Out in the courtyard she saw that Benjamin Li had stepped out to smoke. She waved to him through the window but the brightness of the sun in the clear skies must have obscured her and he didn’t notice her. She was glad that he didn’t; now she could watch him freely. He pulled a cigarette from his etched silver case and lightly tapped it three times, as he always did. None of the other adults smoked and he was somewhat bashful about it and always went outside even though no one would have objected, especially in this weather. He didn’t seem aware that he smoked with a rakish stance, his coat collar raised, shielding the match flame from the wind with his hands and narrowing his eyes as he inhaled. When they first started their Latin lessons when he arrived in the summer, he often blew rings for her, though the other day she had suddenly felt it was too childish and didn’t reach out and poke through them, instead letting them dissipate on their own. He’d seemed almost hurt, if only for a moment. His Chinese name was Ping-Wo but everyone called him Benjamin, the name he’d chosen for himself while studying in England, after Disraeli. Sylvie only recently began calling him by his given name, asking him a question with the address during one of their lessons. He’d paused before answering but said nothing and resumed without mention or pause the next times she said his name.
She knew it was because he was afraid she might tell her parents what had happened one evening two weeks ago, when he returned from a dinner in Changchung. Of course she would never speak a word of it, for it would ruin everything, even if what had occurred was not his doing but hers and hers alone. No one would believe that, she knew. She didn’t wish the cloud of her telling to loom above him and yet she did nothing to make it dissipate, preferring to act as if nothing real had happened except in the darkened theater of her thoughts. The light there was hushed and orangine and within it she’d been waiting in her cot for the sound of the horse, and when she heard the slow chocking of hooves against the frozen ground she put on her coat over her nightgown and told her parents, who were reading, that she was going to use the outhouse. Instead she ran to the stables that once housed five horses but now held only one, which the Lums used for transportation and sometimes to plow the garden or hitch the wagon to for hauling firewood or coal.
When she got there he was unbuckling the saddle and even through the heavy screen of the worked horse’s scent she could smell the smoky whiskey on his breath. He drank sometimes with Tom Harris but he looked different now in the lamplight, his face and neck flushed and his eyes searching and distant as he patted the black mane of the animal. He startled at her presence but before he could speak she rushed up and embraced him, reaching with both arms inside his unbuttoned topcoat. He didn’t move, but didn’t push her away, either; and when her hands slipped down below the line of his belt and onto his flanks he didn’t protest, his body tensing under her hands. She craned her face to try to meet his but he wouldn’t look at her and kept his eyes shut, and not knowing what else to do she gripped more tightly at his thighs, at his backside; she felt like an obtuse child trying to figure a puzzle or lock, fraught with a dizzying conflation of ignorance and desire and self-rage. But suddenly he pressed her close with an almost frightening force and beneath his gabardine trousers something rose up against her hip and seemingly without volition her hand met it, instantly understanding the necessary meter that became its own reason and only ceased with his momentary, almost pained, shuddering. All the while she was peppering his neck with kisses but he turned her away without even looking at her and struggled off, muttering only
Good night
. Afterward he had avoided her for several days, even canceling two lessons, but then when they resumed the tutorials it was as if nothing had happened and he was exactly himself again, friendly and bright.
Benjamin finished his cigarette and went back inside. She was resolved that later on, perhaps even tonight, she would go to him in his quarters and once again press herself against him. That it might bring him some misery as well as pleasure only girded her, made her feel more mature and confident. She was sure that inside she was much older than her years and that Benjamin Li was in fact younger than his, for despite his intelligence and learning he was evidently inexperienced as far as women were concerned (once Sylvie asked him if he had had a girlfriend at university and he blurted out to her, before he could think twice, that he’d
never
had one). The moment in the stable would be their secret and she was certain that whatever he eventually wished to do to her she would comply, and wholly.
Her other self-promise was that she would not depart with the Harrises if her parents stayed behind. She could not allow such a thing to happen. She would simply refuse, as adamantly as her parents would refuse to leave a mission before they believed their work was done. (She was mostly sure it was not about leaving Mr. Li, even if the prospect of never seeing him again made her nauseous with grief.) She was old enough that she understood now how best to confront her parents. She would reveal how like them she truly was. The three of them had lived through dangerous circumstances before, and if none had yet been during an actual war, then it seemed ever more vital that they not be separated now, with its specter so near. Without her presence they’d press on despite any dangers, willfully ignore their own safety to do their work. In Sierra Leone, when she was nine, they had left her at a mission of French nuns to trek with food and medicine to a settlement caught in the middle of a tribal war. Four native men accompanied them. They planned to be away for a week but had been gone almost two when the nuns started praying hourly for their return. Then there were rumors of a massacre in the very hills where they had gone. Sylvie herself was certain that they were dead. When they did finally arrive in the middle of the night it was with only two of the men; the others had been killed protecting them, her parents and the others barely able to escape. Her mother and father woke her with their tearful embraces and had her sleep between them that night, but in the morning she could see in their eyes that although devastated they were as resolved as ever, if not more so, and she knew that they would do the same again one day, risk leaving her an orphan if it meant saving a score of the ever-inexhaustible number.
If she thought about it, hadn’t they been preparing her for such a day for as long as she could remember? Hers was an education that was perhaps not intentional but certainly thorough. They had traveled all over the world and rarely ever visited a cultural site like a museum or palace or castle but instead went to hospitals and soup kitchens, to shelters and cemeteries, to every notable memorial or monument to the wronged and righteous dead. Early in her memories they often visited churches and cathedrals, but those visits became more and more infrequent as their humanitarian work increased. Just before coming to China they had been in Italy, and even there, with chapels around every corner, they didn’t bother, except of course for the one they’d planned the journey around, a church that was not a church at all. Though they led prayers and carried the Bible and still believed in God (she thought), they seemed to have lost all zeal for proselytizing, and her father had even begun asking the missionaries to identify him and her mother to the locals not as a minister and his wife but as teachers from the Red Cross, to which they’d officially signed on that summer while in transit through Europe. Just as Reverend Lum did, the missionaries would naturally ask why and the Binets would simply say they wished “to work unimpeded,” and though puzzled, and even insulted, the missionaries would never refuse two such experienced hands.
Her mother told her that sometimes the local people would not accept the full help they needed if they thought something was expected of them in return, especially if it went against their traditional beliefs. “No one should have to make a choice,” she said. This was of course good and right. They were always good and right. But was their steady distancing from the Church a sign that they’d found the final circle of their life’s passion, one that seemed to be steadily shrinking as it grew in intensity, with room enough only for two? She’d thought as she grew older that they would begin to include her in their work and all its attendant joys and dangers. Her mother had been talking to her more and more about living in Seattle, and Sylvie had begun picturing the cozy, pretty house they might live in overlooking the lake, but then her mother kept talking about Aunt Lizzie and how excited she would be to see Sylvie again, and she realized that her parents were firming the ground for a different scenario altogether, one they had planned for all along.
But in Italy that had seemed far in the future, when she’d go to college back in the States. For now they were inseparable. They’d made a trip to a town in Lombardy called Solferino, whose blood-soaked ground had compelled the bloom of the Red Cross. They had planned to join in the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the infamous battle that had taken place there, a pilgrimage her parents had been talking of for years.
It began as a mostly dull and enervating journey for Sylvie and her parents both: the incessant heat and airlessness of the third-class train cars rolling slowly eastward along the Côte d’Azur after the draining ferry crossing from North Africa to Spain, all of them suffering stomach distress and motion sickness, and when they trekked across the northern lowlands of Italy, the biting gnats and flies. To save the little money they had (money was a worldly curse), they did not break up the trip by disembarking in Nice or Milan to restore themselves in a decent hotel, but rather used the occasional two-hour waits between trains to find a rooming house near the station that would allow them to bathe for a few francs or lire, and for her father to shave. They were gypsies of mercy, her mother would remind her, and didn’t require a proper bed.
So they slept on the trains, eating butter sandwiches bought from hawkers (her mother would toss the slick cured ham from the
panini
to the crows, for the Binets were the rare vegetarians, whenever they could help it), reading the Red Cross founder’s account of the battle and aftermath to each other aloud, to remind them of their purpose. They still packed a Bible among their things but read it less and less, returning instead to their Marx and Zola and old pamphlets of Debs, for already by then they had become missionaries of action, a Socialist streak rising in them, which would ultimately draw them to northern China. When they finally reached Mantova her father hired a car to drive them up to Solferino, but it broke down climbing the hill to the village and they had to go the rest of way on foot in the already burning late-morning sun, her father and the driver each carrying two pieces of luggage, her mother’s skirt as soiled as a charwoman’s as she lost her footing on the dirt road, though of course it did not concern her. For they were here, very close now; they were on the last part of the march.
The church was built on a ridge that rose up in the heart of the village. From the
albergo
they could easily see it standing majestically up at the end of a rising allée of young cypress trees. They checked into their room and to Sylvie’s surprise her father announced that instead of seeing it right away they should close the curtains and lie down for a few hours, that they were here now and should rest and rejuvenate. Of course they all knew that they had missed the commemoration ceremony by a day, having been delayed at length, first in Paris and then at the French-Italian border.
But it was a most welcome sleep, even in the lumpy, malodorous bed, which after the hard, cracked-leather seats of the trains seemed to Sylvie a lair of pure goose down. When her parents woke her five hours later it seemed as if she had slumbered for a week, and could have slumbered on for another. But their hunger overwhelmed them. The innkeeper’s wife kindly fixed them an early supper of fried zucchini flowers and a pasta, its creamy egg sauce with peas so rich and satisfying they ate even all the bits of salty pancetta, which none of them mentioned. Afterward the innkeeper opened the one-room “museum of battle” across the road for them, which was mostly just a packed storeroom. It was full of bayonets and muskets and cannonballs and ornate, brightly colored uniforms with tufted headgear and avian epaulets pinned up on the walls, some of them rent and torn and blotted black with dried blood. There were a dozen framed maps and the innkeeper offered them a lengthy disquisition (translated, as he went, by her father) on the various arrays of the Austrian and French forces, a timeline of the early skirmishes and major advances, and the location of the most brutal battles, many of which were fought on and around this very foothill. There were so many dead that they were piled up in carts and buried wherever they could be buried, singly and in groups and in mass numbers. After the fighting, many more died of their wounds and were buried in the same fashion, residents of all the neighboring towns laboring to inter them as quickly as they could to ward off disease. It took weeks. The stench was historic. The rats grew to the size of small dogs. By the end, every able-bodied man and woman and strong-enough child had become, of necessity, a gravedigger. Years later, when the church was erected, the bones from the known mass graves were exhumed and cleaned and arrayed inside, transforming it into a sacred reliquary of the dead.
The innkeeper finally led them up the hill to the church. It was nearly six o’clock but still very hot, and although the incline was not exceedingly steep, to Sylvie it seemed a hike up a great mountain. She was lethargic with her fully laden belly, and the radiant heat of the pebbled ground and the battle museum room had sickened her, its smell of iron and moldering linen clinging to her like an iniquitous dust, this promise of doom. Halfway up she felt her mouth water terribly and she vomited at the side of the wide path. Though her mother said they should go back to the
albergo
, Sylvie told her that they could keep going up. She did not wish to disappoint them. At the top they stood before the church doors, the façade lighted golden by the low sun, its lines plain and almost severe, before stepping inside. The shift from brightness to shade momentarily veiled their vision. Like any church it was hushed and still, but here all breath seemed to pause. And then their sight returned and her mother loudly gasped, gripping her husband’s arm. The innkeeper stood apart from them, saying not a word. Sylvie didn’t understand. She looked up at the white marble altar and plain wooden cross and recognized them to be like any other, but the unusual, lovely filigree of the walls of the chancel drew her forward. And then she heard them, as if she were on the stage peering out at the audience of a macabre opera house, the coally voids of countless eyes speaking to her all at once.