“The problem is determining what that last minute is,” Tom Harris said, but not forcefully, for of course he knew it was pointless to argue. He and his wife had been stationed in the same place or area with Sylvie’s parents several times, and like all the other aid workers and missionaries who had worked with them, they came to understand that the Binets were not out in the forsaken regions of the world for the usual constellation of reasons, for the glory of God and Samaritanism, or as some mode of escape or adventure or self-trial. They were not ultimately sentimental people, being rarely ruled by their hearts, even as they were genuinely loving and caring to their charges. They were two people who over the years had honed themselves into ideal instruments of mercy, and like any such instruments the greatest sin was to be only half used.
“I see there are some moon cakes to be had,” her father said brightly, breaking the mood. They each got a quarter-cake, Sylvie eating hers in a single mouthful as the others slowly nibbled. Both her parents offered theirs to her but she refused, despite how its greasy sweetness made her insides leap. She was not some needy child. Li, the young Latin and math teacher, nudged her with his elbow and silently offered his to her but she refused him as well. A month ago she would not have taken it for the reason that others might sense how infatuated she was with him. But now she did not care anymore what the others might see. For she was infatuated, and had been practically from the moment he arrived. He had a lovely English accent and when he asked her during their private Latin lesson to translate a passage from the Gallic Wars, he would address her as Miss Binet, like some proper suitor in a novel. He was not much taller than she and although several years removed from university he could easily be mistaken for a high schooler, with his lithe, smooth-skinned build. He had the habit of adjusting his round silver-framed spectacles with both hands, delicately propping them higher on his unusually prominent nose. He pomaded his thick, coal-black hair with an English ointment that smelled of sweetened almonds, like marzipan. One day back in the late summer she had seen him shirtless when he helped her father bear large buckets of well water for the children’s baths, the wiry bands of his arms and shoulders and neck tensing with the effort. He had noticed her watching and waved to her and she had felt something drop from the top of her chest to the bottom. Now beneath the table he opened her hand and tucked the small wedge of cake into her palm but she could only feel the brief graze of his fingers on her knuckles and while they resumed talking she gently pressed the cake into a damp, doughy mass, focusing now on his gift to her and her chance to eat it. Only after the conversation turned again to how best to engage the Japanese and Chinese authorities was she excused from the table, and she walked across the frozen ground of the courtyard to the room she shared with her parents. In the unheated room she let her fingers curl open, uncupping the tiny lode of heat. She ate slowly this time, simply letting her mouth dissolve the cake rather than chewing or swallowing, running the tip of her tongue on the creases of her palm to get every last tinge of the lard.
The sweetness warmed her, despite the frigidity of the room. She unbuttoned her coat, unwound her scarf. In fact she felt overheated of late, when her parents and the others seemed to have developed a waxen rime from the unceasing bitter temperatures. Even Benjamin Li could seem to stiffen in his movements. Her changing body had become a perfectly efficient generator, somehow able to turn any meager morsel into a sustained heat. In the absence of fuel it ran anyway, heedless of her spells of dizziness and great thirst and a waving ache in her joints, in her bones. Worst of all was the abraded sensation, the feeling as if her insides were in perpetual friction, flaring and rebelling against her body. Every night now in her cot, on her side of the folding painted screen her parents had borrowed from the Lums for some privacy in their shared room, she’d cast aside the many layers of rough woolen blankets and pull up her nightgown to her throat and let the piercing air check her until every ember seemed finally to succumb and she was as ashen as the moonlight painted her. She shivered terribly in her nakedness and gripped the side bars of the cot until her hands grew numb, and one morning her mother told her while brushing her hair that one’s body was never wrong and though she’d said it before, just as cryptically, Sylvie finally understood what she meant. For hadn’t she let go, too, stunning herself to another state of waking with her frozen hands? As with everything else, she learned this, too, from her parents. For as long as her memory served she’d listened to them making love (their living quarters were necessarily humble and cramped wherever they went) and she’d peered through her arms at their caresses and then her mother’s willowy body shifting above her father, tapping out even before it happened the rhythmic tick of the bed frame and the beautiful breathing by which she would slumber.
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.