Han Kang - Human Acts

It’s really extraordinary how those young women, their faces, ended up scored into my memory so deeply, you know? I mean, I only caught just a fleeting glimpse of them.

But now, each time I fall asleep, and each time I wake up again, I see those faces. Their pale skin, their closed mouths, their legs stretched out straight … it’s so clear, so vivid, it’s like they’re really there. Just like the face of the man with blood dripping from his jaw, his eyes half closed … etched into the insides of my eyelids. Inside, where I can’t get at it. Where I’ll never be able to scrape it off.

Your own dreams are filled with sights that are quite different from the ones haunting this first witness.

At the time, you were more closely acquainted than most with brutalised corpses, yet there have only been a handful of times in the past twenty-odd years when your dreams have been vivid with blood. Rather, your nightmares tend to be cold, silent affairs. Scenes from which the blood has dried without a trace, and the bones have weathered into ash.

The street lamp’s feeble glow encases it in a lead-grey aureole, but beyond the reach of its light the night is pitch-black. It isn’t safe to stray beyond the bounds of this lit place. You do not know what might be lurking in the darkness. But you’ll be all right as long you don’t move a muscle. You don’t venture outside the circle of light. You merely wait, stiff with tension. Wait for the sun to rise and the outer dark to dissipate. You’ve held out this far, you mustn’t waver now. Safer to keep your feet absolutely still, rather than risk taking a false step.

When you open your eyes, it’s still dark. You get up from your bed and switch on the bedside lamp. This year you will turn forty-two, and there has only been one single period in your entire adult life during which you lived with a man. And you didn’t even manage a year at that. Living alone means there’s no need to consider whether you’ll be waking another person up, so you walk straight over to the door and switch on the light. You switch on all the lights, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the entrance hall, and fill a glass with cold water, your hand trembling only very slightly, and drink.

NOW

You rise from your seat at the unmistakable sound of someone turning the door handle. You bend down, slide the dissertation back into the locker and call out ‘Who is it?’

You’ve locked the door.

‘It’s Park Yeong-ho.’

You walk over to the door, turn the key in the lock and open it.

‘Working at this hour?’ you both chorus, and then, as if on cue, burst out laughing.

Team leader Park affects nonchalance as he peers over your shoulder into the office. Traces of laughter still linger around his mouth, but you can see the suspicion in his eyes. His thick-set frame is tending towards a paunch, his fringe an attempt to mask a receding hairline.

‘It’s because we’ve got the Kori meeting tomorrow, of course. There’re still a few documents missing.’ Park drops his bag by his desk and switches on his computer. He carries on justifying his presence, like someone who has dropped by another’s house unannounced. ‘Something’s come up that means I’ll have to head down to the plant myself. Anyhow, I’ll need every file we have if I’m going to convince them to finally shut down the reactor. I was really surprised when I saw the lights on,’ he continues, his voice now excessively genial. ‘Naturally, I’d assumed the place would be empty.’ Suddenly he pauses and glances around, looking faintly disconcerted. ‘What’s with the heat?’ He strides over to the wall and flings the windows wide open, then switches on both fans. He walks back to his desk, shaking his head in bewilderment. ‘You thinking of renting the place out as a sauna?’

You are the oldest of the employees here. Your juniors are extremely reserved around you, possibly slightly intimidated by the way you keep yourself to yourself, diligently getting on with your allotted tasks. They address you using the honorific seonsaeng , but you respond with equally polite language, maintaining a respectful distance. When there’s something they can’t find, it’s you they’ll come to. ‘I’m looking for the documentation from such-and-such a forum in such-and-such a year; I’ve had a look in the records room but there’s only some loose papers. Isn’t there an official booklet containing all the speeches?’ You search your memory, then explain: ‘That particular forum was only arranged at the last minute, so there wasn’t time for a booklet to be produced. The speeches were recorded and then later transcribed, but those transcripts only exist as loose copies. Nothing was ever officially written down.’ Now and then, team leader Park likes to joke: ‘You’re a human search engine, Miss Lim.’

Now Park is standing in the middle of the office, waiting for his documents to print. His sharp eyes scrutinise the contents of your desk. A wad of damp tissue balled up in the ashtray, several cigarette butts, a mug of coffee. The Dictaphone and tapes.

He starts speaking the instant you intercept his probing gaze, as though conscious of the need to excuse himself.

‘You seem to genuinely enjoy your work, Miss Lim. I mean, I look at you and I think: that’s me in twenty years’ time, if I keep on with this line of work …’

You understand that he is thinking of the meagre pay, the laborious, irregular duties which are never sufficiently recompensed, your bony hands with their protruding veins running along the backs. Park is silent for a short while, and there is only the low, impatient whir of the laser printer as it spits out sheets of paper.

‘We’re all curious about you, Miss Lim,’ he resumes, his jovial tone even more pronounced than before. ‘We hardly ever get an opportunity to talk to you … you never have dinner with us after work, and you never let any of us know what you’re thinking.’

Park staples the printed sheets together and returns to his desk. He doesn’t sit down, just fiddles with the computer mouse and then goes back to wait by the printer.

‘I heard you were involved with the labour movement before you came here. Something to do with industrial accidents, wasn’t it? And in the same organisation as Kim Seong-hee, no less. I heard the two of you are quite close.’

‘Not exactly close,’ you answer, conscious of a friendship you can no longer claim. ‘But she was a great help to me. For a long time.’

‘I’m a different generation, so Kim Seong-hee’s the stuff of legend to me. The late 1970s, the last days of the Yushin system and all President Park’s emergency measures — I was raised on those stories. I remembering hearing about that Easter Mass on Yeouido, when Kim Seong-hee leaped up onto the podium, got hold of the CBS mic they were using for the live broadcast and chanted “We are human beings, guarantee labour rights” before she and the rest of her group were dragged away. A bunch of factory girls barely into their twenties. You were there too, weren’t you, Miss Lim?’

Park’s voice is part awed, part earnest. You shake your head.

‘I didn’t have anything to do with that. I wasn’t in Seoul at the time.’

‘Oh, I see … it’s just that I’d heard you spent some time in prison, and I’d always assumed it was because of that. So did the rest of our colleagues.’

The moisture-laden wind is billowing in through the dark window. It strikes you as uncannily like a long inhalation. As though the night is itself some enormous organism, opening its mouth and exhaling a clammy breath. Then breathing back in, the stuffy air trapped inside the office being sucked into black lungs.

Overwhelmed with exhaustion, you bow your head. You spend a few moments peering at the brackish dregs at the bottom of your mug. You raise your head and smile in the way you always do when you cannot think of an appropriate reply. A delicate tracery of wrinkles fans out from the corners of your mouth.