Comfort Woman

by Nora Okja Keller

  Yom: Preparing your body for its final transition, I lay it down, stretched long against the mat in the main room. I boil ginger root, and with the cooled scented water, I bathe you for a fznal time. I massage your stiffening limbs, then tuck them close against your body. I wash your intimate places, pull your white hairs, and cut your nails. The loose trimmings I wrap in cloth to bury under you. And through it all I sing.

  I sing Hanul, Pada, Ch-onji, sa-nam gwa irum, calling on Heaven, Sea, the four directions of Earth, and I sing your name. I mark the place where you are buried so that you will always find your way.

  Abugi. Omoni. Kun Aniya. Mul Ajumoni. I sing the names by which I have known you, all of you, so that you will remember. So that I will remember. So that those who come after me will know. Induk. Miyoko. Kimiko. Hanako. Akiko. Soon Hi. Soon Mi. Soon Ja. Soon Hyo.

  So many true names unknown, dead in the heart. So many bodies left unprepared, lost in the river.

  Not once did my mother sing my name. And though primarily in English, this tape was not for me, was addressed not to me but to her mother, a final description of her mother’s death and feast. Faithful in performing the death anniversary chesa, my mother proved to be dutiful and dependable as a daughter in a way she never was as a mother.

  When the first side of the tape hissed to a stop, I realized that what I had thought were drums accenting my mother’s lament was actually a dismal rapping at my door, incessant but faint. Flipping the tape over, I pressed Play and, with my mother’s words wrapped around me, drifted to the door. Through the eye of the peephole, I saw the apartment manager leaning against the door, thumping listlessly with flattened hand, his bowed head a balloon on the string of his body.

  “What?” I yelled through the closed door.

  Hiram Hirano jumped away from the door, blinking his pink, watery eyes. “Sorry to bother you,” he squeaked. “But there’ve been complaints about your, ah, music.”

  I watched him fiddle with his balding head, stick a finger into his ear. He snuffled at the door, trying to look into the peephole. “Hallo?” he stammered. “Did you hear me? Hallo? Could you turn it down?”

  “My mother is dead,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, scuttling away from the door as if it were diseased.

  Wishing I could turn up the volume even more, I added my own voice, an echo until I stumbled over a term I did not recognize: Chongshindae. I fit the words into my mouth, syllable by syllable, and flipped through my Korean-English dictionary, sounding out a rough, possible translation: Battalion slave.

  Chongshindae: Our brothers and fathers conscripted. The women left to be picked over like fruit to be tasted, consumed, the pits spit out as Chongshindae, where we rotted under the body of orders from the Emperor of Japan. Under the Emperor’s orders, we were beaten and starved. Under Emperor’s orders, the holes of our bodies were used to bury their excrement. Under Emperor’s orders, we were bled again and again until we were thrown into a pit and burned, the ash from our thrashing arms dusting the surface of the river in which we had sometimes been allowed to bathe. Under Emperor’s orders, we could not prepare those in the river for the journey out of hell.

  The Japanese believe they have destroyed an entire generation of Koreans. That we are all dead and have taken the horrible truth with us, but I am alive. I feel you, knowing you wait by my side until the time comes for me to join you across the river. I offer you this one small gesture each year, worth more than the guilt money the Japanese now offer to silence me: a bit of rice burned in your memories, and your names called over and over again, a feast of crumbs for the starving.

  I rewound the tape where my mother spoke of the Chongshindae, listening to her accounts of crimes made against each woman she could remember, so many crimes and so many names that my stomach cramped. Without reference, unable to recognize any of the names, I did not know how to place my mother, who sounded like an avenging angel recounting the crimes of men.

  “Mommy—Omoni—is this you?” I cried, but my mother did not pause in her grief, her song for the dead.

  I could not view my mother, whom I had always seen as weak and vulnerable, as one of the “comfort women” she described. Even though I heard her call out “Akiko,” the name she had answered to all my life, I could not imagine her surviving what she described, for I cannot imagine myself surviving. How could my mother have married, had a child, if she had been forced into the camps? And then, given new context, came the half-forgotten memory of the night my father was taken to the hospital.

  From the little consistencies I could gather from her stories, we were living in Florida, in a bungalow adjacent to the chapel on the campus of the Miami Mission House for Boys. What I remember is a small yard in which I played and a small room where I slept by myself. That particular morning, a Saturday that I had been allowed to watch television, I saw Curse of the Mummy. Although, remembering its time slot, the movie I saw was more likely to have been Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, or even Scooby-Doo and the Haunted House. But whatever the movie, images of the resurrected dead chased me into the night, into my dreams. I remember the wrapped mummy shuffling toward me—strips of rotting, stinking cloth hanging from outstretched arms—stalking me even as I ran from sleep into the reality of my room. Screaming, feeling the mummy’s breath rustle the hair on the back of my head, I jumped from my bed and stormed into my parents’ bedroom.

  Halfway across their room, I realized it was empty, that there was no one to save me. I waited for the mummy to devour me, but when she reached me, she merely turned my head toward the open window. I opened my eyes and, as if caught in another dream in which I had no control, saw my mother dancing in the alley of our yard and my father on his knees before her, begging her to come inside, come inside before someone saw them.

  “Bow down before God, for He alone can heal your wounds,” my father told my mother. “Remember the woman of Luke, chapter thirteen. She had been inflicted by evil spirits, suffering for eighteen years, before Jesus put His hands on her, saying ‘Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.’ Bow down, Akiko, just as that woman did, and you shall be free.”

  But my mother laughed and spat at my father. “I will never, never again lay down for any man,” she said. And she swung around, spinning in circles about him.

  My father stood and clasped his hands to his chest. “Forgive her, Father. She knows not what she speaks.”

  “I know what I speak, for that is my given name. Soon Hyo, the true voice, the pure tongue. I speak of laying down for a hundred men—and each one of them Saja, Death’s Demon Soldier—over and over, until I died. I speak of bodies being bought and sold, of bodies—”

  “ ‘Put away perversity from your mouth; keep corrupt talk from your lips, or—,’ ” my father yelled.

  “Of bodies that were burned and cut and thrown like garbage to wild dogs by the river—”

  “ ‘Or ye shall be struck down!’ ” My father grabbed my mother’s shoulders and shook her.

  “I’m the one! I’m the one to strike you down, and God down too!” my mother screamed, charging my father, scratching at his face.

  But my father was the one to strike her down, pushing her into the damp ground in an attempt to cover her mouth. “Quiet! What if someone hears you speaking like this? The boys, the brothers? What if Beccah hears you? Think of how she would feel, knowing her mother was a prostitute.”

  My father held my mother in his arms, cradling her as she moaned and pounded against him. “Shush,” he murmured. “It is not for me to judge. But know that ‘The sins of the parent shall fall upon their children and their grandchildren.’ I ask you to protect our daughter, with your silence, from that shame.”

  I fell asleep in my parents’ bed that night, listening to the sound of my mother crying, and when I woke, I was in the hospital. I spent most of the next few weeks in the hospital, roaming its corridors, dreaming in front of the candy machines, sliding on the slick white floors, waiting for my mot
her to emerge from my father’s room. When I asked to see him, my mother said, “Wait, wait until he is better,” but I never saw him again. On our final visit to the hospital, I remember hearing the words “heart failure,” “complications,” “pneumonia,” “I’m sorry.” And as the doctor bent toward my mother and me, offering his condolences, I asked not about my daddy, but about the candy in the vending machine.

  I clawed through memory and story, denying what I heard and thought I remembered, and tried to pinpoint my mother’s birth date, her age during World War II. Flooding my mind with dates and numbers, I wanted to drown my mother’s voice, wanted to reassure myself that these atrocities could not have been inflicted on her, that she was just a child when she claimed to be a comfort woman. I began to scratch dates on the bedsheet—1995, 1965, 1945, 1931-2-3— when the manager came back. I recognized his feeble knocking, but the voice that called my name from outside the door was Sanford‘s, whom I had listed on the rental agreement as the person to contact in case of emergency.

  I did not need to get off the floor in front of the speakers to know what was happening behind the door. Hiram, bug-eyed and sweating, would be backing away after having performed his obligatory knocking. Sanford would be waving the timid manager down the hallway while fretting with his hair and expression, concerned with looking supportive yet boyishly handsome.

  I didn’t rush to open the door upon hearing his voice, and I knew Sanford’s mask must have slipped. “Beccah!” he roared, pounding the door. “It’s me.”

  I turned the knob of the volume down. “Who?” I said, then twisted the knob back toward high.

  Sanford stopped pounding for a moment, then yelled out his name as if it were a question.

  About to take pity on him and open the door, I heard my mother call me, weaving my name into her chants, her prayers for justice.

  Beccah-chan, lead the parade of the dead. Lead the Ch‘ulssang with the rope of your light. Clear the air with the ringing of your bell, bathe us with your song. When I can no longer perform the chesa for the spirits, we will look to you to feed us. I have tried to release you, but in the end I cannot do it and tie you to me, so that we will carry each other always. Your blood in mine.

  I remembered watching my mother lay out the offerings for the dead before she would feed me, remembered her dancing over me with strips of cloth torn from the sheets of my bed. And while I had felt invisible, unimportant, while my mother consorted with her spirits, I now understood that she knew I watched her. That in her way, she had always carried me with her.

  Feeling my mother’s arms around my waist, I walked to the door. “I’m speaking to my mother,” I told Sanford through the cracks.

  “Your mother is dead,” Sanford said, speaking to me as I had spoken to my mother, as if she were unstable. Dangerous.

  I looked at Sanford, made small through the tunnel of the peephole. When I was in high school, the art teacher taught us to look through a square made by our fingers, in order to focus on what we wanted to paint. I often looked at my mother through the finger frame, trying to put her in perspective. I liked the way my fingers captured her, making her manageable. Squinting my eye through my lens, I could make her any size I wanted. I could make her shrink, smaller and smaller, until she disappeared with a blink.

  I looked at Sanford as I had looked at my mother, fitting him in the space between my fingers, and slowly, slowly, with infinite gentleness, brought my fingers together until he shrank smaller than the lines in a standard obituary, smaller than newsprint.

  “I have to leave you, Sanford,” I called out, while he slammed his weight against the door. I watched him rub his shoulder, then dropped my hand and closed my eyes. With my mother’s voice filling the apartment, her words swirling around my shoulders, I thought how easy—in a pinch, with a blink—it was to make someone disappear. “Goodbye,” I told him. “My mother is calling me.”

  18

  BECCAH

  Reno and I fought over my mother’s body.

  “What’s this? And this? And this?” I pointed into the rented casket, at the black eyeliner circling my mother’s eyes, the blush slashing across her cheeks toward her temples, the bright-orange lipstick, the feathered headpiece perched on her piled hairdo.

  “What?” Auntie Reno placed her hands on her hips. “Whatchu trying for say?”

  I glared at her pursed lips, done up in the identical shade of tangerine as my mother‘s, and snorted.

  “Whass your problem? If you no like Koral Kiss, then I change em; I know not everybody can wear em like me.”

  “Yeah, Reno. It’s the lipstick. And the purple eye shadow—looks like somebody beat her to death. And the clothes and the hootchy-kootchy feather thing—straight from the strip show in Vegas or what?” I leaned over the coffin. “This isn’t my mother,” I told her. “This is you. Just like it’s always been you.”

  Reno slammed her hands down on the edge of the casket so hard the feathers on my mother’s headpiece quivered. “Goffunnit, girlie. You wait. You da one leave dis in my hands. You da one say, ‘Auntie Reno, I no can dress my maddah. Auntie Reno, I no can fix her face. I no can touch one dead body. I no can even write one suckin’ obituary.’ ”

  She marched around my mother, toward my side of the coffin. “So what den? If her own daughtah not goin’ take care her, den who? Me. Auntie Reno. Thass who. And dis dah tanks I get.”

  Instead of backing up when she stomped toward me in her tottering heels, I stepped forward. “Oh, Auntie, thank you thank you thank you,” I sneered. “Always, all my life, I’ve been thanking you. And for what?”

  “What!” Auntie Reno screeched, bringing the mortician running into the room. “For what—for what?”

  The mortician smoothed the front of his coat and cleared his throat, oiling his voice. “Ladies, may I assist you in some way?”

  Reno turned toward him, bringing her hand to her forehead. She wobbled, the bulk of her body threatening to drop onto the young man. “I sorry, sir,” she breathed. “For one moment, I was overcome wit grief.”

  The mortician touched her on the shoulder, a practiced move: sympathetic yet unintrusive. “I understand. This is a difficult time for the ones left behind.” He glanced at my mother. “She was a beautiful woman,” he said, then, looking back at Auntie Reno, added, “Your sister?”

  I snorted, and Reno fluttered her eyes. “Jus’ like. I dah one help her when she first move to Hawaii. I dah one gamble on her, give her her first job.” She raised her voice and, turning her face from the mortician to give me stink-eye, said, “I dah one manage her business, take care her daughtah when she was, ah, feeling indispose.”

  I forced a laugh. “Thank God for Auntie Reno,” I crooned into Reno’s scowl. “What would we have ever done without her?”

  “You bettah believe it, sistah,” Reno spat.

  The mortician lifted his hand in my direction, placing it tentatively between Reno and me. “Uh, you must be Ms. Bradley, daughter of the deceased.”

  I ignored him. “Oh, I believe it, Reno. And what would you have done without my mother? Without all the money she made for you? How could you have made all those gambling trips? How could you have sent all your own kids to Punahou—at least until they got kicked out?”

  Reno slapped the mortician’s arm down and narrowed her eyes. “What exactly you tryin’ for say?”

  The man inched toward the door. “Eh, Frank! Frank,” he called toward the front room.

  I glared at him. “Do you mind? We’re trying to have a private conversation. »

  Reno pushed at my shoulder. “Eh, no take it out on him, he’s jus’ doing his job.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Unlike some people, leaving dah dirty work for others.”

  The mortician backed against the door. “Frank, I said, try come,” he shouted, his job English fraying under stress. “Please! Dis only my first week, and look, get one 911 in here!”

  Reno bustled over to the man. “Hush you, boy,” she clucked
, patting his hands. “No worry ‘bout us. We jus’ havin’ one difference of opinion.” She smiled. “You was saying?”

  The man rubbed his hands across the thighs of his pants. “No, really,” he said, pasting a smile across his face. “I nevah said—I wasn’t saying anything. In fact, uh, if you’d please excuse me, ladies, I, uh, should check on the arrangements for the next group.”

  When Reno moved toward him, saying, “No need go; we finished here,” I grabbed at her arm. The man escaped.

  “Reno,” I said. “We are not finished.”

  “Den what?” Reno yelled. “I wen ask you before: Whass your friggin’ problem?”

  “And I told you, Auntie Reno. It’s you,” I said. “You my friggin’ problem.” I stretched toward my mother’s head, snapped the feather off the hat, and waved it in front of Reno’s face, where it dangled at an angle like a furry finger. “Ever since I met you, you used us. Used my mother, treated her just like a puppet on your string. I watched you over the years, saw how you got when she went into her trance—tike every minute was gonna make you richer and richer. And it did, didn’t it? Never mind that she might not have come back to us each time. You never cared about her. Or me, either. Just about what was in it for you!”

  Reno reached for the feather, but I jerked it from her hands before she could touch it. “Thass not true,” she protested. “Outta the goodness of my heart, I—”

  A laugh, hot and harsh, melted my throat. “Cut the crap, Reno. It’s me you’re talkin’ to. Not my mother. I know you made a ton of money off us.”

  “Now listen, honey—”

  “Don’t call me that!” I shouted. “How dare you call me that, like we’re so close, when you never invited me even once into your home!” I threw the feather at her. It fluttered, then drifted into the coffin between us.