Human Acts(58)

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Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

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He was really ticklish, you see.

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All I had to do was poke his foot with my big toe and he’d start squirming.

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At first I couldn’t tell whether he was grimacing like that because he was ticklish, or because it really hurt…

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But then he would turn bright red and laugh.

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Just as there were some soldiers who were especially cruel, so there were others who were especially nonaggressive.

There were paratroopers who carried the wounded on their backs all the way to the hospital and set them down on the steps before hastening back to their posts. There were soldiers who, when the order was given to fire on the crowd, pointed the barrels of their guns up into the air so they wouldn’t hit anyone. When the soldiers formed a wall in front of the corpses lined up outside the Provincial Office, blocking them from the view of the foreign news cameras, and gave a rousing chorus of an army song, there was one of their number who kept his mouth conspicuously shut.

Even the civil militia, the ones who stayed behind in the Provincial Office, displayed an attitude that wasn’t dissimilar. The majority of them were willing to carry guns but, when push came to shove, couldn’t actually bring themselves to fire them. When asked why they stayed behind when they knew they were staring defeat in the face, the surviving witnesses all gave the same answer: I’m not sure. It just seemed like something we had to do.

I’d been mistaken when I’d thought of them as victims. They’d stayed behind precisely to avoid such a fate. When I think of those ten days in the life of that city, I think of the moment when a man who’d been lynched, almost killed, found the strength to open his eyes. The moment when, spitting out fragments of teeth along with a mouthful of blood, he held his failing eyes open with his fingers so he could look his attacker straight in the face. The moment when he appeared to remember that he had a face and a voice, to recollect his own dignity, which seemed the memory of a previous life. Break open that moment and out of it will come massacre, torture, violent repression. It gets shoved aside, beaten to a pulp, swept away in the tide of brutality. But now, if we can only keep our eyes open, if we can all hold our gazes steady, until the bitter end…

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Dong-ho, I need you to take my hand and guide me away from all this. Away to where the light shines through, to where the flowers bloom.

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The boy with the slender neck and thin summer clothes is walking along the snow-covered path that winds between the graves, and I am following behind. The snow has already melted in the heart of the city, but here it lingers. The boy steps into a frozen drift, soaking the bottom of his tracksuit bottoms. Startled by the cold, he turns to look back at me. He smiles, and the smile reaches his eyes.

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Except that, of course, there was no actual encounter among the graves. I simply wrote a note for my sleeping brother, left it on the kitchen table, and slipped out of the apartment in the early hours of the morning. Slung on my backpack, bulging with all the documents I’d gathered during my time in Gwangju, and caught the bus out of the city to the cemetery. I didn’t buy flowers, didn’t prepare fruit or alcohol as offerings. Coming across a box of small candles in the drawer beneath my brother’s kitchen sink, I picked out three along with a lighter, but that was all.

His brother, the science lecturer, said their mother had never truly recovered after the bodies were exhumed from Mangwol-dong in 1997 and reburied in the newly constructed May 18 National Cemetery.

Like the other bereaved families, we waited until the day the fortune-teller had suggested as auspicious before we went to exhume the body. When we opened the coffins, it was every bit as gruesome as when we’d closed them. The corpse wrapped up in a plastic sheet, and a bloodstained Taegukgi covering it…all the same, Dong-ho’s remains were in relatively good condition, because we’d been the first ones to dress the body, it hadn’t been left to someone who didn’t know him. So that time, too, we didn’t want to entrust the job to anyone else. We unwound the cotton shroud and polished every one of his bones ourselves. I was worried that the skull would be too much for our mother, so I hurriedly picked it up myself and polished the teeth one by one. Even so, the whole experience clearly shook her to the core. I really ought to have insisted she stay at home.

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Searching among the snow-covered graves, I finally found his. The Mangwol-dong gravestone, which I’d seen a long time ago, had only had his name and dates inscribed, no photo; they’d had the black-and-white photo from his school’s records enlarged, and put on the new gravestone. Those flanking his all belonged to high-schoolers. I peered at those youthful faces and dark winter clothes in what were presumably middle-school graduation photos. The night before, his brother had repeatedly insisted that Dong-ho had been lucky. Wasn’t it lucky that he was shot so he died straightaway, don’t you think that was lucky? A strange fever had burned in his eyes as he begged me to agree with him. One of the high-schoolers who was shot next to my brother at the Provincial Office, who’s buried next to him now, when they exhumed him there was a hole right in the middle of his forehead, and the back of his skull was completely missing. He can’t have died straightaway, so the soldiers would have shot him again to be sure that they’d finished him off. He told me how the boy’s white-haired father had wept soundlessly, his hand over his mouth.