Han Kang - The Vegetarian

I groped for my shoes. The ones I’d picked up weren’t a pair, so I had to swap them before I was able to open the front door and go out.

—

…the dog that sank its teeth into my leg is chained up to Father’s motorcycle. With its singed tail bandaged to my calf wound, a traditional remedy Mother insisted on, I go out and stand at the main gate. I am nine years old, and the summer heat is stifling. The sun has gone down, and still the sweat is running off me. The dog, too, is panting, its red tongue lolling. A white, handsome-looking dog, bigger even than me. Up until it bit the big man’s daughter, everyone in the village always thought it could do no wrong.

While Father ties the dog to the tree and scorches it with a lamp, he says it isn’t to be flogged. He says he heard somewhere that driving a dog to keep running until the point of death is considered a milder punishment. The motorcycle engine starts, and Father begins to drive in a circle. The dog runs along behind. Two laps, three laps, they circle around. Without moving a muscle I stand just inside the gate watching Whitey, eyes rolling and gasping for breath, gradually exhaust himself. Every time his gleaming eyes meet my own I glare even more fiercely.

Bad dog, you’d bite me?

Once it has gone five laps, the dog is frothing at the mouth. Blood drips from its throat, which is being choked with the rope. Constantly groaning through its damaged throat, the dog is dragged along the ground. At six laps, the dog vomits blackish-red blood, trickling from its mouth and open throat. As blood and froth mix together, I stand stiffly upright and stare at those two glittering eyes. Seven laps, and while waiting for the dog to come into view, Father looks behind and sees that it is in fact dangling limply from the motorcycle. I look at the dog’s four juddering legs, its raised eyelids, the blood and water in its dead eyes.

That evening there was a feast at our house. All the middle-aged men from the market alleyways came, everyone my father considered worth knowing. The saying goes that for a wound caused by a dog bite to heal you have to eat that same dog, and I did scoop up a mouthful for myself. No, in fact I ate an entire bowlful with rice. The smell of burnt flesh, which the perilla seeds couldn’t wholly mask, pricked my nose. I remember the two eyes that had watched me, while the dog was made to run on, while he vomited blood mixed with froth, and how later they had seemed to appear, flickering, on the surface of the soup. But I don’t care. I really didn’t care.

—

The women stayed behind in the house in order to calm the children down, Yeong-ho saw to my mother-in-law, who had fainted, and my brother-in-law and I took my wife to the casualty department of a nearby hospital. Now no longer in a critical condition, she was transferred to a general two-patient room, and only then did we two men become aware that our clothes were stained with dried blood.

My wife fell asleep with an IV needle inserted into her right arm. The two of us observed her sleeping face in silence. As though some sort of solution were inscribed there. As though, if I only kept on examining her face, I would be able to figure out the answer.

“Could you step outside for a moment?” I asked my brother-in-law. His expression suggested that he had something he wanted to get off his chest, but he limited himself to a noncommittal “all right.” I pulled out won from my pocket, which was all I could find in there, and handed it over.

“Please use this to buy a set of clothes from the store.”

“Me? Ah, my wife will bring me some clean clothes when she comes around later.”

Yeong-ho and his wife showed up that evening, with In-hye. Apparently my father-in-law still hadn’t calmed down. Their mother kept stubbornly insisting on coming to the hospital, but Yeong-ho was adamant that she wasn’t to go anywhere near the place.

“What on earth went on back there?” Yeong-ho’s wife exclaimed. “And right in front of the children…” She must have been crying, as her makeup had run and her eyes were swollen. “Your father went too far, you know. How can he hit his daughter in front of her husband? Has he always been like this?”

“Of course, he’s always been quick-tempered,” In-hye admitted. “Haven’t you seen how Yeong-ho takes after him? But still, now he’s older it’s not so bad…”

Yeong-ho looked put out. “Why are you putting the blame on me?”

“Though after all,” In-hye continued, ignoring him, “Yeong-hye refused to say a single word to him, so he was bound to get upset, you know — I mean, she is his daughter…”

“Force-feeding her meat was certainly taking it too far, but what made her decide to stop eating it in the first place? And then why the knife? I’ve never seen such a thing in all my life. However will she look her husband in the face?” Yeong-ho’s wife looked still half in shock.

While In-hye was examining my wife, I changed into her husband’s T-shirt and went to the sauna upstairs. I washed off the black congealed blood under the shower’s lukewarm stream of water. I looked at myself in the mirror, frowning. The whole affair made my flesh crawl. It just didn’t seem real. Right then, thinking about my wife didn’t cause me shock or confusion so much as an intense feeling of disgust.

After In-hye had gone home, the only people left in the general ward aside from my wife and me were a schoolgirl who’d been admitted with a ruptured intestine, and her parents. They kept on darting sideways glances at me while I stood watch at my wife’s bedside, and I could see perfectly well that they were whispering together. But any minute now this long Sunday would be over and Monday would begin, which meant I would no longer have to look at this woman. I expected that Yeong-ho would take my place, and that the day after tomorrow my wife would be discharged. Discharged — in other words, I would once again have to live with this strange, frightening woman, the two of us in the same house. It was a prospect I found difficult to contemplate.

At nine o’clock the next evening I visited the ward. Yeong-ho greeted me with a smile.

“You must be tired, no?” he said.

“How are the children?”

“Ji-woo’s dad’s staying with them today.”

If only my colleagues had decided to go for drinks after work, I would have had the perfect excuse to avoid the ward for another two hours. But it was Monday, so there was no chance of any such reprieve.

“How’s my wife been?”

“She’s just been sleeping. You can see that without having to ask. She ate what they gave her…it seems she’s going to be okay.”

Yeong-ho was clearly trying to be considerate, and he did manage to soothe my sharp mood a little. A short while after he left, and just as I was thinking to myself that I ought to loosen my tie and freshen up, someone knocked on the door of the ward.

To my surprise, it was my mother-in-law.

“I’m so ashamed to face you,” she began babbling as soon as she came near me.

“There’s no need for that. How are you?”

She took a deep breath.

“Well, you see how it is with old age, the slightest shock…” She’d brought a shopping bag with her, which she now thrust at me.

“What’s this?”

“Something I prepared before we came up to Seoul. You waste away after months without meat, it seems, so…eat this together, the two of you. It’s black goat. I was afraid that if In-hye and her husband found out they might try and stop me from coming. Try feeding it to Yeong-hye, just tell her it’s herbal medicine. I put a load of medicinal stuff in to mask the smell. She’s become such a scrawny thing, just a ghost, and now what with losing all that blood…”