Comfort Woman (9 page)

Only I knew she went swimming to try to catch death.

My mother was like that cat who could never catch the tail of happiness because she never stopped chasing it; despite all her begging and threats and wishes, she was snubbed by death until she stopped wanting it.

After the doctors pumped the yellow waters of the Ala Wai from my mother's body, I spent even more time by the canal, watching the water trudge by my space underneath the bridge. I spent hours on the bank, sitting cross-legged on the foot of the bridge's concrete support, trying to see what my mother saw in the brackish, polluted water. If I hung my feet over the ledge of the support, I would have been able to touch the water. But afraid of the stinging jellyfish that shimmered, ghostlike, underneath the surface, I never even tried.

I did, however, ask my mother what she saw in the water, why she tried to drown herself in the canal. Actually, I think I asked her why she wanted to leave me when she said I was the only thing she loved.

“Beccah,” she told me, touching my hair, “it's not a matter of leaving you, but of retrieving something that I lost.”

My mother looked so sad then that I wanted to take back my words, words I said without thinking, just because I felt them. “Mommy,” I said, “I could help you look for it, if you told me what you lost.”

Back then, I thought I was good at finding lost objects. “Remember?” I told her. “Remember when you lost the jade frog Auntie Reno gave you for good luck? And I found it under the bed, under all those old boxes? Remember the Wishing Bowl money you thought we lost, that I found in Auntie Reno's trunk?”

I named the specific things I'd found for her over the years, from ever since I could remember, but I was really asking her to remember me, her daughter, and how much I could help her. I was her finder, and she needed me. I wanted to remind her that she was bound to me.

Instead of telling me what she was looking for, my mother told the story of Princess Pari. She pulled me down next to her on the couch, partially cradling me as if I were a much younger child. When I tried to ask my questions, her fingers fluttered over my mouth in a gesture so soft and fleeting that even then I was not sure if she'd actually touched me.

“Once on a time, many, many years ago...,” my mother began as soon as I had wriggled into a comfortable space. With my knees tucked close to my body, I sat with my back nestled into my mother's bosom. As she spoke, I could feel her words tickle the back of my head. “... A king and queen with no sons had yet another daughter, their seventh. Full of despair, not knowing what else to do to turn away their bad luck, the royal couple offered this girl to the Birth Grandmother spirit.”

My mother spoke often of the Birth Grandmother, the spirit assigned to protect and nurture the children of the world. Every year on my birthday, my mother would place an offering of sweet rice cake on our shrine, thanking Birth Grandmother for the blessing of my birth. I was taught to pray to her, calling her by name—Induk—if ever I was in trouble or frightened.

“Did you offer me to the Birth Grandmother?” I interrupted my mother.

My mother tapped me on the head. “Listen,” she said.

“When Princess Pari's parents died without any sons, Saja the Death Messenger carried them to hell. The daughter felt sorry for her parents and dived through the skies, into the earth, and across the deep, dark river that flowed past Kasi Mun, the Thornwood Gate, which is the entrance to hell. At the gate, the princess threw handfuls of barley and rice, she rolled oranges and poured whiskey through the bars, until Saja, greedy for the offerings, opened the gate.

“Saja was so distracted by the feast, the princess was able to slip into hell and, once there, searched for her parents. She swam through schools of human souls trapped in fish bodies until she heard a song she recognized as the song her mother had sung when she was still in the womb. ‘Mama!' she cried, and caught her parents with strips of long cloth that she tied around her waist. Quickly, before Saja could belch and close the gate, she dragged them back through the gates of hell, through the earth, through the skies, and into the Lotus Paradise, where they were reborn as angels.”

After the story, I crawled out of her lap and turned to face her. “What was the song?” I asked. “The one that Princess Pari recognized.”

“You know it.” My mother laughed, and sang:
“Pururun mul, Kang muldo mot miduriroda ...
”

I sang the last part with her. “The river song. I'll never forget it, okay, Mom? You sing that song, and no matter what, I'll find you, okay? I'll be like Princess Pari, and I'll rescue you.”

The first Saturday after my mother died, I went to the canal. I parked at Ala Wai School, retracing the path from the playground through the park toward the canal. Still used, probably by several classes of elementary school kids since I was there, the red-dirt path—narrower than I remembered, made by smaller feet than mine now—wandered through the park's date trees and ended at my old hiding place beneath the bridge. Bending over, I crawled under one end of the bridge and fit myself onto the same ledge I sat on those many years ago. Looking down where the water of the canal licked the rocks, I saw a handful of date pits. I remembered how I would search the ground under the date palms and how if I found some of the small, hard fruit, I felt that I would have good luck, as if they were pennies, only better, because they were a gift from nature. When I gnawed the thin flesh from its seed, I would thank the Birth Grandmother for looking out for me.

As an adult, I discovered that Foodland sold pitted dates in large plastic tubs. I bought one and couldn't wait to experience the taste I remembered from childhood. I opened the tub in the car, ripping the seal with my teeth, but when I popped a date in my mouth I was disappointed. The fruit was too sweet, too thick in my mouth, and I missed being able to suck on the seed.

Next to the pile of seeds, half swallowed by the mud, was a once-white satin shoe, the kind girls wore to their wedding or to the prom. And next to the shoe, draped limply among twigs and mush, a condom. I'd seen all these things in the canal before, along with the arms and heads of Barbie dolls, beer bottles and soda cans, shit, newspaper boats and hats, and dog-paddling rats. Occasionally I would spy a jellyfish or a tilapia, the trash fish, and before it flipped away, my heart would beat faster as I waited to see if it would sing me the river song, thus revealing itself as a soul in disguise.

The Saturday after my mother died, I watched the water of the canal lap at the trash under me and waited for something, some sign from my mother. I don't know what I was thinking, but I never caught a glimpse of a fish that might have carried her spirit.

When the time came, when she needed me, I had failed to rescue her. No Princess Pari, I could not swim to the far shores of death to pull my mother back to life; I could not even put my feet in the water.

The day after Induk called me out of the river, I went looking for the spirit I knew I could never find. Go to Manshin Ahjima, Induk said as she dipped her hand into my chest and pulled out my maum, the force of my heartbeat, and led me forward by a silver thread.

I walked and slept, walked and slept, and throughout the journey kept my eyes fixed on Induk beckoning before me. At times, her form would blur until it doubled, then quadrupled, and she would become Induk and my mother, and in turn my mother's mother and an old woman dressed in the formal top‘o of the olden days. I realized I was walking with my ancestors.

I tried running to my mother, but she shook her head and remained just outside my reach. It was then that I noticed that she held a small book, no bigger than the palm of my hand, which I recognized as the Ch‘onja-chaek, the most basic school primer. When she began to turn the pages, I strained to read what it said, but to my surprise, I found I could not understand the words. Even concentrating on the rapidly moving pictures milked most of my energy.

As my mother flipped through the book, I saw myself and my sisters as children, hanging on to our mother as she moved through our barley field and tended to our garden. And I saw us holding on to her body as we cried the death cries for her spirit. I saw myself underneath the pumping bodies of Japanese soldiers and, in the later pages, saw my oldest sister beneath the same soldiers. I saw myself sitting in the river, and I saw myself walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping, until I died.

At this point my mother closed the book. When I asked her why I could not see the rest of the book, the oldest spirit, whom I knew to be my great-grandmother, said, If you read the final chapters, you would know the universe. You would be dead.

When I looked up, I was alone and could smell the sea, so I knew I had followed the river west. Ahead of me I saw the cluster of small adobe homes Induk had told me about, nestled into the hillside. I knocked at the first house, wanting to ask if I could sleep in the courtyard. No one answered there, nor at the second home I came to. Finally, after failing to wake anyone at the third home, I entered the courtyard anyway and disrobed at the well. In the cold night, I laid my clothes on the brittle mud surrounding the well and bathed in the ice-cold water, wanting to purify myself and knowing I never could.

My skin felt waxy, as Induk's had the day after the soldiers killed her, the day after she reclaimed her name and I became the new Akiko. When the other camp women and I went to the river to bathe, we found her skewered body, abandoned alongside the path. We wanted to take her to the river with us to prepare her body for the separation of its spirit. Someone she loved should have cleansed her skin with her favorite scented oil. Someone who loved her should have laid her body out, with her head to the south, and prepared a feast to feed her soul for its next and longest journey.