by Han Kang
“Could you step outside for a moment?” I asked my brother-in-law. His expression suggested that he had something he wanted to get off his chest, but he limited himself to a noncommittal “all right.” I pulled out won from my pocket, which was all I could find in there, and handed it over.
“Please use this to buy a set of clothes from the store.”
“Me? Ah, my wife will bring me some clean clothes when she comes around later.”
Yeong-ho and his wife showed up that evening, with In-hye. Apparently my father-in-law still hadn’t calmed down. Their mother kept stubbornly insisting on coming to the hospital, but Yeong-ho was adamant that she wasn’t to go anywhere near the place.
“What on earth went on back there?” Yeong-ho’s wife exclaimed. “And right in front of the children…” She must have been crying, as her makeup had run and her eyes were swollen. “Your father went too far, you know. How can he hit his daughter in front of her husband? Has he always been like this?”
“Of course, he’s always been quick-tempered,” In-hye admitted. “Haven’t you seen how Yeong-ho takes after him? But still, now he’s older it’s not so bad…”
Yeong-ho looked put out. “Why are you putting the blame on me?”
“Though after all,” In-hye continued, ignoring him, “Yeong-hye refused to say a single word to him, so he was bound to get upset, you know—I mean, she is his daughter…”
“Force-feeding her meat was certainly taking it too far, but what made her decide to stop eating it in the first place? And then why the knife? I’ve never seen such a thing in all my life. However will she look her husband in the face?” Yeong-ho’s wife looked still half in shock.
While In-hye was examining my wife, I changed into her husband’s T-shirt and went to the sauna upstairs. I washed off the black congealed blood under the shower’s lukewarm stream of water. I looked at myself in the mirror, frowning. The whole affair made my flesh crawl. It just didn’t seem real. Right then, thinking about my wife didn’t cause me shock or confusion so much as an intense feeling of disgust.
After In-hye had gone home, the only people left in the general ward aside from my wife and me were a schoolgirl who’d been admitted with a ruptured intestine, and her parents. They kept on darting sideways glances at me while I stood watch at my wife’s bedside, and I could see perfectly well that they were whispering together. But any minute now this long Sunday would be over and Monday would begin, which meant I would no longer have to look at this woman. I expected that Yeong-ho would take my place, and that the day after tomorrow my wife would be discharged. Discharged—in other words, I would once again have to live with this strange, frightening woman, the two of us in the same house. It was a prospect I found difficult to contemplate.
At nine o’clock the next evening I visited the ward. Yeong-ho greeted me with a smile.
“You must be tired, no?” he said.
“How are the children?”
“Ji-woo’s dad’s staying with them today.”
If only my colleagues had decided to go for drinks after work, I would have had the perfect excuse to avoid the ward for another two hours. But it was Monday, so there was no chance of any such reprieve.
“How’s my wife been?”
“She’s just been sleeping. You can see that without having to ask. She ate what they gave her…it seems she’s going to be okay.”
Yeong-ho was clearly trying to be considerate, and he did manage to soothe my sharp mood a little. A short while after he left, and just as I was thinking to myself that I ought to loosen my tie and freshen up, someone knocked on the door of the ward.
To my surprise, it was my mother-in-law.
“I’m so ashamed to face you,” she began babbling as soon as she came near me.
“There’s no need for that. How are you?”
She took a deep breath.
“Well, you see how it is with old age, the slightest shock…” She’d brought a shopping bag with her, which she now thrust at me.
“What’s this?”
“Something I prepared before we came up to Seoul. You waste away after months without meat, it seems, so…eat this together, the two of you. It’s black goat. I was afraid that if In-hye and her husband found out they might try and stop me from coming. Try feeding it to Yeong-hye, just tell her it’s herbal medicine. I put a load of medicinal stuff in to mask the smell. She’s become such a scrawny thing, just a ghost, and now what with losing all that blood…”
I was beginning to get sick and tired of this stubborn “maternal affection.”
“There’s no stovetop here, is there? I’ll go and see if they have one in the nurses’ room.” She took one of the packets out of her bag and left. Repeatedly winding my tie around my hand and clenching it into a ball, I felt myself get more and more worked up, as the irritation returned that Yeong-ho had briefly appeased. Luckily, a short while later my wife woke up. Only then, when I realized how much better this was than if she’d woken up when I was there alone, did my mother-in-law’s arrival come to seem like a good thing.
My mother-in-law came back, and was the first thing my wife’s eyes fixed on. The older woman’s face was wreathed in smiles from the moment she opened the door, whereas my wife’s expression was difficult to decipher. She’d spent all day lying in bed and now, whether because of the drip or simply due to swelling, her face was practically bloodless, almost as white as milk.
Holding a steaming paper cup in one hand, my mother-in-law grasped my wife’s hand in the other.
“This…” Her eyes welled with tears. “Take this. Ah, look at your face.” My wife obediently took the paper cup. “It’s herbal medicine. They say it strengthens the body. Why, in the old days, back before your marriage, we had the very same medicine made up for you, remember?”
My wife sniffed it and shook her head. “This isn’t herbal medicine.” Her expression cheerless and indifferent, and her eyes filled with something strangely like pity, my wife handed the cup back to her mother.
“It is herbal medicine. Just hold your nose and drink it down quickly.”
“I’m not drinking it.”
“Drink it. This is your mother’s wish. Even the dead get their wishes obeyed, but you’d ignore your own mother’s?”
She held the cup to my wife’s lips.
“Is it really herbal medicine?”
“Of course, I just said so.”
My wife held her nose and took a sip of the black liquid. My mother-in-law was all smiles, exclaiming, “More, drink more!” Her eyes flashed below their wrinkled lids.
“I’ll keep it here and drink it a little later.”
My wife lay back down again.
“What would you like to eat? Shall I buy something sweet to take away the aftertaste?”
“I’m all right.”
All the same, the old woman kept on pestering me to go and find a shop. I refused to be harried into going, and eventually she left the room to find the shop herself. Then my wife pushed her blanket aside and got up.
“Where are you going?”
“The bathroom.”
I picked up the IV bag and followed after her. She hung the bag up inside the toilet and locked the door. And then, accompanied by several groans, vomited up everything in her stomach.
She staggered out of the toilet, trailing the faint smell of gastric juices and the sour tang of semi-digested food. As I hadn’t done it for her, she was forced to pick up her IV bag with her bandaged left hand, but she didn’t hold it high enough and a small amount of blood began to flow back down the tube. Tottering forward, she picked up the bag of black goat her mother had set down by the bed. Her right hand, which clutched the heavy bag, still had the IV needle embedded in it, but she didn’t pay this the slightest bit of notice. Then she left the ward—and I had absolutely no desire to go and find out what she was up to.
After a little while, the door banged loudly enough to make the schoolgirl and her mother frown in disapprova
l, and my mother-in-law burst in. She had a packet of cookies in one hand, and the paper shopping bag in the other—I could see even at a glance that the black liquid had burst out.
“Mr. Cheong, what on earth were you thinking of, just sitting there like that? Didn’t you guess what that child might have been planning?”
More than anything else, I was strongly tempted just to walk out of the ward and go home.
“You, Yeong-hye, do you know how much this is worth? Would you throw it away? Money scraped together with your own parents’ sweat and blood! How can you call yourself my daughter?”
The moment I saw my wife, bent at the waist, I noticed her red blood trickling backward into the IV bag.
“Look at yourself, now! Stop eating meat, and the world will devour you whole. Take a look in a mirror, go on, tell me what you look like!”
Finally, her high-pitched screeching subsided into low sobs. But my wife merely gazed at the sobbing woman as though she were a complete stranger, and eventually, as if having decided that this performance had gone on quite long enough, got back up onto the bed. She pulled the blanket up to her chest and closed her eyes. Only then did I raise the IV bag, now half full of crimson blood.
—
I don’t know why that woman is crying. I don’t know why she keeps staring at my face, either, as though she wants to swallow it. Or why she strokes the bandage on my wrist with her trembling hands.
My wrist is okay. It doesn’t bother me. The thing that hurts is my chest. Something is stuck in my solar plexus. I don’t know what it might be. It’s lodged there permanently these days. Even though I’ve stopped wearing a bra, I can feel this lump all the time. No matter how deeply I inhale, it doesn’t go away.
Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.
One time, just one more time, I want to shout. I want to throw myself through the pitch-black window. Maybe that would finally get this lump out of my body. Yes, perhaps that might work.
Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.
—
I packed my mother-in-law off in a taxi and when I got back the ward was dark. The schoolgirl and her mother, presumably fed up with all the commotion, had turned off the television and lights a little ahead of time, and drawn their curtain. My wife was sleeping. I lay down awkwardly on the cramped side bed and tried to fall asleep. I had absolutely no idea how I was going to sort this mess out. Only one thing was clear, and that was that this whole affair was bound to cause me no end of trouble.
When I eventually succeeded in falling asleep, I had a dream. In the dream, I was killing someone. I thrust a knife into their stomach with all my strength, then reached into the wound and wrenched out the long, coiled-up intestines. Like eating fish, I peeled off all the squishy flesh and muscle and left only the bones. But in the very instant I woke up, I ceased to remember who it was that I had killed.
It was early in the morning, still dark. Driven by a strange compulsion, I pulled back the blanket covering my wife. I fumbled in the pitch-black darkness, but there was no watery blood, no ripped intestines. I could hear the other patient’s sleeping breath coming in little gasps, but my wife was unnaturally silent. I felt an odd trembling inside myself, and reached out with my index finger to touch her philtrum. She was alive.
—
When I woke up again the ward was already light.
“Goodness, you’ve been sleeping so deeply,” the young girl’s mother said. “You didn’t even wake up when they came and brought the food.” She sounded as though she felt rather sorry for me. I saw the meal tray that had been left on the bed. My wife hadn’t even opened the rice bowl, had left the meal tray untouched, and gone…where? The IV had been pulled out too, and the bloody needle was dangling from the end of the long plastic tube.
“Where did she go?” I asked, wiping away the traces of drool from around my mouth.
“She was already gone when we woke up.”
“What? In that case, you should have woken me, you know.”
“Even if I’d tried to, you sleep like a log…of course, I would have woken you if it had seemed like something had happened.” Her face reddened, either from anger or simple confusion.
I adjusted my clothes and rushed out, looking around impatiently as I passed down the corridor and came to the lift, but my wife was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t have time for this. I’d told them at the office that I’d be two hours later than usual getting in; right now my wife should already have been being discharged. I decided that when I took her home I would tell her, and indeed myself, that we should just think of the whole thing as a bad dream.
I took the lift down to the ground floor. She wasn’t in the lobby, so I hurried out into the hospital garden, out of breath but making sure to scan the area thoroughly. The only people in the garden were those patients who had already finished their breakfast. The early-morning chill, which would pass off soon enough, was fairly mild even now. You could tell who was a long-term patient based on how they looked—whether fatigued and gloomy, or peaceful. As I drew near the fountain, which was dry, I noticed that there was some kind of commotion; the people gathered there were all looking at something. I pushed my way through them until I had a clear view.
My wife was sitting on a bench by the fountain. She had removed her hospital gown and placed it on her knees, leaving her gaunt collarbones, emaciated breasts and brown nipples completely exposed. The bandage had been unwound from her left wrist, and the blood that was leaking out seemed to be slowly licking at the sutured area. Sunbeams bathed her face and naked body.
“How long has she been sitting there like that?”
“Good grief…she looks like she’s come from the psychiatric ward, this young woman.”
“What’s that she’s holding?”
“It looks like she’s gripping something.”
“Ah, look over there. They’re coming now.”
When I turned to look over my shoulder, a male nurse and a middle-aged guard could be seen hurrying over, their faces grave. I looked at my wife’s exhausted face, her lips stained with blood like clumsily applied lipstick. Her eyes, which had been staring fixedly at the gathered audience, met mine. They glittered, as though filled with water.
I thought to myself: I do not know that woman. And it was true. It was not a lie. Nevertheless, and compelled by responsibilities that refused to be shirked, my legs carried me toward her, a movement that I could not for the life of me control.
“Darling, what are you doing?” I murmured in a low voice, picking up the hospital gown and using it to cover her bare chest.
“It’s hot, so…” She smiled faintly—her familiar smile, a smile that could not have been more ordinary, and which I had believed I knew so well. “It’s hot, so I just got undressed.” She raised her left hand to shield her forehead from the streaming sunlight, revealing the cuts on her wrist.
“Have I done something wrong?”
I prized open her clenched right hand. A bird, which had been crushed in her grip, tumbled to the bench. It was a small white-eye bird, with feathers missing here and there. Below tooth marks that looked to have been caused by a predator’s bite, vivid red bloodstains were spreading.
The deep oxblood curtain fell over the stage. The dancers waved their hands so vigorously the whole row became a blur of movement, with individual figures impossible to make out. Though the applause was loud, with even the odd shout of “bravo” thrown in here and there, there was no curtain call. The ovation abruptly subsided and the audience began to gather up their bags and jackets and make their way to the aisles. He uncrossed his legs and stood up. He’d kept his arms folded during the five or so minutes of app
lause, silently gazing up at the dancers’ eager faces as they greedily drank it in. Their efforts had inspired in him both compassion and respect, but the choreographer, he felt, hadn’t deserved his applause.
He exited the auditorium and crossed the foyer, studying the now-obsolete performance posters. He’d been in a bookshop in the city center when he’d happened upon one of the posters, the sight of which had sent a shiver through his body. Worried that he might have missed the last performance, he’d hurriedly phoned the theater and made a reservation. On the poster, men and women sat displaying their naked backs, which were covered from the napes of their necks right down to their bottoms with flowers, coiling stems and thickly overlapping petals, painted on in red and blue. Looking at them he felt afraid, excited, and somehow oppressed. He couldn’t believe that the image that had obsessed him for almost a year now had also been dreamed up by someone else—the choreographer—someone, moreover, whom he’d never even heard of. Was that image really about to unfold in front of him, just as he’d dreamed it? Sitting in his seat waiting for the lights to go down and the performance to start, he’d been so nervous he couldn’t even take a sip of water.
But he hadn’t found what he’d been looking for. Threading his way through the crowds of theatergoers who had thronged into the foyer, and who all looked so dazzling and extroverted, he headed for the exit nearest to the underground station. There had been nothing for him in the booming electronic music, the gaudy costumes, the showy nudity, or the overtly sexual gestures. The thing he’d been searching for was something quieter, deeper, more private.
He had to wait a while for a train, it being a Sunday afternoon, and when he got on he stood near the carriage door, holding a program with the photograph from the posters printed on its cover. His wife and five-year-old son were waiting at home. His wife, he knew, would have liked for them to spend weekends together as a family, but all the same he’d set aside a half day to see the performance. Would he get anything out of it? He’d known that, more than likely, he would only end up disillusioned yet again—that in the end, it was the only possible outcome. And now that was exactly what had happened. How on earth could a complete stranger be expected to tease out the inner logic of something he himself had dreamed up, to find a way to make it come alive? The bitterness that suddenly welled up inside him was exactly the same as the feeling he’d experienced a long time ago, on watching a video work by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The work had been filled with scenes of promiscuous sexual practices, featuring around ten men and women, each of them daubed all over with colored paint, their greed for each other’s bodies playing out against a background of psychedelic music. They never stopped moving the whole time, flailing and floundering like fish out of water. Not that his own thirst was any less strong, of course—only he didn’t want to express it like that. Anything but that.