Human Acts by Han Kang
NOW
The tang of bleach spikes your nostrils in the hospital bathroom. You run the taps, and take a swig from your water bottle while the sink fills. After you’ve finished washing your face, you give your teeth a vigorous brushing. Washing your hair with the hand soap and drying it with a hand towel reminds you of the sit-ins you used to go on with Seong-hee. You’ve brought a lotion sample with you, in your cotton wash bag. You tear open the packaging and smear the gel onto your pallid cheeks.
When you and Seong-hee spoke on the phone the previous Monday, her voice had sounded so altered that you were momentarily unable to picture her face. Only after you’d hung up did you recall her bright, intelligent eyes, the sliver of pink gum that was revealed whenever she smiled. But of course, ten years have gone by, and that face must be as changed as her voice. Gaunt with illness as well as age. Right now, she will be asleep. Her breathing will be low and laboured, punctuated by snores like the snuffling of a sick animal.
YOU REMEMBER
You remember that night in the dead of winter, in the attic room of a two-storey house belonging to an American pastor who ministered to the factory workers – a place where the police couldn’t just rush in whenever they felt like it, and where Seong-hee had sought shelter for a number of years in her twenties – where you abandoned any sense of impropriety and slept with your body jammed up against hers. You remember that Seong-hee had snored the whole night through, which had jarred with the usual impression she gave of gentle earnestness. You tried pressing up against the wall, tried pulling the mothball-scented quilt right up over your head, but nothing could block out those deafening snores.
NOW
Hunched up in the corner where two rows of chairs meet, hugging your backpack to yourself, you slide into a shallow sleep. Every time some external sound startles you and the fabric of sleep wears thin, the repeated words from Yoon’s email, a pianist hammering the same keys, flicker in your mind’s eye like a cursor blinking on a computer screen. Testimony. Meaning. Memory. For the future.
The nerves threading your eyeballs spark into life, slender as light-bulb filaments, and your eyelids blink open. With the muscles of your face still heavy with drowsiness, you turn to examine the dimly lit corridor, the deep dark beyond the glass door. Again, you experience that moment when the contours of suffering coalesce into clarity, a clarity colder and harder than any nightmare could ever be. The moment when you are forced to acknowledge that what you experienced was no mere dream.
Yoon has asked you to remember. To ‘face up to those memories’, to ‘bear witness to them’.
But how can such a thing be possible?
Is it possible to bear witness to the fact of a thirty-centimetre wooden ruler being repeatedly thrust into my vagina, all the way up to the back wall of my uterus? To a rifle butt bludgeoning my cervix? To the fact that, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I had gone into shock, they had to take me to the hospital for a blood transfusion? Is it possible to face up to my continuing to bleed for the next two years, to a blood clot forming in my Fallopian tubes and leaving me permanently unable to bear children? It is possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up with a pathological aversion to physical contact, particularly with men? To the fact that someone’s lips merely grazing mine, their hand brushing my cheek, even so much as a casual gaze running up my legs in summer, was like being seared with a branding iron? Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up despising my own body, the very physical stuff of my self? That I wilfully destroyed any warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive.
Only a portion of the emergency department is visible from where you are sitting, but this is constantly lit by the harsh glare of strip lighting. Someone starts moaning, either a child or a young woman. Impossible to tell. Then the raised voices of a middle-aged couple, most likely the parents. Hasty footsteps, and you see a nurse running.
You shoulder your backpack, stand up and walk outside. Two ambulances, their emergency lights off, are huddled together beneath a chill light. The wind has lost its clammy warmth. Finally, the heat has abated.
You walk along the tarmac for a while, then step to the side, onto the grass where it is apparently forbidden to tread. You take a diagonal line across the grass, heading for the main building. Your trainer socks leave your ankles exposed, brushed by the tips of the moisture-beaded grass. You inhale deeply, the impending rain bringing out the rich, loamy base notes of the soil. About halfway across the grass, the faces of the two girls slide into your mind. Lying side by side, a banner resting on their chests. Their sleepy faces as they lift the banner up over their heads and put it aside, rise to their feet and come stepping lightly over the grass. Your throat is dry. There is a bitter taste at the back of your mouth, even though you brushed your teeth only an hour ago. What lies beneath the dark grass, what you are continuing to tread on, seems not soil but fine, sharp splinters of glass.
UP RISING
After that night, I stopped hanging the wet towel on the door handle.
And yet all through that winter, and even in the spring, when the air was no longer so dry and there would have been no need for a wet towel anyway, I continued to hear that sound, seeming to come from just the other side of the door.
Even now, those occasional times when I manage to awake from a sleep that was free from nightmares, I hear it.
Each time, my eyes tremble open and I face out into the darkness.
Who is it?
Who’s there?
Who is coming towards me, and with such soft footsteps?
YOU REMEMBER
All the buildings have their shutters down.
All the windows are closed and locked.
Suspended above the darkened street, the seventeenth-day moon hangs in the sky like an eyeball formed of ice, peering down on the van you are riding in.
It was mainly the female students who rode around with megaphones to do the street broadcasts. When those with you were completely spent, when they said it felt as though their throats had closed up and could no longer produce anything louder than a whisper, you took over for forty minutes. Brothers and sisters, please turn on your lights. That was the kind of thing you said. Addressing the blind windows, the deserted alleyways. For God’s sake, please just turn on your lights.
The reason the soldiers let you ride around broadcasting all day, waiting until the dead of night before forcing your van to a halt and arresting all its occupants, only occurred to you later: they simply hadn’t wanted to expose their movements. The women, the ones who’d been doing the actual broad-casting, were hauled off to the cells at Gwangsan police station, while the man who had been in charge of driving was taken to the military school. You were carrying a gun at the time of your arrest, and so you were kept separate from the other women, and transferred to the custody of the military police.
There, the only name by which you were referred to was ‘Red Bitch’. Because you used to be a factory girl, and had been involved in the labour union movement. Their script decreed that the four years you’d spent at a dressmaker’s in what they called ‘a provincial city’ had been a mere cover, that you were a spy sent down from the communist North. It was to elicit the confession that would confirm these accusations that they had you lie down on the table in the interrogation room, day after day. Filthy Red bitch. Scream as much as you like, who’s going to come running? Tube lighting flickered along the ceiling of the interrogation room. Beneath the flat, banal brightness of that perfectly innocuous light, they kept at you until the haemorrhaging had gone on for so long you were finally released from feeling.
Around a year after you got out of there, you saw Seong-hee again. You went to the Industrial Mission Church to ask after her whereabouts, got in contact and arranged to meet at a noodle place in Guro-dong. Listening to your story, she seemed surprised.
‘It never even occurred to m
Repeated stretches either in prison or on the run, arrested and later released only to be pursued again for further acts of agitation, had left Seong-hee’s cheeks so sunken she was barely recognisable as the same person. She was twenty-seven when you met her then, and could easily have passed for ten years older. She stayed silent for a while, as the steam rose from her cooling noodles.
‘Jeong-mi disappeared that spring; did you know?’ This time you are the one to look surprised. ‘I heard she helped out with the union for a while. We were blacklisted, of course, so she quit her job at the factory before they had the chance to lay her off. After that, I didn’t hear anything more … in fact, I only recently heard about her disappearing. The woman who told me used to attend night classes with her when they both worked at a textiles factory in Gwangju.’
You stare, mute, at the shapes formed by Seong-hee’s mouth. As though your mother tongue has been rendered opaque, a meaningless jumble of sounds.
The words you are struggling for refuse to come. You can’t even remember the girl’s face with any clarity. The effort to remember is wearing you out. Fragments surface momentarily, only to disappear from whence they came. Pale skin. A compact set of small white teeth. I want to be a doctor.
Nothing else.
UP RISING
I went back to Gwangju to die.
For a little while after I got out of prison my older brother let me stay with him out in the countryside, but the police had his address on file, and their twice-weekly visits were too much for me.
One morning in early February, when the sun hadn’t yet come up, I put on the smartest clothes I had, packed a bag with a few basic necessities and went out to catch one of the intercity buses.
At first glance the city looked as though it hadn’t changed a jot. But it didn’t take me long to see that actually, nothing was the same any more. There were bullet holes in the outer wall of the Provincial Office. The people moving through the streets in their sombre clothes all had something twisted about their faces, as though they were contorted with transparent scars. I walked among them, my shoulders jostling theirs. I didn’t get hungry, didn’t get thirsty, and my feet didn’t get cold either. It seemed like I could have gone on walking that whole day through, all through the night until the sun came up.
That was when I saw you, Dong-ho.
I was looking at the photos some students had recently pinned up, on the wall of the Catholic Centre on the main road leading to the Provincial Office.
The police were a constant menace. Even then, I was aware that one of them might be hiding nearby, watching me. I hurriedly pulled one of the photos down, rolled it up tight and clenched it in my fist. I crossed the main street and disappeared down an alleyway. There was a sign for a music cafe, so I hastened up the stairs to the fifth floor, took a seat in the cavernous room and ordered a coffee. I sat there stock-still until the waiter had set my coffee down in front of me and left me alone. The acoustics were excellent in such a large space, yet I was hardly aware of a single note. It was like being submerged in deep water. Eventually, once I was sure that I was completely alone, I unclenched my fist and smoothed out the photograph.
You were lying on your side in the yard of the Provincial Office. The force of the gunshot had splayed your limbs. Your face and chest were exposed to the sky, while your knees were pressed against the ground. I could see how you must have suffered in those final moments, from the way you were twisted like that.
I couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t make a sound.
That summer, you were dead. While the blood was still haemorrhaging out of my body, the rot was running furiously through yours, packed into the earth.
What I saw in the photograph saved me. You saved me, Dongho, you made my blood seethe back to life. The force of my suffering surged through me in a fury that seemed it would burst my heart.
NOW
At the entrance to the car park for the main hospital building, the lights are on in the security hut. You peer in at the elderly guard, sleeping the night through with his head tipped back over the top of his swivel chair, his mouth hanging open. A dust-clouded bulb is suspended from the ceiling of the hut. A scattering of dead flies litters the cement floor. The sun will soon be up. It will pulse gradually brighter, glaring fiercely down on the city it holds in its grip. Everything that has lost the life it once had will rapidly putrefy. A foul stench will waft in waves from every alley where rubbish has been dumped.
You remember that hushed exchange between Dong-ho and Eun-sook, all those years ago. Why do they cover corpses with the Taegukgi, Dong-ho had wanted to know, why sing the national anthem? You can’t recall Eun-sook’s answer.
And if he were asking you? If he were asking now? To wrap them in the Taegukgi – we wanted to do that much for them, at least. We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute’s silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.
Twenty years lie between that summer and now. Red bitches, we’re going to exterminate the lot of you. But you’ve turned your back on all that. On spat curses, the abrupt smack of water against skin. The door leading back to that summer has been slammed shut; you’ve made sure of that. But that means that the way is also closed which might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.
UP RISING
I don’t know who the footsteps belong to.
Whether it’s always the same person, or someone different every time.
Maybe they don’t come one at a time. Maybe that’s something they’ve left behind, now, their individual identities merging into a body with only the barest trace of mass, the merest quivered hint at an outer boundary. Countless existences, blurring into vagueness like ink in water.
YOU REMEMBER
Only occasionally, just now and then, you wonder.
Some weekend afternoon when the sun-drenched scene outside the window seems unusually still and Dong-ho’s profile flits into your mind, mightn’t the thing flickering in front of your eyes be what they call a soul? In the early hours of the morning, when dreams you can’t remember have left your cheeks wet and the contours of that face jolt into an abrupt clarity, mightn’t that wavering be a soul’s emergence? And the place they emerge from, that they waver back into, would it be black as night or dusk’s coarse weave? Dong-ho, Jin-su, the bodies which your own hands washed and dressed, might they be gathered in that place, or are they sundered, several, scattered?
You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.
After the policeman stamped on your stomach, you chose to leave the labour union. After you got out of jail you rejoined Seong-hee for a while in the labour movement, but you went against her advice in transferring to the environmental organisation, which was quite different in character to Seong-hee’s union. Afterwards, you chose not to seek her out again even while knowing how much this would wound her. The Dictaphone and tapes in the backpack which is cutting into your shoulders will, after all this, wind up in the post to Yoon as soon as you can get to the post office on Monday morning. Unused.
But at the same time you know that if a time like that spring were to come round again, and even knowing what you know now, you might well end up making a similar choice to the one you’d made then. Like those times during a primary school dodgeball game when, having nimbly avoided danger thus far, there was no one but you left standing on your team and you had to face up to the challenge of catching the ball. Like the time your feet led you to the square, drawn there by the resonant song of the young women on the bus, even though you knew that armed soldiers were stationed there. Like that final night when they asked who was willing to stay until the end and you quietly raised your hand. We mustn’t let o
NOW
You walk away from the hospital’s main building. The morning’s half-light comes creeping over the grass as you cut back across it. You slide both hands beneath the straps of the backpack, its dragging weight like a lump of iron. Like a child you’re carrying on your back. So perhaps your hands are supporting, comforting, the backpack a baby’s sling.
I’m the one who’s responsible, aren’t I?
You ask this of the blue-tinged darkness undulating around you.
If I’d demanded that you go home, Dong-ho; if I’d begged, while we sat there eating gimbap, you would have done as I asked, wouldn’t you?
And that’s why you’re coming to me now.
To ask why I’m still alive.
You walk, your eyes’ red rims seeming carved with some keen blade. Hurrying back to the bright lights of the emergency department.
There’s only one thing for me to say to you, onni.