Human Acts(29)

As Eun-sook stares transfixed at this scene unfolding, her own lips twitch without her knowing. As though in imitation of the actors, she calls out a silent name, the sound dying heavy in her throat. Dong-ho.

The young man at the back of the procession turns around, still bent double, and snatches the skeleton out of the boy’s grasp. Passed from one dangling hand to another, the skeleton eventually reaches the old woman at the head of the procession, her back so bent that it resembles the letter ?. Hanks of gray-streaked hair falling down around her face, she clasps the skeleton in a tight embrace as she mounts the steps to the stage. The woman in white and the man in hemp, who have been standing up there all the while, quietly move aside to let her pass.

Now the only moving figure is that of the old woman.

Her footsteps are so incredibly slow, they barely disturb the air around them, while an abrupt cough from the audience seems an intrusion from another world. As though this is the trigger, the boy starts out of his stasis, leaping up onto the stage in a single bound and pressing himself against the old woman’s bent back. Like a child being given a piggyback, like the spirit of someone dead. So close, it’s impossible to say whether or not they are touching.

Dong-ho.

Eun-sook bites down on her lip, hard, as multicolored streamers flutter down from the ceiling onto the stage. Scraps of silk on which funeral odes are written. The actors gathered in front of the stage abruptly straighten up. The old woman stops in her tracks. The boy, who had been inching along behind her, turns to face the audience.

Eun-sook closes her eyes. She does not want to see his face.

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, so my life became a funeral.

After you were wrapped in a tarpaulin and carted away in a garbage truck.

After sparkling jets of water sprayed unforgivably from the fountain.

Everywhere the lights of the temple shrines are burning.

In the flowers that bloom in spring, in the snowflakes. In the evenings that draw each day to a close. Sparks from the candles, burning in empty drinks bottles.



Scalding tears burn from Eun-sook’s open eyes, but she does not wipe them away. She glares fiercely at the boy’s face, at the movement of his silenced lips.





It was a perfectly ordinary pen, a black Monami Biro. They spread my fingers, twisted them one over the other, and jammed the pen between them.

This was the left hand, of course. Because I needed my right hand to write the report.

It was just about bearable, at first. But having that pen jammed into the exact same place every day soon rubbed the flesh raw, and a mess of blood and watery discharge oozed from the wound. Later on it got bad enough that you could actually see the bone, a gleam of white amid the filth. They gave me some cotton wool soaked in alcohol to press against it, but only then, only once the bone was showing through.

There were ninety other men in the cell with me, and more than half had that selfsame bit of cotton wool stuck there between their fingers. You weren’t allowed to talk to each other. Your eyes would just flick down to that scrap of cotton wool then up to meet the other man’s gaze, but only for a split second. That was enough to acknowledge the mark you shared. No need to linger.

I’d assumed they’d give the wound time to heal up once it had got into that state. I was wrong. I got to know a new pain instead, when the cotton wool was removed and the pen jammed back between the fingers, mashing that raw meat to a pulp.

—

There were five cells in total, laid out in a kind of fan shape. In the central area on the other side of the bars, the soldiers with their guns could keep watch over all five cells at the same time. When they first shoved us in and locked the doors behind us, not a single one of us dared to ask where they’d brought us. Even the kids from high school knew enough to keep their mouths shut. We stayed silent, avoided each other’s eyes. We needed time to process what we’d experienced that morning. A scant hour’s worth of silent despair, that was the last grace left to us as humans.

—

That black Monami Biro would be there on the table every time I went into the interrogation room. Lying in wait. The first stage in a sequence which unfolded exactly the same way every time, the whole process seemingly designed to hammer home a single fact: that my body was no longer my own. That my life had been taken entirely out of my hands, and the only thing I was permitted to do now was to experience pain. Pain so intense I felt sure I was going to lose my mind, so horrific that I literally did lose control of my body, pissing and shitting myself.

Once the sequence had been brought to its usual conclusion, the questions began. The voice that asked the questions was never anything other than calm and composed, but whatever answer I made would inevitably bring the same result: a rifle butt to the face. I couldn’t fight the instinct that made me shrink back against the wall and shield my head with my arms, even though that only ever made things worse. When I fell down, they stamped on my back with their army boots. Only until I was just on the point of losing consciousness; then they would flip me over, and trample my shins instead.

—

Once you were told to leave the interrogation room and go back to your cell, you might be forgiven for thinking that you’d be able to relax, to let your guard down a bit. But that would be a mistake.

We had to sit on the floor of the cell for hours at a time, shoulders and back ramrod straight. Eyes front, too, directly at the window. The sergeant would bark out a warning if your gaze even threatened to stray from those iron bars, and one older guy actually had a cigarette stubbed out on his eyelids as an example to the rest of us. One of the high-school kids inadvertently scratched his neck, once; him, they beat until he lost consciousness and went as limp as a rag doll.