Chang-rae Lee

by The Surrendered (v5)

  EIGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH DAY, for a few hours or so, Sylvie could believe she was herself. She would arise just before Ames and fill the coffeepot with grounds and then get fresh water from the pump outside and balance it on the single-burner field stove while she set out the tin mugs on the table. Soon enough they would eat breakfast with the rest of the orphanage, but, as was their habit back home, they’d have coffee before doing anything else. Sitting in their nightclothes, the brief, wordless slip of time as they gradually came awake was as unburdened as any moments of their marriage. It was as though each understood the other was as blank of feelings or thoughts as himself, or herself, not yet angling on a purpose for the day, or on any previous emotions or feeling between them, comfortable in the simple animal appreciation of nearness, if not togetherness. It was almost as if they were back in Seattle, in their small, upright house in Laurelhurst, time graced by a merciful repose. But soon enough the spell would be broken by Ames getting up and dressing himself for the day, the final punctuation the heavy scrape of his shoes against the floorboards as he pulled them out from beneath the bed, and Sylvie would feel the first tiny tears under her skin, as though the flesh were being loosed from beneath, pulled down toward a core that she knew had no bottom. By ten o’clock, an unmooring seemed imminent. She would be teaching an English conversation class to the younger children, asking questions of each one in turn: “Would you like another glass of milk?” or “Which is your favorite kind of candy?” or “What is the date of your birth?” And while the child gamely answered, she would be certain that the rest of them could somehow sense the growing rime of hollowness developing inside her, even if none showed anything but the usual enthusiasms; the disparity only made her more self-conscious, and, just as she thought her mother might counsel her, she regained a hold and girded herself and matched their brightness and zeal, and this carried her through to the midday meal, where she would make the motions of eating. Although she had from the first day found the soups and vegetables the aunties prepared to be flavorful and often delicious, especially considering the meager budget they had, her body no longer craved the food. Now that she was on the high slow horse again she consumed just enough to sustain her until the next meal, spark enough of her blood so that she wouldn’t grow dizzy or faint. She was trying to convince herself as much as everyone else. She had begun to feel again that she no longer had an understanding of hunger, a bowl full of barley rice as significant to her as if it were mounded with pebbles. Her habit was as casual as was possible, and had been so since the beginning. It was why she could almost believe it was not a habit, and never would be. Like someone else who loved eating chocolate a little too much and from time to time decided chocolate didn’t exist and never had, blotting it from her visceral memory with a thoroughness that was itself a serial compulsion. She would go for many months—once even a year and a half, in the period following her swift marriage to Ames and their first attempts to have a child—and not feel the smallest prickle for that cool, sweet burning, that glimmering river, if anything marveling at the fullness of her distance from it, her perfect liberty. And yet what would spur a change was not some unhappy memory or incident or a physical need but rather a sudden, panicked thought that this free state could not possibly go on. In this sense her lapses were predicated upon what could only be seen as an evaporation of faith. Her thoughts would branch and multiply, and it was inevitable then that certain remembrances would take over, or maybe it would be her feelings of shame and guilt before Ames. He had little idea of the woman he had married, and treated her only with adoring, deep respect for her abilities and her mind; he had encouraged her plans to attend medical school, even after she became a mother, and they’d talked about her restarting his pediatric practice as he continued with his ministries. He couldn’t know how she had passed her adolescence after she returned from China, how in her second year of college she befriended a fellow volunteer named Jim while working at a mission soup kitchen. He was a middle-aged man, in his early forties. She had pursued him, always initiating their conversations and even asking him to get a coffee at the diner around the corner. He worked as the night watchman at a textile factory, and after her aunt went to sleep she crept out of their bungalow, holding her shoes in one hand and her purse in the other, trying not to breathe, and ran down the hill to catch the night bus that would take her toward downtown. Jim was gentle and soft-spoken and obviously bighearted, but there was something ruined about him and it was this that she always saw in his face when he opened the alley door, his expression pleased but with the shattered eyes of a man who could see perhaps only the drenching sadness in beauty. He never talked about his life or anything further removed than a few weeks in the past, and they would sit together in a tiny office, drinking the root beer he’d brought for them. Jim had a youthful face with a white scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his ear, the top of which was gone. They talked about books and sang songs and eventually he apologized for being the worst kind of depraved, awful man who would have a schoolgirl as a drinking friend, and it was then that she would lightly kiss him, on the mouth, to quell his conscience. He kissed her back with his dry hard lips and she had to hold him tight, for otherwise he’d push away, and then they wrapped their arms around each other while lying down on the wood floor on which he had spread a thick bolt of surplus velvet curtain, worthless because of the malformed pattern of its brocade. He’d lined the walls, too, with other, mismatched, defectively manufactured curtains and bedspreads, and the effect beneath the dim electric light was of a carnival funhouse owner’s idea of a bordello. But to Sylvie it was simply Jim’s attempt to make her feel comfortable. He suffered from a severely bad back and the floor gave him some relief from the constant pain, but it was the sips he took from a dark brown bottle that finally seemed to transport him. His voice grew husky and the suddenly huge discs of his eyes took on the same shade of the bottle glass and he clung to her tightly, telling her again how ashamed he felt that she should be wasting time with such a sorry man. Of course he knew something had to be wrong with her, too, by virtue of her presence. “You’re not sorry at all,” she told him, as always. “Please don’t say that.” “Then what am I? Why do you keep coming here? You could be going out with any boy in your school.” “I’m not interested in any of them,” she said, which was true. The boys were nice enough and certainly interested in her but she found them all too keen and bristling, like frantically spawning fish. But she didn’t answer Jim, either, for although she would have liked to say that she was here because he was thoroughly kind (which he was, without any effort, to her and to everyone he met), it was in fact because he was also frail, if not somehow wrecked, that she was drawn to him. He was overtly slung with the weight of time, but to her he wasn’t a pitiable sight, rather as if he had been stitched with one of the marred but still beautiful bolts, this forlorn cape, and could no longer take it off. What he sipped along with his root beer was a tincture of opium, which he had been given many years earlier for dysentery while hospitalized in France at the end of the Great War. He always had some now and although she kept asking him if she could try it he refused, saying it was dangerous medicine, but one night when he left her for five minutes to make his rounds she dug in his coat pocket and took a small swallow, and then another. The thick, sweetly fragrant syrup instantly coated her entire insides, the sensation the exact opposite, it would turn out, of the precipitous detachment she would later suffer, hotly fusing her to herself in a manner that made her feel whole again, even if she were no more substantial than ether and light. Years later, married to Ames Tanner, she would seek out that feeling again, though it would come in the form of a vial and needle, procured in the service alley behind the city hospital by a person met, again, through a mission, though this one a client. When Jim returned he could tell something was different and immediately smelled the tincture on her breath but before he could get cross she kissed him again. He balked at first but then melted into he
r as he had not allowed himself previously, the sudden force of his arms momentarily alarming her but then just as swiftly firing her desire to make love to him. She was not saving herself for any reason or person—for what propriety, what realm, would she be doing so?—and as such there was nothing stopping her from being with him now, in this oddly, lovingly enrobed little room. She tugged at his belt to unbuckle it but he twisted away and when she clutched at it again he held on to her hands. “Please turn off the light,” he said. She rose and flicked it off and the room went completely black. She didn’t know if it was the perfect dark or his medicine but she floated back to him on a silken wing and when they began kissing again she felt a wonderful new ache flooding her limbs, filling her torso. She slipped off her underpants. Then he was busy kissing her and caressing her hair and she found his belt again and undid his trousers. Her long skirt had ridden up and he lay atop her but there was nothing but his bare thighs against hers and she kept waiting for the pushing that didn’t come. She reached down to touch him and when she found him he was hardly there, not tiny but empty, more skin than blood, and beneath it there was almost nothing there at all, just a node seamed by a hardened, smooth line of a scar in the flesh. “I’m no good,” he whispered to her in the dark. He was crying. “I’ve been useless since the war.” “You’re not useless,” she said to him. She guided his wet face to her chest, the way she’d once seen her mother do to her father as she peered at them through a hole in the rice paper screen. She guided him lower still, feeling the cooling trail of his tears on her belly, her hip, the crook of her thigh, but he stopped before he went any lower. “It’s all right,” she said. “You can keep going, if you want.” “I don’t know what to do.” “Yes you do. Just kiss me.” “How?” “However you want to.” “Just kiss you?” “Yes.” And when he did she was surprised by them both, their shared ignorance in the act an object lesson in how experience only mattered if one let it, his mapping of her with the gentlest, humblest fervor innocently building her up before smashing her in the darkness, exquisitely obliterating her again. The pattern of the evening was reprised each time she visited him, once a week throughout that winter, Sylvie staying with him until five, when the first buses began running; she’d ride back up through the fogged-in hills to her aunt’s house with her mind similarly sodden and obscured but her body still bounding and alive with his hands and his lips and then soon enough the taste of the tincture, craving it not in her own mouth but in her bones. Each time she’d take a little more, Jim warning her to be careful and that it was not meant for a healthy young woman, but she knew she wasn’t a tenth as sturdy as she appeared to Jim or to her aunt or to everyone else who saw her as a beautiful, somewhat aloof, scholarly girl who had so quickly righted herself after such a lamentable family tragedy, whose good long years spanned out freely before her. But the recent past was a well-rutted road, still the only way she knew to get back and forth to the present, and as she went to her classes at the college, attended church with Aunt Lizzie, a part of her couldn’t help but wish to run to Jim and the pitch-black room at the factory, drink in the potion and transmogrify, be anything but her mortal self. It was soon after she was introduced to Ames Tanner, by a deacon of the church whose family was a longtime acquaintance of her parents, that she decided to stop seeing Jim. Ames hadn’t even asked her out yet that but she knew, he would imminently and that if he was truly as he appeared, she would be with him always. She loved seeing Jim and loved his gentleness and modesty but it was really a love of cloistering and smallness and her own physical pleasure, all of which she already understood were signs of her ugly narcissism, her insoluble weakness. Ames Tanner, by contrast, would compel her into the wider world: he was freshly ordained, and a pediatrician as well, and he had great plans for his new church, not only for its congregation but for the charitable works he would urge it to pursue in the wider community. He had the same incandescence in his eyes that her parents had, that cool flame that seemed an uncanny reincarnation of them both, and he had asked her right away, as they sat for tea and cookies in the warm basement of the church, if she would come to his congregation and recount her parents’ dedication to improving the circumstances of the poor and powerless. Like everyone else, he knew generally what had happened to them, but he was one of the few who didn’t shy away from mentioning them. So it was with foreknowledge that it would be the last time that she went to Jim. But once there, she couldn’t bear to say anything; he had brought her a bouquet of dried flowers that night, in addition to the root beer and of course the half-pint bottle, its glass the color of dark caramels. He’d tacked different fabrics on the walls. For the first time in many weeks she declined to take her sips (he’d had to buy extra bottles from his friend at the hospital), and as he slowly twisted the cap back on, his expression was that of a prisoner being led down into an isolation hole, regarding her as the man might check the sky. She thanked him for the flowers and hugged and kissed him and he hugged her back stiffly. “Should I turn off the light?” she asked him. “Okay.” But in the customary dark she had some trouble finding him. “Over here,” he said, from the far corner. When they touched it was a minor collision, the crown of her head against his chin. He was sitting up rather than lying on the curtain he had spread out, and before she could apologize he took her shoulders and pinned her hard enough that she could feel the points of her shoulder blades grating against the floor. He took off her clothes. He wasn’t kissing her this time but using his hands, searching her out as if he had only a few scant moments to get to know her and pinching her nape, her nipples, rooting his thumbnail into her belly button until she thought it might have begun to bleed. And yet she willed herself not to tense under his hands; she laid herself open. She wanted to show him that it was all fine, that it was all welcome, that no matter what his compulsion or need she would try to take pleasure now, genuinely and not in spite, for she knew he could only feel any sexual pleasure through her. It was a surprise, then, when he tugged down his trousers and got between her legs, began driving into her, though there was nothing but a rubbing and the spurs of his own narrow hips knocking into her own; he kept on and she urged him, gripping his buttocks to pull him to the right rhythm, and when he matched it with his own fingers in her mouth and in her rear, simultaneously reaching as if he were going to clasp her in the middle, she lost herself as she never had before. She waited to leave until he thought she was asleep and had gone on his rounds. It was cowardly of her, but he hadn’t said a word to her after their lovemaking and she thought it would be a mercy for them both if she simply disappeared. But it was still an hour before the buses began running, and she walked all the way home in the steady, chilly March rain, wholly accepting the misery of being soaked to her bones. It took her an hour to climb the long road up the hill. The next two days she was fever-wracked and shaky, her aunt feeding her soda crackers and beef tea in bed, wondering aloud how her skirt and sweater could have gotten so wet, then telling her in the next breath that Ames Tanner had dropped by while she was asleep, leaving a note card that he’d inscribed in the cleanest, upright hand: “Will you give me the honor of learning more about your experiences? I am eager for your wisdom! Faithfully yours, A.T.” Ames took her to lunch the following week, and to the movie theater and dinner the week after, not making any small talk but rather asking about her family’s travels in Africa and China, about the conditions they encountered and how her parents set up the ministries and schooling at each of the missions, about the other kinds of projects they instituted, in mercantilism and agriculture and disease control. He wanted to know how they had gone about learning the local languages, or if it was difficult to work with other missionaries, particularly the Catholic ones. He didn’t ask about the circumstances of her parents’ deaths, nor in fact speak of them as if they were even gone. She was glad to talk about them this way, for he made her feel as if they were not just alive but still out in the world somewhere, still setting up missions, still aiding and organizing and teac
hing, and she found herself recounting their activities of those last years in more detail than she had offered anyone else, including her aunt. He’d have her celebrate them, shout their praises if she would, make them gleam again by their brightest light. He did ask, however, as he drove her back to her aunt’s house in his Packard sedan (his family was wealthy, being prominent in the timber business), whether she’d had serious boyfriends in her life, or any present suitors, and she immediately said no, though flashing on Jim. Ames nodded, still quite serious but obviously pleased. She hadn’t volunteered again at that particular soup kitchen, but she couldn’t help but think about Jim sitting in the dim factory office, the various curtains still tacked on the walls, nursing his bottle of the tincture. At certain moments late at night she craved the taste of it terribly, and longed for him as well, and she found she could master both impulses by kneading herself raw with the back of her thumb until the sensation was only, solely, painful; she would make her body quell its own urges with an even sharper reality. For she knew she must not hide out any longer. She must climb out from every cave of her making. Ames’s presence in her life and his interest in her parents was in fact a blessing; he would bring her forth, even if her memories of those last hours might be fully rekindled. And soon enough, one evening, the past engulfed her all at once. She was preparing for just her fifth dinner out with Ames when she cut herself shaving, the blood running freely from her calf. She was in the tub and instead of stepping out and blotting the wound with a tissue she propped her foot against the tiled wall and let it bleed, accelerating the flow with another quick gash, letting the blood stream past her knee to her thigh, the streaked pale limb fallen asleep and coldly tingling but still existing outside her sensation. It looked as if a wave of blood had washed over her leg but it was merely a surface current, and she was never in the remotest danger; the sight froze her, however, and although she heard the doorbell (her aunt was out of town) she didn’t stir, seeing only the bodies of Reverend Lum and his wife lying uncovered in the courtyard of the mission, a splotch of dark red that had spread over Mrs. Lum’s face the lone mark on the ground, light snow descending upon them. It was odd, for it was never an image of her parents, but rather of the Lums, which would always spark her mind. She could hear Ames shouting up at the opened window of the bathroom, and when she didn’t answer right away he shouted again. He called her name and when she weakly responded with his he must have heard something wrong in her voice, for he pushed through the unlocked front door and bounded up the narrow stairs of the modest row house. He anxiously called and banged on the bathroom door, and when she didn’t answer he came right in, his eyes instantly drawn wide in horror at the dyed hue of the water, the smears of blood on the tiles, on the rim of the tub; her leg had slipped down below the surface. He instinctively grabbed her wrists and pulled them out of the water, but when he saw they were untouched he shook them in panic and cried: “Where is it? What have you done to yourself ?” She was listless from the still-hot water and feeling she could open her throat and disappear within it when Ames reached in and lifted her out in one swift movement. She glanced toward her feet and he quickly found the two tiny slits above her heel; he dressed them with bandages from the medicine cabinet. She was dripping and now cold, but when he knelt and covered her with a towel she bared herself and blotted his drenched suit jacket and trousers. He tried averting his eyes and kept asking what was wrong, but she felt him aroused underneath and hardly knowing what she was doing undid his belt and put him in her mouth. He said no but his face was bound up and he shuddered. In just a few minutes he was ready again and they lay down right there and it was then that blood came from her once more, the ruined towel beneath them like a shock of color in new snow. The next day Ames proposed to her, something that he was planning anyway but which was certainly accelerated by what occurred, as well as by their assumption that she might be pregnant, which she was. They were married within the month. Yet she didn’t stay pregnant, nor could she remain so the next time, or the next. It was not his problem; she would become pregnant at least five times that they knew of, her body simply unable to nurture to term. The last time would be several years before they went to Korea, a three-month-old fetus with nothing obviously wrong with him, a devastating fact, though ultimately not as disturbing to him as was Sylvie’s demeanor afterward. She wasn’t inconsolable as she was the other times, even as those pregnancies were much shorter-lived, lasting barely a month, or two. This time after recovering from the extraction of the lifeless child Sylvie had simply showered and dressed and with hardly any despondency folded her hospital gown and placed it on the bed and silently waited for the nurse to come with the chair to wheel her out of the hospital. At their small home in Laurelhurst she left the nursery they had set up intact, which heartened Ames for a while, until he realized that she was slowly removing items from it, a book or picture, a stuffed toy or rattle, one piece at a time, until eventually the room was bare, save for the furniture and the crib. He blamed her, blamed her for the dire force her frailty and sexual abandon could have on him, and he more than she grew to be haunted by the idea that they had tainted themselves with the debased, confused desire of that first coupling. Out of anger or spite or desperation he began asking her about what had finally happened to her parents in Manchuria, as if he were sure that it was where the source of all her troubles might be found. She refused to answer him. But was he right? Were they so easily derived? She didn’t think so, and yet who could dismiss the insistent push of those memories? For it was too easy to recall how she and her parents had watched through the classroom window as the soldiers dragged the Lums’ bodies outside, her parents not shielding her from the sight. They were still in shock from the easy brutality of their deaths, Sylvie’s father perhaps most of all. After the Lums were left there, he had sat back down on the blanket with his head in his hands, her mother hotly whispering something to him in the roughhewn Provençal dialect they used when they wished to obscure their talk. Sylvie could have gleaned the gist of their conversation if she had concentrated, as she had countless others over the years; she had never let on that she could understand them at all, not intending at first to deceive but rather, like any child, simply fascinated by the sound of her parents’ unrestrained engagements, whether it was joking or arguing or lovemaking. But Sylvie wasn’t listening now, or even trying to listen; she could not look away from the Lums. Her eyes were alive and working but as might a bright screen playing in a suddenly emptied theater. She had fled to somewhere inside herself, and was still running, and yet the horrid sight was strange in that they didn’t appear so terribly perturbed, in and of themselves, the Lums lying there almost peacefully in the gathering snowfall, the reverend’s hand accidentally come to drape upon his wife’s forehead, as though he were checking her temperature. Her mother gasped, “You knew about him, Francis? My God!” with a fury Sylvie had never heard from her before. But they were done talking and her father stood up and took Sylvie in his arms and embraced her so tightly and suddenly that all the air in her chest was squeezed out, her vision near blurring. He smelled sharp with soured, dried sweat but she breathed him in as deeply as she could, burying her face in his thick brown hair. He was not a large man and she was nearly as tall as he but she felt like a little girl again in his grasp and without knowing it was coming she found herself breaking down all at once, sobbing and pressing her mouth against the smooth, curved bone behind his ear. She wasn’t afraid for her own life so much as stricken by the fear that she might not see one or both of them ever again. Her mother caressed her back. It was only the three of them in the classroom now. The officer and soldiers had taken away Benjamin Li, to interrogate him one last time. The Harrises, too, had been removed, forced back to consciousness with smelling salts and half-carried to their quarters in the corner of the compound, a sentry posted in front of their door. Through all their travels they were a constant trio, Sylvie schooled by them or by someone else (like Benjamin Li), the three of
them slumbering together and eating together and often enough bathing together because of the usually meager supply of hot water—she would always picture their nakedness much more easily than her own—but now it seemed that they could never be close enough, that if it were possible she’d slip inside one of them and fill herself with their tears and their blood and become an indistinguishable plenitude. And despite everything that had transpired, did she continue to wish the same in regard to Benjamin Li? Was it still possible that all of them could get past this wretched day? Her parents, she could see, might not have any feeling left for him, but they had shown him a lasting grace and Sylvie would lead them back to accepting him and convince them to plead for his life. For her father had been ever so right: Benjamin was not the cause of the situation; he had intended no one harm; he was nearly as much a victim of the cruelty as the Lums, perhaps equally so for the mountain of guilt he would forever have to shoulder. He was a gentle and lovely man and a dedicated teacher, and that he was a stalwart freedom fighter who could refuse under such horrid duress to divulge his secrets only painted him more valorously in her mind. He was indeed a person of principle and it was why he would never take advantage of her desires, why he’d given his school medal to her instead and exhorted her only nobly, why she must wait patiently, until she knew herself to be less blatant and childish, before she could ever hope to attain a lasting, worthy love. “Your mother and I need to talk to you now, sweetie,” her father said to her, cupping her cheek. “We may not have much time, so please just listen.” “Why? What’s going to happen? We’re going to stay together, aren’t we?” “We will try our best,” her father said, trying to smile at her now. “We’ll stay together as long as possible. To the last minute. But you must promise us that if you can get away safely, you’ll go. Whether it’s with us or with the Harrises or by yourself. You must not hesitate. You must not think twice. You cannot be concerned with anyone else. Including us.” “What are you talking about?” she cried righteously, her face hot with a flush of angry fear. “How can you expect that of me, when all you’ve taught me was to put first the welfare of others? How could I possibly leave?” “But you must, if you have the chance. Please. Your mother and I would never forgive ourselves . . .” Sylvie shook her head, pushing away from him. “I’m sorry, Father, but after all the dangerous times over the years, you can’t ask this of me now. You just can’t! It’s too late.” “It’s not too late,” her mother broke in, with her full-throated voice. She squeezed Sylvie’s hands with a fierce grip. “You’re going to get out of this, with or without us. Do you hear me, darling?” She nodded. Her mother was twice as steadfast as she could ever hope to be and a certain gaze from her was enough to both diminish and exalt, often simultaneously. Her father might be the beacon, the light conveying them forth, but even now, amid even this, her mother was the great clarifier, the person who could always make her know her exact place, who could always show her what she must do, and for this reason hers was the picture Sylvie would behold brightest in her mind, this serene and beautiful figure, alabaster for flesh, marble-dust for blood. “Say you do.” “I do.” “Say it again.” “I hear you, I do!” she said miserably, new tears wetting her cheeks. “Here, we’re going to give you these things,” her mother said. “Just to hold for now.” She took off her husband’s wedding band and put it on Sylvie’s finger, where it hung loose. She removed her own and fit it on top, the second ring a good, tight fit. “We love you more than anything,” her mother murmured, kissing her brow, her cheeks, her messy nose and eyes. “I know,” Sylvie answered, if not quite believing it was true. They loved her, yes, but the whole world was woeful, all the places they had been were so bereft, that no one could blame them for having to care for it equally or perhaps even more than for their own child. She should be more wise and serious and realize again the necessary scale of their devotions. How capacious their hearts truly needed to be. For only such would lead them now as it had before, as long as they were steadfast, the force of benevolence lighting the way. And wasn’t there some hope? The Harrises were injured, yes, but had walked away mostly under their own power; she and her parents were untouched; and while Benjamin was in grave danger, he must finally see now that there was no other way, he had witnessed the vile consequences and would relent, tell the officer whatever he wished to know. The sudden report of footfalls made her mother grip Sylvie’s side with an urgent, pincering force. “Careful now,” she whispered in her ear. “Stay quiet.” Before Sylvie could answer the officer entered. Three soldiers followed, pushing in Benjamin Li before them. He was still shackled. As far as she could tell he hadn’t been harmed further, and was even cleaned up, his swollen face swabbed clear of dried blood. She tried to catch his eye but he kept his head bowed, as though he were still deeply ashamed. “It’s all right, Benjamin,” she cried out, not able to help herself, “we’ll be fine now!” At that moment the officer’s lightless eyes met hers. “Still this man refuses to answer my questions,” the officer said in the plainest, uninflected voice. “So it has led us to this.” He spoke a few words gruffly in Japanese and there was an odd pause and then without warning one of the soldiers grabbed her mother by the hair, wrenching her up on her feet. A low, feral sound came from her father and he hurled himself at the soldier’s face with both hands. Her mother screamed, “Francis!” but it was too late; another soldier lunged at him from behind with his rifle, a dull glint of metal flashing in the lamplight. Her father groaned and fell. Sylvie scrambled to him, not sure where he was injured; then she felt a warmth emanating from his side. Her hand came away damp; he’d been stabbed just below the ribs. In the lamplight the blood stained her fingers dark, almost black. He was grimacing terribly, unable to speak, and he pulled her down to him. His face frightened her and she resisted but then she realized what he was doing, what he desperately did not want her to see. The two soldiers were pushing her mother about, pulling off and tearing at her clothes as though they were flaying her, piece by piece, and Sylvie could hear her mother gasping, the rents of the fabric, the taunts of the soldiers. The officer had forced up Benjamin Li’s bowed head by the chin, to make him watch. “Don’t!” Benjamin said, his eyes closed. “Don’t do this.” “Speak!” the officer cursed at him. “Speak now!” But Benjamin shook his head, hoarsely crying out as though it were his own mother or sister before him. By now they had stripped Jane Binet naked. The officer repeated his demand but Benjamin wouldn’t comply, tightly shutting his eyes. He was shuddering and weeping. He had crumpled to his knees, scraping his face against the rough, splintered boards of the floor. On the officer’s command one of the soldiers dragged Benjamin to Jane as she was held down by the others and shoved him on her, making him kiss her on the mouth and the neck and the belly and down below. Then they forced them to copulate. They kicked him when he balked, but when that did no good they began kicking her instead, until he finally assented. His grunts were low and fitful; there were no longer any sounds from her. The soldiers were deriding him and laughing and when he couldn’t seem to finish the large soldier with the thick neck hurled Benjamin aside and threw himself on top of her. Benjamin ended up a few feet away, suffering a few more kicks in the groin and chest before lying in a curled heap, weakly coughing up blood. When the big soldier was done the other two began bickering for their turn but the officer silenced them with a sharp order. It was only at that point that Sylvie was able to glance up. She herself was breathless, shaking, her own throat as if throttled by a pair of invisible hands. Her mother gathered her ruined clothes and began dressing. She did so without looking at anyone. She simply threaded her arm through the torn sleeve of her blouse and then crawled back over to Sylvie and Francis, immediately checking her husband for his wounds. He tried to embrace her but he had no strength. She rolled her coat and gently laid it beneath his head. “I’m so sorry, darling,” her father said, hardly audible for how weak he was. Tears were streaming down his face. The color seemed drained from his cheeks, his lips. “Will you f
orgive me? Please?” “Stay quiet now,” she said, wiping his eyes. “Don’t try to move. You’re bleeding too much.” “I don’t care,” he said. “I only care about you and Sylvie.” “We know that,” she said. “Just stay still.” “I love you so much, Jane,” he said. “We love you.” “Please say you do,” he said. “Please.” “I love you.” He was going to answer but his breathing suddenly became labored, his torso heaving hard upward, once, twice, and then down. Her mother was crying. Sylvie kissed his temple and there was warmth. He was still alive. She kissed him again and it was the same. It was over now. She felt a hand on her neck, slightly rough, as if her mother had instantly, terribly aged, and for an instant she leaned her cheek into it before she horridly realized it was the hand of the young officer, his short, narrow fingers chapped and scarred. “Get up,” he said to her. But it was Jane Binet who rose instead, her expression strangely icy and dispassionate, only her hands leaping out in fury at his holstered revolver. For a moment she had it in her grasp before he wrested it from her, striking her in the ear with its grip. But she did not pause and came at him and he shot her twice in the chest. After she fell to the floor he shot her again. The officer pulled Sylvie from her father’s side and dragged her toward Benjamin Li. She was too frightened to resist, or even move; her mind was bounding but in place, disconnected from her limbs. Everything came to her through the small end of a spyglass. When he shoved up her skirt she heard her own meager voice, blunted as if through a cold horn, calling out for her mother, for her father, even as she knew neither would answer. The officer was now shouting, though not at her; he had Benjamin by the throat. He was shouting thunderously at him, lividly, if almost wearily, as if he himself were finally sick of the torment. “You are a worthless human being! Do you hear me? Less than that! Not even a rat! A piece of dung! You are nothing! You will make no difference! You will not be remembered!” He thrust him toward Sylvie, making him eye her nakedness. “You wish to see what will happen to her now? You wish to, yes? Is that it?” Benjamin was shaking his head, crying something over and over to himself, his eyes now tightly shut. “Tell me who they are!” Benjamin curled up in a ball, as though he were trying to make himself disappear. “Ahhh!” the officer cried. He kicked him in frustration. Then he gave an order to the soldiers and two of them held Benjamin down so that he couldn’t move. The officer kneeled over him and took a straight razor from his back pocket. He unsheathed it and worked quickly. Benjamin was groaning, guffawing; then he began to scream. When the officer stepped back Benjamin’s eyes were bloodied; they looked as if they had been gouged out. But the officer roughly wiped them with his sleeve and it was clear what he had done: he had cut away only the eyelids. The eyes themselves were intact, the orbs monstrous, for being so exposed. His was a fleshy skull. They retied his hands so that they were secured behind his back. “Watch now, you son of a bitch.” The officer sharply gave an order and one of the soldiers stood over Sylvie and began unbuckling his belt. It was then that Benjamin began screaming again. He was screaming bloody murder, all the names of his compatriots, screaming them in a litany, most loudly his own.