One Left: A Novel

by Kim Soom

  While she was begging forgiveness, Kisuk ŏnni was begging for her life. And mercy be, Kisuk’s soldier merely stabbed her in the thigh.

  In another room a petty officer struck a match to Haegŭm’s pubic hair.

  The girls in this comfort station in Manchuria could hear one another’s screams, an endless round of pain, through the thin plywood walls of their rooms. And they could hear one another moaning and groaning.

  3

  THE ONE-STORY WESTERN-STYLE house she occupies is located in 15-bŏnji, the building and the plain cement-covered yard occupying barely fifteen p’yŏng of land. The faucet in the yard beside the outhouse sits in a housing just big enough for a washbasin.

  Though it’s her fifth year here, she’s not the registered leaseholder— through no fault of her own she couldn’t fill out the necessary change-of-address form. That’s probably why from time to time she feels so fretful and uneasy there, as if she’s sneaked into someone else’s home.

  There’s a reason for all of this: the official leaseholders are her nephew’s family in P’yŏngt’aek, and you can’t report a new address if your name doesn’t appear on the lease. The 15-bŏnji neighborhood is scheduled for redevelopment, and the residents have priority for lease-to-own rights to one of the new apartments that are going up. Knowing this, her nephew and his wife took out a lease on the house and filed the address-change form for themselves. In the mail she gets bills addressed to her nephew—for the residency tax and car insurance premiums, for example—as well as notices from the National Health Service and the tax administration. This mail sits unopened in a neat pile until the next time he comes around.

  The nephew is the son of her younger sister. She herself wasn’t part of the family circle while he was growing up, which might be why he’s never felt like a blood relation to her. And his blunt, offhand tendencies don’t help. Which is why she felt both burdened and grateful when he offered her the house. She doesn’t like accepting handouts, but when he practically got down on his knees and begged her, she gave in. Only then did he come clean about the priority right to the lease-to-own apartment and entreat her not to file the change-of-address when she moved in. That he was loath to register her as a resident was hurtful and upsetting, but she kept her feelings to herself. And she doesn’t have to listen to the relatives jawing about a situation they’re ignorant of to know what comes next: What a nice guy he is to look after his poor, vagrant auntie when other people turn their backs on their own parents!

  And it’s obvious to her why she of all people has been chosen by her nephew to occupy the leased house: she’s childless, which will present one less problem in the future.

  People have no clue where she’s been or to what she’s been subjected.

  They can only assume that her marriageable years were spent drifting from one housemaid job to another. She never imposed on her family but could never bring herself to spill the truth even to her younger sisters, who considered her a burden and an eyesore: that she hated men; the mere sight of them made her shudder, made her wish she had a gun with a silencer so she could exterminate them.

  Any talk of marrying her off sent her ballistic.

  Every month or two the nephew stops by. Supposedly he works security at an apartment complex. Her heart goes out to him. Just think, a man aged sixty-plus who’s never owned a home of his own, who has to take out a lease in a condemned neighborhood to obtain priority rights to the new housing that’s going up.

  In the government registry she’s listed as living in multi-unit housing in Hwasŏng, near Suwŏn. The landlady there must have a new renter by now. And good riddance to she herself: she once overheard the landlady lamenting to another tenant that before long she’d have a corpse on her hands.

  Recently she happened to learn that a landlord has the right to file for nullification of a former tenant’s official residency status if the tenant fails to submit the change-of-address form. She’s afraid this has already happened—why, seven years later, would her landlady want to continue listing her as a tenant?

  What’s going to happen when the demolition starts? She wants to ask her nephew this but tells herself she shouldn’t. It won’t be long now, but still she takes the broom and the rag to the house morning and evening, paying special attention to the windows and doorways. The house is old, and if she slacks off in her cleaning, it shows.

  She stops at the gate to look back at the one-bedroom house and finds herself wondering if a child was ever born there. Or—considering all the families who at one time in their lives had to live crammed together in a single room—if an extended family once lived there.

  Every time she passes through the gate she feels she’s leaving forever. Especially a few days earlier when she wasn’t able to lock the gate on her way out, an experience that left her churning inside. It wasn’t her fault, the lock was rusty, but still she felt as if she’d been driven from the house, and all she could do was squat miserably outside the gate.

  The alley is thick with shadow and layered with a desolate silence. The house is the only one in the alley that’s still occupied. You’d think that someone should be living in the two-story Western-style house at the far end of the alley, but it too is vacant.

  In just two or three years there’s been a drastic increase in the number of empty dwellings in 15-bŏnji. The only people remaining are, like her, those whose circumstances prevent them from leaving.

  The alley gives onto another alley. This alley too is deathly still—it seems the last remaining occupants are gone.

  For twenty minutes she wanders these alleys and not a person does she meet. Leaving her feeling that if she were to encounter someone, she’ll want to give that person all of herself—her heart, liver, kidneys, even her eyes. But still she sees no one.

  On her way down an alley that’s steep as a slide she stops and looks intently at her feet.

  She feels as if her feet are clad with dead magpies instead of shoes.

  Even when she’s convinced her shoes haven’t turned to magpies, she can’t remove her gaze from them. She’s afraid that if she does, they will.

  The woman who does alterations is out. Her shop and the living space behind it add up to maybe three p’yŏng and are packed with what she needs to make her living: mother-of-pearl wardrobe trunk and dressing table, television, dining table for two, sewing machine, clothes-drying rack, chest with three drawers, electric fan. The dining table is strewn with pill bottles alongside a rice cooker. The drying rack is strung with handkerchiefs and underwear, and the floor beneath is littered with a glasses case, a roll of toilet tissue, cookie snack-packs, and such. This is where the woman eats, sleeps, and does finish work, attaching zippers to clothing and cords to curtaining.

  Beneath the sewing machine is a lace-bedecked pink seat cushion with a white dog curled up on it. The dog is some 13 years old but small enough that you might mistake it for a puppy that’s just been weaned.

  The dog’s been staring at her since she arrived, and now it makes an effort to rise but quickly curls up again. To her it seems more human than animal—probably the look. She marvels at how an animal is capable of producing a human look. Maybe it’s only natural when an animal lives with a person, sharing the good times and the bad, the pleasure as well as the pain?

  The dog’s expression is so perfectly human it unsettles her. And its hair loss and the scabby eruptions on its skin are hideous.

  She knows that over the years this dog has produced some fifty puppies. Every time its mistress gathers it in her arms and goes off on a spiel about its fecundity, she finds herself shaking her head. How could the little thing produce fifty puppies?

  The woman has the dog artificially inseminated and sells the resulting litter at the pet market. The proceeds are nothing to sneeze at, the woman likes to say—after all it’s a purebred and a preferred breed at the pet market. Whenever the dog is due, the woman anesthetizes it, makes an incision in its belly, and delivers the puppies herself befo
re stitching the dog back up. That way she can account for every last one of the puppies. The dog’s belly is an ugly belt of stitch marks, flesh abrading flesh.

  She’s about to leave but thinks better of it and eases herself down on the threshold. Reading her behavior, the dog comes down from the seat cushion, and the next thing she knows it’s inching toward her, dragging its hind legs and rump. It settles close by, and now it’s licking the hand that grips the threshold for support. It’s a weird, tickling sensation and she closes her hand into a tight fist, but the dog takes no notice and licks for dear life.

  She’s discomfited by the devotion of this dog that’s smaller than her foot, and at the same time feels sorry for it.

  “Now stop that . . .”

  She just can’t understand it—the dog is practically basting her fingers with its tongue. Not once has she given the dog a good petting. It’s nice the way it always welcomes her with a wag of its tail, but the way it mimics a human expression weighs heavily on her mind.

  The alteration shop woman has returned. She watches her enter the shop but continues to let the dog lick her hand to its heart’s content.

  “The little darling, isn’t she lovable,” the woman says casually.

  “She’s a sweetie, all right,” she says, her face betraying embarrassment as she pulls her hand back.

  “Then maybe you’d like her for a pet?”

  “Me?”

  “She eats about as much as a bird, and she’s long since potty-trained.”

  “But why . . . would you want to give her away?

  “I’d just as soon get rid of her if there’s someone who wants her.”

  She knows that this woman doesn’t sugarcoat her words, whether she’s talking about herself or others, but doesn’t beat around the bush either.

  “You must be so attached to her, you’ve had her since she was a puppy—how could you give her to someone—”

  “There comes a time when you have to let your kids go, why should it be any different with a dog?”

  She’s pretty much figured out the woman’s scheme—now that the dog is too old to produce puppies, she wants to pass it on.

  The woman’s attitude toward the dog has thrown her into confusion. It’s heartless the way the woman has the dog artificially inseminated whenever she wants it to turn out more puppies, but on the other hand she’s terribly devoted to it—it’s as if the dog is her own offspring. Just a few days ago the woman was for the longest time simmering a pollack head to feed it. She’s not sure which of these approaches reflects how the woman really feels about the dog. Maybe they both do—but how could these different mind-sets, like the two poles of a magnet, coexist within the same person?

  Was it forty years the woman said she’d been living in 15-bŏnji? She said she’d raised her three boys all by herself after her husband, a fireman, had died of cirrhosis of the liver. And when her boys were going through their growth spurt, she was up past midnight at her sewing machine, then up again by five in the morning to make two lunchboxes apiece for their long day of school and study. No way would she want to relive that period, the woman once declared, before adding that it was nevertheless a period worth living.

  She finds her gaze wandering beneath the sewing machine. Before they’ve noticed, the dog is once again curled up on the seat cushion.

  The woman goes to the refrigerator and returns with two glasses of milk, one of which she places in front of her. Seeing her merely staring at the milk, the woman picks up the glass and offers it to her.

  “I’m sorry, milk doesn’t agree with me . . .”

  She just can’t bring herself to say that it reminds her of semen.

  He told her to swallow his semen. When she protested, the soldier unsheathed the knife from his waistband and stabbed the tatami.

  The girls had to do what the soldiers told them. Soldiers had been known to shoot girls who didn’t. Shoot them down below. As if they’d forgotten that where the muzzle was sighting in on was the very space where all of humanity had been fashioned.

  One day a Japanese officer shot Myŏngsuk ŏnni down below. Because she’d refused, even after being beaten. Beaten unconscious, she continued to refuse after she came to. The bullet passed through her uterus. It didn’t kill her, but it left her like a rotten pumpkin down there.

  Eating shit would be better than this. She grimaced as she swallowed the fluid.

  And she can’t eat squid. Because the suction cups remind her of the mounded sores that erupted in her groin when she came down with syphilis. When the sores erupted even her eyes would start itching. Itching so badly she felt like poking her eyes with a needle.

  Back out in the alley she wanders around.

  “Why me?” she murmurs.

  She thinks she knows why the woman’s attitude toward the dog is beyond confusing, is painful to her even. It reminds her of haha, the woman who ran the comfort station.

  Haha gave the girls Japanese names and provided them with food and clothing. She also distributed jimigami—coarse, dark-colored toilet tissue—as well as olive green soap, toothbrushes, tooth powder, gauze menstrual pads, and towels. And a navy blue sleeveless dress that looked like a rice sack.

  When the girls didn’t pay attention, haha would tell on them to her truck driver husband, the man who had delivered them from the Harbin train station. He had been in the army, and the girls called him otosan—which, she had learned from Kŭmbok ŏnni, was Japanese for “father.” On the wall of the kitchen, where the girls took their meals, was a photo of otosan in a military uniform sporting two dots that you might almost take for stars. While the girls sat around the plywood dining table taking their meal, haha and her family ate among themselves. The girls took in the aromas of pike mackerel and beef soup. Those items didn’t appear on their table, which bore only watery gruel and pickled radish.

  Haha and her family lived in a hut apart from the comfort station. Otosan spent his days in a room near the entrance to the station where, armed with sword and pistol, he kept watch over the girls. To keep them from escaping, he had strung electric wire around the compound.

  When she thinks of haha’s two daughters a strange thought occurs to her: those little girls also referred to haha as haha.

  Come to think of it, the alteration shop woman had also tried to hand off her dog to the woman who runs the Seoul Beauty Parlor. This woman had flat out said no; she was born in the year of the tiger and the poor dog would be scared shitless in her presence. The beauty parlor woman is the sort who believes that marriage compatibility is a matter of fate, and she understood her husband’s vagabond nature—he was an itinerant construction worker—as an inevitable result of their conflicting personalities, which made it necessary for them to live apart from each other if their marriage was to survive. She herself found it dubious that a husband and wife doomed with combative personalities were so strongly attracted to each other that they could marry and have two children. If they were in fact bad news for each other, shouldn’t they have cut their losses and run off in opposite directions before they tied the knot?

  She doesn’t know if the determination of a person’s fate is a matter of the alignment of the stars, temperament, or the will of the gods. Perhaps it’s a combination of all three?

  She’s not sure if the gods exist, but there are times she feels them. When she sees the first light of dawn through the milky glass of her window, when a flock of sparrows take flight from the woods, when she bites into a sweet, juicy peach. . . . Now that she’s figured out it’s the gods she senses, she’s surprised at how often she’s felt them at work. The first time she saw bellflowers she felt the gods.

  And at the same time she feels fright.

  And even though she’s not sure the gods exist, you won’t find her picking up fruit that’s fallen from someone else’s tree, for fear that one of the gods might see her. And you won’t hear her curse another, even in an undertone, for fear a god might hear. Indeed, she thinks that perhaps she’s
more afraid of the gods than the people who trust in their existence.

  But the real reason she’s turned down the woman’s offer of her dog is this: what if she breathes her last before the dog lives out its days?

  People are always urging her to keep a dog or a cat; after all, she doesn’t have a husband or children. The elderly woman who took her in as a housekeeper for six years went so far as to say she had the heart of a person who could revive any living thing. This after seeing her minister to houseplants that had shriveled and seemingly died at the hands of the daughter-in-law but now, miracle of miracles, were blooming anew! This gift was enough, said the mistress, to revive a person on death’s doorstep. She herself, though, believed that her revival of the houseplants resulted not from her green thumb but from always going the extra mile. Her success with the plants owed to feeding them with water used for rinsing the rice, finding the sunniest place to put them, and watching morning, noon, and night for any sign of withering.

  Even if she was convinced that at age 93 she would outlive the dog, she would refuse it anyway. For she’s not sure she can prevent a pet from getting sick and dying.

  She does have Nabi, who likes to hunt and then bring her the trophies. And as much as she wishes Nabi wouldn’t do that, her greater hope is that one day the cat won’t return from its hunting expedition. At the same time, if it’s gone even four days she feels anxious. She wonders how old the cat is. And if it ever had another master. And if so, if that person abandoned it.

  She’s afraid that someday Nabi will bring home a live magpie and drop it at her feet.

  And the next time a dead girl.

  The comfort station in Manchuria was a living hell. Even if you wanted to hang yourself, there wasn’t a single tree fit for the purpose. Out on the plains there were only scrub oaks and a scattering of husk-like shrubs poking out of the ground. You had to go high up in the hills to find trees worthy of the name. Four long days of scrambling across the highest of the high hills would get you to Soviet land.