by Kim Soom
And then there were the girls who departed only in death, such as Kisuk ŏnni, who had bled to death after taking opium.
The girls who left or died were invariably replaced. Some of the new arrivals were as oblivious as she had been about their duties at the comfort station; others had circulated among other comfort stations.
Atarashino kita! “A new shipment!” There was an instant buzz among the soldiers.
Depending on where a new girl was from, the others might pelt her with questions: “What’s happening in Taegu?” “How’s life in Pusan?”
Sisters T’anshil and Changshil were among the transplants. Otosan had brought them not long after Sŏksun ŏnni’s death. Ch’unhŭi ŏnni heard him boasting to haha that he’d gotten two for the price of one.
“That one doesn’t know a thing—show her,” haha would order the girls. After which the girls would demonstrate for the new arrival, unrolling a sakku over their thumb as haha had done for them.
“You have to tell them to use it, otherwise someone gets sick.” Kŭmbok ŏnni would drill this into the new girls.
Among the new arrivals was a 12-year-old. Like most girls she wore a ch’ima the color of ink, and it smelled of the wild greens of her native village—shepherd’s purse, chives, mugwort . . .
“How could they take you away, you’re just a baby?” asked Kŭmbok ŏnni, sprawled out on the floor from the effects of her 606 shot.
“They got me at the village well when I was fetching water,” drawled the new girl as if talking in her sleep. “I filled my water jar and was about to set it on my head when someone grabbed me by the shoulder. It was a soldier with a star right here, and he was wearing a sword, and he had such mean eyes—”
“Sweetie,” interrupted pockmarked Pongae, who was scratching her sallow, lumpy face. “What’s your name?”
“Yŏngsun. What is this place anyway?” The girl seemed to come out of her trance, her eyes widening.
“It’s a ppiya,” growled opium-laden Hunam ŏnni, whose complexion was the color of lead.
Ppiya was what the girls called the comfort station. The term was used by haha, otosan, the Japanese soldiers, and the Chinese as well. The girls were Chosen ppi. This was the expression she herself most hated hearing, once she learned that ppi was Chinese for “cunt. ” Among the vulgarities she’d learned, Chosen ppi was the foulest and most degrading.
“Ppiya? What’s that?”
“It’s a place where soldiers come and you sleep with them,” said Yŏnsun as she puffed on one of the cigarettes she’d been given by a soldier. A rat could be heard squeaking from the kitchen. Maybe the rat trap was working?
“Soldiers? What if they shoot me? Then I won’t be able to take care of them.”
Tongsuk ŏnni chuckled.
“You’re a little chick, they won’t kill you,” said Haegŭm.
Yŏngsun seemed relieved, but the next moment was bawling that she wanted to go home.
“Crying won’t get you anywhere,” said T’anshil, her dim gaze directed at the ceiling where rats were scampering about.
“You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave,” said Changshil ŏnni. Her lips were the color of an eggplant. The previous night a noncommissioned officer had knocked out three of her front teeth. He’d put his finger in her vagina and was trying to wiggle it around when she said, “Why don’t you try that on your mother instead?” Earning her a beating from the enraged soldier. By the time she left the comfort station she had lost almost all her teeth.
Haha gave Yŏngsun the name Gohana, Japanese for “little flower,” and sent her to a vacant room. The girls didn’t tell Yŏngsun it was the room where Kisuk ŏnni had died. Yŏngsun took soldiers on the same tatami mat that Kisuk ŏnni had used. She wore Kisuk ŏnni’s dress, used Kisuk ŏnni’s leftover tissue, and used the sakku that Kisuk ŏnni had cleaned and left out to dry.
The next morning Yŏngsun visited each of the other girls, crying all the while.
One day Tongsuk ŏnni coughed up blood the deep red color of wild strawberries. Her face turned ashen and the next they knew, she was having trouble walking. The girls whispered among themselves that she’d come down with lung disease.
“It’s all those damn soldiers she had to take, that’s why,” said Haegŭm, her hands trembling more violently than usual as she rinsed her sakku.
“Next it’ll be us,” said Punsŏn as she washed her sakku number fifteen.
“We’ll be useless down below,” said Ch’unhŭi ŏnni as she tore a sakku apart instead of washing it.
Tongsuk ŏnni’s cough got worse, but still haha made her take soldiers. After she coughed blood while taking a soldier haha turned the nameplate on her door backside out. And to make sure the other girls wouldn’t catch her ailment, haha prevented them from visiting her. From time to time the girls could hear Tongsuk ŏnni coughing her lungs out, and all day long her room bore a somber chill along with a bloody stink. The girls would peep into Tongsuk ŏnni’s room whenever haha wasn’t looking.
The frosts arrived and Tongsuk ŏnni’s condition deteriorated rapidly.
Kŭmbok ŏnni stopped to see haha on her way to the wash area with a tin washbasin containing a bloody towel from Tongsuk ŏnni’s room.
“Can’t you send her home?”
“I’m not sending her anywhere until she pays off her debt.”
Even while Tongsuk ŏnni was coughing the last of her lifeblood, her debt continued to swell like a cocoon being spun by a silkworm.
“Can’t I pay it off for her?”
“Do you have any idea how much you owe us? You pay off your debt first and then I’ll listen to you!” And with that haha turned and disappeared. Even an imminent death wouldn’t make her more generous.
An officer on horseback arrived in the middle of the night to find her in bed weeping. Watashiga anatani jihi o hodokosu daro! he boasted. “I bestow on you my charity!” He followed by giving her a mildewed Japanese banknote. When that didn’t bring a stop to her weeping, he snarled, Jihi o kotowaru nante! “Is that how you respond to my charity!” The enraged officer sat her up and slapped her back and forth. Chosenjini chihio hodokusuyori inuni hodokushita houga ii! “Better to give charity to a dog than a Korean!”
And then he stripped her naked and ordered her to give him a massage. Crouching like a sick kitten on his back, she massaged his shoulders.
After he’d fallen asleep she left to go to the toilet. Along the way and shivering with cold, she looked into Tongsuk ŏnni’s room. Kŭmbok ŏnni was at Tongsuk ŏnni’s bedside watching over her. Eerie moonlight filtered through the ice-glazed window. The station was tranquil, as if everyone was gone and only the three of them were left. Not even the sound of breathing could be heard from Ch’unhŭi ŏnni’s room across the way, where earlier around midnight a bestial wail had escaped, as if she were being taken to a slaughterhouse.
Rubbing the instep of her frozen foot against the back of her other leg, she gazed at Tongsuk ŏnni’s brazier. Amid the white ash a single coal glowed faintly. It looked to her like the heart of a dying hare left unnoticed among the spent coals. The least she could do was give Tongsuk ŏnni some coal, but she had none. She had the elusive sensation that the air in the room was changing along with the waning of the glow.
“Is she sleeping?”
“She just now dropped off. . . . Sure is pretty.”
She could see Tongsuk ŏnni’s breath, blossoming like a white paper flower.
She looked uncomprehendingly at Kŭmbok ŏnni.
“Her face, I mean.”
Over Kŭmbok ŏnni’s shoulder she could see Tongsuk ŏnni’s face. It was devoid of expression. Kŭmbok ŏnni reached out and caressed the expressionless face. The bloody stench from the room was painfully nauseating and forced her to stifle her breathing.
“You should get some sleep, ŏnni,” she managed to say.
“You’re right.” But now she was combing Tongsuk ŏnni’s hair with her fingers, like a mother sen
ding off a daughter at daybreak to her new in-laws in a far-off place. Tongsuk ŏnni, who had just now dropped off to sleep, never woke up.
“Ŏnni . . . ŏnni !” No matter how Aesun called, her parrot voice couldn’t awaken Tongsuk ŏnni. Outside in the hall T’anshil’s head poked out from her room and moved back and forth as she wondered what was happening. But the next moment her confused expression gave way to a bright smile as if she had caught sight of a welcome presence. Her dim eyes would apprehend things the other girls couldn’t see. She once said she saw a girl standing naked on the other side of the barbed wire, only to learn later that this must have been Sŏksun ŏnni, who had died before T’anshil arrived.
Yŏngsun, unable to relieve herself for four days because of her prolapsed privates, went down the hall crying. Changshil ŏnni had contracted syphilis and her nameplate had been turned inside out. Ch’unhŭi ŏnni emerged from her room scratching her head. Because she never washed her face, she had the look of someone who had caught the plague. Sitting across from each other, legs spread, Yŏnsun and Haegŭm picked crab lice from each other’s pubic hair with tweezers.
“We’re going to survive, we’re going to make it back home,” said Yŏnsun.
“And we’re never going to forget each other,” said Haegŭm.
The crab lice lived in the pubic hair and came with the soldiers. Their bites left the privates an angry red, itchy and swollen. In their spare time the girls spread their legs and picked lice from each other.
Yŏnsun and Haegŭm pledged themselves to sisterhood and sealed the pledge by giving each other a blue, threadlike tattoo.
Aesun emerged bawling, “Tongsuk ŏnni’s dead!”
Kŭmbok ŏnni dressed Tongsuk ŏnni in the best preserved of her garments. Tongsuk ŏnni’s long eyelashes seemed to twitch faintly, like the second hand of a clock. Maybe she’s still alive? she herself wondered.
No flowers were available and so the girls opened their mouths and adorned Tongsuk ŏnni with a bouquet of vapor blossoms. Suok ŏnni opened her mouth and from between her buck teeth came tiny white flowers resembling those of chili pepper plants. Yŏnsun and Haegŭm mingled their breath to produce a peony. Perched above Tongsuk ŏnni’s face, Kŭmbok ŏnni was painstakingly fashioning a huge flower that resembled a snowball viburnum.
Otosan burned Tongsuk ŏnni’s corpse. When a girl died he would roll up the body in a straw mat and either toss it into the empty fields or burn it.
While the girls were taking soldiers, they could hear the crackling of the fire and smell Tongsuk ŏnni’s burning body. The bursting of her swollen stomach and the cracking of her burning bones circulated in the heavens before settling in the girls’ ears.
Her burning body smelled like rotting fish.
And it was just their luck that the soldiers surged in nonstop that day. The girls had to skip dinner to take them. The soldiers had just returned from battle and smelled like cow dung. Their red, crater-like eyes still bore a bloodthirsty tinge, and they were rabid as hunting dogs. A soldier missing a boot entered her, and the next moment opened his maw and vomited all over her face. A lieutenant with wavy hair entered her making a sound with his mouth like the buzzing of a blowfly. A soldier bit her ear upon mounting her, and she imagined him turning into a mad dog. Another soldier’s contorted face she saw as a reflection from the surface of the flickering light bulb.
Not until dawn was she was able to visit the site where Tongsuk ŏnni had been burned. Kŭmbok ŏnni and Punsŏn were already there. Kŭmbok ŏnni stepped into the ash, each step producing a silvery fluff. In the light of dawn Kŭmbok ŏnni’s thighs beneath her sack dress were so pale you could see her veins. Kŭmbok ŏnni bent over to pick up something—a round, grayish fragment of Tongsuk ŏnni’s skull that gave off a ghostly white glint in the dawn light. Kŭmbok ŏnni brushed the ash from the fragment before wrapping it in a cotton cloth and bringing it to her chest. “It’s still warm,” she murmured, “like her heart.”
Kŭmbok ŏnni kept the fragment in the wooden box that contained her clothing. A year later when she left the comfort station it was the first item she packed in her cloth bundle. She said if she made it back home she would go to Tongsuk ŏnni’s home village and bury it there.
She turned in to haha the mildewed Japanese banknote given her by the officer, along with the tickets she’d collected the previous day. Japanese bills were worthless scraps of paper to the girls, who had no use for them.
From Pongae’s room came the cajoling voice of Kŭmbok ŏnni: “What’s the matter with you? We don’t have to die here, you know.”
“What kind of a future do I have?” Pongae was on drugs.
“We have to do whatever it takes to get back home—don’t you want that?”
“But ŏnni, how can I look my mom in the face?”
“Wake up, girl. You don’t want to die like a dog out here in the middle of nowhere.”
Pongae went off opium and took up tobacco and strong liquor instead.
The girls had heard of comfort stations elsewhere, and on one of their trips to the Chinese village they saw one. Whenever the girls had to go to an outpost, haha would take them to the bathhouse in the village. There they scrubbed each other clean, dead skin and all, while haha for her part had a Chinese girl do it.
On this particular trip Pokcha ŏnni indicated a three-story brick building on a busy street and told the girls about it. Pokcha ŏnni had arrived after Tongsuk ŏnni died. The so-called atarashi, “new shipment,” she looked as old as haha. Pokcha ŏnni didn’t ask what she was supposed to do there and didn’t go around to the other girls’ rooms in tears the next morning.
“There are girls from back home there.”
The brick building had wide, squat windows at regular intervals on each floor, but the windows had odd-looking grates over them. The metal gate to the building was like a folding door, and there was a sign made of wood on one of the posts. She herself couldn’t read Chinese and had no idea what the column of characters on the sign meant. Then the gate opened and an older girl rushed out. The girl was wearing a kimono, but she could tell the girl was from Korea. She could spot the ones from back home, whether they wore kimono or qipao. Across the street the girl went, toward a place that looked like a shop. Back she ran and as soon as she was through the gate it clanked shut as if it would never open again.
“It used to be an inn, and then the Japanese took it over.”
Pokcha ŏnni went on to say the Chinese owner had hung himself from the stairs.
“The Japanese soldiers cut open a pregnant Chinese woman and took out her baby,” said Pongae.
“I saw six Japanese soldiers rape a Chinese woman behind the train station in Harbin,” said Pokcha ŏnni. “They saw her walking by and went after her like a pack of mad dogs. She was terrified and tried her best to get away, but she must have had bound feet because she took only a few steps before they caught up with her. Some Chinese men were nearby, but do you think they cared? All they did was gawk.”
At the thatch-roofed building where the girls had a weekly medical exam for venereal disease, they sometimes saw girls who worked at other stations.
Once they arrived to see a line of new faces in front of the building. A man in a military uniform was haranguing one of them, a girl whose face was the color of an orange and who couldn’t stand up straight.
“These Korean bitches are hopeless,” the man said, then hit the tottering girl in the head with his baton. The girl spun once like a slow-motion top, fell to her knees, then collapsed to the ground. “Leave her alone—she can die for all I care,” he barked when the other girls went to her aid.
She noticed in the line three girls linked at the wrist by a rope, looking like a string of dried fish. Presumably the rope was to prevent them from escaping.
She overheard otosan talking with the man. She had a basic understanding of Japanese by then, thanks to haha’s insistence that the girls speak Japanese. Haha also had Kisuk ŏnni and Sundŏk, who knew Japanese, te
ach the girls who didn’t. The first phrase she learned was Irasayemase! “Welcome!” This was how they were to greet the soldiers arriving at the comfort station.
“How are the girls at your place?” otosan asked the man who looked like a soldier. “Are they giving you any trouble?”
“Those three are from Kyesŏng and they stick together—they’re always up to no good.”
“How much did they cost?”
“I paid two hundred for one of them, a hundred for that one, and one-fifty for the third one.”
One day when she’d been at the comfort station about three years, haha assembled the girls and asked, “Who wants to go Singaporu?”
“Singaporu?”
“Tell me if you want to go, and I’ll send you there.”
The girls exchanged whispers while trying to read haha’s intentions.
“Where’s Singapore?”
“I think it’s somewhere down south.”
“Then it must be warm there.”
Suok ŏnni kept mum, but haha told her to go to Singapore anyway. The next morning haha handed a bundle to each of the girls bound for Singapore.
Kŭmbok ŏnni was among those girls. She herself was fond of Kŭmbok ŏnni, who was four years older and like a big sister to her. Kŭmbok ŏnni was from Angang, near the city of Kyŏngju, and was compassionate and attentive to the other girls. In need of food, her mother sent her and her younger sister out to forage in the hills, where they were kidnapped by soldiers. The two girls got separated and Kŭmbok ŏnni didn’t know if her sister was dead or alive. Seeing that she herself was the spitting image of her sister, she took her under her wing.
On the day of departure for Singapore she would gladly have given up one of her arms instead of Kŭmbok ŏnni. But when Kŭmbok ŏnni reiterated to her before leaving, “Just do what haha says,” it sounded servile and so she pretended not to hear.
