Han Kang - The Vegetarian

That day back then, as Yeong-hye lay there in the ward with the drip needle inserted into the back of her hand, In-hye asked her, “Why did you do it? What were you doing in those dark woods? Wasn’t it cold? What would you have done if you’d caught something, something serious?” Yeong-hye’s face was terribly haggard, and her uncombed hair was matted like seaweed. “You have to eat. I understand you not eating meat if you don’t like it, but why won’t you eat other things now either?”

Yeong-hye’s lips twitched almost imperceptibly. “I’m thirsty,” she whispered. “Give me some water.” In-hye went and fetched some from the lobby. After she’d had a drink, Yeong-hye let out a shallow sigh and asked, “Did you talk to the doctor, sister?”

“Yes, I did. Why—”

Yeong-hye cut her off. “They say my insides have all atrophied, you know.” In-hye was lost for words. Yeong-hye moved her emaciated face closer to her sister. “I’m not an animal anymore, sister,” she said, first scanning the empty ward as if about to disclose a momentous secret. “I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight.”

“What are you talking about? Do you really think you’ve turned into a tree? How could a plant talk? How can you think these things?”

Yeong-hye’s eyes shone. A mysterious smile played on her face.

“You’re right. Soon now, words and thoughts will all disappear. Soon.” Yeong-hye burst into laughter, then sighed. “Very soon. Just a bit longer to wait, sister.”

—

Time passes.

Outside the window, the rain looks to be coming down less heavily than before. The raindrops on the mosquito netting appear undisturbed, so perhaps the rain actually stopped a little while ago.

In-hye sits down in a chair by Yeong-hye’s bedside, opens her bag and gets out various containers of different sizes, all tightly sealed. She opens the lid of the smallest container first. A sweet fragrance spreads through the humid air of the ward.

“It’s a peach, Yeong-hye. A tinned Hwangdo peach. You like them, remember? You used to insist on buying them even when fresh peaches were in season, just like a child.” She carves off a piece of the ripe, yielding fruit with a fork and brings it up to Yeong-hye’s nose. “Smell that…don’t you want to try a bit?” The next container is filled with watermelon, cut up into conveniently sized cubes. “Don’t you remember, when you were young, every time I cut a watermelon in half you would come and smell it? With some of them, when we cut them up they gave off this wonderful sweet smell that spread through the whole house.”

Yeong-hye remains entirely motionless.

In-hye gently rubs a piece of melon against her sister’s lips. She tries to use two of her fingers to part Yeong-hye’s lips, but her mouth is shut tight.

“Yeong-hye,” In-hye says. Her voice is low. “Answer me, Yeong-hye.” She shakes her sister by her stiff shoulders, and resists the temptation to force her mouth open. She wants to yell right into her sister’s ear: What are you doing? Are you listening to me? Do you want to die? Do you really want to die? Dazed, she examines the hot anger that is boiling up inside her like spume.

—

Time passes.

In-hye turns her head and looks out of the window. The rain seems finally to have stopped, but the sky is still overcast, the wet trees still silent. The densely wooded slopes of Mount Ch’ukseong stretch far into the distance. The huge forest blanketing those slopes is as silent as everything else.

She gets a thermos flask out of her bag and pours Chinese quince tea into the stainless steel cup.

“Try some, Yeong-hye. It’s infused really well.”

She brings it to her own lips first and takes a sip. The taste that lingers on the tip of her tongue is sweet and fragrant. After pouring some of the tea onto a hand towel, she uses it to moisten Yeong-hye’s lips. There is no response. “Are you trying to die?” she asks. “You’re not, are you? If all you want to do is become a tree, you still have to eat. You have to live.” She stops speaking. Her breath catches in her throat. A suspicion that she hasn’t wanted to acknowledge has finally raised its head. Might she have been mistaken? Might it be precisely that, death, which Yeong-hye is after, which she has been after from the first?

No, she repeats silently. You’re not trying to die.

Before Yeong-hye stopped speaking for good, around a month ago, she had said, “Sister, please let me out of here.”

She would often break off mid-sentence, perhaps because she found it difficult to keep talking for a long time, and her speech was mingled with the rasping sound of her breathing.

“People are always telling me to eat…I don’t like eating; they force me. Last time I threw it up…yesterday as soon as I’d eaten they gave me an injection to put me to sleep. Sister, I don’t like injections, I really don’t like them…please let me out. I don’t like being here.”

In-hye had held Yeong-hye’s wasted hand and said, “But you can’t even walk properly anymore. It’s only now that you’ve got this IV that you’re managing to keep going…If you come home, will you eat? If you promise to eat I’ll get you discharged.” She couldn’t fail to notice how the light went out of Yeong-hye’s eyes then. “Yeong-hye. Answer me. All you need to do is promise.”

Yeong-hye twisted away from her sister. “You’re just the same,” she whispered, her voice barely audible.

“What are you talking about? I…”

“No one can understand me…the doctors, the nurses, they’re all the same…they don’t even try to understand…they just force me to take medication, and stab me with needles.”

Yeong-hye’s voice was slow and quiet, but firm.

In-hye couldn’t hold herself back any longer. “You!” she yelled. “I’m acting like this because I’m afraid you’re going to die!”

Yeong-hye turned her head and stared blankly at In-hye, as though the latter were not her sister but a complete stranger. After a while, the question came.

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”

—

Why, is it such a bad thing to die?

A long time ago, she and Yeong-hye had got lost on a mountain. Yeong-hye, who had been nine at the time, said, “Let’s just not go back.”

At the time, In-hye hadn’t understood what she meant. “What are you talking about? It’ll get dark any minute now. We have to hurry up and find the path.”

Only after all this time was she able to understand why Yeong-hye had said what she did. Yeong-hye had been the only victim of their father’s beatings. Such violence wouldn’t have bothered their brother Yeong-ho so much, a boy who went around doling out his own rough justice to the village children. As the eldest daughter, In-hye had been the one who took over from their exhausted mother and made a broth for her father to wash the liquor down, and so he’d always taken a certain care in his dealings with her. Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father’s temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

Could I have prevented it? Could I have prevented those unimaginable things from sinking so deep inside of Yeong-hye and holding her in their grip? She saw her sister again, as a child, her back and shoulders and the back of her head as she stood alone in front of the main gate at sunset. The two of them had eventually made it down off the mountain, but on the opposite side from where they’d started. They’d hitched a ride on a power tiller back to their small town, hurrying along the unfamiliar road as darkness fell. In-hye had been relieved, but not her sister. Yeong-hye had said nothing, only stood and watched the flaming poplars kindled by the evening light.