by Kim Soom
All this time the women kept themselves out of sight—and she herself had no clue. She doesn’t recall hearing, seeing, or smelling anything the times she’s passed by P’yŏnghwa Villa. She looks up toward the building but can’t see it; it’s obscured by the other buildings.
She wonders if the women really are sent back to their home country. She’s afraid it won’t happen. Instead the women will slip into some other place where there’s money to be made and return home when they’re too old to be recognized by their husband and kids.
She plods along and finds herself in the same alley where the woman was crying. Was that woman in the alley one of the P’yŏnghwa Villa occupants? She thinks so.
She has a hunch she’ll be next. As early as tonight, the police along with the man from the city will raid the house where she stays.
She turns on her cell phone and enters her nephew’s number. He picks up immediately but says nothing.
“Hello, Nephew. . . . It’s me.”
Only then does he ask why she’s calling. She tells him the man from the precinct office stopped by.
“What for, do you know?”
“You see,” she mumbles before pausing—she can’t recall the term actual resident.
“Why did he stop by?”
“To survey people . . . those who didn’t report an address change . . .”
“Survey?”
“Yes, survey, people like you, there are quite a few people who registered their residence but don’t actually live—”
“The man from the precinct office—I hope you didn’t say anything to get him wondering?”
“Why would I do that?”
“If he comes back, just tell him you don’t know anything.”
She just listens.
“Just say flat out, ‘I don’t know anything.’”
“All right, sure.”
It sounds like her nephew knows the 15-bŏnji redevelopment plan is history.
“How old are you, Imo?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Can you tell me how old are you?”
“Ninety-three . . .”
“That old?”
It strikes her that he’s shocked by the answer, but the next moment he’s broaching the idea of a nursing home for her. When she doesn’t respond to the unexpected suggestion, he hurriedly ends the call, saying he’ll stop by before long.
A nursing home—that was probably her nephew’s plan all along. And even if it wasn’t, he’ll do it anyway once he gets priority for a new apartment. She has no desire to go to a nursing home. She doesn’t know how much longer she has to live and wants only to remain in the Western-style house living quietly till she dies.
She learns that night on the nine o’clock news that the last one was hospitalized several days ago. Old age is finally taking its toll: the last one is bedridden and unable to take food. The camera captures her face as she lies on her side. The haggard face looks different from that of the woman who told people she loved flowers.
The last one’s eyes are shut tight as though she’s fast asleep, but suddenly they open and stare into space. The last one looks startled. Her mouth wiggles like that of a babbling baby, and she looks as though she has something she wishes ardently to say.
As far as she knows, ever since the last one went public she’s been diligent about letting the world know what happened at the comfort station. And according to the newspaper, the last one even flew to a faraway land across the ocean and testified in a pretty hanbok about her experiences.
She wonders if the last one has a story she hasn’t been able to tell until now. Or if perhaps she’s just remembered something else to tell.
A few days ago she too had a sudden recollection, and it was enough to interfere with her sleep. The girls had been taken to the outpost, and three soldiers, cackling and jabbering, decided to have some fun with her as she emerged from the outhouse. She backpedaled when she saw them, and one of the men took a dagger from his waistband and mimicked slitting his throat. She drew near, faltering, and they dragged her into the woods, where the man with the knife continued to threaten her while a second soldier was cajoling her. The third one stopped them but took off his pants like the other two and was quick to do his business when his turn came.
I want to see her. They say she no longer recognizes people but I think she’ll recognize me. I think she’ll know who I am and why I’ve come to see her.
Should she let the world know, before the last one departs, that there is another last one?
She has a mind to do so, to be a witness. But how? And why now? She’s never said a word, hiding the truth this way, covering it up that way, she’s grown helplessly old, and soon she herself will be at death’s doorstep.
She opens the drawer to the television stand and takes out a folded sheet of paper. As she unfolds it the words that are practically etched into the paper seem to jump out and compete for her attention.
I’m a victim too.
It took more than seventy years for her to write that down.
She wants to add something, but suddenly everything is blank.
If only she could, instead of words to tell she’d like her tilted uterus displayed.
Imagining someone sitting across from her, she begins to speak: “At first, when I was there, in the beginning . . . how I was taken there—I don’t tell anyone about Manchuria. I felt so ashamed . . . I wasn’t able to spill it out, even to my sisters. I don’t want to go home, no one’s there anymore. One of the girls reported that she was a comfort woman. That brought the TV people and the camera crews, and all the neighbors got to know about it. With her government assistance she had a house built. But a neighbor who used to visit her every day stopped coming. She learned the neighbor had called her a dirty cunt and said she sold her pussy to have that house built.”
She can no longer continue.
No words can express her torment.
15
THE LAST ONE is out of her coma. For three weeks she recognized no one. She speaks in a labored, halting tone: “I can’t allow myself to die—not with no one after me to speak . . .” 1
The last one spends practically the whole day hooked up to oxygen. She herself feels pained but proud to see the last one without her oxygen mask, managing to utter one word and then the next, stitching the words together in an attempt to tell the world who she is. Standing next to the last one is a caretaker who observes her with concern.
“I am not a comfort woman.”
“I am Yun Kŭmshil.”
The last one gasps for air, and the caretaker is quick to place the oxygen mask over her mouth. The caretaker lays the last one down as carefully as if she’s handling an infant. Then she puts her mouth to the last one’s ear, whispers something, removes the oxygen mask, and sits her up.
The last one stares straight ahead as if she’s being photographed for a passport.
“I want to be happy until the very end.”
As she sits in front of the mirror slowly combing her hair, she mumbles to herself, “Me too, I want to be happy.”
It’s the first time she’s ever thought about wanting to live happily. The first time in her nearly century-long life.
Even if it’s just a single day.
She reaches toward the mirror.
And passes her hand across the image of a face she feels belongs to someone else.
As she’s wiping the floor with a rag the television and the fluorescent light go out. She takes a candle and matches from the drawer of the television stand. She strikes a match, brings the flame to the wick, and the instant the candle lights she recalls the girl from the neighborhood.
The girl’s face comes to mind lightning-like and just as quickly is gone, but she feels that in that brief instant she’s said a prayer for her.
No need to bother with the circuit breaker. Instead, by the light of the candle she passes her fingers back and forth across the lower part of the mask, where the mouth should be
.
She takes her nail clipper and brings its tiny file to the mask.
With the tip of the file she draws a line where the mouth should be. She traces the line, traces it again and again, and some fifty tries later an opening appears. There.
Relentlessly she widens the mouth, the tip of the nail file going back and forth, the opening growing almost imperceptibly. She stops when the hole is big enough for her tongue to go through.
She puts the mask over her face.
I want to be born a girl . . . once more, just once, I want to be born a girl.
She’s been out on the veranda all day. Just in case the man from the city stops by. There’s something she must tell him.
The banging on the gate awakens her. Her head jerks up and her eyes open toward the gate.
The yard and veranda are full of light and the mask resting in her lap has taken on a peculiar gleam. The mouth hole she cut out with the tip of the nail file flickers in the light.
A man’s head is sticking up above the gate, but with the sun at his back his facial features are blurred. It has to be the man from the city, she tells herself—she had a hunch he would drop by. And he’s the only one who comes by without advance notice except the meterman, and the meterman visited two days ago.
“Please open the gate.”
She swallows heavily, then mechanically utters the words she’s prepared: “You know . . . I live here . . .”
“What?!” There’s a touch of irritation to the voice.
“This . . . is where I live . . .”
“I can’t hear you!”
“This is where I . . . I . . . live . . .”
“I said I can’t hear you!”
She’s in no mood to open the gate. She doesn’t want to let the man from the city inside.
“Please open the gate!”
Stubbornly she holds her position, as if fixed by a spike to the veranda’s wooden floor.
The man shakes the gate in exasperation.
She tries to restrain her racing heart, and when she’s regained her composure, she says yet again, “This is where I live.”
“Imo! It’s me!”
What? It’s not the man from the city?
“Open up.”
She isn’t inclined to let her nephew in either, but she can’t just sit there. She gets up, but in the process the mask falls to the floor.
Instead of moving toward the gate, she plops herself back down on the veranda. Clutching her skirt with both hands, she tries to make herself as small as possible.
“Imo! Come on, Imo!”
She imagines the rattling of the gate echoing throughout the neighborhood.
No one can force her out from this house, she tells herself. Not the city guy, not her nephew from P’yŏngt’aek, not the owner she’s never seen.
She forever longs to return home. Even in this home she longs to return home. She panics at the prospect of never returning home.
The ancestral home she wanted to return to at least in spirit was still there, but not for her.
Not long ago this Western-style house—in which she has never officially resided—began to feel like the home to which she so longed to return.
She doesn’t want to be sent out of a home to which she returned after well over seventy years.
Seeing that she’s unwilling to open the gate, her nephew climbs over the wall. He strides toward where she’s planted herself on the veranda. His hiking boots tromping on the mask, he grabs her shoulders and shakes her.
“Imo!”
The mask with the mouth she labored to create last night lies mercilessly crushed beneath his foot.
As she gazes vacantly at the seeds she collected last fall from a vacant home, she’s struck by the realization that she is not alone but instead is surrounded by all of creation—the sky, the earth, the air, light, wind, water, seeds, and so much more.
And yet she feels even more alone.
All alone.
Once on television she saw images of the earth as seen from outer space. She knows the earth is round, but round like what? A baby pumpkin? An egg? An apple? A bead? And she wondered what color she could call it. The images she saw on television were not a single color but an indistinct blend of white, blue, orange, and green.
She held her breath and watched and before she knew it her face was inches from the screen as she wondered where all the houses were, and the people, and the birds on a wing.
It occurs to her that the earth is like a seed. And inside this seed called Earth there is water, there is land, and there are trees. Birds are flying, rabbits are nibbling grass, moles are tunneling, horses are jumping, and ants are marching.
To her the inside of the seed called Earth is beautiful and yet ugly.
Is it the same inside a cockscomb seed, beautiful and yet ugly?
She mutters to the seed, “Look here, there’s one more who’s left . . .”
Like the astronauts viewing the earth from outer space, she wants to see herself from the outside. Just as the earth looks utterly different from space, she wonders if she would look different if she saw herself from the outside.
Strolling in the alley, she flinches. Something reddish is wrapped around the metal handle of a gate. Her first thought is that it looks like a scorched hand hanging from the handle. She feels her hair standing on end as she inches closer. It’s a mesh bag. But there’s no kitten inside. The mesh bags she comes across in the alleys invariably contain a kitten.
She walks up to the gate and puts her face so close to the bag she feels like the bag is forming a noose around her neck. She wonders if there actually is a kitten in the bag and her eyesight is so bad she can’t see it.
But if someone set it free, then who could it be?
Who?
Yi Yongsu: Kangje ro kkŭllyŏgan Chosŏnin kun wianbu tŭl, vol. 1.
16
GOING THROUGH THE neatly folded clothing in her wardrobe, she selects a brown pleated skirt and a pink knit cardigan and lays them out on the floor. From the basket heaped with socks she picks out a pair of white ones. The pink cardigan is her favorite, perfect for spring and fall.
As she fits the egg-flower buttons into the holes, her hands stiffen. Only now does she remember the exact number of men who came and went from her that first day, when she was 13 years old and had yet to experience her first menstrual flow.
Seven in all. She bled more that day than she did later when her menstrual flow started.
Number seven was an officer, a man who looked older than her father.
She steps down from the veranda to the yard holding a box inside a wrapping cloth the color of apricots. In the box is the set of long underwear she has kept all this time for the Chinese widower.
She hesitates at the gate, remembering her nephew is supposed to stop by today.
He visited two days ago and told her in no uncertain terms she was not to go anywhere today; instead the two of them were going somewhere.
“Where to?”
“To a nice place.”
“A nice place?” she asked, recalling what Aesun had said on the train to Manchuria. Aesun had assumed she was going to “a nice place,” a factory where she could earn money.
“You get your meals there and they give you a bath and a nurse gives you medication and shots if you’re not feeling well.”
She didn’t respond.
“You’ll make a lot of friends there, so you won’t be lonely and bored. Three square meals, you can rest easy, and that’s it.”
She shook her head, her expression telling him no, but he ignored her.
“They provide everything. All you need to pack is your valuables and a change of clothing.”
No matter how good the place mentioned by her nephew, she doesn’t want to go there.
At the “nice place” Aesun had anticipated, her body became a graffiti board. With needle and ink the Japanese soldiers inscribed her belly, vulva, and tongue with tattoos.
At t
hat place the girls’ bodies were not their own.
She feels resentful toward her nephew but wishes she didn’t. She doesn’t want to resent or feel hate toward anyone in this world.
But she cannot forgive what happened to her.
If I heard those words, could I forgive?
Those words had to come from a certain source and no other, not even God in Heaven.
Keeping to a sun-lit alley, she places her hand against the wall and breathes deeply. The leaning, crumbling wall has become a momentary support. Her energy level isn’t what it used to be.
The old man is nowhere to be seen. But his yard is if anything even more littered with heaps of wire, and with the cloth and copper he’s stripped from it, than it was a month ago. Her gaze lands at a plastic bowl filled with rusty nails—more loot from the empty houses.
She leaves the box with the long underwear next to the bowl. When it gets cold he instead of the Chinese widower will wear it.
A half-collapsed home comes into sight down the alley. She’s not sure if it’s collapsing on its own or undergoing demolition. Here and there in 15-bŏnji she sees such houses. And there are places where the demolition is complete except for the wall fronting the alley, standing fortress-like.
The brick walls of this house and the wall facing the alley are mostly gone and only the skeleton of a room remains. There’s no ceiling, and all that’s left of the windows is shattered glass. A precarious door frame is the only indication that the space used to be a room.
She’ll need to hurry if she’s to return by lunchtime, but her feet are not in rushing mode.
The room she sees looks like a uterus.
She imagines her own uterus dropped into that room. Her feet just aren’t moving; instead she hears the rattling of a gate. It sounds like the gate of her house.
The minibus that runs between 15-bŏnji and the subway station leaves every twenty minutes. The 15-bŏnji residents generally take this bus to the subway station if they’re going somewhere. Waiting with her for the bus is a boy who looks like a high school kid. Wearing earbuds and seemingly disinterested in the sounds drifting about the world outside, he glares at the toes of his shoes. From a few steps away she can sense his erupting dissatisfaction and rebellious heart.
