Sad Peninsula (8 page)

This was a wisdom she did not want.

The officer screamed into her ear and stopped his thrusting, just held himself there and melted away like wax off a candle. His breath was a wheeze that smelled vaguely of oysters. He pulled out of her and slipped off the condom with one motion of his hand. Threw the limp, soggy sack, stained red on the outside and bloated with a milky white on the inside, at Meiko's face.

“Stupid
Chosunjin
!” he said, pulling his loin cloth back up. “You ruined your first time. Let that scar on your shin be a lesson to you!”

S
o this was how it really worked. This was what they meant by comfort. At least there were rules you were supposed to follow — chief among them to insist that the men put on the
saku
before they took comfort from you, and to cleanse yourself with the antiseptic liquid in your little ceramic bowl after each man had finished. There were also rules about time. Mornings to mid afternoons were for enlisted soldiers, mere boys, really; late afternoons and early evenings were for the noncommissioned officers; and the nights were for officers. Everyone was on a strict schedule so that they would never cross paths and interfere with someone of a higher rank. The enlisted boys did not stay long — they would enter your stall with a quick little snap of your curtain, climb aboard you and pump away until they let out that little scream of triumph, perhaps urged on by the yells of
hayaku! hayaku!
from the hallway. The officers were, by contrast, far worse. They were allowed to stay longer, sometimes all night, and asked for the most awful, humiliating things.

Another rule was that you were not to speak Korean at any time. This meant the girls ate in silence at meals, huddled over their plates of bland rice balls and miso soup, silent because most of them couldn't speak Japanese, couldn't even speak enough Japanese to find out if the girl sitting next to her spoke Japanese.
What a clever way to keep us from conspiring
, Meiko thought. Of course, some girls forgot or couldn't help themselves, blurting out a brief Korean phrase while at the table or lugging boxes of supplies to the trucks lined up in the courtyard. It enraged the soldiers to hear Korean because most of them didn't understand a word of it and assumed that the girls were planning an escape. Speaking a single Korean sentence could result in a ten-minute beating.

One afternoon a couple of weeks after her arrival, Meiko was at the lunch table admiring a ferocious little bruise that an officer had left on her ankle, when one of the older girls came over and said in fluent Japanese: “They will lose interest in you soon enough, you know.”

Meiko gaped at the girl who had spoken at her. She looked about twenty years old, but it was hard to tell: her hair was matted against her head and her eyes had gone yellow from some form of disease.

“The officers, I mean,” the girl went on. “They've a taste for the virgins — or at least the virginal. You have that look for now, but don't worry — you'll lose it eventually.” She half smiled then, revealing a mouth full of missing teeth. “Before long you'll start to look like me and they'll leave you alone. Leave you for the common soldiers.”

Meiko said nothing.

The girl glanced down then at the bruise on Meiko's ankle, and above it at the weeping blister across her shin where the first officer had burned her with the poker. “The other girls have been murmuring about you,” she said. “Did you really bite a corporal on the penis your first night here?”

Meiko nodded solemnly.

The girl looked like she wanted to chuckle, but held it in. “You shouldn't resist them so much. They'll kill you if they think you're too difficult to handle. If you want to live, then you should follow the rules and accept what they want from you. If you want to live, then just do what needs to be done. Make sure they wear the sack, make sure you clean yourself, give your tickets to the manager on time, and don't make a fuss — about anything. If you want to live, be a ghost. Be anonymous.”

Meiko licked her lips. “Do I want to live? Should I want to live?”

The girl did chuckle then. “My name is Natsuki,” she said. “That's not my real name, of course. What's yours? What's your not-real name?”

“Meiko.”

Natsuki placed a hand on the back of Meiko's neck and leaned in close. Whispered low, so the house wouldn't hear. “You bit a corporal on the penis, Meiko. Trust me — you want to live.”

N
atsuki proved to be an expert at anonymity, at being the sweet silent flesh that the men expected to find on the other side of a stall curtain. Her background was similar to Meiko's: she had attended a private school for girls in Pyongyang before being taken away, and she was fluent in Japanese. She took it upon herself to teach Meiko how to be just another nameless spectre living in the house, as opposed to a girl with a reputation for defiance. “I consider it my obligation, as your
unni
,” she said. So strange, Meiko thought, to hear Natsuki speak even a single word of Korean.
Unni
: an older sister, but here meant as a female friend who is older than you are. “Firstly, you cannot blame the soldiers for their tantrums. They see all this as a simple transaction. They give money to the manager, the manager gives them their ticket, they give the ticket to you, you give them service. Refuse to service them, or refuse to service them in the way they wish, and they feel cheated and perfectly within their right to go berserk on you. So don't refuse them.” Be pliant, she said. Eat quietly. Don't ask questions. Don't breathe loudly. Don't even let them see you go to the bathroom. Achieving anonymity made respecting your own role easier. That meant collecting your tickets and guarding them against thievery, and making sure that the house manager accurately recorded your day's take in the big ledgers. Meiko noticed that Natsuki always pushed her way to the front of the line to have her tickets counted, standing over the podium and staring at the manager's hand to make sure he wrote the numbers down correctly. “The ledgers are
everything
,” Natsuki told her. “It's how we and our families will be paid when this ordeal is over. Endure whatever the soldiers want of you, Meiko — no matter how disgusting or violent — but make sure you're paid. If the house sees these acts as nothing more than simple transactions, then treat them as such. But make sure you're paid.”

But Meiko couldn't endure. Defying the men just came too naturally to her. This
wasn't
a place of simple transactions. It was a battleground. Any number of things would enrage the soldiers, and trying to guess what wouldn't was a fool's errand. Even the sight of her monthly bleeding would make them ferocious, accusing her of deliberate poor timing. How could she not fight them, when nothing was off-limits, when every crevice of her body was open for exploration? And despite Natsuki's promise, the senior officers were not losing interest in her; they continued to spend the night in her stall. They wanted to bury themselves deep in her folds, clutch her to their fat chests, violate her body in the most horrendous ways. Even insisting that the soldiers follow the most basic rule of the house — wear a sack — grew more difficult as the weeks and months went on. Before long, of the forty-odd men who raped her each day, a full third of them didn't put on a condom.

And so. Each scar on Meiko's legs came to represent a moment of resistance against the men, a trophy she had earned for herself. It was her legs that aroused the soldiers' passions the most — but they were also what the men took out their frustrations on when she refused them certain acts. They “loved” her legs; the soldiers would rub their crotches into her calf, run their fat tongues along her ankles, suck her toes, tell her how the shape of her knees reminded them of their mothers. Yet if Meiko defied the men in any way, it was her legs that they would lash out against. They would burn her thighs with their cigarettes, stomp on her shins, pierce the flesh of her calves with their knives. To her, it seemed like such a Japanese thing to do — to vandalize that which they found beautiful.

I
t was around April that Meiko first spotted the sesame seed-like bumps cropping up on the lips of her
poji
. They were bright white, oily, and burned with an insatiable itch. No matter how often Meiko scrubbed the disinfectant from her little ceramic bowl into herself, the bumps would not go away. She knew what awaited during their monthly doctor's examination if she couldn't get them to subside. The girls were well aware of the army doctor's dreaded “606” injection, used on them to combat diseases that the men passed around. Natsuki had somehow learned the clinical names for this treatment — Salvarsan, arsphenamine — but to the girls, it was known simply as 606, or sometimes “the rat poison.”

In the line outside the doctor's tent, Meiko held Natsuki's hand in a state of dull panic. “The first time is always the worst,” Natasuki told her. “The first time for
everything
around here is the worst,” Meiko replied. When it was finally her turn, she pried herself away from Natsuki's grasp, entered the tent, climbed onto the examination table, and laid back as she was ordered. There were fresh cuts and burns on her legs, but, as usual, the doctor paid them no attention; he was concerned only with whether she was carrying a disease that she could pass on to the soldiers. He shoved her legs apart and looked at the curtains of her genitals. Stuck his fingers inside her, jerked them vigorously, gave her clitoris a thumbing on the way out.

“You need the injection,” he said, throwing her legs shut again. Meiko began to weep as she sat up. She stared at the tent wall, unable to watch him prepare the enormous syringe.

“You really should wear the
saku
,” the doctor said, tapping at air bubbles. “That is, after all, what they're there for.”
We don't wear the
saku
, the men do
, she thought, but didn't bother pointing it out. The doctor rolled up Meiko's sleeve and pulled her arm taut. “This will hurt immensely,” he said, and jabbed the needle into the flesh just below her shoulder. Instantly it felt as if her arm had been severed at the point where the needle went in. Meiko screamed at the tent walls, felt nausea erupt in her stomach, and her bowels twist like hoses. The doctor lifted her gruffly off the table and thrust her toward the tent's back door. She staggered outside into the cool spring air, fell forward, and vomited onto the grass. Doing so didn't quell her nausea; in fact, her retches only stirred up the arsenic racing through her blood until her whole body became a water skin of poison, a battle between what the soldiers had infected her with and what the doctor had given to cure it.

And on it went. Convulsing chills. Vice-like stomach cramps. Vomiting and diarrhea, involuntary evictions from opposite ends of her body. And Natsuki, sitting next to her on the grass, unbothered by the stench and mess and willing to hold her hand through it.

“You should go,” Meiko said faintly, spitting out chunks of vomit that had gathered around her gums. “Your afternoon off. Should find something better to do than this.”

“Foolish girl,” Natsuki said. “I'm your
unni
. I'll stay with you for as long as I'm allowed.”

And she did. Kept Meiko company through the dry heaves and debilitating shivers, the dribbles from her anus. Stayed until the sun touched the western horizon.

“It's time,” Natsuki said morosely. “I have to go get raped now.”

“Okay. You go get raped. I'll talk to you later.”

A nearby soldier caught the nonchalance in their Japanese and came over to grab Natsuki by the arm. “Back to your stall,
Chosunjin
!” he barked, throwing her toward the house. “Go earn some money for your family.” Then he looked down at Meiko, at the vile paddies of sick that orbited her. “Ugh. Why don't you wear the sack, you slut?”

T
he 606 did its job. Soon the manager began allowing soldiers to line up outside Meiko's stall once again. A cruel irony: the 606 had left her too enervated to fight with the men about putting on a sack, and many more than usual enjoyed her without one. She became like a latrine for the boys, only instead of relieving their bladders they relieved their lust – fully into her. The line ups were getting longer. The soldiers' hollers of
hayaku! hayaku!
were a constant chorus in the hallway. Anxious men watched from the threshold of her stall with the curtain pulled back, their faces like moons floating in her doorway as one of their comrades did his business with her. As soon as he finished, the next soldier entered, practically climbing over his friend to get at Meiko, sometimes rolling on a
saku
, sometimes not. Her genitals had now swollen into some mutant fruit, stone-hard and leathery.

S
pring turned to summer and summer into fall. Something was happening beyond their stalls, out on the battlefield — a growing sense of hopelessness among the platoons as defeat loomed over their heads. The manager became less fastidious about making the men adhere to the rules: stopped bothering to keep the intoxicated boys out of the hallway, allowed a few soldiers to slip into the lines with the non-commissioned officers in the evenings. The war was practically lost, they said. We're all going to die tomorrow, they said. So why not enjoy these fleeting pleasures while we can? One day, Meiko peeped outside her curtain to see a girl getting raped in the hall: she was down on all fours with a fat, oily soldier pumping away behind her with other soldiers cheering him on and the manager making tacit requests to take it back to a stall. When the soldier finished, he pulled up his loin cloth, grabbed the weeping girl by her throat and dragged her outside. No one ever saw that girl again.

M
eiko was awoken in the middle of the night by a boom that shook the house. Instant voices of panic, of men and girls, above and around her, and the sudden shuffling of feet, of racing bodies through the hall. She sat up on her mat. Another boom, and a wave of muddy earth slapped the side of the house. Meiko screamed, grabbed for her clothes. Her curtain snapped and there was the manager. “Out, now! Out of the house now!” The hallway was full of smoke. Meiko raced into the plumes and fell in line with the herd of other girls thumping up the planks while soldiers weaved among them in a dash to the doors. Out into the courtyard and Meiko saw the night sky glow a fiery orange. Shells whined over their heads and ripped into the ground. “Trucks! Get into the trucks!” someone was screaming. Meiko found Natsuki, nearly crushed into her. “What's happening?” she screamed at her
unni
, but then an explosion blew through the centre of the house behind her, sending wood splinters into the air like a cloud of startled bats.