Comfort Woman (10 page)

The women from the camp wanted to do these things for her, but in the end we left her, just as the soldiers had, mounted on the pole, her nakedness only half concealed by the forest's undergrowth, her eyes dry and open and staring toward the river.

When my husband brings home toys for our newly born daughter, I pick out the dolls with the plastic skin and the unyielding, staring blue eyes and put them in the linen closet. Their skin feels like day-after-death skin, cold and hard though still faintly pliant. I feel sick thinking of my baby lying next to, gaining comfort from, the artificial dead. After I bury the dolls under the sheets and towels, I pick up my child, placing her against my chest. My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles, roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life.

I try not to think of the dolls, stacked against each other in the closet, staring at us through the doors and walls with their unblinking, sightless eyes.

I woke at dawn with my fingers dangling like bait in the water at the edge of the river, and a rope looped around my neck. Old-lady breasts, flattened and elongated from years of childbearing, flapped against the side of my head. When I tried to sit up, the breasts squawked, Aigu! The dead is sitting up! and swung away.

Lifting my head against the noose, I could see that the breasts belonged to a gray-haired woman sitting cross-legged and naked on my clothes. Though her body was covered with wrinkles and age spots, her face was curiously unlined, youthful. I knew this was the Manshin Ahjima whom Induk had told me to find.

She tugged on the end of the rope.

Manshin Ahjima, I asked her, why am I tied?

E-yah! the woman cried. The dead knows me! the old lady jumped to her feet, and the rope between us stretched taut.

I lifted my hands to the rope, then pulled gently. The rope slithered from her grasp and onto the ground. Please, I said, why?

The woman's hand jerked as if she still held the rope. You were lost, she said, between this world and the next, and I was trying to lead you back. She lifted her breasts and scratched her scarred belly. Besides, you were scaring me, growling like an animal one minute, crying like a baby the next.

The woman shuffled closer, then knelt to peer into my face. You aren't a tiger spirit, are you? She held her hands out, palms down. If so, I am ready to go. I've tended the mounds, burned the incense for the spirits whose families have been lost or run away. I've seen and I've remembered which son was taken by the Japanese, which son was killed by bandits, and which went to Shanghai as a freedom fighter. I've ...

The old woman stopped talking, blinked, then touched my hair. I've seen the tiger spirit haunt the graves before, she said, but only at night. You are just a little girl.

When she called me a little girl, I remember I wanted to cry. I wanted to curl into a ball, cover my head, and call, Mother! Mother! as I did when I was very young and feeling alone, as I did from the rooftop of our home the night my mother died and I tried to catch her fleeing spirit. But I didn‘t, because I knew no one would ever again hold me in tenderness. Instead I stood up and looked around.

And I saw that we were not in a village but in a graveyard. When I realized that the homes that I knocked at the night before were houses of the dead, I started shaking, and perhaps then I did start to cry.

Here, Manshin Ahjima said, handing me my clothes. I don't suppose a tiger spirit would need these rags to keep warm. And I don't suppose a tiger spirit would have such messy hair. Tiger spirits are really rather prissy, you know.

Manshin Ahjima stretched her arms above her head, then began to braid her sparse hair. Hard to believe I was a beauty, huh? she said. But it's true; my husband couldn't get enough of me, just like a dog. I had so many babies, I couldn't even count them anymore.

The old lady's lips flapped, then stopped. I knew she was waiting for me to say something, to respond with a smile or a nod, but I could only stare at her mouth, watching for when her lips parted in a certain way and I could see the black gap where she had lost some teeth.

Olppajin-saram, the mouth suddenly said. And again, louder, as if breaking a spell or casting one: Olppajin-saram. You've lost your soul. That is why you came to the graveyard. You were trying to steal someone else's spirit, a wandering spirit, maybe, one that was confused about where it belonged.

She lifted the rope from my head. This is useless, she said, throwing it to the ground. You need a pyong-kut, a healing ceremony.

I asked her if she could help me.

When she shook her head no, I became desperate. I begged her, telling her I would pay her for her services.

Manshin Ahjima wrapped her braid slowly around her head and seemed to consider the possibility. She looked down at me, then eyed the pitiful bundle of my clothes lying by the well. I was embarrassed, not by my nakedness or hers but because I knew and she knew I had nothing to pay her.

The old woman pulled her dress, white as death, around her freckled, flabby body and tied the sash tight across her chest. I cannot perform a kut for you, she said, because I no longer do the devil's work. But I will help you because that is the Christian way.

Manshin Ahjima bent to pick up a thin gold-plated chain, which she slipped around her neck. The old lady held the chain out so that I could see the tiny cross, smaller than my thumbnail, before she slipped it under the neckline of her dress. You see, she said, I've been saved.

She would help me, she said, because I reminded her of herself when she first got the sinbyong, the possession sickness. And of her daughter whom she sent away to live with her grandmother when the spirits first began to visit her, many years ago. The spirits are very jealous, Manshin Ahjima explained. They cannot stand it if you love someone more than them.

Manshin Ahjima touched my hair. Come, I will braid your hair for you, and then I will take you to the Pyongyang missionaries for food and clothes.

The missionaries had saved her from starvation and damnation, and in return Manshin Ahjima let them call her Mary.

Be prepared, she said. I think they call all of the girls Mary.

We followed the train tracks into Pyongyang, keeping mostly in the bordering woods, though sometimes slipping onto a side road to make it easier on the decrepit ox pulling her cart. We depended on that ox not only for transportation but also for sustenance. Some nights, after failing to forage anything to eat, Manshin Ahjima would nick the ox under its shoulder blade to siphon off some of its blood. I learned to savor the taste of blood.

To pass the days, Manshin Ahjima would tell me of the spirits who continued to talk with her. Sinjang-nim, the General, is the most powerful spirit, a giant-fighter, she said. And very sexy. He comes to me even now, waving his sword, demanding that I acknowledge him. It takes everything in my heart to call on Jesus Christ, Manshin Ahjima said, and even then, I can still hear the General whispering, whispering, planning his strategy.

One day, a day when we had not even talked about her spirits or about anything other than the food we dreamed of eating, Manshin Ahjima started screaming. She jumped off the oxcart and ran along the road, stopping to scoop up rocks, which she threw into the air. I yelled at her to stop, to tell me what was wrong, but she only screamed louder, covering my voice with hers until we were both hoarse.

After what seemed a long time but I know was not, she simply stopped. She dropped her rocks, stopped screaming, and climbed back into the cart. With scratched and bloody hands, she smoothed the wisps of hair that had escaped from her braid and smiled as if in apology.

Damn jealous, those men. The Satan General and the Jesus God fight over me, she said, thrusting her chest forward. I am the arena of their power contest. And in their battle to possess me, neither has any pity for me. I just can't take it sometimes.

That was the day she taught me to find lost things, something she taught all her daughters, because, she said, a woman must always find her own way.

Find the place of darkness within yourself, Manshin Ahjima explained, and imagine what you have lost. Then picture yourself in the last place you saw the object and spiral up and away, as if you were flying circles around that spot. Your spirit finds the object, so the better you can re-create the lost thing in your mind and in the spirit world, the more likely that you will find it in your hands again.

When Manshin Ahjima urged me to try to find something I had lost, all I could think of was my mother. I could not see her face clearly; even then, so soon after the time my sisters and I buried her alongside our winter's kimchee, the details of her face lacked focus in my memory. But she was all I could think of, and what I saw when my mind flew into its own darkness was a woman buried backward in a shallow forest grave, her face pressed against the earth, her mouth full of snakes.

Induk's voice erupted from Manshin Ahjima's mouth: It is an omen.

After I had described this vision to Manshin Ahjima, we no longer avoided people traveling away from Pyongyang. Instead Manshin Ahjima greeted everyone who looked and dressed Korean. I've had a vision from the spirits, Manshin Ahjima would sing out, about Korean independence! If they gave her money she would tell them my dream and explain to them that the snakes in the body of Korea would be slithering north to bite at the head of the revolutionaries. Send the warning, she would say, tell them to beware.

One man, dressed in traditional yangban attire, seemed especially excited at the news. If your vision proves true, he said, I will be very rich. If your vision proves true, Sonsaeng-nim, Honored Teacher, I will repay you at the end of the year.

Manshin Ahjima gave me a sly look and wrote down the name of her cemetery. Months later, toward the end of the war, I heard rumors that the Japanese had burned what they could in that cemetery, that they had dug up graves, desecrated bodies, and killed the caretaker, who might or might not have been Manshin Ahjima.

The yangban gave us a handful of coins, promising more as he scurried away, and for the rest of that day we did not talk, merely listened to the muffled jingling of the coins we had wrapped against our skin.

Manshin Ahjima told me that the people in Pyongyang were well fed, bigger and taller and bolder than the people from her village and mine. She told me that their skin was as pale as the milk they drank and smelled of, and that they never had to sweat in the fields. What I came to find out was that Manshin Ahjima was talking about the Americans, the missionaries, not about real people.

We entered Pyongyang through what people called tongk- kolchon, shit alley, because of the stench of rotten pumpkins, and unwashed bodies pressed against unwashed bodies, and, most of all, the piles of maggoty feces that dotted every bare patch of earth.