Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

  One afternoon a couple of weeks after her arrival, Meiko was at the lunch table admiring a ferocious little bruise that an officer had left on her ankle, when one of the older girls came over and said in fluent Japanese: “They will lose interest in you soon enough, you know.”

  Meiko gaped at the girl who had spoken at her. She looked about twenty years old, but it was hard to tell: her hair was matted against her head and her eyes had gone yellow from some form of disease.

  “The officers, I mean,” the girl went on. “They’ve a taste for the virgins — or at least the virginal. You have that look for now, but don’t worry — you’ll lose it eventually.” She half smiled then, revealing a mouth full of missing teeth. “Before long you’ll start to look like me and they’ll leave you alone. Leave you for the common soldiers.”

  Meiko said nothing.

  The girl glanced down then at the bruise on Meiko’s ankle, and above it at the weeping blister across her shin where the first officer had burned her with the poker. “The other girls have been murmuring about you,” she said. “Did you really bite a corporal on the penis your first night here?”

  Meiko nodded solemnly.

  The girl looked like she wanted to chuckle, but held it in. “You shouldn’t resist them so much. They’ll kill you if they think you’re too difficult to handle. If you want to live, then you should follow the rules and accept what they want from you. If you want to live, then just do what needs to be done. Make sure they wear the sack, make sure you clean yourself, give your tickets to the manager on time, and don’t make a fuss — about anything. If you want to live, be a ghost. Be anonymous.”

  Meiko licked her lips. “Do I want to live? Should I want to live?”

  The girl did chuckle then. “My name is Natsuki,” she said. “That’s not my real name, of course. What’s yours? What’s your not-real name?”

  “Meiko.”

  Natsuki placed a hand on the back of Meiko’s neck and leaned in close. Whispered low, so the house wouldn’t hear. “You bit a corporal on the penis, Meiko. Trust me — you want to live.”

  Natsuki proved to be an expert at anonymity, at being the sweet silent flesh that the men expected to find on the other side of a stall curtain. Her background was similar to Meiko’s: she had attended a private school for girls in Pyongyang before being taken away, and she was fluent in Japanese. She took it upon herself to teach Meiko how to be just another nameless spectre living in the house, as opposed to a girl with a reputation for defiance. “I consider it my obligation, as your unni,” she said. So strange, Meiko thought, to hear Natsuki speak even a single word of Korean. Unni: an older sister, but here meant as a female friend who is older than you are. “Firstly, you cannot blame the soldiers for their tantrums. They see all this as a simple transaction. They give money to the manager, the manager gives them their ticket, they give the ticket to you, you give them service. Refuse to service them, or refuse to service them in the way they wish, and they feel cheated and perfectly within their right to go berserk on you. So don’t refuse them.” Be pliant, she said. Eat quietly. Don’t ask questions. Don’t breathe loudly. Don’t even let them see you go to the bathroom. Achieving anonymity made respecting your own role easier. That meant collecting your tickets and guarding them against thievery, and making sure that the house manager accurately recorded your day’s take in the big ledgers. Meiko noticed that Natsuki always pushed her way to the front of the line to have her tickets counted, standing over the podium and staring at the manager’s hand to make sure he wrote the numbers down correctly. “The ledgers are everything,” Natsuki told her. “It’s how we and our families will be paid when this ordeal is over. Endure whatever the soldiers want of you, Meiko — no matter how disgusting or violent — but make sure you’re paid. If the house sees these acts as nothing more than simple transactions, then treat them as such. But make sure you’re paid.”

  But Meiko couldn’t endure. Defying the men just came too naturally to her. This wasn’t a place of simple transactions. It was a battleground. Any number of things would enrage the soldiers, and trying to guess what wouldn’t was a fool’s errand. Even the sight of her monthly bleeding would make them ferocious, accusing her of deliberate poor timing. How could she not fight them, when nothing was off-limits, when every crevice of her body was open for exploration? And despite Natsuki’s promise, the senior officers were not losing interest in her; they continued to spend the night in her stall. They wanted to bury themselves deep in her folds, clutch her to their fat chests, violate her body in the most horrendous ways. Even insisting that the soldiers follow the most basic rule of the house — wear a sack — grew more difficult as the weeks and months went on. Before long, of the forty-odd men who raped her each day, a full third of them didn’t put on a condom.

  And so. Each scar on Meiko’s legs came to represent a moment of resistance against the men, a trophy she had earned for herself. It was her legs that aroused the soldiers’ passions the most — but they were also what the men took out their frustrations on when she refused them certain acts. They “loved” her legs; the soldiers would rub their crotches into her calf, run their fat tongues along her ankles, suck her toes, tell her how the shape of her knees reminded them of their mothers. Yet if Meiko defied the men in any way, it was her legs that they would lash out against. They would burn her thighs with their cigarettes, stomp on her shins, pierce the flesh of her calves with their knives. To her, it seemed like such a Japanese thing to do — to vandalize that which they found beautiful.

  It was around April that Meiko first spotted the sesame seed-like bumps cropping up on the lips of her poji. They were bright white, oily, and burned with an insatiable itch. No matter how often Meiko scrubbed the disinfectant from her little ceramic bowl into herself, the bumps would not go away. She knew what awaited during their monthly doctor’s examination if she couldn’t get them to subside. The girls were well aware of the army doctor’s dreaded “606” injection, used on them to combat diseases that the men passed around. Natsuki had somehow learned the clinical names for this treatment — Salvarsan, arsphenamine — but to the girls, it was known simply as 606, or sometimes “the rat poison.”

  In the line outside the doctor’s tent, Meiko held Natsuki’s hand in a state of dull panic. “The first time is always the worst,” Natasuki told her. “The first time for everything around here is the worst,” Meiko replied. When it was finally her turn, she pried herself away from Natsuki’s grasp, entered the tent, climbed onto the examination table, and laid back as she was ordered. There were fresh cuts and burns on her legs, but, as usual, the doctor paid them no attention; he was concerned only with whether she was carrying a disease that she could pass on to the soldiers. He shoved her legs apart and looked at the curtains of her genitals. Stuck his fingers inside her, jerked them vigorously, gave her clitoris a thumbing on the way out.

  “You need the injection,” he said, throwing her legs shut again. Meiko began to weep as she sat up. She stared at the tent wall, unable to watch him prepare the enormous syringe.

  “You really should wear the saku,” the doctor said, tapping at air bubbles. “That is, after all, what they’re there for.” We don’t wear the saku , the men do, she thought, but didn’t bother pointing it out. The doctor rolled up Meiko’s sleeve and pulled her arm taut. “This will hurt immensely,” he said, and jabbed the needle into the flesh just below her shoulder. Instantly it felt as if her arm had been severed at the point where the needle went in. Meiko screamed at the tent walls, felt nausea erupt in her stomach, and her bowels twist like hoses. The doctor lifted her gruffly off the table and thrust her toward the tent’s back door. She staggered outside into the cool spring air, fell forward, and vomited onto the grass. Doing so didn’t quell her nausea; in fact, her retches only stirred up the arsenic racing through her blood until her whole body became a water skin of poison, a battle between what the soldiers had infected her with and what the doctor had given to cure it.

/>   And on it went. Convulsing chills. Vice-like stomach cramps. Vomiting and diarrhea, involuntary evictions from opposite ends of her body. And Natsuki, sitting next to her on the grass, unbothered by the stench and mess and willing to hold her hand through it.

  “You should go,” Meiko said faintly, spitting out chunks of vomit that had gathered around her gums. “Your afternoon off. Should find something better to do than this.”

  “Foolish girl,” Natsuki said. “I’m your unni. I’ll stay with you for as long as I’m allowed.”

  And she did. Kept Meiko company through the dry heaves and debilitating shivers, the dribbles from her anus. Stayed until the sun touched the western horizon.

  “It’s time,” Natsuki said morosely. “I have to go get raped now.”

  “Okay. You go get raped. I’ll talk to you later.”

  A nearby soldier caught the nonchalance in their Japanese and came over to grab Natsuki by the arm. “Back to your stall, Chosunjin!” he barked, throwing her toward the house. “Go earn some money for your family.” Then he looked down at Meiko, at the vile paddies of sick that orbited her. “Ugh. Why don’t you wear the sack, you slut?”

  The 606 did its job. Soon the manager began allowing soldiers to line up outside Meiko’s stall once again. A cruel irony: the 606 had left her too enervated to fight with the men about putting on a sack, and many more than usual enjoyed her without one. She became like a latrine for the boys, only instead of relieving their bladders they relieved their lust – fully into her. The line ups were getting longer. The soldiers’ hollers of hayaku! hayaku! were a constant chorus in the hallway. Anxious men watched from the threshold of her stall with the curtain pulled back, their faces like moons floating in her doorway as one of their comrades did his business with her. As soon as he finished, the next soldier entered, practically climbing over his friend to get at Meiko, sometimes rolling on a saku, sometimes not. Her genitals had now swollen into some mutant fruit, stone-hard and leathery.

  Spring turned to summer and summer into fall. Something was happening beyond their stalls, out on the battlefield — a growing sense of hopelessness among the platoons as defeat loomed over their heads. The manager became less fastidious about making the men adhere to the rules: stopped bothering to keep the intoxicated boys out of the hallway, allowed a few soldiers to slip into the lines with the non-commissioned officers in the evenings. The war was practically lost, they said. We’re all going to die tomorrow, they said. So why not enjoy these fleeting pleasures while we can? One day, Meiko peeped outside her curtain to see a girl getting raped in the hall: she was down on all fours with a fat, oily soldier pumping away behind her with other soldiers cheering him on and the manager making tacit requests to take it back to a stall. When the soldier finished, he pulled up his loin cloth, grabbed the weeping girl by her throat and dragged her outside. No one ever saw that girl again.

  Meiko was awoken in the middle of the night by a boom that shook the house. Instant voices of panic, of men and girls, above and around her, and the sudden shuffling of feet, of racing bodies through the hall. She sat up on her mat. Another boom, and a wave of muddy earth slapped the side of the house. Meiko screamed, grabbed for her clothes. Her curtain snapped and there was the manager. “Out, now! Out of the house now!” The hallway was full of smoke. Meiko raced into the plumes and fell in line with the herd of other girls thumping up the planks while soldiers weaved among them in a dash to the doors. Out into the courtyard and Meiko saw the night sky glow a fiery orange. Shells whined over their heads and ripped into the ground. “Trucks! Get into the trucks!” someone was screaming. Meiko found Natsuki, nearly crushed into her. “What’s happening?” she screamed at her unni, but then an explosion blew through the centre of the house behind her, sending wood splinters into the air like a cloud of startled bats.

  “Truck!” Natsuki bellowed over the noise. “Find a truck. Find a truck.”

  They did, at the edge of the courtyard. Hustled aboard with other girls, found wooden crates to sit on under the canvas top. When the truck was full, it tore out from the grounds and sped toward the dirt road leading down the hill. Meiko looked to see other trucks lining up behind theirs, each full of girls and soldiers. A hard whistle and then the vehicle directly behind theirs sank under an eruption of flames, a mad bang that seemed to suck the very air out of her mouth. Meiko buried her face in her arms and screamed. Felt Natsuki’s face on the back of her neck.

  By dawn, everything was silent except for the rattle of the truck beneath them. Meiko awoke to look at the other frightened girls sitting on their crates. Some were holding one other, others were alone in their terror. Meiko turned to see Natsuki staring at her.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “We’re moving houses,” Natsuki replied. “I’m surprised we lasted this long. I’ve moved four times since becoming a comfort girl.” Her face grew serious. “That was the worst of the moves. By far.”

  Four days south and they arrived at their new comfort station. Not a house this time but just a camp of wooden structures cobbled together in the dip of a valley. A scorched forest of bare, ashen trees lay just east of it, offering no protection from whatever lay beyond. Much worse than the house, Meiko thought as the girls were unloaded from the trucks. No “comfort” here at all.

  The girls lined up in front of the hospital tent for their examinations. Natsuki stood behind Meiko and held her hand while they waited their turn. Why was the line moving so slowly? Meiko thought. It didn’t make sense: There were fewer girls now than before, and yet each one seemed to take her sweet time inside the tent. At one point, an officer came by and bullied his way inside to yell at the doctor for taking so long; the girls could hear their curt argument echoing off the canvas from where they stood.

  When it was finally Meiko’s turn to step through the flap, she found the doctor standing in the pale light, his face soft and unsmiling and yet somehow kind. “Please come in,” he said. “Do you speak Japanese? What is your name? Come in. Please, come. Don’t be afraid.” He was an older man, maybe in his forties. His uniform was neat and well-pressed. He took Meiko’s hand and helped her up as if she were a lady climbing into a carriage. And then he surprised her by asking permission — permission — to look between her legs. Meiko laid back and spread herself for him by rote, not trusting this kindness. But the doctor’s fingers were warm and gentle on her. She could sense his eyes fall on the scars of his legs, could feel him wanting to ask about them. But he didn’t. When he finished his examination, he sighed and helped her back up. “I’m sorry, my child,” he said. “But you need the injection.”

  So in went the 606, the blinding pain and the flush of poison that seeped right into her organs. The doctor told her to go next door to a shack of cots that he had set up for sick girls like her, a quiet place where she could recover. Meiko left the tent under a cloud of nausea and weaved across the camp’s macadam of earth. Found the shack, found a cot. Climbed onto it, collapsed under the heaves and her fading consciousness. Waited for Natsuki to come and stay with her like she had before. Twenty minutes, an hour, but Natsuki didn’t come. The afternoon bled into evening and there was still no sign of her unni. Just these other girls on other cots, lost in the haze of their own injections of 606.

  Meiko was out of commission for nearly a month this time. Except for the occasional soldier sneaking into the shack at night and climbing aboard her cot, she was left alone to recover. For those four weeks, she saw no sign of Natsuki. When the doctor came by to check on her, she asked about her friend. “Which one was she?” he asked. How can I describe her? Meiko thought. Aren’t we all the same to you, the same mounds of flesh? “I think I know who you mean,” he said. “I’m sorry, my child. She was not ill, but your friend was … she was carrying something else.” He lowered his eyes. “The arsephenamine … it can kill more than just disease. If you give a strong enough dose, it can kill something else. Your friend … your friend is alone where she is, to recove
r. I’m sorry, but you won’t be seeing her for a long while …”

  It took another month before Natsuki resurfaced, floating into the girls’ mess one day to collapse next to Meiko. She was as pale as snow and large chunks of her hair had fallen out. Meiko embraced her unni and wept into what was left of her shoulder.

  “The doctor was kind to me,” Natsuki said, almost in a trance. “Did you not find him kind?”

  Meiko sobbed and nodded.

  “He offered me a choice. The injection — or the hook.”

  “Don’t speak. Don’t speak, my unni.”

  “Stupid me — the hook would have made more sense.” She ran her tongue over her bloated lips. “It’s unpleasant, but only for a few minutes. They stick that wire inside you as far as it will go and then just pull the whole mess out. Instead, I asked for the injection. Why did I do that?” She sucked air through the space left by her missing teeth. “Maybe I wanted two months off.”

  “Did you know? Natsuki, did you even know?”

  “How could I? I haven’t had my period in two years. Too many diseases. But the doctor said it will never happen again. Not for as long as I live.” The leathery flakes of Natsuki’s face quavered. “The 606 made sure of that.”

  Fewer men lined up outside Natsuki’s stall when she was eventually allowed to go back to work. The extra doses of 606 had left her hideous. There were days when she had no tickets to return to the manager at all. Meiko watched as her unni shook her empty ticket box over the manager’s podium in a fit of melodrama. “What, don’t the boys want me anymore?” she said. She threw her box down, then raised her skirt and waggled herself at the manager. “I still have one of these, you know.” The manager came around the podium and kicked her to the floor, kicking her again when she began to laugh. “Back to your stall,” he said. “You sad old hag. Maybe one of our brave men will take pity and fuck you like the dog you are.”