“You stood up to that horrible officer.”
“But see what it’s gotten me. And now what it has brought on the rest of you. On the mission. Perhaps he wouldn’t be forcing us out of our quarters had I simply let him in.”
But they both knew it likely wouldn’t have made a difference, and she didn’t try to say otherwise. The Japanese were becoming more and more brutal as they drove to make permanent their grip on the region. Manchukuo, as the Japanese called it, was now a reality. There were unverified accounts from peasants who had witnessed how they treated the soldiers of the Communists and the Kuomintang and the civilian resistance, rumors of how they tortured and executed their prisoners and innocent villagers. It was all part of what Tom Harris had been warning about, the shift from the years of minor skirmishes between the Chinese factions themselves and then against the occupiers to a steady tightening of Japanese control, of their total dominion over the region and its resources.
Just then the officer who had hurt Reverend Lum pressed up and peered into the window and he instinctively turned away, inadvertently knocking his broken wrist against the seat back. He cried out sharply. The officer made no expression but gazed at Sylvie with a look of mild surprise. The young soldier who was the driver of the car trailed him, shouldering two rucksacks; his face was badly swollen and reddened from a fresh beating, one of his eyes pinched nearly shut. Still, he followed his superior with the dutiful bearing of a porter, only his fur-lined cap slightly askew, and they walked directly to the Binets’ quarters, where her mother and father were trying to get their clothing and few possessions out of the room as quickly as possible. They were going in and out in turn, placing bags and loose shoes and sheets haphazardly out front, directly on the bare ground. The officer didn’t wait for them to finish, simply passing them and stepping in without pause, as if he had been living there always. Her mother glared at him, but her father tugged at her and they filled their arms with as much as they could hold and headed back toward the dining room.
Reverend Lum was crying now, curling up around his injury.
“What can I do?” she said, her heart galloping, racing.
“I don’t know,” he said, wincing, breathing rapidly through his teeth. “Could you give me another dose? Betty left the kit. There it is.”
On the dining table was the wooden box that held the ampoules and needles.
“I don’t know how to do it…”
“You saw Betty, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then you can, too.”
“I’ll go get Mrs. Harris!”
“All the soldiers are out there!” he gasped. “You must stay here, like your mother told you.”
She filled a syringe and tried to find a place on his arm where she could jab him as Betty Harris had, swiftly and surely. But his wrist was bandaged up and when she tried to remove his coat for a second time he wheezed sharply, his body stiffening against the pull of her hands.
“I’m so sorry, but there’s no place,” she said, his suffering making her heart race. “I don’t know where I should do it.”
“Underneath,” he rasped, tapping the bottom of his coat. “Do it underneath.”
She had to lift up his coat and loosen his belt. He then turned with great effort, freeing his trousers. She pulled out his shirttail and firmly held his bare hip and with her eyes shut jabbed him forcefully with a staccato strike, just as Betty Harris had done, injecting him high on his soft, almost fleshless rump. A thick dark drop of blood welled up around the point and she blotted it with a patch of linen from the kit, pressing it tightly. His body had tensed with the shot but had just as quickly relented, going completely limp, and his mouth hung open slackly and for a moment she was afraid that she had killed him. She held his hand again, squeezing it to rouse him. Suddenly he exhaled with a visible shudder of his chest and his eyes went dull, and before disappearing again inside himself he whispered, “You did fine, my sweet girl, you did fine.”
THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON and night passed without incident. Dawn was now breaking, and the dining room was frigidly cold, the windows opaque with a frozen haze from their breathing. They had all gathered here as Sylvie’s father suggested and although the stove was kept lit most of the night (if very low, for the officer had his soldiers confiscate most of the mission’s coal, leaving them with a barrel the size of a large garden pot, and they had no idea how long it would have to last them), the fire had died out and no one could bear to stir from beneath the thin blankets. There were just the eight of them now, as the Chinese helper ladies and their children had been allowed to leave at dusk, Jane Binet sending the two orphans off with them. They had spread tablecloths on the rough plank floors about the stove (the chairs became uncomfortable after a while and Tom Harris had already noted they could burn them, if it came to it) and slept in a communal half-circle, only Benjamin Li lying slightly off by himself. The soldiers were bivouacked in their former rooms and in the main classroom on the other side of the wall. For much of the night they could hear them good-naturedly arguing and laughing as they played cards, their youthful voices and the burnt-hay smell of their low-grade cigarettes almost making it seem as if the soldiers and they were snowed in together in some rustic isolated dormitory. Outside, gusts of wind were casting sprays of dirt against the window, knee-high funnels of dust skittering about the empty courtyard. Across the way, in Sylvie’s family’s former sleeping quarters, the officer had spent the night, his driver having hung a tarpaulin over the window to screen the light.
Reverend Lum slept resting his head in his wife’s lap. Mrs. Lum was the only one who had remained sitting up, her back lodged against the inner wall, so that she could comfort her husband by stroking his forehead, his thinning hair. She was sleeping now with her head bowed far forward. Her husband’s wrist had bothered him all night-it had swelled into a purplish mass, the skin shiny from the extreme distention-and so Betty Harris gave him two separate, full doses of morphine. She was careful in the beginning because he had a weak heart, but the pain was so great that she couldn’t refuse him. Yet they all knew the anesthesia was not going to last. Her kit was meant for emergencies, and she estimated that she had only enough to keep him comfortable for the night and perhaps the next morning. Sylvie’s father, through Mrs. Lum, had informed the Japanese officer of this yesterday evening but he flatly refused to let anyone leave; in fact he had come to announce that he would be interviewing them again, this time the women as well, including Sylvie. Her father furiously insisted that the women be left alone, especially Sylvie, and for some reason the officer had finally assented, saying, “Okay, then,” in perfectly accented American English. Francis and Tom Harris were stunned silent for a moment but then barraged him with protestations; yet he would still not explain why he was again conducting the interrogations, and in the middle of their entreaties and arguments he simply walked out.
Tom Harris restarted the coal stove and set a kettle of water on top. Next door they could hear the yawns of soldiers and the tinkle of their mess kits and soon the smells of boiling rice and cigarettes came to them. Sylvie and her mother served tea and some leftover moon cakes for breakfast but no one was much hungry and they were all getting back under their blankets, to wait for the room to warm up, when a large, stoop-shouldered soldier came into the room. He pointed to Tom Harris and barked an order; apparently he was to be the first for reinterrogation. Harris rose slowly enough as to appear defiant. After kissing his wife he left with the soldier, but as the time kept passing Betty grew anxious, sitting against the wall with her knees up to her chin. Sylvie’s mother sat beside Betty and put her arm around the woman’s shoulder, to offer comfort.