Han Kang - The Vegetarian

“I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.”

—

“Thank you so much for all your trouble,” In-hye tells the head nurse. “I really appreciate it.” She holds out the rice cakes she’s brought and greets the other nurses in turn. While she makes her usual inquiries regarding Yeong-hye’s condition, a female patient in her fifties who has mistaken her for a nurse hurries over from the window and gives her a shallow bow.

“My head hurts; please tell the doctor to change my medication.”

“I’m not a nurse. I’m here to see my sister.” The woman stares deep into In-hye’s eyes.

“Please help me…my head hurts so much I can’t go on. How can I live like this?”

Just then a male patient in his twenties comes and presses himself against In-hye’s back. It’s a common enough occurrence in the hospital, but it makes her nervous all the same. The patients pay no mind to conventional ideas about personal space, or it being rude to stare at other people. On the one hand, there are many of them whose utterly blank gazes indicate minds shut up in their own private worlds, but then again there are also a certain number who appear so lucid one could easily mistake them for members of the medical staff. Yeong-hye had been one of the latter kind, once.

“Nurse, why on earth doesn’t anyone ever do anything about that guy?” a familiar female patient in her thirties shouts at the head nurse, her tone aggressive. “I mean, you know perfectly well how he’s always hitting me!” The woman’s persecution mania seems to get worse every time In-hye visits.

In-hye bows to the nurses again.

“I’ll just go and have a talk with my sister.” Judging by the nurses’ expressions, they are all well and truly fed up with Yeong-hye. Clearly, none of them is holding out any hope that In-hye’s attempts at persuasion will have the slightest effect. She threads her way out carefully between the patients, taking care not to brush against them. She walks down the eastern corridor outside Yeong-hye’s ward. The door to the ward is open, and when she enters, a woman with her hair cropped short comes up to her.

“Ah, you’re visiting today?”

The woman is Hee-joo, who is receiving treatment for alcoholism and hypomania. Her body is stout but her round eyes give her a sweet look, and her voice is always somewhat hoarse. In this hospital, the patients who are in good control of their faculties look after those with more acute psychological problems, and receive a little pocket money in return; when Yeong-hye had grown difficult to manage, refusing point-blank to eat, she had come under the care of Hee-joo.

“Thanks for all your trouble,” In-hye says, and is about to force out a laugh when Hee-joo’s slightly damp hand clasps her own.

“What can we do?” Hee-joo says, her round eyes filling with tears. “They’re saying Yeong-hye might die.”

“How has she been?”

“Just now she vomited some blood. She doesn’t eat, so her stomach acid is eating away at her stomach, and she constantly has these convulsions. And now this bleeding too?” Hee-joo grows ever closer to the brink of tears. “When I first began to look after her she wasn’t like this…perhaps she might have been okay if I’d taken better care of her, do you think? I didn’t know she would end up like this. Perhaps this wouldn’t be happening to her if I hadn’t been put in charge of her.”

Hee-joo is working herself up, so In-hye releases her hand and slowly approaches the bed. If only one’s eyes weren’t visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one’s eyes from the world.

Yeong-hye is lying very straight on the bed. At first she looks as though she is gazing out of the window, but on closer inspection she actually isn’t looking at anything at all. Barely any flesh remains on her face, neck, shoulders and limbs. In-hye notices the hair growing on her sister’s cheeks and forearms, fine but unusually long, like the faint down that babies often have. The doctor had explained that this was due to Yeong-hye’s hormonal balance being disturbed, something that happens after a long period of starvation.

Is Yeong-hye trying to turn herself back into a preadolescent? She hasn’t had her period for a long time now, and now that her weight has dropped below thirty kilos, of course there’s nothing left of her breasts. She lies there looking like a freakish overgrown child, devoid of any secondary sexual characteristics.

In-hye lifts up the white bedsheet. She turns the completely unresisting Yeong-hye over and checks that no bedsores have appeared on her coccyx or back. The area that had been inflamed last time still hasn’t got any better. In-hye allows her gaze to rest on the clear, pale blue Mongolian mark imprinted in the middle of her buttocks, which are now wasted away to the bone. The image of those flowers, which had spread out from that mark like bleeding ink, covering Yeong-hye’s whole body, flickers briefly, dizzyingly, in front of In-hye’s eyes.

“Thank you for everything, Hee-joo.”

“Every day I wash her with a wet towel, and powder her skin too; it’s this damp weather that won’t let it heal.”

“Thank you so much.”

“I used to need one of the nurses to help me give her a bath; now she’s so light I can lift her easily on my own. It really is like caring for a baby. Anyway, I was hoping to give her a bath today as well; I heard you’re moving her to a different hospital, so this would be the last time…” Hee-joo’s big eyes turn red again.

“All right, let’s give her a bath together in a little while.”

“Yes, the hot water comes on at four…” Hee-joo wipes her bloodshot eyes, one after the other.

“All right, then I’ll see you in a bit.”

In-hye nods to Hee-joo as the latter leaves, then covers Yeong-hye back up with the sheet, adjusting it to make sure that her sister’s feet aren’t sticking out. In-hye checks for burst veins and finds them everywhere; on both hands, the soles of both feet, even her elbows. The only means of providing Yeong-hye with proteins and glucose is the IV, but now there are no undamaged veins left where a needle could be put in. The only other way would be to link the IV to one of the arteries that run over Yeong-hye’s shoulders. Yesterday, the doctor phoned In-hye to explain that, as this requires a dangerous surgical operation, Yeong-hye would have to be transferred to the general hospital. They’d tried on numerous occasions to get some gruel into Yeong-hye by inserting a long tube into her nose, but this had always ended in failure as Yeong-hye had simply closed up her gullet. They would try this method one last time, today, but if this too failed then Yeong-hye would no longer be able to remain in their care.

Three months ago, just after Yeong-hye had been found in the forest, when In-hye had arrived at reception on the scheduled visiting day, she’d been told that Yeong-hye’s doctor wanted to meet with her. This made her anxious, as she hadn’t spoken with him since Yeong-hye had first been admitted.

“We know that it disturbs her psychologically if she sees a side dish containing meat, so we’ve been taking extra care to make sure this doesn’t happen. But now she won’t even come down to the lobby at mealtimes, and even if we bring a meal tray up to the ward, she won’t eat. It’s already been four days. She’s started to become dehydrated. And, since she becomes violent every time we try to put in a drip…well, I’m not sure we can even give her the medicine properly anymore.”

In fact, the doctor doubted whether Yeong-hye had been taking her medication at all. He even blamed himself for not being as vigilant as he should have been, after things had initially seemed to be going well. Just that morning, the nurse had been asked to check that Yeong-hye took her medicine, but apparently Yeong-hye hadn’t listened when she’d been told to stick out her tongue. When the nurse then forced her tongue up and used a flashlight to look inside, the tablets were still there.