Look at us
, they said to her, in a single voice.
We were never divine
.
SYLVIE FELT THE PANE of the window buzz; it was the rumble of vehicles approaching the front gate. There was a horn blast and then another and when she looked outside she saw her father and Reverend Lum coming out from the dining room, walking across the courtyard as they buttoned up their overcoats. Tom Harris and Mr. Li followed them. The wives peered out from the dining room window, and her mother, on seeing Sylvie across the courtyard in their quarters, motioned for her to stay inside. Sylvie couldn’t see what they could see, as the sleeping quarters were on the same side as the main gate, and when the men disappeared from her view she couldn’t help but step outside herself.
There were two vehicles idling on the other side of the wrought-iron gate, a beat-up black sedan and a covered truck. Reverend Lum was talking to the driver of the sedan, a young soldier in uniform who kept trying to present some papers to him through the bars. Reverend Lum spoke Japanese, and though she couldn’t understand what they were saying it was clear enough that Lum was being stubborn, and even high-handed, shoving the papers back whenever the soldier tried to push them through to him. The soldier was very young and despite his heavy clothing he looked as though he could slip between the black iron bars. It was surprising that he wasn’t getting angry or irritated, which was perhaps an indication of his youth, or else he was cowed because Lum had unbuttoned his coat to show his minister’s garb-a modest number of the Japanese were devout Christians. The soldier soon gave up and went back inside the car with the papers. The car jostled slightly but nothing could be seen as their view through the windshield was obscured by the sun’s reflection. For a moment it even seemed they might back up and drive away. But then an officer emerged from the back of the car with the papers rolled up in his hand, and he gestured with them for Reverend Lum to approach the gate. Sylvie’s father and Harris and Mr. Li stepped forward with him.
By this time her mother was beside her but she was no longer tugging at Sylvie to go back inside. The officer was certainly young as well but had the drawn, placid expression of a seasoned soldier. Sylvie recognized him as one of the officers who had come the week before to question the men. The officer ungloved his hand and offered it to Reverend Lum, who refused him. The officer half-chuckled and threw his arms wide, as if to ask what else he could do, and Lum finally relented, slowly extending his hand through the bars. When they shook, the officer leaned in close against the gate and whispered something to Lum, and Sylvie was confused when the reverend began to dip down on one knee opposite the officer, her mother now desperately trying to pull her away. It sounded as if Lum were humming, huffing now in singsong, and when her father and the others rushed forward to him as he was pinned against the bars he cried out in Mandarin,
Oh, please stop!
The sound was as clean and fine-grained as a calligraphy brush being snapped in two. Lum collapsed and fell back on the frozen ground, shouting and moaning horribly as he cradled his wrist. The officer had forced it back against the iron bar until it broke. While her father and Li tried to calm him, Tom Harris began shouting at the Japanese officer about the treatment of noncombatants, how he would report this incident to the U.S. consulate, but the officer stood impassively through the epithets, staring at him as blankly as if he were deaf. He then motioned to the gate lock and, when Harris refused, unholstered his pistol in a smooth, swift movement and leveled it at his head. Sylvie’s father cried, “That’s enough!” and rose and quickly unlocked the gate. From the back of the truck four rifle-bearing soldiers jumped out and walked through with the Japanese officer into the mission’s courtyard. The vehicles rolled slowly in behind them, the hard strum of the engines reverberating loudly in the small courtyard. Li and Harris had helped Reverend Lum to his feet and Betty Harris met them and they brought him back inside the dining room. Sylvie was hustled in by her mother right after them, Li and Harris immediately heading back outside.
Mrs. Lum was shrieking while Betty Harris attended to her husband, who sat jittering in a chair, his arm lying dead still on the table as if it were independent of the rest of him. It was a terrible ordeal simply to remove his overcoat, and at several points Lum fainted from the pain. Betty Harris tried to bind his wrist while he was out but he roused and screamed and involuntarily swung at her with his good hand. The wrist of the other hand was broken back and played freely with a gruesome range. When he finally looked at it he gagged and then vomited onto the floor. All the while Betty Harris was crying and Sylvie’s mother was teary as well as she tried to calm Mrs. Lum. But Sylvie herself was quiet. She could not quite speak or move. She had seen much suffering in her parents’ travels, but it was suffering caused by deprivation, hungry and sick children or adults hobbled and disfigured by chronic or untreated disease. Once, in Port Loko District, in Sierra Leone, they had come across the hacked body of a homicide victim (murdered, her parents were later told, by a neighboring tribe), and it was the first time she had witnessed intentional cruelty and violence, but never directed against someone in the position of her parents, and all she could do was stand stiffly by the window, unconsciously gripping her own wrist so tightly that later, before sleep, there was still a rawness ringing her skin.
Her gaze was now drawn outside by raised voices in the courtyard. The three men were talking to the Japanese officer, their puffs of breath quickly dissipating in the cold air. They were speaking English to the officer, her father insisting that he reconsider. The officer looked as if he understood, but he turned away and her father reached out to him and a soldier stepped between them and shoved him back with the side of his rifle. Her father stumbled, but Li caught and steadied him before he fell. Tom Harris was yelling again, but the officer ignored him completely and shouted orders to the rest of the soldiers, perhaps two dozen of them in all. They began unloading their gear, hopping out of the large truck and passing down rucksacks and crates.
When they came back inside the dining room, the men helped hold down Reverend Lum so that Betty Harris could finally wrap his wrist. She had run to get her nurse’s kit and had just drawn from an ampoule of morphine and stuck the needle in his forearm, but he was still in terrible agony and thrashing in distress. Luckily the fracture had not broken through the skin or ruptured a vein, and she was able to bind it tightly for now, though she said they would have to get him to a hospital with an experienced orthopedic surgeon and should leave right away. There was a hospital in Mukden, but he would likely have to travel all the way to Peking for proper treatment. Sylvie’s father’s eyes narrowed and he told them what they already suspected: The Japanese soldiers would be occupying the mission.
“For how long?” Mrs. Lum cried.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“This is where we’ve always lived! We have nowhere else to go! We can’t just go someplace else like all of you.”
“I’m sorry, but he wouldn’t say.”
“What are they here for?” Sylvie’s mother asked him.
“He refused to say that, too. But I think it must be about those incidents.” There had been a rash of resistance activity since Christmas, a couple of bombings of Japanese ammunition and fuel depots, and then an assassination of an officer in Changchung.
“We have to get Reverend Lum to the hospital,” Betty reminded everyone. “There’s risk of a blot clot, or even limb loss. We should be leaving right now.”
“We can’t go anywhere,” her husband said angrily. “We’ve all been ordered to remain. We’re prisoners here.”
“But why?” Mrs. Lum cried. “We’re only missionaries. My husband needs a doctor!”
“I’ll try to speak again to the commanding officer,” Sylvie’s father said to her, clasping Mrs. Lum’s hands. “I promise you we’ll get him to a hospital somehow. But for now we have to remove our personal things from our quarters. We must do this right now. I suggest we go to it immediately and then meet back in here. We should be warm enough for the time being, if we stay together and get the stove going.”
The adults hurriedly bundled themselves in their coats and rushed out to gather their things. Sylvie’s mother forbade her to leave the dining room, so she remained alone with Reverend Lum. They had placed chairs in a line so he could lie down and rest. Sylvie sat beside him, holding his good hand to comfort him as her parents had instructed her. His hand was clammy and cold, but at least he was calm now, despite the uneven, makeshift surface of the wooden chairs. Like his wife, he was short and pudgy, and he hardly fit on the narrow width of the seat bottoms. She had to press her leg up against him so he wouldn’t roll off. He was no longer in pain. His eyelids were heavy but he was looking up at her with a gratified expression, as if he were gazing into the face of his own attentive daughter. She wasn’t uncomfortable touching him. The Lums had no children of their own and they were always kind to her, offering her sweets or cakes whenever they were at hand, at least before they started rationing.
“I wish you had not had to see that,” he said. “You were watching, yes?”
She nodded.
“You’re like your parents. Strong and stoic. But you are even more so, I think. Are you sure you’re not a Chinese?”
“Maybe I am,” she said, playing along.
“Truly? Come closer. Let me see your eyes.”
She bent her head down toward him and he examined her as carefully and methodically as a physician might, slowly taking in her brow, her cheekbones, the shape and line of her eyes.
“Perhaps it is true. I see something now that I had not noticed before. Something about the inner part of your eyelids. They are not quite Occidental. They remind me of my niece’s, in fact, the way they make you both look a little sleepy.”
“My mother says that, too,” Sylvie said. “That I always appear tired.”
“But you’re a vigilant girl,” he said. “Always taking everything in. And it is good that you’re not as scared as I am.”
She immediately said she was scared, to try to comfort him.
“No, you’re not,” he said, faintly smiling, his eyes glassy from the drug. “Don’t worry. I don’t feel bad. I have never been much of a hero, that way. I always knew I was never going to be such a man.”
“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.”