Human Acts by Han Kang
It’s possible that the kids who stayed behind at the Provincial Office that day experienced something similar. Perhaps they would have considered even death a fair exchange for that jewel of conscience. But no such certainty is possible now. Kids crouching beneath the windows, fumbling with their guns and complaining that they were hungry, asking if it was okay for them to quickly run back and fetch the sponge cake and Fanta they’d left in the conference room; what could they possibly have known about death that would have enabled them to make such a choice?
When the announcement came over the wireless that the army would reach the Provincial Office within the next ten minutes, Jin-su propped his gun against the wall, stood up and said, ‘It’s possible that we could hold out until the morning and run the risk of dying in the process, but that’s not an option for the youngsters here.’ For all the world as though he himself were a seasoned adult of thirty or forty, rather than a boy barely out of school. ‘We have no choice but to surrender. If death seems the only other outcome, put down your guns and surrender right away. Look for a way to live.’
I don’t want to talk about what happened next.
There is no one now who has the right to ask me to remember any more, and that includes you, professor.
No, none of us fired our guns.
None of us killed anybody.
Even when the soldiers stormed up the stairs and emerged towards us out of the darkness, none of our group fired their guns. It was impossible for them to pull the trigger knowing that a person would die if they did so. They were children. We had handed out guns to children. Guns they were not capable of firing.
I found out later that the army had been provided with eight hundred thousand rounds that day. This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred thousand. In other words, they had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over. I genuinely believe that, if something had come up, the commanding officers would have issued the order for the troops on the ground to do just that. If we’d all done as the student representatives said, piled our guns in the lobby of the Provincial Office and attempted a clean surrender, we would have run the risk of the soldiers turning those same weapons on unarmed civilians. Every time I recall the blood that flowed in the small hours of that night – literally flowed, gushing over the stairs in the pitch dark – it strikes me that those deaths did not belong solely to those who died. Rather, they were a substitute for the deaths of others. Many thousands of deaths, many thousands of hearts’ worth of blood.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see blood silently seeping from people I’d been speaking with mere moments before. Unable to tell who had died and who survived, I lay prone in the corridor, my face pressed into the floor. I felt someone write on my back with a magic marker. Violent element. Possession of firearms. That was what someone else informed me was written there, afterwards when they threw us into the cells at the military academy.
*
Those who hadn’t been carrying a gun at the time of their arrest were classified as mere accomplices, and were released in batches up until June, leaving only the so-called ‘violent elements’, those who had been caught in possession of firearms, still in the military academy. That was when the programme of torture entered a different phase. Rather than brutal beatings, our captors now chose more elaborate methods of inflicting pain, methods that would not be too physically taxing for them. ‘Hairpin torture’, where both arms were tied behind the back and a large piece of wood inserted between the bound wrists and the small of the back; waterboarding; electric torture; the method known as the ‘roast chicken’, which involved trussing the victim with ropes and suspending them from the ceiling, where they were then beaten while being spun around. Before, they’d tortured us in order to extract the particulars of actual crimes. Now, all they wanted was a false confession, so that our names could be slotted neatly into the script they had already devised.
Kim Jin-su and I continued to receive a single tray and share its scant meal between us. It took an enormous feat of will to put what we’d experienced a few hours ago in the interrogation room behind us and wield our spoons in stony silence, fighting the temptation to scrap like animals over a grain of rice, a shred of kimchi. There was one man who knocked his meal tray over and screamed, I can’t take any more of this! What’s going to happen to me if you shovel the whole lot down yourself? As he grappled with his partner, a boy pushed between them and stuttered, D-don’t do that. I was taken aback; this was the first time I’d ever seen that quiet, shy-seeming kid open his mouth.
W-we were r-ready to die, you know.
It was then that Kim Jin-su’s empty gaze rose to meet mine.
At that moment, I realised what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realise how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.
The boy with the stutter was called Yeong-chae. It was a name Kim Jin-su pronounced frequently in the afternoons following that initial altercation. In the ten or so minutes after the meal, which was when the guard tended to relax his vigilance, he would address the boy in a soft, friendly tone. You must be hungry, Yeong-chae, no? Kim Yeong-chae, where’s your family from? I’m a Gimhae Kim too. Which branch? You’re fifteen, right, well then, no need for honorifics with me. I’m only four years older than you at the most. I don’t look my age, do I? Oh, well, all right. Call me uncle, then. We’re distant relatives, after all.
From listening in to their conversation, I learned that the boy hadn’t continued his education beyond middle school, and was learning carpentry at his uncle’s woodworking shop. He’d joined the civilian militia to follow in the footsteps of this uncle’s son, who was two years older; this cousin, to whom he’d always looked up, had been killed that final night at the YMCA. I-I l-like to eat sp-sponge cake the best. W-with S-sprite. Yeong-chae’s eyes stayed dry while he told the story of his dead cousin, but when Jin-su asked him what his favourite food was he had to scrub at them with his fists. With his right fist, that is. His left remained in his lap. I stared at it, at the cotton wool poking out from between those clenched fingers.
I was constantly racking my brains.
Because I wanted to understand.
Somehow or other, I needed to make sense of what I’d experienced.
Watery discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left to me. No, that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only ‘me’ there was.
Even now I find summer difficult to endure. When runnels of sweat trickle down over my chest and back, itching like the bite of insect mouths, that time when I was nothing but a lump of meat is suddenly back with me, the feeling unchanged, and I have to take a deep, steady breath. Grind my teeth together, and take another deep, steady breath.
When a square wooden cudgel is squeezed in between my shoulder blades, manipulated so that my screaming joints are forced as far apart as the physical composition of my body will possibly allow, when this body writhes and contorts and the words spew from its lips, for God’s sake, stop, I did wrong, seconds strung together with jerked, juddering gasps, when they insert a drill bit beneath my fingernails and toenails, shuddered-in breath spat out in a rush, for God’s sake stop, I did wrong, seconds patched with broken groans, rising into a wail, make this body disappear, please, for God’s sake, just wipe it off the face of the earth.
From that first summer into the autumn, during the time when we were made to write our evidence reports, a single-storey building was erected in the grounds of the barracks. It was intended to function as a military law court, so they could pass sentence without the hassle of trans
I remember that the trial lasted for five days, with two sessions per day. Around thirty people were sentenced during each session. There were so many defendants, we filled the rows of benches all the way to the back. Spaced among us at regular intervals, the soldiers kept their hands resting on their guns.
‘All bow.’
I bowed my head at the staff sergeant’s command.
‘Bow lower.’
I bowed lower.
‘The chief justice will be here any moment now. If there’s so much as a squeak from any of you, you’ll be shot in your seat, got it? You just keep your heads down and your mouths shut until it’s over. Understand?’
They stalked between the benches with their rifles loaded and primed, and anyone who they judged to be slumping got a butt to the back of the head. From outside the court building, the grasshoppers’ shrill cries reminded us that the seasons had turned. The blue prison uniforms we were wearing had been handed out that morning, and still gave off the smell of detergent. As I held myself rigid I mulled over those words, ‘you’ll be shot in your seat’. I held my breath as though I really was expecting to be executed at any moment. At the time, death seemed as though it would be something refreshing, like slipping on that clean new uniform. If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.
‘The chief justice is present.’
It was then that my ears picked up a strange sound, coming from in front of me. I’d been bowing so low my chin was almost touching my chest, but that sound made me raise my head an inch, just enough so I could scan the rows in front. Someone was singing, though the sound was more like a stifled whimper. It was the opening bars of the national anthem. By the time I realised that the singer was young Yeong-chae, other voices had joined in for the chorus. Almost in spite of myself, my own voice was drawn out of my throat. We who had had our heads bowed as though we were already dead, who had been sitting there as nothing but loose agglomerates of sweat and blood, were for some reason permitted to continue our quiet song unchecked. The soldiers didn’t scream at us, didn’t drive their rifle butts into our heads, didn’t shove us up against the wall and shoot us as they’d threatened to do. We were left to bring the song to its close, the silence between each bar a perilous window of calm within the cool air of the summary court, laced with the grasshoppers’ chirping.
I received a nine-year sentence, and Kim Jin-su was given seven years.
Of course, those terms were meaningless. The military authorities continued to release us in batches, even those who’d been sentenced to capital punishment or life imprisonment, up until Christmas the following year. These releases were always officially justified as taking place ‘on amnesty’. It was almost a tacit acknowledgement of the absurdity of the charges.
Two years after we were released, as the year was drawing to a close, I saw Kim Jin-su again. It was late at night, as I was making my unsteady way home after a lengthy session downing beers with an old classmate from middle school. I saw a young man sitting in a shabby roadside shack, hunched over a bowl of hangover soup, and it stopped me in my tracks. That posture was so painfully familiar; the head bowed over the soupy rice, the spoon clenched tightly, to be wielded with the kind of diligence which kids reserve for their homework. Empty eyes framed by long, thick lashes, peering into the bottom of the soup as though its oily swirls of black oxblood were congealing to form a riddle, one whose answer would remain impenetrable.
When I entered the shack and sat down across from Kim Jin-su, the gaze he regarded me with was cold and dispassionate. Feeling the onset of a hangover, I smiled and waited for him to show that he forgave my intoxication. For the ghost of a smile to appear on his face, the smile of one who has just surfaced from sleep.
As we each enquired how the other had been, something like transparent feelers reached tentatively out from our eyes, confirming the shadows held by the other’s face, the track marks of suffering which no amount of forced jollity could paper over. Neither of us had managed to go back to university, and we were both still living at home, a burden to our families. Jin-su worked at his brother-in-law’s electric goods shop; I’d held down a position at my relative’s restaurant for a short while, but had quit some time ago. I told him I was thinking of waiting until New Year and then joining a taxi company, maybe even saving up to get my own taxi at some point. He made no response.
‘My brother-in-law advised me to do something similar,’ he said flatly. ‘He said I ought to study for an HGV licence. After all, it’s not like an office job is an option. But how am I going to get a driving licence? These days even simple sums are enough to make my head hurt. Some days it’s a struggle just to tally up the payments in the shop. The most basic addition. The headaches are so bad, it’s impossible for me to memorise anything for an exam.’
I told him that I frequently suffered from a toothache which didn’t seem to have any physical cause, that there weren’t many days when I didn’t have to take painkillers.
‘Can you sleep?’ he asked listlessly. ‘I can’t. That’s why I’m here chasing my hangover. I had two bottles of soju before this. My sister doesn’t like me to drink at home, you see. I mean, not that she gets angry or anything. She just cries. But then that only makes me want another drink.’ He looked up from his soup. ‘How about a glass now? Just the one?’
We stayed there drinking until the streets began to fill again, with men and women hastening to work, the collars of their woollen coats turned up against the cold. We poured glass after glass of strong, clear alcohol in the vain hope that this would help us forget. My memory of that night is a series of jump cuts, which later collapsed completely. I can’t remember when we parted or how I managed to make it home. The only shards that have lodged themselves in my brain are the sensation of cold liquid dripping onto my corduroy trousers when Jin-su knocked the bottle over; the sight of him clumsily trying to blot the spillage with the sleeve of his sweater; the moment when he could no longer hold his neck up, and had to rest his forehead on the table.
Afterwards, we continued to meet up now and then and drink through the night. Seven years dragged by in this way, with each of us seeing in the other a crooked mirror image of our own pathetic lives: failing to gain any qualifications; being involved in a car accident; getting into debt; suffering injury or illness; meeting kind-hearted women who made us dare to believe that our suffering was finally over, only to see it all turn to shit through no one’s fault but our own, and eventually end up alone again. Burdened by nightmares and insomnia, numbed by painkillers and sleeping pills, we were no longer young. There was no longer anyone who would worry over us or shed tears over our pitiful lot. We even despised ourselves. The interrogation room of that summer was knitted into our muscle memory, lodged inside our bodies. With that black Monami biro. That pale gleam of exposed bone. That familiar, broken cadence of whimpered, desperate pleas.
At some point during those seven years, Jin-su said to me, ‘There used to be people I was determined to kill.’ His deep black eyes, not yet entirely clouded by intoxication, watched me intently. ‘I thought that, whenever my time came to die, I would take those people with me.’ Wordlessly, I filled his glass. ‘But I don’t have those thoughts any more. I’m worn out.’ Hyeong, he called me. Brother. But instead of raising his eyes to meet mine, he kept his head bowed over the glass of clear alcohol, as though any words I might speak would be found there. ‘We carried guns, didn’t we?’ This
Last September, I bumped into him late at night when I was heading home after my taxi shift. One of those drizzling autumn days. I’d just turned a corner and there, from beneath the rim of my umbrella, I saw Kim Jin-su waiting for me. He had the hood of his black waterproof jacket up over his head. Perhaps because I was so startled, I remember being gripped by an odd rage, wanting to punch that ghost-pale face. Or no, not punch it, just rub my hands over its contours and erase the expression I saw there.
Not that his expression was hostile, you understand.
He looked exhausted, of course, but that was hardly anything out of the ordinary. I’d barely ever seen him looking otherwise that past decade. But there was something else in the planes and shadows of his face that night, something different. Some inexplicable emotion that was not quite resignation, not quite sadness or even malice, was visible beneath those long lashes. Part submerged, like ice in water.
I ushered him through the darkened streets to my house. He never said a word the whole way.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him once we were home and I could change out of my wet clothes. He pulled his waterproof off over his head, folded it and put it on the floor by the mattress. Then he sat down next to it, ramrod straight in a thin cotton T-shirt. His posture made me recall the barracks, and that unaccountable anger welled back up in me. Ever so slightly hunched, the sight was identical to the one I’d seen every single day that summer nine years before. The stink of his sweat was rank in my nostrils. As he sat there looking up at me, his dark face seemed a nauseating mixture of submission, resignation, and blankness.