The Surrendered

So she organized and reorganized her small footlocker, which every child had, discarding the pairs of socks that were past darning, resolving to wear the ugly olive-drab trousers as often as she could to preserve her two decent blouses and skirt, which she snapped in the air to rid of dust and then tightly folded. She polished her ill-fitting leather shoes, knowing that she would have to wear them on the plane. She went through her workbooks and tore out the pages marred by idle sketches or doodles and she honed her three pencils against the floorboards to sharp pinpoints. She cleaned the footlocker itself, removing the grime from the handle with a kerosene-dipped rag and sanding the rust from the rivets and steel-clad corners. Lastly she borrowed a pair of good scissors from the aunties and trimmed her own hair (which was in a rough, unkempt pageboy because she never sat long enough for them to cut it properly), smoothing out the line of the ends and pi

Thus it didn’t bother her in the least that the atmosphere of the orphanage was lifeless for some days after the a

It was with the news that visitors from a new adoption agency in America were coming to take photographs of the children that the compound came back to life. The aunties heated water the entire day to draw enough for bathing all forty children, separate boys’ and girls’ tin tubs accommodating three or four of them at a time.

June refused at first to bathe, for there was no reason for her to do so, she was already spoken for, but as one of the aunties berated her she realized she ought to take every chance to better herself, as much as stay in line. And so she got in with three much younger girls, soaping up their hair for them, reminding them to shut their eyes, even drying them off quickly in the chilly air and helping them get dressed in their best outfits. She put on her own good clothes and accompanied the younger ones out and waited in line with them for their photographs, except that the kindly-faced, plumpish older couple who arrived by taxi had no intention of taking portraits but rather wanted to meet all the children in the hope of taking home as many as they could manage. They had a camera, but only for taking snapshots of their journey. Reverend Ta

Reverend Ta

“And what about you, June? Would you like to be educated?”

“I am already. Mrs. Ta

“I can see that!” Mrs. Stolz said to her, with a spark of delight. “And do you have any brothers or sisters here?”

She didn’t answer but Reverend Ta

“What do you think about living in America? Mr. Stolz and I live in a place called Oregon. Do you know where that is?”

She shook her head.

“It’s near Seattle,” Reverend Ta

“You know Seattle?” Mr. Stolz asked her. “That’s way too big a town for me.”

“We’re close enough, I suppose,” Mrs. Stolz added, if perhaps somewhat confused herself. “It’s a half-day’s car ride.”

June said, “I will go there soon.”

“You seem quite certain of that.”

“I am.”

“Well, I guess why shouldn’t you be?” Mrs. Stolz said, gently squeezing her palm. “You’re a very strong girl, aren’t you?”

June was about to tell her it didn’t matter what she was but Reverend Ta

By the time the Stolzes got around to meeting the last child in line June was back to the girls’ bunk room, where she changed out of her good blouse and skirt. She had first gone straight to the Ta

“May we come in?” a voice said. It was Mrs. Stolz, her head poking in the doorway of the bunk room. When she saw that June was dressed she entered, her husband at her side. They seemed somehow shorter and even plumper now that they were standing up: these two smiling folk dolls, their cheeks round and pink. He was dressed in a denim work shirt and rough wool trousers and scuffed-up shoes, and though they seemed to her as impossibly rich as all the other civilian Americans she had ever seen, she understood now that they were probably country people, small-town citizens like those in the village where she had grown up. But rather than feeling enmity toward them for how those villagers had treated her mother and father with suspicion and resentment and ultimately callousness and cruelty, instead a tide of longing unexpectedly washed over her, this longing for the days before her father yielded to his demons and retreated to his study, longing for her mother’s proud face, longing finally for her two brothers and two sisters who could not even stand here as she was in an ugly, too-large pair of trousers, and all at once June was not mature or resolute or strong in the least but a fallen pile of child, sobbing and shaking.