“I have to go. Will you do this for me?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You’ll please just look in on her. Knock on her door, if you like.”
For the rest of the day Hector rehearsed in his mind how he would do so. But for the first few days of Tanner’s absence Hector simply avoided her. There was little reason for anything else, as Sylvie was regularly teaching her classes and taking meals with the children under the newly patched roof of the mess hall. She was even playing tag in the yard after the Korean minister from Seoul departed in the early afternoon. The minister, Reverend Kim, was a rail-thin, bookish young man who arrived each morning by nine and led prayers and Bible study and then ate with a ravenous vigor at lunch, even as he was nose deep in his volumes, taking second and third helpings of rice and vegetables and downing his soup in long slurps that echoed in the hall like the sound of a great, sucking drain. The children slyly mocked him by doing the same, and even Sylvie did as well-the man was almost completely oblivious-and whether it was because her husband was gone or she was left alone to play with the children she seemed mostly at ease again, lighthearted and girlish.
The one obvious difference was that June was no longer at Sylvie’s side as she went about the camp; Sylvie walked by herself or with a phalanx of various others, favoring no one, and perhaps it was now only June who wouldn’t take her turn. Hector didn’t know if Sylvie had spoken to her. He and everyone else was waiting for June to do something, push someone down and start a fight. But she simply kept to the periphery, marking Sylvie from a near distance, watching and listening like some secondary conscience; and if the girl was broken inside or in a rage, one couldn’t tell from the way she wordlessly completed her chores and attended classes. She conducted herself like a more typical orphan, a child vigilant and laconic and careful, as if her temper had completely disappeared.
In truth it was Hector who most clearly felt the burden of the period. Or at least showed the strains. The reverend’s absence was oppressing him. He had not counted the days at first but now he was counting them down. Soon Tanner would be back; from Pusan he’d phoned the ministries’ administrative office in Seoul, the young Reverend Kim’s home base, and the fellow announced word of it before the service, adding at the end of his prayer an entreaty for Tanner’s safe travels and return, which drew a melodious, resonant amen from the children and the aunties. He thought he heard Sylvie singing it. All this made him moody and preoccupied, at night even more sleepless than usual despite the fact that he was working constantly, his body driving hard to try to exhaust itself, self-bury. He ranged far to collect firewood, affixed yet another stretch of roof tiles. But he would run out of nails, or his ax dulled and too often bounced off the wood, and the night would descend quickly and he’d have to walk with his hands stretched out before him to make his way back to the darkened compound. There was always more sewer trenching to be done, so he returned to that with fury, but this, too, was beginning to thwart him; a spate of rain came and he was becoming slowly sickened by the smell of damp earth, the half-alive taste it left in his mouth, in his gut, the feeling that he was not burrowing into it but that it was instead coursing through his body as if he were an earthworm, veining him with seams of slow-rotting grit.
On the way back from the digging he stopped when he saw a glow from the rear of the cottage. By tomorrow Tanner would have likely returned. The night sky was clear and the clouds of his breath lingered in the crisp air. He stood at the edge of the small back plot, in full view of the house. He was still running hot from the work and wearing only a light shirt and dungarees and the sensation of difference against the chill was a kind of welcomed fever. The bedroom window was curtained with a thin lace fabric and he could clearly see she was reading by candlelight. He must have counted a dozen turns of page, deciding each time she lifted her hand to await yet another before he would let his shovel drop and go to her. When at last she put down the book he was resolved, but she rose abruptly and left the frame of the window, as if she realized she was being watched. He froze and braced himself for her to come out and confront him. But now she simply reappeared in the window. She had already taken off her sweater. Without hurry she slipped off her blouse and underclothes, exposing the long smooth shell of her back, the spur of her hip. She shivered visibly but did not clutch herself. Then she pulled on the frock of the nightgown, pushing up her arms, shaking loose the folds gathered at her waist. She extinguished the candle flame. He searched the window, the panes black and glintless, and although he had just glimpsed her in full it was the slow, measured covering of her nakedness that caught his breath. He turned to go, but then he heard the sound of a creaking. And in the starlight he saw the reflected sway of her gown as her long pale hand pulled open the door.
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.