Human Acts(47)

Around a year after you got out of there, you saw Seong-hee again. You went to the Industrial Mission Church to ask after her whereabouts, got in contact, and arranged to meet at a noodle place in Guro-dong. Listening to your story, she seemed surprised.

“It never even occurred to me that you might be in prison. I just presumed you were living quietly somewhere, trying to put the past behind you.”

Repeated stretches either in prison or on the run, arrested and later released only to be pursued again for further acts of agitation, had left Seong-hee’s cheeks so sunken she was barely recognizable as the same person. She was twenty-seven when you met her then, and could easily have passed for ten years older. She stayed silent for a while, as the steam rose from her cooling noodles.

“Jeong-mi disappeared that spring; did you know?” This time you are the one to look surprised. “I heard she helped out with the union for a while. We were blacklisted, of course, so she quit her job at the factory before they had the chance to lay her off. After that, I didn’t hear anything more…in fact, I only recently heard about her disappearing. The woman who told me used to attend night classes with her when they both worked at a textiles factory in Gwangju.”

You stare, mute, at the shapes formed by Seong-hee’s mouth. As though your mother tongue has been rendered opaque, a meaningless jumble of sounds.

The words you are struggling for refuse to come. You can’t even remember the girl’s face with any clarity. The effort to remember is wearing you out. Fragments surface momentarily, only to disappear from whence they came. Pale skin. A compact set of small white teeth. I want to be a doctor.

Nothing else.





Up Rising


I went back to Gwangju to die.

For a little while after I got out of prison my older brother let me stay with him out in the countryside, but the police had his address on file, and their twice-weekly visits were too much for me.

One morning in early February, when the sun hadn’t yet come up, I put on the smartest clothes I had, packed a bag with a few basic necessities, and went out to catch one of the intercity buses.

At first glance the city looked as though it hadn’t changed a jot. But it didn’t take me long to see that, actually, nothing was the same anymore. There were bullet holes in the outer wall of the Provincial Office. The people moving through the streets in their somber clothes all had something twisted about their faces, as though they were contorted with transparent scars. I walked among them, my shoulders jostling theirs. I didn’t get hungry, didn’t get thirsty, and my feet didn’t get cold either. It seemed like I could have gone on walking that whole day through, all through the night until the sun came up.

That was when I saw you, Dong-ho.

I was looking at the photos some students had recently pinned up on the wall of the Catholic Center on the main road leading to the Provincial Office.

The police were a constant menace. Even then, I was aware that one of them might be hiding nearby, watching me. I hurriedly pulled down one of the photos, rolled it up tight, and clenched it in my fist. I crossed the main street and disappeared down an alleyway. There was a sign for a music café, so I hastened up the stairs to the fifth floor, took a seat in the cavernous room, and ordered a coffee. I sat there stock-still until the waiter had set my coffee down in front of me and left me alone. The acoustics were excellent in such a large space, yet I was hardly aware of a single note. It was like being submerged in deep water. Eventually, once I was sure that I was completely alone, I unclenched my fist and smoothed out the photograph.

You were lying on your side in the yard of the Provincial Office. The force of the gunshot had splayed your limbs. Your face and chest were exposed to the sky, while your knees were pressed against the ground. I could see how you must have suffered in those final moments, from the way you were twisted like that.

I couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t make a sound.

That summer, you were dead. While the blood was still hemorrhaging out of my body, the rot was running furiously through yours, packed into the earth.

What I saw in the photograph saved me. You saved me, Dong-ho, you made my blood seethe back to life. The force of my suffering surged through me in a fury that seemed it would burst my heart.





Now


At the entrance to the car park for the main hospital building, the lights are on in the security hut. You peer in at the elderly guard, sleeping the night through with his head tipped back over the top of his swivel chair, his mouth hanging open. A dust-clouded bulb is suspended from the ceiling of the hut. A scattering of dead flies litters the cement floor. The sun will soon be up. It will pulse gradually brighter, glaring fiercely down on the city it holds in its grip. Everything that has lost the life it once had will rapidly putrefy. A foul stench will waft in waves from every alley where rubbish has been dumped.

You remember that hushed exchange between Dong-ho and Eun-sook, all those years ago. Why do they cover corpses with the Taegukgi, Dong-ho had wanted to know, why sing the national anthem? You can’t recall Eun-sook’s answer.

And if he were asking you? If he were asking now? To wrap them in the Taegukgi—we wanted to do that much for them, at least. We needed the national anthem for the same reason we needed the minute’s silence. To make the corpses we were singing over into something more than butchered lumps of meat.