Human Acts(24)

She gave the room a thorough going-over with a damp cloth, making sure to get into all the nooks and crannies. But even after washing the cloth, hanging it up, and going back to sit at her desk, the nighttime stubbornly lingered. She didn’t read anything, just tried to sit there quietly, and hunger began to creep up on her. She went and filled a bowl with some of the early-ripening rice that her mother had prepared for her, then brought it back to her desk. As she silently chewed the grains of rice, it occurred to her, as it had before, that there was something shameful about eating. Gripped by this familiar shame, she thought of the dead, for whom the absence of life meant they would never be hungry again. But life still lingered on for her, with hunger still a yoke around her neck. It was that which had tormented her for the past five years—that she could still feel hunger, still salivate at the sight of food.

“Can’t you just put it behind you?” her mother had asked, that winter when she’d failed the university entrance exams and confined herself to the house. “This is hard on me, you know. Just forget about what happened, then you can go off to university like everyone else, earn a living and meet a nice man….It’d be such a weight off my shoulders.”

Not wanting to be a burden, Eun-sook had resumed her studies. She applied for a place at a university in Seoul, as far away from Gwangju as possible. Of course, Seoul was hardly a safe haven. Plainclothes policemen were a permanent feature of campus life, and students who fell foul of them were forcibly enlisted in the army and sent to the DMZ. The situation was so precarious that meetings frequently had to be called off. Life was a constant skirmish. The central library’s glass windows were smashed from the inside so that banners could be hung from them. DOWN WITH THE BUTCHER CHUN DOO-HWAN. Some students even went so far as to secure a rope to one of the pillars on the roof, knot it around their waist, and then jump off. It was a tactic to gain time while the plainclothes policemen would be occupied in racing up to the roof and hauling up the rope. Until this happened, the student dangling at the end would scatter flyers and yell slogans, while down below in the square fronting the library thirty to forty fresh-faced students of both sexes formed a scrum and sang songs. Not once did they get to the end of a single song; the crackdown was always too rapid, too brutal for that. Whenever Eun-sook witnessed such a scene, always from a distance, it was a safe bet that she would have an unquiet night ahead of her. Even if she did manage to fall asleep, a nightmare would soon jerk her awake.

It was in June, after the first end-of-term exams, that her father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which left him paralyzed down his right side. Her mother got work as a pharmacy assistant, becoming the breadwinner of the family. Eun-sook took a leave of absence from university. During the day she looked after her father, then when her mother got home from work she headed out to her own part-time job, packaging and selling at a downtown bakery until they closed their doors at 10 p.m. She would be able to snatch a few scant hours of sleep before getting up with the sun and preparing packed lunches for her two younger siblings. She returned to university when the year’s turning saw her father regain enough movement to be able to feed himself, but only managed a single term before she had to drop out again to earn the fees for the following term. After scraping through the second year in this on-off fashion, she finally gave up on the idea of graduating. When her professor recommended her for the publishing job, she took it.

For her mother this was all a source of regret, but she herself thought differently. Regardless of their financial situation, she knew she would never have been able to graduate. Rather, she would have ended up ineluctably drawn into that scrum of students. There, surrounded by those youthful faces, she would have held out for as long as possible. Being left as the sole survivor would have been the most frightening thing.

—

It wasn’t as though she’d had her mind set solely on surviving.

After she went home that day and changed into a clean set of clothes, she’d slipped back out of the main gate without her mother knowing. Night was beginning to fall by the time she got back to the municipal gym. The entrance was closed and there was no one to be seen, so she went to the Provincial Office. The complaints department was also deserted. Aside, that is, from several rotting corpses, which were giving off a foul miasma. They looked just as they had when she and Seon-ju had handled them; perhaps the civilian militias hadn’t had time to transfer them all to the gym, and these had been left behind.

In the lobby of the annex she finally found some other people. One of the university students she’d seen working in the cafeteria called out to tell her that the women were all supposed to go up to the first floor.

When Eun-sook went up the stairs and stepped into the small room at the end of the corridor, the women were in the midst of a heated debate.

“We have to be given guns, too. This fight needs everyone it can get.”

“We’ll only hand out guns to those who really want them. Who’ve resolved to see this through.”

She spotted Seon-ju sitting at the end of the table, resting her chin in her hand. When Eun-sook went and sat down next to her, Seon-ju flashed her a quick smile. As ever, the latter was economical with her words, but when the debate came to a close she calmly announced that she was for the side that wanted guns.

It was around eleven o’clock at night when Jin-su knocked on the door. This was the first time any of them had seen him carrying a gun, and the sight was somewhat incongruous alongside the wireless radio he was never without.