Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller Read Free Book Online Page B

was time only for one planting, one harvest, so everything had to be done quickly and well. As the youngest, I was responsible for feeding the workers their meals of rice and soup, carried to them on trays balanced on my head. When I delivered the food without spilling, I was allowed to play—a function also rooted in practicality; as I jumped through the rows of fragile plants, waving sticks into the air, I kept scavenging birds away from our future meals.
    But as I grew and second and third sister were hired on neighboring farms, I took over more of the work. Mother, oldest sister, and I would spend hours bent over the knee-deep silt, our fingers cradling the baby rice, laying them into the oozing earth.
    During one season of planting, my mother gave birth to a dead baby. Smaller than one of my mother’s outstretched hands, the infant slipped between her fingers in a gush of blood and sour-smelling fluid. My mother wrapped it in a bundle, packing it neat as a field lunch, before I could see it, but oldest sister saw. It was deformed, Soon Ja whispered. Tail like a tadpole. Or maybe, she added as an afterthought, it was a boy.
    We walked with our mother to the river, taking the clothes that needed to be washed. My mother divided up the clothes between my sister and me, and humming under her breath, she walked downriver. We listened to her voice, rising in waves above the rushing of the water, sing the song of the river: Pururun mul, su manun saramdul-i, jugugat-na? Blue waters, how many lives have you carried away? Moot saram-ui seulpumdo hulro hulro sa ganora. You should carry the sorrow of people far, far away.
    And as we beat our clothes clean, we watched out of the corners of our eyes as she tightened the knot on her baby’s shroud and set it into the water where the current pulled it down. Into Saja’s mouth, oldest sister told me later in an attempt to torment me. An offering for the gatekeeper of hell.

    When I was dry from my bath, I took the rags that had held back my blood and all that was left of my first baby, and instead of throwing them into the water, I planted them in a clean patch of earth next to the stream.

    I like to imagine the face of my first child, what she would have looked like had the features evolved from fetus to infant. I imagine her as perfectly formed as my living daughter: her head, her hands, her toes, everything perfect and human-looking, except in miniature. No bigger than my fist, her tiny body crosses in on itself, arms and legs folded over her chest and belly. Her eyes flutter against closed lids, and her mouth opens and closes as she dreams of suckling. I like to imagine my first baby in this way: nestled in the crook of the river’s elbow, nursing at its breast.

5

BECCAH
    Like the rats and cockroaches that ruled The Shacks, Saja the Death Messenger, Guardian of Hell, lived in the spaces between our walls. Each morning before dressing, I inspected the clothes hanging in the closet for the light dusting of gray fur or pawprints, and for the poppy-seed shit or fragile rice-paper skin of molting roaches. In the same way, I looked for indications of the Death Messenger: As I brushed and beat the dresses hanging in the closet, or shook and sifted through the underwear drawer, I unearthed the jade talismans my mother pinned to the insides of my clothes, the packets of salt or ashes she sewed into my panties.
    I imagined the Death Messenger as an ugly old man with horns and ulcerous skin, burning yellow eyes and a gaping, toothless mouth that waited to feed ravenously on the souls that lined up in front of our apartment. Our open door was Saja’s gaping mouth, my mother his tongue, sampling each person for the taste of death. The demon waiting to snatch me off to hell if I did not carry a red packeted charm, Saja was the devil my father had preached about and, through my mother’s chants and offerings, became more real to me than my father ever was.
    Sometimes