Human Acts by Han Kang

  ‘I can’t even smell any booze on you; how long were you waiting for? And in this rain.’ Eventually, he opened his mouth.

  ‘There was a trial yesterday.’

  ‘A trial?’ I repeated.

  ‘You remember Kim Yeong-chae? He was in the cell with us.’ I sat down facing Jin-su. At first, I sat up straight as though imitating him, but I quickly realised what I was doing and lolled back against the chilly wall. ‘The stutterer. My distant relation.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember.’ For some reason, I didn’t want to hear whatever Jin-su was going to say next.

  ‘He’s ended up in the psychiatric hospital this time.’

  ‘Right.’ I got to my feet and went to have a look in the fridge. The shelves were practically bare, but four bottles of soju were lined up in the salad drawer. Two days’ worth of emergency medicine.

  ‘He’ll probably never get out.’

  I pulled out two bottles and stood them on a tray with a pair of shot glasses. I gripped the bottles by the necks to remove the lids; cold droplets of condensation made my palms slick.

  ‘They say he almost killed someone.’

  I scooped some stir-fried anchovies out of a Tupperware container and onto a plate, then some beans boiled in soy sauce. It was all I had. I suddenly had the idea of putting the soju in the freezer compartment. What would it feel like to crunch on cubes of frozen soju, to hear them crack against my teeth?

  ‘There’s not much in the way of snacks.’ I set the tray down by the mattress, but Jin-su didn’t so much as glance at it. Instead, he carried on talking, his words gradually speeding up.

  ‘The public defender said Yeong-chae had slit his own wrists six times in the past ten years. That he had to take sleeping pills and get drunk every night just so he could get to sleep.’

  I filled Jin-su’s glass. With any luck I’d be able to get away with just a single shot, then I could spread the quilt out, lie down and try to get some sleep. I’d tell him he could carry on drinking for as long as he wanted, and go home whenever the rain let up. I didn’t let myself wonder about how often Jin-su had met up with that kid in the nine years since we’d shared a cell, or how the latter had been living in the meantime. Whatever Jin-su had come here to say, I didn’t want to hear it.

  The dawn’s faint light was beginning to leach into the sky, but the rain was still mizzling down and outside the window it was as dark as evening. Eventually, I spread the quilt out over the mattress and lay down.

  ‘Get some shut-eye,’ I told him curtly. ‘You look like you haven’t slept in about a year.’

  He filled his own glass and tossed it back. While I tossed and turned in my sleep, the quilt pulled up to my face, he carried on talking at me. A slurred stream of high-flown words and random babble. It was no good to me.

  Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some non-existent idea? Or something that might as well not exist?

  Or no, is it like a kind of glass?

  Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

  Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

  That was the last time I saw Kim Jin-su alive.

  I saw his obituary in the paper that same year. I had no idea what had happened to him in the meantime, during those three months that had seen autumn give way to winter. He did leave a message at the taxi office once, but we weren’t allowed to make personal calls during work hours, and when I called him back after my shift was over he didn’t pick up.

  There’d been an unusually large amount of rain that autumn, and every time the rain did stop the temperature immediately plummeted. Whenever I found myself heading home after a night shift, I would automatically slow down before rounding that corner. Even now that I know for a fact he’s dead, I still do exactly the same thing. Whenever I pass that corner, and particularly when it’s raining, I can see him in my mind’s eye standing there, his face pale as a ghost’s against the night’s dark. His black waterproof.

  His funeral was a neat and proper affair. I recognised his deep double eyelids and long lashes in the faces of his family, and even that same blankness to the eyes, hinting at unknowable depths. His sister, who had clearly been stunningly beautiful at one time and who still retained a haggard loveliness even now, gave me a perfunctory handshake and then turned immediately away. They didn’t have enough coffin bearers so I volunteered and accompanied the family to the crematorium. I only stayed until I saw the coffin enter the oven, though. On the way home, I remember there was no bus that would take me all the way into the centre, so I got off at the three-way junction and walked for the final thirty minutes.

  I never got a look at the suicide note.

  And did they really find this photo next to it?

  He never talked to me about it, not one word.

  Of course, he and I were close in some senses, but think about it; how close could we really have been? Yes, we relied on each other, but we also wanted to smash each other’s face in. To erase each other’s very existence. To thrust each other permanently out of sight.

  And you want me to explain this photo, professor?

  But how? Where to even begin?

  The people in the photo are dead, they’ve been shot, their blood is all over the ground. It’s in the yard in front of the Provincial Office. One of the foreign journalists must have taken the photo. No Korean reporters were allowed in, you see.

  Ah, I know what must have happened – he must have found it in some photo collection and clipped it out. There were plenty of those collections circulating at the time, you must have seen one yourself, no?

  And now you want me to guess why Kim Jin-su kept this photo with him until the very end, why it was found with his suicide note?

  You want me to tell you about these dead kids, professor? Like felled trees, lying in such an unnaturally straight line.

  What right do you have to demand that of me?

  We kept our faces pressed into the corridor carpet for as long as the soldiers ordered us to. Around dawn, they hauled us to our feet and took us down to the yard. They made us kneel in a line, our backs to the walls, with our hands tied behind us. An officer came over. He’d worked himself up into quite a state. His combat boots thudded into our backs, driving our heads down into the dirt, while he spat out a string of curses. ‘I was in Vietnam, you sons of bitches. I killed thirty of those Vietcong bastards with my own two hands. Filthy fucking Reds.’ Kim Jin-su was kneeling next to me. The officer stamped on his back, grinding his face into the gravel. When he let him back up, I saw slender threads of blood clinging to Jin-su’s forehead.

  That was when five of the younger boys came down from the second floor, holding their hands above their heads. Four of them were high school students. When the army first began to pepper the building with indiscriminate machinegun fire, lit by flares as bright as the noonday sun, I’d ordered them to hide in the conference room’s cupboard. The fifth was Dong-ho, the middle-schooler who’d had that brief argument with Kim Jin-su. They’d waited until the sound of gunfire could no longer be heard, then put down their weapons and come out to surrender. All as Jin-su had told them to do.

  ‘Look at these bastards!’ the officer yelled. He was practically frothing at the mouth. ‘Want to surrender, do you, you fucking Reds? Want to save your precious skins?’ With one foot still up on Kim Jin-su’s back, he raised his M16, took aim and fired. The bullets tore into those school kids without hesitation. My head inadvertently jerked up, and when he whooped in the direction of his subordinates, ‘As good as a
fucking movie, right?’, I saw how straight and white his teeth were.

  Now do you understand? The kids in this photo aren’t lying side by side because their corpses were lined up like that after they were killed. It’s because they were walking in a line. They were walking in a straight line, with both arms in the air, just like we’d told them to.

  Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.

  Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

  I once met someone who was a paratrooper during the Busan uprising. He told me his story after hearing my own. He said that they’d been ordered to suppress the civilians with as much violence as possible, and those who committed especially brutal actions were awarded hundreds of thousands of won by their superiors. One of his company had said, ‘What’s the problem? They give you money and tell you to beat someone up, then why wouldn’t you?’

  I heard a story about one of the Korean army platoons that fought in Vietnam. How they forced the women, children and elderly of one particular village into the main hall, and then burned it to the ground. Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions in wartime had won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

  I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.

  Every day I examine the scar on my hand. This place where the bone was once exposed, where a milky discharge seeped from a festering wound. Every time I come across an ordinary Monami biro, the breath catches in my throat. I wait for time to wash me away like muddy water. I wait for death to come and wash me clean, to release me from the memory of those other, squalid deaths, which haunt my days and nights.

  I’m fighting, alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

  So tell me, professor, what answers do you have for me? You, a human being just like me.

  5

  The Factory Girl. 2002

  YOU REMEMBER

  She told you that the moon was called ‘the eye of the night’.

  You were seventeen when you first heard it described that way. It was a Sunday night in spring, when your small labour union group had gathered at Seong-hee’s house. She lived on the top floor, so after the meeting was over you all went up onto the roof, sat in a circle on sheets of newspaper and ate peaches. Seong-hee was twenty, and her romantic nature was frequently fed by poetry. It seems that way, doesn’t it? she said, gazing up at the full moon. An eye cold and pale as ice, looking down on you from the centre of the black sky. That the moon is the eye of the night. You were the youngest of the group, and for some reason those words scared you. It makes it seem frightening when you call it that, Seong-hee. At that, everyone burst out laughing. I’ve never known such a scaredy-cat! one of the women giggled, popping a slice of peach into your mouth. What’s so scary about the moon?

  NOW

  You get out a cigarette and put it between your lips. You light it, take a deep drag, and feel your tense throat muscles ache.

  You’re alone in the second-floor office, a room little bigger than twenty pyeong. None of the windows are open. The heat and humidity of an August evening pummels you as you sit there in front of your computer. You’ve just deleted two spam emails. You still haven’t clicked on the latest arrival in your inbox.

  Your hair is cropped short. You are wearing jeans and ultramarine trainers. The sleeves of your pale grey shirt are just long enough to cover your elbows, and at the top of your back the sweat-soaked fabric has darkened to an inky black. In spite of your androgynous outfit, your small frame and slender neck make you seem delicate, almost fragile.

  The sweat clinging to the hair behind your ears crawls down over your jaw and drips onto your shirt collar. You run a finger along your upper lip, wiping away the beads of moisture, and click on the email. You read it slowly, twice, then close the browser and switch off the computer. As the monitor’s blue glow fades, the last light in the darkened room, you draw repeatedly on your cigarette, exhaling the smoke in a steady stream.

  The cigarette is only half smoked when you place it in the ashtray and stand up. You stick your sweat-gummed fists into the pockets of your jeans. As you walk over to the window, the air inside the sealed office is stiflingly close. The distance from your desk to the window seems a vast expanse. Your movements are sluggish, like wading through water, and even this minimal effort leaves your entire body slick with sweat. Glittering droplets bead your cropped hair.

  You stand in front of the window and rest your forehead against the dark glass. The only reflection it holds is that of your own image. The glass is slightly damp, and refreshingly chill. You gaze down at the dark, deserted alleyways, dotted with ashen street lights. You stand up straight, turn to look at the clock on the opposite wall, then, as if doubting its accuracy, check its time against your watch.

  UP RISING

  I was listening to that sound.

  The sound woke me up, but I didn’t have the courage to open my eyes, so I kept them closed and strained to listen in the darkness.

  Footsteps, so quiet as to be almost imperceptible. Two feet marking time with the lightest of treads, like a child learning a new and difficult dance.

  I felt a knot of pain tightening in my solar plexus.

  I couldn’t tell whether it was fear I was experiencing, or happiness.

  Eventually, I got up.

  I walked towards the sound, and stopped in front of the door.

  The wet towel that I’d hung on the handle to try and get a bit of moisture into the air; a pale swatch in the darkness.

  That was the source of the sound.

  Drops of water steadily tapping down, blotted by the papered floor.

  NOW

  You place the Dictaphone in front of you on the desk, next to three small, blank cassette tapes, each with a white label attached. Your face shiny with sweat, your breathing, despite your wide-open eyes, as deep and regular as someone asleep, you regard them.

  Ten years ago, when Yoon first contacted you, you were still working at the labour rights organisation run by Seong-hee. It was only after getting in touch with her that Yoon had managed to obtain your contact details. You’d listened in silence as he explained the topic of his current dissertation and mentioned the name of the specific civilian militia which he’d chosen as the focus for his ‘psychological autopsy’.

  ‘I’ll think about it and give you a call.’

  When you called him back an hour later and turned down his request for an interview, Yoon simply said that he understood. The following spring, he sent you a copy of his dissertation. You didn’t read it.

  A few days ago, contacting you again for the first time in ten years, he said that he really wanted to meet you, just once. His words and tone were cautious. Even a phone interview, he said, would do.

  ‘The dissertation I sent you back then, did you get round to reading it?’

  ‘No.’

  He seemed somewhat thrown by this, but quickly regained his composure. He told you that he’d since made further en
quiries regarding the ten members of the militia whom he’d interviewed for the dissertation, and discovered that there are now only eight left; two had taken their own lives. Of the remaining eight, seven agreed to a follow-up interview. He had taped these interviews, and was planning to include the transcripts in the conclusion of the book he was currently writing, a book in which the dissertation he wrote ten years previously will form a single chapter.

  After finishing his speech, he paused.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes, I’m listening.’

  Whenever you take a phone call, you habitually make a note of any numbers that come up in the course of the conversation. On the memo pad next to you were the digits 10, 8, 2, 7.

  ‘There were several women who were taken into custody at the time, but I’ve had trouble tracking down an appropriate witness. Even in cases where they were willing to provide a testimony, it was too brief, too simple. Anything painful was just skimmed over … please, do me this favour. I need you, Lim Seon-ju, to be the eighth witness for this book.’

  This time you didn’t ask for time to think about it.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.’ Your voice betrayed no emotion.

  A few days later, though, Yoon sent a parcel to the office. Inside were the tape recorder and blank tapes that you are looking at now, and a letter. His handwriting was such a scrawl that it was difficult to make out the words, but you struggled through to the end. I understand that you’d prefer not to meet me in person, but might you be able to record your testimony instead and send the tapes to me? His business card was attached to the bottom of the letter with a paper clip.