Han Kang - Human Acts
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- Название:Human Acts
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- Издательство:Portobello Books
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- Год:2016
- ISBN:нет данных
- Рейтинг книги:4 / 5. Голосов: 1
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Human Acts: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
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Human Acts
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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 day and changed into a clean set of clothes, she’d slipped back out of the main gate without her mother knowing. Night was beginning to fall by the time she got back to the municipal gym. The entrance was closed and there was no one to be seen, so she went to the Provincial Office. The complaints department was also deserted. Aside, that is, from several rotting corpses, which were giving off a foul miasma. They looked just as they had when she and Seon-ju had handled them; perhaps the civilian militias hadn’t had time to transfer them all to the gym, and these had been left behind.
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?’
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