Human Acts by Han Kang
You reseal the letter to make it look as though it has never been opened, and put it into your locker. The dissertation is still there, from when you filed it away all those years ago; you take it out and peruse it with care, reading through each of the transcripts included in the appendix. Twice. Once your colleagues have all gone out to lunch, the office is quiet. Before they return, you put the dissertation back exactly where you found it and close the locker securely, as though wanting to hide from yourself the fact that you’ve read it.
UP RISING
How strange.
Only the sound of dripping water; yet I remember it as though someone really did come to my door.
That winter night, it seemed as though those imagined footsteps which caused a knot of pain inside me were the stuff of waking reality, while the damp floor and the dripping towel were the substance of a dream.
NOW
You insert the cassette into the Dictaphone.
Your name will be kept anonymous, Yoon had written. Any names of people or places that might enable someone reading to identify you will be assigned a randomly chosen initial. Recording your testimony this way, not only do you get to avoid a face-to-face meeting, but what’s particularly convenient is that you can erase any parts you want to, whenever you like, and re-record them until you’re happy.
Still, you don’t press down on the ‘record’ button. Instead, you run your fingers carefully over the smooth plastic corners of the device, as though checking for a flaw in the design.
By coincidence, voice recordings are precisely what you deal with in this office, every day.
Your job is to transcribe the recordings of informal gatherings and forums, to categorise photographs of certain events, along with reports, trials and testimonies – anything relating to environmental issues – and file them in the record room. For events of particular importance, you produce three or four versions from the original camcorder film, edited depending on what the footage might later be used for. These exercises are time-consuming and monotonous, and not especially distinguished. They are tasks that require you to spend the majority of your time alone. Your workload is, of course, heavier than that of your colleagues, but this isn’t a problem for you; you’re used to working evenings and weekends. Rather than being given a monthly salary, you get paid per job. The amount you’re able to earn this way doesn’t even cover basic living costs, but the financial situation was even worse at the labour organisation.
Over the ten years you’ve been working at your current job, the killings which you spend your days archiving have all been slow and drawn-out. Radioactive elements with long half-lives. Additives that either needed to be banned, or had been banned already but were still being used illegally. Toxic industrial waste, agricultural chemicals and fertilisers which cause leukaemia and other cancers. Engineering practices which destroy the ecosystem.
The tape recordings that Yoon has in his possession will deal with a different world altogether.
You imagine the office of this man whose face you have never seen. You imagine the tapes that will be lined up on his shelves. Each with a name and date, scrawled on its white label in his sloppy handwriting. You imagine the deaths that will be imprinted along the tape’s smooth, brown belt, the living voices that will speak them: a world of guns, bayonets and cudgels; sweat, blood and flesh; wet towels, drill bits and lengths of iron piping. Nothing slow about such deaths.
You put the Dictaphone back down on the desk, bend over and open your locker. You pull Yoon’s dissertation out and turn to the page where the first transcript begins.
They made us keep our heads bowed the whole time, so we had no idea which direction the truck was heading.
We could tell when we were going uphill though, and when the truck eventually stopped and they dragged us out we’d clearly come a fair way out of the city. There was a building, but I couldn’t tell what kind of building it was. Then they started with the ‘disciplinary beatings’ – you know, like they do in the army, only far worse. Kicking us, swearing at us, hitting us with the butts of their rifles. I remember one of us, a plump man in his forties, snapped and started yelling. ‘Just kill me and have done with it!’
That really did it. The soldiers rushed over to him and started wielding their cudgels in earnest. They beat him so viciously it really did look like they weren’t going to stop until they’d killed him. He seemed to go from thrashing around to completely limp in a single moment. Even his feet had stopped twitching. They splashed a bucket of water over his face and took a photograph. The blood was dripping from his face. Blood and water. The rest of us just held our breath.
That wasn’t the only time something like that happened. We spent three days there, in the main hall inside that building. It didn’t seem like an army place, just an ordinary hall like you’d find in any public building. The soldiers mostly went away during the day, just a couple stayed behind to guard us. I assumed they went back into the city centre to crack down on any remaining demonstrators. In the evenings they were drunk by the time they got back to us. Then there’d be another round of disciplinary beatings, and woe betide anyone who did anything other than cower in absolute silence. Anyone who lost consciousness would get kicked into a corner, then the soldier would grab them by the hair and pound their head against the wall. Once they actually stopped breathing, the soldiers would splash water over their face and take a photo, then order them to be stretchered away.
I prayed every night. I don’t mean anything formal; I’d never been a regular at any temple or church. I just asked to be set free from that hell. But they were answered, you see, my prayers were answered. There were around two hundred of us being held captive there, and after three days they released half of us. Including me. At the time we had no idea what was going on, but later on I found out that the army had been about to make a strategic retreat to the suburbs and they thought too many prisoners would just get in the way. They’d chosen who was going to be released purely at random. So it was just blind luck.
We were told to keep our heads down when the truck took us back down the hill, too. But, you know, I was quite young at the time, and I suppose curiosity just got the better of me. I was kneeling right at the very edge of the truck, so if I twisted my neck I could get a look outside through the gap in the sideboards.
I … I’d never dreamed that they’d been keeping us in the university.
The building where we’d been kept was the new lecture hall, just behind the sports ground where me and my friends had used to play football at the weekends. Now, with the army occupying the campus, there were no other signs of human life. The truck itself was rattling along, but otherwise the road was silent as the grave. Then I saw them, lying on a patch of grass by the side of the road. They just looked like they were asleep, at first. Two students in jeans and college sweaters, with a yellow banner laid across their chests as if they’d both been holding up an end. The letters had been done in thick Magic Marker, so I could read it even from inside the truck. END MARTIAL LAW.
It’s really extraordinary how those young women, their faces, ended up scored into my memory so deeply, you know? I mean, I only caught just a fleeting glimpse of them.
But now, each time I fall asleep, and each time I wake up again, I see those faces. Their pale skin, their closed mouths, their legs stretched out straight … it’s so clear, so vivid, it’s like they’re really there. Just like the face of the man with blood dripping from his jaw, his eyes half closed … etched into the insides of my eyelids. Inside, where I can’t get at it. Where I’ll never be able to scrape it off.
Your own dreams are filled with sights that are quite different from the ones haunting this first witness.
At the time, you were more closely acquainted than most with brutalised corpses, yet there have only been a handful of times in the past twenty-odd years when your dreams have been vivid with blood. Rather, your nightmares tend to be cold, silent affairs. Scenes from which the blood has
The street lamp’s feeble glow encases it in a lead-grey aureole, but beyond the reach of its light the night is pitch-black. It isn’t safe to stray beyond the bounds of this lit place. You do not know what might be lurking in the darkness. But you’ll be all right as long you don’t move a muscle. You don’t venture outside the circle of light. You merely wait, stiff with tension. Wait for the sun to rise and the outer dark to dissipate. You’ve held out this far, you mustn’t waver now. Safer to keep your feet absolutely still, rather than risk taking a false step.
When you open your eyes, it’s still dark. You get up from your bed and switch on the bedside lamp. This year you will turn forty-two, and there has only been one single period in your entire adult life during which you lived with a man. And you didn’t even manage a year at that. Living alone means there’s no need to consider whether you’ll be waking another person up, so you walk straight over to the door and switch on the light. You switch on all the lights, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the entrance hall, and fill a glass with cold water, your hand trembling only very slightly, and drink.
NOW
You rise from your seat at the unmistakable sound of someone turning the door handle. You bend down, slide the dissertation back into the locker and call out ‘Who is it?’
You’ve locked the door.
‘It’s Park Yeong-ho.’
You walk over to the door, turn the key in the lock and open it.
‘Working at this hour?’ you both chorus, and then, as if on cue, burst out laughing.
Team leader Park affects nonchalance as he peers over your shoulder into the office. Traces of laughter still linger around his mouth, but you can see the suspicion in his eyes. His thick-set frame is tending towards a paunch, his fringe an attempt to mask a receding hairline.
‘It’s because we’ve got the Kori meeting tomorrow, of course. There’re still a few documents missing.’ Park drops his bag by his desk and switches on his computer. He carries on justifying his presence, like someone who has dropped by another’s house unannounced. ‘Something’s come up that means I’ll have to head down to the plant myself. Anyhow, I’ll need every file we have if I’m going to convince them to finally shut down the reactor. I was really surprised when I saw the lights on,’ he continues, his voice now excessively genial. ‘Naturally, I’d assumed the place would be empty.’ Suddenly he pauses and glances around, looking faintly disconcerted. ‘What’s with the heat?’ He strides over to the wall and flings the windows wide open, then switches on both fans. He walks back to his desk, shaking his head in bewilderment. ‘You thinking of renting the place out as a sauna?’
You are the oldest of the employees here. Your juniors are extremely reserved around you, possibly slightly intimidated by the way you keep yourself to yourself, diligently getting on with your allotted tasks. They address you using the honorific seonsaeng, but you respond with equally polite language, maintaining a respectful distance. When there’s something they can’t find, it’s you they’ll come to. ‘I’m looking for the documentation from such-and-such a forum in such-and-such a year; I’ve had a look in the records room but there’s only some loose papers. Isn’t there an official booklet containing all the speeches?’ You search your memory, then explain: ‘That particular forum was only arranged at the last minute, so there wasn’t time for a booklet to be produced. The speeches were recorded and then later transcribed, but those transcripts only exist as loose copies. Nothing was ever officially written down.’ Now and then, team leader Park likes to joke: ‘You’re a human search engine, Miss Lim.’
Now Park is standing in the middle of the office, waiting for his documents to print. His sharp eyes scrutinise the contents of your desk. A wad of damp tissue balled up in the ashtray, several cigarette butts, a mug of coffee. The Dictaphone and tapes.
He starts speaking the instant you intercept his probing gaze, as though conscious of the need to excuse himself.
‘You seem to genuinely enjoy your work, Miss Lim. I mean, I look at you and I think: that’s me in twenty years’ time, if I keep on with this line of work …’
You understand that he is thinking of the meagre pay, the laborious, irregular duties which are never sufficiently recompensed, your bony hands with their protruding veins running along the backs. Park is silent for a short while, and there is only the low, impatient whir of the laser printer as it spits out sheets of paper.
‘We’re all curious about you, Miss Lim,’ he resumes, his jovial tone even more pronounced than before. ‘We hardly ever get an opportunity to talk to you … you never have dinner with us after work, and you never let any of us know what you’re thinking.’
Park staples the printed sheets together and returns to his desk. He doesn’t sit down, just fiddles with the computer mouse and then goes back to wait by the printer.
‘I heard you were involved with the labour movement before you came here. Something to do with industrial accidents, wasn’t it? And in the same organisation as Kim Seong-hee, no less. I heard the two of you are quite close.’
‘Not exactly close,’ you answer, conscious of a friendship you can no longer claim. ‘But she was a great help to me. For a long time.’
‘I’m a different generation, so Kim Seong-hee’s the stuff of legend to me. The late 1970s, the last days of the Yushin system and all President Park’s emergency measures – I was raised on those stories. I remembering hearing about that Easter Mass on Yeouido, when Kim Seong-hee leaped up onto the podium, got hold of the CBS mic they were using for the live broadcast and chanted “We are human beings, guarantee labour rights” before she and the rest of her group were dragged away. A bunch of factory girls barely into their twenties. You were there too, weren’t you, Miss Lim?’
Park’s voice is part awed, part earnest. You shake your head.
‘I didn’t have anything to do with that. I wasn’t in Seoul at the time.’
‘Oh, I see … it’s just that I’d heard you spent some time in prison, and I’d always assumed it was because of that. So did the rest of our colleagues.’
The moisture-laden wind is billowing in through the dark window. It strikes you as uncannily like a long inhalation. As though the night is itself some enormous organism, opening its mouth and exhaling a clammy breath. Then breathing back in, the stuffy air trapped inside the office being sucked into black lungs.
Overwhelmed with exhaustion, you bow your head. You spend a few moments peering at the brackish dregs at the bottom of your mug. You raise your head and smile in the way you always do when you cannot think of an appropriate reply. A delicate tracery of wrinkles fans out from the corners of your mouth.
UP RISING
You’re not like me, Seong-hee.
You believe in a divine being, and in this thing we call humanity.
You never did manage to win me over.
I could never believe in the existence of a being who watches over us with consummate love.
I couldn’t even make it through the Lord’s Prayer without the words drying up in my throat.
Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
I forgive no one, and no one forgives me.
NOW
The sign for the bus stop sheds its dim light down on you.
In your backpack is a notebook, pen and pencil, toiletries, a 250ml bottle of water, the Dictaphone and tapes.
The stop is a little out of the way, but all Line 3 buses come here. A succession of these buses have pulled up and whisked their new passengers away, and now you are alone. You stare silently at the paving slabs that lie beyond the reach of the lamp’s light.
You turn and walk away from the sign. The straps of your backpack are cutting into your shoulders, so you slide your hands beneath them. The summer night is sultry, its hot fug of air dragging on your limbs. You pace a few yards one way, then turn and double back. Up to the edge of the road, then back.
<
What might you have been able to bring yourself to do if he hadn’t shown up and interrupted you?
You wonder.
Would you have been able to summon the courage to press the ‘record’ button?
Would you have been able to string together a continuous thread of words, silences, coughs and hesitations, its warp and weft somehow containing all that you wanted to say?
You’d allowed yourself to believe that yes, you could have done all this; that was why you’d come in to the office today, the public holiday for National Liberation Day. You’d even decided to stay up all night if that was what it took, hence the toiletries.
But would you really have gone through with it, even if you hadn’t been interrupted?
If you go back now to your cramped, stifling room, will you be able to place the Dictaphone on the table in front of you and start again, from the beginning?
Last Monday, as soon as you heard the news about Seong-hee, you called her. You waited an hour before calling again, and on the fourth try the call finally went through. The first conversation you’d had in ten years was brief and matter-off-act. You held your breath and strained to listen to the voice made hoarse from radiation therapy.