If You Leave Me Page 10

  “I won’t be allowed.” I mimicked Mother’s peaked face and spouted the excuses she would give. Minhee laughed and imitated her own mother’s sandy voice. As we turned a corner, her chatter quickly turned to a hush. She nodded at the fork in the path. “I hear something.”

  Whispers of women being taken wove through the nurses’ circles. Even the prisoners warned us to be careful. We strained together, struggling to hear beyond the rustle of trees.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. Minhee pointed to a shadow as it moved into the light. A man, walking down the right-side path.

  She grabbed my hand. “I have a knife in my satchel.”

  “Let’s turn back,” I said, but then the man cleared his throat, releasing a familiar cough. “Wait, I think—”

  “Haemi?”

  Major Kim. He slipped his hands into his pockets. “Nurse Minhee and Miss Haemi.”

  “It’s you,” I said.

  Minhee relaxed her grip and bowed. “We were helping the overnight shift, sir.”

  I watched him pull out a cigarette, look at it, then return it to its case. There was something strange about seeing him in this setting. He seemed ordinary. “Do you need an escort? You don’t want to be here alone once it’s dark.”

  “We’ll walk quickly. Thank you anyway.” Minhee bowed, and I followed.

  He touched my crown as he passed. “I’ll see you when I’m back from Geoje. Good night.”

  Minhee raised her eyebrows once he was far enough away. “You know, right?” She pointed at the fork.

  We always took the left path, and Major Kim had come down the right. I followed Minhee’s thinking. “The prostitutes?” The last time a drove of soldiers came through Busan, the village women to the right of the fork had disappeared into the mountains. Whispers had candled into flames, but when the women had returned, they appeared unchanged. “You think the major was with one of them?” I asked.

  “You don’t? Those whores are famous,” Minhee said.

  Major Kim. He was a man who doled out sweets to the nurses, to the soldiers in pain. He’d offered me a job because of my smart mouth. I sometimes caught his gaze skimming my features, but he had never done more than look.

  “He’s spent too much time with the Americans,” Minhee said.

  Of course. He was also a man who slept with prostitutes. With women who weren’t his wife. My mouth filled with spit, metallic and sour. I pointed to the nearest house we could see. “Do you think it was that one?”

  “I know about her. Kim Yejin. They say she gave birth to a white man’s child and drowned it in the ocean.” Minhee tugged me along. “Let’s go. Are you jealous?”

  “What?” I stared at Minhee, then back at the house. “Of her?”

  “He touches you. A little pat on the head, the shoulder. Do you like him?”

  I pulled away, my face rushing with heat. “Don’t be stupid.”

  She laughed, looped my arm with hers again. “I’m only joking. You have to come with me now.” She tugged me along, despite my protests. “Jeongja and Kyungah will love this.”

  The air was cool as I left the nurses’ boardinghouse later that evening, ignoring their insistence that I stay until morning. I was tired of them. They’d surprised me with their gossip, their insults jagging sharper against the women than the men.

  “Men are disgusting,” Kyungah had said, “but the women are unforgivable, selling their bodies for money.”

  “They prey on men’s weaknesses,” Jeongja had added, then nipped my arm. “What’s wrong?”

  Minhee had pinched my cheek. “She’s jealous. She’s in love with Major Kim.”

  But I wasn’t jealous. I’d only wanted to feel pretty. Clever. There was no harm in Major Kim’s affections. I’d wanted distraction and comfort and some attention, just as he had. It had been the same with Kyunghwan and Jisoo. Yet they were still men, protected and forgiven, while women were not. I turned those facts around in my head.

  “You will not sneak out with Kyunghwan again,” Mother had said, last year, the night Jisoo took me home from the bar. Hyunki was the sickest we’d ever seen him, yet Mother focused on purity, reputation, on whether Jisoo still wanted me for his wife. “If he doesn’t take you, we’ll never be able to return home.” She didn’t call me a whore, but I felt it shimmering her every word into a threat.

  Why was it that Kim Yejin was sullied and shunned, if she wasn’t married and the major was? Why had I been called a fox by the aunties in the marketplace, while Kyunghwan walked on without shame?

  I watched the moon, its chaste white glow. The nurses’ words reminded me of my place in the world. Even if the next day brought the end of war, I was still a seventeen-year-old girl married to a man I barely knew, a man who could be dead even now.

  I passed my home. I turned down the road and walked back to the fork, following the clouds until I stood before her house. Kim Yejin. I knew about her, too. She was tall and slight with one rolling eye.

  A thick metal cylinder lay by her gate. I picked it up and wondered if it had to do with Major Kim and what they’d done together. Its body was cold and strange, with a lever at one end. I knew the nurses would have told me not to touch it. I wondered what would happen to me if my husband died. A widow. I would never lie with a man. I would live alone, at the mercy of the goodwill of others. Or perhaps Mother would move us to a new town and present me as an unwed, marriageable girl again. I rolled the cylinder between my palms.

  “Don’t push it. It might explode.”

  Kim Yejin. Shaded by the trees at her front door, she stood in a white dress with a chamber pot in her arms.

  “A chamber pot in May?” Jealousy flexed in me as I imagined this woman with Major Kim. I was jealous—not of their sex, but of her ability to choose. The control she must have felt while disrobing.

  “Drop the grenade.”

  “If my husband comes back, will I ever see my family again?”

  “Who are you?”

  I set my thumb on the lever. “Do I press here?”

  She hissed and held the pot in front of her face. “Are you crazy?”

  I pointed it at the sky above. “What will happen?”

  “Don’t—”

  I pushed.

  She screamed.

  Clouds.

  Clouds came out in streams and caught on the trees. Mist and a grenade and smoke and the whore and the sliding open of doors and the smell—artificial, burning, unfamiliar. It wasn’t a bomb at all.

  “What’s happening out there?” a woman’s voice yelled. “What’s going on?”

  A slow clearing.

  The world returned in layers. Sky. Shadows of humans. Trees. Ragged breathing. Watery eyes. Whispers from the awakened, from those who’d emerged from their homes. Kim Yejin’s white dress. Her fear.

  It was only mist and smoke. One of those cans used to distract the enemy or signal to your own.

  “Just smoke,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  Nothing. Nothing was wrong.

  We were fine. We were undrowned, awake, not strung across the trees in pieces. We were fine.

  Jisoo

  1953

  Yuri woke me. Her familiar body leaned over my narrow cot. Right away, I could tell she looked different. As I tried to place the change, Jongyul whooped from the cot beside mine. No curtains divided our corner of the hospital, and I saw his lips widen into a floppy grin.

  “Tell me it’s true, Yuri. I can see it on your face,” he said.

  That was it. Serious, grim Yuri was smiling. She nodded and swept a screen of black hair behind her ear. “You’ll be discharged tomorrow.”

  “We’re leaving?” I braced myself against the wall. “How many of us?”

  “There’s a whole list. Definitely the two of you.” She adjusted the pad that supported my arm, and it felt like a mattock swinging into my shoulder. I looked at Jongyul’s face, at Yuri, at anything except myself. Yuri’s hairpin had loosened, and
I tried to touch it through the blur of pain.

  “Don’t force it.” Yuri was gentle with her reminders, even when she shouldn’t have been. “It’ll be good for you to leave. Get used to moving around.”

  “I’m going to get a girl pregnant tomorrow!” Jongyul yelled, smacking his cot’s metal frame.

  Yuri pretended to cover her mouth, but she was used to our crassness. A hundred of us lay on cots in the one wing of the hospital that remained usable. Parts of our bodies were buried around us. Not just parts, the remains of commodity lieutenants and one-day officers, too. At least I’d kept my arm. I was lucky, they said. I didn’t think so.

  “Even if you’re given duty, you could ask for a pass in a few weeks for Chuseok.” She placed her pinkie in my hand. I tried to squeeze as hard as I could. “Your grip’s getting stronger.” She searched my face. “You could celebrate the harvest festival at home, make sure your family’s all right.”

  “My family’s gone.” I squeezed again and tried to feel the strength she insisted was returning to me.

  “Your wife and her family,” she said. “They’d want to see you.”

  Jongyul lifted his casted foot off the cot. “I’m going straight home to my parents. The agreement’s been signed, the war’s over. I’m not working a day longer.”

  “It’s not over yet,” I said.

  “Armistice, truce.” He shrugged. “The fighting’s done. We’ve been waiting around for a month already. We should be allowed to go home.”

  I stared at Jongyul’s half-burned, disfigured face. It looked like someone had spooned out his left eyeball and patted extra skin over the hole. He’d lost a thumb and two fingers and broken his foot. “You’ll be fine.”

  He kicked my cot and explained what else he would do once he was out. Yuri left to tell the others. The hospital filled with the noise of grown men crying and cursing and yelling.

  I lay back down. I could go home for a day—south to Seoul or farther east to Haemi’s hometown, where they’d returned once the fighting passed. To a disappeared family or to a wife I hadn’t seen in two years. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore.

  The next morning, they loaded the too damaged and almost recovered into trucks without ceremony. I stood outside the hospital in used fatigues. Going home to become a civilian—the thought of life as an ordinary man felt slippery, dangerous.

  I couldn’t imagine myself back in Seoul. I didn’t want to see our square hanok home, the courtyard where Mother and Father used to watch Hyesoo fly her kite in the afternoon. I squeezed my shoulder until the pain pierced my thoughts. My useless arm. I would return to my wife as a man no longer whole.

  Jongyul limped to my side. “My mother’s going to cry when she sees me.” He squeezed his milky, shiny cheek. “I’m disgusting.”

  “You look fine,” I said, but I looked away.

  Yuri called to us from the door. In the late-summer brightness, her dress was almost sheer. The silhouette of her thin legs, the intimate revealing, reminded me that I understood her only within the hospital’s confines. A nurse, a kind woman. She bowed. “Were you two going to say goodbye?”

  Jongyul bent his head to hers as they bid farewell and then scrambled past me with his crutch and half-blind face. “I’ll save you a seat on the truck. I got a dirty magazine.” He was like a monkey—always joking around and a little stupid, but in a tolerable, winsome way.

  Yuri offered me a cloth-wrapped bundle. “Tofu for lunch. I had to sneak it from the kitchen.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Her red pin had loosened again, and her bangs swept over her eyes. “You should let your hair grow.”

  She shook her head. “They might not recognize me then.”

  Her brothers were almost certainly dead, but I didn’t say this; we all needed our own logic to withstand the war. “Leave your address. Your brothers will find you.”

  She smiled for my sake and rewrapped the binding around my arm. “Keep the sling on for another two weeks at least.” I counted the seconds, concentrated on her hair, on the buttons of her uniform. Perfect yellow circles with tiny holes. “Breathe. Stop being stubborn. I know it hurts.”

  “How would you know, with your two whole arms?” I tried to joke.

  “You stare at my pin when you’re in pain.” She unclipped it. “Take it. Give it to your wife.”

  I turned the pin around in my hand, unsure what to say. It was lighter than I’d imagined. Red and palm sized and sweet, as if it were made for a child.

  “Take these, too.” She handed me my release papers. “My turn to give advice. Tell her about the injury. Let her share your burden. She’ll understand.” Yuri saluted. “Corporal.”

  All the things I once would have said—to find me if she was ever in Seoul, that I’d treat her to a good meal—I could no longer offer. My family, my home, my money—they were all gone, and with them, my generosity. I bowed. “Be safe, Nurse Yuri.”

  The truck led us to an overcrowded officer center an hour away, where Jongyul and I waited together in line. When we reached the front desk, the staff sergeant eyed me as he took my information. “Crippled arm?”

  “Partially, but I don’t want to be discharged yet. I’m able,” I said.

  “Stay here.” He returned with my work papers. “You’re stationed in Daegu.”

  “What about Seoul? I have people I’m searching for.”

  He looked beyond me. “Next!”

  Jongyul hobbled up, already asking about the best train home. I waited outside. A few minutes later, Jongyul staggered through the entrance. “They’re keeping me. I got blown to pieces and they’re keeping me.” He leaned his head against his crutch. “Goddamn Daegu.”

  “Daegu?” I asked. “They put you there, too?” Of course. We were injured but still able. Our government didn’t want cripples like us in the capital when we could still serve.

  We trudged to the train station. Inside an unroofed container, we stared at the wispy, pathetic clouds. As the rails led us to our new city, we quieted with our different angers. I didn’t know which one of us was right.

  In Daegu, I stamped and signed official papers that held no meaning. Some retained corporals got to patrol the DMZ border. Others watched prisoners while the brass argued over a decent arrangement. They gave me a job at a desk.

  “Lunch?” My partner, Taeil, stood from the chair beside mine. “Let’s get out of here.” He said the same thing every day, and every day, we walked to the mess hall to meet Jongyul, and there we ate the same meal—a handful of rice and a bowl of vegetable soup that wouldn’t satisfy a child.

  I fumbled with my jacket on the walk over. Though I had worn the sling for a few extra weeks as Yuri recommended, the pain in my arm had taken on a new form. Sometimes it was now a blistering worm that grubbed from muscle to muscle without reason. Other times, I felt nothing at all, as if no limb hung from my shoulder socket. I didn’t know which was worse.

  Jongyul, already seated in the hall, waved us over to our usual table. An eye patch covered half his face, and a man we didn’t know sat beside him. “This is Kim Kwangseok. He’s new in my division,” Jongyul said.

  Kwangseok bowed. He seemed needlessly nervous, his hands shifting from his pockets to the front of his shirt and then down to his belt.

  Taeil nodded at Jongyul’s eye patch. “New fashion accessory?”

  “A girl sold it to me. She said it made me look handsome.” Jongyul thrust out a hip and posed like the women in clothing advertisements.

  “Let me try.” Taeil snapped the band and pulled off the patch.

  From the look on Kwangseok’s face, it was clear he hadn’t yet seen the mass of grooved skin over Jongyul’s eye socket. He let out a loud, ugly sound that made me want to punch his childish face.

  “What’re you looking at?” I asked. “Can’t keep your eyes on the ground?”

  Kwangseok stopped gaping at Jongyul and turned to me. “Him, sir, I’m looking at him.”

  “Be nice,” Jongyul s
aid to me.

  Taeil returned the patch with a shrug. “I think it looks good on you.”

  I shook my head. They were too easily content with the life given to us. We were half-formed and useless in the minds of our government, and these boys accepted it as fact.

  Taeil nodded at the line forming along the back wall. “Let’s get our meals.”

  As we ate, I realized I wasn’t any better. I couldn’t look away from Jongyul’s hands, even if I tried. He squeezed his spoon between his pointer and middle fingers as if he’d always eaten that way. I was the one who’d struggled to learn how to use my left hand to use chopsticks, to wipe my ass, to stamp the damn documents.

  At the end of the meal, Jongyul stomped his healed foot and cleared his throat. “I want to make a toast. There’s a reason Kwangseok’s here. He’s replacing me.”

  “What do you mean?” Taeil asked.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow.” Jongyul grinned. “They’re finally letting this cripple go home.”

  We whooped. We slapped him on the back and knuckled his head. “You have to become a lot funnier if you’re going to be the next Jongyul,” Taeil said to Kwangseok.

  Kwangseok’s scrawny build annoyed me. He reminded me of Kyunghwan. After I’d enlisted, Kyunghwan tried to knock down the plank walls dividing our rooms. He couldn’t even do that right. “Father signed me up. Did you convince him?” He had kicked at the rice bowls, pathetic, ineffectual. “If I die, she won’t forgive you.” But he was wrong. I had nothing to do with his enlistment. I had won Haemi, and I didn’t need a traitor in my life. Staring at Kwangseok, I saw Kyunghwan’s weak limbs, the sly face of a liar.

  We walked out of the hall after lunch, still celebrating Jongyul’s news. Taeil blew a thin line of smoke from his pipe. “Lucky bastard. Eunmi writes every day asking when they’ll let me go, why we have to stay when the war’s been over for months.”

  “Our wives should get together and commiserate,” I said.

  “They let me go home for a weekend,” Taeil said. “You should ask.”

  “Jisoo’s too honorable to leave before anyone else.” Jongyul turned to Kwangseok. “You know about this guy?”