Day of Good Fortune

The valley has a name, and I could find it easily enough on a map of Korea, but to me it will always be Her Valley. It is a wilderness by now, and the village--Her Village--has been swallowed up by the tangled underbrush, for the armistice line that divides the country runs close by, and no one lives in the buffer zone between north and south, and no one may enter it to tend the ancient graves--or to chase down memories. She may still be alive, perhaps on the inaccessible side of that no man's land, perhaps on this side, where I could find her and thank her if I knew where to look, and if I knew her name. But all I have now is this memory of a spring day--and the knowledge that she found for me something I had lost.

It was the April after the bad winter. The fighting line had raked the little valley as our side advanced; now the gunfire had faded away to the north, the ashes were cold and Her Valley was abruptly green again with spring. But two alien armies had battled through the place, burning houses and smashing irrigation dikes, and gouging craters and foxholes in the paddy fields and up the hillsides, and the scars of war were fresh. The Chinese had retreated, taking many of the valley's young men along and leaving only disease in the villages and threatening propaganda slogans daubed on walls. And our troops had passed through and abandoned the valley once it was won, leaving a spoor of scattered ration tins and shell casings and snarls of disconnected telephone wires. The irrigation ditches were empty and no water stood in the paddies that should have been flooded, but rain had nourished the thin green rice plants and they could still have been saved if there had been anyone to tend them.

And then, about four days after the fighting, a solitary Army truck came lurching up the rutted trail, fording back and forth across the swift, muddy stream that surged wastefully through the silent landscape, sometimes splashing clumsily along shallow places of the stream bed itself. In the back of the truck, two soldiers sat in silence, staring blankly at the ruins along the roadside, at the charred thatch roofing hanging in shreds over crumbling mud walls and shattered chunks of earthenware littering the courtyards and ragged gashes in the green fields. The two soldiers had not said a word to each other for more than an hour. Nothing but the truck was moving in the valley. At length, one soldier spoke.

"What a place to die," I said.

There was no response from the corporal sitting opposite me. One wheel of the truck hit a stone and we were flipped off our benches and banged down again hard.

"What I mean ..." I began, but then I had to hold my breath as we passed a fertilized paddy. "What I mean is, 'What a place to die for.' To fight for."

"Yeah?" the corporal said. And he added: "What do you know about fighting?"

So they had heard. Already, only a few hours after I had been attached to this unit, the men in it knew all about me. I turned away and chose one rice shoot in a nearby paddy and watched it until it was gone, blended with the green of the others, all of a color, all fluttering bravely, doomed in the drying field. Never would I be able to blend like that with other men, I realized as the truck carried us up the deserted valley. I had purchased survival, and this was the price I was paying, and this was the way it would always be. And I did not regret my choice. Of the 14 men who had panicked and fled, I alone had refused to go back to the line. There would be a court-martial in a few days, and punishment. But afterward, eventually, I knew there would be hot baths and dry martinis, and football games to watch on brisk afternoons and love on clean sheets, and thick newspapers and the whir of lawn mowers on Sunday mornings. Never again, whatever they did to me, would I have to cower at the thump of the mortar shells or endure the sweating terror in the foxholes waiting for an attack to begin.

Brooding on my aloneness, smug in my safety, unaware of what the jolting truck was bringing me to, I gazed at the terraced paddies rising like stairways up the hillsides to where the woods began. As we ascended farther, the span of terraces narrowed, the mountain walls pressed closer, looming over us and muffling our sounds and condensing our field of view, so that when we came suddenly upon a gutted house or a burned-out tank, it appeared larger than reality and more awesome.

Far up near the head of the valley, where it was narrowest, we stopped beside a few undamaged thatch roofs. The sergeant who was driving switched off his engine and in the silence, for a long moment, the last sigh and mutter of the engine hung unfading in our ears. Then we heard the fluid yammer of the stream, and that was all. There was no trace of life in this village, and no mark of death. The only sign of the war was the message that a retreating Chinese had smeared on a wall: Gi Prepare to die.

The sudden wail of a child in pain skewered us on an icy needle of sound. Then it melted to a whisper, and a sob, and was gone. The corporal and I dropped off the tailgate, our canteens and carbines clinking, and stretched our legs. The sergeant and the Korean doctor who had been sitting beside him climbed down from the cab and walked up to the nearest house. In a moment the sergeant reappeared on the path and shouted for us to follow him.

Wordlessly, the corporal handed me a thick metal tube with a handle at one end, like a fat bicycle pump. He took another for himself from a carton on the truck and started after the sergeant. I followed, not really knowing why, or caring yet about anything or anybody in this nameless village at the end of the line.

We came around the corner of a house and filed into a muddy, cluttered courtyard, and all at once I understood for the first time why we had come to this remote and empty valley with our cargo of rice and medicine and DDT. The stench, first of all, was so strong I thought I could see it, like a fog. Fetid, rotten, sickly sweet, it hung as it had for days over the house and the courtyard, seeping into and out of the roof thatch, an evil miasma of garlic and decaying flesh, and the odor of bodies too ill to move, and their sweat and waste. In a corner of the yard, oddly small, lay a corpse, uncovered, the black mouth open in a jackal grin. From the darkness of a doorway came a low, pulsing ululation that we had not heard from the road, because it was pitched to the murmur of the stream. It rose and fell in rapid folds, as if an unseen wounded animal was panting in terror.

I held a handkerchief to my face and stepped into the house. At first I could see nothing but the sergeant standing next to me, writing in a small notebook. The moaning swelled, and out of it came the heavy accents of the doctor, first a brief conversation in Korean, all hisses and clucks, then in awkward phrases the flat, detached, professional data, spoken quickly. "No food four days... This woman fifty, flu one week... This man fifty-five, flu two weeks... This man thirty-four, typhus... They say he sick six days. He's strong, be OK, I think. But need DDT here..."

I could see shapes now. The doctor bent over a small bundle in a far corner, feeling the pulse on a thin arm. He moved through the room, peering into frightened eyes with a pencil flashlight, examining sores, handing out white pills. "This baby, five maybe, child of man with typhus. Smallpox three weeks ago. Now smallpox finished, but typhus, too..." A scrawny crone sat propped against the wall. Her frail, leathery body was nude to the waist, and she held an infant on the gray quilt that covered her legs. The baby tried vainly to grasp the withered teats while the old woman jabbered at the doctor and pointed at the child and then stretched a knobby arm toward the courtyard where the body lay. A dozen groaning people sprawled on the floor of the tiny black room, and the doctor looked at each. And when he came to the door and glanced at us, I could see he was young. "They say, probably whole village like this. Nobody come, nobody go, nobody can move. Maybe many dead, not buried. Much typhus." Then he ducked out past me into the courtyard and hustled off to the next house in his blue-serge trousers and black city shoes. His pudgy white hands were almost hidden by the cuffs of an Army field jacket that was too big for him, and he wore his stethoscope like the silken ribbon of a decoration of honor. He walked past the dead woman, glanced down and went on.

"We'll bury that woman later," the sergeant told us. "After we see how many we got. Dust 'em good, and I mean everybody." Suddenly he remembered I was new. He jerked a thumb at me and told the corporal: "You'll have to show Harris, here."

"The name's Farris," I said, but he was gone, following the doctor.

The corporal hitched his carbine farther back on his shoulder, out of the way, picked up his dust gun and stepped over the high threshold into the gloom of the house. "DDT," he said in a loud voice. He held his spray gun up so they all could see it and pushed the plunger once. A fine white dust floated out of the nozzle and hung in the air. "DDT," he repeated, and added: "For bugs. Kills the bugs." There was no sign that anyone understood him, but the voices hushed and they eyed him warily as he moved down one side of the room spraying into the crevices between wall and floor, and into corners, and over a bundle of rags. I watched, and then took the other side, and in a few minutes we were through.

"Now comes the hard part," said the corporal. He regretted having to speak to me. "Always start with the men. Women last, so they don't think you're trying to screw them."

"Screw them? Don't be funny."

"It happens," said the corporal. His eyes were flicking over the people in the room. "Young guys are best to start on. They're more likely to know what it's about. But you don't usually find no young men."

A middle-aged farmer with a wispy beard was sitting propped against a wall, his forehead speckled with sweat. He gasped in alarm when the corporal squatted down beside him, and tried to pull away when the soldier picked up his sleeve and puffed the powder up his arm. "See," said the corporal in a cheery voice. "It doesn't hurt."

Quickly, expertly, while the man (continued on page 82) Good Fortune (continued from page 76) mumbled something, the corporal sprayed up his sleeves, down the collar of his dirty white jacket, into the waistband and up the cuffs of his baggy trousers. The farmer laughed in embarrassment, someone giggled, and a feeble, brave titter arose incredibly from the murk and the stench.

"OK, Harris, you start on that side. Sleeves, pants, waist and collar. Any place where the lice can get in. They're full of lice and that's what carries the typhus."

"I know that," I said, bending to an old man nearly unconscious. I had to step to the door before finishing.

"You'll get used to it," the corporal said, watching me, grinning. When I came inside again the titter had died, and the next man I dusted didn't look at me. Nor the next. Then the old crone was staring up at me, eyes glistening. She uttered a few words that evoked a grunt--was it meant to be a laugh?--from the man beside her, but no one else was paying attention by then. I tried not to look at the breasts that hung down like flaps as I pumped the white powder into the waist of her soiled linen skirt.

We finished and went out and took deep breaths in the courtyard where a few minutes earlier I had pushed a handkerchief to my nose. The corporal pumped his duster once, with something like fury, at the corpse, and then we were off at a trot, following the doctor and the sergeant.

The next house was much like the first, and so were the others. Some men struggled to their feet before we dusted them; whether they understood and wanted to cooperate, or whether they merely wanted to be prepared to defend themselves against an unspeakable outrage, I did not know. But most of the villagers lay to ill to protest or question; when we turned them over to pump the powder inside their clothing, we could tell that some of them had not moved for days.

In the beginning I was frightened of them and of my task, and was gentle with all; if they seemed to be in pain, or themselves frightened of me and my strange weapon, I just gave them a puff or two and let it go at that. But soon fright went, and with it sympathy, and I began to maul the adults, turning them over like carpets to be swept under, yanking and shoving those who groped to their feet for the ordeal, and growling in annoyance at the occasional man who protested when we touched his women, threatening him by shifting the position of the carbine strapped around my shoulder. Haste was essential, or so it seemed. There were scores of houses, and we did not know how many people. To finish with this village, to dust every villager, bury every corpse, leave our rice and escape--that was the object, and nothing else mattered. I resented each new roomful of sick and foul specimens as just so many more barriers between me and... but I did not know what I was approaching.

Only with the children did I move slowly, being careful not to bruise the skin when I poked the nozzle of the dust gun at them, and laying the duster down when a child had to be turned, so that I could use both hands and do it carefully. For the fear in their eyes was a wild, animal panic. Even those adults who feared the worst from us knew what the worst was; there was a limit to their terror, because we, too, were men. But to the sick children, who had already seen death and felt their valley shudder with the thudding of artillery, our strange pale faces, our gibberish tongue, our long bodies and outlandish machines--and, of course, our preposterous activity--must have convinced them that they would be eaten alive; or so said their eyes, and without thinking it all through, we treated them more gently.

But then there would be a man with fever, whose eyes held suspicion, and I would make up for lost time, and push and pull him so the job could be done. Or an old woman, cackling and jabbering, toothless and hideously ugly--and I hated her for her ugliness and noise and stench and for bringing me here to exterminate her lice, and I dusted her quickly, roughly, furiously; and she sensed my hate and, I think, cursed me for it, so we were even.

We worked on all morning, penetrating deep into the maze of alleys in the village. Sometimes we caught up to the doctor and the sergeant and heard again the mounting statistics of disease and hunger. The sergeant kept notes and scrawled numbers with chalk high on the doorpost of each house, and as we lost count of houses and sick and dead, as the festering sores and bloated stomachs blurred in our minds so we could no longer remember which house was which or where the worst ones were, I saw the sergeant draw arrows in the earth pointing to houses where lay corpses that we would have to bury in the afternoon. The sun rose higher, the day warmed and the sticky, pungent air we breathed felt more and more like glue. And poking everywhere, our stubby instruments spread a thin, white scientific layer of dust over this eternal, fertile misery.

And then, then... The house we came upon was slightly larger than the others, with a tile roof instead of thatch, and a burnished wooden gate, and it was set back against the hillside so that the garden could face the woods. What caught our eyes from the first, because it was so outrageously inappropriate, was a garland of bright-red flowers hanging on the outer wall. It was a thin, droopy garland and the blossoms were small, but beads of dew still clung to the petals. Someone had plucked and displayed the flowers that morning, and that was what brought horselaughs and bitter wit from the three sickened soldiers who wanted only to finish their task and go away.

Then we rounded the courtyard corner--all of us together, as it happened--and we saw her, and our wise-guy sarcasm dissolved on our lips.

She was kneeling on a blue pillow, but we could tell she was tall. We could see only her back, but each man could feel her beauty like a breeze fresh and clean on his skin. On her heels she sat, motionless; her long hair hung straight and sleek, a tapering black column on a garment of happy reds and yellows. The fall of her hair reached exactly and with precision to the mat she sat on and a plain pink ribbon tied the end. Each of us thought: If she turns, she will be looking straight at me. And we waited for that moment, halted as if stapled to the earth. She sat within the house, on a level above the courtyard; the sliding doors were open and the naive doll colors of her dress sparkled in the sunlight. At first we did not notice the shriveled old man, in starched bright white, who stood stiffly beside her, or the small boy who sat cross-legged on the outer portico, arms folded rigidly before his chest and glaring fiercely at the intruders in the courtyard.

But then the old man began to speak, in a voice like dry leaves, and we became aware of him and the boy. The old man addressed the doctor, and the doctor acknowledged his words with occasional grunts and a phrase or two, but it was some minutes before the doctor translated what the man had said.

"The old man says his daughter virgin, his daughter bride. Today is wedding day. This is wedding dress. She is waiting. But her man, how you say...? The groom, he doesn't come. He's from the next village, the last one we passed."

"There was nobody there," said the sergeant.

"Yes, they know. Boy went north. Chinese took all young men from that village, and from this village. All young men have to go. Groom go, but bride waiting. Father says she good girl, she wait. He is waiting, too. And younger brother."

"What are they waiting for?"

The doctor shook his head. "It's wedding day. They wait. Groom's father, he very good friend of this man. They arrange marriage. Very good boy, very good girl. Also this very lucky day for wedding. Day of good fortune. Priests (continued on page 165) Good Fortune (continued from page 82) say so, fortunetellers say so. So they wait."

"But if the boy has gone with the..."

The dry leaves in the old man's throat were rustling again, and when the doctor translated he was careful and suddenly formal. "He welcomes you to village. He congratulates your Army for victory. He promise cooperation his family, his friends. He asks only permission to wait."

"To wait? Sure he can wait," said the sergeant. "Whatever he's waiting for. But tell him he can start cooperating right now. Tell him that we gotta spray this place and them with DDT now."

The doctor looked away. "Nobody sick here. Looks clean."

"I know, but we got orders."

"OK," the doctor said, "OK." And he spoke again to the weathered face of the father. All this time the girl sat unmoving. But it was not repose: It seemed too still for that. Even her breathing was controlled, invisible. She was wound up tight, concentrating on the moment, absorbing every word, hearing every clink and shuffle behind her. I was sure that she knew, without turning, how many of us were there, and what we carried and what we looked like; and suddenly I had the sensation that she also knew what I was thinking, and at that thought desire plunged through me, followed by shame. But then the doctor started translating the father's words and all reverie ended.

"I told him what you say. He says, No. He says you cannot enter house today. He says, you go in house, you try touch girl, he will try kill you. He says, maybe he can't kill you, maybe you shoot him, but he will try. He says you come in and touch girl, you must kill him and young boy, and maybe girl, too."

We all stared into the seamed face of the old man. His glittering eyes stung each of us in turn and passed on. For a long moment no one moved, no one spoke; we stood in a frieze, an invisible line drawn between the three people in the house and the four of us in the mud of the courtyard. There was the sunshine, dazzling on the white garment of the old man, a gleam of red lacquer deep in the shadows of the room beyond the girl, her blue-black hair, and the prattle of the stream. I felt the dust gun, heavy in my hand, and heard, from the woods behind the house, an unfamiliar birdcall, lonesome and sweet.

Finally the sergeant found his voice. "Tell Papa-san we have to spray and there's nothing he can do about it. Tell him what DDT is, about typhus and lice, and about all the people who are sick in his village. Tell him it won't hurt her. Tell him."

The doctor sighed and began. He spoke softly and the old man watched and listened, and still the girl didn't move and the young boy glared. We were damp with sweat, our uniforms grimy. We carried weapons and the rude dust guns, and our boots were covered with mud and filth. And then I looked at the old man in his brilliant white robe, and at the girl in her carmine skirt and embroidered yellow jacket, and at the blue-silk cushion and the ribbon in her hair. And I wondered if the hygiene lesson was as incomprehensible to them, who understood the language, as it was to me, for whom the sounds were meaningless.

At length the doctor finished and it was the old man's turn. He gestured toward the girl, and to us, and it seemed he shook his head. "OK," said the doctor. "I think DDT OK. But he say girl clean, she wash body every day, no lice, no typhus here. This clean house, he say. This virgin girl. Man never touch her. If man touch her wedding dress, specially if GI touch her, she cannot marry. But he say DDT OK, but he will give DDT. You DDT boy, he will watch, he will DDT the girl."

The sergeant sighed. "OK," he said. At an order from the old man, the boy stood up. Taking my dust gun, the sergeant stepped up on the flat stone under the portico. The boy came to him and the sergeant pumped powder into the boy's sleeves, and down his neck in front and back, and up the legs of his trousers and down around the waistband. For each operation, he gently turned the boy so the old man could see what he was doing. The boy's eyes narrowed and his lips set tight; and still the girl had not stirred. When the sergeant was finished, he walked over and handed the duster up to the father. The old man took it, holding it backward, and muttered something.

"He is very sad," the doctor translated. "He says again, she wash every day, not sick. He think maybe DDT very bad thing for bride, for virgin."

The sergeant's voice tightened. "You just tell him it won't hurt her, and that if he don't do it, I will." And he hitched his carbine around so that the old man would be reminded of it.

The father studied the sergeant, nodded slowly and walked around to face the girl. Words fluttered from his mouth, long sentences, and he seemed to bow slightly. We waited. And then, in slow motion, like wood smoke drifting upward on a calm day, the girl rose to her full height, tall as the old man, taller. The fall of black hair hung straight for half her length, glossy and cool, and the pink ribbon at the end swayed saucily. A small red flower, like those of the garland on the gate, fell from her lap to the floor. Her figure was hidden within her billowing red skirt; but in the soft contour of shoulder and neck, there was sign enough of youth, grace and beauty to kindle us all. We knew she felt our stares and that somehow she was fencing with our lust: Tall and erect though she stood, she was poised to spring away if we approached too near, or to vanish entirely by some stroke of girlish magic. I heard the strange birdcall again, nearer now, and fancied that it came from within the house.

The old man spoke and the girl lifted her arms toward her father. Her hands seemed strangely small and pale. Nervously, the old man edged the snout of the dust gun under one cuff and looked at the sergeant. The sergeant nodded. The man twiddled the handle and blinked in bewilderment when nothing happened.

"Harder," said the sergeant, making a fist and pushing the air. The father muttered what sounded like a curse, planted his feet wide and pumped the gun vigorously. His eyes were moist. We could see some white powder puff out through the pores of the long lemon-yellow sleeves, but the girl stood rigid. The old man glanced at us again, took a deep breath and started on the other sleeve. Abruptly, the doctor turned away and studied the label on a bottle of pills. But the three of us, hoping that the girl would have to turn, could not unfasten our eyes from the back of her head.

When the sleeves were done, the old man turned pleading eyes on us again, but the sergeant pulled at his own belt and pointed inside his trousers and into his shirt. For a second longer, the old man watched the sergeant's face, weighing, wondering. Then he spoke softly to the girl. Her arms came down and the back of her high waistband tightened as she pulled it out in front. Over his daughter's shoulder the father gazed, looking at us and beyond, as if he could somehow lessen the insult of the thing by counting the trees along the hilltop across the valley; and the sprayer worked briskly in his hands.

It could have ended there, I suppose. No one really thought that the dusting of the girl was essential, and I am sure that the sergeant, when he first insisted, had not imagined what it would lead to. Now he had obeyed his orders and he could have halted the performance. But the event was running and no one thought to turn it off; we were all caught up in it, desperate to see the face of the girl. So when the father looked to us again, the sergeant pointed to the girl's back with one hand and to his own with the other.

And now the old man had a problem: to turn the girl or to come around and dust her from our side. He considered, and whispered a phrase. Smoothly, as if she were on a turntable, the bride moved around to face us, her hair glistening in the sunlight.

The face we saw was small, eternal and composed, the living model for all the ivory dolls in all the curio shops in all the East. It was a shockingly young face, cream smooth and glowing with a golden tint that was only partly embarrassment. Her lips, damp like the red flowers she had gathered, were slightly parted, but she knew the danger of smiling at strangers on her wedding day. From her moist brown eyes--wide, profound and serene--an oceanic gaze laved over us, floating us one by one to an ancient peaceful land of pagodas and silks and strange music, the Orient of the picture books. I thought I heard a temple bell, and for a long dream, in the instant she looked at me, the guns had never fired. Then the tide of her eyes receded; she dropped us one at a time and we were discarded, floundering and gasping, in the war-struck village at the valley's head.

It was over in a minute. The girl stood motionless and patient while her father pumped DDT into the back of her blouse and skirt. Then her small, soft hands gathered the folds of her skirt together. But before she knelt again, she looked out over our heads, and at that instant I heard the bird once more. The girl heard it, too, and caught her breath; a smile tugged at her lips, and she spoke one word.

"What did she say?" The question came from three of us.

"The bird," said the doctor. "What do you call it? Nightingale, I think. She said, 'Nightingale.'"

Again the girl spoke, and this time she looked at us.

"She asks, do you have nightingales in your country?"

"Nightingales?" asked the sergeant.

"No," I said. "Tell her we do not have nightingales in our country."

The doctor translated, and the girl listened. She still stood with the folds of the carmine skirt gathered in her hands, and when the doctor had finished, she sank gently down again to kneel upon her blue cushion, and rocked back upon her heels, and regarded us for the last time. She was not smiling now, but when her treasure-laden eyes made fast to mine, there passed between us a wave of such tenderness that I, mistaking it, began to rejoice--and then I saw the sorrow in that gaze, and felt the pity in it, and could not bear to look at her. She spoke then, and her voice was grief, and one white hand took the fallen flower and carried it gently back to her lap. Deep in the woods the nightingale sang again. Then the old man slid shut the paper door on his child.

"She said," the doctor stammered. "She said... her words, like this: 'I am sorry for you. What a poor country yours must be if it has no nightingales.'"

We dusted the old man and we hurried out of that courtyard, and we hurried through the remainder of our task, the passing out of rice, the burials, the inoculations. I do not remember that part clearly. But in the days and weeks that followed, I know I listened often for the song of the nightingale, and sometimes I thought I heard it, in those rare moments when the mortars were still, when I waited, sweating in my foxhole, for an attack to begin.