Festival for Three Thousand Women

by Richard Wiley

  “How much do you want?” he asked. “I’m an American, but I’m not rich.”

  “I need fifteen hundred won,” said the Goma.

  “Fifteen hundred,” Bobby said out loud. About five dollars. “I’ll give you a thousand but you have to pay me back.”

  “Of course,” the Goma said.

  Bobby took a thousand-won note from his pocket. That left him with three thousand more until the end of the month. But though the Goma had the money, he didn’t leave. Something else was on his mind.

  “My father was over eighty and I am now eighteen,” he said. “I should have a real job by now. I’ve been working in this inn ever since I was nine.”

  Bobby looked at the Goma. He had thought that he was no more than about twelve. He was a foot shorter than Bobby and he acted at least six years younger than he was. “What kind of a job would you like then,” Bobby asked. “If you’re eighteen.”

  “A real job, a job where you go to work and then come home. A job with a quitting time. I could make more than this every week.” He held up the thousand-won note Bobby had given him.

  Bobby nodded, about to say more, but he heard a commotion from a room farther down and, not wanting to be a bother to anyone, hurriedly pushed the Goma back, closing the door once more. He turned off his light again and stood there in the dark until the Goma went away.

  Bobby unrolled his bedding and lay down diagonally across his room, so that he could stretch his toes and still not touch the wall. He had almost been in a fight that night, saved only by the expert Judo Lee. Perhaps Bobby did not know enough about himself, but he did know that he was not a physical coward. He had had to prove that too many times at home, using his rampant bulk to subdue the muscular insults of those who were always in his way.

  He was sleepy and a little sick from the wine, but he was suddenly awake again, gratified by the thought of himself as far better off than the Goma. In America he had a place of his own, at least inside his grandmother’s house, but what place did the Goma have? In America Bobby had only his fat and the weakness of his impulses to worry about, but the Goma was pitiful and ugly and decrepit, and the thought of him made Bobby’s fatness seem, for a moment, almost beside the point.

  As Bobby let the sleep come back, he tried, as an experiment, to imagine the Goma’s life instead of his own. He could imagine the Goma quite easily, traveling into the country to bury his father, but he could not imagine what was in the Goma’s mind as he went.

  I am amazed how fat this American is. He is tall, like all Americans, but he has the shape of a Western pear, with most of its meat down low. I’ll wager that he weighs one hundred thirty kilograms, perhaps more. When he got off the train he dwarfed our poor Mr. Soh, but his size, rather than making him seem strong and fit, as is the case with Mr. Lee, gave him a helpless and muddle-headed look. His face is wide and his eyes bulge from it like those of a frog! Also he has poor posture and sits in his chair as if dumped there like a sack of rice. And he makes noise when he walks, which is good, I suppose, because it lets us hear him coming and we can prepare ourselves.

  It is odd to have an American in our teachers’ room and in our school, but it makes me understand how appropriate our word for foreigner is. The word means “outside person,” and all one has to do is observe this man to realize its aptness. He is outside of everything imaginable, and because of it he has no way of relating, no way of being among us, no way of partaking in our everyday lives.

  Ah, but this is too complicated for an old country man like myself. Let me be satisfied with the realization that he is “outside,” which is so obvious as to be evident to a blind man, and let me not spend so much time thinking about him and worrying about what it all means. Outside is outside, simple as that. It is the opposite of inside, and inside is normalcy, an ordinary view of things. The youngest teacher on our staff could tell me that.

  I have decided that I must say something good about this American before I close my diary for the day, and what I have chosen is this: his Korean, though I haven’t heard him say much, sounds better than I thought it would, and he is a good singer, who knows all the words to at least one song.

  Written as I sit in my study, watching the leaves fall from the plum tree in my neighbor’s yard.

  Decrease

  Six in the third place means: When three people journey together their number decreases by one.

  Bobby was having trouble with an old woman who hung about the train station and seemed never to go anywhere else. He’d seen her there on the night of his arrival, and now whenever he ventured that way she’d run at him, shout wildly, and try to catch hold of his arm. The second time he saw her he hadn’t been quick enough and she’d torn his sleeve, so now, whenever he walked that way, he took the Goma along. The boy didn’t hesitate to roll at her knees. He had no mercy and would hiss like she did whenever the occasion arose.

  Though the teachers at school weren’t happy about it, Bobby and the Goma were becoming friends. At least with the Goma Bobby could be himself, not always on guard, feeling as though he were on stage. And the fact that the Goma, like himself, was truly alone in the world made the friendship seem natural. To be sure, Bobby enjoyed the idea of having his own sidekick walking the streets ahead of him, taking the crazy women out of his path, but it was more than that. Bobby thought of it as a Don Quixote kind of thing, for though the Goma acted the part of his servant, he continued to speak to Bobby as if he were an idiot, thus reversing what Koreans considered their proper roles to be.

  During his first days in Taechon, Bobby hadn’t been able to recognize the utter hopelessness of the Korean the Goma used, but as the weeks passed he studied hard, and he improved. Now he found new verbs everywhere, added complex-sentence structure daily, and he had nearly mastered the honorifics, those difficult verb endings that give the Korean language its sliding scale, allowing it to be gross or majestic, belittling or grand, turn and turn about. And all this time the Goma didn’t change the way he spoke a whit.

  “Hey! You go school?” he would ask every morning. “Hey! Come go tearoom? Hot tea have yes?”

  His Korean was bereft of adjectives or prepositions, empty of such easy connectives as “but” or “because,” and generally contained nothing but robot directions. Do this. Do that. Go there. Eat this. And the odd thing was that he seemed instantly to have developed this stick-figure language of his upon meeting Bobby. Whenever the Goma was along Bobby could not speak to the real people of the town without him interpreting, shifting the language downward and blurting out obscenities. “Tell me,” the town druggist might ask, “have you found adjusting to Korean food difficult? Is our way of life causing you problems?” Before Bobby could absorb the questions and form intelligent answers using the learned Korean in his mind, the Goma would shout his own version into Bobby’s ear. “Korean food sticky-sticky? Korean life no good?,” and Bobby would somehow be forced to answer with nods and grunts, as if captured by the Goma’s way of speech and whisked away from the real thing.

  It was infuriating, but it drew Bobby to him nevertheless, and perhaps the reason was this: though the Goma was a bare-bones communicator he did have a way of seeing what the druggist, or anyone else, was really asking, and he translated the suspicion of cultural inferiority implicit in their questions, rather than the words they used.

  About six weeks after his arrival in Taechon, Bobby left the village for the first time, heading for a U.S. Army missile base, where he had been invited for Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving had always been a big holiday with Bobby, and he had looked forward to it with what his grandmother justly called gluttony. Now, though, after six weeks of half-ration Korean food, he was beginning to feel a particular looseness in the way his trousers fit, and he rode the train northward in an unusual frame of mind. Would being with Americans again feel strange? Would they once again be repulsed by the way he looked, and would he once again take up the methods he had continually relied upon for getting by, namely facial
tricks and a memory for jokes? Though he had been away from Americans for only a short time, he felt a certain tentativeness, and a bewilderment as he realized that he would have been willing to miss the meal.

  The train trip was uneventful and Bobby used the time to write a letter to his grandmother and a note to Mrs. Nesbitt, his grandmother’s closest friend in the Royal Neighbors lodge, and a woman whose youngest son was missing-in-action in Vietnam. Mrs. Nesbitt had always been kind to Bobby, but the son, Carl, whom he’d known since childhood, had always been a bully and a jerk. Once, at the beach near his house, Carl had seen Bobby in a bathing suit and had actually pushed his fist in among the rolls of Bobby’s fat. Bobby had held it there, bending forward and closing himself around Carl’s fist and slowly walking toward the water, warding off the blows from Carl’s other hand by the simple turning of his head. Bobby’s idea was to walk out until Carl’s head was below the water level, his own just above. Carl Nesbitt had begged then, and thereafter had hated Bobby completely, though from a distance. Still, Carl and Bobby had been called to their preinduction physicals together, and while Bobby had ballooned to two eighty and was classified unfit, Carl Nesbitt had been healthy and strong, excited to go. It was odd. Bobby had hated Carl all through school, but now he was writing Carl’s mother to say how sorry he was.

  When the train arrived at the village below the missile base an army truck was waiting, and the private driving it gave Bobby the peace sign as he opened the door. The ride up into the hills took half an hour, and during the trip Bobby lost whatever tentative feelings he’d had on the train. When they parked the truck, the driver, whose name was Ron, told Bobby that the colonel and some other Peace Corps volunteers were waiting in the officers’ club, but that if Bobby could spring loose after dinner he should come down to the Vil where Ron had a hooch. “Don’t get me wrong,” the private said. “The officers here are OK. But later on. You know, when you’ve had enough.”

  The officers’ club was a flat-roofed, low-built affair, and when Bobby walked in he immediately saw Cherry Consiliak, a black girl from Philadelphia whom he’d furtively ogled during training, and Larry Corsio, a guy he hadn’t known at all. They were drinking whiskey and talking to the missile-base officers, a colonel, and three lieutenants, all of them white and smiling.

  “Ah, the last arrival,” said the colonel. “Bobby, isn’t it? Come, let me get you a drink. Pull up a chair.”

  A table set for seven took up most of the space in the room. Cherry Consiliak, it was easy to see, had decided the predinner configuration by where she sat when she came in. She was a beautiful girl, and though she and Bobby hadn’t been close during training, they had often smiled and said hello. Then she had seemed completely out of reach. Now, however, she jumped up and greeted Bobby like a relative.

  “Hey!” she said, “God, I’ve missed you!” She gave him a hug and kissed him across his nose and eyes.

  Bobby shook hands with Larry Corsio, and all three of them laughed. It seemed their solitary experiences, over the weeks, had brought them closer together, though they hadn’t seen each other at all.

  The colonel introduced Bobby to the other officers, and when the introductions were over Cherry and Larry Corsio made room for him between them on the couch.

  “This has been the longest six weeks of my life,” said Cherry. “Has anyone gone home yet? Has anybody quit?”

  Bobby said he didn’t know, but Larry said that nobody had. He shook his head and smiled. “We’re all going to make it.”

  Cherry laughed and smiled and held Bobby’s hand as if it were he who had voiced such optimism. She leaned up to give him another little kiss, and his heart began to skip around, pounding out a nervous rhythm in his chest. What was going on?

  “How much weight have you lost?” Larry asked. “In six weeks I’ve lost twenty pounds! There is a scale in the colonel’s room. Let’s go see what it says about you.”

  Bobby, content on the couch, was completely unprepared for this. He was lighter than he’d been in years—he knew that—but he didn’t want to stand up on a scale in front of this girl. His weight had always been an enemy when it came to the women he had liked, and though he had no idea what he weighed now, he didn’t want to find out.

  But Cherry, whose body seemed perfect to Bobby, smiled and said that she had lost five pounds herself, so Bobby let himself be pulled from the couch.

  “We’re going in to weigh Bobby,” Larry told the colonel, and the officer bowed gallantly, throwing his hand out as if to show them the way.

  The colonel’s room was small and Larry dragged the scale to the middle of the floor. Before Bobby got on, he took off his shoes and peered at the gauge to make sure that it was set on zero. Cherry was right next to him, so he sighed and stood up on the thing, stealthily trying to cover the needle with his toe.

  Larry knelt down. “What did you weigh when you got here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bobby mumbled, “two fifty, maybe.” He knew, of course, that it had been two fifty-five.

  Bobby could feel himself growing red, but when Larry pushed his toe out of the way and said, “Two thirty-seven!” he was surprised. And when Larry and Cherry both started laughing, he got down off the scale and joined them, mindlessly happy with the news. He hadn’t weighed two thirty-seven since high school.

  When they all finally stepped back into the main room the three lieutenants told them that it was time to eat. The lieutenants separated them, as they were no doubt assigned to do, and Bobby was sharply disappointed at seeing Cherry seated so far away. What an easy girl she was to talk to. Why in the world had he not thought so before?

  The lieutenant in charge of Bobby was Gary Smith, who was in his twenties and seemed quiet and self-effacing. From Chicago, he had gone to officers’ candidate school and said that he’d actually volunteered for Vietnam. “That way I was sure I’d end up somewhere else,” he said.

  Gary Smith and Bobby sat at the end of the table farthest from Cherry, who was with the colonel at the head. The table was nicely set and despite his weight loss, Bobby was salivating like a dog when the wine came and the colonel raised his glass to propose a toast.

  “This is special,” he said. “The army is thankful that these Peace Corps volunteers are with us, and we are thankful that America’s presence in Korea is not so totally military as it once was.” He raised his glass a little higher. “To Larry, Cherry, and Bobby,” he said. “And to peace.”

  They all said, “To peace,” but right after that the turkey came and then the potatoes and the dressing and the rolls, and Bobby forgot everything else. Though he tried for some decorum, he ate like a maniac, hardly stopping to taste his food. The one saving factor was that as he looked down the table he discovered that he was not alone. He was among people now who all ate the American way, finishing everything in less than twenty minutes, with only a little conversation to get in the way.

  After dinner there was pumpkin pie, and then the colonel excused himself, saying he was the duty officer but that they could do what they liked, stick around for the movie, stay here and drink, whatever. Bobby saw the colonel touch Cherry’s arm before he left. “I’ve got a fine collection of Motown in my room,” he told her. “Feel free to go on in and listen. I’ll only be gone a while.”

  But by the time the colonel closed the door, Cherry was back at Bobby’s side and Larry was too. The three of them looked at each other and then sidled up next to Gary Smith.

  “Let’s walk on down to the Vil for a while,” said Larry. “How about we see what’s happening in the Vil?”

  Gary Smith went to his room and came back wearing his jacket, and the other two lieutenants shook their hands before heading off on their own.

  “Who told you about the Vil?” asked Gary. “Did anyone mention me?”

  Larry said he hadn’t heard anything, and Bobby mentioned Ron’s invitation, which had apparently been extended to them all in turn.

  “Oh yeah, Ron,” said Gar
y. “He’s one of the best guys.”

  Though Bobby had no clear idea what a “hooch” was, it turned out that Ron and Gary both had hooches in the same low building, on a dirt stretch behind a bar and hidden from view. They walked out of the officers’ club, across the missile-base grounds and out the main gate. The Vil seemed made up entirely of bars and tailor shops, each with a certain glossy sheen. In a way it was like being transported back to America and Bobby felt an unexpected little charge. The bar girls standing along the street said hello to Gary and smiled at the rest of them. And when they turned down the pathway Gary showed them, they found Ron standing there waiting, the line of hooches behind him.

  “That was fast,” said Ron. “The colonel must have gone out early.”

  “We keep these places as a kind of a getaway,” said Gary Smith.

  There were six rooms in the building, and Ron and Gary Smith had the last two. It was clear that they were buddies, though that wasn’t the impression Gary had given them earlier. And it was interesting to watch Gary change once he shed his responsibilities as an officer on the base. It was like walking down some poor American street with a guy who originally came from there.

  Gary’s hooch was darkly psychedelic, and as they ducked through the low door Cherry took a firm hold of Bobby’s hand. Once they were inside Gary went into the darkest corner and took his uniform completely off. Standing there in his underwear, he slipped into a pair of old jeans and a plain brown T-shirt. There were posters on the walls and pillows all over the floor.

  Once they were seated Ron reached over and pushed a button and the place was filled with music, a sweet country-blues tune by Mississippi John Hurt. Soon they had all arranged themselves on the pillows, forming a circle along the edges of the room, and Ron pulled out a noodle package that was stuffed full of marijuana. Bobby had smoked dope only twice before, both times in college, but he was willing to try it again. Cherry, however, surprised them all by speaking up. “I don’t know,” she said softly, “you guys go ahead. I think I’ll pass.” She apparently knew the song that Mississippi John Hurt was singing and she took a little of the sting out of her refusal by quickly singing along.