Human Acts(51)

I’ll never understand it. The militia with their faces pale and resolute, did they really have to die? When they were just children, really, just children with guns. And why did they refuse to let me in? When they were going to die such futile deaths, what difference could it possibly have made?

—

After your brothers have come and gone my days seem that much emptier, and I mostly just sit out on the veranda warming myself in the sun. The quarry just beyond the yard’s southern wall might have caused one hell of a din, but at least it meant the place felt nice and open.

We used to live on the other side of the quarry, before we bought this house. The old place was a tiny little slate-roofed affair and could be a bit stuffy, so you and your brothers couldn’t wait for Sundays, when the workers had a day off and the three of you could run riot. The big chunks of granite made it prime territory for hide-and-seek, for shouting “the hibiscus has bloomed” at the top of their voices. I could hear them all the way from where I stood in the kitchen. Such rowdy lads, not that you’d have known it once they had another year or so under their belts; they were quiet as anything then.

When your eldest brother moved to Seoul, we decided it was high time for a change of scene. Jeong-mi and Jeong-dae were both so quiet and unassuming, and it was nice to think that here were some friends for you, with you being so much younger than your brothers. There was something comforting about the sight of you and Jeong-dae heading off to school in your identical uniforms, side by side like two peas in a pod. At the weekends when the two of you played badminton in the yard and the shuttlecock inevitably flew over the wall and onto the building site, your game of rock-paper-scissors to decide which of you would go and fetch it never failed to make me smile.

I wonder what became of Jeong-dae and his sister?

When their father came to Gwangju to search for them and started roaming the streets like a madman, I was in no position to offer comfort to anyone. He quit his job and spent a year sleeping in our annex, hanging around the government offices by day. Whenever he heard that a secret grave had been discovered, or that corpses had risen to the surface of some reservoir, he would spring into action. Didn’t matter if it was the crack of dawn or the middle of the night.

“They’re alive somewhere, I know it. Both of them. They’ll turn up one of these days.”

I can still picture him staggering into the kitchen after one of his benders, muttering to himself like someone who’d lost his mind. His small face and flat nose. Eyes that used to sparkle with mischief just like his son’s, once, before it all went wrong.

He can’t have lasted very long after that. When the bodies were exhumed and moved to new graves, the families of the missing set up small cenotaphs; your middle brother went expressly to look for the two kids’ names, but apparently they weren’t there. If their father had still been alive, surely he would have set up a pair of cenotaphs for them?

Sometimes I wonder whatever possessed us to let the annex out…was it all for such a paltry bit of rent? I think about how if Jeong-dae had never set foot in this house, you wouldn’t have put your own life at risk trying to find him…but then I recall the sound of your laughter on those Sundays when the two of you used to play badminton, and it’s my fault, I’m the only one to blame. I shake my head to try and shake all the bad thoughts out. I’m the one with the mark on my conscience, bearing a grudge against those poor kids. I’m the only one to blame.

How pretty she was…how pretty, I thought, to have vanished without a trace. That lovely young girl stepping into our house with her arms wrapped around the laundry basket, padding across our yard in her sneakers, with her toothbrush dripping water. Such things seem like the dreams of a previous life.

—

The thread of life is as tough as an ox tendon, so even after I lost you, it had to go on. I had to make myself eat, make myself work, forcing down each day like a mouthful of cold rice, even if it stuck in my throat.

I’d known about the meetings for bereaved families for some time, of course, but I’d never shown my face there. When I eventually did go, it was because I’d received a phone call from a woman calling herself their representative. Our military thug of a president is coming here to Gwangju, she told me, that butcher dares to set foot in our city…when your spilled blood had barely had time to dry.

My sleep was shallow and fitful at the best of times, then, but that news plunged me into a fresh bout of insomnia. Your father was equally disturbed, and what with his delicate constitution and gentle nature I thought it best to have him stay at home while I went to the meeting alone. So I went along to the home of the organizer, who ran a rice shop, introduced myself to the other women, and stayed there until late at night making banners and pickets. Finally, the host decided that we should each go back home, as whatever we didn’t have enough of yet could be made just as well there. We shook hands when we said good-bye. We were like scarecrows, shells stuffed with nothing but straw. Our farewells were as hollow as our eyes.

I wasn’t frightened.

Death would have been welcome at that point, so what could there possibly have been to fear? When we met up again the next day, to wait for the butcher’s convoy, we were each wearing white mourning clothes. The day had hardly got started when the bastard really did show up. Our opportunity had come, to hurl slogans like stones with one voice, and all hell broke loose. We went into a frenzy of howling and fainting, tugging at our hair and tearing at our clothes. No sooner had we rolled out our banners than they were snatched away and the whole lot of us were hauled off to the police station. We were just sitting there in a daze until some young people were brought in; they’d formed their own association, of the wounded, and had been demonstrating at a different spot along the convoy’s route. Their faces were sullen when they filed in, until they saw us there.