Han Kang - Human Acts

It was as that strange, vivid night was drawing to a close, as the faint blue light of dawn had begun to seep into the sky’s black ink, that I suddenly thought of you, Dong-ho. Yes, you’d been there with me, that day. Until something like a cold cudgel had suddenly slammed into my side. Until I collapsed like a rag doll. Until my arms flung themselves up in mute alarm, amid the cacophony of footsteps drumming against the tarmac, ear-splitting gunfire. Until I felt the warm spread of my own blood moving up over my shoulder, the back of my neck. Until then, you were with me.

The grasshoppers were chirring. Hidden birds began to trill their morning song. Gusts of wind grazed the leaves of dark trees. The pale sun trembled over the lip of the horizon, moving up to the sky’s centre in a violent, majestic advance. Piled up behind the thicket, our bodies now began to soften in the sun, with putrefaction setting in. Clouds of gadflies and mayflies alighted on those places that were clagged with dried black blood, rubbed their front legs, crawled about, flew up, then settled again. I pushed out to the edges of my body, wanting to check whether yours was also jammed into the tower somewhere, whether you had been one of those souls whose fleeting caress had swept over me the previous night. But I couldn’t, I was stuck, unable to detach myself from my body, which seemed to have acquired some kind of magnetic force. Unable to look away from my ghost-pale face.

Things went on like this until, with the sun almost at its zenith, I knew: you weren’t there.

Not just that you weren’t there, in that pile; you were still alive. For some reason, though the identities of the other souls who were clustered near at hand remained unknown, if I used all my powers of concentration to picture a specific individual, someone I’d known, I was able to tell whether or not they had died. And yet, at that moment, my discovery brought me no comfort. Instead, it frightened me to think that here by this strange thicket, surrounded by bodies gradually breaking down into their constituent parts, I was alone among strangers.

There was worse to come.

In an attempt to batten down the rising tide of fear, I thought of my sister. Watching the blazing sun describing an arc further and further to the south, staring at my face as though trying to bore through those shuttered eyelids, I thought of my sister, only of her. And I felt an agony that almost broke me. She was dead; she had died even before I had. With neither tongue nor voice to carry it, my scream leaked out from me in a mess of blood and watery discharge. My soul-self had no eyes; where was the blood coming from, what nerve endings were sparking this pain? I stared at my unchanging face. My filthy hands were as still as ever. Over my fingernails, dyed a deep rust by watery blood, red ants were crawling, silent.

I no longer felt fifteen. Thirty-five, forty-five; these numbers came, in turn, to feel somehow insufficient. Not even sixty-five, no, nor seventy-five, seemed to encompass what I was.

I wasn’t Jeong-dae any more, the runt of the year. I wasn’t Park Jeong-dae, whose ideas of love and fear were both bound up in the figure of his sister. A strange violence welled up within me, not spurred by the fact of my death, but simply because of the thoughts that wouldn’t stop tearing through me, the things I needed to know. Who killed me, who killed my sister, and why. The more of myself I devoted to these questions, the firmer this new strength within me became. The ceaseless flow of blood, blood that flowed from a place without eyes or cheeks, darkened, thickened, into a viscous treacle ooze.

My sister’s soul, like mine, must still be lingering somewhere; but where? Now there were no such things as bodies for us, presumably physical proximity was no longer necessary for the two of us to meet. But without bodies, how would we know each other? Would I still recognise my sister as a shadow?

My body continued to putrefy. More and more mayflies crowded inside my open wounds. Gadflies crawled slowly over my lips and eyelids, rubbing their dark, slender legs together. Around the time when the day grew dark, and beams of orange light strafed down through the crowns of the oaks, exhausted with wondering where my sister might be, my thoughts turned instead to them. To the person who had killed me, and the one who had killed her. Where were they, right now? Even if they hadn’t died they would still have souls, so surely, if I bent all my thought on the idea of them, I would be able to sense them, touch them. I wanted to shuck off my body as a snake sheds its skin. I wanted to sever the pure strength, that force thin and taut as a spider’s web, dilating and contracting, from the inert lump of rotting flesh. I wanted to be free to fly to wherever they were, and to demand of them: why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister, what did you do to her?

The metal screech of the iron gate opening and then closing sliced through the silence of the night. The sound of an engine rumbled closer. The twin beams from the truck’s headlights swept in sharply. When these beams arced over our bodies, the shadows cast by the leaves and branches, those black tattoos, danced over every face.

This time there were only two of them. They carried the latest batch of bodies over towards us, one by one. There were five altogether; four whose skulls had been caved in by some blunt weapon, leaving a splatter-pattern on their upper bodies, and one wearing a blue-striped hospital gown. They stacked them in a low heap next to ours, again in the shape of a cross. The body in the hospital gown was the last on, then they covered the pile with a straw sack and hurried away. I stared hard at their furrowed brows, their empty eyes, and realised that, in the space of a single day, our bodies had started to give off a horrific stench.

While they started the truck’s engine, I slipped towards those new bodies. I wasn’t alone; clustering around these new arrivals, I sensed the shadows of other souls. The four whose skulls had been staved in were three men and a woman. Thin, watery blood was still trickling from their clothes. Perhaps someone had splashed water over their heads, as their faces seemed relatively clean, compared with the state of their bodies. The young man in the hospital uniform was clearly set apart, special. Lying there with the straw sack pulled up to his chest like a quilt, he was cleaner and neater than any of the others. Someone had washed his body. Someone had sutured his wounds and applied a poultice. The bandage coiled around his head gleamed white in the darkness. We were bodies, dead bodies, and in that sense there was nothing to choose between us. All the same, there was something infinitely noble about how his body still bore the traces of hands that had touched it, a tangible record of having been cared for, been valued, that made me envious and sad. Mine, on the other hand, crushed out of shape beneath a tower of others, was shameful, detestable.

From that moment on, I was filled with hatred for my body. Our bodies, tossed there like lumps of meat. Our filthy, rotting faces, reeking in the sun.

If I could close my eyes .

If I could escape the sight of our bodies, that festering flesh now fused into a single mass, like the rotting carcass of some many-legged monster. If I could sleep, truly sleep, not this flickering haze of wakefulness. If I could plunge headlong down to the floor of my pitch-dark consciousness.

If I could hide in dreams .

Or perhaps in memories .

If I could go back to last summer, waiting in the corridor for your class to be let out, jigging impatiently from one foot to the other. To the moment I saw your form teacher step out into the corridor and hastily straightened my uniform. To the moment after I’d watched all the other kids but you file out, when I stepped into the classroom and saw you rubbing away at the blackboard.