Han Kang - Human Acts

The corridor is fairly gloomy even during the day. Hearing someone call her name, Eun-sook looks up. Whoever they are, they sound happy to see her. She soon recognises the theatre producer Mr Seo striding towards her, backlit against the small window.

‘How have you been, Eun-sook?’

Her response to this hearty greeting is a quiet ‘hello’, and when she bows Mr Seo’s eyes widen visibly behind his brown-framed glasses.

‘Goodness, what happened to your face?’

‘I had a bit of an accident.’ She gives a half-smile.

‘What kind of accident …’ Seeing her hesitation, he swiftly changes the subject. ‘Is the boss in?’

‘No, he didn’t come in today. He said he had a wedding to attend.’

‘Is that so? I called him yesterday evening and he said he’d be here.’

Eun-sook opens the door to the office.

‘Please come in, sir.’

Something twitches in her cheek as she leads him over to the table they use for receiving guests. She goes into the tiny kitchen and places her hands on both cheeks; the right one throbbing, the left, tensed. Taking a deep breath to compose herself, she heats up the coffee pot. She can’t understand why her hands are shaking, as though she’s been caught out in a lie. After all, it’s not as though she’s the one who destroyed that book. Why isn’t the boss here? Has he deliberately stayed away in order to avoid this delicate situation?

‘While we were on the phone yesterday evening and I asked how much they’d redacted, the boss just sighed,’ Mr Seo tells Eun-sook. She sets his coffee down and straightens the pale yellow tablecloth. ‘So I came to see for myself. Even if the book itself can’t be published, that won’t really affect the performance run. Any parts they had an issue with will just have to be fixed or taken out, and then they’ll give us the go-ahead.’

Eun-sook goes over to her desk and opens the bottom drawer. She takes out the manuscript proof, brings it back over to the table and puts it down in front of Mr Seo. As she sits down, she sees his habitual friendly smile falter; he seems shocked, but quickly regains his composure. He examines each page of the manuscript, not even choosing to skip the ones that have been completely mulched by the ink roller.

‘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.

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.’