Human Acts(33)

Even when the soldiers stormed up the stairs and emerged toward us out of the darkness, none of our group fired their guns. It was impossible for them to pull the trigger knowing that a person would die if they did so. They were children. We had handed out guns to children. Guns they were not capable of firing.

—

I found out later that the army had been provided with eight hundred thousand rounds that day. This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred thousand. In other words, they had been given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city twice over. I genuinely believe that, if something had come up, the commanding officers would have issued the order for the troops on the ground to do just that. If we’d all done as the student representatives said, piled our guns in the lobby of the Provincial Office and attempted a clean surrender, we would have run the risk of the soldiers turning those same weapons on unarmed civilians. Every time I recall the blood that flowed in the small hours of that night—literally flowed, gushing over the stairs in the pitch dark—it strikes me that those deaths did not belong solely to those who died. Rather, they were a substitute for the deaths of others. Many thousands of deaths, many thousands of hearts’ worth of blood.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see blood silently seeping from people I’d been speaking with mere moments before. Unable to tell who had died and who survived, I lay prone in the corridor, my face pressed into the floor. I felt someone write on my back with a magic marker. Violent element. Possession of firearms. That was what someone else informed me was written there, afterward, when they threw us into the cells at the military academy.

—

Those who hadn’t been carrying a gun at the time of their arrest were classified as mere accomplices, and were released in batches up until June, leaving only the so-called violent elements, those who had been caught in possession of firearms, still in the military academy. That was when the program of torture entered a different phase. Rather than brutal beatings, our captors now chose more elaborate methods of inflicting pain, methods that would not be too physically taxing for them. “Hairpin torture,” where both arms were tied behind the back and a large piece of wood inserted between the bound wrists and the small of the back; waterboarding; electric torture; the method known as the “roast chicken,” which involved trussing the victim with ropes and suspending them from the ceiling, where they were then beaten while being spun around. Before, they’d tortured us in order to extract the particulars of actual crimes. Now, all they wanted was a false confession, so that our names could be slotted neatly into the script they had already devised.

Kim Jin-su and I continued to receive a single tray and share its scant meal between us. It took an enormous feat of will to put what we’d experienced a few hours ago in the interrogation room behind us and wield our spoons in stony silence, fighting the temptation to scrap like animals over a grain of rice, a shred of kimchi. There was one man who knocked his meal tray over and screamed, I can’t take any more of this! What’s going to happen to me if you shovel the whole lot down yourself? As he grappled with his partner, a boy pushed between them and stuttered, D-don’t do that. I was taken aback; this was the first time I’d ever seen that quiet, shy-seeming kid open his mouth.

W-we were r-ready to die, you know.

It was then that Kim Jin-su’s empty gaze rose to meet mine.

At that moment, I realized what all this was for. The words that this torture and starvation were intended to elicit. We will make you realize how ridiculous it was, the lot of you waving the national flag and singing the national anthem. We will prove to you that you are nothing but filthy stinking bodies. That you are no better than the carcasses of starving animals.

—

The boy with the stutter was called Yeong-chae. It was a name Kim Jin-su pronounced frequently in the afternoons following that initial altercation. In the ten or so minutes after the meal, which was when the guard tended to relax his vigilance, he would address the boy in a soft, friendly tone. You must be hungry, Yeong-chae, no? Kim Yeong-chae, where’s your family from? I’m a Gimhae Kim, too. Which branch? You’re fifteen, right, well then, no need for honorifics with me. I’m only four years older than you at the most. I don’t look my age, do I? Oh, well, all right. Call me uncle, then. We’re distant relatives, after all.

From listening in to their conversation, I learned that the boy hadn’t continued his education beyond middle school, and was learning carpentry at his uncle’s woodworking shop. He’d joined the civilian militia to follow in the footsteps of this uncle’s son, who was two years older; this cousin, to whom he’d always looked up, had been killed that final night at the YMCA. I-I l-like to eat sp-sponge cake the best. W-with S-sprite. Yeong-chae’s eyes stayed dry while he told the story of his dead cousin, but when Jin-su asked him what his favorite food was, he had to scrub at them with his fists. With his right fist, that is. His left remained in his lap. I stared at it, at the cotton wool poking out from between those clenched fingers.

—

I was constantly racking my brain.

Because I wanted to understand.

Somehow or other, I needed to make sense of what I’d experienced.

Watery discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left to me. No, that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only “me” there was.