If You Leave Me Read online

  He pulled, gentler this time. “It’s Hyunki. He’s sick. Your mother had to go for help.” He turned to me, his gaze resting on my wet collar. “Her brother’s sick, and you brought her here.”

  “Hyunki?” Haemi looked at me, asked me. “Where is he?”

  But I didn’t know. Only Jisoo knew. I tried to grab Haemi’s other wrist. “I can find him.”

  “You left him, Haemi. You were supposed to watch him tonight,” Jisoo said. “I’ll take you.”

  “You can’t marry her.” I looked from Haemi to Jisoo, trying to pin them with my stare. “You can’t come here and do this.”

  He glanced past me. “Stop being an idiot. This is serious.”

  Haemi touched his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  I called her name as they walked out, but when they turned back, I had nothing to say. My mind was an empty, murky blank. Haemi let Jisoo pull her through the tent’s flapping tarp and out into the street—a blur of loose hair rounding a corner.

  They were halfway across the alley when she looked back at me again. A quick, blanched face I couldn’t divine. I tried to work my mouth, ready my words. If I could say the right thing. If I knew where Hyunki was. If I hadn’t let Jisoo treat me like a child.

  I sat back down at our table.

  I stayed alone.

  The papers I had copied for Haemi lay scattered. They leached up the makgeolli puddles. Charcoal markings thickened and spread, like worms surfacing after a long night’s rain.

  Part 2

  Haemi

  1952

  Luck spilled between our fingers and pooled around us. Mother spoke of the others—the sullied, unlucky women. “By the Chinese, the Japanese. Mongols. Americans. Korea’s girls have been snatched up since the beginning.” She dipped a dirty shirt from the field hospital into the stream that tendriled from the Nakdong River to our refugee village.

  “That doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said.

  “My job is to prepare, not comfort.” She rubbed the shirt against a boulder until the bloodstain loosened its grip. Women we knew from the Busan markets waved at us from the other side of the bank. Mother ignored them. “They only want to take our jobs.”

  We squatted together, our long skirts bunched, our hands full of other people’s laundry. “The sullying happened to Kim Hasun up on the hill,” she said.

  “Auntie Chyu told me Hasun was in love with that white soldier. Does that still make her a tainted woman?”

  “What does the seamstress know?” Mother clucked. “Besides, that’s just as bad.”

  I snapped a sheet in the water. “Let’s finish the washing. No more gossip.”

  I didn’t want to discuss these marred women or their men any longer. I could too easily imagine myself in their place. Jisoo and I had married before he left for the war, a quick but formal ceremony. If he returned, we would lie with each other just like Hasun and the American, and yet Mother wouldn’t call that a shame. It was strange, how marriage turned the act into something good, something natural between a man and a woman.

  I stretched a nearly dry shirt across a flat stone and pummeled it with wooden sticks. Mother saw our work as luck, too. Before he left, Jisoo found us jobs washing and drying for the field hospital. As long as the war continued, even in this stalemate, we had security.

  She raised her arms and made thumping noises. “Hit the shirt harder. Rhythmic, constant, for an even shine.”

  The nurses’ outfits were the most tedious. They wanted pristine seams and their Western-style shirts had buttons that broke easily under my careless pounding. “Hyunki loves pressing clothes,” I said. It was true. He liked to hold one wooden stick between his hands and match my rhythm.

  “Let him play.”

  Hyunki—alive and shin deep in the almost-summer water. Mother and I watched him together. At the stream’s bend, where a group of boulders formed a small pond, he splashed with a few village boys. Wet and speckled by the shadows of the trees, his body flickered like glass glinting in the sun.

  “After this load, you can relax,” Mother said.

  “Can I swim, too?”

  “What we do isn’t so bad, Haemi.” Mother rubbed the good luck pujok she kept tucked inside her skirtband. Ever since another washer introduced her to these yellow-papered talismans, she had covered our bodies with them.

  Mother cycled through superstitions with more fervor than anyone I knew. They kept her hopeful, and maybe they worked. We were lucky. The stalemate continued, far away from us. I was married yet still remained with my family. I had not been taken away to tend the groom’s relatives for the rest of my life. It was a calm April morning, and we squatted with our bare feet in cool running water, a wealth of whitened clothes swimming around us.

  Relaxing meant an hour’s walk to the hospital tents southeast of our village, where the soldiers had cordoned off the area for the sick and dying prisoners of war. “Come back with next week’s sets,” Mother said. Hyunki, still swimming, splashed me as I left.

  From the top of the hill, where the old blind man relayed his radio announcements, the field hospital could be seen in its entirety. Beyond that, the sea that roiled against the sand. And farther out, Geoje-do, the island the prisoners returned to once they’d healed. Stories of uprisings there had crossed over the strait, circulated by village women content with the war’s standstill. I didn’t pay these stories much attention. If it didn’t have to do with Kyunghwan or Jisoo, I didn’t want to know.

  The first time I delivered clean laundry to the field hospital, I had spoken to everyone I encountered. The Military Police that demanded my entrance papers, the foreign doctors who strode so purposefully between the indistinguishable tents. I’d repeated two names into their blank, uninterested faces.

  The boys had left me for the war. Jisoo had gone the right way, enlisted and eager. I never understood Kyunghwan’s departure—whether he was forced or had joined to spite me. He’d left without saying goodbye. Nearly a year later, I didn’t care about his reasons any longer. I only wanted them both to remain whole.

  I stopped an American soldier with eyes the color of gosari. He wore a belt with too many pockets and boots I wanted to steal. “Yun Jisoo? Yun Kyunghwan?” I asked.

  The soldiers all responded in English or with apologetic shakes of their heads. This was a space for injured Reds. Jisoo and Kyunghwan could be anywhere, and I was only a girl.

  I tried not to think of them, and the hospital provided a decent distraction. I liked how the soldiers’ attempt at order butted up against the chaos of their days. They had laid out the grounds in neat sections, separating their half-moon huts from the guarded lodgings of the prisoners and the hospital’s surgical tents. But, in reality, the doctors, Military Police, and patients continuously crossed all these constructed borders.

  With the fresh laundry, I passed the guards with a bow, walked down the array of tents, and entered the one reserved for clean supplies. I searched for a Korean to report to. “Nurse Minhee? I’ve come with this week’s sets.”

  “Oh, damn.” She stood beside a rack of towels, her arms laden. “I forgot you were coming today. The dirties are still in Recovery. Leave those here and follow me, will you?”

  We walked to the middle of the pathway, where the tents were laid out in a grid. “I have to go into an operation now,” she said.

  “Is everything all right?”

  She focused on me, a sudden flutter of attention. “We’re a nurse short today, so it’s a bit more hectic than usual. You see that tent?”

  “I could help,” I said. “What do you need me to do?”

  She smiled but shook her head. “Go to the Recovery tent. Dirties will be there.”

  I watched her walk away. She was the nicest of the Korean nurses. Twenty and unmarried, she’d been in college when the war began. Fluent in English, French, and Japanese. She wasn’t pretty, too tall, but she was sharp, and foreign words fell from her lips with precision when she spoke to the Ameri
cans. She was better and smarter than me, and everything she had, I wouldn’t. It made me hate her.

  On my way to Recovery, I heard a man’s cries coming from one of the surgical tents. Chinese curses flew through the air like birds. I pictured a man about to lose a part of himself—a leg, a hand, a full arm. His screams peeled away my frustration. Only meters away, our doctors worked metal instruments through the bones of our enemies. I had all my limbs intact. I had a free life. I could pick up the laundry without fuss.

  The dirty satchels waited inside a tent that smelled of iron and vomit. I peered through the sacks, looking for the easiest items to wash. Mother preferred sheets, towels, prisoners’ uniforms—simple fabrics without buttons or complicated seaming. I preferred the doctors’ clothes. Sometimes, inside their pockets, I found half-eaten biscuits, letters, an ink pen that Hyunki could use to scrawl across leaves.

  As I nosed around, I heard a whimper crawl up the corners of the room. I touched my chest, where Mother had laid a pujok that morning. I didn’t believe in her death ghosts, but I stilled with fear.

  “Is someone here? I’m the cleaning girl,” I said.

  The whimpers continued, harsh and uneven. I followed the sound like a fisherman’s line, from one section of the tent to the next. Behind a wooden pallet, I found him—a man all in white. He shoved his shoulders against the wall like a caught animal.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth and blood spilled out, red and trickling and staining his teeth. Hunched over, he tried to suppress his coughing. He was a prisoner, and I’d caught him in a room where he didn’t belong.

  “Let me help you.” I turned him on his side and pounded his back. When another fit overtook him, I stuck my finger in his mouth to check for choking. The soft insides, the rough terrain of teeth. A familiar act.

  I called for help. I couldn’t tell if the man looked like Hyunki or if I only imagined it. Round eyes. A raked, naked look to his gaze. His body twined in and around itself, as if the smaller the space he consumed, the smaller the pain.

  An American nurse found us, gasped, exited, and returned with doctors and soldiers. English chatter crowded the room, and the prisoner looked up at them with his large, alarmed eyes. A Korean man in a flat military cap guided me from the room before I could see what happened next. With a firm grip on my elbow, he led me into one of the endless tents and sat me at a wooden table.

  “My name is Major Kim,” he said. “Are you a girl-san?”

  I twisted in my seat to look out the entrance. I could no longer hear the prisoner. “I’m a laundry washer. My name is Lee Haemi, and I have identification.”

  “You should face your elder when you speak,” he said.

  I rose from the chair and half bowed, still stunned by the prisoner’s coughing, the blood flooding from his mouth like a pond after heavy rain. “What will happen to him?”

  A cup appeared. My hands were red, but I didn’t care about the stains I left on the tin. I drank. The water slid down my throat like a fish. I remembered the dirty laundry sets I had left behind. I saw Mother at home, wondering why I was late.

  Major Kim closed the tent flap, dragged a chair to the other side of the table, and sat down. He gazed at the stacked papers and the driftwood branch acting as a paperweight. Blood stained my clothes. The prisoner—he’d had a leg wound, too. The memory came to me as I touched the hem of my reddened dress.

  “Did you know him?” Major asked.

  “How could I?”

  He stared at me as if I hadn’t helped a sick man. Graying eyebrows decorated his saggy, jowled face. “He was trying to escape. Why didn’t you call for someone first? How did you know he wouldn’t hurt you?”

  “Am I in trouble?” I glanced at the entrance again. It seemed to have moved farther away, stretched out at the other end of the tent.

  “Please answer my questions.” The major picked up the driftwood paperweight and rolled it in his hand.

  I stood. “The man couldn’t breathe. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

  He stood, too, still grasping the branch. He was tall, maybe the tallest Korean I had seen in a year. “You don’t scare easily.”

  Mother’s words about men and their strength and what they could do to women returned to me. I gripped the aluminum cup, my fingers looped through the handle. We were alone in a tent I’d never been in before. At least ten paces to the entrance, and I couldn’t remember which direction he’d taken me.

  “Let me go,” I said.

  He stepped back. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He gazed at the branch, set it down, and motioned at the air between us. “No one’s keeping you here. I meant you’re not frightened by the sight of blood.”

  Heat crawled up my skin. I wasn’t ashamed of my thoughts, only at how easily he’d deciphered them. I loosened my fingers but didn’t release the cup. “You can’t blame me. We’ve all heard the stories,” I said.

  “You have a brazen mouth for a girl.”

  “My mother says the same.”

  His face broke into a smile like a watermelon cracking open. He chuckled as he eased back into his chair. A soft ripple of laughter revealed a gentler man. He offered me his handkerchief. “I’m only curious as to how a laundry girl would know what to do in that situation.”

  I wiped my hands, the cup, my face. I left my hem as it was. “My brother was sick in the lungs. Sometimes he would cough so much he’d choke.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He’s better now.”

  Major Kim pushed himself out of his chair. “Come.” At the other end of the tent, beyond a trio of stools and a smaller desk, someone had tacked a map onto a post. He gestured toward it. “Where’s home for you?”

  The map was unmarked, peaceful compared to the truth of the war. I found my hometown below the line that had severed our country after the Second World War. On the eastern side of South Korea, my village was a speck of brown encircled by mountains. “Here.” I pointed.

  “When did you flee?”

  “Late July, two years ago.”

  I remembered it too clearly. The day we learned of Seoul’s fall, Hyunki and I had been catching grasshoppers. Mother ran to us with her hanbok skirt clutched in one hand. She didn’t speak, only motioned for us to follow. Snippets, flaring and incomprehensible, wove through the crowd as the whole village gathered in the market. The Northerners had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel three days before. The Chinese were with them. No, the Soviets. No, both. Whoever they were, they were Reds. Seoul had fallen in less than an hour. Our country would be reunited. We would be killed. The hysteria was contagious, congested with too many emotions. I didn’t want to catch their panic, didn’t want to understand.

  “What’s happening, Nuna?” Hyunki held his string of chirping grasshoppers above his head.

  I turned to my brother. “Let’s go back and cook up these critters. Mother will tell us later.” As we walked home, I helped Hyunki pluck their wings one by one.

  Major Kim pointed to Busan. “How long did it take to get here?”

  “Weeks. It felt like years.”

  In the days afterward, our young men began to disappear. Some left freely to fight, others were forced. The families with teenage boys, like Kyunghwan and his father, were among the first to flee. After our own ROK soldiers absconded, and the whispers of piled bodies had frenzied our neighbors, Mother decided to leave.

  “We left together—the families with children and girls. There were so many of us, at first,” I said.

  With beans, rice, hollowed gourds, and a few garments wrapped in bojagis, we’d gathered in the market before sunrise. The mothers had argued over the best path south. Hyunki, excited by the idea of missing school, had tugged on my pants and laughed because I wore Father’s old clothes. I felt anger at his innocence, so clean and simple, and leaned close to say, “I’m pretending to be a boy so men won’t rape me.” The bewilderment on his face as he tried to understand. My immediate sh
ame. I’d hugged him and said, “Don’t listen to your mean old nuna. I’m sorry, Hyunki. Tell me what you want to see in Busan.”

  “The ocean,” he’d whispered.

  “Let’s go now. Let’s head to the water.”

  Then the walking, a mass exodus of bodies. Not only our village, but all the villages. The mood wavered between community and competition whenever shelter or food appeared. Tanks and soldiers swarmed the roads as if they sprouted from the ground. Our feet were splintered and raw, and hunger shone in our faces. I remembered the dead, how the summer heat pitched the old, young, and sickly into roadside graves. Their bodies decomposed quickly, and strangers stole the clothes that covered their limbs. Fear marked us more than our desire for food—fear of others, ourselves, the soldiers, planes, death, of finding Busan occupied. Mother and I feared for Hyunki the most. He was always near death, and yet always managed to hold on.

  I touched the map again. “We ate the beans inside Hyunki’s favorite cornhusk doll and he hated us.” It was strange to speak about those first days now. I’d never shared this story with anyone, not even Kyunghwan.

  “I’m sure your brother understands.”

  “How would you know?” I asked.

  “That mouth again.”

  Major Kim stood behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his breath. I was no longer afraid of him. I knew this type of man. He wouldn’t hurt me. He touched a spot of land to the west of my hometown. “This is where I grew up. I went away for middle and high school, but I remember my father’s house.”

  I turned to him as he spoke. He thought I was pretty. I could see it in the way he avoided my gaze. I smiled at my earlier fear, at how hastily I’d accepted Mother’s beliefs. I didn’t want to be like her, walking through the world fearing the evil in all men. Since Kyunghwan’s and Jisoo’s departures, it was too easy to despair, to see only how senseless living had become. I had to resist such thinking.

  “We need another house girl,” he went on, “for the mess hall.”