Han Kang - Human Acts

‘The church aunties were handing these out, so I thought I might as well get some.’

You hadn’t even realised you were hungry; now you tear off the plastic wrapper and cram the sponge cake into your mouth. Eun-sook peels the lid off the yoghurt and hands it to you.

‘I’ll stay here for now; you can go home and change. If anyone was going to come, they would have been and gone by now.’

‘No, you go, I barely got wet,’ you say, mumbling around a mouthful of sponge cake. You swallow the cake and gulp the yoghurt down.

‘This place doesn’t have the home comforts of the Provincial Office, you know,’ Eun-sook says delicately. ‘And it’s hard work you’ve been doing …’

You blush; you know you stink of sweat. Whenever you go to wash your hands in the tiny annex bathroom you always try to give your hair a quick wash too. The putrid smell seems to have soaked into your skin, so at night you even splash the cold water over your whole body, teeth chattering and sneezing violently; now it seems you might as well not have bothered.

‘I heard at the assembly that the army are coming back into the city tonight. If you go home, stay there. Don’t try and come back tonight.’

Eun-sook draws up her shoulders, and the hairs escaping from her braids tickle the nape of her neck. You watch in silence as her fingers smooth her wet hair and pluck at her sweater. Her face, which had had a chubby cuteness to it when you first saw her, has grown gaunt in the space of a few days. You fix on her eyes, which have become hollow and shadowed, and think, whereabouts in the body is that bird when the person is still alive? In that furrowed brow, above the halo-like crown of that head, in some chamber of the heart?

You cram the last of the cake into your mouth and pretend you hadn’t heard what Eun-sook just said about the army.

‘What’s a bit of sweat?’ you say. ‘It’s people who’ve got drenched from the rain who ought to go and change.’

Eun-sook fishes another yoghurt out of her pocket.

‘This was supposed to be for Seon-ju … Take your time with this one, don’t just wolf it down. No one’s going to snatch it out of your mouth!’

You accept it greedily, peel back the lid with your fingernail and grin.

Seon-ju, unlike Eun-sook, isn’t the kind to creep up on you undetected and quietly put a hand on your shoulder. As she walks over, she’s still several metres away when she calls your name in her clear, strong voice.

‘No one came?’ she asks, as soon as she’s near enough not to have to shout. ‘You’ve just been here on your own?’ She plonks herself down on the steps next to you and thrusts a roll of foil-wrapped gimbap in your general direction. You pinch a piece between your fingers and pop it into your mouth while Seon-ju stares out at the gradually lessening rain.

‘So you still haven’t found your friend?’ The question is blurted out without any preamble, and you need a moment before shaking your head in reply. ‘Well,’ Seon-ju continues briskly, ‘seeing as you’ve not had any luck so far, the soldiers have probably buried him somewhere.’ You rub your chest; the dry chunk of seaweed-wrapped rice seems suddenly difficult to get down. ‘I was there too, you see. That day. The soldiers picked up those who got shot close to them and loaded them into a truck.’ You wait for the rush of words to continue, but there doesn’t seem to be any more.

‘You’re soaked,’ you say. ‘You should go home and change. Eun-sook’s gone already.’

‘What for? Once we start work again this evening we’ll be sweating buckets.’ Seon-ju folds and refolds the empty aluminium foil until it’s down to the size of a little finger, gripping it in her fist as she watches the rain coming down. Her profile makes her look composed and resolute, and a question bubbles up inside you.

Will those who stay behind today really all be killed?

You hesitate, and think better of voicing these thoughts. If it looks like that’s what’s going to happen, surely they should all clear out of the Provincial Office and go and hide at home. How come some leave and others stay behind?

Seon-ju flicks the scrap of foil in the direction of the flower bed, examines her empty hand, then scrubs vigorously at her tired-looking eyes, her cheeks, her forehead, even her ears.

‘I can’t keep my eyes open. Maybe I’ll just nip to the annex … find a comfy spot on one of the sofas and snatch a quick nap. I can dry my clothes while I’m at it.’ Seon-ju laughs, revealing her compact front teeth. ‘I’m leaving you all alone again, poor old Dong-ho!’

Perhaps Seon-ju is right; perhaps the soldiers took Jeong-dae away and buried him somewhere. On the other hand, though, your mother’s still convinced that he’s being treated at some hospital, that the only reason he hasn’t been in touch is that he’s still not regained consciousness. She came here with your middle brother yesterday afternoon, to persuade you to come home. When you insisted that you couldn’t go home until you’d found Jeong-dae, she said, ‘It’s the ICU you ought to be checking. Let’s go round the hospitals together.’

She clutched the sleeve of your uniform.

‘Don’t you know how shocked I was when people said they’d seen you here? Good grief, all these corpses; aren’t you scared?’

‘The soldiers are the scary ones,’ you said with a half-smile. ‘What’s frightening about the dead?’

Your middle brother blanched. Your brother, the straight- A student who’d spent his childhood studying as though nothing else existed, only to make mistake after mistake in the university entrance exams. He was currently on his third try. He took after your father with his broad face and thick beard, making him look much older than his nineteen years. By contrast, your eldest brother, a ninth-grade civil servant in Seoul, is much more delicately built — you could almost call him pretty. When he comes back down to Gwangju during the holidays and the three of you are together, it’s your middle brother whom everyone mistakes as the eldest.

‘Paratroopers from the Special Warfare Command, with their tanks and machine guns — you really think they’re quaking in their boots at the thought of a bunch of civilians who only have clapped-out rifles that haven’t been fired since the war? You think that’s why they haven’t re-entered the city? They’re just biding their time and waiting for orders from higher up. If you’re here when they return, you’ll be killed.’

You take a step back, worried he’s going to give you a clip around the ear.

‘What reason do they have to kill me?’ you say. ‘I’m just lending a hand with a couple of things, that’s all.’ You wrench his arms away and shake free of your mother’s clinging hands. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just finish helping out and then I’ll come home. After I’ve found Jeong-dae.’

You run inside the gymnasium, waving awkwardly over your shoulder.

The sky, which has been gradually clearing up, is dazzlingly bright all of a sudden. You stand up and walk round to the right-hand side of the building. The square is practically empty now the crowd have dispersed. There are only the bereaved left, monochrome figures clustered near the fountain in groups of two and three. The bereaved, and a handful of men transferring the coffins from beneath the rostrum onto a truck. Squinting, trying to make out individual faces, your eyelids tremor in the face of this harsh smack of light. Minute spasms travel down to the muscles in your cheeks.

There wasn’t a scrap of truth in what you told Eun-sook and Seon-ju, that first day at the Provincial Office.

In that same square you’re looking at now, where hordes of people gathered to demonstrate, from old-timers in their fedoras to boys of twelve and women carrying colourful parasols, that day when they loaded the corpses of two men who had been shot in front of the train station into a handcart and pushed it at the very head of the column, it wasn’t a neighbour who caught that last glimpse of Jeong-dae, it was you yourself. And it wasn’t as though you just caught sight of him from a distance; you were close enough to see the bullet slam into his side. At first the two of you were hand in hand, excitedly making your way to the front. Then the earsplitting sound of gunfire tore through the afternoon and everyone was pushing and shoving, trying to run back the way they’d come. Someone shouted, ‘It’s okay, it’s just blanks!’, one group tried to push back to the front again, and Jeong-dae’s hand slipped from yours in the turmoil. Another deafening cannonade of shots, and Jeong-dae toppled over onto his side. You took to your heels and fled. You pressed yourself up against the wall of an electrical goods store, next to the lowered shutter. There were three older men there with you. Another man, who seemed to be part of their group, was running over to join them when a spray of blood suddenly erupted from his shoulder and he fell flat on his face.