Human Acts by Han Kang
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she says, watching his fingers tentatively brush the final page, where the copyright details are printed. ‘Truly sorry. I wish there was something I could say.’
‘Eun-sook.’ She meets his eyes. He looks baffled. ‘What’s the matter?’
Startled, she scrubs hastily at her eyes. She had sat through that sequence of seven slaps without her eyes welling up, so she can’t understand why it’s happening now.
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeats. The tears keep leaking out, faster than she can dash them away, like sticky sap oozing from a stem. ‘I’m truly sorry, sir.’
‘What do you have to be sorry for? Why should you apologise to me?’
Eun-sook’s cup is midway to her lips when Mr Seo abruptly puts the manuscript down; she starts, spilling some coffee, and Mr Seo’s nimble fingers snatch the proof up again. To save it from getting stained. As though it still contains something. As though everything in it hasn’t been nullified.
Slap Five
It was a Sunday, so Eun-sook had planned to sleep in. As always, though, her eyes were open before it was even 4 a.m.
She lay there in the darkness for a few moments, then got up and went to the kitchen. It seemed unlikely that she’d be able to get back to sleep, so she took a sip of cold water and then started on the laundry. Her socks, which were in an array of bright colours, her towel and white shirts all went into the small washing machine, while she washed her underwear and dark grey jumper by hand, before spreading them out to dry on an upturned wicker basket. Her jeans went into the laundry basket; they might as well wait until she had more coloureds to wash. She hunkered down on the kitchen floor, letting the machine’s rhythmic swoosh gradually lull her back to drowsiness.
Okay, time to sleep.
When she went back to her room, lay down and forced her eyes shut, the unyielding stiffness of the mattress, of the paper-covered floor, passed through the edges of her body and leached into her muscles. It spread from her shoulders downwards, leaving her paralysed, unable even to moan. When this slow seepage stopped, in its place the space around her seemed to shrink, cement walls closing in on all sides.
She gasped for breath, and her eyes jerked open. She could tell from the sound that the washing machine was on its final spin cycle. After a few minutes, the swoosh of the rotating drum ceased as abruptly as a strangled breath, and a high-pitched bleep cut through the silence it had left in its wake.
Eun-sook stayed where she was. There were still three slaps that she needed to forget, and today was the turn of the fifth. The fifth slap, when she’d told herself to stop counting. The fifth slap, when it had felt as though the stinging flesh was peeling from her cheekbone, when blood had begun to seep to the surface of the skin.
She got to her feet and went to hang up the laundry, on the washing line strung above the sink. Even this task didn’t take as long as she’d hoped, and the dawn was still far away when she went back to her bedroom.
She folded the quilt with exaggerated care and put it on top of the chest of drawers, organised her desk and arranged the drawers, and still the day remained impossibly far away. She tidied everything that could be tidied, even lining up her toiletries on the side table. Briefly, she let her hand linger on the small mirror she kept there. The world imprisoned in its glass was cold, silent and unchanging. Gazing abstractedly into that world, the face which looked out at her was familiar, but for the bluish bruise branded on the cheek.
There’d been a time when people had been quick to tell her how ‘cute’ she was. You’ve got such nice features, it’s like they came out of a copybook. You look like a dancer with that black hair, a salon perm would be pointless on you. But after that summer when she was eighteen, the summer of the fountain, no one said such things to her any more. Now she was twenty-three, and loveliness was what was expected. Loveliness in the form of apple-red cheeks, of comely dimples expressing delight in life’s brilliance. Yet Eun-sook herself wanted nothing more than to speed up the ageing process. She wanted this damned, dreary life not to drag on too long.
She gave the room a thorough going-over with a damp cloth, making sure to get into all the nooks and crannies. But even after washing the cloth, hanging it up, and going back to sit at her desk, the night-time stubbornly lingered. She didn’t read anything, just tried to sit there quietly, and hunger began to creep up on her. She went and filled a bowl with some of the early-ripening rice her mother had prepared for her, then brought it back to her desk. As she silently chewed the grains of rice, it occurred to her, as it had before, that there was something shameful about eating. Gripped by this familiar shame, she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. It was that which had tormented her for the past five years – that she could still feel hunger, still salivate at the sight of food.
‘Can’t you just put it behind you?’ her mother had asked, that winter when she’d failed the university entrance exams and confined herself to the house. ‘This is hard on me, you know. Just forget about what happened, then you can go off to university like everyone else, earn a living and meet nice people … and live, just live. It’d be such a weight off my shoulders.’
Not wanting to be a burden, Eun-sook had resumed her studies. She applied for a place at a university in Seoul, as far away from Gwangju as possible. Of course, Seoul was hardly a safe haven. Plain-clothes policemen were a permanent feature of campus life, and students who fell foul of them were forcibly enlisted in the army and sent to the DMZ. The situation was so precarious that meetings frequently had to be called off. Life was a constant skirmish. The central library’s glass windows were smashed from the inside so that banners could be hung from them. DOWN WITH THE BUTCHER CHUN DOO-HWAN. Some students even went so far as to secure a rope to one of the pillars on the roof, knot it around their waist and then jump off. It was a tactic to gain time while the plain-clothes policemen would be occupied in racing up to the roof and hauling up the rope. Until this happened, the student dangling at the end would scatter flyers and yell slogans, while down below in the square fronting the library thirty to forty fresh-faced students of both sexes formed a scrum and sang songs. Not once did they get to the end of a single song; the crackdown was always too rapid, too brutal for that. Whenever Eun-sook witnessed such a scene, always from a distance, it was a safe bet that she would have an unquiet night ahead of her. Even if she did manage to fall asleep, a nightmare would soon jerk her awake.
It was in June, after the first end-of-term exams, that her father suffered a cerebral haemorrhage which left him paralysed down his right side. Her mother got work as a pharmacy assistant, becoming the breadwinner of the family. Eun-sook took a leave of absence from university. During the day she looked after her father, then when her mother got home from work she headed out to her own part-time job, packaging and selling at a downtown bakery until they closed their doors at 10 p.m. She would be able to snatch a few scant hours of sleep before getting up with the sun and preparing packed lunches for her two younger siblings. She returned to university when the year’s turning saw her father regain enough movement to be able to feed himself, but only managed a single term before she had to drop out again to earn the fees for the following term. After scraping through the second year in this on-off fashion, she finally gave up on the idea of graduating. When her professor recommended her for the publishing job, she took it.
For her mother this was all a source of regret, but she herself thought differently. Regardless of their financial situation, she knew she would never have been able to graduate. Rather, she would have ended up ineluctably drawn into that scrum of students. There, surrounded by those youthful faces, she would have held out for as long as possible. Being left as the sole survivor would have been the most frightening thing.
It wasn’t as though she’d had her mind set solely on surviving.
After she went home that d
In the lobby of the annex she finally found some other people. One of the university students she’d seen working in the cafeteria called out to tell her that the women were all supposed to go up to the first floor.
When Eun-sook went up the stairs and stepped into the small room at the end of the corridor, the women were in the midst of a heated debate.
‘We have to be given guns too. This fight needs everyone it can get.’
‘We’ll only hand out guns to those who really want them. Who’ve resolved to see this through.’
She spotted Seon-ju sitting at the end of the table, resting her chin in her hand. When Eun-sook went and sat down next to her, Seon-ju flashed her a quick smile. As ever, the latter was economical with her words, but when the debate came to a close she calmly announced that she was for the side who wanted guns.
It was around eleven o’clock at night when Jin-su knocked on the door. This was the first time any of them had seen him carrying a gun, and the sight was somewhat incongruous alongside the wireless radio he was never without.
‘Could three of you stay here until the morning?’ he asked. ‘We want to do some street broadcasts overnight, and three’s all we need for that. The rest of you, please go home.’
Of the three who stepped forward, each had been on the side that argued for the women to be given guns as well as the men.
Then the young woman from the cafeteria, the one who’d directed Eun-sook to the first floor, spoke up.
‘We want to stay too. We want to see this through together. That’s why we came here, to be together.’
Thinking back on it afterwards, Eun-sook could never quite remember how Jin-su had managed to persuade them. Perhaps because she didn’t want to. She could dimly recall something about how it would tarnish the reputation of the civilian militias if women were left behind in the Provincial Office to die with the men, but she couldn’t be sure whether that argument had actually decided anything for her. She’d thought she’d come to terms with the idea of dying, yet something about death itself, the various forms it might take, still disturbed her. Having seen and handled so many dead, she’d imagined she would have become inured to it all, but on the contrary her fear had increased. She didn’t want her last breath to be a gasp from a gaping mouth, didn’t want translucent intestines spilling out through a gash torn into her body.
Seon-ju was one of the three women who had elected to stay behind. She took a carbine rifle for self-protection, listened to a brief explanation of how to use it, then slung it clumsily over her shoulder. Turning her back on the others without any goodbyes, she followed the other two students down to the ground floor. Jin-su addressed the three women.
‘You need to get as many people as you can to come out of their homes. As soon as the sun’s up, the whole square in front of the Provincial Office has to be packed with demonstrators. We’ll hold out until then, somehow or other, but by morning we’ll need the support.’
It was around 1 a.m. when the remaining women left the Provincial Office. Along with one other male student, Jin-su led them along the alleyway which fronted Nam-dong Catholic church. At the entrance to the alley, where the street lighting was sparse, he stopped.
‘Now spread out. Each of you go and find a house to hide in, any house.’
Had she ever had such a thing as a soul, that was the moment of its shattering. When Jin-su, rifle strap pressing against his sweat-soaked shirt, gave you all a farewell smile. But no, it had already shivered into fragments, when she’d come out of the Provincial Office and the sight of your diminutive frame, more like a child’s than a teenage boy’s, had stopped her in her tracks. Your pale blue tracksuit bottoms, your PE sweater – and then she’d seen the gun you were clutching. ‘Dong-ho,’ she’d called out, ‘why aren’t you at home?’ She marched up to the youth who was explaining to the others how to load a gun. ‘That kid is still in middle school. You have to send him home.’ The young man looked surprised. ‘He told me he was in the second year at high school; I had no reason not to believe him … we even sent the first years home just now, but he never said anything.’ Eun-sook lowered her voice. ‘That’s nonsense. Look at his face. And you’re telling me he’s in high school?’
The women waited until Jin-su disappeared around the corner before they began to break up. ‘Do you know anyone who lives around here?’ the student who worked in the cafeteria asked her. She shook her head. ‘Come with me to Jeonnam hospital, then. My cousin is a patient there.’
At the hospital the lights in the lobby were all off and the entrance was locked. After the two of them had been banging on the door for a few minutes, a guard came out flashing his torch at them. He was followed by the head nurse. The tension was evident in both their faces. They’d thought it was soldiers who’d come back.
The corridors and emergency stairs were as a dark as the lobby. Guided only by the beam from the guard’s torch, they eventually reached the ward where the other woman’s cousin was staying. Here, the blackness was even more intense; sheets had been hung over the windows. Even in the pitch dark, they could sense that the patients and nurses were alert. The other woman left Eun-sook’s side and went over to her aunt. ‘What are we going to do?’ her aunt whispered. ‘They’re saying that when the soldiers get here, the wounded will all be shot.’
Eun-sook sat down beneath the window, her back against the wall.
‘Don’t sit near the window, it’s dangerous.’ The speaker was a man who seemed to be the relative of the patient in the neighbouring bed. It was too dark for Eun-sook to make out his face. ‘There was a lot of gunfire the day the soldiers retreated, too – the clothes we’d hung over this window had bullet holes in them. If someone had been standing there, what d’you think would’ve happened to them?’
She shifted away from the window.
One of the patients was in a critical condition, his breathing ragged; a nurse came to the ward every twenty minutes to check up on him. Every time the beam from her torch arced over the ward like a searchlight, the faces it illuminated were rigid with terror. What are we going to do? Will the soldiers really come into a hospital? If they’re saying the wounded will be shot, shouldn’t we discharge them all as soon as it’s light? It’s barely been a day since your cousin recovered consciousness; what’ll we do if the stitches tear? To each of her aunt’s whispered questions, the student who’d worked in the cafeteria made an even quieter reply. ‘I don’t know, Aunty.’
How much time had passed? Eun-sook heard a faint voice, clearly coming from some distance, and turned towards the window. The voice grew stronger: it was a woman, speaking into a megaphone, but not Seon-ju.
‘Citizens, please join us in front of the Provincial Office. The army are re-entering the city.’
The silence swelled inside the room, like a huge balloon expanding to fill all corners. A truck rattled by in front of the hospital, and the voice grew even louder.
‘We have resolved to fight to the end. Please come out and join us, fight with us side by side.’
The voice dwindled, fading into the distance. Barely ten minutes had passed before the silence it had left it its wake was broken by the sound of soldiers. It was like nothing Eun-sook had ever heard before. The resolute, synchronised thud of a thousand pairs of combat boots. Tanks whose thunderous roar threatened to shatter paving slabs, shiver down walls like glass. She put her head between her knees. A small voice piped up from one of the ward beds. Close th
When the unmistakable sound of gunfire was eventually heard, coming from the direction of the Provincial Office, Eun-sook was already wide awake. She could have pressed her hands over her ears, could have screwed her eyes tight shut, shook her head from side to side or moaned in distress. Instead, she simply remembered you, Dong-ho. How you darted away up the stairs when she’d tried to take you home. Your face frozen with terror, as though escaping this importunate plea was your only hope of survival. Let’s go together, Dong-ho. We ought to leave together, right away. You stood there clinging to the second-floor railing, trembling. When she caught your gaze, Eun-sook saw your eyelids quiver. Because you were afraid. Because you wanted to live.
Slap Six
‘How is he planning to get it past the censors?’ the boss muttered. He was examining the invitation card which had just been delivered by a young man from Mr Seo’s theatre. He almost appeared to be talking to himself, but Eun-sook knew that the question was aimed at her.
‘Could he be rewriting the whole script from the beginning? But there’s less than a fortnight left until the performance … how are they going to rehearse?’
The initial plan had been to publish the play this week and ensure that a review appeared in the newspapers’ literary sections the week after. That would be a good way of publicising the stage performance, which in turn would offer an opportunity to promote the book; they had also decided that, during the run, Yoon would sell copies of the play at the entrance to the theatre. But now that the censors had made publication impossible, even performing a play based on that eviscerated script was off the cards. And now, for whatever reason, Mr Seo had gone and sent round the invitation cards as though none of this had happened.