Han Kang - Human Acts

While all this was going on, I was busy riding the bus in Suyuri. When I returned home and opened the front gate, I bent down to pick up the evening edition of D newspaper. Crossing the long, narrow yard, I read the lead article. GWANGJU IN STATE OF ANARCHY FOR FIFTH DAY. Blackened buildings. Trucks filled with men wearing white bandannas. The atmosphere inside the house was both subdued and unsettled. They’re not working, the phones still aren’t working. Mum kept on trying to put a call through to her family, who lived near Daein market.

As it turned out, none of my relatives died; none were injured or even arrested. But all through that autumn in 1980, my thoughts returned to that tiny room at one end of the kitchen, where I used to lie on my stomach to do my homework, that room with the cold paper floor — had the boy used to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I’d heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?

After loitering near the site of the home fixtures store now occupying the site of my family’s old house, I eventually stepped inside. The proprietor, a woman in her fifties wearing a lilac jumper, looked up from her newspaper.

‘Can I help you, love?’

Having left this city when I was still young, for me its dialect was inextricably associated with my family; now that I was back, it stirred up an oddly discomfiting pathos to find perfect strangers reminding me of family members.

‘There used to be a hanok on this spot …when did this building go up?’ Just as I’d been thrown by the woman’s dialect, so she seemed unsettled by mine, and the air of friendly camaraderie dissipated.

‘You were hoping to visit the previous inhabitants?’ she responded, having switched to scrupulously formal Seoul speech. I said yes; any other answer would have been too complicated. ‘That house was demolished the year before last.’ The woman’s voice was completely flat. ‘There was an old woman living there alone; after she died her son decided there was no way he could rent out such an old house, so he had it pulled down. This current building is only temporary. We signed a lease for two years, and after that we’ll leave.’

I asked if she’d met the old woman’s son in person.

‘When we signed the contract, yes. Apparently he’s a lecturer at one of the big cram schools. All the same, the pay can’t be that good if he could only afford to put up a temporary building like this, could it?’

After I left the shop, I walked along the main road for some time before stopping to hail a taxi. The driver took me to this study institute which the woman had mentioned, and I flicked through the brochure until I found the staff photos. It wasn’t difficult to identify the boy’s older brother: a middle-aged science lecturer with thick-lensed glasses. He was wearing a brown tie with a white shirt, and his hair was streaked with grey.

*

‘I can maybe spare thirty minutes,’ he said, when we spoke on the phone later that day, ‘if you come to my classroom tomorrow at five thirty, but that’s all. I hope you understand. Sometimes the students rush their dinner so they can turn up early; in that case, even thirty minutes might not be possible.’

That night, I walk down into the subway in front of the scaffolded Provincial Office and emerge on the other side of the street. Pounding music spills out into the night-time streets, neon signs blaring as I walk against the flow of the crowd all the way to the after-school study institute, a big one specifically for cramming for the university entrance exams. I head to the information desk on the ground floor. My gaze skims over the brochures displayed there, the colour leaflets advertising public lectures, the timetable for private courses.

I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to finish the previous class early; in fact it went on longer than usual.

Please have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?

Yes, I knew the previous owner was one of Dong-ho’s teachers.

I hadn’t realised you would know our story.

To be honest, I was in two minds about the whole thing. At first I was worried that I didn’t have anything to say, that it would be awkward to meet like this. But then I thought, what would my mother have done if she were still alive?

Well, I’ll tell you: she would have agreed to meet you without a second’s thought. She would have sat you down and made you listen to Dong-ho’s story all the way through to the end. You wouldn’t have been able to stop her if you’d tried. She lived thirty years with those words inside her. But I’m not like her, I can’t dredge the past up again the way she would have.

Permission? Yes, you have my permission, but only if you do it properly. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again.

In the small guest room near the front door, where my brother has rolled out a spare mattress and bedding for me, I spend the night tossing and turning. Every time I manage to fall asleep I find myself back in those night-time streets, in front of the study institute. Strapping high-school boys, the kind the fifteen-year-old Dong-ho never managed to become, jostle me with their broad shoulders. Please, write your book so that no one will ever be able to desecrate my brother’s memory again. I walk with my right hand placed over the left side of my chest, as though cradling my heart. Shadowed faces swim out of the street’s dark. The face of the murdered. And of the murderer, who had thrust his dream-bayonet into my shattered chest. His blank eyes.

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

He was really ticklish, you see.

All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.

At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt …

But then he would turn bright red and laugh.

Just as there were some soldiers who were especially cruel, so there were others who were especially non-aggressive.

There were paratroopers who carried the wounded on their backs all the way to the hospital and set them down on the steps before hastening back to their posts. There were soldiers who, when the order was given to fire on the crowd, pointed the barrels of their guns up into the air so they wouldn’t hit anyone. When the soldiers formed a wall in front of the corpses lined up outside the Provincial Office, blocking them from the view of the foreign news cameras, and gave a rousing chorus of an army song, there was one of their number who kept his mouth conspicuously shut.

Even the civil militia, the ones who stayed behind in the Provincial Office, displayed an attitude that wasn’t dissimilar. The majority of them were willing to carry guns but, when push came to shove, couldn’t actually bring themselves to fire them. When asked why they stayed behind when they knew they were staring defeat in the face, the surviving witnesses all gave the same answer: I’m not sure. It just seemed like something we had to do.

I’d been mistaken when I’d thought of them as victims. They’d stayed behind precisely to avoid such a fate. When I think of those ten days in the life of that city, I think of the moment when a man who’d been lynched, almost killed, found the strength to open his eyes. The moment when, spitting out fragments of teeth along with a mouthful of blood, he held his failing eyes open with his fingers so he could look his attacker straight in the face. The moment when he appear ed to remember that he had a face and a voice, to recollect his own dignity, which seemed the memory of a previous life. Break open that moment and out of it will come massacre, torture, violent repression. It gets shoved aside, beaten to a pulp, swept away in the tide of brutality. But now, if we can only keep our eyes open, if we can all hold our gazes steady, until the bitter end …