Human Acts(39)

After finishing his speech, he paused.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

Whenever you take a phone call, you habitually make a note of any numbers that come up in the course of the conversation. On the memo pad next to you were the digits 10, 8, 2, 7.

“There were several women who were taken into custody at the time, but I’ve had trouble tracking down an appropriate witness. Even in cases where they were willing to provide a testimony, it was too brief, too simple. Anything painful was just skimmed over…please, do me this favor. I need you, Lim Seon-ju, to be the eighth witness for this book.”

This time you didn’t ask for time to think about it.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.” Your voice betrayed no emotion.

A few days later, though, Yoon sent a parcel to the office. Inside were the tape recorder and blank tapes that you are looking at now, and a letter. His handwriting was such a scrawl that it was difficult to make out the words, but you struggled through to the end. I understand that you’d prefer not to meet me in person, but might you be able to record your testimony instead and send the tapes to me? His business card was attached to the bottom of the letter with a paper clip.

You reseal the letter to make it look as though it has never been opened, and put it into your locker. The dissertation is still there, from when you filed it away all those years ago; you take it out and peruse it with care, reading through each of the transcripts included in the appendix. Twice. Once your colleagues have all gone out to lunch, the office is quiet. Before they return, you put the dissertation back exactly where you found it and close the locker securely, as though wanting to hide from yourself the fact that you’ve read it.





Up Rising


How strange.

—

Only the sound of dripping water; yet I remember it as though someone really did come to my door.

—

That winter night, it seemed as though those imagined footsteps that caused a knot of pain inside me were the stuff of waking reality, while the damp floor and the dripping towel were the substance of a dream.





Now


You insert the cassette into the Dictaphone.

Your name will be kept anonymous, Yoon had written. Any names of people or places that might enable someone reading to identify you will be assigned a randomly chosen initial. Recording your testimony this way, not only do you get to avoid a face-to-face meeting, but what’s particularly convenient is that you can erase any parts you want to, whenever you like, and rerecord them until you’re happy.

Still, you don’t press down on the “record” button. Instead, you run your fingers carefully over the smooth plastic corners of the device, as though checking for a flaw in the design.

—

By coincidence, voice recordings are precisely what you deal with in this office, every day.

Your job is to transcribe the recordings of informal gatherings and forums, to categorize photographs of certain events, along with reports, trials, and testimonies—anything relating to environmental issues—and file them in the record room. For events of particular importance, you produce three or four versions from the original camcorder film, edited depending on what the footage might later be used for. These exercises are time-consuming and monotonous, and not especially distinguished. They are tasks that require you to spend the majority of your time alone. Your workload is, of course, heavier than that of your colleagues, but this isn’t a problem for you; you’re used to working evenings and weekends. Rather than being given a monthly salary, you get paid per job. The amount you’re able to earn this way doesn’t even cover basic living costs, but the financial situation was even worse at the labor organization.

Over the ten years you’ve been working at your current job, the killings that you spend your days archiving have all been slow and drawn out. Radioactive elements with long half-lives. Additives that either needed to be banned or had been banned already but were still being used illegally. Toxic industrial waste, agricultural chemicals, and fertilizers that cause leukemia and other cancers. Engineering practices that destroy the ecosystem.

The tape recordings that Yoon has in his possession will deal with a different world altogether.

You imagine the office of this man whose face you have never seen. You imagine the tapes that will be lined up on his shelves. Each with a name and date, scrawled on its white label in his sloppy handwriting. You imagine the deaths that will be imprinted along the tape’s smooth, brown belt, the living voices that will speak them: a world of guns, bayonets, and cudgels; sweat, blood, and flesh; wet towels, drill bits, and lengths of iron piping. Nothing slow about such deaths.

You put the Dictaphone back down on the desk, bend over, and open your locker. You pull Yoon’s dissertation out and turn to the page where the first transcript begins.


They made us keep our heads bowed the whole time, so we had no idea which direction the truck was heading.

We could tell when we were going uphill though, and when the truck eventually stopped and they dragged us out we’d clearly come a fair way out of the city. There was a building, but I couldn’t tell what kind of building it was. Then they started with the “disciplinary beatings”—you know, like they do in the army, only far worse. Kicking us, swearing at us, hitting us with the butts of their rifles. I remember one of us, a plump man in his forties, snapped and started yelling. “Just kill me and have done with it!”