Human Acts(52)

“Even the mothers are here, too?” one youth wailed, tears streaming down his face. “What crime have they committed?”

In that instant, everything inside my head got blanked out. It was blindingly white, as though the whole world had been painted white. I hitched up my torn skirt and clambered up onto the table.

My voice sounded so much smaller than usual. “That’s right,” I stammered, “what crime have I committed?”

I jumped down, dashed over to the desk opposite, and scrambled up before anyone had time to blink, the hem of my white skirt fluttering at my ankles. There was a photo of the murderer hanging on the wall—I pulled it down and smashed the glass with my foot. Something splattered across my face—tears, or maybe blood.

The blood kept spurting from my foot, so the policemen had to take me off to the hospital. Your father came to the emergency department after they’d let him know I was there. While the nurse removed the shards of glass from my foot and bandaged the wound, I asked him to do me a favor. “Please go home and look in the wardrobe. There’s a banner I made last night but didn’t bring with me today.”

Around sunset that same day I hobbled up the stairs that led out to the hospital roof, leaning on your father’s shoulder for support. I steadied myself against the railing, unfurled the banner, and screamed. Chun Doo-hwan, you murdered my son. Let’s tear that bloodthirsty butcher to pieces. I carried on screaming until the police came charging up the emergency stairs, seized hold of me, carried me back down to one of the wards, and bundled me into a bed.

We met up frequently after that, determined to carry on the fight. Each time we mothers parted, we clasped hands and brushed shoulders, peering into each other’s eyes as we made arrangements to meet again. We even took up a collection so that those who were having trouble making ends meet could afford to hire a bus to go to a meeting in Seoul. One time, some good-for-nothing bastards chucked a smoke grenade inside our bus and one of us collapsed, choking. When the riot police arrested us and forced us into one of those vans with chicken wire over the windows, they pulled over at a secluded spot by the highway and made one of us get out, then drove on for a while before evicting someone else…those bastards made sure we were well scattered. I trailed along the side of the road for what felt like an age, completely disoriented. I hadn’t the faintest clue where I was. Until finally I stumbled across one of the other women, her lips tinged blue like mine, and we chafed each other’s numbed hands.

We made a firm pact to carry on the fight until the end, but the following year your father got ill and I couldn’t keep my promise. Watching him facing death that winter, I was bitter. It’s all right for you, you’ll soon be out of it. I’m the one who’s being left behind, alone in this hell.

But I don’t have a map for whatever world lies beyond death. I don’t know whether there, too, there are meetings and partings, whether we still have faces and voices, hearts with the capacity for joy as well as sorrow. How could I tell whether your father’s loosening grip on life was something I ought to pity, or to envy?

Winter passes, and spring comes round again. Spring sends me into my usual delirium; summer brings exhaustion and an illness I find difficult to shake off. By the time autumn sets in it’s as much as I can do just to keep breathing. And then in winter, of course, my joints stiffen up. The ice that penetrated deep into my bones, into my heart, never leaves me. However sweltering the summer, I never shed a single drop of sweat.

—

My Dong-ho, I was thirty when I had you. My last-born. My left nipple had been a strange shape for as long as I could remember, and both of your brothers had favored its properly formed partner. My left breast would still swell with milk, of course, but because they refused to suckle from it, it hardened in a way that was completely different from the soft right breast. It was unsightly, a cross I had to bear for several years. But with you, everything was different. You latched on to the left breast of your own free will, your tiny mouth pulling at that deformed nipple with an astonishing gentleness. And so both breasts developed identical soft contours.

My Dong-ho, I never knew a baby could look so happy to be breastfeeding. Or the yellow feces filling the cloth nappy to have such a strangely sweetish scent. You crawled all over the place like a puppy, and there wasn’t a thing on earth that you wouldn’t put in your mouth. Then there was the time you ran a fever and your face puffed up; you had convulsions and vomited a mess of sour milk onto my chest. After you were weaned, you sucked your thumb with such intensity that the nail wore thin and transparent as paper. You wobbled toward me one step at a time as I clapped and chanted, Here you come, here you come. Seven chuckling steps until I could fold you into my arms.

“I don’t like summer but I like summer nights”: that was something you came out with the year you turned eight. I liked the sound of those words, and I remember thinking to myself, he’ll be a poet. Times when you three boys sat out on the bench in the yard, sharing watermelon with your father on hot summer nights. When your tongue groped for the sticky-sweet remnants smeared around your mouth.

—

I cut out the photo from your school ID and put it in my purse. Day or night, the house is always empty, but still I like to wait until the early hours of the morning, when there’d be no earthly reason for anyone to drop by, before I unwrap it from the folds of plain writing paper and smooth out the creases lining your face. There’s no one around to overhear, but still I only let myself whisper it…Dong-ho.