One Left: A Novel

by Kim Soom

  And so the girls would cut themselves and bleed to death while high on opium. Knowing that if they cut a finger and sucked long enough to get the blood flowing, the opium would put them to sleep and they’d never wake up. Kisuk ŏnni had died like that, her blood-caked teeth looking like pomegranate kernels.

  Back in her ancestral home of Miryang, Kisuk ŏnni had worked at a cotton-gin operation run by the Japanese. You put the cotton bolls from the field into the gin, and it separated the cotton from the seeds. Kisuk ŏnni said she had seen a man get dragged into the machine by his hair.

  “He was a distant relative,” Kisuk ŏnni had said, “and his daughter saw it too. What could any of us do except jump up and down and scream. . . . She was the same age as me, and she didn’t have a proper name and so we called her Monnani, the ugly one. Monnani went off before I did. After what happened to her father, she was the only one in the family who could bring money in. . . . She said she was going to work in a munitions factory in Japan. . . . I can still visualize that accident, it was so real, so imagine what it was like for her. It was the hair that got caught . . . just a few strands of it . . . and as soon as we said uh-oh his head was sucked in . . .”

  The morning Kisuk ŏnni died she got an injection of opium from otosan and went out to the yard and started dancing. She pulled at the sleeve of the kimono the scarecrow was wearing, so that it looked like she was dancing along with the scarecrow. Haha called this scarecrow Haruka. Haruka’s face was redder than it was the day the girls arrived at the comfort station. Supposedly haha daubed it with blood every night. None of the girls saw her doing this, but Haruka’s face got redder by the day. Unlike the faces of the girls, which turned a sickly yellow or black.

  After what happened to Kisuk ŏnni, she dreamed she was slinking down the hallway of the comfort station. Calling to Kisuk ŏnni, telling her it was time for breakfast. Haha provided only two meals a day, so if you missed breakfast you either went hungry all day or got by on hardtack from the soldiers. The girls often missed breakfast when officers arrived late at night. In her dream she just couldn’t find Kisuk ŏnni’s room—the names of the girls had all been removed from the doors.

  Haha had made name tags for the girls and posted them on the doors. Umeko, Kiyoko, Fumiko, Eiko, Kinoe, Asako. . . . The girls who came down with gonorrhea or syphilis had their name tags turned inside out, and the soldiers didn’t line up outside their doors.

  The name tags were made of wood and were hung lengthwise. They were about the size of a container for spoons and chopsticks and resembled a memorial plaque bearing the name of the deceased, which made her feel as if the names written on them were those of the girls who had died rather than the ones still alive.

  Haha didn’t bother burying Kisuk ŏnni. Why waste dirt and soil on her?

  The girls had been told they’d be issued new rubber footwear and be fed full portions of rice, not the chaffy stuff. They had no idea that the place they went to upon hearing these promises was a living hell.

  And in this living hell the girls were flogged with soekkudae, whips with metal handles; beaten with red-hot fire pokers or with metal bars; hit with the flat of a sword; or kicked indiscriminately. And they stuck red-hot metal rods into the girls’ vaginas. The rods came out with charred flesh stuck to them.

  She’s in an alley where no one lives. She stops and looks at all the empty dwellings. They’re of every size and shape imaginable. One moment she’ll see a house shut tight, windows and all, the next moment a house with its gate open wide onto the alley. There are houses with shattered windows, the shards of glass strewn in the alley, and houses with overflowing piles of trash and abandoned furniture.

  If it was her, she’d want to make sure she’d shut all the doors and windows before vacating.

  Some places it’s hard to tell whether they’re vacant or inhabited. Somehow the house she occupies strikes her the same way.

  She worries about the empty houses in 15-bŏnji, thinking of them as birds and hoping they’ll fly off before the wrecking crews and the excavators arrive.

  There were houses on the Manchurian plains. They come hazily to mind now, dwellings appearing in the distance from the cargo truck that picked them up in Harbin. Houses made of boards slapped together, houses with brushwood fences, sooty structures that looked more like fireboxes than homes. Houses resembling migratory birds taking a respite from their endless journey to feed on bugs and stray grain.

  When the plains became bare, with neither house nor tree in sight, Haegŭm mumbled anxiously, “I wonder how far it is to the silk factory.”

  The truck was rattling terribly, but her face and eyes showed that Haegŭm herself was rattled. We were too young, we didn’t know a thing; they never doubted how it came to be that they were all led to believe they were going to different factories. She herself didn’t care if it was a factory that made thread, silk, or needles; if it was a good or a bad place to work; she just wished they would get there.

  There were in fact girls who had gone to factories to make money. Miok ŏnni had left school in the sixth grade at the urging of her principal and joined the Workers Service Corps. She took the streetcar to Kyŏngsŏng Station and with other girls boarded a train for Pusan. Young as she was, she thought only that she was off on a trip to some distant place. At Pusan she boarded a shuttle ferry named Kamome, which means “seagull,” to Shimonoseki, where she was loaded onto a truck and taken to a munitions factory in Toyama Prefecture that made cartridges for assault rifles. Her work table was so high she had to stand on a chest to do her work. One area of the factory was stacked with brassware confiscated from Korea to be melted down and made into weaponry. Not once was Miok ŏnni compensated during the time she worked at this factory.

  At the comfort station Kisuk ŏnni, hearing that Miok ŏnni had been at a munitions factory in Japan, asked, “You must know Monnani, then?”

  “Monnani?”

  “Well, Monnani said she was going to work at a munitions factory.”

  “There wasn’t anyone named Monnani where I worked.”

  “That’s strange . . .”

  When Kisuk ŏnni cocked her head dubiously, Miok ŏnni followed up with, “Where was this Monnani from?”

  “Miryang.”

  “We had a lot of girls from Chinju and Masan but none that I know of from Miryang.”

  “At the factory where I worked,” said Ch’unhŭi ŏnni, “there were a lot of girls from Chŏlla.”

  Ch’unhŭi ŏnni had worked at a clothing factory. From eight in the morning to seven in the evening she did laundry, cleaned up, and made clothes. At that factory were women in their thirties who had left their children back in the home village so they could go out to make money.

  “The dinner they fed us was so measly you could practically count the grains of rice. And until dinner all they gave us was three lumps of rice cake that was more like bean cake. I used to wrap it in cloth and stick it in my waistband, then eat it later by myself—along with all the lice that lived there, no doubt. Before I got here I sent a telegram home asking my family to send me salt and beans . . .”

  After several months at the clothing factory some fifteen of the girls were summoned, put on a truck, and taken away. They ended up in a large room. Japanese soldiers arrived and the girls found themselves being taken one at a time to smaller rooms. After that the girls, but only the younger ones, were scheduled by the day—on Tuesday the Tuesday girls went out to the smaller rooms, on Wednesday the Wednesday girls went out, and so on.

  The days the girls didn’t have to go out to serve the soldiers were days of freedom.

  “This MP asked me how old I was,” said Ch’unhŭi ŏnni. “I guess because my face is kind of round like a baby’s . . . anyway I told him I was 13, and he went ‘Wow’ and laughed.”

  Ch’unhŭi ŏnni was 15 when she arrived at the Manchuria comfort station. Her round baby face, as she called it, became sunken and pointed like a trowel. From her very first day she was desperate
to escape. She made a nuisance of herself playing sick to haha, anything to reduce the quota of soldiers she had to take. The other girls went about with mouths pursed like goldfish, going through the motions even when singing “Kimigayo,” the Japanese national anthem, and reciting the Rescript for Loyal Citizens.

  Before breakfast the girls gathered on the lawn outside the comfort station. Standing immobile facing the Japanese flag, with loud voices they sang the anthem and recited the rescript.

  It was summer and from early in the morning the air reeked of the outhouses. The girls staggered out onto the lawn with dazed expressions, as if addled by nightmares, and stood watching the flag. The sunlight landing on the nape of Haegŭm’s neck felt prickly. She stood somnolent, her head down. Blowflies just hatched in the outhouses buzzed among the girls. All summer long the outhouses spawned maggots, mosquitoes, and blowflies. Ch’unhŭi ŏnni was scratching her face, which was patchy from malnourishment, and half mumbling, half cursing. Hanok ŏnni was grabbing at her armpits. The lice were a constant presence and had found a home there as well.

  She moved next to Yŏnsun. “What happened?”

  In the wee hours of the morning she had heard Yŏnsun scream. And then a door being kicked in. Feet running down the hall. Otosan and a soldier tussling. It had gone on for quite some time.

  Thousands of years of happy reign be thine;

  Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now

  By age united to mighty rocks shall grow

  Whose venerable sides the moss doth line.

  The girls started singing, and she and Yŏnsun joined in. Suddenly Yŏnsun plopped down, yellowish pus streaming from between her thighs. A blowfly came to rest on her open, blackened mouth.

  Even as the girls sang in praise of the emperor and pledged their undying loyalty as citizens of the empire, the lice were feeding on their blood.

  Today the memories of the comfort station in Manchuria are especially vivid. The building had block walls overlaid with plywood and was filled with rooms flanking the bamboo-straight hallways. The slipshod wooden floors of the hallways creaked loudly day and night. At the end of one of the hallways was the kitchen; it had a dirt floor and a Chinese-style firebox for cooking. Atop one of the board shelves the girls’ rice bowls were stacked like a tower, round bowls made of nickel. When the rats were active haha put out pieces of cardboard bearing a glue-like substance. Haha didn’t like people coming and going from the kitchen, and the only time the girls were allowed in was when they came for water. Whenever she went to the kitchen for water and saw the rats stuck fast by their feet or tail to the cardboard, she felt a close kinship with them. Once she found a couple of baby rats stuck to the cardboard; the mother rat was looking on, fire in her eyes.

  The yard in front of the comfort station was bare earth except for a few clumps of tangled grass. A stream went past the yard out back. A channel had been carved for the stream, and where the water pooled, an area for washing up had been curtained off with thick sheets the color of military fatigues. Fed by the stream water, half a dozen lengths of hose resembling fat worms stuck out of the ground, each one topped by a ladle-like showerhead.

  The three plywood outhouses had locks made of a yellow metal. Haha gave the keys to the girls, in effect making the outhouses off-limits to the soldiers. Otherwise the pits would be overloaded in no time and stink to high heaven. The only time the girls gave out the keys was to the officers who arrived at night.

  Each of the girls’ rooms had an opening set ridiculously high in the wall. What’s more, the window was curtained with a thick cotton drape that fell nearly to the floor, so even during daytime the rooms were dark as caves.

  On average the rooms were about one and half p’yŏng in area. There were rooms slightly smaller and rooms slightly larger. When new girls arrived at the comfort station, haha would hang a blanket in the larger rooms, partitioning them in two.

  When she sees the upper windows of the buildings bordering the alleys she can’t help but relate them to the windows in the rooms of the comfort station. Even the tallest girls were barely head-high to the windowsill.

  There she is again.

  She recalls the first time she encountered this girl. She saw her approaching from the far end of the alley and startled. Punsŏn, back from the dead! With her cropped hair and eyes as round as a bird’s, the girl definitely resembled Punsŏn.

  Punsŏn, taken from the cotton fields where she worked. Punsŏn, calling out It hurts, it hurts, every waking moment at the comfort station.

  When Punsŏn’s infection down below made it difficult for her to walk, haha cut into the pus-filled flesh with her dagger. After squeezing out the pus she stuck a cotton ball coated with a white powder to the area.

  There was a Japanese officer, ready for action, who said to Punsŏn, “Let’s have some fun.” But she didn’t understand Japanese and just stood there. Whereupon the officer grabbed her and threw her to the ground.

  The girl is wearing a backpack and squatting at the base of the wall, next to a crack that looks like a slash mark. She hasn’t seen her for a few months and assumed the girl had moved.

  It’s a miracle the girl is still here in 15-bŏnji. There are precious few children left. When she moved in she could hear children’s voices from time to time, but by now practically all the families with children have moved. Growing up in 15-bŏnji has become bleak and anarchic. Maybe that’s why this girl strikes her as the one girl left not only in 15-bŏnji but in the whole world.

  Today as always the girl is by herself. She’s never seen the girl with friends.

  The girl wears a small yellow dress that stretches tightly across her chest and leaves her thighs exposed. Because she’s squatting, the hem of her dress is rolled up to her hips, and her panties are in and out of view. Maybe the girl doesn’t have a mother? Or maybe the mother is off to work and leaves the girl to her own devices? If she were the girl’s mom she wouldn’t be letting her wander the alleys of 15-bŏnji. The girl doesn’t look like she’s beyond the age where she’d be playing the baby with her mom, but there’s definitely something more girlish than baby-like about her.

  With half a mind to pull the girl’s dress down, she approaches gingerly. And yet the girl is already on guard and the next moment the vigilance has changed to hostility.

  Stopping to read the girl’s intentions, she catches sight of an object resting in the hand that lies limp against the pavement. Her mouth widens as she gawks at it.

  “A mask—something you made at school?”

  Not a wooden mask but a mask made of paper pulp. Examining the mask, she cocks her head inquisitively. The mask has eyes and a nose but no mouth.

  The girl gets up and sticks out the mask toward her. “Try it on.”

  She flinches at the girl’s voice, which to her ears is obnoxiously loud.

  “Try it on,” says the girl, fretful now.

  Don’t tell me she made that mask just for me?

  It’s not a huge request, but she doesn’t feel right about it. There’s no mouth, the entire surface is purple, it gives her the creeps.

  It’s only a mask made of paper pulp but somehow she feels it would stick to her face and she wouldn’t be able to get it off. She doesn’t know how many days she has left in this world, but she would have to live out those days with this mask stuck to her face. And even when she’s dead and buried and her face has rotted away, the mask would remain intact, wandering underground.

  “I told you to try it on!” Now it’s an order.

  She knows she can’t win and takes the mask.

  A sly, mischievous expression comes over the girl’s face, which is oddly contorted. But the next instant it looks old and weary, as if the girl has experienced every conflict life can throw at her.

  She tries to avoid looking at the girl’s face as she observes the mask she’s holding. It has a garish shine from its coating of paint and varnish. The gleam gives the mask a peculiar expression that she who is human canno
t mimic.

  Only after inspecting the alley to make sure no one is watching the two of them does she bring the mask to her face. She positions it this way and that so her eyes can see through the holes, then realizes the holes and her eyes are not equidistant and the mask won’t fit. One eye might but then the other one won’t.

  Before she’s finished she hears the girl’s shrill laughter. Then it seems to grow distant, and suddenly it’s gone. Only then does she remove the mask and look about the alley; the girl is nowhere to be seen.

  “Hey, sweetie, you need to take your mask . . .”

  Her fear-ridden voice rings hollow in the alley.

  Is the mask a gift? A gift of the gods, sent by way of the girl? The mask using the girl as a medium, like the dead magpie used the cat as a medium?

  She finds the mask more terrifying than the magpie. She can’t return dead magpies whence they came, but she would like to return the mask.

  But she doesn’t know where the girl lives. Once she secretly followed the girl in an attempt to find out. It was a game of hide and seek, the girl leading her on a circuitous trip through the alleys, only to vanish in the blink of an eye.

  How old could the girl be—10? 11? 12? 13? Every time she goes out the gate of the house she occupies, she decides that if she sees the girl in the alleys she’ll ask—but she always forgets.

  The girl couldn’t have reached age 13 yet. She still can’t believe that’s how old she herself was when she was taken away back then.

  One night at the comfort station a drunken officer took his dagger and made a cut in her privates. She was barely 13 and her underdeveloped genitalia wouldn’t admit him.

  Could the last one be Aesun? Aesun with her swarthy face and thin eyelids drank the potassium permanganate solution she was supposed to dilute with water to clean her privates. Fortunately Kŭmbok ŏnni found her and made her throw up. But the solution left her throat raw. And her vocal cords too, so that she sounded like a parrot when she spoke.