Comfort Woman (11 page)

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?

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 where 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.