Han Kang - The Vegetarian

I was beginning to get sick and tired of this stubborn “maternal affection.”

“There’s no stovetop here, is there? I’ll go and see if they have one in the nurses’ room.” She took one of the packets out of her bag and left. Repeatedly winding my tie around my hand and clenching it into a ball, I felt myself get more and more worked up, as the irritation returned that Yeong-ho had briefly appeased. Luckily, a short while later my wife woke up. Only then, when I realized how much better this was than if she’d woken up when I was there alone, did my mother-in-law’s arrival come to seem like a good thing.

My mother-in-law came back, and was the first thing my wife’s eyes fixed on. The older woman’s face was wreathed in smiles from the moment she opened the door, whereas my wife’s expression was difficult to decipher. She’d spent all day lying in bed and now, whether because of the drip or simply due to swelling, her face was practically bloodless, almost as white as milk.

Holding a steaming paper cup in one hand, my mother-in-law grasped my wife’s hand in the other.

“This…” Her eyes welled with tears. “Take this. Ah, look at your face.” My wife obediently took the paper cup. “It’s herbal medicine. They say it strengthens the body. Why, in the old days, back before your marriage, we had the very same medicine made up for you, remember?”

My wife sniffed it and shook her head. “This isn’t herbal medicine.” Her expression cheerless and indifferent, and her eyes filled with something strangely like pity, my wife handed the cup back to her mother.

“It is herbal medicine. Just hold your nose and drink it down quickly.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

“Drink it. This is your mother’s wish. Even the dead get their wishes obeyed, but you’d ignore your own mother’s?”

She held the cup to my wife’s lips.

“Is it really herbal medicine?”

“Of course, I just said so.”

My wife held her nose and took a sip of the black liquid. My mother-in-law was all smiles, exclaiming, “More, drink more!” Her eyes flashed below their wrinkled lids.

“I’ll keep it here and drink it a little later.”

My wife lay back down again.

“What would you like to eat? Shall I buy something sweet to take away the aftertaste?”

“I’m all right.”

All the same, the old woman kept on pestering me to go and find a shop. I refused to be harried into going, and eventually she left the room to find the shop herself. Then my wife pushed her blanket aside and got up.

“Where are you going?”

“The bathroom.”

I picked up the IV bag and followed after her. She hung the bag up inside the toilet and locked the door. And then, accompanied by several groans, vomited up everything in her stomach.

She staggered out of the toilet, trailing the faint smell of gastric juices and the sour tang of semi-digested food. As I hadn’t done it for her, she was forced to pick up her IV bag with her bandaged left hand, but she didn’t hold it high enough and a small amount of blood began to flow back down the tube. Tottering forward, she picked up the bag of black goat her mother had set down by the bed. Her right hand, which clutched the heavy bag, still had the IV needle embedded in it, but she didn’t pay this the slightest bit of notice. Then she left the ward — and I had absolutely no desire to go and find out what she was up to.

After a little while, the door banged loudly enough to make the schoolgirl and her mother frown in disapproval, and my mother-in-law burst in. She had a packet of cookies in one hand, and the paper shopping bag in the other — I could see even at a glance that the black liquid had burst out.

“Mr. Cheong, what on earth were you thinking of, just sitting there like that? Didn’t you guess what that child might have been planning?”

More than anything else, I was strongly tempted just to walk out of the ward and go home.

“You, Yeong-hye, do you know how much this is worth? Would you throw it away? Money scraped together with your own parents’ sweat and blood! How can you call yourself my daughter?”

The moment I saw my wife, bent at the waist, I noticed her red blood trickling backward into the IV bag.

“Look at yourself, now! Stop eating meat, and the world will devour you whole. Take a look in a mirror, go on, tell me what you look like!”

Finally, her high-pitched screeching subsided into low sobs. But my wife merely gazed at the sobbing woman as though she were a complete stranger, and eventually, as if having decided that this performance had gone on quite long enough, got back up onto the bed. She pulled the blanket up to her chest and closed her eyes. Only then did I raise the IV bag, now half full of crimson blood.

—

I don’t know why that woman is crying. I don’t know why she keeps staring at my face, either, as though she wants to swallow it. Or why she strokes the bandage on my wrist with her trembling hands.

My wrist is okay. It doesn’t bother me. The thing that hurts is my chest. Something is stuck in my solar plexus. I don’t know what it might be. It’s lodged there permanently these days. Even though I’ve stopped wearing a bra, I can feel this lump all the time. No matter how deeply I inhale, it doesn’t go away.

Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.

One time, just one more time, I want to shout. I want to throw myself through the pitch-black window. Maybe that would finally get this lump out of my body. Yes, perhaps that might work.

Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.

—

I packed my mother-in-law off in a taxi and when I got back the ward was dark. The schoolgirl and her mother, presumably fed up with all the commotion, had turned off the television and lights a little ahead of time, and drawn their curtain. My wife was sleeping. I lay down awkwardly on the cramped side bed and tried to fall asleep. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to sort this mess out. Only one thing was clear, and that was that this whole affair was bound to cause me no end of trouble.

When I eventually succeeded in falling asleep, I had a dream. In the dream, I was killing someone. I thrust a knife into their stomach with all my strength, then reached into the wound and wrenched out the long, coiled-up intestines. Like eating fish, I peeled off all the squishy flesh and muscle and left only the bones. But in the very instant I woke up, I ceased to remember who it was that I had killed.

It was early in the morning, still dark. Driven by a strange compulsion, I pulled back the blanket covering my wife. I fumbled in the pitch-black darkness, but there was no watery blood, no ripped intestines. I could hear the other patient’s sleeping breath coming in little gasps, but my wife was unnaturally silent. I felt an odd trembling inside myself, and reached out with my index finger to touch her philtrum. She was alive.

—

When I woke up again the ward was already light.

“Goodness, you’ve been sleeping so deeply,” the young girl’s mother said. “You didn’t even wake up when they came and brought the food.” She sounded as though she felt rather sorry for me. I saw the meal tray that had been left on the bed. My wife hadn’t even opened the rice bowl, had left the meal tray untouched, and gone…where? The IV had been pulled out too, and the bloody needle was dangling from the end of the long plastic tube.