by Junghyo Ahn
Again and again he tried to convince himself that it was all right, it had nothing to do with him if Chandol peeped into Imugi’s room, but hardly had he started to lean toward the decision to let him watch the room, when he would be seized by an overwhelming suspicion that Toad and Chandol must have watched his mother too. Then he felt like a criminal.
Mansik was appalled when he visualized Chandol and Toad spying on his mother. He knew perfectly well what his mother was doing at the Club. He had actually seen it with his own eyes one night when he ran to the Club, carrying Nanhi on his back, to ask Mother what he was supposed to do because his sister had diarrhea and kept crying. When he arrived at Dragon Lady, he heard laughter and music coming through the closed door. Nanhi was still crying but his mother did not come out; nobody inside heard her cry, maybe because the music was too loud or because they were too busy drinking. He pushed open the door and saw his mother taking her lace underwear off, dancing on the plank table to music from the radio, while two bengkos and Imugi watched her, laughing and applauding wildly. They were so engrossed that they did not notice the door open and then close again. Trudging back home, Mansik kept asking himself how it was possible for his mother not to hear her own daughter cry so close at hand, just outside the door.
Mansik was aware of precisely what was going on every night at Dragon Lady Club from Imugi’s casual talk and it was unbearable for him to imagine the boys watching his mother at such embarrassing moments. But he could not stand guard behind the Imugi House forever, night after night in the cold as he had done in the past four days, to keep the snoopers away.
He had asked his mother to buy a dog “as big as a horse.”
“Why do we need a dog?” Mother said. “Are you afraid to be home alone with Nanhi at night?”
“I didn’t mean to keep a dog here,” he said. “I think you’d better have a dog at the Club.”
“What for?”
Mansik could not tell her the real reason. “Well, you have many expensive things over there,” he said. “Aunt Yonghi’s camera, the radio, PX stuff. A burglar may break in to steal them some day.”
“We don’t have any burglars in this village.”
“There have been no burglars because there was nothing worth stealing. But you have valuable things at the Club that might attract burglars.”
For no other reason than to please her son and relieve herself from the pangs of a guilty conscience, she agreed to keep a dog at Dragon Lady Club. Mansik immediately went to the town and bought the biggest and fiercest dog he could find. He drove a stake into the ground behind the Club to tie the dog’s leash to. He used a very long leash to allow room for the dog to attack anybody skulking around the back of the house. He concealed himself every night and watched. Chandol and Kijun never showed up; maybe they were aware of the presence of the savage dog, or they had decided to wait until Mansik cooled down and relaxed his vigilance before they came to watch the rooms again. But the dog scared the bengkos coming to the Club. OUye complained that the dog was driving her customers away and told Mansik to get rid of it. Mansik sold the dog in town and bought the fierce-looking rooster instead. He had planned to train it to attack. Maybe a trained rooster could guard the house, he thought. But he soon realized that he would never succeed in making the cowardly rooster attack anybody.
Now Mansik had no plan. And he had to see Chandol sooner or later to let him know his decision, if he could reach one. Chandol might have interpreted his silence in the past four days as a refusal. But was it indeed a refusal? Mansik was not sure.
Mansik glanced over at the three boys making snow babies under the ginkgo tree. Kangho was not with them.
Mansik thought this winter would be even longer than the summer.
“You surely made the right decision, Mansik,” said Chandol. He had finally come to the Chestnut House to ask in person whether or not Mansik agreed to his proposition. “I promise I will not fail in my part of the deal.”
“You’re going to watch only Imugi’s room. No matter what. And you will go to Texas Town and never come to the Club when the river freezes over. You promise.”
“Sure.”
“And you also promise to keep Toad away from the Club.”
“You don’t have to worry about him. When I tell him not to come near the Club, he won’t come near the Club. He knows perfectly well what he’ll get if he goes against me.”
“This deal will be immediately called off if you ever go near my mother’s room or Toad shows up anywhere around the Club.”
“I know. You can rest assured.” Chandol was in a hurry to finish talking and go home before Mansik had time to change his mind. “By the way, we’re going to the woods for a weasel hunt. I want you to come, okay? We leave the village one hour after noon. We will be waiting for you at Eagle Rock.”
The five boys of Kumsan village, hiding among the rocks on the ridge, waited for the weasel to come out of its hole. Nobody knew for sure if the hole was a weasel’s, but they liked to believe it was. They would not mind if the hole belonged to a bobcat or a fox; they were ready to kill any animal that came out of the den with their magnificent pistol. Lying on their stomachs in the snow, they waited.
Mansik’s clothes were soaking wet. His skin was slowly freezing; he had not put on enough warm clothes, for he had not expected to be lying in hiding this long. He felt exposed and abandoned. He felt there was nothing but cold emptiness in his heart. He was with the boys and he was out on the weasel hunt, but he felt sad and desolate.
The color of the sun was white. The winter sun had lost its heat and glow, blending into the pale sky. Even the scanty patches of cloud looked colder in its whiteness. The field and the village at the foot of the hill, the pile of fallen leaves in the gulch, the dead ivy leaves clinging to the rocky cliff opposite the ridge, the rice paddies and the hilltops—everything in sight was shrouded.
Looking at the undulation of snow-capped mountains in the distance, he felt empty inside. Whatever he did Mansik felt empty inside, as if he had left something very important unfinished, as if he was suspended, lost, in the air. He felt he should be somewhere else, doing something totally different from whatever he was doing.
Mansik looked around at the other boys. Prostrate under an oak tree like a resting turtle, Bong shivered with cold. The little boy was too young and innocent to notice what was going on in the minds of the older boys around him. Chandol pretended to be casual, but he was either too dramatically flattering or too consciously aloof toward Mansik. Kijun was spiteful and irritable, hating everybody in sight; he jumped at any slight, real or fancied. Kangho was a reticent boy by nature, but he was too quiet today. Kangho had probably noticed something fishy was going on, Mansik thought. On their way up to this ridge, Kangho had not said a single word to him, and Mansik did not venture to talk to Kangho either.
Mansik thought this was not right—his lying side by side with the culprits. But everything was over and done with him anyway. The deal had been made and he could do nothing about it. It was all over, all over.
The boys waited, lying in the snow, but the weasel never came out of the hole.
Opening the door to let the fresh air in—the room was always foggy with cigarette smoke when Yonghi had been there for longer than an hour—Ollye looked up at the little icicles dangling closely in a row along the eaves. The icicles, yellow against the straw thatch, slowly melted in the warm sun and dripped in shining beads into the tiny puddles on the ground.
“Is the tingling pain gone now?” Sister Serpent said, leaning against the papered wall and stirring the coffee in her china cup with a plastic spoon.
Ollye glanced at Nanhi, who was rolling her yo-yo around the floor, babbling something to herself. Mansik was not home and Nanhi was too young to understand what they were talking about but Ollye was selfconscious about discussing anything related to her profession in the presence of her children.
“The shots must be working fine,” Ollye said, returning to
the mirror stand to continue making up her puffy face. “I think I am clean now. No more pus, you know.”
Ollye had been terrified when green pus had started to ooze out of her down there one afternoon. She rushed to the Club and asked Yonghi what was happening to her. “Am I going to be a leper?” she said in breathless fear, for leprosy was the only disease she knew of that was supposed to produce oozing pus.
“That’s the social disease I told you about,” Yonghi replied casually as if it was the most common thing in the world.
So she finally had contracted a social disease, the dirtiest and most shameful disease in the world, Ollye thought in consternation. She was appalled and terrified at first, but soon began to wonder, in anger and indignation, which Yankee had given this dirty disease to her. She recalled the soldiers she had slept with recently and mentally examined them one by one. She concluded that the stumpy bengko called Herman was the culprit. Every bengko carried the nauseating body odor of burning fur, but Herman had the most disgusting stench of them all. Ollye remembered what his crotch had smelled like when she had had to lick his thing. Now that her own crotch had begun to give off a similar stench, Ollye was sure that Sarging Herman had had the disease.
It would not help a bit to locate the soldier who had given her syphilis. She had to cure this smelly oozing complaint immediately. She asked about the town doctor who specialized in this kind of trouble. “I don’t want to die of this sickness,” Ollye said. “What would people say about me?”
Sister Serpent was outrageously relaxed and careless. “Don’t worry too much, Sis,” she said. “Lots of people died of pox in the old days, but there’re very good medicines these days and I assure you, you’ll be clean again in no time. And you can’t call yourself a pro in this business until you experience both clap and pox at least once.”
Ollye went to town with the map Sister Serpent had drawn for her to find the doctor who had treated many Texas Town girls. It did not take much time for her to locate the old tiled house with a shabby plank sign saying “General Gurinick” in the alley behind Central Market, but she found herself unable to open its gate and step into the house. She feared she would never come out of the clinic alive again once she entered it. It occurred to her that nobody would care if she was killed in that seedy clinic. And she was too ashamed of her illness to walk in and tell somebody, some stranger inside General Clinic, the reason why she was there. She paced up and down the alley for some time to summon enough courage to face the doctor but finally gave up and returned to Dragon Lady Club. She asked Sister Serpent to accompany her to the clinic.
“You are really impossible, Sis,” Yonghi said, chuckling. “What face do you think we have to save in this business? You have been a U. N. lady long enough to become brazen about these things. And you say you’re afraid to see a doctor for syphilis treatment!”
The fat doctor and Yonghi seemed to be on intimate terms and exchanged bawdy jokes about the bed manners of some Yankees and Korean Army officers they knew in common while he was taking a sample of her pus and examining the slide with his microscope. Yonghi’s presence made Ollye feel worse. Although she had exposed her naked body to many soldiers so far, it was still humiliating and exasperating to expose her smelly secret part to the gloating doctor who had a sly knowing look in his cynical eyes behind the thick glasses he wore. Ollye was not sure if some of his questions were really necessary for curing her: “How many soldiers have you slept with this week?” “Which soldier did you like best among them and why?” “Did you suck his thing?” and so on and on and on—while Sister Serpent was listening in the waiting room. Whenever she went to the clinic, there were one or two U.N. ladies from Texas Town in the waiting room. Even if there was nobody else in the clinic, Ollye felt like dying whenever she had to display her body to the doctor, who ordered her to undress on every visit. She came to believe that he enjoyed his work too much and that was the reason he had not hired a nurse.
The most distressing fact was that she had to keep entertaining the soldiers while undergoing the treatment. She wanted to rest until she was completely cured but she had to make as much money as possible quickly; the Texas Town U.N. ladies said the Allied Forces would retreat soon. Besides, Sister Serpent could see no reason at all why Ollye should care if every Yankee in the world got syphilis from her.
“You got it from them, after all, didn’t you?” Yonghi said. “Do you think other girls stop working when they contract V.D.? No. They don’t give a hoot. If you stop working every time you get V.D., you will starve to death. It’ll take at least two months until you’re completely cured, and the whole war may be over by the time you start working again! Keep working, but play it smart. When a steady customer comes to sleep with you, tell him you have the disease. Say T got bee dee’ and he will understand. Some bengkos appreciate it a lot if you tell him you have the disease and stay with you all night anyway. If he wants a fuck with a condom on, let him do it. If he doesn’t want to do it, give him a nice suck or other services so that he won’t go to Texas Town for another girl. Remember—the steady customers are the best capital you have.”
There was something that tortured Ollye even more than the disease did. She had to drink every night. It made her sick to her stomach at night and even in the morning, day after day. If she sneaked out of the drinking party and puked everything she had inside her, beer or whiskey and sausages and carrots and everything, she felt her guts were being scraped out with sharp razors. After vomiting like that for a while, squatting in the dark rice paddies behind the house, shedding tears of pain and anger, she would wash her face with a handful of snow and shamble back to the party for some more drinking.
To please all sorts of perverted customers was not easy either. She was expected to satisfy every demand the bengkos made; the soldiers came and paid her, as Sister Serpent once said, because they wanted to have her fulfill their most impossible whims. “You still have a lot to learn, Sis,” Yonghi said. “How can a whore choose her customers? Some bengkos are beasts who want to try the weirdest things with their women. If you happen to have that kind of a customer, think this way—at least this is an easier way to make a living than toiling all day long under the scorching sun on a farm owned by some fat neighbor. I told you, you’ll get used to everything in time, didn’t I?” But Ollye suspected she would never get used to the requests made by some soldiers. There was a bengko who liked to put various strange things inside her. Another bengko enjoyed watching Yonghi and Ollye perform sexual acts with each other. There was a soldier who ordered her to sit upright with her legs wide open, took lots of close-up photographs of her crotch, collected a sample of her dark pubic hair in an envelope and went back to Omaha without any actual sex. One bengko, whom she had never seen before nor since, asked her to do various humiliating things for two hours, constantly swearing, and then did not pay her anything, saying he had left his wallet back at the camp. After this soldier, she lay in her room for a long while, naked, blankly looking up at the ceiling with an odd feeling that she was falling into a bottomless dark well. When she told Yonghi about this incident the next morning, Sister Serpent laughed and said, “Tough luck.” That was all.
But all this might be over soon. Texas Town was stirring because of the rumor that a total retreat of the U.N. Forces had begun. The departure of the Yankee soldiers would mean the conclusion of a phase for Ollye. She could not see what her future would be like after this. As the time for the retreat neared, Sister Serpent asked every Yankee she knew when and where Camp Omaha would move but the bengkos themselves did not seem to know anything definite. Yonghi suspected General Megado’s Army was losing badly to the Chinese and considered moving to safety as far south as Pusan. She hoped to open a big club like Bichuku somewhere on Haeundae Beach and asked Ollye more than once if she would go with her. Sundok had already agreed to work there if Sister Serpent opened a club, but Ollye was not sure if she wanted to work for her any more.
On many occasions Ollye had
resented Yonghi. As the days passed she began to wonder why Yonghi took half of the money Ollye earned by entertaining bengkos, when she was providing so many services to Sister Serpent such as cooking, washing her clothes and disposing of the Yankee goods on the black market. But what would happen to her and her children if the World Army moved away? When the bengkos and Sister Serpent along with the Texas Town girls were gone, what actions would Old Hwang and the villagers take to avenge themselves? They would surely do something to release their pent-up animosity against her. What would she do then?
Ollye briefly considered going south with Sister Serpent as an escape. She saw nothing but despair in her future if she travelled with Mansik and Nanhi across the country following the horde of bengkos and U.N. ladies. What weighed most on her mind was Mansik. And Nanhi, too. Whatever she might choose to do from now on should not bring any more suffering to her children.
Nanhi chortled, chasing after the yo-yo rolling toward the C-rations basket. Gazing at her daughter, Ollye swore to herself that she would never go anywhere with her children to continue prostitution. She had saved some money in her secret jar buried in the corner of her kitchen, though Yonghi had taken so much from her earnings. Perhaps she could start a new life somewhere with that money. Then Mansik and Nanhi would no longer be ashamed of her. Where was Mansik, she wondered. She had not seen him all morning.
“I wonder where he’s gone,” Ollye said to herself, looking for the lipstick in the drawer of her mirror stand.
“Were you talking to me?” asked Yonghi, closing the door before changing her underwear.
“I wonder where Mansik has gone. I haven’t seen him all morning. Do you know where he is?”
“He went out when you were still sleeping.”
