum had unbuttoned his coat to show his minister’s garb—a modest number of the Japanese were devout Christians. The soldier soon gave up and went back inside the car with the papers. The car jostled slightly but nothing could be seen as their view through the windshield was obscured by the sun’s reflection. For a moment it even seemed they might back up and drive away. But then an officer emerged from the back of the car with the papers rolled up in his hand, and he gestured with them for Reverend Lum to approach the gate. Sylvie’s father and Harris and Mr. Li stepped forward with him. By this time her mother was beside her but she was no longer tugging at Sylvie to go back inside. The officer was certainly young as well but had the drawn, placid expression of a seasoned soldier. Sylvie recognized him as one of the officers who had come the week before to question the men. The officer ungloved his hand and offered it to Reverend Lum, who refused him. The officer half-chuckled and threw his arms wide, as if to ask what else he could do, and Lum finally relented, slowly extending his hand through the bars. When they shook, the officer leaned in close against the gate and whispered something to Lum, and Sylvie was confused when the reverend began to dip down on one knee opposite the officer, her mother now desperately trying to pull her away.
It sounded as if Lum were humming, huffing now in singsong, and when her father and the others rushed forward to him as he was pinned against the bars he cried out in Mandarin, Oh, please stop! The sound was as clean and fine-grained as a calligraphy brush being snapped in two. Lum collapsed and fell back on the frozen ground, shouting and moaning horribly as he cradled his wrist. The officer had forced it back against the iron bar until it broke. While her father and Li tried to calm him, Tom Harris began shouting at the Japanese officer about the treatment of noncombatants, how he would report this incident to the U.S. consulate, but the officer stood impassively through the epithets, staring at him as blankly as if he were deaf. He then motioned to the gate lock and, when Harris refused, unholstered his pistol in a smooth, swift movement and leveled it at his head. Sylvie’s father cried, “That’s enough!” and rose and quickly unlocked the gate. From the back of the truck four rifle-bearing soldiers jumped out and walked through with the Japanese officer into the mission’s courtyard. The vehicles rolled slowly in behind them, the hard strum of the engines reverberating loudly in the small courtyard. Li and Harris had helped Reverend Lum to his feet and Betty Harris met them and they brought him back inside the dining room. Sylvie was hustled in by her mother right after them, Li and Harris immediately heading back outside. Mrs. Lum was shrieking while Betty Harris attended to her husband, who sat jittering in a chair, his arm lying dead still on the table as if it were independent of the rest of him. It was a terrible ordeal simply to remove his overcoat, and at several points Lum fainted from the pain. Betty Harris tried to bind his wrist while he was out but he roused and screamed and involuntarily swung at her with his good hand. The wrist of the other hand was broken back and played freely with a gruesome range. When he finally looked at it he gagged and then vomited onto the floor. All the while Betty Harris was crying and Sylvie’s mother was teary as well as she tried to calm Mrs. Lum. But Sylvie herself was quiet. She could not quite speak or move. She had seen much suffering in her parents’ travels, but it was suffering caused by deprivation, hungry and sick children or adults hobbled and disfigured by chronic or untreated disease. Once, in Port Loko District, in Sierra Leone, they had come across the hacked body of a homicide victim (murdered, her parents were later told, by a neighboring tribe), and it was the first time she had witnessed intentional cruelty and violence, but never directed against someone in the position of her parents, and all she could do was stand stiffly by the window, unconsciously gripping her own wrist so tightly that later, before sleep, there was still a rawness ringing her skin. Her gaze was now drawn outside by raised voices in the courtyard. The three men were talking to the Japanese officer, their puffs of breath quickly dissipating in the cold air. They were speaking English to the officer, her father insisting that he reconsider. The officer looked as if he understood, but he turned away and her father reached out to him and a soldier stepped between them and shoved him back with the side of his rifle. Her father stumbled, but Li caught and steadied him before he fell. Tom Harris was yelling again, but the officer ignored him completely and shouted orders to the rest of the soldiers, perhaps two dozen of them in all. They began unloading their gear, hopping out of the large truck and passing down rucksacks and crates. When they came back inside the dining room, the men helped hold down Reverend Lum so that Betty Harris could finally wrap his wrist. She had run to get her nurse’s kit and had just drawn from an ampoule of morphine and stuck the needle in his forearm, but he was still in terrible agony and thrashing in distress. Luckily the fracture had not broken through the skin or ruptured a vein, and she was able to bind it tightly for now, though she said they would have to get him to a hospital with an experienced orthopedic surgeon and should leave right away. There was a hospital in Mukden, but he would likely have to travel all the way to Peking for proper treatment. Sylvie’s father’s eyes narrowed and he told them what they already suspected: The Japanese soldiers would be occupying the mission. “For how long?” Mrs. Lum cried. “I don’t know,” he answered. “This is where we’ve always lived! We have nowhere else to go! We can’t just go someplace else like all of you.” “I’m sorry, but he wouldn’t say.” “What are they here for?” Sylvie’s mother asked him. “He refused to say that, too. But I think it must be about those incidents.” There had been a rash of resistance activity since Christmas, a couple of bombings of Japanese ammunition and fuel depots, and then an assassination of an officer in Changchung. “We have to get Reverend Lum to the hospital,” Betty reminded everyone. “There’s risk of a blot clot, or even limb loss. We should be leaving right now.” “We can’t go anywhere,” her husband said angrily. “We’ve all been ordered to remain. We’re prisoners here.” “But why?” Mrs. Lum cried. “We’re only missionaries. My husband needs a doctor!” “I’ll try to speak again to the commanding officer,” Sylvie’s father said to her, clasping Mrs. Lum’s hands. “I promise you we’ll get him to a hospital somehow. But for now we have to remove our personal things from our quarters. We must do this right now. I suggest we go to it immediately and then meet back in here. We should be warm enough for the time being, if we stay together and get the stove going.” The adults hurriedly bundled themselves in their coats and rushed out to gather their things. Sylvie’s mother forbade her to leave the dining room, so she remained alone with Reverend Lum. They had placed chairs in a line so he could lie down and rest. Sylvie sat beside him, holding his good hand to comfort him as her parents had instructed her. His hand was clammy and cold, but at least he was calm now, despite the uneven, makeshift surface of the wooden chairs. Like his wife, he was short and pudgy, and he hardly fit on the narrow width of the seat bottoms. She had to press her leg up against him so he wouldn’t roll off. He was no longer in pain. His eyelids were heavy but he was looking up at her with a gratified expression, as if he were gazing into the face of his own attentive daughter. She wasn’t uncomfortable touching him. The Lums had no children of their own and they were always kind to her, offering her sweets or cakes whenever they were at hand, at least before they started rationing. “I wish you had not had to see that,” he said. “You were watching, yes?” She nodded. “You’re like your parents. Strong and stoic. But you are even more so, I think. Are you sure you’re not a Chinese?” “Maybe I am,” she said, playing along. “Truly? Come closer. Let me see your eyes.” She bent her head down toward him and he examined her as carefully and methodically as a physician might, slowly taking in her brow, her cheekbones, the shape and line of her eyes. “Perhaps it is true. I see something now that I had not noticed before. Something about the inner part of your eyelids. They are not quite Occidental. They remind me of my niece’s, in fact, the way they make you both look a little sleepy.” “My mother says that, too,” Sylvie said. “That I always appear tired.” “But you’re a vigilant girl,” he said. “Always taking everything in. And it is good that you’re not as scared as I am.” She immediately said she was scared, to try to comfort him. “No, you’re not,” he said, faintly smiling, his eyes glassy from the drug. “Don’t worry. I don’t feel bad. I have never been much of a hero, that way. I always knew I was never going to be such a man.” “You stood up to that horrible officer.” “But see what it’s gotten me. And now what it has brought on the rest of you. On the mission. Perhaps he wouldn’t be forcing us out of our quarters had I simply let him in.” But they both knew it likely wouldn’t have made a difference, and she didn’t try to say otherwise. The Japanese were becoming more and more brutal as they drove to make permanent their grip on the region. Manchukuo, as the Japanese called it, was now a reality. There were unverified accounts from peasants who had witnessed how they treated the soldiers of the Communists and the Kuomintang and the civilian resistance, rumors of how they tortured and executed their prisoners and innocent villagers. It was all part of what Tom Harris had been warning about, the shift from the years of minor skirmishes between the Chinese factions themselves and then against the occupiers to a steady tightening of Japanese control, of th
eir total dominion over the region and its resources. Just then the officer who had hurt Reverend Lum pressed up and peered into the window and he instinctively turned away, inadvertently knocking his broken wrist against the seat back. He cried out sharply. The officer made no expression but gazed at Sylvie with a look of mild surprise. The young soldier who was the driver of the car trailed him, shouldering two rucksacks; his face was badly swollen and reddened from a fresh beating, one of his eyes pinched nearly shut. Still, he followed his superior with the dutiful bearing of a porter, only his fur-lined cap slightly askew, and they walked directly to the Binets’ quarters, where her mother and father were trying to get their clothing and few possessions out of the room as quickly as possible. They were going in and out in turn, placing bags and loose shoes and sheets haphazardly out front, directly on the bare ground. The officer didn’t wait for them to finish, simply passing them and stepping in without pause, as if he had been living there always. Her mother glared at him, but her father tugged at her and they filled their arms with as much as they could hold and headed back toward the dining room. Reverend Lum was crying now, curling up around his injury. “What can I do?” she said, her heart galloping, racing. “I don’t know,” he said, wincing, breathing rapidly through his teeth. “Could you give me another dose? Betty left the kit. There it is.” On the dining table was the wooden box that held the ampoules and needles. “I don’t know how to do it. . . .” “You saw Betty, didn’t you?” “Yes.” “Then you can, too.” “I’ll go get Mrs. Harris!” “All the soldiers are out there!” he gasped. “You must stay here, like your mother told you.” She filled a syringe and tried to find a place on his arm where she could jab him as Betty Harris had, swiftly and surely. But his wrist was bandaged up and when she tried to remove his coat for a second time he wheezed sharply, his body stiffening against the pull of her hands. “I’m so sorry, but there’s no place,” she said, his suffering making her heart race. “I don’t know where I should do it.” “Underneath,” he rasped, tapping the bottom of his coat. “Do it underneath.” She had to lift up his coat and loosen his belt. He then turned with great effort, freeing his trousers. She pulled out his shirttail and firmly held his bare hip and with her eyes shut jabbed him forcefully with a staccato strike, just as Betty Harris had done, injecting him high on his soft, almost fleshless rump. A thick dark drop of blood welled up around the point and she blotted it with a patch of linen from the kit, pressing it tightly. His body had tensed with the shot but had just as quickly relented, going completely limp, and his mouth hung open slackly and for a moment she was afraid that she had killed him. She held his hand again, squeezing it to rouse him. Suddenly he exhaled with a visible shudder of his chest and his eyes went dull, and before disappearing again inside himself he whispered, “You did fine, my sweet girl, you did fine.” THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON and night passed without incident. Dawn was now breaking, and the dining room was frigidly cold, the windows opaque with a frozen haze from their breathing. They had all gathered here as Sylvie’s father suggested and although the stove was kept lit most of the night (if very low, for the officer had his soldiers confiscate most of the mission’s coal, leaving them with a barrel the size of a large garden pot, and they had no idea how long it would have to last them), the fire had died out and no one could bear to stir from beneath the thin blankets. There were just the eight of them now, as the Chinese helper ladies and their children had been allowed to leave at dusk, Jane Binet sending the two orphans off with them. They had spread tablecloths on the rough plank floors about the stove (the chairs became uncomfortable after a while and Tom Harris had already noted they could burn them, if it came to it) and slept in a communal half-circle, only Benjamin Li lying slightly off by himself. The soldiers were bivouacked in their former rooms and in the main classroom on the other side of the wall. For much of the night they could hear them good-naturedly arguing and laughing as they played cards, their youthful voices and the burnt-hay smell of their low-grade cigarettes almost making it seem as if the soldiers and they were snowed in together in some rustic isolated dormitory. Outside, gusts of wind were casting sprays of dirt against the window, knee-high funnels of dust skittering about the empty courtyard. Across the way, in Sylvie’s family’s former sleeping quarters, the officer had spent the night, his driver having hung a tarpaulin over the window to screen the light. Reverend Lum slept resting his head in his wife’s lap. Mrs. Lum was the only one who had remained sitting up, her back lodged against the inner wall, so that she could comfort her husband by stroking his forehead, his thinning hair. She was sleeping now with her head bowed far forward. Her husband’s wrist had bothered him all night—it had swelled into a purplish mass, the skin shiny from the extreme distention—and so Betty Harris gave him two separate, full doses of morphine. She was careful in the beginning because he had a weak heart, but the pain was so great that she couldn’t refuse him. Yet they all knew the anesthesia was not going to last. Her kit was meant for emergencies, and she estimated that she had only enough to keep him comfortable for the night and perhaps the next morning. Sylvie’s father, through Mrs. Lum, had informed the Japanese officer of this yesterday evening but he flatly refused to let anyone leave; in fact he had come to announce that he would be interviewing them again, this time the women as well, including Sylvie. Her father furiously insisted that the women be left alone, especially Sylvie, and for some reason the officer had finally assented, saying, “Okay, then,” in perfectly accented American English. Francis and Tom Harris were stunned silent for a moment but then barraged him with protestations; yet he would still not explain why he was again conducting the interrogations, and in the middle of their entreaties and arguments he simply walked out. Tom Harris restarted the coal stove and set a kettle of water on top. Next door they could hear the yawns of soldiers and the tinkle of their mess kits and soon the smells of boiling rice and cigarettes came to them. Sylvie and her mother served tea and some leftover moon cakes for breakfast but no one was much hungry and they were all getting back under their blankets, to wait for the room to warm up, when a large, stoop-shouldered soldier came into the room. He pointed to Tom Harris and barked an order; apparently he was to be the first for reinterrogation. Harris rose slowly enough as to appear defiant. After kissing his wife he left with the soldier, but as the time kept passing Betty grew anxious, sitting against the wall with her knees up to her chin. Sylvie’s mother sat beside Betty and put her arm around the woman’s shoulder, to offer comfort. Sylvie kept looking at Benjamin Li. His jaw was tensing, and when she tried to smile at him he could only grin tightly back at her. He took out his cigarette case and got up to smoke in the small vestibule that led out to the courtyard. Last night Tom Harris had asked him if he thought they might try to conscript him—many Chinese men had been forcibly enlisted by the Japanese, to fight against the Communists and elements of the Kuomintang or work as labor—but he was confident his passport would shield him. They had no cause to interfere with a British subject, though he had indeed heard of instances of foreign Chinese being conscripted. The idea of his being taken away by them was as horrifying to Sylvie as what had happened to Reverend Lum, and she wanted to tell him now that if the Japanese did try to take him she would attempt anything for him, to prevent it. Of course she knew the idea was pure silliness, but he should know her sentiment at least and she was waiting for a moment in which she could go and speak to him. As if he sensed her wish, Benjamin caught her eye and she immediately rose and stepped out into the much colder vestibule. The others, resting quietly in the dim room, hardly seemed to notice. He was already smoking and she asked him if she could have one, too. Bright rays of light shot through gaps between the door and jamb and coolly illuminated the small space. She had not smoked before and he regarded her with his bright eyes but then took out the case. “I should make you ask your parents, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t mind.” He showed her how to tap it, and when he lit it for her she tried to breathe it in as deeply as he did
. She coughed terribly at first, and they both laughed. But she soon got accustomed to it, inhaling ever so gently, letting the smoke come out. “Not bad,” he said. “I’m almost fourteen,” she said. “When did you start?” “I guess around your age.” “You see? And I bet you didn’t have my life.” “No, I didn’t. I grew up in one place. I didn’t see what you’ve seen. And I certainly wasn’t in a situation like this.” “But I’m not scared,” she said. “But you should be,” he told her firmly. “This is a very dangerous situation. Please don’t think anything else.” She nodded, feeling chastised. They smoked for a while in silence, though the more she smoked the sillier she felt, like a girl playing dress-up. She dropped her cigarette and stamped it out. “Listen,” he said kindly, his voice relaxed and low. “I wanted to tell you today, during the meal, that I’ve enjoyed our lessons together. You’re an excellent student, so good in fact that you make me think I’m a master teacher.” “I’m excelling in mathematics, too?” “Well,” he said, chuckling, “you know what I mean. You should seriously consider studying Classics when you enter university.” “Maybe I could study in England,” she said. “You could be my instructor then.” “That would be nice. But I doubt I’ll be able to get back there again.” “Where will you go, I mean, after here?” “I had hoped to settle in Shanghai, though it seems the Japanese aim to make everyone’s plans moot. In any case, you’ll require someone who’s twice the scholar I am, for what you’ll be reading.” “I don’t care,” she said, feeling suddenly that she was losing control, her voice rising. “I don’t care about that at all.” “Well, you should. By the time you get to university you’ll have equaled and likely surpassed me in your translations. I told your parents as much. They’re very proud of you, you know. Not only because of the Latin.” “I’m just a burden to them.” “You shouldn’t ever think that, Sylvie,” he said, taking her by the shoulders. His spectacles glinted with the reflected light. “That’s surely the furthest thing from the truth. If anything, one might say it’s been you who’s been burdened. I wonder if you ever minded being taken all over the world. Always moving around.” “Sometimes I wish we could live in one place,” she said, though that wasn’t quite true. She never minded their missionary existence, as it was the only life she’d ever known. But until now “one place” had not included a person like Benjamin Li. “I wish we could all stay here.” “You know that’s impossible now.” “I know. I just don’t want to be sent off with the Harrises.” “How I wish that were still an option. You probably should have left last week, when the Japanese first came through. I thought it then and should have told your parents. Really, all of you should have left then.” “What about you?” “I’ll be fine,” he said, but then didn’t offer any more of an answer. She asked him for another cigarette and he gave one to her. As she waited for him to light it she shivered and he leaned in close to her, cuffing his arm about her shoulders but very quickly letting go, like any teacher might. “I have something for you,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his parka and gave it to her. It was a small brass medal attached to a striped silk band of blue and white. “What was this for?” Sylvie asked, rubbing its embossed face with her thumb. “Were you a soldier once?” “Oh, no,” he laughed. “It’s an academic medal, from my high school days. Though it was a military academy. For some reason they gave these out—to make our accomplishments seem heroic, I guess. They gave great big medals for athletics and martial exercises, but I’m afraid this one is merely for Greek and Latin. I want you to have it.” “I shouldn’t take it.” “Why not? I wanted to give you something for your Latin prowess, and this is just the thing. It would mean vastly more to me that you had it than my carrying it around. I just found it again this afternoon among my things and I realized I’d eventually just lose it. I’m hoping you’ll keep it safe for me. Then someday you can give it to someone else. Would you do that?” She nodded, feeling as though he were bestowing on her an eternal prize, and she already knew that she could never give it away. Beneath all the layers of her clothing her heart was bursting, and, unbuttoning her coat, she asked him if he would pin it on her. As the pin backing the medal was rusty, he did so with care, looping it through her sweater so as not to injure her, but just as he enclosed it she pressed his hand against her chest and momentarily held it there. He pulled away his hand. He looked slightly mortified but her expression was such that he smiled at her and then gave her a quick, deep embrace, her face buried in the rough wool of his coat. They were quiet then. They shared another cigarette. They stood close together but not touching and smoked without talking but in Sylvie’s mind she was already leaning against him with her temple tucked in his neck, her arm locked in his, two people in the shadow of a long-mourned departure. Maybe they were even lovers. She was sure that if he asked her in the freezing vestibule to remove her hat and coat and sweaters and skirt and every other underlay of her clothes that she would do as instructed, with whatever his fancied flourish or speed, hew to the exact line of his wishes until she was all but bared. The door opened and Tom Harris came in from the courtyard with an armed soldier, the chill rushing in behind them. She and Benjamin let them through and followed and when they entered the classroom Betty Harris jumped up to hug him, shouting, “Oh, Tom! Are you all right?” “I’m fine,” he said, embracing her. “I’m fine.” He turned to Sylvie’s father. “He wants to talk to you now, Francis.” “What does he want?” Mrs. Lum asked. “How was he able to speak to you?” “He speaks English well,” Harris answered. “He asked what I knew about those incidents, especially the killing of the officer.” “What did you tell him?” her father asked. “What could I? I told him I knew nothing about it, that we had just arrived here at the mission then. But he didn’t believe me and threatened me with this goon, but then in the middle of arguing about it he suddenly stopped the interrogation.” The soldier barked something and Francis held up his hand to indicate himself and they went across the courtyard. But he was only interrogated for about ten minutes before he returned, saying the questions were the same as Harris had been asked: When did he arrive in the area? In what capacity? With whose resources? Had he ever served in uniform? Where was he on the dates of the bombings and the night the Japanese officer was assassinated in the restaurant in Changchung? The guard took Benjamin next. As he was being escorted away, Sylvie ran up and hugged him. She took him—and herself—by surprise, but he warmly embraced her in return and assured her that everything would be fine. He didn’t seem self-conscious or concerned that the others were watching. After he left she sat beside her mother, who brushed her hair as she did every morning and night. But this morning Sylvie felt a strange electric tinge at the nape of her neck as the brush tugged at her hair, redolent and oily from having gone unwashed for a week; she sensed her mother was looking at her differently, taking another measure of the line of her features, as if she suddenly possessed someone else’s eyes. Was she imagining what a young man, say, Benjamin Li, would desirously see and linger upon in her daughter? Surely it was an unseemly thought in this circumstance, and yet Sylvie closed her own eyes and nurtured the sensation as it flared down the back of her neck and spine, substituting the brush for a caressing hand, the hand for a cheek, the cheek for the most ravenous mouth, the exhilaration quelled only by the renewed murmurings of Reverend Lum, whose ruined wrist was coming fully awake; the morphine was wearing off. It was the very last dose: from now on he would be in his own body. And yet it was Mrs. Lum who was now crying, very softly and to herself, as if already feeling what her husband would soon have to endure. Sylvie’s mother and Betty Harris had been consoling her but didn’t try to do so now; there was nothing else to say or do. Soon enough his murmurs turned into shuddering, bellowing moans, the terrible sounds seeming to come less from his throat than from the body itself, as if immense sections of earth were shifting deep within a cave. “What the hell is taking so long?” Harris said. He was standing at the window, staring grimly across the courtyard. It had been nearly an hour sinc
e Benjamin had gone. “Sit tight, Tom,” her father said. “He’ll come back soon. And all this will be over.” “You think so? I’m beginning to wonder. What day was that officer killed? Early last week, wasn’t it? Wasn’t Benjamin away then, at least one night?” “I don’t think so,” Francis said. “He was here. He ate supper with us as usual.” “But he was away a good part of the day, in Changchung, right? And he was away those other days last month?” “What if he was?” Jane spoke up. “It’s his business what he does.” Harris checked to see if the sentry outside was within earshot, then said in a lowered voice: “But what if his business is endangering the rest of us? Look at poor Reverend Lum over there. I think we all know Li’s Communist sympathies run pretty deep. Even if he is a British citizen, I’m sure the Japanese didn’t have to do too much snooping around to get wind of him.” “What did you say about him when you were questioned?” Jane asked. “Nothing. But it would be no big news to me if he had some involvement in that business. I wouldn’t blame him. Whether he’s with the Communists or Kuomintang, here’s a young Chinese man with patriotic feeling, and he’s going to be fine with the Japanese taking over his country? I’d think he was with the resistance, wouldn’t you? But I’m telling you, I won’t abide the rest of us being imprisoned here because of him, whatever the reason. He can’t use us as some cover or shield. I’ll say that right to Benjamin, when he returns. I think all of us should.” “He’s not using anyone!” Sylvie stood up and said, the force of her own voice surprising her. But it lifted her, too. She was angry and yet practically on the verge of tears. “He’s just a teacher!” Harris was about to respond but then kept quiet, clearly deciding not to bother arguing with her. He drifted back toward the window, looking out again for any signs. Her father took her by the shoulders to calm her. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You should try to sleep now, okay? Get some rest.” “What’s going to happen to Benjamin?” “I don’t know,” he said, glancing at the Lums. The reverend was in great distress. “We’ll just have to wait. Right now we have to get Reverend Lum out of here, somehow. But nothing’s wrong yet, as far as Benjamin is concerned.” But as the time kept passing it grew ever clearer that something was indeed going wrong. No one was saying anything, and only Harris was watching the covered window. But there was nothing to see or hear except the winds. Soon the skies clouded over and it began to snow, the flurries flying sideways across the courtyard of the mission. The air had grown damp and heavy and crept inside the dining room, the coal stove burning just hotly enough to keep the temperature inside bearable. The only benefit was that the cold seemed to help blunt Reverend Lum’s pain. Tom Harris also made him drink from the gin he always brought along with him on his travels. Lum at first choked on it, as he didn’t normally drink, but in his tortured delirium and desperation to anesthetize himself he was able to sip down a good quarter of the bottle; he was curled up with it as he lay his head in his wife’s lap, his breathing audible but controlled, only crying out every few minutes or so rather than constantly, which was a mercy to them all. It was a mercy to Sylvie especially, for even with each small groan her own wrist ached in empathy. She had tried to sit with him and Mrs. Lum but he was so distressed and disassociated that he hardly appeared to recognize her. Then his cries made her picture Benjamin sitting vulnerably before the Japanese officer; what would he do to Benjamin, given the brutality he’d shown Reverend Lum, if he in fact suspected he was part of some resistance group? Despite the possibility, she was still furious at Tom Harris for ever stating it aloud, as if its very airing were somehow accelerating Benjamin toward a similar fate. She resolved that she would not divulge anything about Benjamin or anyone else, including Harris. Never betray a word. It didn’t matter that she knew nothing to betray. She’d flashed with pride when her mother had challenged Harris, and like her mother and father she would display humility and strength of will and undying fidelity to a righteous cause, no matter the duress. “People are coming out,” Harris said from his position at the window. “It’s a bunch of them.” “Is Benjamin with them?” Francis said. “Yes,” Harris said, his voice suddenly grim. “He’s with them.” Before Sylvie could get to the window the outside door of the vestibule opened and closed and then a rush of freezing air preceded the entrance of armed men. The officer came in after them, followed by several others. They were all bundled for the weather—all but one of them, who wore almost no clothing at all. Clad only in his dull gray undershorts, he was immediately pushed down on his knees before them. It was Benjamin Li. A sharp gasp went up in the room but Sylvie had not cried out, though now it was not from self-control; she simply could not quite breathe. For a long time afterward, for the rest of her years in fact, her grasp of that day would function more as an ill fantasy than a memory, a dark figment she could screen for the purpose of self-torment, letting herself view it over and over until it became a kind of homily, a saying in pictures, until she lost herself within it completely. His hands were tied behind his back. He seemed only half conscious, barely able to stay kneeling as she shivered with cold. He had been badly beaten, his shoulders and neck lashed with welts. Small angry pocks peppered his chest: he’d been burned with cigarettes. His face was gruesomely battered, one eye swollen completely shut. Blood had flowed and congealed in a branching stream from a gash in his head. He could not, or would not, look up. The soldiers, oddly, now leveled their weapons on the missionaries. “This man has confessed to his own crimes,” the officer said to them. His English voice was softer than his Japanese, its tone almost decorous, genteel. “Yet he refuses to speak further about his comrades.” “There’s nothing he can say about us,” Tom Harris told him. “We have nothing to do with what’s happened. We’re innocent.” “I know this,” the officer said. “I am talking about his comrades in the province. He is not a British subject at all but a Kuomintang agent. Yet no matter what we do to him he won’t answer. So I have brought him here.” The officer stepped toward the Lums and went down on one knee. He took Reverend Lum’s broken wrist gingerly in his hand and as Mrs. Lum began to titter in fear he asked Benjamin to tell him what he wished to know. Benjamin shook his head, surprising them all that he could even hear anymore. The officer repeated himself and Benjamin once again refused. The officer then barked angrily in Japanese and through his blood-spittled mouth Benjamin gasped, “No!” and the officer stood up abruptly, still gripping the reverend’s wrist. The shriek from Lum burst like an explosion; for an instant it seemed to rend the room with its flash, and then there was nothing. Sylvie’s father rushed to him after the officer got up but there was nothing to Reverend Lum; his heart had stopped. He was dead. The officer unholstered his revolver and spoke again to Benjamin, asking him to name his compatriots. He was now peering down at Mrs. Lum, who was unable to notice or care; she was wailing and clawing at her own eyes and hair and at her husband’s chest, kissing the back of his lifeless hand. Harris was hollering to Benjamin that he should tell the officer what he knew, but he turned his face away. “Speak now and I will let the rest of these people go,” the officer told him. “It is my promise.” Benjamin bent his head lower, averting his good eye. “Will you not?” “Tell him, you fucking bastard!” Harris cried. “Forgive me,” Benjamin mumbled in Mandarin, unable to look at any of them. The officer said, “Open your eyes. All of you,” and then, without a word of warning, he shot Mrs. Lum in the head. She fell heavily over her husband’s body. Part of her face was missing, the wound a mass of jammy, out-turned flesh. She stared into space as if she were about to say certain words to the rest of them: Help me. In the shock of the moment they were numbed pliant as the soldiers lined them up on their knees. And like others in such circumstances who are all too aware of their fate, they were remarkably docile and quiet in their array; even Harris simply clasped hands with his wife, who was breathing fitfully, her lungs stifled by fear. The Binets had Sylvie lodged tightly between them, her mother whispering to her not to look up, not to move. Sylvie could not have moved anyway. She could not have s
tirred herself a hair. Her father, however, was staring fiercely now at Benjamin. “I can see all of you had fondness for this fellow, from the way you are regarding him now,” the officer said to her father, noticing his attention. “He has surprised you. But I know this man. We met today, but I know him well enough. He is not so special. You should know that he would do the same to me, if I were in his place. He would do the same to any of you.” The officer stepped before her father and motioned for him to rise. “You are a Samaritan, yes? That’s why you are out here in this miserable place, helping miserable people. You even bring your family! And during a period of conflict! It is admirable work, I am sure, but it has also led you to this. Now you can see this man has decided that your lives are not worth those of his coconspirators. Or the sake of his already futile cause.” While he spoke, the officer opened the cylinder of his revolver and let the bullets fall out into his hand. He slipped one back into a chamber and closed the cylinder, rotating it so that the single cartridge would be the next to fire. “This man is very willing to die. In fact he is already dead. He has obviously chosen the same for all of you, and it is why I have not bothered to compel him further by simply beating or torturing him. I fear he will never talk. I am becoming curious, however, about something else.” It was then that he placed his revolver in her father’s hand. The soldiers around them nervously rustled about and locked and bolted their rifles. “Would you shoot him now? Would you kill him, for the deaths he has already caused?” Francis held the gun in his palm as if it were a lump of coal. He had never handled a weapon, though the officer could not have known it. During the First World War he had been a conscientious objector, but rather than go to prison or expatriate he served as a medic. He’d been wounded several times and almost killed by a shell in the Meuse-Argonne in eastern France, in the last months of the war; it was the bloody fall campaign of General Pershing, when he lost 120,000 of his men. Francis never spoke of that time to his wife or daughter but it was why he had trouble sleeping at night, partly from dreams of the wounded he could not reach and then for the searing pains in his back, from still-embedded bits of shrapnel. “You committed these murders,” Francis said, speaking quietly but clearly. “You are determining the moral choices here. Not he.” “Moral choices!” The officer chuckled. “Well said! But to be philosophical about it, I could say this man set those choices in motion. And before him, many others. Yet now the rest of us, soldiers or missionaries or bystanders, we must endure the consequences. We must act out the remainder as best we can, according to our roles.” With his boot the officer shoved Benjamin forward onto his belly. He then fitted the gun into her father’s hand, pressing the stock to his palm, hooking his finger into the trigger. “You have a single round. If you kill him there will be no reason to hold the rest of you. Otherwise we will keep on.” Benjamin craned up his battered face and nodded weakly to Francis; he tried to say something but his words were barely audible. He kept nodding even as he lay prostrate, grinding his temple into the rough floorboards, as if he were offering sanction. “Shoot him!” Harris said. “For goodness’ sakes, Francis! He’s nothing. He’s less than nothing. End this now!” And yet Francis could not quite move. He couldn’t aim or even raise his arm. When he finally held out the pistol for the officer to take back from him, Jane whispered, “Oh, my love.” Her eyes were shimmering. Sylvie was crying as well, suddenly remembering now what her mother always told her, that mercy was the only true deliverance. There was nothing more exaltedly human, more beautiful to behold. And a great searing rush of love seemed at once to cleave her and bind her back up, a love for her father and her mother and then, too, for Benjamin Li, despite what had happened, whom she could see only as her father just did, as the one wanting for mercy most of all. It was finished, even the officer could realize that, there was nothing else to be done but to cease the madness, to acknowledge this horrid interlude was done. But suddenly Harris cried, “Damn it, let me!” and rushed to take the gun himself. The officer shouted and the soldier guarding Harris wheeled and bashed him in the ear with his rifle stock. Harris fell down, his eyes rolling up in his head. He lay dazed, his jaw broken, the hinge on one side seemingly loosed within his skin. Betty screamed and leaped for him toward the soldier and in pure reaction he struck her, too, in the forehead, knocking her completely unconscious. In the way she fell her skirt rode up her legs, revealing the soft jut of her backside where it met her bared thigh. The garter straps were unfastened, her rent stockings fallen down to her knees. Her plain undergarment glowed marble-white. The guard stood over her, transfixed, and was reaching down to touch her when the officer barked at him in Japanese and the guard stepped back. The officer regarded Betty Harris, measuring her exposed body with his gaze only, before cinching down her skirt to cover her. But then he looked long at Jane Binet, and to Sylvie, and before everything would end, it was then that the madness commenced once again.
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