Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller Page B

cannot sing to my daughter like that, in a voice full of laughter, for I never learned funny songs, songs that make you laugh and laugh. I remember only bits and pieces from those my mother sang when she was working. And they were songs that filled you with sadness, that made you want to cry until your throat swelled with salt.

    After one of the missionaries’ communal dinners, the person who came to take the chopsticks from my hand was the minister the girls always followed. By then most of the people there had stopped speaking to or looking at me, unnerved by the silence by which I was surrounded. But when this man took the chotkarak away from me, he held my chin and looked into my eyes. He looked until I was forced to stop listening to the women crying in the comfort camps, until I looked back and saw him. And then he smiled, rubbed a napkin over my lips, and helped me stand. He took my hand and led me down the basement stairs, where the world turned on its side once again.
    In the basement meeting room, he placed me on a bench between two other missionaries. I concentrated on watching him walk down the aisle to the pulpit, but my vision narrowed and buckled under the increasing intensity of camp sounds. During his speech, each time I saw him slap the pulpit for emphasis, I heard the sounds of women’s naked buttocks being slapped as they were paraded in front of a new arrival of troops.
    When the congregation stood, opening and riffling through their black books, I heard the shrieking of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.
    And when the people around me all at once opened their mouths wide, I heard every sound from every day I spent in the camp all at once, so loud I felt I was drowning under a raging river, until, in a rush, my ears shattered.
    After a moment of utter silence I heard singing, but singing like I’ve never heard before. The only songs I had heard before that day were sung by one person at a time, or by a group of people who all sang the same part in the same way.
    What I heard after my ears cracked open was a single song, with notes so rich and varied that it sounded like many songs blended into one.
    And in that song I heard things that I had almost forgotten: the enduring whisper of women who continued to pass messages under the ears of the soldiers; a defiant Induk bellowing the Korean national anthem even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out; the symphony of ten thousand frogs; the lullabies my mother hummed as she put her daughters to sleep; the song the river sings when she finds her freedom in the ocean.

    My daughter’s cries filter into my dreams. Just before I wake, her crying turns into my mother’s singing. My mother is crying and dancing and singing a song that I heard her sing repeatedly in my childhood, but in my dream I cannot quite make out the words. I try to embrace my mother, but she dances away from me again and again. Just as I finally reach her, her song erupts into the screams of an infant.
    I look toward my husband’s bed, see his unmoving form huddled beneath the blankets. Dazed with sleep, still seeing my dream, I go to my daughter. As I pick her up, her body stiffens with her screams, and out of my mouth comes my mother’s voice, singing the song I forgot I knew:
    Nodle Kang-byon pururun mul
Kang muldo mot miduriroda
Su manun saramdul-i jugugat-na
    It’s a song full of tears, but one my mother sang for her country and for herself. A song she gave to me and one that I will give to my daughter. I want to shake my baby into listening, force her to hear, but I only sing louder and louder:
    E he yo! Pururun mul, kang muldo
Na rul mit-go nado kang mul-ul miduriroda
    Over my daughter’s cries, I continue to sing and sing, until she begins to quiet. Her body falls into mine and the air in her room becomes sweet and heavy with the breath of her sleep, and still I sing. I sing until I reach the