The Surrendered

“June, would you come here, please?”

She came out holding a dusting rag lightly dampened with lamp oil and began wiping the top of the rolltop desk.

“That’s all right, June,” he said, motioning for her to stop. “I didn’t mean that. Please sit down.”

He’d never offered her such a courtesy before, and she was hesitant to take it.

“You don’t have to sit,” he said, taking off his bifocals. The sleeves of his white shirt were crisply ironed, the fabric against the mottled skin of his wrists as papery as the stiff white linen garments the dead were clothed in.

“How old are you, June?”

“Fourteen.”

“You’ve been here since the end of the war, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s fine here, but it’s not a home, is it?”

She didn’t answer.

“I wonder: Do you know what you’d like to be when you’re an adult? Would you like to have your own family?”

She nodded, not because she definitely wanted one or had even considered it, but because she was sure that was what he wanted to hear.

“Mrs. Ta

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Ta

“She says I don’t like to give up.”

“That’s right. You may be surprised to hear this, but I admire that about you as well.”

June said thank you, not knowing how else to reply. She was uneasy in his presence always, but now only more so, given how directly he was speaking to her. With his graying cowlick loosened and flopped down over his brow, his long, narrow face seemed softer, younger. His eyes were very blue up close, the color of the fancier marbles her younger brother used to play with.

“When I’m away on my trips to the other orphanages, I’m sure you spend more time with Mrs. Ta

“She is tired often,” June said, recounting herself how many times in the last weeks Sylvie had asked her to leave so she could rest.

“Yes,” Ta

“I try to help her with many things.”

“Yes, yes. Please keep doing so, especially when I’m away. She gives herself so completely to the demands of the orphanage, and by the end of the day she has nothing left. I think she has begun to suffer for it.”

June nodded. Indeed she was suffering, which the aunties saw as physical illness brought on by exhaustion, the untreated water, the strange food, by having to wake each morning to a sad, destroyed land. This often happened to foreign aid workers, they said. At some point they just broke down. But June knew Sylvie’s trouble had less to do with the conditions than with something else, that she had fallen into what she referred to in her diaries as “the ash pit,” a hole that seemed to drain all her energy and will. It seemed to June the condition would come and go mysteriously. At first when Sylvie didn’t appear at the morning meal, Reverend Ta

“It’s why I ask you, June,” Ta

“At night?”

“Whenever you believe she needs you. Or seems lonely. I’m afraid she’s lonely too often.” His gaze wandered, like he’d lost himself for an instant. But then he said: “It’s for her sake, her well-being, you understand that, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said, patting her arm. “Thank you.” He opened his fountain pen to resume his letter writing, pausing for her to leave.

“Do you still want a family of your own?” June asked. “Or will you stay here forever?”

“Forever sounds like a very long time,” he said. “But you never know.”

“What about your own family?”

“We’re still thinking about that.”

“There are many children here,” she said, desperate to sound generous. “You must meet so many children on your visits.”

“Yes, I do. So many. All worthy and good. Really every last one of you.”

When he uttered those words she took his implication whole; she went back to her chores with the conviction that Reverend Ta

She kept vigilant of their movements whenever Reverend Ta

The following day, having returned to the orphanage, Reverend Ta

“How goes it, June? Is everything fine?” he asked. Sylvie was at a far table eating with the younger children. Hector was not present, being likely out in the field.

She could merely nod, not yet ready for his questioning.