Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  I woke at dawn with my fingers dangling like bait in the water at the edge of the river, and a rope looped around my neck. Old-lady breasts, flattened and elongated from years of childbearing, flapped against the side of my head. When I tried to sit up, the breasts squawked, Aigu! The dead is sitting up! and swung away.

  Lifting my head against the noose, I could see that the breasts belonged to a gray-haired woman sitting cross-legged and naked on my clothes. Though her body was covered with wrinkles and age spots, her face was curiously unlined, youthful. I knew this was the Manshin Ahjima whom Induk had told me to find.

  She tugged on the end of the rope.

  Manshin Ahjima, I asked her, why am I tied?

  E-yah! the woman cried. The dead knows me! the old lady jumped to her feet, and the rope between us stretched taut.

  I lifted my hands to the rope, then pulled gently. The rope slithered from her grasp and onto the ground. Please, I said, why?

  The woman’s hand jerked as if she still held the rope. You were lost, she said, between this world and the next, and I was trying to lead you back. She lifted her breasts and scratched her scarred belly. Besides, you were scaring me, growling like an animal one minute, crying like a baby the next.

  The woman shuffled closer, then knelt to peer into my face. You aren’t a tiger spirit, are you? She held her hands out, palms down. If so, I am ready to go. I’ve tended the mounds, burned the incense for the spirits whose families have been lost or run away. I’ve seen and I’ve remembered which son was taken by the Japanese, which son was killed by bandits, and which went to Shanghai as a freedom fighter. I’ve ...

  The old woman stopped talking, blinked, then touched my hair. I’ve seen the tiger spirit haunt the graves before, she said, but only at night. You are just a little girl.

  When she called me a little girl, I remember I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl into a ball, cover my head, and call, Mother! Mother! as I did when I was very young and feeling alone, as I did from the rooftop of our home the night my mother died and I tried to catch her fleeing spirit. But I didn‘t, because I knew no one would ever again hold me in tenderness. Instead I stood up and looked around.

  And I saw that we were not in a village but in a graveyard. When I realized that the homes that I knocked at the night before were houses of the dead, I started shaking, and perhaps then I did start to cry.

  Here, Manshin Ahjima said, handing me my clothes. I don’t suppose a tiger spirit would need these rags to keep warm. And I don’t suppose a tiger spirit would have such messy hair. Tiger spirits are really rather prissy, you know.

  Manshin Ahjima stretched her arms above her head, then began to braid her sparse hair. Hard to believe I was a beauty, huh? she said. But it’s true; my husband couldn’t get enough of me, just like a dog. I had so many babies, I couldn’t even count them anymore.

  The old lady’s lips flapped, then stopped. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, to respond with a smile or a nod, but I could only stare at her mouth, watching for when her lips parted in a certain way and I could see the black gap where she had lost some teeth.

  Olppajin-saram, the mouth suddenly said. And again, louder, as if breaking a spell or casting one: Olppajin-saram. You’ve lost your soul. That is why you came to the graveyard. You were trying to steal someone else’s spirit, a wandering spirit, maybe, one that was confused about where it belonged.

  She lifted the rope from my head. This is useless, she said, throwing it to the ground. You need a pyong-kut, a healing ceremony.

  I asked her if she could help me.

  When she shook her head no, I became desperate. I begged her, telling her I would pay her for her services.

  Manshin Ahjima wrapped her braid slowly around her head and seemed to consider the possibility. She looked down at me, then eyed the pitiful bundle of my clothes lying by the well. I was embarrassed, not by my nakedness or hers but because I knew and she knew I had nothing to pay her.

  The old woman pulled her dress, white as death, around her freckled, flabby body and tied the sash tight across her chest. I cannot perform a kut for you, she said, because I no longer do the devil’s work. But I will help you because that is the Christian way.

  Manshin Ahjima bent to pick up a thin gold-plated chain, which she slipped around her neck. The old lady held the chain out so that I could see the tiny cross, smaller than my thumbnail, before she slipped it under the neckline of her dress. You see, she said, I’ve been saved.

  She would help me, she said, because I reminded her of herself when she first got the sinbyong, the possession sickness. And of her daughter whom she sent away to live with her grandmother when the spirits first began to visit her, many years ago. The spirits are very jealous, Manshin Ahjima explained. They cannot stand it if you love someone more than them.

  Manshin Ahjima touched my hair. Come, I will braid your hair for you, and then I will take you to the Pyongyang missionaries for food and clothes.

  The missionaries had saved her from starvation and damnation, and in return Manshin Ahjima let them call her Mary.

  Be prepared, she said. I think they call all of the girls Mary.

  We followed the train tracks into Pyongyang, keeping mostly in the bordering woods, though sometimes slipping onto a side road to make it easier on the decrepit ox pulling her cart. We depended on that ox not only for transportation but also for sustenance. Some nights, after failing to forage anything to eat, Manshin Ahjima would nick the ox under its shoulder blade to siphon off some of its blood. I learned to savor the taste of blood.

  To pass the days, Manshin Ahjima would tell me of the spirits who continued to talk with her. Sinjang-nim, the General, is the most powerful spirit, a giant-fighter, she said. And very sexy. He comes to me even now, waving his sword, demanding that I acknowledge him. It takes everything in my heart to call on Jesus Christ, Manshin Ahjima said, and even then, I can still hear the General whispering, whispering, planning his strategy.

  One day, a day when we had not even talked about her spirits or about anything other than the food we dreamed of eating, Manshin Ahjima started screaming. She jumped off the oxcart and ran along the road, stopping to scoop up rocks, which she threw into the air. I yelled at her to stop, to tell me what was wrong, but she only screamed louder, covering my voice with hers until we were both hoarse.

  After what seemed a long time but I know was not, she simply stopped. She dropped her rocks, stopped screaming, and climbed back into the cart. With scratched and bloody hands, she smoothed the wisps of hair that had escaped from her braid and smiled as if in apology.

  Damn jealous, those men. The Satan General and the Jesus God fight over me, she said, thrusting her chest forward. I am the arena of their power contest. And in their battle to possess me, neither has any pity for me. I just can’t take it sometimes.

  That was the day she taught me to find lost things, something she taught all her daughters, because, she said, a woman must always find her own way.

  Find the place of darkness within yourself, Manshin Ahjima explained, and imagine what you have lost. Then picture yourself in the last place you saw the object and spiral up and away, as if you were flying circles around that spot. Your spirit finds the object, so the better you can re-create the lost thing in your mind and in the spirit world, the more likely that you will find it in your hands again.

  When Manshin Ahjima urged me to try to find something I had lost, all I could think of was my mother. I could not see her face clearly; even then, so soon after the time my sisters and I buried her alongside our winter’s kimchee, the details of her face lacked focus in my memory. But she was all I could think of, and what I saw when my mind flew into its own darkness was a woman buried backward in a shallow forest grave, her face pressed against the earth, her mouth full of snakes.

  Induk’s voice erupted from Manshin Ahjima’s mouth: It is an omen.

  After I had described this vision to Manshin Ahjima, we no longer avoided people travel
ing away from Pyongyang. Instead Manshin Ahjima greeted everyone who looked and dressed Korean. I’ve had a vision from the spirits, Manshin Ahjima would sing out, about Korean independence! If they gave her money she would tell them my dream and explain to them that the snakes in the body of Korea would be slithering north to bite at the head of the revolutionaries. Send the warning, she would say, tell them to beware.

  One man, dressed in traditional yangban attire, seemed especially excited at the news. If your vision proves true, he said, I will be very rich. If your vision proves true, Sonsaeng-nim, Honored Teacher, I will repay you at the end of the year.

  Manshin Ahjima gave me a sly look and wrote down the name of her cemetery. Months later, toward the end of the war, I heard rumors that the Japanese had burned what they could in that cemetery, that they had dug up graves, desecrated bodies, and killed the caretaker, who might or might not have been Manshin Ahjima.

  The yangban gave us a handful of coins, promising more as he scurried away, and for the rest of that day we did not talk, merely listened to the muffled jingling of the coins we had wrapped against our skin.

  Manshin Ahjima told me that the people in Pyongyang were well fed, bigger and taller and bolder than the people from her village and mine. She told me that their skin was as pale as the milk they drank and smelled of, and that they never had to sweat in the fields. What I came to find out was that Manshin Ahjima was talking about the Americans, the missionaries, not about real people.

  We entered Pyongyang through what people called tongk- kolchon, shit alley, because of the stench of rotten pumpkins, and unwashed bodies pressed against unwashed bodies, and, most of all, the piles of maggoty feces that dotted every bare patch of earth.

  Animals, Manshin Ahjima said, hand over her mouth, as she stepped over a fresh mound of human dung.

  We walked past old women, younger than I am now, who picked through garbage and crowed when they found a scrap of food or material with which they could build a hako-bang, as the Japanese called the cardboard shacks a lucky few lived in.

  And we walked past a woman lying at the side of the road, a begging bowl atop her still chest and two small children clinging to her bloated legs and hands. They cried against their mother’s corpse, afraid to leave her side, afraid to stay, afraid to beg of the people stepping over and around them. I thought of my dream, and maybe I thought about my sisters and about what happened to me after my own mother died. I dropped the coins the yangban had given me into their bowl.

  Manshin Ahjima swooped down and plucked back half of the coins. You crazy? Give them this much, and someone will kill them for it.

  When I told her I only wanted to make sure they could buy something to eat, Manshin Ahjima told me that they would eat, that the missionaries would get them soon enough.

  Just as they got me soon enough.

  When we entered the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company building, where the missionaries hid from the Japanese, Manshin Ahjima began yelling.

  She was half dead, Manshin Ahjima bellowed. Crazy out of her mind, dangerous. Thank the good Lord I was able to nurse her back to health and bring her here.

  Manshin Ahjima pulled the cross out from under her blouse. Of course, she added, I spent all the money I had to feed her. I went hungry myself, you know.

  You have such a good heart, Mary Ahjima, the missionary women cooed around Manshin Ahjima. You will surely be blessed.

  Thank you, Manshin Ahjima said. I’m sure the good Lord will provide.

  Yes, the missionary ladies agreed, as they pressed money into her hands. He always does.

  Manshin Ahjima wrapped the coins in a strip of cloth, then slipped it under her skirt. After she had tied the cloth to her thigh, smoothed her skirts, Manshin Ahjima turned to go. Her eyes swept across me, but she did not look at me. I do what I can, she said. I do what I can, but my God is a jealous God, and I am in the midst of a war.

  Wait, I cried, but I did not recognize my voice. Don’t leave me, I yelled after her in words that did not sound like words.

  The missionaries held on to my arms. Cuckoo, one of them said. Unsure of what she meant, I could not tell if she was referring to me or to Manshin Ahjima. I cried out again for Manshin Ahjima, and I cried for my mother.

  In the end, I let the missionaries strip me down, burn my clothes, bathe my skin. I wanted to tell them that it would do no good; I would never become clean enough to keep.

  My daughter does not blink. She watches me with eyes that have not found their true color, changing from blue to gray, brown to green, with the light. I hold my finger in front of her nose; still she does not blink. My finger floats toward her open eyes, reaching until it touches the fringe of her lashes. Her eyes remain open with stubborn trust, and I think: How many betrayals will she endure before she loses that trust, before she wants to close her eyes and never open them again?

  7

  AKIKO

  When Manshin Ahjima stumbled out of the missionary house, fondling her thigh where the money—the price of my trust—was tied, she took my hearing with her. By the time the echoes of her footsteps on the wooden stairs of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company building had faded, I could not hear the sound of my own voice.

  As the missionaries pulled at my hair, my clothes, my arms, I watched their chattering mouths but could not make out what they were saying. Eventually I turned my eyes away and gave my body to them. After bathing, dressing, and feeding me, the women pressed a Bible into my hands and led me to a small room, a closet in the women’s sleeping quarters, that was not much bigger than the stall I had had in the camps.

  In the darkness of that room, I cried for Induk. She, like me, must have been deaf, for she never came. But then again, maybe I had not even called for her, my voice lost with my hearing.

  I considered finding her with the trick Manshin Ahjima had taught me, but I did not yet have the courage to envision the last place I saw Induk in this world.

  In the days that followed, the missionaries assigned me to various tasks about the house. Sometimes they put a broom in my hands, and I would sweep until they took the broom away. If they put me in front of a tubful of dishes, I would wash them until the tub was empty and someone drained the water. Once, they positioned me at a table piled with matchboxes and labels. With big mouth movements and exaggerated gestures, one of the lady missionaries showed me how to glue the labels on the boxes. I sat and glued until all the boxes had labels, and then I glued labels on the table until I had run out of labels. I was considering what else to glue, when someone relieved me of my duty.

  I would watch the broom scratch across the surface of the floors and on the stairs in front of the house. I could feel the water in the tub running down my hands as I rubbed my fingers across the smooth and resistant surfaces of plates and cups. And I smelled the pungent stickiness of the glue when I pasted the labels on the matchboxes, table, and chairs. But without the sounds of these actions, I had no way to connect them to myself. No way to judge time, distance, action, reaction.

  As I swept, washed dishes, pasted labels, followed gestures and pointing fingers, instead of hearing the broom or the water or the fat sucking noise of glue on paper, my ears were filled with memories of the comfort camps.

  Invading my daily routine at the mission house, shattering the gaps between movement and silence, were the gruntings of soldier after soldier and the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh. Whenever I stopped for a beat, for a breath, I heard men laughing and betting on how many men one comfort woman could service before she split open. The men laughed and chanted niku-ichi—twenty-nine-to-one, one of the names they called us—but I heard the counting reach one hundred twenty-four before I could not bear to hear one more number.

  Whenever I stopped cleaning or gluing to stretch cramping fingers or crack my stiff neck, I heard the sounds of a woman being kicked because she had used an old shirt as a sanitary pad. Or I heard a man sigh loudly as he urinated on the body wh
ere he had just pumped his seed.

  And always, a low rumbling underlying every step I took at the mission house, I heard the grinding of trucks delivering more men and more military supplies: food rations, ammunition, boots, and new women to replace the ones that died, their bodies erupting in pus.

  I remember thinking that I could not stop cleaning, washing, cooking, gluing, because if I did, the camp sounds would envelop me and I would be back there, trying to silence the noises I made eating, crying, relieving myself, breathing, living. As long as I was quiet, there was the hope that I would be overlooked and allowed to die in the darkness.

  Each day, I woke in silence, not sure of where I was. Then, when I sat up, saw the Jesus-on-the-cross hanging on the back of the door, and realized I was in the Mentholatum building with the missionaries, I would begin to hear the thunder of delivery trucks and the grinding metal of gears shifting. The rumbling of the trucks would get louder and louder, and I knew that if I did not jump out of bed and hurry into action, I would be delivered into the camps once again.

  I worked hard at the mission house, holding on to the labor to keep from spinning back into myself.

  Because I could not risk looking away from my chores, it took me a long time to recognize the others staying in the home. Every day, I met the same people over and over again as if for the first time. No matter how many times I would glance at the faces floating by and away from me, I was never able to catch and hold on to the individual features of each person.

  The missionaries saved several girls by pretending to hire them as employees of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company. Used as a shield from the Japanese, who, not trusting foreign influences, discouraged Christianity but encouraged businesses for the revenue that could be sent back to the Emperor, the Mentholatum and Matches building had been erected at the start of the Japanese occupation and now appeared generations old.