by Junghyo Ahn
“Step back,” Ollye told her. “That’s right. You stay away from us. You stay there until the other villagers come to hear what I’ve got to tell them.”
“She’s gone crazy, Mom. She’s gone crazy and you must not believe what she is raving about.”
“Raving?” Ollye said. “I am raving? All right, raving or not, listen to what I’ve got to tell you, villagers.”
More farmers, some of them carrying kerosene lamps with tall glass chimneys, joined the spectators and formed a circle around the howling woman and the captive boy, asking one another in whispers and mutters what had caused this commotion.
“Everybody in Kumsan village knows that I am a whore. I became a whore a couple of months ago as you all know. Everybody despised me because I am a dirty woman and I found many scribblings on the walls describing me as a Yankee whore. I was too ashamed even to use the same boat with other decent West County people. I’ve become a shameless woman. And now I will behave like one. I’ve undergone all sorts of insults and humiliations, but were you all really so estimable that you could treat me that way?”
Old Click Beetle, stooping, drew his lamp to the boy’s face, covering the top of the lamp chimney with his hand to keep the flame from flickering. The boy turned away, covering his forehead with his arm. The old man stepped back, nodding his head. “Yes, you were right,” he said to the wizened farmer next to him. “It is Chandol.”
“Of course it is Chandol,” Ollye said, perspiring, her voice choking with fury. “And you want to know what this boy did to deserve this treatment? Do you know what this boy and Kijun … Is Kijun here by any chance? He and this boy have been prowling around the Club night after night peeping through the window at me while I was in bed with the soldiers. That’s what Chandol and Kijun were up to.”
Chandol, keeping his head low, stole a furtive glance at the crowd, some twenty of them by now, and then decided to act like an innocent child.
“What are these tears for, Chandol?” Ollye said with an almost bemused sarcasm. “Do you think you can buy me and these people with a few drops of water? Tell them the truth.” She turned to Kangho’s family. “They came to the riverside house again tonight to watch me and my friend play with the foreign soldiers. My son Mansik found them peeping in the rooms and tried to stop them. A fight started and Mansik had to fire his pistol at them.”
The farmers began to murmur.
“What is she talking about?”
“Does she mean that the village boys went to watch her whoring with the bengkos every night?”
“What is this village becoming?”
“She said foul things to Rich Hwang last time, remember? And now she is after a young boy.”
“She said Mansik shot Chandol with a pistol.”
“Heavens! A village boy shooting another village boy!”
“You can expect anything when you have whores in your village. You just wait and see what will happen to us next. When the Communists come back, they’ll kill everybody in West County because we didn’t do anything to stop these women from offering themselves to the Yankees.”
Ollye heard what they said about her and knew that nobody was on her side but she found herself unable to stop. She had to continue. She was not sure of the exact reason why she had to, but she had to. “Oh, you’re wondering what I am talking about? I will tell you what I’m talking about if you want to know,” she said. “Yes, the boys came to peep into our bedrooms every night. Whether you want to believe it or not, that is what has been happening.” She kept screaming but she was not sure any more what the point was. “All right, some of you are wondering what this village is turning into. You really don’t know what this village is turning into, do you? Well, I know. I’ve known all along what this village has been turning into. Do you want to know what I think about your village? I would tell you, but there are no words for what I would say.” She was unable to use logic now. In fact she did not do much rational thinking as she talked; something other than consciousness, a more basic and instinctive voice in her mind compelled her to spit out her accumulated anger and resentment. She screamed on and on, hysterical, shedding torrential tears, not from her eyes, but from her heart. “And do you know what he, what that boy told me? He said he had never done such a thing. This liar not only denied his own lie, but tried to make a liar out of me, too!”
Chandol was crying harder.
“This boy was confident that I would find it impossible to prove to you or anybody what he had done. And he called me a crazy woman. He said no one would believe me if I accused him. He said I should keep my hands off him. He called me a bitch, a whore, and a crazy woman!”
“He seems to have said all the right things,” said Chandol’s mother. “What else can you call a whore but a whore?”
She stepped out and jerked Chandol toward her by the wrist. Ollye did not try to keep Chandol beside her. Chandol, hugging his mother by the waist, burst into the loudest cry he could give.
“Is it true?” Chandol’s mother asked, her voice trembling with indignation. “Did you really go to the Imugi House every night to watch the whores?”
Chandol wept, stalling.
“What this woman is telling the villagers—is it true, my boy?” the mother said.
Chandol wept, thinking.
“It is not true, is it?” the mother said.
Ollye turned speechless at this woman’s blatant prompting of her son to deny the truth. The villagers looked on curiously to see how Ollye would react to the question, rather than to find out the answer.
Chandol’s mother repeated, “Tell me, Chandol, it is not true that you went to the Imugi House to watch the whores, is it? I don’t believe you or Kijun did such a thing.”
Chandol stopped crying.
“Tell these neighbors that Mansik’s mother has been lying about you,” Chandol’s mother said.
Chandol said finally, “I’ve never gone near that house ever since bengkos started coming there. We used to go there often before the war to watch the snakes, but I’ve never been there since.”
Ollye felt her knees might give way any moment. You cannot trap a liar with truth, she thought.
“Did you hear that, Mansik’s mother? Did you hear what my son said?” Chandol’s mother repeated. “My son says he’s never been near that house, much less peeped in the rooms. What were you trying to do to my family? Why did you wake up the whole village and accuse my innocent child in front of them? What terrible wrong did anybody in my family do to you to deserve this public humiliation?”
The onlookers, who had accepted the boy’s denial with silence, began to murmur again, a few of them openly sympathetic to Chandol’s family. Ollye was tongue-tied. Then a shout rang out from the outer circle of the crowd:
“What a great show you folks are putting on!”
It was Yonghi who had been watching the whole thing for quite some time.
The crowd turned their faces to her and several of them stepped aside as Sister Serpent approached Chandol’s mother menacingly. Yonghi stood firmly before her, bristling up like a rooster in a cockpit.
“So you think Ollye is wrong for calling your innocent boy a criminal, ha?” Yonghi said. “You claim that she is humiliating a nice innocent family for no reason at all. I’ve been watching what’s been going on in this village and you really made me puke. Sure, we—Ollye and me—are dirty whoring bitches as you and your angelic child said, but I see a lot more stinking characters around here who are worse—much worse—than Mansik’s mother or any other whore.”
She looked Chandol’s mother in the eyes. “You’re trying to convince these hypocrites that this filthy scum, your son, is an innocent victim of a whore’s lies, aren’t you? You want to tell the whole world that nothing like what your son did ever happened. But I was there when the shooting started, I was there to see the two boys running away. We caught one of them, a fat boy, and the other boy managed to escape. And I heard what that fat boy said about the other b
oy who got away—about this innocent child, this Chandol. Yes, I know what the two boys had been doing there. Tell me, why do you think the Yankees opened fire? Do you think they were hunting ducks in the winter night? What do you think they shot at? At your innocent cunt?”
“Listen to that!” Chandol’s mother screamed. “Did you hear that, villagers? A whore speaks like a whore. Please somebody do something to shut that bitch up!”
“Bitch? Do you think I am a bitch?” Yonghi’s voice became shrill. “All right, I will show you what a real bitch behaves like.”
Yonghi attacked Chandol’s mother, her ten sharp enamelled fingernails, like cat’s claws, raking across that snub-nosed face. The startled villagers pulled the two grappling women apart, but the damage had been done already; Chandol’s mother had several scratches across her face. The two women charged each other again, floundering amid the snatching hands and loud voices. Everybody shouted to everybody else to calm down but nobody calmed down. While the farmers and the village women and the two prostitutes were attacking, pulling, pushing, howling, shrieking, swearing, brandishing their fingernails, raising dust, waving their lamps and tumbling one upon another, someone in the rear said that Old Hwang was coming.
The commotion abruptly subsided. Nobody wanted the old man to see them involved in such an incident. Yonghi and Chandol’s mother let each other go and stood aside; Yonghi’s hair was in a tangle while Chandol’s mother was bleeding from several more new scratches on her dusty face. Groaning painfully, Ollye staggered up from the ground, her whole body trampled by the villagers during the riot.
Old Hwang and his son stood by themselves in the road, a few steps off from the guilty crowd. Sokku checked their faces one by one with his military flashlight.
“What is the meaning of this untimely row?” Old Hwang asked.
But the old man’s attitude did not show an intention to pass judgment as to who was in the wrong or who should be punished. Strangely, he no longer sounded like the leader of the community; rather, his reproach sounded like a casual remark, as if he was inquiring about the situation as a mere traveler passing through the village. In response to the detached attitude of the old man, the villagers kept silent. Yonghi, who still hoped to sell the house back to the old man, also became silent. Ollye remained in the center of the crowd, lost, as if she had forgotten her next line and could not think of anything to say instead.
Chandol’s mother finally ventured to explain her position. “That—” she said, pointing to Ollye, “that woman came to my house at this late hour and dragged my son out of bed to make a preposterous—”
“I do not want to hear your explanation,” the old man interrupted her. “Go back home, Ollye. If you speak more in anger now, it will only breed resentment and regret in your heart and in others’ too. What is the use of all this anger and hatred when every one of us knows only too well that we will soon leave home to take refuge and be scattered. Don’t you think this war has brought enough hate and fighting among us? We have had enough of ill feelings for one generation. Now everybody go home. The day will break soon.”
But Ollye was not willing to leave. Her accusation had been stopped short and she wanted to finish what she had intended to say to the villagers. She began, “But Mansik lost two fingers. Chandol is a liar, Kijun is a sneak and a liar. They are both cowards. Worst of all, their parents encourage this, encourage them to bully the weak and scorn the unfortunate. Because of me … because of what happened to me. …” She looked at old Hwang, then at the throng of villagers. “Now you will see, all of you, who will help you in your time of need. You will see, soon enough.”
“No more, Ollye, no more. Do not put this burden upon me,” Old Hwang said.
Ollye skipped a breath. Since the unfortunate accident, she had not heard Old Hwang speak her name in such a gentle voice. Was it some sort of new beginning? Might he have decided to permit her to return to what she had been? This thought brought her sadness rather than relief. She knew no return was possible now.
NINE
0llye and her two children joined the procession of refugees streaming south carrying everything they could load on their heads and backs and shoulders, parents holding their young children’s hands. Most of them traveled on foot with only a few bundles and packages, but some others, the wealthier countryside landowners, could take along with them much more family property such as sewing machines and chests of drawers on their farming carts and ox-wagons and the backs of their cattle. Abandoning their houses, hometowns, neighbors, some older members of their families and all the things they had cherished but could not take with them, they ran for their lives, not knowing where they would go or how they would survive. They left their homes hoping the war would pass and they could come back soon, but nobody was sure when the war might end—or if it would ever end.
Ollye glanced back over her shoulder at the northern sky whenever she heard the occasional muffled booms of artillery somewhere not too far behind the refugees. The sounds of war chased them, and came closer and closer as the days passed. Now and then she sat down with her children on the roadside on clumps of dead grass to rest her tired legs and watched the countless men and women, children and old people—all strangers—who were going the same way she went with the single purpose of fleeing from the war. Babies traveled on their mothers’ backs, sometimes two babies on one mother, but most boys and girls older than five had not only to walk on their little legs but to carry their own small share of the load, a bag of rice or a roll of quilt. They trudged on and on, night and day, to the south, everything needed for their survival packed into various sizes and shapes of bulging bundles, strapped onto human bodies like giant warts.
Again in her farming clothes of loose pants and chogori vest with sagging sleeves, Ollye looked like any other countryside housewife, although she had her hair permanented like a modern city woman. Nanhi, completely covered with cotton-stuffed clothes and wrapped in a baby quilt, traveled most of the way on her mother’s back. Mansik plodded on behind Ollye, a large bundle of clothes on his back, holding in his arms the rooster that he once had tried to train to attack.
Ollye had joined the procession of refugees on an icy morning four days earlier. The previous night she packed some clean clothes, cooking utensils, the few valuable things Mansik’s father had left her, the Zenith radio and the camera and some other Yankee PX goods left over from black market trading. Ollye knew those bengko goods, along with the handful of bank-bills neatly folded into small squares and hidden deep in her bosom, would be of a great help to her in surviving. When she crossed the frozen river the next morning to join the refugees, the war nomads, milling around on the road, she had some consolation in thinking that her family would survive a lot longer than most of these people.
When Ollye left Kumsan, only a few families remained in the village. Old Click Beetle had decided not to leave home because “Nobody on either the Communist or the Yankee side would bother to waste a bullet to kill a worthless old man like me.” Pae, the village chief, and his family were busy packing at the last moment; the Paes did not want to go away leaving their aged parents behind alone, but their decision was prompted by the fearful rumor that the Communists had killed all the families of South Korean policemen and soldiers during the last invasion and that this time even the petty officials like village chiefs would be executed. “We have lived long enough,” Pae’s father said. “But you must stay alive to lead the family.” Other families had not yet decided whether they should leave, risking the hard refugee life in a strange place or stay home, risking the possible atrocities of the Communists.
Most families had not thought or argued much as to whether they should go or not. As soon as the word got around that the Hans of the rice mill had left the county secretly at dawn without saying goodbye to anybody, the other families immediately started packing. Soon the village was virtually deserted. Ollye found nothing suspicious about the secret flight of the miller and his family; it was natura
l for them to be ashamed, for they were the first family to run away, after all. But she could never understand why the Hwangs had also fled secretly like criminals the next night.
Ollye left the village later than most because she had to wait for Mansik’s injured hand to heal. Leaving the desolate village behind, she crossed Cucumber Island for the last time. The skeletons of Texas Town and Camp Omaha were dead and buried under white snow. Looking around the ruins of Camp Omaha, looted by the townspeople and the West County farmers after the departure of the Yankees, she had a strange illusion that she was facing her own grave. One whole phase of her life was buried there in the snow and she was leaving for a new beginning, for better or for worse, in a place she did not know.
In the town she mingled with the countless refugees surging south like a human river. A young boy wiping tears from wet eyes with the soiled back of his frozen hand, a stooped old man carrying six apple crates stuffed with clothes on his A-shaped wooden back-carrier, a woman in her fifties leading five children in a row like a mother duck swimming in a pond with her ducklings, a little girl playing alone with dirt on the road and the grownups hurrying by without even glancing at the lost child, a boy with white scabs on his head, an ancient woman cooking rice in a military mess-tin in a roadside vegetable patch, a baby with a cardboard canopy hooding her face like a box mask to protect her tender skin from cold winds, a boy limping with frost-bitten feet, children with shaven heads, a weeping old woman … Swept along by these people, Ollye walked south day and night with her two children.
“Mother, where are we going, anyway?” Mansik asked her when they were one day away from Chunchon.
“Well, I don’t know exactly.” This was the best answer she could give. “Everybody is going south, so I guess we have to go south too, if we want to save our lives.”
Although she was not sure where they were heading, Ollye had an odd premonition that her family would eventually find themselves in Pusan, the port city at the southeastern tip of the peninsula, the only big city that had not been taken by the People’s Army during the initial Communist offensive. Leaving for the south with Sundok and two other U.N. ladies of Texas Town before the bengko unit moved to Osan, Sister Serpent had asked once more, for the last time, if Ollye would like to join her later in Pusan. “Just come to Bichuku and they’ll tell you right away where you can find me. We cannot do any more whoring business together because I understand you’re determined not to continue this kind of life, but you surely will need Imugi’s help if you want to settle down and get started in Pusan. So, be sure to look for me if you ever set foot in Pusan, okay?” she had said.
