The Apprentices (10 page)

A man was painting the front door of a house meticulously, as if the smooth brushstrokes were the most important thing in the world. A woman, visible in a backyard, hung white sheets on a line. Jin Lo’s feet carried her on, against her will.

Then she stopped in front of a small, unpainted house. Its brown, dead garden grew only weeds. A window was cracked, and the gate hung off its hinge. She pushed the gate open, and it creaked. The front door gave when she pushed. There was no furniture inside the house. It had all been carried away. The wooden trunk she had hidden in was gone. A layer of dust covered the floor, and she left footprints in it. She looked at the tiny room she had shared with her baby brother, and at her parents’ room, and at the kitchen where they had eaten their meals. She heard her father saying
something sardonic, her mother saying something gentle, her brother squealing with delight. And then her legs seemed to collapse beneath her, and she sat cross-legged in the dust on the kitchen floor.

“I’m here,” she said to the empty air. “I’m back. Please talk to me.”

T
he first thing Benjamin saw when they took the blindfold off was the oilcloth that had protected the Pharmacopoeia, thrown in a heap on the ground. One of the soldiers held the heavy book and flipped through the fragile, valuable pages with impatience, unable to read the Greek or Latin. Benjamin was about to say something, but then he saw a woman whose stomach had been cut open. She was alive, kneeling and begging for help in a low, persistent voice that had been lost among all the other voices in the settlement. It was the only thing he could hear, now that he could see her. His hands were bound behind his back.

His father, beside him, was speaking insistently to the Vietminh officers in the local dialect, then switching to French, which had been the language of authority in the country: “You must untie my hands. Let me help her.
Laissez moi l’aider.
”

“It is a punishment,” one of the soldiers said.

“For what?”

“Eating rice that was meant for seed.”

“And for this you cut her open?” his father asked.

“It is fitting. Too many people need food.”

“She’ll die.”

“We all will die, without food.”

“Please let me help her.”

“We need you inside.”

The men pushed them both across the dusty courtyard and into a wooden building. Benjamin wondered if the woman had been shown to them on purpose, as a warning of what might happen to them. But then he wondered if such brutality was so ordinary that their captors had simply taken off their blindfolds as soon as they reached the settlement, forgetting that there was anything disturbing there to see. He feared it was the second possibility—the soldiers had been thoughtless. That seemed worse than any threat. And they had the Pharmacopoeia. Would they destroy it? Keep it? All paper was valuable in the villages, as toilet paper, but he decided not to think about that.

It was dark inside the small building, and Benjamin’s eyes took some time to adjust. There was a smell of bodies and also a smoky smell. The soldiers were respectfully silent, shuffling their feet nervously. In the middle of the room was a cot, and on the cot lay a man. He seemed to stare at Benjamin and his father without seeing, and he shook with chills. His high forehead shone with sweat.

“How long has he been in a fever?” Benjamin’s father asked.

“Three days,” said their guard.

“Does he hallucinate?”

The guard looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps.”

“How is his vision?”

“Not good.”

“He’s your leader?”

“Our general.”

“If I cure him, you let me tend to the woman.”

There was a pause. “If you do not cure him, we kill you.”

Benjamin’s father switched to French again.
“Il a le neuropaludisme. Il mourra sans traitement.”

Neuropaludisme
was cerebral malaria. Benjamin looked at the sick general, who should be in a bucket of ice right now. His brains were being cooked by the fever as they talked.

“Alors traitez-le!”
the soldier said: So treat him.

“Et puis la femme,”
Benjamin’s father insisted.

The man waved a hand in impatience, as if they were bargaining for the life of a fly, not a woman.
“Oui,”
he said.
“D’accord.”

“Déliez nous.”

Their hands were untied as he asked, and Benjamin’s father knelt beside the general and reached for his bony wrist to take his pulse.

It occurred to Benjamin that his father might
pretend
to try to rescue the general, but instead let him die. It was the best thing he could do, to remove this man who had killed and enslaved innocent people.

But his father wasn’t capable of killing a man while seeming to save him. His job was to heal, and he was stubborn in his principles. Murdering a man, even a dangerous and
destructive man, would be impossible for him. And he had made his deal for the woman’s life.

So they set about saving a villain. His father carefully laid out the contents of his knapsack, and asked for clean, boiled water. The men brought a tin cup, and he measured drops from a bottle into it.
“Barbaric,”
he muttered, almost to himself—he was still thinking of the woman, Benjamin knew. “The barbarity of it, Benjamin.”

He helped the glassy-eyed general drink from the cup, then let his head down carefully on the pillow. He dampened a cloth and laid it over the man’s sweating forehead. Then he took the man’s listless hand and studied the fingernails. “You told me three days,” he said to the soldiers in their dialect. “He’s been sick much longer.”

The men looked at each other. “Yes,” one said. “The fever comes and goes.”

“You have ice?”

“No.”

Benjamin’s father pressed on the general’s abdomen, feeling for the edges of the liver, for the spleen. He seemed very much like a doctor, and Benjamin knew the men thought he was one. If they knew he was really a London apothecary, what would they say? “Let him sleep,” he finally said. “I want to see the woman now.”

The soldiers looked unsure, but he had such confidence and authority that no one dared to stop him as he moved toward the door. Benjamin followed, trying to look half as steady as his father did.

At the last moment, one of their captors stepped in their way. “You must stay until the general is well.”

“My son will stay,” his father said. “And I will return.”

All eyes in the dim room turned to Benjamin, who hesitated, then went back to the bedside of the feverish man. He kneeled where his father had been. The men seemed to weigh the question of whether to allow a teenage replacement at the bedside of their leader, but then let his father pass.

The light outside was dazzling. The door closed and it was dim again. The remaining men looked at Benjamin, as if expecting him to do something medical, so he picked up the sick man’s wrist. The pulse was thready and racing, and the skin felt like tissue paper over sticks for bones. His father was right; the man had been sick a long time. His mind would never be the same. He set the hand gently back on the cot, wondering what terrible things it had done.

He heard his father’s voice issuing orders outside, and then he heard a woman’s wail. There was silence in the hut. The wail turned to soft sobbing. How many stitches would the gaping hole in her belly require? The blue paste was effective in healing wounds quickly, but he had never seen it applied to anything so drastic.

The sounds from outside became indecipherable, and Benjamin fell into a kind of stupor as he waited. He was roused from it by his father calling,
“Benjamin!”

His father said, “Walk right through them.”

Benjamin had to close his eyes, afraid he would feel the cold phantom fingers on his throat. He smelled something sharp and metallic, and then they were out of the clearing. They walked a hundred yards from the village. When they were out of sight in a bamboo grove, his father led him off the trail, smoothing and arranging the greenery behind them to cover their path. They hid under the wide, sheltering leaves of a
Hopea odorata
tree. After a few minutes, the soldiers mastered their fear and came running down the path in pursuit.

Hidden beneath the
odorata
leaves, Benjamin held the Pharmacopoeia on his lap. “Did you save the woman?” he whispered.

His father frowned. “She might live.”

“And the ghosts? I thought you didn’t like to encourage superstition. Evil spirits and all that.”

The muscle in his father’s eye jumped. He said, “I don’t. But sometimes you work with what you have.”

B
enjamin and his father spent the next two nights in one of the ruined villages, in an unburned hut. It was safer there than in the inhabited villages because it wasn’t likely to be attacked.

Benjamin made soup over a tiny chemical fire that gave off no smoke and wouldn’t give away their position. He had taken over the business of cooking. His father, who could work such wonders, ought to be a better chef, but he saw cooking as a task of refueling, delivering calories to the body.

There were mats in the hut to sleep on, and Benjamin stretched out on one. The moment he put his head on the rolled-up jacket that was his pillow, he had a vivid memory of Janie holding back her hair over a little pot, in her parents’ London kitchen, boiling leaves that the gardener in the Physic Garden had given them. The smell of the steam compelled a person to tell the truth, and made Benjamin and Janie tell each other things they didn’t want to say.

He sat up on the mat, in the abandoned hut. Janie had the glassine envelope. He was sure of it. He looked at his watch.
It was ten o’clock at night on a Sunday, which meant it was late morning for her. A good time to try.

The idea behind the powder, which he wasn’t sure he had perfected, was that a thing split in half is still connected to its other half. It was meant to establish a means of communication over great distance. He had been thinking about the story of Zeus splitting human beings in half, out of fear that they would become too powerful. In the story, the halved people felt incomplete, and always yearned for their missing counterparts. Benjamin believed that the divided particles in his powder would behave the same way, and provide a link between the users. He dug in his knapsack, tapped a few grains into his canteen, and drank it down. Now he needed to concentrate. He closed his eyes and deliberately called up memories:

Janie ringing Sergei Shiskin’s doorbell, making up a story about the science team needing the Russian boy’s help. The brave, solemn look on her face as she took off her grandmother’s gold earrings to melt them down for the invisibility solution. Janie on the deck of the icebreaker, cap pulled over her ears, hair blowing wildly. The way he had known that he could kiss her then—that she would let him and it would be all right.

And then he was in a place he had never seen, a small room with flowered curtains and a low bookshelf. He was sitting on a sagging couch. There was a thin paperback atlas open on his lap, and a hand—not his hand, but a girl’s hand—turning the pages.
Janie.
It worked! She was looking
at a map of Australia, and there were the New Hebrides. Did she know he had been there, from his letters? He wondered if he could move her hand. Could he
point,
if he concentrated hard enough?

He thought about her right index finger and willed it toward the speck of island on the map. But instead she turned the page. Now she was looking at South America. That didn’t do him any good, but still he concentrated on her hands, trying to move them. He tried to stretch out the fingers on her right hand, but nothing happened. He made a fist with his own hand, and thought her fingers curled slightly, but maybe she was doing that anyway.