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He killed her mother, and in this he knows: one day he will teach her how to kill as well.
Her eyes follow him from room to room, as dark as the barrel of a rifle, and Bernhardt knows that his story was decided the moment he pulled his trigger on that humid day in Myanmar. The jungle heat, the mosquitos on his arms, and the woman who would have killed him if he hadn't killed her first. Two shots, one to do the job and the other to make sure the job stayed done — and then her daughter's eyes, dark as dried blood.
He intends to leave, because it's not like the villagers won't have heard the shots and come running. It's not like the girl won't be found any time soon. He isn't leaving her to die in the wilds, food for tigers. But she follows him. Out of the shack and into the fields, her bare feet making silent shadows against the ground. She follows him to the pickup truck and then she climbs inside without a word, riding the bumpy road to the airstrip where he finally looks at her and says, "Guess you're coming along, aren't you?"
She doesn't speak.
Back in France, and he dreams of the places he's been, the wars he's fought. For the French Foreign Legion, and then the others. He dreams of Nicaragua, of Afghanistan, of Palestine, and always, always of that sweaty shack in Myanmar, and a little girl's eyes upon him.
He cooks her dinner, and then goes to bed, leaving his door unlocked. There's plenty of knives in the kitchen. He wonders if she'll make use of them.
She doesn't.
In the mornings she sits at the table, eating the food he gives her, and then she goes out into the fields, ghostly Asian girl in the French countryside — he wants to laugh, but instead he takes a piss and then has a smoke.
She doesn't leave. He doesn't get rid of her.
She jumps rope in a rhythm that he can count by metronome, and he takes young men into the shooting range and teaches them how to kill their enemies. She watches, all the while, and some of the men talk to her, but most of them don't. She's background noise to them, as still as a stone, and Bernhardt thinks that's fine. One of the men who does talk to her ends up getting too close, too drunk, and Bernhardt is forced to break his fingers in three places.
Another one of the trainees looks at her, and then looks at the door, and winces. "It can't be healthy," he says. "Girl her age, she should be going to school. Making friends."
Bernhardt stares at him coolly. The man makes his apologies.
"She does go to school," Bernhardt says later, icy eyes in his sunburned face. "It's only because it's summer that you see her around so often." He doesn't mention that half the days he sends her off to town, he leaves her by the school gate and makes sure she goes inside — otherwise the teachers will tell him she never shows up at all. She'll run into the fields like a wild animal and stay there all day. As for friends, ha. Likely story, that.
The first time he ever hears her speak, he has no idea what she's saying. It's Burmese, and he was only ever in Burma to fight. He can only recognize a word or two, and none of what she's saying in that sparse sentence which drags on like a famine.
"I don't even know your name, girl," he says, watching her clear the dishes after dinner. "I could call you anything I want."
She lifts one shoulder, shrugs.
"All right then," he says, and goes out to fix a broken window in the rain.
He takes her to the doctor, and each time she balks at going. "Come on," Bernhardt says gruffly, and he doesn't want to drag her along but most of the time he's forced to, because she'll dig her heels in and refuse to move. He has to carry her kicking and shouting into town, where everybody looks at him like he's a monster, because they know. They know he's kidnapped her, they know she doesn't belong.
She gets a physical and her immunization shots, and at the doctor's she shows fear for the first time. Tears are streaming down her face. When the long-suffering country doctor tells her to make a fist, she clutches her arm like a flag.
"No," she says in French. "No, no, no, no."
He buys her ice cream as a reward, but she lets the cone drop to the ground. "You killed my mother," she says in that soft, awkward French that surprises him.
"I know," he says, "but on the other hand, I never killed you."
She grows up. He doesn't know how old she is, but he goes by the doctor's best guess, and in any case — she grows. He has to buy her new dresses, new blouses, and when that isn't enough, he sits on the porch in the evenings and mends her ripped clothes. Hugo Bernhardt, mercenary and leader of men, working with lace and ruffles and dresses with pink felt pockets.
She watches him from the gardens, her knees dirty from where she's kneeling, fiddling with the plants. She loves that weedy, patchwork garden, and he sees her in the mornings when she wakes up even before he does. She goes into the garden and waters it from her little plastic can, and when she thinks he isn't watching, she hums.
Most days they don't even talk. They get up, Bernhardt trains, and they share their meals in a silence that's grown as familiar as her freckles.
He only realizes that something is wrong when he goes to town and sees the other girls her age, laughing with each other as they walk back from school. He's never heard her laugh, but why should she? He's never given her a good reason.
She still watches him from room to room. He still sleeps with his door unlocked.
"Is she your daughter?" Tenma asks, and Bernhardt isn't used to anyone being so forthright with him. Usually people are scared enough never to approach the question, and it's pretty obvious anyway that she isn't his daughter. Unless they think he raped some poor Asian woman in the midst of war — maybe they do think that, after all.
She isn't his daughter. She isn't his family. She isn't anything but what she is, always there, a quiet presence that moves through the house and the meadows, her small feet growing larger by the year.
"What should I call her?" Tenma wants to know.
Bernhardt says nothing. Tenma's frustration is palpable. Here is a man who is used to everything in its proper place, a surgeon who likes his world neat and orderly, as structured as the organs in an anatomy textbook. In Bernhardt's eyes, Tenma's only ever seen the battlefield from the other side of the operating table, behind antiseptic lines. He lives to save. He's never seen how brutal death is when you've got nothing else to care about.
"Call her whatever you want," Bernhardt finally says. She isn't his daughter, or his family, but when he looks out the screen door to see her playing in the grass, there's a feeling in his chest like a bullet.
The first time he ever hears her laugh, and he thinks of the women singing in Jerusalem, and of the taste of summer's first apples when he was a boy — a boy and not a soldier.
She laughs, and he thinks, I would take apart nations for you.
It's not forgiveness, not quite, but she holds out her hand to him in the rain. He accepts it, feeling her clammy skin against his, and they walk down the street and away from the police station.
They still don't speak, because here words are a currency bought cheaply. It's not until they reach his automobile that she looks up at him with her dark eyes, and she says, "I'm Thet."
"Thet." He runs it over his grizzled tongue, blood-price bought and paid. "Get in the car, Thet. You're going to get soaked." He gives her a nudge in the right direction, and watches as she scrambles into the backseat, dripping water everywhere, her hair plastered to her forehead.
In that moment he sees the future. He sees her as she'll be. Of all the soldiers he'll train, of all the mercenaries he'll make, she'll be the most dangerous. She'll be a seraph of destruction, death in three words and a stern mouth — and it's the last thing he wants, the very last. He wants to preserve her the way she is now, pattering around her garden with her skirts stained in mud, and it's foolish of him. He's grown sentimental. All girls grow up, and any girl who grows up with Hugo Bernhardt will grow up deadly.
Deadly but not dead, he thinks and he vows, because no one will ever touch her. No one will ever take away her daughters. No one will ever track her down and fire two shots into her brain. This is the legacy he'll leave her. This is the only gift he knows how to give.
Except it's not the only gift.
When she is sixteen, he hands her the gun. "Go ahead," he says. "You're old enough to understand the consequences." He walks away ten steps, and then he waits. He waits, and he waits, and all he hears is silence. The wind blows through the field, through the echoes in the forest.
She stirs behind him.
"It's time for lunch," he hears her say. When he turns around, he sees her set the gun aside and go into the house. It's noon, and he can smell the nikujaga on the stove — and when the wind floats through the kitchen and lifts her hair from her neck, he can hear her singing.