The Apothecary (20 page)
She sat cross-legged in front of us and tapped some herbs from three different jars into a stone mortar. With the wooden pestle, she ground the herbs together, then poured clear oil over them and ground up the mixture some more. She dipped her finger in the oil and applied it to my left temple. When I started to draw back, she said, “No! Stay.” Then she dipped her finger again and put a smear of oil on my right temple and on each of my wrists.
“It smells strong,” I said.
She turned to Benjamin and applied the oil the same way: to the sides of his forehead and the insides of his wrists.
“Now,” she said. “You remember more.”
“Can I have some?” Pip asked. “I need to remember things, too!”
“What things?”
“Racing tips! Poker tells!”
She shook her head. “Very dangerous, remember too much,” she said.
She took one of my hands and one of Benjamin’s so that the insides of our wrists pressed against hers. Her arms were wiry and strong.
“You hold, too,” she commanded, nodding at our loose hands.
Benjamin took my wrist, and I took his. It was soft and warm, and I could feel his pulse beating through his skin. The three of us were now sitting in a triangle on the cellar floor, cross-legged and linked at the wrists. Pip sat on the outside, pouting and bored.
“Close eyes now,” Jin Lo said. “Think.”
I closed my eyes and felt the oil on my wrists and my temples. It tingled slightly. I wondered if Benjamin could feel my pulse, too.
“Apothecary says hide,” Jin Lo said. “You go in cellar.”
I felt a little dizzy and disoriented, as if something was happening to the part of my brain that was just behind my eyes, and also to the backs of my eyelids. The present started falling away, and I was vividly in the past. It wasn’t like normal memory, superimposed on the present, able to co-exist with other thoughts and experiences. It was more like an intensely realistic waking dream, of a time and place I’d been before. I remembered the terror of that night in the cellar, and the nervousness about being with Benjamin, this strange boy. I felt his shoulder brushing mine as he tried the locked doorknob. And then I heard voices, too distant to make out, in the front of the shop, and I heard the explosion. Then the German voices were closer.
“Wo ist er?”
one of them asked.
“Ich weiss nicht,”
another said.
“Er ist verschwunden.”
“So?” Jin Lo said, beside me, startling me out of the past.
I opened my eyes and blinked, and tried to imitate the words the Germans had said. Jin Lo listened.
“They don’t see apothecary,” she said. “They say, ‘Where is he?’ Go back. Before.”
I closed my eyes and felt the odd, swooning feeling, and again I was climbing down the cellar stairs with Benjamin in the dark, before the Germans arrived. Just as he brushed my shoulder, I heard a hoarse whisper from above, in English. I hadn’t heard it before, in all the confusion.
“The shelter, Benjamin,”
his father whispered.
“I’ll be in the
shelter.”
Then there were the distant voices, and the explosion, and the sounds of things being knocked over. The German voice asked,
“Wo ist er?”
again.
I opened my eyes. “Did you hear it?” I asked Benjamin.
“The shelter!” he said.
“Isn’t this it—the cellar?”
“No,” he said. “There’s an old Morrison shelter up there, from the war. My father uses it as a table.”
We scrambled up the ladder, and Benjamin went to a corner of the office. There was a wide, low table there, with an oilcloth covering, and books and papers scattered across it. Benjamin pulled the oilcloth back. The table underneath was actually a giant metal cage, with wire mesh sides and a flat steel top.
Pip whistled. “You had this in your
house
?” he said. “My mum and da had to fight their way into the Underground.”
“The shelter wouldn’t withstand a direct hit,” Benjamin said. “But it was supposed to keep the walls from crushing you if, you know, one of the V-1s hit your block. My father and I used to get inside and sleep in it at night. He made it like a game.” He paused, and I guessed he was thinking of his mother. “But he isn’t in it now,” he said finally.
“He said he’d be in the shelter,” I said.
“Maybe he was there and he’s gone. Maybe we heard it wrong. Anyway, the Germans would have found him in here.”
I looked around for Jin Lo, and realised she hadn’t come up with us. I went back to the iron grate and looked down, and saw her crouched in the cellar, staring into the darkness with a terrible look in her eyes.
“Jin Lo?” I said.
She recoiled from my voice, looking haunted.
“Are you all right?”
She shook her head and said something I couldn’t understand. I climbed down the ladder and saw that she was trembling. I sat beside her.
“What happened?”
She opened her hands in front of her face and gazed at her wrists. They were shiny with the oil from Benjamin’s arm and mine. The austere strength in her face was gone and replaced by something wild and vulnerable. “Things I do not wish to remember,” she said.
Pip and Benjamin were at the top of the ladder, looking down.
“Is she all right?” Benjamin asked.
“She’s shaking,” I said.
“Soldiers come,” Jin Lo said, in a little girl’s voice. “Japanese army. I am eight years old. They kill everyone. Father, mother, baby brother. They think I am dead. So many guns. At night, everything quiet. I climb out from under body, our neighbour, and I look. Whole city . . .” She stopped, and her narrow shoulders danced and trembled. She pressed her hands into her eyes, as if to block out what she had seen, smearing the oil down her cheeks.
I didn’t know what to say that could help. I put my hand on her shoulder and I could feel how overcome she was. I didn’t know if she’d be able to move.
“Janie,” Benjamin said, after what seemed like a long time. “We can’t stay here. They might come.”
I reached in the pocket of my trousers—Benjamin’s trousers—and found another of the folded handkerchiefs his father must have neatly ironed. I gently pried one of Jin Lo’s hands from her face and wiped the oil off the delicate skin inside her wrist.
“We have to go,” I said. “It’s dangerous for us to stay here.”
I took the other wrist and wiped away the oil, and then I cleaned the tears and oil from her face. She let me do it, as if she were a small child. Her eyes were still spilling tears.
“I’m so sorry about your family,” I said. “And your city.”
She blinked vacantly.
“We need your help,” I said. “The apothecary said he’d be in the Morrison shelter, and we found it, but he isn’t there.”
I thought I could see her eyes slowly returning to the present, from the distant past. I could feel that I was coming into focus.
“Come and look,” I said, and I helped her stand up. She was unsteady on her feet, as if all strength had been drained from her. “Can you get up the ladder?”
“I try,” she said.
I stood behind her, making sure her feet were on the rungs, and Benjamin and Pip helped pull her up when she reached the top. Upstairs, we all stood in front of the Morrison shelter, and Jin Lo crouched to peer through the wire mesh.
“We open,” she said, and together we lifted one of the long side walls of the shelter off its hooks. Jin Lo peered inside again. There was a flat board making a floor in the bottom of the shelter, and I imagined a tiny Benjamin and his father sleeping on it.
“See this,” she said, and she pointed to a cone-shaped pile of white dust on the shelter’s floor. “Japanese call ‘Morijio’. Like Shinto offering. But English say ‘Lot’s wife’—you know this meaning?”
“Is Lot the one who had all the bad luck?” Benjamin asked.
“No, that’s Job,” I said.
“Lot’s wife turned to a pile o’ salt,” Pip said.
I looked at him, surprised. “How do you know that?”
Pip shrugged. “I ’ad to go to church lessons once, for stealing, like. The stories were all right, though.”
“This salt your father,” Jin Lo said.
“What?”
Benjamin said.
“You find one glass beaker now,” she said.
“Clean.”
J
in Lo climbed into the Morrison shelter and gathered all of the salt onto a piece of paper, carefully brushing up every loose grain with her finger, even after I was sure she had them all. I still didn’t believe that the salt was the apothecary, but I could see how she wouldn’t want to leave a whole leg behind. She bent the paper and poured it into the clean beaker. Then she brought the beaker out of the shelter. She still had the marks of tears on her face, but she was steady again.
“Where he work?” she asked.
Benjamin looked around the paper-strewn office and raised his hands to offer it up. “Here,” he said.
“No,” she said. “
Real
work. Laboratory.”
Benjamin shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Must be in house.”
“It’s not upstairs. That’s where we live.”
I looked around the room, which had no doors except the one to the shop. “What about the locked door in the cellar?” I asked.
We all climbed back down the ladder into the dark, and Pip got out his wire to start working on the heavy iron door’s lock.
“No time,” Jin Lo said. “Hold please.”
She handed me the beaker, moved Pip aside, and kicked open the door with what I guess you’d call a kung fu kick. The door swung on its hinges, and she walked calmly through and turned on a light. Benjamin and Pip watched, impressed.
We all followed her into what was, as she had promised, a laboratory. Where the cellar looked dusty and unused, the lab was spotless and orderly, with rows of shining bottles and jars. It had an oven against one wall, a sink, and a row of gas burners. There were beakers and vials and crucibles, and mortars and pestles in different sizes: Some were made of wood and some of white marble, but one bowl looked like black onyx, and one like green jade.
Jin Lo started to move around the lab like a chef moving around her own kitchen, pulling out an enormous copper pot. She emptied the white liquid from a large bottle into it, and a clear liquid from another, and lit a burner underneath.
“You’re not going to put my father in there,” Benjamin said.
“We wait too long,” she said, pouring black seeds into the green jade mortar, “harder to change. You want him like this?” She handed me the mortar and pestle. “Crush,” she said.
“But what if we do something wrong?” Benjamin persisted.
Jin Lo surveyed the shelves again, and slapped Pip’s hand away from a jar that said
LICORICE ROOT
.
“Just one little bit?” he pleaded.
She ignored him. I started grinding the black seeds with the heavy pestle.
“I need a minute with the beaker,” Benjamin said.
Jin Lo looked at him. “Is
salt
,” she said.
Benjamin’s jaw was set firmly. “I still do,” he said. “It’s my father.”
Jin Lo sighed at this sentimentality and let him have the beaker. Benjamin held it in both hands and turned away from us. He was telling his father something, but even in the small room, I couldn’t hear the words.
The liquid in the pot had started to boil, and Jin Lo added a dark red powder, and then a yellow paste that she measured in spoonfuls from a jar. She took the mortar and inspected my work, then gave it a few more emphatic grinds with the pestle and poured the powdered seeds in. She stirred the pot, and lifted the wooden spoon experimentally: As it boiled, the solution had started to thicken into a greenish-brown ooze. It glopped off the spoon back into the pot. She leaned over and sniffed it. “Now,” she said to Benjamin.
He looked at the pot. “I can’t,” he said, clutching the beaker.
“Now,”
she said. “Will be too late, too thick.”
“Have you done this before?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I read how.”
“What if you remember wrong?”
Jin Lo shrugged. “Then he stay salt.”
I could feel Benjamin’s fear of letting his father go, and of never being able to get him back. Finally he handed the beaker to Jin Lo and turned away, unable to watch as she dumped his father into the goo.
Pip pulled over a footstool so he could see inside the pot, and I stood on tiptoe. As Jin Lo stirred, the mixture took on a stickier consistency. At first, nothing happened. I realised I wasn’t breathing. I didn’t think Pip was either. I thought of the witches in
Macbeth
, hunched over the cauldron, waiting for their evil magic to happen. Was it “eye of newt and tongue of frog”? Something like that.
Jin Lo pulled the glop up out of the pot with the spoon, working and stretching it like toffee. Each time she pulled, some of it stayed stretched for a moment. Benjamin couldn’t stand it and turned to look. I thought I saw something like a knee forming as Jin Lo pulled. It held its shape for a second before sinking back into the pot. I blinked, thinking I’d imagined it. Then I was sure I saw part of an arm, before it sank back in.
Then the whole mixture started to boil up over the lip, and the shape of the apothecary’s head emerged and sank down again. Then his head returned with both shoulders. Two sticky hands gripped the sides of the pot and pushed his torso and then his legs up out of the ooze. He stepped onto the counter, towering over us, and Jin Lo handed him a linen towel to cover the nakedness that would be revealed when all the goo dripped off. He wrapped it around his waist automatically, like a man at the beach, and she handed him a second towel to wipe his face and arms. Pip stared with his mouth open. I’m sure I did, too. Jin Lo had reconstituted the apothecary out of a tiny pile of salt, and he was standing there in front of us, whole and alive.