Human Acts(55)

Past single-story houses and larger tenement buildings, a piano academy and a shop selling engraved seals, I finally arrived at the end of the street. The three-story concrete building standing on the site of the former quarry was something of an eyesore. Our old hanok had been pulled down, and in its place was a two-story prefab—a shop selling fixtures and fittings.

What had I been expecting? I hung around in front of that shop for a long time, as though I’d arranged to meet someone there.

—

Yesterday, the day after that visit to the site of the old house, I made an early start. I went first to the 5:18 Research Institute at Jeonnam University, and the related Cultural Foundation. The main entrance to the military police headquarters, where the central intelligence agency had been stationed since the 1970s and where torture had been carried out, was locked, making it impossible to go inside.

In the afternoon I went to D middle school. At first I’d thought of looking through the yearbooks for the boy’s photo, but then I remembered that, of course, he’d never made it to graduation. I called up the retired art teacher, who’d spent his entire working life at that school and was an old friend of my father’s, and he arranged permission for me to look through the school’s records, where they kept a photograph of every former student. There I saw his face for the first time. There was something meek and gentle about those single-lidded half-moon eyes. The traces of infancy still lingered in the soft line of his jaw. It was a face so utterly ordinary you could easily have mistaken it for that of another, a face whose characteristics would be forgotten the moment you turned away from it.

When I left the staffroom and crossed the exercise yard, streaks of white were just beginning to appear in the leaden sky. By the time I reached the school gates the snow was coming down in earnest. I brushed away the flakes clinging to my eyelashes, hailed a taxi, and, when one pulled over, asked him to take me back to Jeonnam University. I seemed to recall having seen a similar face in the exhibition hall at the 5:18 Institute.

The exhibition featured several small wall-mounted screens, each one showing a different video on a loop. Since I couldn’t remember in what context I’d seen the face, I had to go around and watch each video from the beginning. It was when they were showing one of the earliest marches, when the bodies of the youths who had been gunned down at the station were being pushed in a handcart, that I spotted the figure of what was surely another middle-schooler. The boy was standing at some distance from the head of the column, staring at the corpses with the stunned look of someone who had just been struck in the face. This had all happened in late spring, yet he was hugging himself as if for warmth. The scene skipped on in a matter of seconds, so I stood and waited for the film to return to the beginning. I watched the whole thing two, three, four times. The boy’s face was every bit as generic, as mistakable as the one from the school records. I just couldn’t be sure. Perhaps, back then, boys with short hair in school uniform all looked much the same? Perhaps they all had such gentle single-lidded eyes. Such skinny gangling limbs, poised for the growth spurt into manhood.

—

My initial intention was to read each and every document I could get my hands on. From early December onward I abandoned all other work, even avoided seeing friends if I possibly could, just obsessively ploughed through reams of documents. After two months of this, by the time January was drawing to a close, I felt unable to continue.

It was because of the dreams.

In one dream I was being chased by a gang of soldiers. My breathing grew ragged as they gained on me. One of them shoved me in the back and knocked me onto my front. As soon as I rolled over and looked up at my attacker, he thrust his bayonet into my chest, smack bang into my solar plexus. At two o’clock in the morning I jerked awake, sat bolt upright, and placed my hand on my breastbone. I spent the next five minutes struggling to breathe. When I passed my hand over my face my palm came away glistening; I hadn’t even been aware that I was crying.

A few days later someone came to see me. “In the thirty-three years between 1980 and now,” this person said, “dozens of 5:18 arrestees have been held in secret underground rooms. Tomorrow, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and without any of this having been made public, they are all due to be executed.” In the dream it was eight o’clock in the evening—only nineteen hours remaining until the planned execution. How could I stop it from happening? The person who had told me all this had disappeared somewhere, and I was standing in the middle of the street clutching my cell phone, totally at a loss. Should I call someone official, some kind of authority, and let them know what was about to take place? Even once I’d informed them, would they be able to stop it from going ahead? Why had this knowledge come to me of all people, someone who had no power whatsoever? Where should I go, how can I…as these words were smoldering inside my mouth, my eyes snapped open. Another dream. Just a dream. As I eased my clenched fists open I was muttering to myself in the darkness, only a dream, only a dream.

—

Another dream: Someone makes me a present of a handheld radio. This is a time machine, they tell me, explaining that you are supposed to enter a given year, month, and day in the digital panel. I key in “5:18.1980.” After all, if I wanted to describe it in a book, then what better way than to actually experience it for myself? But the next moment I find myself standing alone at the intersection by Gwanghwamun Station. The vast streets are deserted. Of course, because it’s only the time that changes. And I’m in Seoul, not Gwangju. I’d set the date to May so it ought to be spring, yet the streets were as cold and desolate as certain days in November. Frighteningly still.