Festival for Three Thousand Women (5 page)

The Goma smirked in the shadows, but then said that his father had been very old, over eighty. “I don't have any money to go home with,” he continued, “nothing with which to buy a bus ticket, nothing to take as a gift.”

He was asking for a loan, Bobby realized, but his own salary was a mere thirty-five dollars a month.

“How much do you want?” he asked. “I'm an American, but I'm not rich.”

“I need fifteen hundred won,” said the Goma.

“Fifteen hundred,” Bobby said out loud. About five dollars. “I'll give you a thousand but you have to pay me back.”

“Of course,” the Goma said.

Bobby took a thousand-won note from his pocket. That left him with three thousand more until the end of the month. But though the Goma had the money, he didn't leave. Something else was on his mind.

“My father was over eighty and I am now eighteen,” he said. “I should have a real job by now. I've been working in this inn ever since I was nine.”

Bobby looked at the Goma. He had thought that he was no more than about twelve. He was a foot shorter than Bobby and he acted at least six years younger than he was. “What kind of a job would you like then,” Bobby asked. “If you're eighteen.”

“A real job, a job where you go to work and then come home. A job with a quitting time. I could make more than this every week.” He held up the thousand-won note Bobby had given him.

Bobby nodded, about to say more, but he heard a commotion from a room farther down and, not wanting to be a bother to anyone, hurriedly pushed the Goma back, closing the door once more. He turned off his light again and stood there in the dark until the Goma went away.

Bobby unrolled his bedding and lay down diagonally across his room, so that he could stretch his toes and still not touch the wall. He had almost been in a fight that night, saved only by the expert Judo Lee. Perhaps Bobby did not know enough about himself, but he did know that he was not a physical coward. He had had to prove that too many times at home, using his rampant bulk to subdue the muscular insults of those who were always in his way.

He was sleepy and a little sick from the wine, but he was suddenly awake again, gratified by the thought of himself as far better off than the Goma. In America he had a place of his own, at least inside his grandmother's house, but what place did the Goma have? In America Bobby had only his fat and the weakness of his impulses to worry about, but the Goma was pitiful and ugly and decrepit, and the thought of him made Bobby's fatness seem, for a moment, almost beside the point.

As Bobby let the sleep come back, he tried, as an experiment, to imagine the Goma's life instead of his own. He could imagine the Goma quite easily, traveling into the country to bury his father, but he could not imagine what was in the Goma's mind as he went.

I am amazed how fat this American is. He is tall, like all Americans, but he has the shape of a Western pear, with most of its meat down low. I'll wager that he weighs one hundred thirty kilograms, perhaps more. When he got off the train he dwarfed our poor Mr. Soh, but his size, rather than making him seem strong and fit, as is the case with Mr. Lee, gave him a helpless and muddle-headed look. His face is wide and his eyes bulge from it like those of a frog! Also he has poor posture and sits in his chair as if dumped there like a sack of rice. And he makes noise when he walks, which is good, I suppose, because it lets us hear him coming and we can prepare ourselves.

It is odd to have an American in our teachers' room and in our school, but it makes me understand how appropriate our word for foreigner is. The word means “outside person,” and all one has to do is observe this man to realize its aptness. He is outside of everything imaginable, and because of it he has no way of relating, no way of being among us, no way of partaking in our everyday lives.

Ah, but this is too complicated for an old country man like myself. Let me be satisfied with the realization that he is “outside,” which is so obvious as to be evident to a blind man, and let me not spend so much time thinking about him and worrying about what it all means. Outside is outside, simple as that. It is the opposite of inside, and inside is normalcy, an ordinary view of things. The youngest teacher on our staff could tell me that.

I have decided that I must say something good about this American before I close my diary for the day, and what I have chosen is this: his Korean, though I haven't heard him say much, sounds better than I thought it would, and he is a good singer, who knows all the words to at least one song.

Written as I sit in my study, watching the leaves fall from the plum tree in my neighbor's yard.

Six in the third place means: When three people journey together their number decreases by one
.

 

B
obby was having trouble with an old woman who hung about the train station and seemed never to go anywhere else. He'd seen her there on the night of his arrival, and now whenever he ventured that way she'd run at him, shout wildly, and try to catch hold of his arm. The second time he saw her he hadn't been quick enough and she'd torn his sleeve, so now, whenever he walked that way, he took the Goma along. The boy didn't hesitate to roll at her knees. He had no mercy and would hiss like she did whenever the occasion arose.

Though the teachers at school weren't happy about it, Bobby and the Goma were becoming friends. At least with the Goma Bobby could be himself, not always on guard, feeling as though he were on stage. And the fact that the Goma, like himself, was truly alone in the world made the friendship seem natural. To be sure, Bobby enjoyed the idea of having his own sidekick walking the streets ahead of him, taking the crazy women out of his path, but it was more than that. Bobby thought of it as a Don Quixote kind of thing, for though the Goma acted the part of his servant, he continued to speak to Bobby as if he were an idiot, thus reversing what Koreans considered their proper roles to be.

During his first days in Taechon, Bobby hadn't been able to recognize the utter hopelessness of the Korean the Goma used, but as the weeks passed he studied hard, and he improved. Now he found new verbs everywhere, added complex-sentence structure daily, and he had nearly mastered the honorifics, those difficult verb endings that give the Korean language its sliding scale, allowing it to be gross or majestic, belittling or grand, turn and turn about. And all this time the Goma didn't change the way he spoke a whit.

“Hey! You go school?” he would ask every morning. “Hey! Come go tearoom? Hot tea have yes?”

His Korean was bereft of adjectives or prepositions, empty of such easy connectives as “but” or “because,” and generally contained nothing but robot directions. Do this. Do that. Go there. Eat this. And the odd thing was that he seemed instantly to have developed this stick-figure language of his upon meeting Bobby. Whenever the Goma was along Bobby could not speak to the real people of the town without him interpreting, shifting the language downward and blurting out obscenities. “Tell me,” the town druggist might ask, “have you found adjusting to Korean food difficult? Is our way of life causing you problems?” Before Bobby could absorb the questions and form intelligent answers using the learned Korean in his mind, the Goma would shout his own version into Bobby's ear. “Korean food sticky-sticky? Korean life no good?,” and Bobby would somehow be forced to answer with nods and grunts, as if captured by the Goma's way of speech and whisked away from the real thing.

It was infuriating, but it drew Bobby to him nevertheless, and perhaps the reason was this: though the Goma was a bare-bones communicator he did have a way of seeing what the druggist, or anyone else, was really asking, and he translated the suspicion of cultural inferiority implicit in their questions, rather than the words they used.

About six weeks after his arrival in Taechon, Bobby left the village for the first time, heading for a U.S. Army missile base, where he had been invited for Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving had always been a big holiday with Bobby, and he had looked forward to it with what his grandmother justly called gluttony. Now, though, after six weeks of half-ration Korean food, he was beginning to feel a particular looseness in the way his trousers fit, and he rode the train northward in an unusual frame of mind. Would being with Americans again feel strange? Would they once again be repulsed by the way he looked, and would he once again take up the methods he had continually relied upon for getting by, namely facial tricks and a memory for jokes? Though he had been away from Americans for only a short time, he felt a certain tentativeness, and a bewilderment as he realized that he would have been willing to miss the meal.

The train trip was uneventful and Bobby used the time to write a letter to his grandmother and a note to Mrs. Nesbitt, his grandmother's closest friend in the Royal Neighbors lodge, and a woman whose youngest son was missing-in-action in Vietnam. Mrs. Nesbitt had always been kind to Bobby, but the son, Carl, whom he'd known since childhood, had always been a bully and a jerk. Once, at the beach near his house, Carl had seen Bobby in a bathing suit and had actually pushed his fist in among the rolls of Bobby's fat. Bobby had held it there, bending forward and closing himself around Carl's fist and slowly walking toward the water, warding off the blows from Carl's other hand by the simple turning of his head. Bobby's idea was to walk out until Carl's head was below the water level, his own just above. Carl Nesbitt had begged then, and thereafter had hated Bobby completely, though from a distance. Still, Carl and Bobby had been called to their preinduction physicals together, and while Bobby had ballooned to two eighty and was classified unfit, Carl Nesbitt had been healthy and strong, excited to go. It was odd. Bobby had hated Carl all through school, but now he was writing Carl's mother to say how sorry he was.

When the train arrived at the village below the missile base an army truck was waiting, and the private driving it gave Bobby the peace sign as he opened the door. The ride up into the hills took half an hour, and during the trip Bobby lost whatever tentative feelings he'd had on the train. When they parked the truck, the driver, whose name was Ron, told Bobby that the colonel and some other Peace Corps volunteers were waiting in the officers' club, but that if Bobby could spring loose after dinner he should come down to the Vil where Ron had a hooch. “Don't get me wrong,” the private said. “The officers here are OK. But later on. You know, when you've had enough.”

The officers' club was a flat-roofed, low-built affair, and when Bobby walked in he immediately saw Cherry Consiliak, a black girl from Philadelphia whom he'd furtively ogled during training, and Larry Corsio, a guy he hadn't known at all. They were drinking whiskey and talking to the missile-base officers, a colonel, and three lieutenants, all of them white and smiling.

“Ah, the last arrival,” said the colonel. “Bobby, isn't it? Come, let me get you a drink. Pull up a chair.”

A table set for seven took up most of the space in the room. Cherry Consiliak, it was easy to see, had decided the predinner configuration by where she sat when she came in. She was a beautiful girl, and though she and Bobby hadn't been close during training, they had often smiled and said hello. Then she had seemed completely out of reach. Now, however, she jumped up and greeted Bobby like a relative.

“Hey!” she said, “God, I've missed you!” She gave him a hug and kissed him across his nose and eyes.

Bobby shook hands with Larry Corsio, and all three of them laughed. It seemed their solitary experiences, over the weeks, had brought them closer together, though they hadn't seen each other at all.

The colonel introduced Bobby to the other officers, and when the introductions were over Cherry and Larry Corsio made room for him between them on the couch.

“This has been the longest six weeks of my life,” said Cherry. “Has anyone gone home yet? Has anybody quit?”

Bobby said he didn't know, but Larry said that nobody had. He shook his head and smiled. “We're all going to make it.”

Cherry laughed and smiled and held Bobby's hand as if it were he who had voiced such optimism. She leaned up to give him another little kiss, and his heart began to skip around, pounding out a nervous rhythm in his chest. What was going on?

“How much weight have you lost?” Larry asked. “In six weeks I've lost twenty pounds! There is a scale in the colonel's room. Let's go see what it says about you.”

Bobby, content on the couch, was completely unprepared for this. He was lighter than he'd been in years—he knew that—but he didn't want to stand up on a scale in front of this girl. His weight had always been an enemy when it came to the women he had liked, and though he had no idea what he weighed now, he didn't want to find out.

But Cherry, whose body seemed perfect to Bobby, smiled and said that she had lost five pounds herself, so Bobby let himself be pulled from the couch.