Martin Limon: The Door to Bitterness

Her eyes widened and she screamed.

In seconds, Ernie’s startled face popped out of the door above her, his chest bare. He looked me over and said, “What in the hell happened to you?”

Julie was up now, throwing on her clothes, and soon the electric bulb was switched on and she was dressed in blue jeans and a pullover sweater. She filled a pail of water from the pump in the courtyard and began dabbing at the thick blood that ran down the side of my neck.

“Apo?” she asked.

“No,” I lied, even though it did.

As Julie worked, clucking away in concern, I questioned her in Korean about the smiling woman.

“She new,” she said in English.

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. Mama-san know.”

All women in an Itaewon bar, whether waitresses or hostesses or out-and-out business girls, had to register with the owner and show their VD cards to verify they’d been checked by the Yongsan District Health Department and wouldn’t be spreading disease to the courageous American allies. If the bar owner failed to enforce this rule, she could be subject to heavy fines. Or even shut down.

“Where’s the mama-san live?”

“Why? This woman take your money?”

“Worse than that.”

Ernie was out of the hooch, dressed in slacks and white shirt, sitting on the lacquered wooden walkway, slipping on his shoes and tying the laces. He wore his. 45 automatic pistol in his shoulder holster beneath his jacket and there was a bulge in the pocket where his badge should’ve been.

“So who do we have to kill?” he asked.

I opened my jacket, flashing the empty shoulder holster.

“Oh shit,” he said.

Julie gasped.

When he’d sufficiently recovered, Ernie asked, “Where’d you wake up?”

“In an alley.”

“You searched for the gun?”

“Thoroughly. Not there. Nor badge. Nor wallet.”

Ernie kept shaking his head, sadly, as if I were the sorriest piece of maggot-meat in the entire universe.

A. 45 caliber automatic pistol is a weapon of massive firepower. My poor judgment, my lack of responsibility, had put that pistol into the wrong hands. Irresponsible hands. Criminal hands. And the misuse of that pistol could cause someone’s maiming or death. I was to blame. No one else. Despite what a panel of 8th Army officers might decide in a court-martial, I knew if someone got hurt by that gun, ultimately I’d be judged most harshly by the person who mattered most: me. Unless I recovered that. 45, I’d be found guilty. And my punishment would not last for one year or ten years or even thirty years. It would last for the rest of my life.

Julie waved goodbye to the old woman who owned the hooch and the three of us stepped through the wooden gate, back out into the cold alleyway.

The proprietress of the King Club switched on a fluorescent light beneath the long wooden bar and flipped open a thick book with heavy cardboard pages.

“You look,” she said.

Each page held three entries, with a black-and-white photograph of a woman, a name, and other identifying information. Their duty position was listed-waitress, hostess, or entertainer-their name, their place of birth, their Korean National Identification Number, their VD card number and the date of their last checkup. All the faces looked lifeless, resigned. Showing none of the spunk I saw in them every night.

It must’ve been humiliating to travel downtown to a government office and admit you were selling yourself to foreigners, have some bureaucrat fill out paperwork on you and snap your mug shot and then send you down to the VD clinic as the next step in processing your body through the maze of Korean officialdom. All to insure the safety of a bunch of rowdy American GIs.

Julie sat on a stool on the customer side of the bar, sucking silently on a tambay, blowing blue smoke rings into the air. Ernie reached into the beer cooler, helped himself to a cold one, and raised his eyebrows in my direction. I shook my head.

Except for the four of us, the King Club was deserted. Cocktail tables sat in front of an empty stage, the straight-backed metal chairs turned upside-down atop them. Earlier, Julie had guided us through the maze of Itaewon’s walkways until we reached the home of Mrs. Bei, the owner of the King Club. After I explained the seriousness of the situation, Mrs. Bei consented to take us to her place of business and give us what little information she had on the woman who had been sitting with me last night.

“I felt sorry for her,” Mrs. Bei said. “Her skirt and blouse were shabby. She said she had come to Seoul to see her mother and only wanted to work here one night to make some money so she could buy her mother a present before she went home.”

It is a Korean custom never to visit anyone, especially one’s parents, with “empty hands.”

“And Chusok is coming up in a few days,” Mrs. Bei said. “She told me she had to save money to properly perform the seibei ceremony.”

Chusok, the Autumn Moon Festival, was an ancient holiday celebrating a bountiful harvest. It is the most popular holiday in Korea. Families travel many miles to be together and give thanks to their ancestors for providing the precious gift of life. The custom is to pile a table with fruit and other delicacies, wear your best hanbok-traditional Korean clothing-and perform the seibei ceremony, where you kneel and bow your head before your parents.

“Of course,” Mrs. Bei told me, “I had to make sure this woman had a VD card.”

She flipped the ledger open to the last page. There, written in ink, with no accompanying photograph, was the entry for the smiling woman. Her name, her Korean Identification Card Number, her VD Card number, her hometown and date of birth. I borrowed a piece of scrap paper and a pen and scribbled it down, copying the hangul script verbatim. The name she’d given was Yun Ai-ja. Love Child Yun.

“Did this Miss Yun tell you where she was staying?” I asked.

Mrs. Bei shook her head. “She was staying here. Hoping some GI-some GI with money-would become interested in her and take her somewhere.”

That GI, unfortunately, had been me.

Things did not go well back on the compound.

The CID First Sergeant was so angry that every red vein in his pale head popped. Colonel Brace, the newly appointed Provost Marshal, didn’t speak to me directly, of course, but word came down that he was livid over having to report to the 8th Army Commanding General that one of his CID agents had been rolled and his badge and. 45 stolen. The CG, in turn, had gone ballistic.

Later, Ernie and I talked to every CID agent or MP who’d been in the King Club last night. None of them remembered me at all. Everyone had been drunk and, as expected, paying attention only to their own concerns.

That afternoon, I made my formal report to the Korean National Police concerning the theft of my sidearm and my badge. Captain Kim, the commander of the Itaewon police station surmised, without me telling him, that I must’ve been drugged. It made sense. Neither Ernie nor Riley nor any of the other guys in the King Club last night had been so inebriated that they’d been unable to walk under their own power. Only me. Captain Kim promised to check with their records division in downtown Seoul, searching for someone known as Miss Yun Ai-ja, and also for any drug-and-mug operations that had been spotted recently.

That night, Ernie and I searched the ville thoroughly, asking everyone if they’d ever heard of a woman who matched the description of Miss Yun Ai-ja. No one had.

The next morning, the KNP records came in and Captain Kim told me that the smiling woman, the woman who called herself Yun Ai-ja, had no police record. Her Korean National ID Card had been a phony. So had her VD card. The smiling woman, at least officially, didn’t exist.