Human Acts(54)

—

When our extended family gathered for the thanksgiving festival that autumn, the grown-ups took care to keep their voices down whenever they were talking among themselves. So that my brothers and I, and even our younger cousins, wouldn’t overhear anything we weren’t supposed to. As though we children were spies.

My father’s brother was working in the defense industry at the time, and the two of them whispered together in the main room until the small hours.

“Please, hyeong, be careful. I’m pretty sure they’ve tapped your phone line. These days, whenever I call you I can hear this kind of whooshing sound; that’s wiretapping. My friend Yeong-jun—you remember him, right? He’s decided to get out of it while he still can. The military police took him the year before last, and pried off every single one of his fingernails. Another round of that would finish him off.”

Hushed voices from the kitchen; the younger wives preparing food with my mother.

“The guy who bought your hanok was renting the annex out to a couple of kids; the boy was in the same year as the landlord’s son. I heard that there’s three dead and two missing from D middle school alone…including both the kids who were living there.”

My mother merely bowed her head in silence. It took a while before she began to speak, and when she did her voice was so low I could barely make it out.

“There was a young woman…she was waiting for her husband outside their house. Not long before her due date. They shot her in the middle of the head. She died instantly.”

In my impressionable child’s imagination, I saw a woman in her twenties standing in front of our old hanok’s main gate, her hands on her round stomach. A bullet hole opened up in the center of her pale forehead. Wide as a surprised eye.

—

Two summers on, my father brought the photo chapbook home.

He’d been down to Gwangju on a condolence call, and had picked it up at the train station—they were relatively common at the time, though printed in secret and sold unofficially. Once the grown-ups had finished passing around the book, the silence that ensued was heavy as lead. Father put it away in the bookcase, up on the highest shelf so we children wouldn’t accidentally come across it. He even slid it in back-to-front, so that the spine wasn’t visible.

At night, though, when the grown-ups were all sitting in the kitchen and I knew I’d be safe at least until the end of the nine o’clock news, I crept into the main room in search of that book. I scanned every spine until finally I got to the top shelf; I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there.

—

The floor of the gymnasium had been dug up.

I stood looking down at the exposed earth. Large windows were set into each of the four walls. The Taegukgi was still hanging in its frame on the wall. I walked over to the opposite wall, the semifrozen earth packed solid beneath my feet. On the laminated A4 notice, a single phrase had been printed in cursive script. Please remove your shoes before exercising.

When I turned to look back at the main door, I noticed the stairs leading up to the first floor. As I walked up, my shoes left deep impressions in the thick layer of dust. The gallery was lined with rows of concrete seating, with a view of the entire gymnasium. When I sat down and breathed out, a cloud of condensation dissolved in the air. The concrete’s chill leached through the fabric of my jeans. Corpses wrapped in makeshift shrouds, plywood coffins covered with the Taegukgi, wailing children and blank-faced women, wavered briefly into view over the dark red earth.

I started too late, I thought. I should have come before they dug up the floor. Before the whole frontage of the Provincial Office was masked with scaffolding, with signs reading “Under Construction.” Before the majority of the gingko trees, which had borne mute witness to it all, were uprooted. Before the hundred-and-fifty-year-old pagoda tree withered and died.

But I’m here now.

I’ll zip up my hooded top and stay here until the sun goes down. Until the outlines of the boy’s face solidify. Until I hear his voice in my mind. Until his retreating figure begins to hover over the invisible floorboards, flickering like a candle’s guttering flame.

—

My younger brother still lives in Gwangju. Two days ago, I arrived at his apartment and unpacked my stuff. I arranged for the two of us to have dinner together when he got home from work, then went to see the old hanok while it was still light. I hadn’t lived in Gwangju since I was a child, so I wasn’t really sure where anything was. I got the taxi to take me to H primary school first, which I’d attended up to the third year. Turning my back on the main entrance, I walked over the pedestrian crossing then headed left, groping through memories for some sense of familiarity. The stationery shop I remembered was still there—or, if not the same shop exactly, then at least the same line of business. I walked a little farther on, then, yes, that was it; I had to take a right. I chose the second right after the stationer’s, trusting to the spatial memory embedded in my muscles. The wall of the battery factory, which once seemed to stretch on forever, was gone now. Even the row of hanok buildings that used to face it had disappeared. Where that street joined the main road there’d been a quarry the length and breadth of a house, sharing a wall with our old hanok. There was no way a quarry, essentially just a tract of vacant land, would have been left undeveloped so near the center of this city of now over a million inhabitants.