The Surrendered (23 page)

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 the 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.