The Surrendered Page 16

  It was strange, but sometimes he felt he might like to be adopted away, too. Welcomed back but by an unfamiliar set of people and in a circumstance in which he would have no responsibilities except for some strenuous job or chores. His mother was gone now, too, from a massive stroke during the last month of the war, and though he still had his sisters, he didn’t want to return to Ilion or any place like it and he even surprised himself with the ridiculous fantasy of being the Tanners’ handyman, lodged in a shack he imagined would be damp and cool for being set on a property on a bay of Seattle, waiting for Sylvie Tanner to come bring him a slice of cake, a mug of tea.

  The kitchen aunties had opinions about everything and held forth in their hardscrabble voices, and while cleaning out the garbage cans he heard their baseless conjectures about why the Tanners were childless (“She’s too thin to become pregnant”; “She must not want his children”; “They lost the one they had”), and why she gave special attention to June (“She needs the most mothering”; “The girl reminds her of herself”), but none of these remarks quite described the cloister Sylvie was willing to make for them, despite Reverend Tanner’s obvious displeasure and the growing puzzlement of the other children. Did the marks on her heels explain it any better? Was any addiction or compulsion (like his own jags of drinking and fighting) really worth looking into, for explanation or cause? Those pin-dots-and all his own perfectly healed scars-went forward and back, and they were now their own reason and consequence.

  As the weather cooled with the onset of autumn, the schedule of Sylvie’s day began to change; she would teach the English class and take the midday meal with the children, but instead of communing with them in work or play the rest of the afternoon she began to retire to the cottage, at first excusing herself in the late afternoon but then going off sooner and sooner until finally she would slip off right after lunch, sometimes for the rest of the day. Whenever she went inside, June would go with her and leave only just before eight o’clock, when Hector shut down the compound’s generator and the entire orphanage went dark. There was talk that Mrs. Tanner was ill-even her usual paleness seemed diluted, as if water had been added to her blood-but she didn’t complain of anything or travel to any hospital, and no doctors visited her. Of course Hector saw her differently, noticing only how she would keep scratching at her arms, her throat, how she would momentarily disappear within herself while the children or aunties were talking to her, coming back only when they raised their voices. He assumed she had a stash of vials hidden somewhere, but what would she do when she ran out? He could get her more, for sure, from the base in town, or some bar in the red-light district. Was that where she really went, when she took her weekly trips into town? Maybe she had already depleted her supply; for a while now everyone else had believed she was suffering from what appeared an intransigent head cold, her eyes rheumy, puffed; she sniffled and blew her nose constantly. She hardly seemed to eat at meals, always just sipping from the roasted barley tea the aunties made for her daily. She didn’t look thinner so much as hollowed out, in certain bright morning light her skin seeming practically diaphanous, the veins of her throat run through with such a deep, dyed blue that Hector kept ready to press his hand against her neck, to warm her in case she fainted. She was paying no more or less attention to him, paying him the usual small kindnesses of a sandwich or a roll of Spam kimbap delivered by June to where he was working, or leaving a pint of bourbon or scotch by his door if she’d been into Seoul for supplies. The regular attention led him to believe she was thinking of him daily but it was still only June who came around, Sylvie no longer stopping by even to watch him work the trench or the roofs. Soon he was alternating between irritation for this surely pitiable person and a feeling as if he were completely parched inside, crackled with a web of fault lines that ran from his insides outward and showed to everyone who looked at him. He felt somehow wounded and ashamed.

  One morning, before first light, he set himself to the trench work, carving out a few meters of earth, thigh deep and twice as wide as he. He welcomed the toil; the only time he felt remotely righteous was as an instrument. In the afternoon he ascended yet another badly leaking roof and pried up the broken tiles and peeled away the rotted layers beneath, reframing the section with fresh planks and sheathing, sometimes working right through dinner. By the end of the day he could hardly lift his arms to strip himself bare behind his living quarters, where he washed his mucked clothes beneath the shower he had rigged. He knelt and scrubbed them with the harsh oil soap, kneading each against a piece of flat stone like the aunties did. After draping them on the bushes he turned to himself and worked the large soap block severely against his arms and flanks in order to get up any suds in the hard well water. Early one evening Sylvie came around the back corner and before he could say anything or cover himself she simply left the supper tray on the ground and was gone. The next day he didn’t see her at all but on the following one she appeared with June at her side where he was digging and offered him a drink of cool plum tea, the two of them departing immediately after he handed over the empty glass, only June looking back at him, twice, three times, as if making certain he would keep his distance.

  After that, during the nights, in his cot, he couldn’t help but keep thinking of her. At first he pictured her chastely, as he might recall a striking woman he’d seen on the street. Was it the beauty of her particular age? She was the age he most often remembered his mother being, still youthful and beautiful enough to draw catcalls from laborers, servicemen. But then his thoughts would turn hazardous. He imagined her beside him in darkest silhouette, only the burnt flax of her hair visible, its brush alighting upon his body in scattered, sweeping sheets, a blowing rain. Or she came to him clothed only by a wide emerald ribbon, and he had to walk around her, undoing her until she was bare. But sometimes June would appear and encroach upon his reveries, as if he had no control of her whatsoever, haunting the shadows behind Sylvie. He screened the image of them bathing together, if innocently, patiently taking turns sitting in the tub in the middle room of the cottage, pouring water on each other’s back and shoulders, pleased in the thought that no one would disturb them, all this ironic in light of Reverend Tanner’s changed attitude toward him. He had surely grown more tolerant of Hector over the past month, was sometimes even friendly when he stopped to ask about the progress of the work projects, as if he, too, understood that this smaller, tighter universe which had coalesced amid them was self-sufficient and complete.

  Reverend Tanner went about his duties with his typical intensity and rigor but there seemed to Hector a different scale to his prayers and his ministrations, an urgency and heat to his teaching and sermons that in another preacher might hardly be noticed but in Tanner seemed the spur of a revitalized faith. He had happiness, as well as zeal. He had lost weight with his traveling and the change in diet, his long face grown gaunt, his dark minister’s suit jacket hanging off his shoulders in mournful gathers such that he looked like a gangly youth donning his father’s clothes. But despite the awkwardness of his appearance he had become more approachable as the weeks passed, his manner when he was addressing the children, at least informally, softened by a newly lingering gaze: when they lined up in the mornings they were no longer to him just rows of moral projects and obligations, but each a hardened kernel of memory, this mystery of survival. If anything, his view was more akin to Hector’s than to his wife’s, that in recognizing the awful turn of their experiences they should now (with his aid) move past them, and quickly, by whatever means might work best: education, the love of God, lessons in discipline, self-reliance. Of course Hector knew his own ways to trounce the past. Sylvie had come to see them differently still. Perhaps she would not have wanted to, would have rather subscribed to the modality of forgetting, but during the brief interviews she was conducting with every child-she was writing an adoption file on each, with biographical information and a description of character (“She is a delightful and bubbly girl with a talent
for singing”)-one of the older girls suddenly broke down and as Sylvie comforted her she began, unbidden, to tell what had happened to her family during the war. Word must have gone around, as many of the others did the same, even some of the toughest boys unwinding upon her the circumstances that had brought them to this place.

  But over the last few weeks, with Sylvie gradually receding, the rest of the children began to warm to Tanner, and it wasn’t unusual for Hector to see him heading up through the now gold and rust-flecked bushes of the hills with a long file of children behind him, or leading a round of vigorous calisthenics in the play yard.

  “Let’s raise up our knees,” Tanner said brightly to them, all of them running in place. “Higher, boys and girls, higher. Let’s reach up to the sky.” He did this wearing woolen trousers and a dress shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up, his height and thinness and pointy elbows and knees making him appear distinctly marionette-like, the silliness of which he seemed quite aware. Soon he made fun of himself by pretending to hit his chin with each high pump of his knees, his head knocking back in time. The children began to mimic him, some of them falling down laughing when he switched to double time, then triple, before he finally broke down himself, lying flat on his back on the reddish ground. The children all did the same and one of the aunties ambled out from the kitchen with scoldings for all of them, complaining that they were making unnecessary laundry.

  Tanner promised they would all lend extra help with the week’s wash. Though he was no less serious than before in his sermons and lessons, he was clearly enjoying his relations with the children and new place in their regard, and sometimes he even cut short a lesson to let them play the games they’d learned from Sylvie. But the instance in which Hector saw the starkest change was when Tanner and Sylvie prepared the children to have new photographs taken for their adoption files. Five children-all young ones, between the ages of three and five-had been sent to America a few weeks earlier to be placed with families in Washington and Oregon.

  Tanner wanted new photographs; the existing ones in the files were lugubrious, stern portraits, joyless and hard, and didn’t show off a single one of the children well. These new shots would be developed and printed in Seoul the next day and air-mailed to the church offices in Seattle, where prospective families would soon view them and make their choices. Hector couldn’t quite tell if the children, at least those who were old enough, were truly eager to be adopted, even when they professed as much and talked excitedly of the rumors of living in a big house where the dinner table was laden with meats and fruits and cakes. For it was obvious that they were fearful, too, and hiding it well, for nothing could be more terrifying than being passed over time and again and eventually being let back out into the ruined streets of Seoul, where there was little to earn in any legitimate trade.

  The new photographs would get them all placed. A chair was set up against the external wall of Hector’s quarters, which was sided with rough-hewn clapboards that were in the worst condition in the compound-Tanner insisted that it serve as the background of the portrait, to present the children as lively and happy but in the grip of privation-and all the children lined up to sit before the old Leica Sylvie had set up on a tripod. One could tell the children were accustomed to the serious portraits they’d seen or sat for with their families, stern pictures of stone-faced adults and children in their best suits and dresses-like the one he’d taken from the boy soldier he was supposed to execute-and Sylvie was having a hard time getting them to relax their mouths, their shoulders. They had only two rolls of film, enough for a single shot of each child and maybe a half-dozen redos. She kept asking the first few to smile but mostly what would come was a strained, stunted grin that made them appear cowed and wary, and so Tanner told her to wait before taking the next picture.

  “For what?”

  “You’ll know,” he said to Sylvie, who looked at him quizzically. “Just be ready.”

  He caught the eye of the next child in the chair. Tanner grunted strangely, then hunched his shoulders and began hopping from one foot to the other. The boy started giggling and Tanner stepped behind Sylvie and the camera and then made ape-lips and began scratching himself and sniffing at Sylvie’s hair, which was when she clicked the shutter. He did this with each child, whooping and beating his chest until it no longer worked, moving on to being an elephant, a rooster, a pig, a sheep, only giving up when it came to June, who was the last to sit for her photograph (after the first three children to go were re-shot). She wouldn’t budge for him, not even offering the slightest smile, any break of the lips, and it struck Hector as odd that Sylvie didn’t try to convince her more heartily to look happy and friendly for her file. She ended up taking the image of June that any of them who cared to remember her might someday see in his mind, that iron gaze that was hers alone.

  Afterward, Sylvie again shrank from view for a few days, staying inside when she wasn’t teaching her class. Her mood had seemed to darken after the taking of the photographs and she wasn’t coming around with June to wherever Hector might be working, the aunties saying she had a bad cold. But he knew it was because she was helping herself too much to the needle, or else not enough. He’d seen it plenty back in the GI towns, former “old soldiers” barely older than he, gaunt and pale from their long weeks inside the dens, their expressions vacant, shattered; there was no worse loneliness than having to take mercy on oneself.

  He felt a new loneliness, too, digging alone in the valley, and he found himself looking up every few minutes from his work, hoping to see her perched on the flattish rock on top of the hill, whether June was by her side or not. But she had ceased to show. A late-summer storm rolled in from the south and made the digging near impossible, its heavy rains undermining his footing; he kept slipping whenever he swung the pickax. So instead he decided to paint the would-be chapel, which he’d been putting off to make progress on the trenching. First he wiped down and dusted every surface, running an oiled rag over the walls and floors (the painted benches were being used for now in the main classroom). He hadn’t planned on painting the exposed beams of the roof or its underside, but he saw how dark it would be if he didn’t and so he set a stepladder atop a table to reach the rafters. He nearly fell a couple of times, once even hanging on to a crossbeam as the ladder beneath him toppled over, letting himself drop to the floor with a great thud. As they couldn’t play outside, the children silently watched him work, pointing out to him the spots he had missed or coated too thinly. Neither Tanner nor Sylvie came around. When he completed the roof and walls the children had to step back into their rooms so he could paint the floor. It was dark outside and even darker within and he lighted an oil lamp, dragging it as he slid back and forth on his knees. The fumes from the paint dizzied him but he felt he was being resurrected, too, with each breath, raised up above the floor as he lost himself in the work, and he thought he could see colors in the broad wash of gray, subtle shimmers of gold and green that made him think of her hair, her eyes. He painted the floor to a line up to the dormitory doors (so the children could get in and out without trampling the fresh paint) and then brushed another coat on everything the next day. The thunderstorms had blown through and the sky was clear and bright but when he stepped back to appraise the room he was disheartened to see how shadowy and grim it still was, even with the front door wide open. It was far worse than what’d he said to Sylvie, the room looking not just like a concrete box but a weird, improvised dungeon, this slapped-together catacomb with painted rafters and a black potbelly stove. A tomb for the living. He’d already sent word to Sylvie via Min that she should look at it tomorrow, and he wished now that he had never begun the project; he entertained the thought of tearing it all down. But Min returned, saying that Mrs. Tanner was still sick and that he hadn’t spoken to her, and while standing there unevenly with his good foot pointed at the rear wall of the room the boy muttered chahng-mun, the word for window.

  Hector couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of
it himself. For he had windows, a half-dozen of them in fact, none of them very big (they stood, propped up, in the storage shed, leftovers from various bygone outbuildings), and he mentally constructed the supporting studs and headers for the largest of them in the center of the wall. But when he actually inspected them he found them to be even smaller than he remembered, the biggest the size of a large square tray, some of the others narrow and elongated. He spread them out on the floor of the storeroom to choose which he’d install. There was plenty of lumber for the supports and framing and soon enough he was combining them to try to shape a single large window. But he couldn’t quite make it work and realized he ought to abandon any hope of balance or symmetry. Nothing else in the orphanage was so graced, and he had no feel for such things anyway, and so he simply settled on what he thought might please her. Several days later when she reappeared and was feeling better he caught up to her while she was gardening with the children and informed her the work was done. Tanner was teaching, and although Hector could easily have shown him the chapel he wanted Sylvie to see it first. He was afraid of what she might think (he couldn’t care less what Tanner’s opinion might be), and he had even waited until a wide bank of clouds had drifted past and there was nothing else on the horizon, to make certain there would be maximum light in the room. She rose from weeding on her bare knees, now smudged with soil, and her hair was stuck to her temples, her neck mottled and flushed, and she seemed as lovely to him as a bride awaking on the first dewy morning of marriage, her skin alive with vital, pumping color. Suddenly a bolt of panic bored into his chest, at the realization of the dread flavor of his project, its absurd aspirations, its dire, smashing homeliness. How ridiculous it was, he was. He wanted to crawl away now but the children working with her were staring at him and he could hardly call forth enough breath to murmur that he didn’t mean to interrupt her, that she ought not stop her gardening.