by Junghyo Ahn
“Take me with you,” Grandmother said.
“Umbrella. Get me the umbrella.”
“Get out. I’ll bring the umbrella out to the field for you later. No, no, not that way! Use the back door!”
During this commotion, Kijun beckoned Kangho out to the road and asked him to come with him to tell everybody to run away. The two boys went over to Bong’s house and showed his parents the soldiers’ flashlight, now crossing the rice paddies.
Fleeing to a willow grove with her two daughters, Bong’s mother took out a worn-out tobacco pouch containing charcoal powder she had been carrying in her bosom, and handed it over to her older daughter. “Here. Put this on your face.”
“What is that, Mother?”
“Charcoal powder.”
“Why do I have to put it on my face?”
“To make your face look black and ugly in case you’re caught by the bengkos. Many women avoided ill fortune with charcoal powder when the Chinese and the Japanese invaded this country and the barbarian soldiers raped every Korean woman in sight.”
“But some bengkos have black skins. They might like us better when we paint ourselves dark.”
“Look, Mother! They’re over there. Can you see the moving light?” Huddling together in the dark under the willows, the mother and her two daughters watched the bengko soldiers approach Inner Kumsan.
Kijun and Kangho and Bong hurried to Chandol’s house to tell his parents that the bengkos were already in the village. Chandol’s parents told it to their neighbors over the fence, and soon all the village women, hastily but silently, vanished into the dark outside. After Chandol’s mother had fled to safety, the four boys concealed themselves in the manure hut by the tall ginkgo tree to watch.
The bengkos, in raincoats, barged into several houses to find seksi, but soon realized that the village was virtually empty except for some old men. They paused before the tobacco shop and discussed something, pointing at Hyonam village a couple of times with their stick lantern before trudging away toward Charcoal village.
Kangho’s father reported to Old Hwang in the morning that no woman had been assaulted the previous night in Kumsan and Hyonam. But the miller did not like what he had to report about Charcoal village.
“I visited Charcoal this morning to see if anything wrong had happened there.”
“And what did you find out?”
“Two girls were raped, sisters. The soldiers found them hiding in a cow shed. The bengkos tied the girls’ father to the manger when the old man tried to stop them. The neighbors were too scared to go to rescue the girls because the soldiers were armed with guns. The bengkos had to knock the old man unconscious with the gunstock because he was howling and fighting them like a madman. One soldier raped one sister while the other stood guard outside to scare away the villagers if they tried to rescue them. And then they took turns. The other sister had to watch the rape going on right in front of her. One girl was seventeen and the other fourteen.”
Old Hwang resented his own stupidity in having gone down to the ferry the other day with the rice paper banner to welcome the arrival of the liberators. And he recalled how a bengko soldier had treated him like a beggar, giving him a chocolate bar. “Brutes,” he said.
The farmers were busy all morning and afternoon because the harvest season was imminent and so much work had been delayed during the uneasy days of the battle on General’s Hill. At sunset, however, they hastened home to have their suppers early and prepare themselves for another visit by the soldiers. Quite a few women had caught cold in the rain the previous night, but they refused to stay home in the warmth although their husbands promised to watch for intruders and help them escape in time if the soldiers did come. About thirty women hid, by fours and fives, in secret hideouts that the young villagers had dug along the banks of the stream that afternoon. Although the hideouts had been cushioned with sheaves of straw and old clothes, the women shivered all night in the cold. They wept and trembled so long that most of them felt sick to their stomachs by midnight. There was fear in the air; even the familiar chorus of frogs croaking in the dark frightened them. It began to rain again a little past midnight.
No bengkos came that night.
The day broke and the women returned home, sniffling and crying. They shivered even after returning to their dry, heated rooms.
It stopped raining in early morning. Rice plants and ginkgo leaves glistened with fresh moisture in the warm sun. In the evening, flickering glowworms flew through the undergrowth. Though many of them were sick after spending two nights in the open, the women went out to hide again. Stars and the moon slowly traversed the sky. After what seemed to be an eternity, day began to dawn in the eastern sky. Their eyes puffy after the sleepless night, their hair disheveled and their clothes soaked with dew, the women returned home at daybreak.
The day was sunny and bright, but nobody cared about the weather any more.
Squatting on the walnut stump by the twig gate, Mansik looked around the open field of rice ears rippling in the cool breeze. Not even a tiny speck of cloud disturbed the tranquil sky. The silent afternoon hypnotized him into drowsiness. The yellow sun laid a film of yellow over the earth and the yellow landscape of the remote sunny world blurred his sight. Hot peppers, spread on the thatched roof of a hut to dry, glimmered red in the sun. Kangho’s parents, alternately raising their bamboo flails high in the air and then beating down, threshed dried legumes on a wide round rush mattress in the yard of their rice mill. Scarlet leaves of wild ivy engraved bleeding patterns on a rocky cliff on General’s Hill. The lilac bushes beside the tobacco shop were withering to a dirty color. In the rice paddies, farmers were busy harvesting. The straw hats of two villagers moved slowly as they cut down the beanstalks they had planted on the bank of the stream. A young girl with braided hair, carrying a reed basket loaded with steamed potatoes on her head, hurried along the winding riverside path to Kamwa village. But these familiar fields and mountains and rice paddies and sky and everything else looked distant, unreal and intangible, to Mansik. Outside his house, it was a world of strangers.
Ever since the bengkos had made his mother dirty, he had not gone anywhere beyond the stream where he washed himself and drew water. He did all the washing at home now and he had to draw the water for drinking and cooking at the stream because he feared to go to use the well at the Paulownia House. Eventually he lost the courage to find out whether the autumn field still belonged to him. He could not venture any further than the stream. And whenever he had to make the short trip to the stream, he checked up and down the road to make sure there was nobody in sight. He did not want someone to stop him and ask anything about his mother. He was ashamed of her.
His mother rarely came out of her room. She brooded. Sometimes she wept quietly.
Mansik watched several hens clucking and pecking in the dirt by the bush-clover fence around the Hwangs’ cabbage patch. The tall red-painted gate of the Paulownia House was latched because the whole family had gone out to the field to work. Now and then Mansik glanced over at the four boys in the distance discussing something under the ancient ginkgo tree beyond the stream. Those boys, who used to be his friends, might be arguing about where they would go to play this afternoon. They could go to the stream to catch rainbow fish with a bamboo basket, or knock down walnuts with stones, or steal chestnuts and dates from the trees in a neighbor’s back yard. The boys had many games to play in autumn.
Mansik raised himself from the walnut stump when the four boys finally left for General’s Hill. He went to the rabbits’ cage to thrust clover and leftover cabbage leaves through the wire netting. After feeding the rabbits, the boy sat down. He remained on the stoop for some time. He had nothing to do. Nothing at all.
Gazing at the closed door of the other room, he called in a languid voice, “Mother.”
Ollye was silent. A rustling sound came from the room a full minute later, and she replied, belatedly, in a weak voice, “Yes?”
Ma
nsik bit the knuckle of his forefinger, thinking. He opened his mouth to say something, but changed his mind. Finally, he said, “I’ve been wondering about something, Mother. I can’t make out why they are doing this.”
“Doing what?” Ollye said softly through the door.
“Why doesn’t anybody come to see us any more?”
She did not answer.
He rose, plodded to the room, cautiously opened the door and peeked in.
“Why doesn’t anybody come to see us?” the boy asked again.
“Why do you think anybody should come to see us?”
“Well, you know, they used to come to see us for a chat or something. Everybody started to behave strangely after that night. They must be angry about what happened to you, I guess.”
Without any reply, she rolled herself toward the wall.
“Did my words hurt your feelings, Mother?”
Still facing the wall, she said weakly, “No, my son.”
“Isn’t it strange that people can change so completely in such a short time?”
“That’s how people are. You will come to understand the reason why they are like this. Some day.”
“I don’t think I can ever understand them. I’ve been thinking about it for a whole week but I still understand nothing,” the boy said. “Do you think the villagers hate us? Is that why?”
She gave brief thought to this. “I don’t think they hate us,” she said.
“Then why?”
She did not answer.
Mansik sadly watched her back slowly heave. A dead fly, pressed flat by her weight, was stuck on her shoulder. She had grown sickly pale and gaunt in the past few days. She looked like a skull with lustreless eyes sunk deep in hollow eye sockets and cheeks pinched to the bone. Mansik was sad whenever he saw her haggard face.
Mansik stood up and quietly closed the door.
Kangho came to Chandol’s house about two hours after breakfast and told him that the bengkos were going away.
Chandol ordered Kangho to go fetch Bong quickly and then the three boys picked up Kijun on their way to the hillock facing the ridge where the World Army had built its tent headquarters. The four boys perched, like a bevy of quail, watching the soldiers in the woods about five hundred yards away. There were at least a thousand of them. The green grass on the sloping terrain had been ruthlessly marred by the brown pockmarks of fresh dirt piled around countless foxholes.
The boys had never seen so many people assembled at one place before. Soldiers with dangling canteens and cartridge belts, soldiers carrying weapons over their shoulders or in their hands, soldiers with talking machines squealing on their backs, soldiers boiling black water in their mess tins and sipping it, soldiers folding and packing their socks and underwear, soldiers deflating and rolling tents—there were soldiers everywhere, moving around constantly.
“It must be great fun to travel around like that, camping day after day in the woods and by the river and any place you want to spend the night,” said Kijun, sitting cross-legged on the rock.
“You can say that again,” said Chandol, observing the soldiers closely to memorize every possible detail about real soldier business.
“I guess all the women in our village can sleep in their rooms from now on,” said Kangho, squatting at the edge of the rock.
“I wonder why the bengkos did their raping only at Kumsan and Charcoal,” Chandol said. “Castle village is much closer to their camp.”
Kijun thought it over and said, “Maybe the bengkos preferred to do evil things at a distant place because they didn’t want to be caught and punished by their captains.”
“Looks like they’re really leaving,” Bong exclaimed, pointing at the opposite ridge. “Bengkos are climbing into trucks over there.”
“Let’s get a closer look at them,” Chandol said, scrambling to his feet.
By the time the boys climbed down the hillock and reached the northern road to Castle village, the advance party of the U.N. troops was moving around the foot of General’s Hill, heading for the North Han River. Trucks with dark canvas covers backed out one by one to carry the soldiers away.
“The bengkos must have had a lot of free chestnuts while they were camping in the grove of chestnut trees,” Chandol said, halting on the road about two hundred yards away from a large group of soldiers sprawling in and around a bean patch, waiting for their turn to leave, their knapsacks and rifles placed in an orderly row along the ditch.
“Do you think they eat chestnuts?” Bong asked uncertainly. “I heard the World Army soldiers eat only food contained in cans or wrapped in papers.”
“They must eat fruits and vegetables and stuff,” Chandol said. “They’re people like us, after all.”
“The owner of that bean patch will get mad as hell,” Kijun said, chuckling. “It’s been all trampled to mush by trucks and soldiers.”
“The U.N. Army has a lot of cars,” Chandol said, looking around at the trucks in admiration.
“Look,” Kijun said, giggling. “That bengko is smiling at us.”
“He’s beckoning,” Bong said in a terrified voice.
“Shall we go over to him?” Chandol asked with a brave grin.
“It’s dangerous,” Bong said, more terrified. “I think we should run and hide.”
“They do bad things at night but it’s daytime now,” Chandol said. “They do the war—fighting and even dying for us—in daytime. You don’t have to be afraid of them as long as there is the sun.”
Kijun said, “Look. He’s holding out a can.”
“Okay. Let’s go,” Chandol said.
The boys approached a swarthy bengko leaning against a broken tree with his helmet cupped on his upright knee. When Chandol halted a few steps away from him, the soldier offered a pack of Chuckles jelly candy to the boy. The children warily watched the colorful pieces of candy wrapped in mysteriously transparent glass paper as if they were dangerous explosives. Then Chandol snatched it from the soldier’s big hairy paw and quickly stepped back. While the bengko was watching the boys with an amused expression, Chandol removed the glass paper and put one of the candy pieces in his mouth. It tasted good, sweet and gelatinous. Chandol gave each boy one piece and he had the extra one himself because he was the captain.
“I know what this is,” Kangho said, chewing. “This is jelly. My father told me about this jelly thing.”
“That’s right,” said Kijun. “My uncle told me about it, too.”
“I like jelly.” Bong stated his opinion in very simple terms.
“Shall we ask for some more candies?” Kijun said.
Chandol asked, “Do you know how to speak bengko?”
“Sure. I learned a lot of English words when I went to town with my uncle. The town boys speak English really well.”
“English? What’s English?”
“That’s the bengko language.”
“How do you say we want more jelly in English?”
“I just know how to say it,” Jun replied.
“Say it then.”
Kijun pranced over to the soldier with stubbly chin and said in a flat monotone as if reciting a Chinese poem, “Hey, bengko, give me chop chop. Jelly give me chop chop.”
The bengko said something briefly in English, shrugging his shoulders. Chandol was disappointed when the soldier showed no sign of giving anything more to the boys. But another bengko who had been scraping the crusted mud from his boots with a broken twig went over to his knapsack by the ditch, fished out a dark green can and came back to give it to Kijun.
“See?” the fat boy said triumphantly.
The can had a small white metal device attached to its side and Kangho showed the boys how to turn it round and round to open the can. Inside there were salty crackers instead of sweet jelly candies.
“This tastes horrible,” Chandol said.
Suddenly there was a ripple of noise among the soldiers by the bean patch. They slowly lined up along both sides of the road. These soldiers
started to march, and the last of the liberators on the eastern ridge moved out, leaving behind a devastated slope that looked like bombed ruins. More soldiers were still coming down another ridge of General’s Hill further north. The grove of chestnut trees was deserted, littered with empty cans with jagged open tops, ammunition casings and crumpled corrugated cardboard, squashy leftover food and other dumped or abandoned things. As if out on a treasure hunt during a school picnic, the four boys searched for useful or valuable things in the ruins, running among the trees and delving into piles of battle trash. Each of them found a couple of unopened C-ration cans, and Bong and Kijun respectively a dented canteen and a shiny can opener. Kangho came across a long loaf of bread that looked like a pillow.
“That’s a pillow bread,” Kijun explained to Kangho. “My uncle said some soldiers use it as pillow at night and cut out a piece of it for a meal when they’re hungry. The bengkos always eat bread. They never eat rice.”
“That’s a lie as red as a monkey’s behind,” Chandol retorted, collecting spent cartridge cases under a burnt tree. “Nobody can live without eating rice.”
Kangho, who had been sitting on a clump of grass chewing the gum stick he had found in a pile of empty cans and slimy lumps of boiled food and damp sawdust-like coffee grounds, said, “Look!”
A lone jeep, with its windshield down, was driving slowly behind the soldiers marching in two rows along the northern road. No more soldiers or vehicles were in sight.
“We will never see the foreign liberators any more, right?” Kangho said, somewhat relieved.
“Right,” Chandol said, somewhat disappointed.
“We will miss them,” Jun said, glancing at the captain and trying to be disappointed, too. “We’ve had really exciting days on account of them.”
“Come on,” Chandol said. “Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” Kangho asked.
“Let’s follow the bengkos and watch them some more. We may never have a chance to see them again.”
“Do you think it’ll be all right?” Bong asked.
“Don’t worry. They won’t harm us. Come.”