by Han Kang
‘No, he’s one of those …’
‘I see. You can come and have a look, if you like.’
You systematically examined the faces and bodies of the twenty-odd people lying against the corridor wall. You had to look closely if you wanted to be sure; your eyes soon started to feel the strain, and you had to keep blinking to try and refocus.
‘Not here?’ the other woman asked, straightening up. She had the sleeves of her pale green shirt rolled up to the elbows. You’d assumed she was a similar age to the young woman in school uniform; seeing her without the mask on, though, you could see she was older, more like twenty. Her skin was somewhat sallow, and she had a slender, delicate neck. Only the look in her eyes was tough and vigorous. And there was nothing feeble about her voice.
‘No.’
‘Have you tried the mortuary at Jeonnam, and the one at the Red Cross hospital?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about this friend’s parents?’
‘His mother passed away, and his father works in Daejeon; he lives in our annex with his older sister.’
‘They still won’t put long-distance calls through?’
‘No, and I’ve tried a few times.’
‘Well, what about your friend’s sister?’
‘She hasn’t been home since Sunday; I came here to look for her too. One of our neighbours said they saw my friend get hit yesterday, when the soldiers were shooting.’
‘Mightn’t he just have been wounded and admitted to hospital?’ the woman in school uniform interjected, without looking up.
You shook your head.
‘In that case he would have found a way to call us. He’d know we were worrying about him.’
‘Come by again tomorrow, and the next couple of days,’ said the woman in the pale green shirt. ‘Apparently all the dead will be brought here from now on. They say there’s no room left in the morgues.’
The woman in school uniform wiped the face of a young man whose throat had been sliced open by a bayonet, his red uvula poking out. She brushed the palm of her hand down over his staring eyes, closing them, rinsed the cloth in a bucket of water and wrung it out viciously. The water that came out was dark with blood, splattering outside the bucket. The woman in the green shirt stood up.
‘How about you give us a hand, if you have time?’ she asked. ‘Just for today. We don’t have enough people. It’s not difficult … you just need to cut up that cloth over there and use it to cover the bodies. And when someone comes looking for a friend, like you did, you uncover them again. The faces are badly injured, so they’ll need to get a good look at their bodies and clothes to decide whether it’s who they think it is.’
From that day on, you became one of the team. Eun-sook, as you’d guessed, was in her final year of high school. Seon-ju, the woman in the green shirt, was a machinist at a dressmaker’s on the main shopping street; she’d been left in the lurch when the boss had decided that he and his son, who’d been studying at one of the universities here, should go and stay with a relative outside the city. Both Eun-sook and Seon-ju had gone to give blood at Jeonnam University Hospital after hearing a street broadcast saying that people were dying of blood loss. There, hearing that the Provincial Office, now being run by civilians, was short of hands, and in the confusion of the moment, they’d taken on the task of dealing with the corpses.
In the classroom, where seats were assigned in order of height, you were always the one at the very front – in other words, the shortest. Since March, when you’d started your third year at middle school, you’d finally hit puberty, resulting in a slightly lower voice and a fair-to-middling growth spurt, but you still looked younger than your age. Jin-su’s work mostly kept him confined to the briefing room; the first time he saw you, he looked surprised.
‘You’re a first-year, aren’t you? This is no place for you.’ Jin-su’s deeply lidded eyes and long lashes were almost feminine; the university in Seoul he was attending was temporarily closed, so he’d come down to Gwangju.
‘No,’ you told him, ‘I’m a third-year. And I don’t have a problem with the work here.’
This wasn’t bravado; there was nothing technically difficult about the tasks you’d been assigned. Seon-ju and Eun-sook had already done most of the heavy work, which involved covering plywood or Styrofoam boards with plastic, then lifting the corpses on top of these boards. They also washed the necks and faces with a cloth, ran a comb through the matted hair to tidy it a bit, then wrapped the bodies in plastic in an effort to combat the smell. In the meantime, you made a note in your ledger of gender, approximate age, what clothes they were wearing and what brand of shoes, and assigned each corpse a number. You then wrote the same number on a scrap of paper, pinned it to the corpse’s chest, and covered them up to the neck with one of the white cloths. Eun-sook and Seon-ju would then help you pull them over to the wall. Jin-su, who seemed to be permanently rushed off his feet, would come striding up to you several times a day, wanting to transfer the information you’d recorded in your ledger onto posters, to put up at the main entrance to the building. A lot of the people who came looking for someone had either seen those posters themselves or been told about them by someone else. In cases of a positive identification, you would retreat to a respectful distance to wait for the sobbing and wailing to pass. As the corpses had only been given a cursory treatment, it was left to the bereaved to stop their noses and ears with cotton wool and give them a fresh change of clothing. Once they had been thus simply dressed and placed into a coffin, it was your job to oversee the transfer to the gym, and make a note of everything in your ledger.
The one stage in the process that you couldn’t quite get your head around was the singing of the national anthem, which took place at a brief, informal memorial service for the bereaved families, after their dead had been formally placed in the coffins. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the national flag, being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place. Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.
When you cautiously voiced these thoughts, Eun-sook’s round eyes grew even larger.
‘But the generals are rebels, they seized power unlawfully. You must have seen it: people being beaten and stabbed in broad daylight, and even shot. The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?’
You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you’d wanted to ask. That afternoon there was a rush of positive identifications, and there ended up being several different shrouding ceremonies going on at the same time, at various places along the corridor. The national anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against the constant background of weeping, and you listened with bated breath to the subtle dissonance this created. As though this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was.
The next morning, you and the two women carried several of the most putrid bodies out to the yard behind the Provincial Office. So many new bodies were arriving, there was no more space to lay them out inside. Jin-su came marching from the briefing room, brisk as always, and demanded to know what you were planning to do if it rained.
He frowned as he scanned the passageway, where the corpses had their feet jammed up against the wall. Seon-ju unhooked her mask.
‘It’s too narrow here,’ she said, ‘there’s just no way. There’ll probably be more corpses arriving in the evening, so what’ll we do then? How about the municipal gym? Isn’t there space there?’
Four men showed up less than an hour later, sent by Jinsu. They must have been standing guard somewhere, as they had rifles slung over their shoulders and were wearing visored helmets which the riot police had left behind. While they loaded the bodies into a truck, you and the two women packed up the sundries. You followed the truck over to the gym,
walking slowly in the balmy morning sunlight. Passing beneath the still-adolescent gingko trees, you reached up mechanically to tug at the branches, the lowest of which brushed against your forehead.
Eun-sook led the way, and was first to enter the gym. When you went inside, you saw that she’d been brought up short by the sight of the coffins filling the hall. The cotton gloves she was clutching were dappled with dark bloodstains. Seon-ju, who’d been bringing up the rear, stepped round you and tied up her shoulder-length hair with a handkerchief.
‘I didn’t realise they’d been bringing them all here … seeing them all together like this, my God, there’s so many.’
You looked around at the bereaved, who were kneeling practically back-to-back. Each family had stood a framed portrait photograph on the coffin they were watching over. Some coffins also had a pair of glass Fanta bottles standing side by side at their head. One of the bottles held a bunch of white flowers, and the other, a candle.
That evening, when you asked Jin-su if he could get hold of a box of candles, he nodded eagerly.
‘Of course, candles, that’ll get rid of the smell.’
Whenever you told Jin-su there was something you needed – whether it be cotton cloth, wooden coffins, scrap paper, flags – he would jot it down in his notebook and within the same day, seemingly out of nowhere, it would materialise. He told Seon-ju that every morning he went to either Daein or Yangdong market, and if there was something that couldn’t be got there, he went and hunted it down in woodworking shops, funeral parlours, drapers, all over the city. There was still a lot of money left over from the donations that had been collected at the meetings, and when he said he was representing the Provincial Office many people chose to give him a hefty discount on whatever it was he wanted, sometimes waiving the fee altogether. Money, then, wasn’t the issue. But now the city had run out of coffins, so he’d got hold of as much plywood as they thought they’d need and a new batch was currently being assembled at the carpenters’.
The morning Jin-su arrived with five boxes of fifty candles each, and matchboxes, you scoured every nook and cranny of the building, collecting any drinks bottles you spotted that could be used to hold the candles. The bereaved queued at the table by the entrance while you lit each candle and inserted it into one of the bottles. They then carried the bottle over to their coffin and set it down at the head. There was more than enough to go round. Enough even for the still-unidentified corpses, and those coffins which had no one to watch over them.
Every morning new coffins were brought to the gym, where a group memorial altar had been set up. The new arrivals were those who had breathed their last while undergoing treatment at the hospital. When the bereaved families brought the coffins in, pushing them in handcarts – was it sweat or tears that made their faces shine? – you had to move the existing coffins closer together to make room.
In the evenings, people were brought in who had been shot in the suburbs, in confrontations with the army. They had either died instantly, from the soldiers’ gunfire, or while being taken to hospital. Many of them hadn’t been dead long and still looked uncannily alive; Eun-sook would be trying to stuff a jumble of spilled, opaque intestines back inside a gaping stomach when she’d have to stop what she was doing and run out of the auditorium to throw up. Seon-ju, frequently plagued by nosebleeds, could often be seen with her head tipped back, pressing her mask over her nose.
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 on 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 how, edge to edge. That night, looking around at all those dead bodies crammed into the gym hall, you thought to yourself how like a convention it seemed, a mass rally of corpses who were all there by pre-arrangement, 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 back yard, 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 honour 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 had to crowd up 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 the only available space had already been taken up by the buildings. A great mass of people, over 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 storey 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 rumour 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 re-entering 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 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 ㄱ, 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 dishevelled 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.
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. Goosebumps 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 draught 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.