One Left: A Novel Page 12

Standing where the bus had dropped her—she’d felt like a sack of potatoes as she stepped with a thud onto the ground—she put out feelers toward her village.

  When finally she entered the yard she was greeted by a woman who turned out to be her new sister-in-law. Her mother had passed away, and her father was bedridden from a stroke. Younger sisters One and Two had been married off and the baby sister she had never met had left home to work in a factory that made fishcake. Brother and his family were the only ones left to take care of Father.

  “Who are you?” inquired the sister-in-law as she emerged from the kitchen with a basin of dishwater.

  That was the very question she herself wanted to ask the woman. She couldn’t have dreamed that the woman with the mountainous belly carrying baby number four was her sister-in-law.

  Without replying she looked around the house. It hadn’t changed during her twelve-year absence, a tiny hole-in-the-wall dwelling with a spiny orange tree that functioned as a hedge.

  “Who are you?” came the question again.

  Disheartened, she plopped herself onto the ground and wailed.

  Father, though clear in the head, did not recognize her. It had been a long time since he last saw her, and now her face was sallow and ruined like the wilted blossom of a rotten cucumber.

  As far as the family was concerned she was dead. Her brother had reported her as such after twelve years had gone by.

  The villagers who remembered her asked, “Where have you been all these years? You were a baby girl when you left.”

  Most of them were first, second, or third cousins. An aunt, the wife of father’s first cousin from Inner Kkamakkol, kept pinching her face as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  Even the sparrows, chickens, and goats seemed to be asking her, “Where have you been all these years? You were a baby girl when you left.”

  She fibbed that she had left home but ended up by mistake in Pusan, where she ended up working as a live-in maid. She dared not tell them about Manchuria.

  When dusk set in she stole out to her mother’s grave to bawl. She never went near the river, afraid she would find the little 13-year-old girl still gathering snails.

  One of her married cousins returned to the village for a visit and stopped by to see her. The cousin was the same age as she and had three kids by now.

  Cooing to the baby strapped to her back, the cousin said, “You must have saved up some money working all these years as a maid.”

  “Sure. I used all my savings for some clothing and a new pair of shoes.”

  The cousin brought the baby down from her back, undid her blouse, and put the baby to her breast.

  At the home she’d longed to return to, if only as a spirit, she was merely an extra mouth to feed. Brother labored at the local mill and barely managed to provide for the family. Sister-in-law cooked watery barley gruel for them. Brother couldn’t look her in the eye. Her baby sister saw her for the first time when she came to visit. She was standing under the persimmon tree, and her sister gazed at her, mystified. The two married sisters promised to visit but had yet to appear.

  She hovered around the crock-pot stand passing her hand along the pots where her mother used to pray for her return.

  She continued to stay away from the river.

  One day she noticed a group of village men hurrying toward the river with a yellow dog. Its bloodshot eyes nagged at her memory. The dog that had made off with a dead boy at the Chinese village on the way to an outpost was yellow too.

  A gamey roasting smell blew in from the river, reminding her of the smell of Tongsuk ŏnni’s burning corpse.

  Sister-in-law returned from a visit to her family across the river. “The river’s frozen over with thin ice.”

  She looked toward the river and saw on the bank a truck with a black rear flap. The truck with half a dozen girls in the cargo area also had a black flap. Twelve years ago she had flown through the air like a bird and landed among those girls.

  “What’s that truck doing over there?”

  “What truck? I see only a cow.”

  “A cow?”

  “Yes, Uncle Tŏksu’s cow.”

  The cow looked like a truck to her. She went into the kitchen and came back out with a hoe and a basket.

  “What’re you going to pick?”

  “Shepherd’s purse.”

  “It’s still winter, so maybe it’s too early?”

  She walked out into the rice paddy, trampling the old shoots, and after carving out the word ttang, “land,” with the hoe, she looked up at the sky.

  She left around the time that the new growth of shepherd’s purse came poking out. One less mouth to feed was one less burden for her brother. Another cousin of hers, a live-in maid in Chinju, had visited just in time to recommend to her a banker’s family there.

  On the way to the bus stop she encountered one of her aunties. “Where are you off to?” said the woman.

  “I got a job as a maid.”

  “Are you going to live and die as a maid? A woman should get married and have kids.”

  It was her decision to leave, but she felt she was being taken once again to some alien place. Before setting out she had had her hair permed and secured with pins and she was now wearing a skirt and leather shoes.

  She had returned home alive but legally was dead because none of her siblings was eager to correct her status in the official records, and she herself kept postponing action since the change in status was a time-consuming affair.

  Brother must have known. Unlike her bothersome sisters, Brother never brought up the subject of marriage. Having spent fall and winter at home after her twelve-year absence, she had informed him she was leaving to become a live-in maid again. “I’m just thankful you made it back home,” he said.

  Brother celebrated his eighty-first birthday then ended his life in a hemp field. He was discovered by the landowner face down in a furrow. A bottle of chemical fertilizer lay twenty steps away. Brother’s fingernails were clotted with blood, attesting to his death agony.

  She envisioned wild greens—shepherd’s purse, wild garlic, and mugwort—bursting out of the ground as Brother consumed the fertilizer and began writhing. The combination of anticipation and horror was unsettling.

  What had made him, octogenarian that he was, feel he couldn’t bear to live another day and had to end his life?

  What a heartless, driven man. This thought too occurred to her when she realized he hadn’t let on even to his wife, her sister-in-law.

  During an ancestral ritual this sister-in-law, oblivious to the end, nonchalantly mentioned that a distant relative had served as a comfort woman. “Can you believe she was wandering around in the snow without any shoes on? Her siblings had her committed to a mental hospital.”

  Sister-in-law also mentioned that she had seen Kim Haksun on television, weeping. “And did you know that in Japan they say that the women in the Volunteer Corps went off to practice a trade?” Volunteer Corps?!

  “What trade?”

  “Selling their body. You know that.”

  “She wouldn’t have been crying on television if she’d gone off for that reason?”

  “Well, I’ve heard even kisaeng want to make money.”

  She had known former kisaeng at the comfort station in Manchuria. Hyangsuk, member of a kisaeng union, had been led to believe she would be working in a high-class restaurant; never had she dreamed of serving a dozen or two soldiers a day in a comfort station.

  “Why would any woman volunteer to serve in a living hell?”

  “A living hell?”

  “Yes, and what would possess a 12-year-old girl to do that?”

  “You mean 12-year-old girls did that?” Gaping at her wide-eyed, her sister-in-law said, “They were too young to know better . . . they must have tagged along when the grownups sweet-talked them about making money.”

  Afraid her sister-in-law would catch on that she’d worked at a comfort station, she decided to k
eep her mouth shut.

  Had Hyangsuk made it back home? Her Japanese name was Yuriko, the same name given to Kisuk ŏnni. Soon after Kisuk ŏnni died, otosan brought Hyangsuk to the comfort station. Haha said to her, “From now on you’re Yuriko.” Haha liked to bestow dead girls’ names on the new girls, just like she would undress a dead girl and give the clothing to a new girl.

  Countless soldiers went to war and didn’t return or else returned injured, but the number of men who came to the girls never decreased, only increased. From where she lay Pokcha ŏnni could tell from which direction the men would swarm in. “They’re coming from the east.” And sure enough a locust-like swarm of men would arrive from that direction.

  The Japanese soldiers thronged in from the south and from the east, north, and west as well. While the number of soldiers spiked by the hundreds and thousands, the number of girls increased by only seven, from thirty-two to thirty-nine.

  The day after some seventy men came and went from her body, she took her can of sakku to the washbasin and found Hyangsuk by herself also washing sakku. She kept her distance from Hyangsuk. Her privates throbbed and stung, as if she’d been mutilated with a knife. She felt like peeing, but not a drop came out. She counted the soldiers who had come and gone from her but gave up at sixty-eight.

  Hyangsuk gave her a quick glance but she pretended not to notice. She kept her distance from Hyangsuk. Not that Hyangsuk was ever mean to her. But whenever she saw Hyangsuk, she associated her with Kisuk ŏnni. When haha and the soldiers called Hyangsuk Yuriko, she felt they were calling dead Kisuk ŏnni.

  As she emptied her aluminum can of sakku and began to clean them, Hyangsuk said to her, “You didn’t show up for breakfast. Couldn’t you get up?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Takashi left some canned food with me. You can have it if you’re hungry.”

  Takashi, one of Hyangsuk’s regulars. Hyangsuk finished washing her sakku and approached her as she was putting her cleaned sakku back in her can. “You know, Takashi said he feels sorry for the Japanese guys too.”

  She couldn’t understand why Hyangsuk would sympathize with the Japanese soldiers when she’d just washed the sakku they’d used.

  “He said they were separated from their parents and siblings just like us and ended up here in Manchuria just to offer up their lives.

  Yesterday I was missing my mom and crying and he said for me not to die . . . but do what I had to do to stay alive and return to Chosŏn and my mom.”

  During her seven years at the comfort station, thirty thousand Japanese soldiers came and went from her body. Of all those men, not a single one was kind enough to say, “Stay alive and make it back home.”

  Sitting against the wall with the window above, she fumbles with her black cell phone and flips it open. The screen is black as ink. She presses ON with her thumb and the screen brightens to a recorded melody.

  She convinced herself she’d forgotten the number at her brother’s home, but now it’s come to mind. She enters the number.

  At the same time she hears the ding that tells her someone has sent her a text message. And a second ding, and a third, and a fourth. She imagines the messages wandering the circuits of the phone when it’s off.

  Quickly she closes the phone. She leaves it off because of unknown callers. Her brother’s family and her sisters are the only ones who know her phone number. A call from an unknown number terrorizes her, as if she’s been flushed out from hiding.

  She’s disgusted whenever she mulls over the tribulations involved in reviving her citizen’s registration. The day she received her new registration card she passed her hand over her chest, reckoning she could die that night—a dead body lacking an official registration card is a calamity, for it can’t be buried or cremated.

  The actual and official dates of her birth are different. As families were wont to do with female offspring, her father reported her birth a year after she was born. She’s a November baby according to her registration card, but her mother knew she was born June 1 by the lunar calendar. Her mother remembered dawn spreading across the papered door to the room where she had given birth, barely able to collect herself afterward.

  She’s vexed at the thought that neglecting to report her new address may mean the expiration of the registration she reclaimed.

  Yet again she feels all alone and wishes she had a child, a daughter.

  When she was a live-in maid in Pusan she had a bachelor suitor. Despite the shuddering she felt at the thought of men, the prospect of a normal family life with this man prompted her to visit a gynecologist. The doctor said only that childbirth would be difficult because of her tilted uterus. She dared not tell him about Manchuria, and without telling the bachelor she left Pusan.

  Her menstruation stopped before she turned 40.

  Around that time she experienced swelling in her privates, which felt so heavy she thought they might separate from her. Such simple tasks as dishwashing became a chore, and she had to quit her job as a maid. When her nether regions were swollen, even bending or stretching her back was difficult. She tried all the “good-for-you” restoratives such as sweet pumpkin, carp, and Chinese herbal medicine, but to no avail. She massaged her lower abdomen with an ancient roof tile she’d heated, and that alone brought some relief. If a television show involved fighting or gunshots, she turned to a different channel. She didn’t like people singing, she didn’t like people who were loud, she didn’t like people having fun—she didn’t like anything.

  Hearing of a place in Hayang, Kyŏngsang Province, where women with “female problems” were treated, she dropped everything and went there for three months. From morning till evening you lay on a heated floor carpeted with a straw mat over pine needles and sea salt, with another straw mat on top of you. On the fifth day of this sauna-like procedure her skin began to come off and a yellow pus-like discharge oozed out.

  Among the other women was one from Ulsan who might have been a comfort woman. She spoke with a Seoul or Kangwŏn Province accent, mixed with Japanese words, instead of the accent of her Kyŏngsang home. The woman related a lamentable story, saying she had gone to Japan as a girl to earn money but returned disabled, and though she looked fine there was no part of her that didn’t hurt.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong, but I always feel like I did. I’ll be going about my own business nice and quiet when out of the blue my heart starts hammering. Then I need a bowl of makkŏlli or else I’ll croak. Makkŏlli’s been my dinner for some time now. Once I was walking down the street pounding my chest and this woman at a fishcake factory comes up to me and says I’ve got a load of pent-up anger.”

  When she was a live-in maid for a family that had managed an herbal medicine shop for generations in Ich’on-dong in Seoul, the old herbalist read her fortune just for fun. He liked to check a patient’s physiognomy and fortune while preparing medication. At the time she was well over 50 and mostly ran errands for the shop. One day he asked her the details of her birth—the day, the time, the phase of the moon, whether the sun was up. She told him she was born June 1 by the lunar calendar, around dawn. Translating that into 5:30 to 6:30 a.m., he said her fortune showed her to be an obstinate but truthful woman with a deep attachment to motherhood and a desire to raise a child with all her heart if one day her husband brought her a stepson.

  Why then didn’t she have children? she asked herself. If she was born with a deep attachment to motherhood, shouldn’t she have at least one child to whom she should devote her motherly self ? Wasn’t there a correlation between motherhood and the blessing of having children? And if so, didn’t that make childlessness a curse?

  She was pregnant only once, at the comfort station and right after her first period. At the time she wasn’t aware of it. At her weekly checkup a blob of blood came out of her after the injection from the doctor.

  She still has a vivid image of the blood lump resembling a person.

  When the bloody lump was released from her she fe
lt her uterus had dropped out as well.

  10

  ON HER WAY BACK with tofu from the mini-mart she comes across an orange mesh bag hanging from the drainpipe of one of the homes. Inside the bag is a kitten. The pipe sticking out from beneath the home’s slate roof is cracked and she fears it will break into smithereens if she touches it.

  In the past two weeks she’s counted six kittens inside bags. The old geezer has been nabbing every kitten he can get his hands on in 15-bŏnji.

  She wonders if they’re all from the same mother. This kitten is brown too, like the one she saw the day before in one of the alleys. And, coincidentally, like her Nabi, for whom she sets out food and water.

  The bag hangs low enough for her to free the kitten. But she dares not.

  Gaze fixed on the television beyond the meal table, she stirs her bean-paste stew in its earthenware bowl. The rest of her dinner is thin-sliced tofu and kimchi with rice.

  The television program shows a young African woman using flint and steel to light a fire of twigs. The woman is only 17 but a mother of three.

  The young woman’s 13-year-old sister, eyes round as jawbreakers, has come to stay with her. On her way home from school one day the girl was dragged into the woods and sexually assaulted by five rebels, leaving her with a severe hernia that required four operations, and she still has difficulty walking. In the town where the young woman was born and raised dozens of women, even those who are pregnant, are sexually assaulted. Government and rebel forces have been at war for decades, and the rebels assault the women to assert their power.

  With a fear-ridden expression the younger sister standing at the door falters, “I don’t know why they did that to me.”

  Those are precisely the words she would like to say but doesn’t know how to. Astonished, she marvels that an African girl with a different skin tone could say this.

  The scene changes and the girl is reading a book. She feels empathy when the girl says her dream is to become a teacher. What the girl experienced in the bushes on her way home from school seems no different from what the girls at the comfort station experienced.