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.
Animals, Manshin Ahjima said, hand over her mouth, as she stepped over a fresh mound of human dung.
We walked past old women, younger than I am now, who picked through garbage and crowed when they found a scrap of food or material with which they could build a hako-bang, as the Japanese called the cardboard shacks a lucky few lived in.
And we walked past a woman lying at the side of the road, a begging bowl atop her still chest and two small children clinging to her bloated legs and hands. They cried against their mother’s corpse, afraid to leave her side, afraid to stay, afraid to beg of the people stepping over and around them. I thought of my dream, and maybe I thought about my sisters and about what happened to me after my own mother died. I dropped the coins the yangban had given me into their bowl.
Manshin Ahjima swooped down and plucked back half of the coins. You crazy? Give them this much, and someone will kill them for it.
When I told her I only wanted to make sure they could buy something to eat, Manshin Ahjima told me that they would eat, that the missionaries would get them soon enough.
Just as they got me soon enough.
When we entered the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company building, where the missionaries hid from the Japanese, Manshin Ahjima began yelling.
She was half dead, Manshin Ahjima bellowed. Crazy out of her mind, dangerous. Thank the good Lord I was able to nurse her back to health and bring her here.
Manshin Ahjima pulled the cross out from under her blouse. Of course, she added, I spent all the money I had to feed her. I went hungry myself, you know.
You have such a good heart, Mary Ahjima, the missionary women cooed around Manshin Ahjima. You will surely be blessed.
Thank you, Manshin Ahjima said. I’m sure the good Lord will provide.
Yes, the missionary ladies agreed, as they pressed money into her hands. He always does.
Manshin Ahjima wrapped the coins in a strip of cloth, then slipped it under her skirt. After she had tied the cloth to her thigh, smoothed her skirts, Manshin Ahjima turned to go. Her eyes swept across me, but she did not look at me. I do what I can, she said. I do what I can, but my God is a jealous God, and I am in the midst of a war.
Wait, I cried, but I did not recognize my voice. Don’t leave me, I yelled after her in words that did not sound like words.
The missionaries held on to my arms. Cuckoo, one of them said. Unsure of what she meant, I could not tell if she was referring to me or to Manshin Ahjima. I cried out again for Manshin Ahjima, and I cried for my mother.
In the end, I let the missionaries strip me down, burn my clothes, bathe my skin. I wanted to tell them that it would do no good; I would never become clean enough to keep.
My daughter does not blink. She watches me with eyes that have not found their true color, changing from blue to gray, brown to green, with the light. I hold my finger in front of her nose; still she does not blink. My finger floats toward her open eyes, reaching until it touches the fringe of her lashes. Her eyes remain open with stubborn trust, and I think: How many betrayals will she endure before she loses that trust, before she wants to close her eyes and never open them again?
7
When Manshin Ahjima stumbled out of the missionary house, fondling her thigh where the money—the price of my trust—was tied, she took my hearing with her. By the time the echoes of her footsteps on the wooden stairs of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company building had faded, I could not hear the sound of my own voice.
As the missionaries pulled at my hair, my clothes, my arms, I watched their chattering mouths but could not make out what they were saying. Eventually I turned my eyes away and gave my body to them. After bathing, dressing, and feeding me, the women pressed a Bible into my hands and led me to a small room, a closet in the women’s sleeping quarters, that was not much bigger than the stall I had had in the camps.
In the darkness of that room, I cried for Induk. She, like me, must have been deaf, for she never came. But then again, maybe I had not even called for her, my voice lost with my hearing.
I considered finding her with the trick Manshin Ahjima had taught me, but I did not yet have the courage to envision the last place I saw Induk in this world.
In the days that followed, the missionaries assigned me to various tasks about the house. Sometimes they put a broom in my hands, and I would sweep until they took the broom away. If they put me in front of a tubful of dishes, I would wash them until the tub was empty and someone drained the water. Once, they positioned me at a table piled with matchboxes and labels. With big mouth movements and exaggerated gestures, one of the lady missionaries showed me how to glue the labels on the boxes. I sat and glued until all the boxes had labels, and then I glued labels on the table until I had run out of labels. I was considering what else to glue, when someone relieved me of my duty.
I would watch the broom scratch across the surface of the floors and on the stairs in front of the house. I could feel the water in the tub running down my hands as I rubbed my fingers across the smooth and resistant surfaces of plates and cups. And I smelled the pungent stickiness of the glue when I pasted the labels on the matchboxes, table, and chairs. But without the sounds of these actions, I had no way to connect them to myself. No way to judge time, distance, action, reaction.
As I swept, washed dishes, pasted labels, followed gestures and pointing fingers, instead of hearing the broom or the water or the fat sucking noise of glue on paper, my ears were filled with memories of the comfort camps.
Invading my daily routine at the mission house, shattering the gaps between movement and silence, were the gruntings of soldier after soldier and the sounds of flesh slapping against flesh. Whenever I stopped for a beat, for a breath, I heard men laughing and betting on how many men one comfort woman could service before she split open. The men laughed and chanted niku-ichi—twenty-nine-to-one, one of the names they called us—but I heard the counting reach one hundred twenty-four before I could not bear to hear one more number.