Human Acts(13)

You turn around and call back to her: “We’re going to close up here at six, Mum.”

Agitated, she moves from one foot to the other, trying to catch your eye from the other side of the line. You can only see her forehead, its furrows reminding you of a crying baby.

You call again, louder this time: “Once we’ve closed up, I’ll come home. I promise.”

Only then do those furrows smooth out.

“Make sure you do,” she says. “Be back before the sun sets. We’ll all have dinner together.”

—

It’s not been an hour since your mother left when you spot an old man heading slowly in your direction. You stand up. Even from this distance, his old-fashioned brown jacket has clearly seen better days. Dazzlingly white hair protrudes from beneath an ink-black peaked cap, and he leans heavily on a wooden walking stick as he totters forward. After weighting down the scraps of paper with the ledger and pen to stop them from being scattered by the wind, you walk down the steps.

“Who have you come to look for, sir?”

“My son and granddaughter,” he says. He seems to be missing several teeth, which doesn’t exactly help you puzzle out his thick accent.

“I got a lift on a cultivator over from Hwasun. They stopped us in the suburbs, said we couldn’t come into the city, so I found a path over the mountains that the soldiers weren’t guarding. I only just made it.”

He takes a deep breath. The drops of saliva clinging to the sparse white hairs around his mouth are the color of ash. You can’t understand how this elderly man, who finds even flat ground a challenge, managed to get here through the mountains.

“Our youngest boy, he’s a mute…he had a fever when he was little, you see. Never spoke after that. A few days ago, someone who’d fled the city told me the soldiers had clubbed a mute to death, a while ago already now.”

You take the old man by the arm and help him up the steps.

“Our eldest lad’s daughter is renting a room near Jeonnam University while she’s studying, so I went there yesterday evening and it was ‘whereabouts unknown’…the landlord hasn’t seen her for a good few days now, and the neighbors said the same.”

You step into the gym hall and put on your mask. The women wearing mourning clothes are wrapping up the drinks bottles, newspapers, ice bags, and portrait photos in carrying cloths. There are also families arguing back and forth over whether to transfer their coffin to a safe home or just leave it where it is.

Now the old man extricates his arm from yours, declining your offer of assistance. He walks in front, holding a crumpled cloth to his nose. He examines the faces that are exposed one by one. He shakes his head. The rubber-covered gym floor turns the regular clack of his cane into a dull thump.

“What about those over there? Why’re their faces hidden?” he asks, pointing toward the ones with cloths drawn up over their heads.

You hesitate, lips twitching at the deep sense of dread this question never fails to thud into you. You’re waiting for those cotton shrouds, their white fibers stained with blood and watery discharge, to be peeled back; waiting to see again those faces torn lengthwise, shoulders gashed open, breasts decomposing inside blouses. At night, snatching a couple of hours’ sleep hunched up on a chair in the basement cafeteria, your eyes start open at the vivid horror of those images. Your body twists and jerks as you feel a phantom bayonet stabbing into your face, your chest.

You lead the way over to the corner, battling against the resistance embedded deep in your muscles, that feeling of being tugged backward by some kind of huge magnet. You have to lean forward as you walk if you’re to master it. Bending down to remove the cloth, your gaze is arrested by the sight of the translucent candle wax creeping down below the bluish flame.

How long do souls linger by the side of their bodies?

Do they really flutter away like some kind of bird? Is that what trembles the edges of the candle flame?

If only your eyesight was worse, so anything close up would be nothing more than a vague, forgiving blur. But there is nothing vague about what you have to face now. You don’t permit yourself the relief of closing your eyes as you peel back the cloth, or even afterward, when you draw it back up again. You press your lips together so hard the blood shows through, clench your teeth, and think, I would have run away. Had it been this woman and not Jeong-dae who toppled over in front of you, still you would have run away. Even if it had been one of your brothers, your father, your mother, still you would have run away.

You look around at the old man. You don’t ask him if this is his granddaughter. You wait, patiently, for him to speak when he’s ready. There will be no forgiveness. You look into his eyes, which are flinching from the sight laid out in front of them as though it is the most appalling thing in all this world. There will be no forgiveness. Least of all for me.





Our bodies are piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross.

The body of a man I don’t know has been thrown across my stomach at a ninety-degree angle, face up, and on top of him a boy, older than me, tall enough that the crook of his knees presses down onto my bare feet. The boy’s hair brushed my face. I was able to see all of that because I was still stuck fast to my body, then.

They came toward us. Helmets, Red Cross armbands over the sleeves of mottled uniforms, quickly. Working in pairs, they began to lift us up and toss us into a military truck. An action as mechanical as loading sacks of grain. I hovered around my cheeks, the nape of my neck, clinging to these contours so as not to be parted from my body. Strangely, I found myself alone in the truck. There were the bodies, of course, but I didn’t meet any others like me. They were there, perhaps, pressing close in the confines of the truck, but I couldn’t see them, couldn’t feel them. “We’ll meet in the next world,” people used to say. Those words were meaningless now.