Han Kang - Human Acts

You were lying on your side in the yard of the Provincial Office. The force of the gunshot had splayed your limbs. Your face and chest were exposed to the sky, while your knees were pressed against the ground. I could see how you must have suffered in those final moments, from the way you were twisted like that.

I couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t make a sound.

That summer, you were dead. While the blood was still haemorrhaging out of my body, the rot was running furiously through yours, packed into the earth.

What I saw in the photograph saved me. You saved me, Dongho, you made my blood seethe back to life. The force of my suffering surged through me in a fury that seemed it would burst my heart.

NOW

At the entrance to the car park for the main hospital building, the lights are on in the security hut. You peer in at the elderly guard, sleeping the night through with his head tipped back over the top of his swivel chair, his mouth hanging open. A dust-clouded bulb is suspended from the ceiling of the hut. A scattering of dead flies litters the cement floor. The sun will soon be up. It will pulse gradually brighter, glaring fiercely down on the city it holds in its grip. Everything that has lost the life it once had will rapidly putrefy. A foul stench will waft in waves from every alley where rubbish has been dumped.

You remember that hushed exchange between Dong-ho and Eun-sook, all those years ago. Why do they cover corpses with the Taegukgi, Dong-ho had wanted to know, why sing the national anthem? You can’t recall Eun-sook’s answer.

And if he were asking you? If he were asking now? To wrap them in the Taegukgi — we wanted to do that much for them, at least. We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute’s silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.

Twenty years lie between that summer and now. Red bitches, we’re going to exterminate the lot of you . But you’ve turned your back on all that. On spat curses, the abrupt smack of water against skin. The door leading back to that summer has been slammed shut; you’ve made sure of that. But that means that the way is also closed which might have led back to the time before. There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.

UP RISING

I don’t know who the footsteps belong to.

Whether it’s always the same person, or someone different every time.

Maybe they don’t come one at a time. Maybe that’s something they’ve left behind, now, their individual identities merging into a body with only the barest trace of mass, the merest quivered hint at an outer boundary. Countless existences, blurring into vagueness like ink in water.

YOU REMEMBER

Only occasionally, just now and then, you wonder.

Some weekend afternoon when the sun-drenched scene outside the window seems unusually still and Dong-ho’s profile flits into your mind, mightn’t the thing flickering in front of your eyes be what they call a soul? In the early hours of the morning, when dreams you can’t remember have left your cheeks wet and the contours of that face jolt into an abrupt clarity, mightn’t that wavering be a soul’s emergence? And the place they emerge from, that they waver back into, would it be black as night or dusk’s coarse weave? Dong-ho, Jin-su, the bodies which your own hands washed and dressed, might they be gathered in that place, or are they sundered, several, scattered?

You are aware that, as an individual, you have the capacity for neither bravery nor strength.

After the policeman stamped on your stomach, you chose to leave the labour union. After you got out of jail you rejoined Seong-hee for a while in the labour movement, but you went against her advice in transferring to the environmental organisation, which was quite different in character to Seong-hee’s union. Afterwards, you chose not to seek her out again even while knowing how much this would wound her. The Dictaphone and tapes in the backpack which is cutting into your shoulders will, after all this, wind up in the post to Yoon as soon as you can get to the post office on Monday morning. Unused.

But at the same time you know that if a time like that spring were to come round again, and even knowing what you know now, you might well end up making a similar choice to the one you’d made then. Like those times during a primary school dodgeball game when, having nimbly avoided danger thus far, there was no one but you left standing on your team and you had to face up to the challenge of catching the ball. Like the time your feet led you to the square, drawn there by the resonant song of the young women on the bus, even though you knew that armed soldiers were stationed there. Like that final night when they asked who was willing to stay until the end and you quietly raised your hand. We mustn’t let ourselves become victims , Seong-hee had said. We mustn’t let them dismiss us like that . That spring night with the moon’s watchful eye silently bearing witness to the girls gathered on the roof. Who was it who slipped that sliver of peach between your lips? You can’t recall.

NOW

You walk away from the hospital’s main building. The morning’s half-light comes creeping over the grass as you cut back across it. You slide both hands beneath the straps of the backpack, its dragging weight like a lump of iron. Like a child you’re carrying on your back. So perhaps your hands are supporting, comforting, the backpack a baby’s sling.

I’m the one who’s responsible, aren’t I?

You ask this of the blue-tinged darkness undulating around you.

If I’d demanded that you go home, Dong-ho; if I’d begged, while we sat there eating gimbap, you would have done as I asked, wouldn’t you?

And that’s why you’re coming to me now.

To ask why I’m still alive.

You walk, your eyes’ red rims seeming carved with some keen blade. Hurrying back to the bright lights of the emergency department.

There’s only one thing for me to say to you , onni.

If you’ll allow me to.

If you’ll please allow me.

The street lights lining the road which branches off to the funeral hall and the emergency department, the main building and the annex, all switch themselves off at exactly the same time. As you walk along the straight white line which follows the centre of the road, you raise your head to the falling rain.

Don’t die.

Just don’t die.

I followed you as soon as I spotted you, Dong-ho.

You had a good head of steam on, whereas I’m a bit doddery these days. Would I ever catch you up? If you’d turned your head just a little to the side I’d have been able to see your profile, but you just kept going, for all the world as though there was something driving you on.

Middle-school boys all had their hair cut short back then, didn’t they, but it seems to have gone out of fashion now. That’s how I knew it had to be you — I’d know that round little chestnut of a head anywhere. It was you, no mistake. Your brother’s hand-me-down school uniform was like a sack on you, wasn’t it? It took you till the third year to finally grow into it. In the mornings when you slipped out through the main gate with your book bag, and your clothes so neat and clean, ah, I could have gazed on that sight all day. This kid didn’t have any book bag with him; the hands swinging by his sides were empty. Well, he must have put it down somewhere. There was no mistaking those toothpick arms, poking out of your short shirtsleeves. It was your narrow shoulders, your own special way of walking, loping like a little fawn with your head thrust slightly forward. It was definitely you.