Benjamin bent his head lower, averting his good eye.
“Will you not?”
“Tell him, you fucking bastard!” Harris cried.
“Forgive me,” Benjamin mumbled in Mandarin, unable to look at any of them.
The officer said, “Open your eyes. All of you,” and then, without a word of warning, he shot Mrs. Lum in the head. She fell heavily over her husband’s body. Part of her face was missing, the wound a mass of jammy, out-turned flesh. She stared into space as if she were about to say certain words to the rest of them: Help me. In the shock of the moment they were numbed pliant as the soldiers lined them up on their knees. And like others in such circumstances who are all too aware of their fate, they were remarkably docile and quiet in their array; even Harris simply clasped hands with his wife, who was breathing fitfully, her lungs stifled by fear. The Binets had Sylvie lodged tightly between them, her mother whispering to her not to look up, not to move. Sylvie could not have moved anyway. She could not have stirred herself a hair. Her father, however, was staring fiercely now at Benjamin.
“I can see all of you had fondness for this fellow, from the way you are regarding him now,” the officer said to her father, noticing his attention. “He has surprised you. But I know this man. We met today, but I know him well enough. He is not so special. You should know that he would do the same to me, if I were in his place. He would do the same to any of you.”
The officer stepped before her father and motioned for him to rise. “You are a Samaritan, yes? That’s why you are out here in this miserable place, helping miserable people. You even bring your family! And during a period of conflict! It is admirable work, I am sure, but it has also led you to this. Now you can see this man has decided that your lives are not worth those of his coconspirators. Or the sake of his already futile cause.”
While he spoke, the officer opened the cylinder of his revolver and let the bullets fall out into his hand. He slipped one back into a chamber and closed the cylinder, rotating it so that the single cartridge would be the next to fire.
“This man is very willing to die. In fact he is already dead. He has obviously chosen the same for all of you, and it is why I have not bothered to compel him further by simply beating or torturing him. I fear he will never talk. I am becoming curious, however, about something else.”
It was then that he placed his revolver in her father’s hand. The soldiers around them nervously rustled about and locked and bolted their rifles.
“Would you shoot him now? Would you kill him, for the deaths he has already caused?”
Francis held the gun in his palm as if it were a lump of coal. He had never handled a weapon, though the officer could not have known it. During the First World War he had been a conscientious objector, but rather than go to prison or expatriate he served as a medic. He’d been wounded several times and almost killed by a shell in the Meuse-Argonne in eastern France, in the last months of the war; it was the bloody fall campaign of General Pershing, when he lost 120,000 of his men. Francis never spoke of that time to his wife or daughter but it was why he had trouble sleeping at night, partly from dreams of the wounded he could not reach and then for the searing pains in his back, from still-embedded bits of shrapnel.
“You committed these murders,” Francis said, speaking quietly but clearly. “You are determining the moral choices here. Not he.”
“Moral choices!” The officer chuckled. “Well said! But to be philosophical about it, I could say this man set those choices in motion. And before him, many others. Yet now the rest of us, soldiers or missionaries or bystanders, we must endure the consequences. We must act out the remainder as best we can, according to our roles.”
With his boot the officer shoved Benjamin forward onto his belly. He then fitted the gun into her father’s hand, pressing the stock to his palm, hooking his finger into the trigger. “You have a single round. If you kill him there will be no reason to hold the rest of you. Otherwise we will keep on.”
Benjamin craned up his battered face and nodded weakly to Francis; he tried to say something but his words were barely audible. He kept nodding even as he lay prostrate, grinding his temple into the rough floorboards, as if he were offering sanction.
“Shoot him!” Harris said. “For goodness’ sakes, Francis! He’s nothing. He’s less than nothing. End this now!”
And yet Francis could not quite move. He couldn’t aim or even raise his arm. When he finally held out the pistol for the officer to take back from him, Jane whispered, “Oh, my love.” Her eyes were shimmering. Sylvie was crying as well, suddenly remembering now what her mother always told her, that mercy was the only true deliverance. There was nothing more exaltedly human, more beautiful to behold. And a great searing rush of love seemed at once to cleave her and bind her back up, a love for her father and her mother and then, too, for Benjamin Li, despite what had happened, whom she could see only as her father just did, as the one wanting for mercy most of all. It was finished, even the officer could realize that, there was nothing else to be done but to cease the madness, to acknowledge this horrid interlude was done.
But suddenly Harris cried, “Damn it, let me!” and rushed to take the gun himself. The officer shouted and the soldier guarding Harris wheeled and bashed him in the ear with his rifle stock. Harris fell down, his eyes rolling up in his head. He lay dazed, his jaw broken, the hinge on one side seemingly loosed within his skin. Betty screamed and leaped for him toward the soldier and in pure reaction he struck her, too, in the forehead, knocking her completely unconscious. In the way she fell her skirt rode up her legs, revealing the soft jut of her backside where it met her bared thigh. The garter straps were unfastened, her rent stockings fallen down to her knees. Her plain undergarment glowed marble-white. The guard stood over her, transfixed, and was reaching down to touch her when the officer barked at him in Japanese and the guard stepped back. The officer regarded Betty Harris, measuring her exposed body with his gaze only, before cinching down her skirt to cover her. But then he looked long at Jane Binet, and to Sylvie, and before everything would end, it was then that the madness commenced once again.
EIGHT
AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH DAY, for a few hours or so, Sylvie could believe she was herself. She would arise just before Ames and fill the coffeepot with grounds and then get fresh water from the pump outside and balance it on the single-burner field stove while she set out the tin mugs on the table. Soon enough they would eat breakfast with the rest of the orphanage, but, as was their habit back home, they’d have coffee before doing anything else. Sitting in their nightclothes, the brief, wordless slip of time as they gradually came awake was as unburdened as any moments of their marriage. It was as though each understood the other was as blank of feelings or thoughts as himself, or herself, not yet angling on a purpose for the day, or on any previous emotions or feeling between them, comfortable in the simple animal appreciation of nearness, if not togetherness. It was almost as if they were back in Seattle, in their small, upright house in Laurelhurst, time graced by a merciful repose. But soon enough the spell would be broken by Ames getting up and dressing himself for the day, the final punctuation the heavy scrape of his shoes against the floorboards as he pulled them out from beneath the bed, and Sylvie would feel the first tiny tears under her skin, as though the flesh were being loosed from beneath, pulled down toward a core that she knew had no bottom.
By ten o’clock, an unmooring seemed imminent. She would be teaching an English conversation class to the younger children, asking questions of each one in turn: “Would you like another glass of milk?” or “Which is your favorite kind of candy?” or “What is the date of your birth?” And while the child gamely answered, she would be certain that the rest of them could somehow sense the growing rime of hollowness developing inside her, even if none showed anything but the usual enthusiasms; the disparity only made her more self-conscious, and, just as she thought her mother might counsel her, she regained a hold and girded herself and matched their brightness and zeal, and this carried her through to the midday meal, where she would make the motions of eating. Although she had from the first day found the soups and vegetables the aunties prepared to be flavorful and often delicious, especially considering the meager budget they had, her body no longer craved the food. Now that she was on the high slow horse again she consumed just enough to sustain her until the next meal, spark enough of her blood so that she wouldn’t grow dizzy or faint. She was trying to convince herself as much as everyone else. She had begun to feel again that she no longer had an understanding of hunger, a bowl full of barley rice as significant to her as if it were mounded with pebbles.