Human Acts(46)

Now


Hunched up in the corner where two rows of chairs meet, hugging your backpack to yourself, you slide into a shallow sleep. Every time some external sound startles you and the fabric of sleep wears thin, the repeated words from Yoon’s e-mail, a pianist hammering the same keys, flicker in your mind’s eye like a cursor blinking on a computer screen. Testimony. Meaning. Memory. For the future.

The nerves threading your eyeballs spark into life, slender as lightbulb filaments, and your eyelids blink open. With the muscles of your face still heavy with drowsiness, you turn to examine the dimly lit corridor, the deep dark beyond the glass door. Again, you experience that moment when the contours of suffering coalesce into clarity, a clarity colder and harder than any nightmare could ever be. The moment when you are forced to acknowledge that what you experienced was no mere dream.

Yoon has asked you to remember. To “face up to those memories,” to “bear witness to them.”

But how can such a thing be possible?

Is it possible to bear witness to the fact of a foot-long wooden ruler being repeatedly thrust into my vagina, all the way up to the back wall of my uterus? To a rifle butt bludgeoning my cervix? To the fact that, when the bleeding wouldn’t stop and I had gone into shock, they had to take me to the hospital for a blood transfusion? Is it possible to face up to my continuing to bleed for the next two years, to a blood clot forming in my Fallopian tubes and leaving me permanently unable to bear children? It is possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up with a pathological aversion to physical contact, particularly with men? To the fact that someone’s lips merely grazing mine, their hand brushing my cheek, even so much as a casual gaze running up my legs in summer, was like being seared with a branding iron? Is it possible to bear witness to the fact that I ended up despising my own body, the very physical stuff of my self? That I willfully destroyed any warmth, any affection whose intensity was more than I could bear, and ran away? To somewhere colder, somewhere safer. Purely to stay alive.

—

Only a portion of the emergency department is visible from where you are sitting, but this is constantly lit by the harsh glare of strip lighting. Someone starts moaning, either a child or a young woman. Impossible to tell. Then the raised voices of a middle-aged couple, most likely the parents. Hasty footsteps, and you see a nurse running.

You shoulder your backpack, stand up, and walk outside. Two ambulances, their emergency lights off, are huddled together beneath a chill light. The wind has lost its clammy warmth. Finally, the heat has abated.

You walk along the tarmac for a while, then step to the side, onto the grass where it is apparently forbidden to tread. You take a diagonal line across the grass, heading for the main building. Your trainer socks leave your ankles exposed, brushed by the tips of the moisture-beaded grass. You inhale deeply, the impending rain bringing out the rich, loamy base notes of the soil. About halfway across the grass, the faces of the two girls slide into your mind. Lying side by side, a banner resting on their chests. Their sleepy faces as they lift the banner up over their heads and put it aside, rise to their feet, and come stepping lightly over the grass. Your throat is dry. There is a bitter taste at the back of your mouth, even though you brushed your teeth only an hour ago. What lies beneath the dark grass, what you are continuing to tread on, seems not soil but fine, sharp splinters of glass.





Up Rising


After that night, I stopped hanging the wet towel on the door handle.

And yet all through that winter, and even in the spring, when the air was no longer so dry and there would have been no need for a wet towel anyway, I continued to hear that sound, seeming to come from just the other side of the door.

Even now, those occasional times when I manage to awake from a sleep that was free from nightmares, I hear it.

Each time, my eyes tremble open and I face out into the darkness.

Who is it?

Who’s there?

Who is coming toward me, and with such soft footsteps?





You Remember


All the buildings have their shutters down.

All the windows are closed and locked.

Suspended above the darkened street, the seventeenth-day moon hangs in the sky like an eyeball formed of ice, peering down on the van you are riding in.

It was mainly the female students who rode around with megaphones to do the street broadcasts. When those with you were completely spent, when they said it felt as though their throats had closed up and could no longer produce anything louder than a whisper, you took over for forty minutes. Brothers and sisters, please turn on your lights. That was the kind of thing you said. Addressing the blind windows, the deserted alleyways. For God’s sake, please just turn on your lights.

—

The reason the soldiers let you ride around broadcasting all day, waiting until the dead of night before forcing your van to a halt and arresting all its occupants, only occurred to you later: they simply hadn’t wanted to expose their movements. The women, the ones who’d been doing the actual broadcasting, were hauled off to the cells at Gwangsan police station, while the man who had been in charge of driving was taken to the military school. You were carrying a gun at the time of your arrest, and so you were kept separate from the other women, and transferred to the custody of the military police.

There, the only name by which you were referred to was “Red Bitch.” Because you used to be a factory girl, and had been involved in the labor union movement. Their script decreed that the four years you’d spent at a dressmaker’s in what they called “a provincial city” had been a mere cover, that you were a spy sent down from the communist North. It was to elicit the confession that would confirm these accusations that they had you lie down on the table in the interrogation room, day after day. Filthy Red Bitch. Scream as much as you like, who’s going to come running? Tube lighting flickered along the ceiling of the interrogation room. Beneath the flat, banal brightness of that perfectly innocuous light, they kept at you until the hemorrhaging had gone on for so long, you were finally released from feeling.