Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller Page A

“Saja may be handsome, but he’s not too smart.”

    My picture of Saja was correct only in the fact that he was a glutton. And though he craved the human spirit above all other foods, he could be fooled or placated with offerings of chicken or pork, heap ings of barley and rice, oranges and whiskey.
    According to my mother, Saja was neither old nor ugly, but young and handsome, a dark soldier, alluring and virile. When she told me this, I then imagined Saja looked like my father, the hand- somest man I could imagine.
    Though his picture showed someone tall and thin, with brownish-gray hair receding sharply from the steep bank of his forehead, I thought my father, because he was haole, looked like Robert Redford. At times I would hold the picture up to the mirror, trying to find my father’s parts in my face, in my high, straight nose, perhaps, or my mouth with its protruding teeth. Not in my tilting eyes or my hair, a sheet of relentless black like my mother’s.
    If I imagined Saja looked like my father, it helped me understand why my mother flirted with death. She, too, must have thought my father was handsome above all other men, at least when they were newly married. I could see them when they first met, looking into each other’s eyes, stunned with love, humming “Some Enchanted Evening,” as their features melt into those of Liat’s and Lieutenant Joe Cable’s in South Pacific. Later, when I believed myself in love for the first time, it was this image I tried to call upon, but the only character I could see clearly was Bloody Mary, Liat’s mother. Her body, materializing in lucid majesty between them, dwarfed the minuscule lovers who clamored over and around her, pitiful in their attempts to speak or to kiss.
    When my mother entered into her trances and began to dance, she would cajole the soldier of death, tease him, beg him to take her with him. She would dance, holding in her arms raw meat—chicken, or pig’s feet, or a pig’s head—calling, “Saja, Saja,” in a singsong voice. When I’d hear her call his name, as if she were summoning a favorite pet or a lover, I would cry out, “Mommy, what about me?” and throw myself across her body in order to keep her from floating away. Mother would step over me and continue waltzing with the pig’s head, daring Saja to cut in.

    Tired of waiting, my mother twice tried to meet the Death Messenger on her own terms. The first time, she almost drowned in the bathtub. Apparently, after toasting Saja with a bottle of Crown Royal, she tried to take a shower and passed out. Sweet Mary, mad as hell when the relentless clanking of the water pipes woke her up before noon, called the police, as she had threatened to do so many times before. When they broke into our apartment, they found my mother dreaming under a thin layer of water, her nose pressed to the sluggish water drain.
    The second time, like the first, no one could say for certain she had been trying to commit suicide. The doctors gave her the benefit of the doubt and said that she had fallen into the Ala Wai Canal by accident; she shouldn’t have walked so close to the edge when she couldn’t swim.
    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