Human Acts(7)

The man with the microphone shouts out, “Please sit down, all of you. The memorial service hasn’t finished yet. This rain is tears shed by the souls of the departed.”

The chilly rainwater, which has crept inside the collar of your uniform, soaks your vest as it trickles down your back. The tears of souls are cold, all right. Goose bumps rise on your forearms, on your back, as you hurry to shelter under the eaves projecting over the main door. The trees in front of the Provincial Office are being lashed by the rain. Squatting down on the highest step, the one closest to the door, you think back to your biology lessons. Studying the respiration of plants during fifth period, when the sunlight was always on the wane, seems like something that took place in another world, now. Trees, you were told, survive on a single breath per day. When the sun rises, they drink in a long, luxurious draft of its rays, and when it sets, they exhale a great stream of carbon dioxide. Those trees over there, who hold those long breaths within themselves with such unwavering patience, are bending under the onslaught of the rain.

Had that other world continued, you would have sat your midterms last week. Today being Sunday, and with no more exams to prepare for, you would have slept in late before going out to play badminton in the yard with Jeong-dae. The time of that other world seems no more real, now, than does the past week.

It happened last Sunday, when you’d gone out alone to buy some practice papers from the bookshop in front of the school. Frightened by the sight of armed soldiers, who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, you took a side alley leading down to the riverside. A couple were walking opposite you, the man wearing a suit and holding a Bible and hymn book, and the woman in a navy-blue dress. Something about the way they were talking made you think they must be newlyweds. A thin scream rang out several times from the top of the road, and three soldiers carrying guns and clubs raced down over the hilltop, surrounding the young couple. They looked to have been pursuing someone, and to have turned down this alley by mistake.

“What’s the matter? We’re just on our way to church…”

Before the man in the suit had finished speaking, you saw a person’s arm—what? Something you wouldn’t have thought it capable of. Too much to process—what you saw happen to that hand, that back, that leg. A human being. “Help me!” the man shouted, his voice ragged. They kept on clubbing him until his twitching feet finally grew still. The woman stood there and screamed when she should have just backed off; you saw them grab her by the hair, but you don’t know what happened after that. You were too busy crawling, trembling, into the next street, a street where a sight even further from your experience was unfolding.

—

You jerk your head up in alarm, startled witless by the hand that just brushed your right shoulder. A slender, outstretched hand that seems wound around with cold scraps of cotton, like some fragile apparition.

“Dong-ho.”

Eun-sook, soaked to the skin from her braids to the hems of her jeans, bends down over you and laughs.

Your face white as a sheet, you muster a halfhearted chuckle in response. You dummy, what would a ghost need hands for?

“I meant to come back earlier; sorry you got caught up in this rain….I was worried that if I left, the others would start leaving, too. Has anything much happened?”

You shake your head. “No one came looking for anyone. No passersby either.”

“It was the same at the service. Not many people came.”

Eun-sook squats down next to you and pulls a sponge cake out of the pocket of her hoodie, the wrapper rustling. A yogurt pot follows it.

“The church aunties were handing these out, so I thought I might as well get some.”

You hadn’t even realized you were hungry; now you tear off the plastic wrapper and cram the sponge cake into your mouth. Eun-sook peels the lid off the yogurt and hands it to you.

“I’ll stay here for now; you can go home and change. If anyone was going to come, they would have been and gone by now.”

“No, you go, I barely got wet,” you say, mumbling around a mouthful of sponge cake. You swallow the cake and gulp down the yogurt.

“The Provincial Office doesn’t exactly have many home comforts, you know,” Eun-sook says delicately. “And it’s hard work you’ve been doing…”

You blush; you know you stink of sweat. Whenever you go to wash your hands in the tiny annex bathroom, you always try to give your hair a quick wash, too. The putrid smell seems to have soaked into your skin, so at night you even splash the cold water over your whole body, teeth chattering and sneezing violently; now it seems you might as well not have bothered.

“I heard at the assembly that the army is coming back into the city tonight. If you go home, stay there. Don’t try and come back tonight.”

Eun-sook draws up her shoulders, and the hairs escaping from her braids tickle the nape of her neck. You watch in silence as her fingers smooth her wet hair and pluck at her sweater. Her face, which had had a chubby cuteness to it when you first saw her, has grown gaunt in the space of a few days. You fix on her eyes, which have become hollow and shadowed, and think, whereabouts in the body is that bird when the person is still alive? In that furrowed brow, above the halolike crown of that head, in some chamber of the heart?

You cram the last of the cake into your mouth and pretend you hadn’t heard what Eun-sook just said about the army.