Human Acts(40)

That really did it. The soldiers rushed over to him and started wielding their cudgels in earnest. They beat him so viciously it really did look like they weren’t going to stop until they’d killed him. He seemed to go from thrashing around to completely limp in a single moment. Even his feet had stopped twitching. They splashed a bucket of water over his face and took a photograph. The blood was dripping from his face. Blood and water. The rest of us just held our breath.

That wasn’t the only time something like that happened. We spent three days there, in the main hall inside that building. It didn’t seem like an army place, just an ordinary hall like you’d find in any public building. The soldiers mostly went away during the day, just a couple stayed behind to guard us. I assumed they went back into the city center to crack down on any remaining demonstrators. In the evenings they were drunk by the time they got back to us. Then there’d be another round of disciplinary beatings, and woe betide anyone who did anything other than cower in absolute silence. Anyone who lost consciousness would get kicked into a corner, then the soldier would grab them by the hair and pound their head against the wall. Once they actually stopped breathing, the soldiers would splash water over their face and take a photo, then order them to be stretchered away.

I prayed every night. I don’t mean anything formal; I’d never been a regular at any temple or church. I just asked to be set free from that hell. But they were answered, you see, my prayers were answered. There were around two hundred of us being held captive there, and after three days they released half of us. Including me. At the time we had no idea what was going on, but later on I found out that the army had been about to make a strategic retreat to the suburbs and they thought too many prisoners would just get in the way. They’d chosen who was going to be released purely at random. So it was just blind luck.

We were told to keep our heads down when the truck took us back down the hill, too. But, you know, I was quite young at the time, and I suppose curiosity just got the better of me. I was kneeling right at the very edge of the truck, so if I twisted my neck I could get a look outside through the gap in the sideboards.

I…I’d never dreamed that they’d been keeping us in the university.

The building where we’d been kept was the new lecture hall, just behind the sports ground where me and my friends had used to play football at the weekends. Now, with the army occupying the campus, there were no other signs of human life. The truck itself was rattling along, but otherwise the road was silent as the grave. Then I saw them, lying on a patch of grass by the side of the road. They just looked like they were asleep, at first. Two students in jeans and college sweaters, with a yellow banner laid across their chests as if they’d both been holding up an end. The letters had been done in thick Magic Marker, so I could read it even from inside the truck. END MARTIAL LAW.

It’s really extraordinary how those young women, their faces, ended up scored into my memory so deeply, you know? I mean, I only caught just a fleeting glimpse of them.

But now, each time I fall asleep, and each time I wake up again, I see those faces. Their pale skin, their closed mouths, their legs stretched out straight…it’s so clear, so vivid, it’s like they’re really there. Just like the face of the man with blood dripping from his jaw, his eyes half closed…etched into the insides of my eyelids. Inside, where I can’t get at it. Where I’ll never be able to scrape it off.



Your own dreams are filled with sights that are quite different from the ones haunting this first witness.

At the time, you were more closely acquainted than most with brutalized corpses, yet there have only been a handful of times in the past twenty-odd years when your dreams have been vivid with blood. Rather, your nightmares tend to be cold, silent affairs. Scenes from which the blood has dried without a trace, and the bones have weathered into ash.

The streetlamp’s feeble glow encases it in a lead-gray aureole, but beyond the reach of its light the night is pitch black. It isn’t safe to stray beyond the bounds of this lit place. You do not know what might be lurking in the darkness. But you’ll be all right as long as you don’t move a muscle. You don’t venture outside the circle of light. You merely wait, stiff with tension. Wait for the sun to rise and the outer dark to dissipate. You’ve held out this far, you mustn’t waver now. Safer to keep your feet absolutely still, rather than risk taking a false step.

When you open your eyes, it’s still dark. You get up from your bed and switch on the bedside lamp. This year you will turn forty-two, and there has been only one single period in your entire adult life during which you lived with a man. And you didn’t even manage a year at that. Living alone means there’s no need to consider whether you’ll be waking another person up, so you walk straight over to the door and switch on the light. You switch on all the lights, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the entrance hall, and fill a glass with cold water, your hand trembling only very slightly, and drink.





Now


You rise from your seat at the unmistakable sound of someone turning the door handle. You bend down, slide the dissertation back into the locker, and call out “Who is it?”

You’ve locked the door.

“It’s Park Yeong-ho.”

You walk over to the door, turn the key in the lock, and open it.

“Working at this hour?” you both chorus, and then, as if on cue, burst out laughing.