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.