Chang-Rae Lee - A Gesture Life

I was somewhat taken aback by her account. I could not quite accept the whole truth of it. But it was more perhaps that I had reached the limits of my conception, than thinking there was something in her story to doubt. Although it was the most naive and vacant of notions to think that anyone would willingly give herself to such a fate, like everyone else I had assumed the girls had indeed been “volunteers,” as they were always called. To the men in the queue, they were nothing, or less than nothing; several hours earlier I had overheard a soldier speak more warmly and humanly of the last full-course meal he remembered than the girl he’d been with the previous afternoon. He was a corporal attached to the motor pool, a typically decent young man. He crudely referred to the comfort girl as chosen-pi, a base anatomical slur which also denoted her Koreanness. Though I knew it was part of the bluster and bravado he displayed for his fellows, there was a casualness to his usage, as if he were speaking of any animal in a pen, which stopped me cold for a moment. I certainly did not think of the other girls as animals, and yet I cannot say they held any sort of position in my regard; perhaps my thinking was as a rich man’s, who might hardly acknowledge the many servants working about his house or on the property, their efforts and struggles, and see them only as parts of the larger mechanism of his living, the steady machine that grinds along each night and day.

In fact a few minutes later I found the soldier and asked him to explain himself and his usage, but he was so bewildered by my question he could hardly speak. “I don’t know what to say, Lieutenant,” he said sheepishly after a pause, “but isn’t that what they are?”

From his perspective, I suppose, he was telling only what he knew. And had I been of the slightest different opinion, I too would probably have thought of them that way, as soft slips of flesh, a brief warm pleasure to be taken before it was gone, which is the basic mode of wartime. But with K, I was beginning to think otherwise, of how to preserve her, how I might keep her apart from all uses in any way I could.

After returning from the gravesite, we sat under the cool cast of the moonlight in the small yard behind the infirmary. There was a dense ring of wide-leafed vegetation enclosing the space, and no one could see us. She was not so obviously upset at having seen her sister’s grave; she had not cried out or made any sound of mourning. Now in fact there was a lightness to her voice, as if she were almost being playful with me, though I knew it wasn’t that either. It was something different, a strange kind of release or relief. For the first time she seemed truly vulnerable to me, not just her physical body, which was always endangered, but her spirit. She would not come closer to me, as much as I thought she wished to, hungering not for anything like love but for plain, humble succor. And though I wanted to, I did not attempt to embrace or touch her or reach out. I did not shift or move at all. What prevented me I can’t know, whether it was deference or detachment or a keening heart of fear.

Earlier she had wanted to speak in the darkness, and now, too, she asked if we could sit close to the building, beneath the low eave, every part of us in the shadows. I could finally understand what she was wishing for. I believe it was so she couldn’t see my uniform or the shine of my boots or even my face; I realized that she was trying to pretend we were other people, somewhere else, with the most ordinary reasons for keeping such furtive company, just our whispering voices apparent to the night air.

We stayed there until just before the light began to rise again. Then I led her back inside and to the closet-room where she slept. I undid the brass spike lock and opened the door and she quickly stepped inside the cordoned blackness. Again I could hardly see her. I bid her good night and told her I would be shutting the door and locking it again. She didn’t answer, and as I was closing the door she pressed her weight against it, and I thought for an instant that she was trying to force it back open. But the pushing stopped and it was her pale fingers curled around the door edge, and then the fall of her long straight hair loosely covering the side of her face. Her eyes were cast downward, and as the door swung open a little, I took her hands cupped weakly into fists and she let me open them and hold them, her hands in my own tremulous hands. I was breathless. I had closed my eyes. And I remained there for what seemed a very long time, drawing no closer to her as we stood in the threshold of her cell, unmoving, unspeaking, barely resisting all.

* * *

TWO MORE WHOLE DAYS I had, before I saw the black flag raised upon the tilted pole of the infirmary. I was heading there in the early morning, in my hand the long, flat, two-pronged key for the lock to the supply closet, when I saw that piece of cloth. At first I thought it was a blank spot in my vision, a colorless void. Then a patch of sky opened low in the east and the light hit the door, and the flag next to it became unusually lustrous, reflective and yet flat-seeming with its absolute stillness. It was larger than I had first thought, a perfect square of black silk. I thought it was of the Chinese kind, its texture subtly striated and banded; and the way it fell stiffly from the two holes cut out along one edge, through which a rough twine was looped and then lashed to the short pole, it was like a piece of shiny, burnt parchment.

I did not touch it. Instead I let myself inside and went directly to the back of the building, to the closet where I had left her. I took my key and pushed it up through the brass slots of the lock. When I opened the door she was already standing up, waiting for me. I gave her the rice balls hidden in my pockets; I had saved them from the officers’ mess the night before, not eating two of my own and taking two others when I saw that the cook had stepped outside for a smoke. We sat on the blankets she had laid out over the floor. I let her eat a little while before speaking.

Then I said to her, “He did not come here last night?”

She shook her head, swallowing the last of the rice balls. “I woke up when I heard someone walking around this morning. I listened but he seemed to go away. It was the captain, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said to her, not meeting her eyes. She was staring at me, I could feel it. I told her, “I think it is this evening, K, that he will come to the infirmary.”

She nodded to herself. We were quiet for some time, and I felt I ought to do something for her, or at least say a few words. I had nothing ready to offer, however, though not because there wasn’t any feeling inside me. I had too much feeling, perhaps. I felt a stone in my chest, which seemed almost to pin me down.

She spoke softly now: “I must ask you again if you will help me.”

“I am sorry, K, but I have told you there is nothing I can do.”

“Yes, I know, but we are friends now,” she said, “and I only ask that you give me something now. I don’t expect you to help me in any other way. You’re a medical officer, and you must know what to give me, so I won’t wake up again.”

I could hardly bear to picture her that way.

“Please, Jiro,” she said, using my name for the first time. She had asked what it was the night before, and I had felt strange telling her, though now the sound of her speaking it was like a balm. “Please. You can help as no one else.”

“I won’t.”

“How can you not wish to, knowing the captain will come here tonight?”

“I do wish to help you.”

“Then you ought to do so,” she said, somewhat harshly, her voice ringing in the ensuing silence. But then she gathered herself, her hands clutching her elbows. She tried to smile. “You have been too kind, spending time with me and bringing me extra food. I have told you how you’re so much like my brother, generous and innocent like him. Blessed that way. But I’ve thought you’ve been a little brave, too.”