Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  My mother never heard her name again.

  When I was a child, my father would call her anae, wife, and the village ahjimas would mostly call her by my father’s name, Kim Uk. Or sometimes ttal omoni, the mother of daughters. Only when the time came to bury her did my sisters and I even wonder what name my mother was born with. In the end, we merely carved Omoni, mother, into the sixth plank of her coffin, the one that faced the sky.

  My mother died just before winter, during the kimchee-making time. Our family had harvested the cabbage and turnips from our field and were preparing to wash and salt them. My sisters and I had finished our day chores, and our mother had just rolled out the ceramic jars, each as high as her hip, that we would place the salted vegetables in overnight, when she began to complain about how tired she was. Still, she wrung the dripping, salted cabbage until her wrinkled hands stung from the brine. When all the jars were packed tight, my mother rinsed her hands in a bucket of clear river water and went to lie down.

  My sisters took that as the sign to prepare the back room for the night and went to spread out our sleeping mats. Instead of joining them, I went to our mother. Mother, would you like some water, some soup, a massage? I asked her, hoping to trade my service for a story. Want me to pull your white hairs?

  My mother touched her hands to my lips, then sighed, a long, tired exhalation, as if to shush me, but I knew from the way her eyes closed, lashes sealed against her blue-tinged skin. I put a blanket over her, as if she were only asleep. In Korea, whenever someone died, the oldest son took the dead person’s coat up to the roof and invited the spirit to return to the house to feast and prepare for the long journey to heaven. Instead of getting her coat, I, her youngest daughter, went to her special box and pulled out her red-and-blue wedding dress.

  I climbed onto the roof, sliding across thatching made slick with ice, and stayed there most of the night, holding her dress open to the wind until my body ached from the weight of the silk and from the cold bite of the stars. I waited on the roof, holding my omoni’s dress in the bitter night air, calling for her spirit to come back, calling, Come back, Mother, come back, until finally, after a sudden blast of wind almost knocked me from my perch, I folded the arms of her dress into myself and knew I held nothing.

  On the twenty-second anniversary of my mother’s death, I try to think of what I will tell my daughter about her grandmother, and I remember the box. In her special box, my mother kept treasures for times other than the present, among them: fingernails and newspaper articles; a red-and-blue wedding dress; gold thread that she was forever saving to sew her first son‘s, then later her first grandson’s, birthday coat; the fine hemp cloth with which she wanted, but would never have the time, to stitch her own shroud.

  As I prepare the chesa—laying out the table with my mother’s favorite foods, with wine, with a set of chopsticks and spoons for the members of my family, dead and alive, who will never eat from them—my daughter screams her displeasure from the crib she will not sleep in.

  My husband has tried to put her in it for the night, but each time she whimpers, I jump to her side. I do not want her to feel the bite of loneliness, to feel she has been abandoned. When I leave her in her basket to take a shower or do the laundry, I hear her frantic screams in the running of the water; yet when I run to check on her, I find her quietly contemplating her hands or toes.

  And each night, after my husband has fallen asleep in exasperation, I bring my baby to my bed, where we sleep, cocooned. The milk from my breasts fills her as she sucks from them even in her dreams; and the warmth of her solid body, the gentle waves of her breathing, soothe my own hunger.

  Now, as her cries subside into soft hiccuping chirps, I wrap my daughter into a towel, tie her onto my back, and prepare to introduce her to her grandmother. I pour the scorched rice tea and, bowing twice, present it to Induk’s spirit in gratitude, to my oldest sister’s spirit—wherever she is—in forgiveness, and finally to my mother’s spirit in love.

  While I sip, I try to think of the words to a prayer I can offer for my mother. I cannot. Instead I will tell my daughter a story about her grandmother. I sift through memory, and this is what I say: She was a princess. She was a student. She was a revolutionary. She was a wife who knew her duty. And a mother who loved her daughters, but not enough to stay or to take them with her.

  I will tell my daughter these things, and about the box that kept my mother’s past and future, and though she will never know her grandmother’s name, she will know who her grandmother is.

  Later, perhaps, when she is older, she will sift through her own memories, and through the box that I will leave for her, and come to know her own mother—and then herself as well.

  In the box I hold for my daughter, I keep the treasures of my present life: my daughter’s one-hundred-day dress, which we will also use for her first birthday; a lock of her reddish-brown hair; the dried stump of her umbilical cord. And a thin black cassette tape that will, eventually, preserve a few of the pieces, the secrets, of our lives. I start with our names, my true name and hers: Soon Hyo and Bek-hap. I speak for the time when I leave my daughter, so that when I die, she will hear my name and know that when she cries, she will never be alone.

  17

  BECCAH

  According to my mother, the rituals that accompanied the major transitions in a woman’s life—birth, puberty, childbirth, and death—involved the flow of blood and the freeing of the spirit. Slipping out of the body along pathways forged by blood, the spirit traveled and roamed free, giving the body permission to transform itself. Necessary but dangerous, these were times when the spirit could spin away forever, lost and aimless, severed from the body.

  “This is the blood of a lost spirit,” my mother told me when I first noticed the bloodied pad she unfolded from her panties each month. “Every once in a while a woman opens her mouth and a wandering spirit tries to take her body. I’m just spitting it out.”

  “What? How?” I mumbled, afraid to open my mouth.

  “When women are forced to bleed, we have to take care to bind our spirits to us, or they will get confused and wander away. Ejected from our bodies, the spirit flows out on the river of blood, losing its name and its place. Sometimes that yongson spirit will try to invade another woman’s body—maybe one that reminds them of the body they left behind. Sometimes they will catch a seed in a woman’s body and be born again, but most times they will die. See? Like this one.” My mother ripped the sticky pad from her panties, rolled it into a wad of toilet paper, and dropped it in the trash.

  “Will that ever happen to me?” I asked, unsure if I was referring to losing my spirit or bleeding out a stray.

  My mother reached into the box of maxipads and stuck a fresh one on her underpants to catch the blood of more dying spirits. “I will protect you, Beccah,” she said, “when the time comes. And I will pray.”

  But despite my mother’s prayers, her charms for my safety, her chants against Saja and Red Disaster, and despite my own efforts to still my body, I eventually bled.

  When I felt the knot of pain pulling in my abdomen, pinning me to my seat in Mrs. Abernacke’s ninth-grade homeroom, I folded my hands over my belly, picturing a beam of light soaking up the blood. The visualization had worked to suppress menstruation for more than two years, the flash of light cauterizing the wound between my legs, but this time I felt the light merge with my blood, rushing true and deep, thickening as it pounded against my tailbone and poji with heavy fists.

  While Mrs. Abernacke called attendance, I dropped my head over my desk. I imagined blood, sweet and sticky as syrup, soaking through my jeans and onto the plastic seat. I stayed down, closing my eyes when first bell rang and everyone left for first period. When I opened my eyes again, I saw that the only ones left were me and, toward the back of the room, Fiaso Rialto—whom everyone called Fatso. Fatso, a cushioned cheek piled like dough on the desktop and his large, fat-ringed arms hanging down the sides so that his knuckles grazed
the floor by his slippered feet, slept on even as Mrs. Abernacke stalked up behind him. She placed a hand against his neck, a caress really, and when he didn’t move, she knocked the back of his head.

  “Mr. Rialto!” His head snapped back and he looked around with red-rimmed eyes. “Naptime ended with kindergarten. Please gather up your belongings and proceed to your next class.”

  “Huh?” said Fatso.

  “Go,” said Mrs. Abernacke as she marched over to my desk. I expected a whack on the side of my head.

  “Miss Bradley, first bell has sounded. If you don’t want detention, please tell me why you are still lounging about in homeroom.”

  “I, uh, don’t know,” I stammered.

  “Then go on.” Mrs. Abernacke folded her hands across her chest, waiting for me to stand.

  I slid off the seat, keeping my eyes down, expecting to see a smear of red blood on the chair. Relieved to see nothing but a heart someone had carved, I bent to retrieve my backpack.

  “Oh, I see,” Mrs. Abernacke said. “You should have just told me. I’m a woman too, you know.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  “It’s a natural, though unfortunate, function. Let me write you a pass for the nurse.”

  “For what?” I asked. I held my backpack between us.

  “Please do not play games,” she said, looking pointedly at my pants. Then she frowned. “Didn’t you watch The Time of Your Life in fifth-grade health?”

  Instead of going to the nurse, I changed into my PE shorts and went home. I tried to sneak my pants into the laundry without my mother seeing, but she found me as I was rubbing Stain Stick against the crotch of my jeans.

  “It’s time,” she cried. “I delayed it for as long as I could, but now it’s time.” She grabbed the jeans from me, pulled the legs apart and wailed, “Oh, my poor baby! Does it hurt?”

  I pushed her away as she tried to hug me. “Quit it,” I told her. “It’s no big deal, just the facts of life.” And then I started to cry.

  “Aigu, ” my mother clucked as she ushered me into her bedroom. “It does hurt. Lie down.” She pulled the blankets to the foot of the bed, nestled me into her pillows.

  “I swallowed a spirit, Mom,” I said, half laughing.

  “No,” my mother said. “It’s your own spirit fighting to get out, wanting to travel. We must make the way safe for it to go and then come back.”

  “I was only joking,” I said. “I’m not a baby anymore that you can fool me with this stuff, you know.” And then I groaned as a spirit raked its nails against my womb.

  “Shh, shh,” she crooned, stroking my hair. When I closed my eyes, I felt my mother move away from me, heard the glass doors open onto the garden.

  I slept, sailing in and out of dreams, riding the waves of my first cramping. Through the night, my mother bathed my face and body with water that smelled sharp, like freshly cut grass, like newly unearthed roots. And as she stroked me, I dreamed I was swimming, then drowning, then climbing an embankment that eroded and dissolved as I scrambled toward the stars. I dragged myself over sand and stone, following the light, until I stepped on a bridge of fire and found a beautiful woman waiting for me.

  At first I thought the woman was my mother, then I realized it was myself. “My name is Induk,” the woman said through my lips. I looked into the face that was once my own and wondered who she saw, who stood in my place looking at the body that Induk now claimed.

  I looked at my new hands, trying to find a clue to my present identity, but as I looked, the hands melted, then dissolved into ash. Quickly I looked at the arms, the feet, the legs, and they, too, disintegrated. I knew I was being devoured by flame ravenous as a dragon, fierce as the sun. I waited, a thin column of ash, for the dragon’s breath, the wind that would blow my body apart.

  “You must come back across running water,” Induk said, exhaling, dispersing my ashes like pollen into the night air.

  When I woke the next morning, my mother said, “You must return across running water.” She pulled one of her white ceremonial gowns over my head and yanked my arms. “Come on.”

  I rubbed my stomach. “I don’t feel so good,” I whined, hoping she would leave me alone.

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why we have to do this.”

  “No,” I said, scrambling to the other side of the bed. “I have to go to school.”

  My mother ran to block the door to her room. “I already called, said you were too sick. That we have to go to the doctor.”

  “Oh,” I said, pulling off my mother’s gown. “Why didn’t you say that’s where we’re going?”

  My mother sighed, then spoke slowly: “Because we’re not. I only told them something they could understand.”

  She lifted the white gown from the bed where I had thrown it, and handed it back to me. I put it on, and when the hem dropped to my ankles, I realized I had grown to my mother’s height. “Come on,” she said as she walked out the glass doors and into her garden.

  I followed her to the back of our lot. When we reached the chicken wire enclosing our property, my mother raised her hands and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, stepped through the fence. I reached the spot where my mother had crossed over, expecting to see some kind of gate worked into the fence, but I couldn’t see an opening of any kind. My mother waited. I slipped my fingers through the loops and shook. The fence rattled.

  “Here,” my mother said. “Look here.” She grasped at the barrier between us and gently eased the wire apart. Creaking, the fence split wide enough for me to insert my body, then snapped shut behind me.

  I followed where my mother led, watching the muscles of her legs flex as she scrambled over the thirsty tongues of tree roots and loose rocks scattered like broken teeth. I felt my body move like my mother‘s, bend and dip with hers, as if I lived within her skin. We climbed a skinny path among dank mulch and dying leaves, weaving our bodies through squares of sunlight that wavered and burst like overripe liliko’i as we stepped on them. And each step was accompanied by the music of the river, a white noise I became aware of only when we jumped over a small finger of water.

  “She has crossed the dangerous stream in search of the spirit,” my mother called out into the moist air.

  “Dance,” she said to me. “Free your spirit, Beccah-chan, let it loose.” She leaped into the air, twirling and pivoting in a space of her own, dancing and singing a song with no words.

  “Mom, stop!” I cried, looking about, afraid that—even here in the middle of nowhere, next to a small, unmarked runoff from the Manoa Stream—someone would see my mother as I saw her: flying unanchored to reality, her own dark waters soaking through her tunic until the lines of her used woman’s body—the sloping shoulder bones jutting like wings out of her back, the sacs of her breasts swinging from her concave chest, the upturned bowl of her stomach—sharpened under the wet clothes.

  “Please not now,” I yelled, to both my mother and the spirits she danced with. I vowed that if she went into a trance, I would leave her here in the woods, making my own way back into sanity.

  Spinning toward me, she grabbed one of my hands. “Dance with me, Beccah,” she said. “Don’t you hear the singing?”

  She pulled and I jumped, hopping from one foot to the other. “That’s it,” she told me. “Let the river speak to you. Listen to what it has to say, to what you have to hear.”

  Her dance slowed. Still holding my hand, she slipped her fingers into the waistband of her tunic pants, pulled out a small pocket knife, and slashed the tip of my middle finger.

  I yelled, then popped my finger into my mouth.

  “Wait, not yet,” my mother said, drawing my finger from my mouth. “Wash it first.”

  When I dipped my hand into the shallow water of the stream, my mother yelled, “Spirit, fly with the river, then follow it back home.” She tapped me on the shoulder. “Okay,” she said to me. “Now drink it.”

  I cupped some of the running water into my hands, brought it to my m
outh. I tasted the metal of blood.

  “Now you share the river’s body,” my mother said. “Its blood is your blood, and when you are ready to let your spirit fly, it will always follow the water back to its source.”

  Like the river in my blood, my mother waited for me to fly to her, waited for me to tell her I was ready to hear what she had to say. I never asked, but maybe she was telling me all the time and I wasn’t listening.

  Wanting to hear her voice once more, I unpacked the “Beccah” tape—my mother’s last message, last gift to me—I had carried back from the Manoa house. But just as when I was a child listening in on my mother’s sessions with her clients, just as when I listened to that one tape many years ago, I heard, when I first began playing my mother’s tape in the apartment I had chosen for myself, only senseless wails, a high-pitched keening relieved by the occasional gunshot of drums. Still, I listened, but only when I stopped concentrating did I realize my mother was singing words, calling out names, telling a story. I turned the volume knob on the stereo until my mother’s voice shivered up the walls, as if the louder the words, the easier I would be able to understand the story.

  Kok: I howl into the night air, emptying my grief into the homes of my neighbors, announcing my loss and my love.

  As the tape wound on, I rummaged through the kitchen cabinets for paper and pen, wanting to write down my mother’s song. I scribbled words I recognized—kok, han, chesa, chudang, Saja, poji—words connected to blood and death. After filling several notebook pages with black scrawl, I stopped the recorder. The scraps of paper seemed inadequate, small and disjointed. Needing a bigger canvas, I stripped the sheet from my bed, laid-it on the living room floor in front of the speakers, pressed Play on the recorder, and caught my mother’s words.