Han Kang - Human Acts

Dong-ho, I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.

The boy with the slender neck and thin summer clothes is walking along the snow-covered path that winds between the graves, and I am following behind. The snow has already melted in the heart of the city, but here it lingers. The boy steps into a frozen drift, soaking the bottom of his tracksuit bottoms. Startled by the cold, he turns to look back at me. He smiles, and the smile reaches his eyes.

*

Except that of course, there was no actual encounter among the graves. I simply wrote a note for my sleeping brother, left it on the kitchen table, and slipped out of the apartment in the early hours of the morning. Slung on my backpack, bulging with all the documents I’d gathered during my time in Gwangju, and caught the bus out of the city to the cemetery. I didn’t buy flowers, didn’t prepare fruit or alcohol as offerings. Coming across a box of small candles in the drawer beneath my brother’s kitchen sink, I picked out three along with a lighter, but that was all.

His brother, the science lecturer, said their mother had never truly recovered after the bodies were exhumed from Mangwol-dong in 1997 and reburied in the newly constructed May 18 National Cemetery.

Like the other bereaved families, we waited until the day the fortune teller had suggested as auspicious before we went to exhume the body. When we opened the coffins, it was every bit as gruesome as when we’d closed them. The corpse wrapped up in a plastic sheet, and a bloodstained Taegukgi covering it …all the same, Dong-ho’s remains were in relatively good condition, because we’d been the first ones to dress the body, it hadn’t been left to someone who didn’t know him. So that time, too, we didn’t want to entrust the job to anyone else. We unwound the cotton shroud and polished every one of his bones ourselves. I was worried that the skull would be too much for our mother, so I hurriedly picked it up myself and polished the teeth one by one. Even so, the whole experience clearly shook her to the core. I really ought to have insisted she stay at home.

*

Searching among the snow-covered graves, I finally found his. The Mangwol-dong gravestone, which I’d seen a long time ago, had only had his name and dates inscribed, no photo; they’d had the black-and-white photo from his school’s records enlarged, and put on the new gravestone. Those flanking his all belonged to high-schoolers. I peered at those youthful faces and dark winter clothes in what were presumably middle school graduation photos. The night before, his brother had repeatedly insisted that Dong-ho had been lucky. Wasn’t it lucky that he was shot so he died straight away, don’t you think that was lucky? A strange fever had burned in his eyes as he begged me to agree with him. One of the high-schoolers who was shot next to my brother at the Provincial Office, who’s buried next to him now, when they exhumed him there was a hole right in the middle of his forehead, and the back of his skull was completely missing. He can’t have died straight away, so the soldiers would have shot him again to be sure that they’d finished him off. He told me how the boy’s white-haired father had wept soundlessly, his hand over his mouth.

I opened my bag and took out the three candles. I stood one in front of each boy’s grave, knelt down and lit them. I didn’t pray. I didn’t close my eyes, or observe a minute’s silence. The candles burned steadily. Their orange flames undulating soundlessly, gradually being sucked into the centre and hollowed out. Only then did I notice how incredibly cold my ankles were. Without realising it, I’d been kneeling in a snow drift which covered Dong-ho’s grave. The snow had soaked through my socks, seeping in right through to my skin. I stared, mute, at that flame’s wavering outline, fluttering like a bird’s translucent wing.

Acknowledgements

Of the documents which aided me during the writing of this book, I am particularly grateful to Historical Sources on the Gwangju May Democratic Uprising (Institute on Modern Korean History, Pale Green, 1990), Gwangju, Women (Gwangju Jeonnam Women’s Federation, Humanitas, 2012), We Are Righteous People (film directed by Lee Hye-ran), May Elegy (film directed by Kim T’ae-il), 5.18 Suicides — Psychological Post-mortems (play produced by An Chu-sik). And I am deeply grateful to all of those who shared their private memories and gave me encouragement.