One Left: A Novel

by Kim Soom

  At the comfort station the girls were tormented by gonorrhea or syphilis. But there was something equally painful. Haegŭm, who had come down with a toothache so excruciating it had her thrashing in pain in the hall, was writing something on the ground with her finger, pressing so hard that dirt got wedged beneath her fingernail. She herself could barely identify numbers, but Haegŭm was literate enough to know how to write her name.

  She knew Haegŭm was writing a word, but she couldn’t read it.

  “What are you writing?”

  “‘Land.’” And then Haegŭm looked up as if the land was somewhere beyond the sky.

  Sundown left the girls wanting desperately to return home. For that’s when the girls had had chores to do: bringing in the laundry, feeding the livestock, grinding the barley, lighting a fire in the firebox.

  She went to the storage room next to the kitchen and there she found Yŏngsun crying over a bowl of wheat gruel. Yŏngsun was always wishing she could go home to fetch the water. She was the only one left in the family who could do this chore, and it was at the village well that she’d been kidnapped. Her mother had fallen ill and died when Yŏngsun was 5, after which she was raised by her grandmother. Here at the comfort station she had just turned 13.

  “I don’t know what she had, she just wasted away. I remember her going around with a bundle on her head and me on her back—she was selling combs, hairpins, fabrics, and such. . . . And then she passed and my grandmother raised me. If one of the neighbor families was having a celebration, Grandmother would be helping them all day and then bring home some rice cake and fried cakes—wanting to feed me, you know.”

  Listening to Yŏngsun’s story, Yŏnsun broke into tears at the thought of her younger siblings having to do the house-to-house begging now that she was gone.

  Whenever the sky was blue and cloudless she herself practically went insane at the thought of the green barley fields back home.

  Escaping from the comfort station was a constant desire, but no girl had ever succeeded. There were girls who tried, but they were caught and brought back.

  One of the girls had run off on the way back from the regular gynecological checkup at the thatch-roofed building. She was caught not by otosan but by the MPs. Otosan hauled her out of the truck and dumped her in the yard. Her sack dress was ripped and torn, and she’d been beaten bloody.

  “Chop her feet off so she won’t do it again,” haha ordered him.

  He pulled out his dagger and for all intents looked ready to show the girls exactly what to expect should anyone else run off. But the girls couldn’t look her way and instead looked off in the distance as if betting who could cast the farthest gaze.

  With his dagger otosan left the would-be runaway with a gash across the ankle.

  She still can’t get her feet into her shoes, feeling the shoes belong to someone else. The edge of the veranda where she’s standing feels like a drop-off to a bottomless pit, and by reflex her toes tense up. Her socks are old and have lost their elasticity and they’ve slipped below her ankles. As she pulls the right sock up, she stops to feel her ankle bone.

  Above the bone is a line you might think was left by an elastic band, but actually it’s a scar left by something sharp, a knife perhaps.

  She passes her hand across the scar, then opens her mouth and a shriek bursts out. That was me who had her ankle sliced open at the comfort station!

  When otosan’s knife dug into her ankle she blacked out from the unbearable horror and pain. Later she learned from the girls that they were sure she was going to bleed to death.

  Two hundred thousand—was it that many? So that’s why they took girls as young as 12 or even 11.

  She wonders how it was possible so many could be taken. Not two hundred thousand chickens, but two hundred thousand people. When she heard on the television that the number of former comfort women had reached two hundred thousand, she couldn’t believe it and so she called to mind each of the girls at the Manchuria station and tried to count them. During her seven years there, some fifty girls had passed through. Some of them had been paid for.

  When Hanok ŏnni said she wanted to leave, haha responded, “Then you’ll have to pay off your debt.”

  “How much is my debt?”

  “Two thousand yen.”

  The girls weren’t aware they had run up a debt—for the sack dress haha made them wear; the gruel infested with weevils that resembled black sesame seeds; the barley balls frozen hard as iron; the coarse, dark toilet tissue; the menstrual pads; the hot-water canister; the pea coal for their brazier; the opium brought by otosan; all that and everything else.

  She herself wondered about the amount of her debt but dared not ask.

  For haha, coming up with the girls’ debt was easier than pricing a pig or cow for sale at the market. No need for the scales, an abacus, or knowledge of a going price. All she had to do was declare that a girl’s debt was such-and-such and that was it.

  She herself didn’t know that the place she had come to was called a comfort station, only that once you were there you took Japanese soldiers. The same for the three-story brick building in the Chinese village. Not until she was older did she understand what a comfort station and a comfort woman were. Until then she assumed the place she was in was like a brothel. No one told her she was at a comfort station or that she was a victimized comfort woman.

  After all, haha referred to the soldiers as customers.

  Take care of the customers, she would say to the girls when a mass of soldiers arrived.

  Not until they arrived at the Manchuria comfort station did the girls imagine there were such places in this world.

  The soldiers always showed up with a beige-colored ticket one fourth the size of a flower card.

  The soldiers bought these tickets from haha. Each girl collected her tickets and took them to haha. The girls never kept this form of payment from the soldiers coming and going from their bodies. And even if they had, why bother, to the girls they were nothing but scraps of paper. The tickets were like money to the soldiers. But they weren’t real money and so the girls couldn’t use them to buy clothing, rice cakes, and such.

  Haha could tell by the number of tickets a girl gave her how many soldiers she’d taken the previous day. She also posted a graph ranking the girls by their productivity. The girl who turned in the fewest tickets had to skip a meal and clean the outhouse instead. The most productive girl was presented with the finest clothing haha had on hand as well as extra food items such as canned goods. For haha tickets meant cash since she would sell them back to the soldiers.

  An officer once gave her a Manchurian banknote. She gave it to haha along with her tickets for the day. To the girls, paper money was just that, paper, just like the tickets. She and the other girls had no idea of the value of money.

  Some soldiers tossed their ticket in the sakku can. She hated fishing a ticket from the gross-smelling container; even worse, she had to wipe the slime from it. There were times she’d thrown her tickets away in the outhouse.

  When the numbers of tickets haha received for the previous day didn’t match the numbers of tickets she’d sold, she summoned the girls and made them kneel in the yard. Otosan was waiting, club in hand, and gave each girl a whack on the thigh, leaving a bruise resembling a tire track.

  She herself tended to bring in fewer tickets than the other girls. Haha didn’t try to hide her displeasure. Once on her way back from the outhouse she stopped to gaze at an enchantingly bright moon, earning her a punch in the head from haha, who followed with, “Don’t think too hard.”

  Several days later she was washing her hair and muttering when haha appeared with her laundry stick and hit her across the back. “Who do you think you’re cussing at?”

  She feared haha more than the soldiers.

  Once when a tubal infection prevented her from taking soldiers and she’d turned in no tickets for four days running, haha erupted: “Keep playing sick and I’ll send you away for goo
d!”

  This repeated threat scared her more than anything, more than the prospect of punishment for a failed attempt at escape—and she never gave up wanting to escape. For in her mind, what haha meant by “send you away for good” was “kill you once and for all.”

  The girls were never paid by the soldiers they took, but she heard other girls say they had been paid. Those girls said that the tickets were payment for sex, even though you couldn’t exchange them for rice grain, clothing, or rubber shoes.

  Never at the comfort station had she taken a soldier because she wanted to, or in exchange for money. She would lie on her back like a corpse while the soldiers did what they had come for and left. There were guys who shot as soon they entered her, guys who shot while waiting their turn out in the hall, guys who barged in and pulled the guy on top of her away.

  The soldiers had at Ch’unhŭi ŏnni, bloody privates and all, as soon as she returned from her abortion.

  She knows that some girls who were comfort women received money. A girl who was at a Singapore comfort station, for example, said the girls there were given 60 percent of what the soldiers paid. And so she took in as many men as her body could handle, to rake in as much money as possible—by then she’d spent three years at a Guangdong comfort station, after being promised a factory job, and she was already a fallen woman. What with Japan emphasizing the need to save in order to fill the national war chest, she deposited her comfort station earnings in a military postal savings account under her Japanese name of Kimiko. By the end of the war she had saved up a tidy sum, but then the war ended and her account was frozen. She brought her bankbook back home to Korea just in case, but when she went to Japan and her bank refused to let her make a withdrawal, she ripped up the bankbook.

  There were two hundred thousand of them, she had heard. But only twenty thousand returned after Liberation from Japan.

  More dismaying than the fact that she is one of two hundred thousand comfort women is the realization that she is one of only twenty thousand who made it back home. That’s one tenth, or one out of ten. . . . Did I get that right? Only one out of ten survived? How could that be?

  She wonders if Hunam ŏnni made it back.

  Hunam ŏnni was five years older and shot herself up with opium five times a day. When it got to the point that she spent all day crying in bed, regardless of the soldiers coming and going from her body, otosan took her by the hair and dragged her outside as if she were a straw mat and dumped her out on the barren plains, while the other girls looked on from inside the barbed wire. And on that particular day it was overcast and blustery. The winds that blew in Manchuria smelled of horses. A sea of birds black as coal flocked toward Hunam ŏnni as if mistaking her bawling for a birdcall.

  Ch’unhŭi ŏnni plopped down. “See? We’ll never walk out of here alive.”

  The next morning when the girls emerged from their rooms for breakfast, Hunam ŏnni had disappeared from the plains. Haha’s daughters yapped about a girl being taken away by the Red Beards, the horse-riding bandits.

  Sundŏk was addicted as well and her face was a bilious dark color. She would cling to otosan begging him to save her. “Sure, I can save you,” he would coo before injecting her.

  She herself couldn’t endure, no way could she endure, and so she had herself injected too. Which got rid of the pain down below, no matter how she bled, and left her oblivious to the number of soldiers who came and went from her. The high left her feeling life was worth living, but when the drug wore off, she felt a crushing pain all over and couldn’t focus. At first one shot a day would tide her over, but then she’d have to add a second, and on Saturdays and Sundays when the soldiers swarmed in like fire ants, she would need five. She finally snapped out of it when she saw Hunam ŏnni dumped in the wilds, and she quit. From then on, if she found herself craving opium, she smoked or drank instead.

  Around the time the flock of soldiers was expected, Pokcha ŏnni would yell into the hallway, “Girls, an invasion from the south!”

  She herself found this more frightening than she would have a warning that someone was coming to kill her.

  Otosan took Miok ŏnni for the regular checkup and was informed she was pregnant but the baby was too far along to abort; he made her continue to take soldiers anyway. Miok ŏnni assumed the baby was dead already, but her tummy grew larger by the day.

  “Do you think she’ll really have a baby?” she herself was asked by Kunja, who was rinsing sakku in the wash area. Kunja had arrived with Miok ŏnni. She herself was the same age as Kunja and had instantly grown close to her.

  She herself had a birthmark-like bruise on her face. From a soldier who hit her after seeing her using part of a gaiter as a menstrual pad. He swore it was bad luck.

  Haha always left the girls short of supplies. When their toothpaste ran out, the girls used salt instead.

  “Even if she does, it probably won’t be healthy,” Hanok ŏnni chimed in.

  Miok ŏnni had told them she was in a place called Heilongjiang before coming here. She was locked up in a room like a pigsty and that’s where she took soldiers. And she was fed like a pig or a cow, her meal of millet pushed through an opening in her door. When she needed to relieve herself she had to holler to the soldier on guard duty to bring a can. Holding it in until the can arrived was as difficult as taking the soldiers.

  Pokcha ŏnni arrived with her sakku can, hobbling from a stab wound to her thigh by a drunken soldier.

  Haegŭm told everyone at breakfast that her father had visited her in a dream.

  “Sweetie, what are you doing in such a frigid place?” her father had said.

  “Oh hi, Dad. How’s Mom?”

  “Your grandma—her mom—is dying, so she went home to check on her.”

  Her father must have died, he was always having coughing fits, said Haegŭm, and then she broke into tears.

  Punsŏn had a telegram sent to her home with the help of a regular customer, the field postmaster. The postmaster said he was from Tokyo and had graduated from Waseda University. After completing his military service he found a job in the postal service and was stationed at the field post office in far-off Manchuria. He sent the telegram for her.

  Punsŏn was illiterate and had to dictate the contents of the telegram to Kŭmbok ŏnni:

  Working at silk factory. Take care till my return. Don’t write back.

  Sometime later Punsŏn received two telegrams from home, brought by the postmaster. They had been sent a month apart but arrived together.

  Mother dying.

  Mother dead.

  6

  SHE IS SITTING on the veranda, legs drawn up, clasped hands resting on her thighs. Her eyes carve out a spot in the air. “As long as she’s still alive, as long as the last one is still alive . . .” 1 She murmurs the words so softly she can’t hear them.

  A face pops into sight above the wall. She startles, wondering if it’s her nephew, then realizes it’s the meterman. After craning his neck to read the meter, he puts something dark and square up to his eyes and slowly directs it toward her. Binoculars! She flinches.

  “Wow—look at all that!” He produces a toothy grin.

  She just looks at him.

  “Your face is right under my nose. You must’ve been quite the beauty back in prime time. Guys in the village lined up to get a look at you, right?”

  She waves off his hitting on her, it’s unsettling. They sure did! They lined up in front of every room. One goes out, another one comes in. 2

  “Glad I kept this, I still get good use out of it. All these weasels, when they hear me knocking, they play deaf and dumb. How am I supposed to read the meter if I can’t get in? So you can imagine why I keep it handy.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Every damn gate around here is locked . . . makes me wonder what they’re up to inside.”

  It sounds as if he’s complaining about her, and she tingles with guilt. A few months ago she was lying in her room and heard someone calli
ng out persistently. Only half awake, she thought it was the television. Even after realizing it was the meterman she remained still, gazing at the ceiling, as if transfixed by a nightmare. She stayed inside even after he grew tired of rattling the gate and left.

  “I can tell which homes are occupied and which aren’t, but some of the occupied ones look dead. Guy like me, I get the willies going into those places.”

  She can understand. Here in 15-bŏnji some of the occupied homes really do look empty. Those are the homes that leave her tensed up when she’s passing by, much more so than the vacant houses.

  “You’re using twice as much electricity as last month.”

  “Oh?”

  Her nephew has set up automatic payments for the utility bills. Double the usage probably means double the electric bill. Her nephew will be wondering. The thing is, she didn’t use more electricity than the previous month, maybe just a tad more television viewing to catch any news about the last one. In the past she used to leave the television on morning and evening. Her appliances are just like those of other households—television, rice cooker, freezer, and small washer. And even in the dog days of August she doesn’t touch the electric fan.

  “That’s odd. Are you sure?”

  “Halmŏni, the meter doesn’t lie.”

  “Say, young man, twenty thousand out of two hundred thousand, is that one tenth?”

  “Twenty thousand out of two hundred thousand?”

  “Yes . . . twenty thousand out of two hundred thousand . . .”

  “What’s that all about?”

  Flustered by the question, she clamps her mouth shut.

  “You mean someone’s hiring twenty thousand and two hundred thousand applied? Hell, two hundred thousand is the population of a small or medium-sized city . . .”

  Regretting her question, she keeps mum.

  “How come you’re clenching your fists?”