Human Acts(37)

And you want me to explain this photo, professor?

But how? Where to even begin?

The people in the photo are dead, they’ve been shot, their blood is all over the ground. It’s in the yard in front of the Provincial Office. One of the foreign journalists must have taken the photo. No Korean reporters were allowed in, you see.

Ah, I know what must have happened—he must have found it in some photo collection and clipped it out. There were plenty of those collections circulating at the time; you must have seen one yourself, no?

And now you want me to guess why Kim Jin-su kept this photo with him until the very end, why it was found with his suicide note?

You want me to tell you about these dead kids, professor? Like felled trees, lying in such an unnaturally straight line.

What right do you have to demand that of me?

—

We kept our faces pressed into the corridor carpet for as long as the soldiers ordered us to. Around dawn, they hauled us to our feet and took us down to the yard. They made us kneel in a line, our backs to the walls, with our hands tied behind us. An officer came over. He’d worked himself up into quite a state. His combat boots thudded into our backs, driving our heads down into the dirt, while he spat out a string of curses. “I was in Vietnam, you sons of bitches. I killed thirty of those Vietcong bastards with my own two hands. Filthy fucking Reds.” Kim Jin-su was kneeling next to me. The officer stamped on his back, grinding his face into the gravel. When he let him back up, I saw slender threads of blood clinging to Jin-su’s forehead.

That was when five of the younger boys came down from the second floor, holding their hands above their heads. Four of them were high-school students. When the army first began to pepper the building with indiscriminate machine-gun fire, lit by flares as bright as the noonday sun, I’d ordered them to hide in the conference room’s cupboard. The fifth was Dong-ho, the middle-schooler who’d had that brief argument with Kim Jin-su. They’d waited until the sound of gunfire could no longer be heard, then put down their weapons and come out to surrender. All as Jin-su had told them to do.

“Look at these bastards!” the officer yelled. He was practically frothing at the mouth. “Want to surrender, do you, you fucking Reds? Want to save your precious skins?” With one foot still up on Kim Jin-su’s back, he raised his M16, took aim, and fired. The bullets tore into those school kids without hesitation. My head inadvertently jerked up, and when he whooped in the direction of his subordinates, “As good as a fucking movie, right?” I saw how straight and white his teeth were.

Now do you understand? The kids in this photo aren’t lying side by side because their corpses were lined up like that after they were killed. It’s because they were walking in a line. They were walking in a straight line, with both arms in the air, just like we’d told them to.

—

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered—is this the essential fate of humankind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?

I once met someone who was a paratrooper during the Busan uprising. He told me his story after hearing my own. He said that they’d been ordered to suppress the civilians with as much violence as possible, and those who committed especially brutal actions were awarded hundreds of thousands of won by their superiors. One of his company had said, “What’s the problem? They give you money and tell you to beat someone up, then why wouldn’t you?”

I heard a story about one of the Korean army platoons that fought in Vietnam. How they forced the women, children, and elderly of one particular village into the main hall, and then burned it to the ground. Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times, when committing such actions in wartime had won them a handsome reward. It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia, and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.

Every day I examine the scar on my hand. This place where the bone was once exposed, where a milky discharge seeped from a festering wound. Every time I come across an ordinary Monami Biro, the breath catches in my throat. I wait for time to wash me away like muddy water. I wait for death to come and wash me clean, to release me from the memory of those other, squalid deaths, which haunt my days and nights.

I’m fighting, alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

So tell me, professor, what answers do you have for me? You, a human being just like me.





You Remember


She told you that the moon was called “the eye of the night.”