by Kim Soom
Setting the folded blanket aside, she wipes the floor with her hand and gathers the dust and the bits of thread and flakes of skin and strands of gray hair into a tiny ball.
“And then there’s me!” she mutters.
Leaving the television on, she goes out to the veranda. As she’s about to step down to the yard, she flinches. A dead magpie, beak tucked beneath a wing, lies next to her copper-colored shoes.
Nabi, her cat. Four days ago it brought her a baby sparrow, tiny and feeble as a newborn’s untouched hand. Yes, the birdie she saw practicing aerial maneuvers in the alley. Over and over it soared and plunged down the obscure, sunless alley devoid of trees and plants. When she ventured near, the mother sparrow shrilled an emergency alert from her lookout somewhere aloft. The startled birdie was gone in a flash, as if sucked into a rain gutter. All she wanted was to enjoy its amazing tricks, but no, she realized forlornly, to the sparrows she was a terrible presence.
She sits huddled at the edge of the veranda, legs draped over the edge, looking back and forth at the dead magpie and her shoes. It’s odd how the more she looks the harder it is to tell them apart.
Nabi is nowhere to be seen. Sometimes the cat announces its presence with plaintive yowling, otherwise it makes its prowl unheard and unseen. There’s only the dwindling supply of food and water in the plastic bowls she sets out that tells her it’s visited. It’s a stray she found lingering by the faucet. She fed the emaciated creature some anchovies left over from broth and that’s how they connected.
Are alley cats the only creatures that offer their prey to their master rather than consuming it themselves? They’re like war trophies, the mice and birds Nabi leaves on display next to her shoes. Like today’s offering, the first such gift was also a dead magpie. Take it back! Unfazed by the tongue-lashing, the cat sprawled out instead on the cement surface of the yard and the following day deposited another gift next to her shoes. This time a mouse.
It knows I get the jitters seeing the results of its hard work! She cringes at the thought of the cat offering its kill just to please her.
Today’s prey is more frightening and ominous—because she’s just heard that another one has passed?
The ash-gray beak of the magpie is open the width of a small grape, revealing the crimson inside. As if someone spit a drop of blood there.
She wonders if Nabi caught it in the first light of dawn.
She extends her right foot toward the shoe at the base of the veranda, only to jerk it back, realizing her foot was targeting the magpie instead.
As she approaches the faucet her head perks up—in the alley a magpie is calling. She imagines the cawing issuing not from its vocal cords but from the tip of the beak that’s been pecking at earthworms and digging into mouse guts.
Her younger sisters were summoned by their mother every time they heard a magpie. One day she, the oldest girl, left to gather marsh snails and never came back. When after a year she was still missing, Mother began calling to the younger girls, “Go see where that magpie is!”
“But why, Mother?” the girls would ask.
“Maybe that’s where your big sister’s body is.”
At the call of a magpie Mother would stop what she was doing, whether stoking the firebox or dipping soy sauce from the crock pot in the yard, and tell the girls to go find it.
The girls shrank like violets and dared not approach the magpie. But Mother would insist, and then Number Two would put on her act, going instead to the sweet potato patch and returning to report that Ŏnni wasn’t there.
If her mother were still alive she’d want to ask, For goodness’ sake, why didn’t you go look yourself instead of sending my poor little sisters?
When five years had passed and her oldest girl hadn’t returned, Mother picked half a dozen ears of corn from their kitchen garden and went to see the fortune teller who lived out behind the tobacco patch. “She crossed the sea and she’s dead and gone.” Hearing this, Mother adopted a nightly ritual of setting out three bowls of water—one on the soy sauce crock, one on the crock of fermented soybean paste, and one on the crock of hot pepper paste—and bowing to each. No matter that the soybean paste crock was empty, the soybean mash that would have filled it having been nibbled up already by the hungry girls.
Father was a day laborer whose earnings couldn’t keep the family fed day in and day out. Mother for her part was never able to memorize the Oath of Imperial Subjects—a necessary condition for obtaining food rations from the colonial administration. So she scrounged the dregs left when others crushed their soybeans for oil and fed them to the children. And when she put in a day at the local treadmill, she gathered the chaff, added radish greens to it, and made porridge.
The insistent cries of the magpie remind her of her mother saying, “Go see where that magpie is.” But if she were to go to where the magpie is calling now, surely what she would find is she herself—a girl without a stitch of clothing on her bony body, her ankles lashed together by a soldier’s belt.
The soldier’s eyes were the color of pus. When she tried to escape his clutches, he undid his belt and the next she knew, he’d tied her ankles together. And when she closed her eyes in resignation, he assumed she was dozing off and slapped her back and forth. Eyes snapping open, she looked daggers at the man’s red-hot, contorted face; it had turned so strange and scary.
The soldiers who visited her body, each and every one of them, wore the ugliest expression they could manage.
The one who’s left, the last one, maybe it’s her? The one who declared on national television several years ago that there was no way in hell she would die until she heard those words? Those words had to come from a certain source and no other, not even God in Heaven.
She who had waited all her life to hear those words, it had to be Kunja. She who had kept her silence all those years until that day on tele-vision when suddenly she opened her blouse, declaring that she couldn’t speak out unless she displayed her naked body for all to see.
And then she’d stripped off her undergarments and there it was, front and center on her belly, the scar that looked like a rusty zipper. “If they’d just removed my baby . . . then I could have had another one, I could have lived. But no, they cleaned me out, womb and all—how could they do that? And I never knew it—I tried to get pregnant, tried every fucking trick, I went to the temple, I prayed to the Buddha, I prayed to the three spirits, I tried, dammit, I even had a mudang do her song-and-dance!”
When 16-year-old Kunja got pregnant and her belly began to swell, they said, “The bitch is young and pretty, low mileage on her, can’t afford to trade her in yet, so just take out her uterus.”
More than sixty years ago she paid a visit to Kunja’s home village. The two girls were the same age and she missed her terribly.
North Kyŏngsang Province, Ch’ilgok County, Chich’ŏn Township . . . she kept repeating the address to herself. And there was her home at the end of an out-of-the-way sickle-shaped road, just as Kunja had told her. The barley in the fields was turning golden yellow on the stalk.
Even now she can picture the bean-sized birthmark beneath Kunja’s mother’s nose.
“And who are you, young lady?”
“I’m Kunja’s friend.”
Hearing this, the woman peppered her with questions. “Were you with her at the thread factory in Manchuria?”
When she didn’t answer, the woman followed with, “Didn’t she leave Manchuria?”
“You mean she’s not here?”
“No! Didn’t the two of you leave together?”
“No, we didn’t.” She didn’t have the heart to tell the woman that they had left together but had gotten separated along the way.
“How come?”
“I wonder about that myself.”
“How I wish the two of you had come back together!” the woman wailed, and with tobacco-stained fingers grabbed her arm as if the arm itself were Kunja.
She was about to leave when the woman detained her sa
ying she should eat first. Then she disappeared into the kitchen to stoke the firebox and make barley rice. Hearing that Kunja’s friend from the thread factory was visiting, the other villagers dropped their work and rushed in from the fields.
A woman with missing teeth was the first to pounce. “Why didn’t my daughter come back?”
“Who is your daughter, ma’am?”
“Hŭisuk! Our Hŭisuk went with Kunja to the thread factory in Manchuria.”
When she didn’t respond, a villager wearing the dark, baggy pants that were standard attire for women in the countryside took her hand and asked, “How is our Sangsuk? Is she well?”
“Sangsuk?”
“Yes, Sangsuk. She has big round eyes.”
“How come my daughter Myŏngok didn’t come back?” another woman asked.
“I’m not sure . . .”
The neighbors left, distraught, and Kunja’s mother asked her, “So you’re the only one who came back?”
Am I the only one who survived? She felt guilt clogging her throat so that the barley rice wouldn’t go down.
Is it a sin if you’re the only one who survives? Even if the place you survived is hell?
Glued to the window, she looks out at the alley. The diamond-pattern screen is rusting where the paint has peeled from it. A sliver of sunlight pricks her face.
Her gaze is fixed on the blotches of mold on the alley walls. A gust of breath explodes from her. Seems like yesterday I heard forty-seven were left, but now it’s only one?
She retreats to the side, moving one foot then the other, over and over, like petals radiating from a flower. Each time she lifts a foot, air is sucked beneath the caramel-colored linoleum of the floor with its ugly punctures, scorch marks, warps, and scratches.
As if leaving behind a chapter of her life, she slowly turns away from the window.
No longer forty-seven.
What year was it, the year we lost nine, so that forty-seven were left? So before that . . . add nine to forty-seven. . . . But the simple math that works well enough when she’s pricing items at the market or in the shops has broken down.
She fetches a bag of noodles from the kitchen and goes out to the veranda. It’s a new bag, unopened, with which she can treat herself to a simple meal of noodles in broth. Perched on the edge of the veranda, she spreads a sheet of newspaper and empties the bag onto it. Picking up a noodle and setting it aside, she mumbles to herself, one; then repeats the sequence, two; then three; then four; . . . and finally fifty-six. Add nine to forty-seven and there you have it.
She returns the noodles to the bag and is just about to step down from the veranda when she looks down at her feet and her face tenses. Look at those dead magpies—what happened to her shoes! No, they’re shoes, they’re shoes, they’re shoes—but she just can’t remove her gaze from her feet.
She takes a break from the dishes and sits down on the floor. Something is moving in her crotch, creaking like a loose, rusty nail.
Poking with a nail was something else they did. Once when her overworked and swollen privates shut down, she was met with curses and the next she knew, they’d poked a nail inside her.
She’s taking a few light sweeps of the broom to the area surrounding the faucet when she catches sight of an army of ants swarming around a dead moth. How could a moth end up dead near the faucet? The next moment she’s nodding. Dead moths could be anywhere—inside the wardrobe, in the sink, in the rice bin.
Sŏksun ŏnni—born in P’yŏngyang, South P’yŏngan Province, died in Manchuria. Before arriving at the comfort station in Manchuria, she’d worked at a tobacco factory packaging cut leaves of Long Life tobacco.
“My shift lasted from eight to seven,” she said, “and I earned enough money in a month to buy half a sack of rice.”
“How’d you end up there?” said Hanok ŏnni; she sounded envious.
“I interviewed and had a physical. I’m small but I move fast and I have a lot of moxie, you know.”
One day a year later Sŏksun ŏnni had returned home from the factory and was steaming kidney beans when a pair of constables came by. One rode horseback while the other was on foot. It was two days before the summer solstice and the evening was luminous. The walking man told her mother she had to send Sŏksun ŏnni to a textile mill in Japan.
“He had big, bulging eyes and he said they’d come and get me five days later and to make sure I stayed home that day. If I ran away, he’d have the whole family shot. What could I do? Mom was wailing—no way did she want to send me off. All I could think of was those kidney beans I was eating. They were so tasty. And sure enough, five days later they showed up in the middle of breakfast and off I went.”
“My time came when I was eating barley rice wrapped in lettuce,” said Hanok ŏnni. “In comes Four-eyes with a stick up his ass and says we got to go now if we’re going to catch the train. I couldn’t even finish my meal. And here I am.”
“Who’s Four-eyes?” said Tongsuk ŏnni.
“Kim, the local Jap stooge. Every dog in my home village knows Four-eyes.”
Resting her broom against the veranda, she squats next to the moth.
The moth looks like a uterus. Her uterus, the army of ants sinking their tiny teeth into it and holding on for dear life reminding her of the line of Japanese soldiers jostling one another while awaiting their turn with her. She begins to gag.
Clenching her fist, she extends her right foot and stomps down on the ants, sending them scattering in terror. Looking at the squashed ones upside-down, legs flailing, she removes her foot, shuddering at what she’s done.
She takes her sleeping pad from the wardrobe and spreads it on the floor beneath the mirror. Sitting with her back to the veranda, she passes her hand back and forth along the pad. The afternoon sun slants deep into the west-facing veranda. Her shadow on the pad fills out like spreading urine. Lying down on the pad, she looks up at the ceiling.
She closes her eyes but sleep doesn’t come. No worries. She knows people can survive a lack of sleep.
For seventy years now there hasn’t been a single night that she’s slept soundly. For when her body sleeps her soul is awake, and when her soul sleeps her body is awake.
She opens her eyes and turns slowly onto her side. She passes her hand along the sleeping pad once more, as if waiting for someone to lie down next to her. But no one comes.
2
HER SHOES ARE always there where she’s put them. Always together, right shoe and left shoe, inseparable it would seem. The dusk settling over the shoes makes them look like a little girl’s.
She’s in her bedroom, sitting statue-like in front of the television. Sound carries from her room out to the veranda, but from there it would be difficult to tell if it’s coming from the television or her lips.
The woman in the program is bent like a sickle blade. She’s been cooking pibimbap for more than forty years at the same spot, she declares. Pork bones in a huge pot are being boiled down for soup stock. Next to the pot are a dozen bowls of vegetable-topped steamed rice ready to serve. The fresh soybean sprouts and strands of spinach and bracken fern cover every last grain of rice. The old stone masons are her regulars, the woman says.
The woman ladles enough boiling broth from the pot to scald the vegetables, then takes the bowl and returns the excess broth to the pot, carefully pressing the ladle against the rim of the bowl so no vegetables or rice escape. Steady and unspectacular, she repeats the process for half a dozen of the bowls.
The fingers of her left hand extend one at a time like the opening of a bud. A smile ripples across her face as she observes her open palm.
She often has visions of marsh snails squirming in the palm of her left hand. She imagines six of them in all—large, medium, and small—a nice little family of snails clustered in her palm.
Though she knows it’s only an illusion, she frets that the snails will fall off. And sure enough one of the large ones begins to slide until it dangles precariously between her
thumb and index finger. She retrieves it and back to the center of her palm it goes.
It’s only a froth-like illusion but the wiggling sensation sets her trembling.
She knows that snails have an incredible life force. Worthless-looking creatures they may be, but they can hold out forever outside the water that sustains them.
It’s been more than seventy years. Already . . .
It was more than seventy years ago, when she was gathering snails from the riverside marsh, that the men had appeared from out of nowhere and brought her up to the road. Where one man took her by the arms and another by the legs and she found herself being tossed into the back of a truck, suspended in air before crashing onto the floor of the cargo bin. Half a dozen other girls huddled there.
She can’t remember how many men there were—four or five?— only that they spoke Japanese among themselves. Their minder on the train from Taegu to Harbin was one of them.
Afraid they might kill her, she dared not ask where they were taking her.
All she could think of was how scared she was.
The truck stopped at an inn next to a stream and took on a group of girls. Far from being frightened like she was, they chattered away cheerfully, at one point cackling even. Before the truck left the inn she used the outhouse and on her way back spotted purple flowers on the hillside. While she gazed in wonder as if she’d never seen such flowers before, a girl approached. “Pretty, aren’t they?”
“Yes. What are they called?”
“Bellflowers.”
The girl was a head taller and wore a bell-shaped, knee-high black skirt with a long-sleeve, buttoned-up white blouse and geta.
“I can get you some?”
Without thinking, she nodded. As the tall girl headed up the slope for the flowers, one of the men yelled at her. Startled and flustered, the girl ended up trampling the flowers she was about to pick.
The crushed bellflowers remained stuck to the girl’s geta all the way to Harbin.