Human Acts(25)

“Could three of you stay here until the morning?” he asked. “We want to do some street broadcasts overnight, and three’s all we need for that. The rest of you, please go home.”

Of the three who stepped forward, each had been on the side that argued for the women to be given guns as well as the men.

Then the young woman from the cafeteria, the one who’d directed Eun-sook to the first floor, spoke up.

“We want to stay, too. We want to see this through together. That’s why we came here, to be together.”

Thinking back on it afterward, Eun-sook could never quite remember how Jin-su had managed to persuade them. Perhaps because she didn’t want to. She could dimly recall something about how it would tarnish the reputation of the civilian militias if women were left behind in the Provincial Office to die with the men, but she couldn’t be sure whether that argument had actually decided anything for her. She’d thought she’d come to terms with the idea of dying, yet something about death itself, the various forms it might take, still disturbed her. Having seen and handled so many dead, she’d imagined she would have become inured to it all, but on the contrary her fear had increased. She didn’t want her last breath to be a gasp from a gaping mouth, didn’t want translucent intestines spilling out through a gash torn into her body.

Seon-ju was one of the three women who had elected to stay behind. She took a carbine rifle for self-protection, listened to a brief explanation of how to use it, then slung it clumsily over her shoulder. Turning her back on the others without any good-byes, she followed the other two students down to the ground floor. Jin-su addressed the three women.

“You need to get as many people as you can to come out of their homes. As soon as the sun’s up, the whole square in front of the Provincial Office has to be packed with demonstrators. We’ll hold out until then, somehow or other, but by morning we’ll need the support.”

It was around 1 a.m. when the remaining women left the Provincial Office. Along with one other male student, Jin-su led them along the alleyway that fronted Nam-dong Catholic church. At the entrance to the alley, where the street lighting was sparse, he stopped.

“Now spread out. Each of you go and find a house to hide in, any house.”

Had she ever had such a thing as a soul, that was the moment of its shattering. When Jin-su, rifle strap pressing against his sweat-soaked shirt, gave you all a farewell smile. But no, it had already shivered into fragments, when she’d come out of the Provincial Office and the sight of your diminutive frame, more like a child’s than a teenage boy’s, had stopped her in her tracks. Your pale blue tracksuit bottoms, your PE sweater—and then she’d seen the gun you were clutching. “Dong-ho,” she’d called out, “why aren’t you at home?” She marched up to the youth who was explaining to the others how to load a gun. “That kid is still in middle school. You have to send him home.” The young man looked surprised. “He told me he was in the second year at high school; I had no reason not to believe him…we even sent the first-years home just now, but he never said anything.” Eun-sook lowered her voice. “That’s nonsense. Look at his face. And you’re telling me he’s in high school?”

The women waited until Jin-su disappeared around the corner before they began to break up. “Do you know anyone who lives around here?” the student who worked in the cafeteria asked her. She shook her head. “Come with me to Jeonnam Hospital, then. My cousin is a patient there.”

At the hospital the lights in the lobby were all off and the entrance was locked. After the two of them had been banging on the door for a few minutes, a guard came out waving his flashlight at them. He was followed by the head nurse. The tension was evident in both their faces. They’d thought it was soldiers who’d come back.

The corridors and emergency stairs were as dark as the lobby. Guided only by the beam from the guard’s flashlight, they eventually reached the ward where the other woman’s cousin was staying. Here, the blackness was even more intense; sheets had been hung over the windows. Even in the pitch dark, they could sense that the patients and nurses were alert. The other woman left Eun-sook’s side and went over to her aunt. “What are we going to do?” her aunt whispered. “They’re saying that when the soldiers get here, the wounded will all be shot.”

Eun-sook sat down beneath the window, her back against the wall.

“Don’t sit near the window, it’s dangerous.” The speaker was a man who seemed to be the relative of the patient in the neighboring bed. It was too dark for Eun-sook to make out his face. “There was a lot of gunfire the day the soldiers retreated, too—the clothes we’d hung over this window had bullet holes in them. If someone had been standing there, what d’you think would’ve happened to them?”

She shifted away from the window.

One of the patients was in critical condition, his breathing ragged; a nurse came to the ward every twenty minutes to check up on him. Every time the beam from her flashlight arced over the ward like a searchlight, the faces it illuminated were rigid with terror. What are we going to do? Will the soldiers really come into a hospital? If they’re saying the wounded will be shot, shouldn’t we discharge them all as soon as it’s light? It’s barely been a day since your cousin recovered consciousness; what’ll we do if the stitches tear? To each of her aunt’s whispered questions, the student who’d worked in the cafeteria made an even quieter reply. “I don’t know, Aunty.”