Han Kang - The Vegetarian

—

Had they run away from home that evening, as Yeong-hye had suggested, would it all have been different?

At the family gathering that day, if she’d been more forceful when she grabbed their father’s arm, before he struck Yeong-hye in the face, would it all have been different then?

And what about when she first took Yeong-hye to be introduced to her future husband, Mr. Cheong? He’d come across as somewhat cold; she hadn’t taken to him at all. What would have happened if she’d acted on instinct and refused to let the marriage go forward?

There’d been a time when she could spend hours like this, weighing up all the variables that might have contributed to determining Yeong-hye’s fate. Of course it was entirely in vain, this act of mentally picking up and counting the paduk stones that had been laid out on the board of her sister’s life. More than that, it wasn’t even possible. But she couldn’t stop her thoughts from running on to her ex-husband.

If only she hadn’t married him.

He called her, just once. It was around nine months ago, and close on midnight. Perhaps he’d been calling from somewhere far away, because there was a brief lag after the sound of the coin tumbling.

“I want to see Ji-woo.” His oh-so-familiar voice, low and tense — she could tell he was struggling to sound composed — was like a blunt knife stabbing her in the chest. “Couldn’t you let me see him, just one time?”

So that was what he’d called to say. Not to say he was sorry. Not to beg for her forgiveness. Only to talk about the child. He didn’t even ask whether Yeong-hye was all right.

She’d always known how sensitive he was. A man whose self-esteem was so easily wounded, who quickly became frustrated if the situation didn’t go his way. She knew that if she refused him this one more time, it would probably be a very long time before he contacted her again.

Even though she was aware of this, no, because she was aware of it, she hung up without answering.

A public telephone booth in the middle of the night. Worn-out sneakers, shabby clothes. A despairing face, no longer young. She shook her head, trying to erase those images from her mind. Whenever she thought of him now, those thoughts were quietly overlaid with the way he’d looked when he tried to throw himself over the railing of Yeong-hye’s veranda, trying to fly like a bird. All those scenes of flight he’d included in his videos; and yet, when he needed it most, such flight had proved beyond him.

“I don’t know you,” she muttered, tightening her grip on the receiver, which she’d hung back in the cradle but was still clutching. “So there’s no need for us to forgive each other. Because I don’t know you.”

When the phone rang again she pulled out the cord. The next morning she connected it up again but, as she’d predicted, he didn’t call again.

—

Time passes.

Now Yeong-hye’s eyes are closed. Is she sleeping? Can she smell the fruit her sister put to her lips just now?

In-hye looks at Yeong-hye’s prominent cheekbones, her hollow eyes, her sunken cheeks. She feels her sister’s ragged breath. She gets up and walks over to the window, where the dark gray of the sky is gradually lightening, the landscape growing brighter at the edges. The light touches upon Mount Ch’ukseong’s forest, rekindling its summer colors. The place where Yeong-hye was discovered that night must be somewhere over on that slope.

“I heard something,” Yeong-hye had said, lying hooked up to the drip. “I went there because I heard something calling me…I don’t hear it anymore now…I was just standing there waiting.”

When In-hye asked, “What were you waiting for?” a fever came into Yeong-hye’s eyes. Her right hand was the one with the needle in it; she reached out with her left and grabbed In-hye’s hand. In-hye was shocked by how strong her grip was.

“It melted in the rain…it all melted…I’d been just about to go down into the earth. There was nothing else for it if I wanted to turn myself upside down again, you see.”

Hee-joo’s excited tone jolts In-hye out of these memories.

“What can we do about Yeong-hye? They’re saying she might die.”

To In-hye, Hee-joo’s words sounded like the deafening roar of a plane taking off.

—

There is one memory that In-hye has never been able to tell anyone else about, and probably never will.

April two years ago. The spring of the year when her husband made that video of Yeong-hye. In-hye had bled from her vagina for close on a month, on and off. She’d never been able to understand why, but for some reason every time she washed her blood-soaked pants she would recall the way in which the blood from Yeong-hye’s wrist had spurted out into the air. Every day she decided she would go for a medical examination the next day, then when the next day came she would postpone it again. She was afraid of going to the hospital. If it was a serious disease, how much time might she have left? A year. Six months. Or three months. For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she’d so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted.

On the morning when she’d finally mustered the courage to go to the obstetrics and gynecology department, the one where Ji-woo had been born, she’d stood on the open-air platform at Wangsimni Station and waited for the train, which was taking an unusually long time to arrive. Opposite the platform was a row of temporary buildings, their steel structures now decaying, and wild grasses straggling up between the sleepers on the edges over which no trains passed. The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her success had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn’t understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.

She’d fought down her feeling of shame and managed to stop trembling before getting up onto the bed. The middle-aged male doctor then pushed a cold abdominal scope deep into her vagina and removed a tongue-like polyp that had been stuck to the vaginal wall. Her body flinched away from the sharp pain.

“So this is why you’ve been bleeding. Well, it came away cleanly, so the bleeding should start to lessen in a few days, and then stop altogether. Your ovaries are completely fine, so there’s nothing for you to worry about there.”

There wasn’t even a scrap of happiness that she could glean from this. Instead of a serious illness, a possibility that had caused her no end of worry over the past month, it had been nothing but a minor niggle. Back on the platform at Wangsimni, it wasn’t only the pain from the operation that caused her legs to tremble. When the train eventually roared into the platform, she staggered behind one of the metal chairs and hid herself, afraid that something inside her would make her throw herself in front of the solid mass of the train.

How to explain the four months or so that followed on from that day? The bleeding continued for around another two weeks, then the cut healed and it stopped. But she felt as though there were still an open wound inside her body. Somehow, it seemed this wound had in fact grown bigger than her, that her whole body was being pulled into its pitch-black maw.