Han Kang - Human Acts

‘The public defender said Yeong-chae had slit his own wrists six times in the past ten years. That he had to take sleeping pills and get drunk every night just so he could get to sleep.’

I filled Jin-su’s glass. With any luck I’d be able to get away with just a single shot, then I could spread the quilt out, lie down and try to get some sleep. I’d tell him he could carry on drinking for as long as he wanted, and go home whenever the rain let up. I didn’t let myself wonder about how often Jin-su had met up with that kid in the nine years since we’d shared a cell, or how the latter had been living in the meantime. Whatever Jin-su had come here to say, I didn’t want to hear it.

The dawn’s faint light was beginning to leach into the sky, but the rain was still mizzling down and outside the window it was as dark as evening. Eventually, I spread the quilt out over the mattress and lay down.

‘Get some shut-eye,’ I told him curtly. ‘You look like you haven’t slept in about a year.’

He filled his own glass and tossed it back. While I tossed and turned in my sleep, the quilt pulled up to my face, he carried on talking at me. A slurred stream of high-flown words and random babble. It was no good to me.

Looking at that boy’s life, Jin-su said, what is this thing we call a soul? Just some non-existent idea? Or something that might as well not exist?

Or no, is it like a kind of glass?

Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.

Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.

That was the last time I saw Kim Jin-su alive.

I saw his obituary in the paper that same year. I had no idea what had happened to him in the meantime, during those three months that had seen autumn give way to winter. He did leave a message at the taxi office once, but we weren’t allowed to make personal calls during work hours, and when I called him back after my shift was over he didn’t pick up.

There’d been an unusually large amount of rain that autumn, and every time the rain did stop the temperature immediately plummeted. Whenever I found myself heading home after a night shift, I would automatically slow down before rounding that corner. Even now that I know for a fact he’s dead, I still do exactly the same thing. Whenever I pass that corner, and particularly when it’s raining, I can see him in my mind’s eye standing there, his face pale as a ghost’s against the night’s dark. His black waterproof.

His funeral was a neat and proper affair. I recognised his deep double eyelids and long lashes in the faces of his family, and even that same blankness to the eyes, hinting at unknowable depths. His sister, who had clearly been stunningly beautiful at one time and who still retained a haggard loveliness even now, gave me a perfunctory handshake and then turned immediately away. They didn’t have enough coffin bearers so I volunteered and accompanied the family to the crematorium. I only stayed until I saw the coffin enter the oven, though. On the way home, I remember there was no bus that would take me all the way into the centre, so I got off at the three-way junction and walked for the final thirty minutes.

I never got a look at the suicide note.

And did they really find this photo next to it?

He never talked to me about it, not one word.

Of course, he and I were close in some senses, but think about it; how close could we really have been? Yes, we relied on each other, but we also wanted to smash each other’s face in. To erase each other’s very existence. To thrust each other permanently out of sight.

And you want me to explain this photo, professor?

But how? Where to even begin?

The people in the photo are dead, they’ve been shot, their blood is all over the ground. It’s in the yard in front of the Provincial Office. One of the foreign journalists must have taken the photo. No Korean reporters were allowed in, you see.

Ah, I know what must have happened — he must have found it in some photo collection and clipped it out. There were plenty of those collections circulating at the time, you must have seen one yourself, no?

And now you want me to guess why Kim Jin-su kept this photo with him until the very end, why it was found with his suicide note?

You want me to tell you about these dead kids, professor? Like felled trees, lying in such an unnaturally straight line.

What right do you have to demand that of me?

We kept our faces pressed into the corridor carpet for as long as the soldiers ordered us to. Around dawn, they hauled us to our feet and took us down to the yard. They made us kneel in a line, our backs to the walls, with our hands tied behind us. An officer came over. He’d worked himself up into quite a state. His combat boots thudded into our backs, driving our heads down into the dirt, while he spat out a string of curses. ‘I was in Vietnam, you sons of bitches. I killed thirty of those Vietcong bastards with my own two hands. Filthy fucking Reds.’ Kim Jin-su was kneeling next to me. The officer stamped on his back, grinding his face into the gravel. When he let him back up, I saw slender threads of blood clinging to Jin-su’s forehead.

That was when five of the younger boys came down from the second floor, holding their hands above their heads. Four of them were high school students. When the army first began to pepper the building with indiscriminate machinegun fire, lit by flares as bright as the noonday sun, I’d ordered them to hide in the conference room’s cupboard. The fifth was Dong-ho, the middle-schooler who’d had that brief argument with Kim Jin-su. They’d waited until the sound of gunfire could no longer be heard, then put down their weapons and come out to surrender. All as Jin-su had told them to do.

‘Look at these bastards!’ the officer yelled. He was practically frothing at the mouth. ‘Want to surrender, do you, you fucking Reds? Want to save your precious skins?’ With one foot still up on Kim Jin-su’s back, he raised his M16, took aim and fired. The bullets tore into those school kids without hesitation. My head inadvertently jerked up, and when he whooped in the direction of his subordinates, ‘As good as a fucking movie, right?’, I saw how straight and white his teeth were.

Now do you understand? The kids in this photo aren’t lying side by side because their corpses were lined up like that after they were killed. It’s because they were walking in a line. They were walking in a straight line, with both arms in the air, just like we’d told them to.

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered — is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

I once met someone who was a paratrooper during the Busan uprising. He told me his story after hearing my own. He said that they’d been ordered to suppress the civilians with as much violence as possible, and those who committed especially brutal actions were awarded hundreds of thousands of won by their superiors. One of his company had said, ‘What’s the problem? They give you money and tell you to beat someone up, then why wouldn’t you?’