And, suddenly, it was as if Induk was still there, between us, inside him and inside me. The buzzing that I felt with her unfurled within me, gaining strength until I could not contain it. As it burst over me, I cried out against my husband’s shoulder and was answered by his own shout of pleasure.
Afterward, when my husband had returned to his bed, I dreamed of Induk and of him and of his shouts that sounded too much like the shouts the men at the camps gave as they collapsed over the women in release and triumph.
The next morning, my husband told me in his sermon-preaching voice, Ah… self-fornication is a sin.
I blinked.
Sungyok un chae ok-ida, he repeated in Korean, an indication of how disorientated he was, to speak my language in his country.
Finally, realizing he was referring to what he had witnessed between Induk and myself, I laughed. How could he compare what went on between men’s and women’s bodies with what happened spiritually?
I was not alone, I said. Did you not see her touching me where your hands touched me? Suckling me where your mouth suckled?
When he asked, Who? I laughed harder.
He licked his lips and looked at my laughing mouth. Succubus, he whispered. And God gave them over to shameful lusts so that even the women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. Succubus.
I howled, and still in his eyes I saw the lust, dark and heavy and animal, that I’d seen in the eyes of men at the camps. But now I also saw the fear.
They came to us in fear as well as lust, lining up against our stalls to spend their scrip and themselves on our bodies. Some would spread our legs, pinch our vaginas, checking for discoloration, open sores, pus, disease—which meant, for them, not death but demotion in rank. Though each shipment of women included boxes of condoms, and though the doctors tried to control outbreaks of syphilis through injections of 606, venereal disease spread through the camp, manifesting itself in the labia and vaginas of the women. When the fist-sized eruptions swelled the women shut and spread to other body parts, climbing toward lips and eyes, the officers took the women out of the camp. Transferred, they called it, but I believe the officers abandoned them in the woods, disposable commodities.
Near the end of the war, they became less politic. Before I left the camp, I saw one more delivery of goods. After the trucks unloaded a half-dozen girls—looking dazed and frightened and younger than myself as they were packed into the service quarters—the commanding officer strode, his light automatic rifle swinging like a walking stick, toward the sick house.
Iriwa, iriwa, he shouted, luring those who could still walk outside with his Korean. Come!
One of the women, named Haruko, her wide, hopeful face distorted by blisters, and another woman—not infected but grossly pregnant—staggered against the doorframe. Before they could voice a question, he shot them, then he opened fire, showering the hut with a spray of random bullets.
Splinters of wood and blood exploded in rapid, concise bursts, the numbing reverberations of gunfire intermingling with the brief, shrill screams of the dying. When the screaming subsided into low, tentative moans, the commander gave orders to torch the remains of the hospital. And while it burned, smoke and ash soaking the camps with the smell of roasting meat, he whistled the “Kimigayo,” his national anthem.
But despite their fears of disease, the men still visited us, propelled by the greater fear of death. The day and night before a battalion was scheduled to leave, the women of the camp did not sleep. Again and again, the same men took their turns with us, until they could no longer create an erection. Touch! they would yell at us, Suck! and when nothing happened, some would beat us about our heads and pojis. Others, though, would merely want to spend their half-hour allotments burrowed into our breasts, being cradled like a child. And when their time was up, these were the ones to pluck curling wires of my pubic hair, which they would carry to the front with them, talismans against danger and against fear.
If they had asked, I would have pulled them myself, woven them into an amulet. Not to keep them safe from but to attract harm, each one of my hairs a wish for death and a call for justice.
After the night Induk came to me, opening my body to her song, I saw the soldiers’ fear of death and disease in my husband’s eyes. His fear that instead of saving me, he had damned himself. That he could not pass the test his God devised for him. And I knew then that he would not use me again like that.
I knew then that he could not.
14
My baby’s head is round—round as a rare and perfect river rock polished by the force of water.
I love her roundheaded perfection, my daughter’s head shape so like mine, and like my mother’s when she was a child.
While I was growing up, my mother would study her daughters for signs of herself, then make pronouncements binding us to her and to our fates. To oldest sister, Soon Ja, she would say: Our hair is like seaweed, so black and slick it can never hold a comb; watch that you don’t fly away. To Soon Hi, she’d say: You’ve got my dimples. Life has to pinch your cheeks hard to make you happy.
My mother would tell third sister to hold out her hands, fingers pressed tightly together. See, she would sigh, see how the light shines through the cracks? Like me, you’ll have trouble holding on to what you most want.
When she would look at me as if she was seeing both me and a memory, I knew what would come out of her mouth: Rockhead. Just like me, she’d say, shaking her head. You’ll have a hard life, always banging against the current. Worse than a boy, more stubborn than a stone.
But she would say these things with pride, so I would know that she loved me.
And every time she called me Rockhead, I’d ask her, Why? How come? How do you know? What does it mean? pestering her for a story, hoping to learn more about my mother and, in turn, about the secrets of myself.
At night, when my mother unwound her hair, combing through the heavy silk with her fingers, I’d press against her, close as she would let me, and wait. If I was lucky, she would notice me. Baby Girl, she might say, pick out my white hairs. Or: Youngest Daughter, massage my temples.
I’d sit cross-legged on the floor and wait for my mother to lie down and slip her head into my lap. I’d stroke her forehead, the sides of her face, the top of her head where the spirit escapes at night. When she’d begin to tell her story, I’d part her hair into sections, using my nails to find and pluck the white strands. As she talked, I’d stick the oily roots onto a sheet of one of the underground newspapers—Daedong Kongbo or Haecho Shinmun—that found their way even into our village. And after the story, after my mother fell asleep, I’d crumple the paper into a ball and burn it in the underground flues that warmed our floorboards. As I drifted off to sleep, breathing in the scent of hair and smoke, I’d imagine that words wrapped in my mother’s hair drifted into our dreams and spiraled up to heaven.
My mother was told that the most famous fortune-teller in Seoul, paid to read her head at birth, said that she was the most roundheaded baby she had ever seen. In a roundheaded family that valued head shape along with money and auspicious birth charts, this was the highest praise.
The fortune-teller predicted that because of her roundness, because of the class she was born into, and because of the sign she was born under, my mother would be very spoiled and very happy. Everything would roll her way.