Comfort Woman (16 page)

I pictured heaven as a Korea liberated from domination, where the angels trod over rivers littered with the charred bodies of the Japanese.

Of God, I had no picture. But in the darkest part of the night, when my prayers were peeled back and laid bare, the face I cried for, called out to, was always Induk's.

During the silences when we were supposed to commune privately with God, I prayed for Induk to return to me. I spiraled my mind away from my body, trying to find her, to catch a glimpse of her. I listened for her in the empty spaces of my days and nights: in the spaces between the beats of words and music, of my breath and my heart. I waited, wondering if she had abandoned me; I called out, Where are you, Where are you? until the words lost their meaning and I was nothing but a bag of skin.

During the silences, and in the privacy of the darkest part of night, this is, as I came to know in the months and years that followed, what the missionary man prayed for: salvation from his sins. And the fulfillment of them.

We all think we have our secrets, the minister said when I refused to tell him where I had come from, but we cannot hide from God. Only when we share our burden with Him, only when we give ourselves over to Him, are we uplifted and relieved.

He patted my head, brushing his fingers across my ear, and I jerked away.

Poor child, he murmured. You have suffered.

I am no longer a child, Sonsaeng-nim, I told him.

He forced his breath into laughs. Please, he said. I am not so much older than you.

I stared at the silver fanning across his temples.

Well, okay, he joked, his voice smooth as glass. I meant that in God's eyes we are all equal. Quick as a snake, he touched the end of my nose. So call me Richard, he said, or Rick. May I call you Akiko? Rick and Akiko, our names somehow match.

I felt as if he had slapped me with the name the soldiers had assigned to me. I wanted to shout, No! That is not my name! but I said nothing, knowing that after what had happened to me, I had no right to use the name I was born with. That girl was dead.

Akiko, the minister said, you are so different from the other girls. You look younger than many of them, yet you seem so mature. The way you carry yourself, the way you measure your words, as if you are always thinking, as if you know and have seen too much. How old are you?

I wanted to say that I was so old I was already rotting in my grave, but I shrugged and said nothing.

How old are you? he repeated, brushing a finger across my knuckles.

Eighteen, I lied. I did not want the missionaries placing me in an orphanage, where many of the older children were adopted by Japanese families looking for an extra worker.

The lids of the missionary man's eyes dropped until he looked at me through slits. If that's what you say, he said, nodding, though he seemed unsure. Sometimes war makes people older than they should be. I myself have been lucky, pampered and taken care of all my life. He said this with scorn, as if bitter, then added, As if God has never seen fit to test me.

But you! The missionary grabbed my shoulders. Just a child, and you have experienced tribulations equal to Job's so that you may feel the full measure of God's glory! Will you tell me what you have done so that I can help you? Confess and come to me and I will lead you into the Body of Christ!

I shrugged away from him, and he dropped his hands. Please, Akiko, do not forsake me or the one true God. Tell me! His voice fell to a whisper, and he leaned toward me. I have heard rumors, terrible rumors, about women being sent north of the Yalu—is that where you've come from? I mean, I noticed your uniform, and—if it is true, then know that God will love the greater debtor. He has said of the fallen woman, Her sins which are many are forgiven, for she loved much. Akiko, the minister cried, the sins of the body will be washed away by the blood of the lamb. His body will become your body; your flesh, His. Just give yourself to Him!

I watched him searching for words that would split open my silence. I looked at him, stripping away his mantle of piousness and humility, and kept looking until I could see the inside of his heart.

Forgive me, he stammered, if I press when I should not. I only want you to know that God does not judge, that I would not. I seek only to offer solace, knowing that God would not give you more than you could handle. Trust in Him. And me. Please, Akiko, welcome the Lord—and me—we who wait for you with open arms.

Even as words continued to spill from his mouth, the minister backed away, but not before I discovered his secret, the one he won't admit even now, even to himself, after twenty years of marriage. It was a secret I learned about in the comfort camps, one I recognized in his hooded eyes, in his breathing, sharp and fast, and in the way his hands fluttered about his sides as if they wanted to fly up against my half-starved girl's body with its narrow hips and new breasts.

This is his sin, the sin he fought against and still denies: that he wanted me—a young girl—not for his God but for himself.

I gave up eating, folding bites of food in my napkin so that I could offer it to Induk later. I sipped water sparingly, leaving glass after glass for Induk. When I lit the candles or the stove, I would imagine that each flame ignited a stick of incense that burned for Induk. And always, always I prayed her back to me. I needed her protection.

One night, as I was on my knees for the last prayer of the day, chanting her name in my head and my heart until her name ran together, seamless in its repetition, I fell to the ground. My body turned to lead, so heavy that I could not lift a finger or a toe, much less an arm or a leg. And then it was as if I liquefied; I lost the edges of myself and began to soak into the floorboards. Waves surged through my arms and legs, rushing toward the center of my body, where I knew they would clash and explode out the top of my head. I became afraid, knowing that I would feel naked and vulnerable without my body.

The fear grew until it pressed against my chest, until I felt I would drown under the weight of it, until it began to take shape and I saw that it was Induk straddling me, holding me down to the earth.

Afraid and angry because I could barely breathe, I still could not ask her why she had abandoned me. I was too happy to see her again. I tried to tell her this, but she began choking me.

Why did you leave me? Induk was the one to ask my question. Why did you leave me to putrefy in the open air, as food for the wild animals just as if I were an animal myself?

Induk, I panted, I had to do what the soldiers told us to.

Liar, she sneered, why did you leave me?

Please, Induk, please, I cried: I was afraid of becoming you.

She rolled off me, then wailed so long and hard she blasted the air into my lungs. See me, she said as she stood up. See me as I am now.

I looked and saw: hair tangled through and around maggoty eye sockets and nostrils. Gnawed arms ripped from the body but still dangling from the hands to the skewering pole. Ribs broken and sucked clean of marrow. Flapping strips of skin stuck to sections of the backbone.

I forced myself to look, to linger over the details of her body. I found her beautiful, for she had come back to me.

I grabbed her hand, and my fingers slipped into bloated flesh. I kissed it and offered her my own hands, my eyes, my skin.

She offered me salvation.

When my daughter still had her umbilical cord, my husband worried about infection. Thick and ugly, the color of dried blood and beef jerky, the cord was resolute and did not fall off when it was supposed to: after a month it was still there, dangling by a persistent thread of flesh. Though her navel turned pink around the edges, my daughter did not seem to be in pain, so we continued to dab it with alcohol, wiggling the umbilicus like a tooth loose in its socket.

Then one day I bent over my baby to change her diaper, and the birth cord was gone. Instead yellow fluid, sticky like glue, filled her navel. I swabbed at the glue, unveiling the indented star of her belly button, then undid the diaper to look for the umbilical cord. It wasn't there. I felt through her sleeper, checked the crib and the floor, but still couldn't find the cord.

I panicked, suddenly frantic to find this one piece of flesh that was both me and my daughter. I threw clothes out of drawers, dug through dirty hampers, and poked into the diaper pail, before I found it on the bathroom rug, already dusted with hair. I brushed it off and placed it in the center of my palm, where it looked tiny and fragile.

I cupped my hand over my daughter's birth cord and vowed to keep it safe, just as I would keep my daughter safe from harm and unhappiness. I would keep the cord so that as she grows into the person she will become, a person I do not know yet, we will both be reminded that we share one body, one flesh.

When my daughter cries in her sleep, caught in a dream of sorrow, I wonder what she has experienced in her short life to make her so unhappy, so afraid. I try to fold her into the comfort of my body, but she pushes away from me, startled into wakefulness. She watches me, her eyelids dropping solemnly until they shut her into sleep once again, taking her somewhere I cannot follow. Does she dream about her birth, about her expulsion from her first home? Or does she cry dreaming that she is there, trapped, once again?