Human Acts(6)

Compared with what the two women were dealing with, your own work was hardly taxing. Just as you had at the Provincial Office, you recorded date, time, clothing, and physical characteristics in your ledger. The cloths had already been cut to the appropriate size, and each scrap of paper had been attached to a clothes peg, ready to be pinned straight to the corpse once the number had been written on it. As the need arose for new places, you pushed the still-unidentified closer together, followed by the coffins. On nights when the influx of new arrivals was especially overwhelming there was neither the time nor the floor space to neatly rearrange the existing order, so the coffins just had to be shoved together any old way, edge to edge. That night, looking around at all those dead bodies crammed into the gym hall, you thought to yourself how much like a convention it seemed, a mass rally of corpses who were all there by prearrangement, whose only action was the production of that horrible putrid smell. You moved swiftly among this silent congregation, clasping your ledger under your arm.

—

It really is going to chuck it down, you think, drawing in a deep breath as you emerge from the dim, twilit world of the gymnasium. You head for the backyard, wanting to drink in more of that clean air, but stop at the corner of the building, worried about straying too far from your post. Now the voice coming from the speakers is that of a young man.

“We cannot just hand in our weapons and surrender unconditionally. First they have to return our dead to us. They also have to release the hundreds they’ve thrown in prison. And more than that, we have to make them promise to admit the true facts about what happened here, so we can recover our honor in the eyes of the rest of the country. After that, there wouldn’t be any reason for us not to return their firearms, would there? What do you all say?”

You sense that the cheers and applause that follow are coming from a much smaller number of people than before. You remember the assembly that was convened the day after the soldiers withdrew. Then, there were so many people that the overflow crowded onto the roof of the Provincial Office and the clock tower. The streets were laid out like a paduk board, with no vehicles permitted entry, and what had been the only available space had been taken up by the buildings. A great mass of people, more than a hundred thousand strong, surged through those streets with the rippling motion of colossal waves. Their voices joined together for the national anthem, the swelling chorus rising up like a tower, a story for every voice. The sound of their clapping was like thousands of fireworks being let off in succession. Yesterday morning, you listened to Jin-su and Seon-ju discussing what was going to happen. Looking serious, Jin-su had said that there was a rumor going around that when the soldiers came back, those who were gathering in the streets would all be killed, and so the demonstration was being hastily scaled down. “We need there to be more of us, not less, if we’re to prevent the army from reentering the city…the mood’s not good. Every day there are more coffins; people are starting to think twice about venturing out of doors.”

“Hasn’t enough blood been shed? How can all that blood be simply covered up? The souls of the departed are watching us. Their eyes are wide open.”

The voice of the man conducting the ceremony cracks at the end. The repetition of that word, “blood,” gives you a tightening feeling in your chest, so you open your mouth wide and suck in another deep breath.

A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?

You recall your maternal grandmother’s death last winter. What started out as a mild cold soon turned into pneumonia, and she was admitted to the hospital. She’d been there around a fortnight when you and your mother went to visit her, one Saturday afternoon when you were basking in the relief of having got through the end-of-term exams. But then, without warning, your grandmother’s condition deteriorated. Your mother contacted her brother and told him to come as quickly as possible, but he was still stuck in traffic when the old woman breathed her last.

Your childhood visits to her home inevitably included a quiet “follow me” as the elderly woman, her back bent into the shape of the letter ?, led the way to the dark room that was used as a pantry. Then, you knew, she would open the larder door and bring out the cakes that were stored there to use as ceremonial offerings on the anniversary of a relative’s death: pastries made from oil and honey, and block-shaped cakes of pounded glutinous rice. You would take an oil-and-honey pastry with a conspiratorial grin, and your grandmother would smile back at you, her eyes creasing into slits. Her death was every bit as quiet and understated as she herself had been. Something seemed to flutter up from her face, like a bird escaping from her shuttered eyes above the oxygen mask. You stood there gaping at her wrinkled face, suddenly that of a corpse, and wondered where that fluttering, winged thing had disappeared to.

What about those who are now in the gym hall—have their souls also escaped their bodies, flying away like birds? Where could they possibly be going? It surely wasn’t some alien place like heaven or hell, which you’d heard about the one time you ever went to Sunday school, when you and your friends were lured there by the prospect of chocolate Easter eggs. You’d never been convinced by the historical dramas on TV, where the spirits of the dead were supposed to be scary figures, dressed all in white and wandering around in an eerie fog, their disheveled hair the sign of an unquiet rest.

You feel drops of rain pattering down on your head. As you look up, the raindrops splash against your cheeks and forehead. Seemingly in an instant, the individual drops meld and blur into thick streaks, pouring down with ferocious speed.