The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to South Korean writer Han Kang “for her richly poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life.” The writer became the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. South Korean writer Han Kang is the 18th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2016, she won the Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in the city of Gwangju, infamous for the mass democratic protests of 1980, ruthlessly suppressed by the government (hundreds of people were killed, thousands were injured; the exact numbers are still unknown). The ten-year-old girl did not witness the events directly, but this tragedy, like another personal one that happened even before she was born – the early death of her sister, who died in infancy – left an imprint on the work of the Korean. Her works are permeated with a sense of irreparable loss, survivor’s guilt and the cruelty of the universe. Her novel Human Actions (2014), translated into Russian, is dedicated to the massacre in Gwangju, and her reflections on her lost sister are in The White Book (2016). Han Kang’s most famous work, the novel Vegetarian (2007), was also published in Russian. The main character first refuses to eat meat and then begins to starve, protesting against the widespread violence. The novel “I’m Not Saying Goodbye” is currently being prepared for publication in Russian, where the uprising on Jeju Island in the late 1940s, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people, is shown through the eyes of three women.

Han Kang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, then moved to Seoul with her family. In the 1990s, the magazine Literature and Society began publishing her poems, and in 1995, she released her first collection of short stories.

The Nobel Committee calls Han Gang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, about a woman who refuses to eat meat, a breakthrough in her career. The book consists of three parts: The Vegetarian, The Mongolian Stain, and The Flame of the Trees, each telling the story of a heroine from the perspective of a specific character. In 2016, the writer was awarded the Booker Prize for it.

In her works, Han Kang describes “historical traumas and unwritten rules” and reveals “the fragility of human life,” the committee said in a statement. Swedish writer Anna-Karin Palm, a member of the Nobel Committee for Literature, advises readers to begin their acquaintance with Han Kang’s work with her novel “Human Acts,” about the student unrest in Gwangju in 1980, CNN notes.

Vegetarian. Gan Han (fragment)

A beautiful and disturbing book about rebellion and taboo, violence and sensuality, and most importantly, about the painful metamorphoses of the soul.

Yeong-hye and her husband lead a normal, orderly life until she begins having nightmares. The dreams—intrusive images of blood and violence—torment Yeong-hye. To clear her mind, she gives up meat entirely. It’s a small act of defiance, but it exposes the fragility of her marriage and sets off a chain of increasingly bizarre events.

Acclaimed by critics around the world, The Vegetarian is a dark, Kafkaesque allegory about power, obsession, and the struggle of a woman to free herself from the violence within and without.

© Lee Sang-yoon, translation, 2017

© OOO Publishing House AST, 2018

* * *
* * *

Until my wife became a vegetarian, it never occurred to me that she was anything special. To be honest, when we first met, I didn’t find anything attractive about her. She was neither tall nor short, her hair was neither long nor short, her skin was dry and yellowish, her eyes were ordinary, her cheekbones were slightly prominent, her clothes were dull – as if her fear of expressing her individuality prevented her from choosing bright colors. She approached me, waiting for her at a table in a café, wearing black shoes of the most basic model. She approached me neither quickly nor slowly, neither boldly nor quietly.

There was nothing special about her, but there were no obvious flaws either, and so she became my wife. It did not occur to me to look for any hint of elegance or ingenuity or originality, but I was quite satisfied with her modest nature. In order to please her, I did not pretend to be intelligent and educated, did not fidget when I was late for an appointment with her, did not suffer, involuntarily comparing myself with the men in fashion magazines: there was no reason for this. I did not have to worry especially about the belly that began to stick out before I was thirty, or about the thin legs and forearms that, despite all my efforts, did not want to grow muscles, or about the small penis – the source of my secret inferiority complex.

I am so made that I have never liked excess, no matter in what form it manifests itself. As a child, I walked around like a rooster, playing the role of the leader of the yard punks two or three years younger than me; when I grew up, I entered the university where I could easily get a scholarship, and then I was quite content with a small but stable salary in a small firm, where my by no means outstanding abilities were highly valued. Therefore, marrying the most unremarkable-looking woman became a natural choice for me. Those who were called beautiful, or smart, or defiantly sexy, or the daughters of a rich daddy, initially seemed to me to be creatures with whom you can not avoid trouble, nothing more.

Having lived up to my expectations, she carried out the duties of an ordinary wife without any fuss. Every morning she woke up at exactly six, cooked rice, soup, fried a piece of fresh fish and served it on the table; in addition, having experience working part-time since her student years, she made her contribution to our family budget. For a year now, she had been working part-time, teaching at some institute where they teach computer graphics, and she also worked in the field of comics, doing work for a publishing house at home: she inserted the speech of characters from cartoon stories into “word bubbles”.

My wife was a silent person. She rarely asked me for anything, and no matter how late I got home from work, she never asked me why. Sometimes we had the same day off, but even on those days she never asked me to take her anywhere. Every evening, while I was lying in front of the TV with the remote control in my hand, my wife would hang around in her room. She was probably busy with her comics or reading there – if she had any hobby, it was just reading, and almost all of her books looked so boring that they didn’t inspire any desire to open them and leaf through them – and she only came out at lunch or dinner time to silently cook. In fact, life with such a wife definitely couldn’t be called interesting. But I thanked heaven that I didn’t get the kind of woman who sits on the phone from morning until night, constantly answering calls from colleagues and friends, and not the kind who nags her husband from time to time and starts noisy family squabbles: I’m really tired of such women.

If there was one peculiarity about my wife, it was her dislike of bras. During our brief and insipid courtship, I once accidentally put my hand on her back and, not feeling the straps under her sweater, became excited. Maybe she was giving me some silent sign, I thought, and to figure out what it was, I began to observe her behavior with different eyes. And I found out: she was not giving me anything, she had no signs in her mind. But if this was not a sign, then what: laziness or indifference? I could not understand. She could not boast of a lush chest, and, frankly, the “no bra” style did not suit her at all. It would be better if she wore bras filled with foam rubber, and I could rise in the eyes of my friends, showing them my future wife.

From the very first days after the wedding, she walked around the house without a bra. Only in the summer, when she went somewhere on business, she forced herself to put it on, and even then so that the buttons of her nipples did not protrude under her clothes. However, not an hour passed before she unfastened the hooks. In a light, thin blouse or a tight-fitting jacket, such freedom was noticeable, but she did not care. When I reproached her, she compared a bra to a vest put on on a hot, stuffy day. And in justification, she added that she could not stand it when her breasts were squeezed. As for me, I had never had the chance to wear this detail of ladies’ attire, so I did not know how difficult it was to breathe in it. However, having made sure that other women did not seem to hate bras like she did, I began to doubt such heightened sensitivity.

And everything else suited me. We had been living together for five years, but since we had never suffered from passionate love, we had never felt any particular disappointment or tiredness from each other. Until last fall, when the apartment became our property, we had not planned to have children, but then I began to think whether it was time for me to hear the word “daddy.” Until that early February morning, when I saw my wife standing in the kitchen in her nightgown, it was hard for me to even imagine that our life could change in any way.

* * *

“What are you standing there for?” I asked, getting ready to turn on the light in the bathroom. It seemed like there was still an hour or two left until dawn. Because of the one and a half bottles of soju[1 – Soju is a Korean vodka.] drunk that evening in the company of my colleagues, I woke up with a feeling of a full bladder and a dry throat.

– Can’t you hear? What are you doing there?

I shivered from the cold and looked at her. I was wide awake and sober. She stood rooted to the spot, her eyes fixed on the refrigerator. My wife’s expression, half turned, was hidden by the darkness, but her whole figure had a depressing effect on me. Her thick, undyed black hair was tousled and stuck out in all directions. As always, the hem of her white nightgown, reaching to her ankles, was rolled up and seemed slightly raised.

Compared to the bedroom, the kitchen was quite cold. Usually, the wife, who loved the warmth, hurried to throw on a sweater and put her feet in fur slippers. I wonder how long she had been standing like this: barefoot, in a thin nightgown that she wore from spring to winter? She stood like a statue, with an expression as if she heard nothing. It seemed as if an invisible person or, perhaps, some kind of spirit was propping up the wall in place of the refrigerator. Had she become a sleepwalker? I had heard of this disease somewhere.

I approached my wife, looking at her profile, impenetrable, like that of a stone statue.

– Why are you standing here? What’s wrong with you?..

My hand fell on her shoulder, and unexpectedly for me the touch did not frighten her at all. She must have kept her wits and was aware of everything: that I had left the bedroom, asked a question, and even that I had approached her. She simply did not attach any importance to it. As sometimes happened when, absorbed in a TV series that was on at night, she did not react to the fact that I had returned home, even after hearing the click of the lock on the front door. But what could have captured her attention so much at four in the morning in a dark kitchen in front of the whitish door of a four-hundred-liter refrigerator?

– Listen, dear!

Her face appeared in the darkness. I saw it like this for the first time: a cold gleam in her eyes, tightly compressed lips.

– …I had a dream.

The voice sounded clear.

– A dream? What are you talking about? And do you know what time it is?

She turned away from me and slowly moved into the bedroom. Stepping over the threshold, she stretched her hand back and quietly closed the door. I was left alone in the dark kitchen, standing and looking at that door, behind which the white figure of my wife disappeared.

He turned on the light and went into the bathroom. The temperature outside had been hovering around ten below zero for the past few days. I had splashed my rubber flip-flops while taking a shower a few hours earlier, and they were still cold and damp. The black hole of the fan above the toilet, the floor, and the white tiles on the walls gave off a feeling of sadness and loneliness, inspired by the cold winter.

When I entered the bedroom, I heard no sounds from the side where my wife lay curled up. It even seemed to me that there was no one else in the room. Of course, I was mistaken. I listened and barely heard quiet breathing. However, a sleeping person breathes differently. I only had to stretch out my hand and I would have felt a warm body. But for some reason I couldn’t touch her. And I didn’t want to talk to her at all.

* * *

When I woke up, I found myself in bed and, for a second losing my sense of reality, I stared at the window with white curtains through which the rays of the morning winter sun were shining. I sat up, looked at the wall clock and immediately jumped up, kicked the door and ran out of the bedroom. In the kitchen near the refrigerator I saw my wife.

– Are you crazy? Why didn’t you wake him up? Look, who’s already…

I stopped mid-sentence, stepping on something wet. The sight before me was so vivid that I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Still in her nightgown, with her tousled hair loose, she sat huddled in front of the refrigerator, just like she had the night before. The entire space on the kitchen floor around her white figure was filled – there was no room to step – with plastic containers and black plastic bags. Thinly sliced ​​pieces of beef for shabu-shabu, pork belly for frying, two beef legs, vacuum-packed squid, a well-dried eel and a bunch of dried yellow pink salmon, recently sent from the village by her mother-in-law, unopened packs of frozen dumplings and many other packages of God knows what. All this food, rustling the bags, one by one, the wife threw into a huge garbage bag.

– What are you doing?!

I screamed, finally losing control of myself. Just like yesterday, not noticing my presence, she continued her work. She dropped packages of meat, chicken pieces, and sea eel worth at least twenty thousand won into the bag.

– Are you out of your mind? Why throw all this away?

I rushed towards her, stumbling over the bags that were laid out, and grabbed her wrist. Suddenly I encountered strong resistance, and before she let go of the bag, I had to tense up so much that I felt hot. Rubbing her left wrist with her right, my wife calmly uttered the same phrase:

– I had a dream.

There she goes again. Not a muscle moved on her face as she looked straight into my eyes. Her mobile phone rang sharply.

– Your mother!

I grabbed the coat I’d left on the couch last night and began frantically searching through my pockets. From the last, inner one, I pulled out the ringing phone.

– I’m sorry. There were problems at home… Excuse me, please. I’ll try to leave as soon as possible. No, I’ll be in the office soon. Just a little… No, please, don’t. Just wait a little. I’m honestly very sorry. I have nothing more to say…

Slamming the lid of his mobile, he ran to the bathroom. He shaved in such a hurry that he cut himself in two places.

– Don’t have an ironed shirt?

There was no answer. I rushed back, pulled out the shirt I had thrown in yesterday from the laundry basket in front of the bathroom. Luckily, it wasn’t too wrinkled. I wrapped my tie around myself like a scarf, pulled on my socks, checked if my diary and wallet were in place, and she had remained in the kitchen the whole time. For the first time in five years of marriage, my wife didn’t come out to see me off, and I had to go to work without feeling her care.

– She’s gone crazy. She’s completely lost her mind.

Crushing the heels, he squeezed his feet into the narrow shoes he had recently bought. He kicked open the front door, ran out of the apartment, saw that the elevator was stuck on the top floor, ran up three flights of stairs, managed to jump into a subway car at the last second, and only then saw his reflection in the dark window of the train. He smoothed his hair, tied a tie, and smoothed out the creases in his shirt with his palm. His wife’s terrifyingly indifferent face and her firm voice surfaced in his memory only later.

She said twice that she had a dream. Her face flashed through the window of a speeding train, pierced the darkness of a tunnel. It seemed unfamiliar, as at our first meeting. However, there was no time to think about my wife, about her strange behavior. In thirty minutes I had to think about how to justify myself to the client, and then how to present him with a draft proposal. “Today, no matter what, I have to leave work early. After all, since you were transferred to another department, for several months you haven’t come home before midnight,” I muttered to myself.

* * *

Dark forest. No one around. Pushing through the dense undergrowth, I scratched my face and hands on the sharp leaves. It seems I came with a companion, but wandered somewhere alone and lost my way. Scary. Cold. I walked through a frozen gorge, and a red building appeared, similar to a barn. I lifted the straw mat hanging instead of a door and entered. And immediately I saw them. Several hundred pieces of meat. Enormous red animal carcasses hung on long bamboo crossbars. Scarlet blood that had not yet had time to coagulate was still dripping from some. I rushed forward, now and then bumping into the meat and pushing it away from me, but there was no exit in sight at the other end. My white clothes were soaked in blood.

I don’t know how I got out of there. I ran back through the gorge and ran further. Suddenly the forest began to brighten, spring trees with thick green crowns appeared. Children were bustling about everywhere, something delicious smelled. Families had gathered here, many families, and were having a picnic. This picture seemed unusually bright. A stream was merrily babbling, people were sitting on rugs next to it, eating kimbap[3 – A Korean version of Japanese rolls with various fillings.]. Somewhere they were frying meat, a song was heard, joyful laughter rang out.

But I was scared. My clothes were still covered in blood. While no one noticed me, I hid behind the trees. My hands were covered in blood. My mouth was covered in blood. After all, I had picked up and eaten the fallen piece. Juicy raw meat was rubbing against my gums and the roof of my mouth, leaving a bloody trail. My eyes sparkled in the pool of blood on the barn floor.

The taste of the raw meat I was chewing couldn’t be so real. And my gaze, my face. It seems alien, but it is definitely my face. No, the opposite. I have seen it many times, but it is not my face. I can’t explain it. Familiar and at the same time unfamiliar… this living and strange, terribly strange sensation.

* * *

On the table, set by his wife for dinner, there were lettuce leaves, boiled rice, soybean paste, seaweed soup cooked without beef or shellfish, and kimchi. That was all.

– What is this? Because of your stupid dream, you threw away all the meat? Do you even know how much money you wasted?

I got up from the table and opened the freezer. It was almost empty. A packet of roasted bean powder, ground red pepper, young green peppers, and a packet of crushed garlic.

– At least fry me some eggs. I’m really tired today. And I didn’t have a proper meal at lunch.
– I threw the eggs away.
– What?
– And I don’t drink milk anymore.
– What’s crazy! Are you telling me not to eat meat, too?
– I can’t keep stuff like that in the fridge. I can’t stand it.

How can she think only of herself! I looked straight into her face. Downcast eyes, expression calmer than ever. Unexpectedly for me. It turns out that somewhere in her there was such egoism, such willfulness was hidden. It turns out that she is simply a reckless woman!

– So, now you can’t eat meat in this house?
– But you’ve always only had breakfast here. After all, you often eat meat for lunch, for dinner… And you won’t die if you go without meat in the morning.

The wife answered in such a way, putting everything in its place, as if her choice was the only reasonable and correct one.

– Okay. Let’s leave me as is, and you? You’re giving up meat now, right?

She nodded.

– Yes? Until when?
– …Forever.

I was speechless. I had heard about plant-based food as a fashionable trend of recent years. I knew that people became vegetarians either for the sake of health for many years, or to improve their body, get rid of allergies, or, as it is also called, atopy, or to help preserve the environment. Of course, believers who have gone to Buddhist temples refuse to kill living beings – they have such a great principle – but she is not a girl in adolescence to behave like that. Why would she do this? It seems she was not going to lose weight, or get treatment for some disease, no devil possessed her, but she simply, you see, one day had a nightmare and decided to stop eating what she had eaten all her life. And she took on this matter with such stubbornness, and her husband’s intentions, his desires, can therefore be ignored?

If meat had made my wife sick from the start, I could somehow understand her. However, even before we got married, I noticed her interest in tasty food, and I liked it very much. With a familiar movement, she turned over thin pieces of meat laid out on the grill, selected those already fried to a golden crust and cut them into small pieces, holding tongs in one hand and large scissors in the other, and her whole appearance inspired confidence. The food she cooked on weekends after her marriage was also distinguished by excellent taste. Fragrant pork belly marinated in sweet ginger sauce and fried, the thinnest slices of beef for shabu-shabu, sprinkled with black pepper and salt aged in a bamboo trunk, seasoned with sesame oil, rolled in rice flour and laid out on a frying pan – only she cooked like that. And what a bibimbap[4 – A mixture of cooked rice, meat, vegetables, chicken egg, and hot soy sauce.] made of ground beef fried in sesame oil, rice soaked in water, and sprouted soybeans! One cannot help but remember the chicken cut into pieces, boiled with large potatoes and seasoned with hot red pepper. I could gobble up three bowls of this deliciousness in one sitting, the spicy broth of which penetrated every cell of the body.

And now you don’t even want to look at the table set by your wife. Sitting calmly on a chair, she put the seaweed soup, which didn’t even look tasty, into her mouth. She put a big spoonful of rice and soybean paste into a lettuce leaf, wrapped it up, put it into her mouth and started chewing.

I knew nothing. I knew nothing about this woman. This thought suddenly pierced me through and through.

– You won’t eat?

In this casual tone, middle-aged mothers who have given birth to and raised four or more children speak to their offspring. Not paying any attention to me, who was standing there in confusion and not taking my eyes off her, she chewed the kimchi for a long time with a crunching sound.

* * *

Until spring, nothing changed for my wife. Every morning I had to eat one grass, but it no longer bothered me. If one person changes to the core, then the second one can only adapt to him.

She was drying out with each passing day. Her cheekbones, already prominent, had become unattractively sharp. Without makeup, her skin looked pale, like a sick person’s. If everyone, having stopped eating meat, lost weight like my wife, then no one would spend so much effort to lose weight. But I knew. I knew that she was losing weight not because of plant food. But because of her sleep. Although in reality, she hardly slept.

My wife wasn’t known for her efficiency. It used to be that she was already in her tenth dream when I got home from work late at night. But now she didn’t rush to the bedroom even after I got home after midnight, took a shower, and went to bed. She didn’t read books, didn’t chat on the Internet, didn’t watch late-night cable. And there couldn’t have been that much work to squeeze direct speech into the word bubbles in comics.

Only closer to dawn, around five, my wife would lie down next to me and either sleep or doze, I don’t know, but about an hour later a short groan would be heard and she would get up. Disheveled hair, a crumpled face, inflamed eyes with reddened lids – that’s how she prepared my breakfast. She herself didn’t touch the food.

But what worried me most was her refusal to have sex. Previously, my wife had always met my body’s demands without any excuses, and sometimes she herself was the first to arouse my desire. However, lately, as soon as I touched her shoulder, she would slowly turn away. Once I asked the reason for her refusal:

– Do you have a problem?
– I’m tired.
– That’s why I say: eat meat. Without it, you have no strength. You weren’t like this before.
– Actually…
– What?
– …I can’t, because you smell.
– Smells?
– Yes, meat. Your body smells like meat.

I burst out laughing.

– Didn’t you see? I just took a shower. Where did the smell come from?

She answered sincerely:

– …From every pore where sweat comes out.

Sometimes dark thoughts visited me. What if she is in the first stage of madness? After all, such behavior could be the beginning of an illness associated with some paranoia, or delusional idea, or neurasthenia. I have only heard about them.

It would be hard to say, however, that she was in some kind of madness. As before, she said little and kept the house in order. On Sunday, she made two salads from greens, cooked potato noodles with fried vegetables and added mushrooms instead of the prescribed meat. Considering that vegetarian dishes are popular these days, no one would have found anything strange in this. But she could not sleep, and when I asked her in the morning why she looked like that – depressed, with an absent gaze, as if something was weighing heavily on her – she would only answer: “I had a dream.” I did not ask what kind of dream it was. I had no desire to hear again about some barn in a dark forest, about a pool of blood where a face was reflected.

She drove herself into this dream, closed to me, where there was no way and which I did not want to know about, and, suffering there, she continued to dry up. At first it seemed that she would become thin, like a ballerina, but it ended with the fact that only skin and bones remained of her, like a sick person. Every time bad thoughts appeared in my head, I began to think. If you look at my father-in-law – he lives in a small town where he runs a sawmill and a grocery store, as well as his eldest daughter and son, people with good character, it would never occur to you that someone in their family could have a mental disorder.

It is worth remembering my wife’s relatives – and their house immediately comes to mind, where a delicious smoke, seasoned with the smell of burning garlic, hovers. While the men drink soju, snacking on thin slices of meat, drops of fat from which fall with a crackle onto the grill, the women loudly discuss the news in the kitchen. All members of the family, especially the father-in-law, loved raw meat in a spicy marinade, the mother-in-law herself skillfully cut up live fish, and their daughters, wielding a large cleaver, like a butcher’s, easily cut up chicken into pieces. I liked the vitality of my wife, who could swat several crawling cockroaches at once with her palm. I had been looking for a partner for a long time, and did my choice not fall on the most ordinary woman in the world?

Even if her health was truly worrisome, I wasn’t going to seek help from a consultant or start treatment, as everyone else did. If such a misfortune had happened to someone I knew, I could have consoled them by saying, “It’s just an illness, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” since I was sure that nothing like that could happen to my wife. But now I couldn’t bring myself to say that. Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for her odd behavior.

* * *

The day before I had this dream, I was cutting thin slices from a frozen piece of meat in the morning. You angrily urged me:

– Your mother, how much longer are you going to dig around?

You know that if you rush me, I get lost. I become as if I am not myself, everything falls out of my hands, and, on the contrary, it only gets worse.

– Faster, come on faster!

My hands moved so fast that my neck became hot. Suddenly the cutting board slid forward. That’s when I cut my finger, and a nick appeared on the blade of the knife. I raised my index finger up, and a red drop of blood quickly spread on it. Rounder, rounder. I put my finger in my mouth and calmed down. It seemed that the scarlet color and, strangely enough, the sweetish taste of blood made me come to my senses.

You started on the second piece of freshly fried meat, but suddenly began to chew more and more slowly, and then spat out everything that was in your mouth. After picking around in this mass, you found something shiny and screamed:

– What is this? It’s a knife fragment!

I looked at you in confusion, at your face distorted with rage.

– And if I hadn’t noticed and swallowed it, what would have happened?! I could have died!

Why wasn’t I scared then? On the contrary, I felt even calmer. As if someone’s cold hand had touched my forehead. Suddenly, everything around me receded from me, like water during low tide. The table, you, the kitchen furniture. It seemed that in the endless space there was only me and the chair beneath me.

The next morning. There is a pool of blood in the barn. In it I saw my reflected face for the first time.

* * *

– What lips you have! Didn’t you put on makeup?

I took off my shoes, grabbed my wife, who was standing there in confusion, by the sleeve of her black coat and dragged her into the bedroom.

– Are you going to go looking like this?

Our faces were reflected in the mirror above the dressing table.

– Come on, smear yourself.

She carefully freed herself from my hand. She opened the compact and went over her face with a sponge. The white cream powder settled on her skin, and my wife looked like a dusty rag doll. Having painted her ashen lips with bright coral lipstick – my wife had always used it before – she erased from her face the deathly pallor typical of sick people. I calmed down.

– We’re late. Hurry up.

I was the first to get out. I pressed the elevator button and watched impatiently as my wife slowly shoved her feet into blue sneakers. The athletic shoes didn’t go with the short coat at all, but she had no other shoes. She didn’t wear boots or shoes. She had thrown away all her leather things and objects.

I was the first to climb into the car, which was parked with the engine running, and heard a report on the situation on the highways. I listened to find out how long it would take to get to the center, where the company director had ordered a banquet in a traditional Korean restaurant, then I fastened my seatbelt and released the handbrake. A few seconds later, my wife, who had given me a blast of cold air from her coat, sat down next to me and, after fiddling with the seatbelt, clicked the lock.

– Today you must show yourself from your best side. For the first time the director invited me, a manager, to such a dinner, where only the top management of the company and their wives gather. That’s how much he values ​​me.

Thanks to the fact that I chose a new route and drove at the maximum permitted speed, we were able to get there right on time. It immediately became clear that this two-story restaurant with a fairly wide parking lot is a very chic establishment.

The last cold weather did not give in. My wife, wearing a thin autumn coat, stood by the car and shivered in the wind. She was silent the whole way, but I had already gotten used to it and did not worry about anything. It was good that she did not talk much, and in general, older people like such women. These thoughts easily relieved some of the tension that was holding me back.

The company director, the executive director, the commercial director and their spouses were already there. The head of my department and his wife arrived right after us. After exchanging greetings and jokes with them, I undressed, took my coat from my wife and hung my clothes on a hanger. Following the instructions of the director’s wife, a lady with finely plucked eyebrows, hung with beads made of huge jade stones, we stood at a long table set for a banquet. Everyone behaved casually, as if they had been to this restaurant many times. Looking at the ceiling, stylized as the roof of a traditional house with ridges on all four sides, and glancing out of the corner of my eye at the stone aquarium with goldfish, I sat down in my place. At that moment, when I turned to my wife without thinking, her breasts caught my eye.

She was wearing a slightly tight black blouse, and the outline of her nipples was clearly visible through the fabric. There was no doubt, she had come here without a bra. Quickly glancing around to see if anyone had noticed, I met the gaze of the director’s wife. She was pretending to be unperturbed, but her eyes were shining with surprise, curiosity, and doubt as to whether it was worth showing contempt. I understood all this in an instant.

I felt a blush spread across my cheeks. Realizing what was behind the sidelong glances the women were casting at my wife, who sat with an indifferent look, not participating in their small talk, I made the only right choice – I behaved naturally.

– Did you find this place without any problems? – asked the director’s wife.
– Yes. I was driving past this place once. The yard in front of the restaurant is so nice that I wanted to visit it.
– Oh, I see… I agree, they decorated the garden beautifully. It’s even better during the day. And you can see the flowerbed from that window.

However, when the food began to be served, the tightly stretched thread of effort, barely held by me, broke.

The first dish served was a dish prepared according to an old recipe. It consisted of buckwheat jelly, herbs, mushrooms and fried beef cut into strips. The wife, who had not said a word until now, stopped the waiter who was raising a small ladle over her plate:

– I won’t eat this.

The voice sounded very quiet, but the movement at the table stopped. Catching the surprised glances of everyone present, she repeated a little louder:

– I don’t eat meat.

– So you are a vegetarian? – the director exclaimed happily. – Abroad, there are some strict vegetarians. And in our country, it seems, they have begun to appear. In the press, especially recently, they have often begun to attack those who eat meat… Sometimes you think: maybe it is worth giving up animal food for the sake of long life? It seems to me that there is a grain of reason in this.
– But is it possible to live, having completely given up meat? – said the director’s wife, putting a smile on her face.

The wife’s plate remained the only white spot on the table. The waiter collected the other nine and disappeared. The conversation, of course, turned to vegetarianism.

– They recently found a mummy of a man who lived five hundred thousand years ago? Have you heard about it? Just think – traces of some kind of hunting equipment were found next to it. Eating meat is a human instinct. And what is called vegetarianism contradicts this instinct. And therefore it is unnatural.
– Nowadays you can meet those who eat only plant foods, guided by the principles of natural philosophy… To find out what my constitutional type is, to understand what food my body is predisposed to, I visited several establishments, and wherever I went, they spoke differently. And each time I tried to change my menu, but all the time my soul was somehow uneasy… So I thought, wouldn’t it be better to just eat a little bit of everything.
– How can you not be healthy if you eat a little bit of everything and everything you want? This is the proof of a person’s well-being, be it physical or psychological.

This was said by the executive director’s wife, who was stealthily glancing at her wife’s erect nipples. Finally, this lady’s arrow flew straight to the target.

– And for what reason did you become a vegetarian?… Or is it a matter of religious principles?
– No.

As if she had no idea how much effort I had had to expend to be here, among these people, my wife quietly and calmly parted her lips. Suddenly I felt goosebumps run down my spine: I knew exactly what she was going to say.

– …I had a dream.

Before she could say these words, I jumped in:

– My wife suffered from a stomach ailment for a long time. Because of it, she couldn’t even sleep at night. On the advice of an oriental medicine doctor, she stopped eating meat, and she felt much better.

Only after this explanation did everyone nod their heads.

– How fortunate that the diet helped. I have never actually sat at the same table with a vegetarian. How unpleasant it must be to share a meal with someone who might think of you with disgust as they watch you eat meat. I think that a purely plant-based diet for psychological reasons can cause hatred of carnivores. What do you think about this?
– Probably, this mood takes hold of you, and when you eat small octopuses with gusto, and the woman sitting next to you looks at you like a beast, watching how their tentacles cling to the chopsticks that you bring to your mouth.

Laughter broke out. I joined in the general merriment, but I was well aware of everything. I was aware that my wife was not laughing along with everyone else. That she was not listening to what those around her were saying, but was looking at their lips, glistening with sesame oil. That everyone at this table felt awkward under her gaze.

They served fried chicken pieces in batter in a spicy hot sauce. Then they brought raw tuna. While everyone was enjoying the delicacy, the wife did not move even her little finger. Demonstrating the clear shapes of her nipples, similar to small acorns, through her blouse, she carefully, as if absorbing everything that was happening, watched the lips of the assembled people: how they moved them, how they opened them, squeezed them, licked them.

About ten magnificent dishes were served at this banquet, and of all that was offered, my wife allowed herself only a vegetable salad, kimchi, and pumpkin soup. She didn’t even eat the liquid porridge of the original taste made from a special kind of glutinous rice, because the grains were kept in meat broth before cooking. Meanwhile, those gathered continued their conversation as if she was not there. Only to me did someone occasionally turn condescendingly, as if out of pity, but in my soul I felt that I also evoked contempt in them.

For dessert they brought fruit, and the wife took a piece of apple and a slice of orange.

– Aren’t you hungry? You’ve hardly eaten anything.

Thus the director’s wife expressed her concern in a superbly trained social voice. The wife did not smile in response, did not blush, was not confused, but only silently looked straight into the well-groomed face of this noble lady. The seconds passed, a heavy atmosphere reigned at the table. Did the wife know where she had ended up? Did she know who this elderly woman was? I felt the thoughts of my wife, her inner world, which I had never had the chance to look into, as an infinitely deep pit, a trap for myself.

* * *

Something had to be done.

That evening, feeling like everything had gone wrong, I drove and thought the whole way. My wife seemed calm. She didn’t seem to understand what she had done. She was either sleepy or tired, but she sat with her head against the window. If this had happened earlier, I would have yelled at her as usual: “Do you want to see your husband fired from his job? What are you even doing?”

But now my intuition told me: all my words were useless. I could be indignant, try to convince, but nothing would make her change. Our relationship had already passed the stage when I could fix the situation with my own hands.

My wife took a shower, put on her nightgown and instead of going to the bedroom, went to her room, and I walked from corner to corner in the living room and stopped at the telephone. In a distant small town, my mother-in-law picked up the phone. It was not late, but her voice seemed sleepy:

– Are you okay? It’s been a while since I’ve heard from you.
– Yes, everything is fine. I’m very busy right now, so I haven’t called for a long time. And how are you, is your father healthy?
– As for us, everything is as usual with us. And how are you doing at work? Everything is good?

I hesitated a little, then said:

– I’m fine. But with my wife…
– What about Yeonghee? Did something happen?

There was a note of concern in my mother-in-law’s voice. My wife was her second daughter, and I hadn’t noticed her caring much about her before, but I guess a child is a child, there’s no getting around it.

– She doesn’t eat meat.
– What?
– She doesn’t eat meat or fish at all, she only eats grass. For several months now.
– I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Is this some kind of diet?
– It’s hard to say. No matter how much I try to dissuade her, she won’t listen. Because of this, I haven’t eaten meat at home for a long time.

My mother-in-law was speechless. While she was in this state, I made my final decision.

– She’s lost weight and become weak. I don’t even know what to do.
– This is no good. If Yeong-hye is nearby, give her the phone.
– She went to bed. I’ll tell her to call you tomorrow morning.
– No, leave it. I’ll call her myself tomorrow morning. What’s wrong with her all of a sudden… She never did this before… I’m so sorry.

After finishing the call, I leafed through my address book and dialed my wife’s older sister. My three-year-old nephew picked up the phone and shouted, “Hello!”

– Call your mother, please.
– Yes, I am listening, – the sister-in-law answered immediately. The sisters look alike, but the older one has bigger eyes, so she seems prettier, and besides, she has no shortage of femininity.

Her slightly nasal voice always aroused some sexual tension in me during our telephone conversations. I told her about my wife’s vegetarianism in the same words as I had told my mother-in-law a few minutes earlier, and after hearing the same surprised exclamations, apologies and promises, I hung up. Finally, I wanted to call my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother, but changed my mind. A third call seemed unnecessary.

* * *

I had a dream again.

Someone killed a man, someone else hid the body unnoticed, but when I woke up, I realized that I had forgotten. Forgotten whether I killed or was killed. If I killed, then whom? Maybe you? It was someone very close to me. Or no, maybe you killed me?.. Then who hid the body? Neither me nor you, for sure… It was a shovel. I am sure. The sharp edge of a huge shovel hit the head and killed. A resounding echo. A stretched moment when the metal fell on the head… A real picture of a dead body falling into the darkness.

I have seen this dream before. It has come to me countless times. And in it is a dream I have already had. This happens when, under the influence of alcohol, you remember a past intoxication. Many times, someone kills someone. Vague, elusive… but terribly certain sensation.

You probably won’t understand. For some time now I’ve been afraid to look at someone cutting something with a knife on a board. Be it my sister or my mother. I can’t explain why. I just feel that I don’t want to look at it, I don’t have the strength. That’s why I tried to treat them with all my tenderness. But this doesn’t mean that my mother or sister was killed in my dream yesterday. It’s just that there was a similar feeling, only this feeling, a trembling, dirty, terrible, cruel feeling that I killed a person with my own hands or that someone took my life, and if I hadn’t experienced it, I would hardly have been able to feel… something categorical, disappointing, lukewarm, like uncooled blood.

I wonder why everything feels unfamiliar to me? I feel like I came in from the back. I feel like I’m locked behind a door that has no handle. Or maybe it’s just now that I’ve realized I’ve been here to begin with. It’s dark. Everything is flattened into a black spot.

* * *

Contrary to my expectations, neither my mother-in-law nor my sister-in-law managed to convince my wife to reconsider her views on vegetarianism. On weekends, my mother-in-law would ask on the phone:

– Yeonhye still doesn’t eat meat?

Even my father-in-law, who had never deigned to dial our number during our entire life together with his daughter, once called and scolded her. The excited, loud voice bursting from the receiver reached me:

– What are you doing there? You only think about yourself. And what should your husband do? He is in the prime of life, isn’t he?

The wife just listened, without even saying the usual “yes” or “no.”

– Why don’t you answer? Do you hear what they’re saying to you?

The water boiled in the soup pot on the stove, and my wife, silently putting the phone down on the table, went into the kitchen. She left and never came back. Feeling sorry for my father-in-law, who was vainly spewing curses that did not reach the addressee, I picked up the phone.

– I’m sorry, father.
– No, it’s me who should apologize.

This was the first time in the five years I had known my patriarchal father-in-law that I had heard this, and I was very surprised. Showing attention to someone, expressing concern, asking for forgiveness – all of this somehow did not fit with him. He had fought in Vietnam and even received an order for military merit, which was the greatest achievement in the life of this man, who always spoke with a voice as loud as his willpower was strong. “I killed seven Viet Cong in Vietnam…” – a story beginning with these words was part of his repertoire, and I, as a son-in-law, had heard it a couple of times. My wife said that she grew up enduring blows to the shin with a stick from her father until she was seventeen.

– …I was planning to go to Seoul next month anyway. I’ll come, sit her down in front of me and have a proper talk.

In June, it was my mother-in-law’s birthday. Her parents’ house was far away, so the children, who lived in the capital, congratulated their mother by phone and sent gifts by mail. But just at the beginning of May, my sister-in-law’s family moved, and the parents decided to visit the children to see the older daughter’s more spacious apartment. So it turned out that the family meeting on the second Sunday of the approaching June became the biggest event in several years. No one said anything openly, but it was obvious that on this day the family was preparing to reprimand my wife.

I don’t know whether she guessed about it or not, but, as before, she lived day after day calmly, without fuss. If it weren’t for her stubborn unwillingness to perform marital duties in bed – she went to bed in jeans – from the outside our relationship would have seemed quite normal. But with each passing day, she continued to lose weight, changing, and when at dawn, having found the alarm clock by touch and pressed the button, I forced myself to get up with difficulty, I saw her lying flat on her back with her eyes open, and she was no longer the same as before. After that ill-fated dinner arranged by the company’s management, my colleagues treated me with suspicion for some time, but as soon as the project I had launched began to bring in income, and quite noticeably, everything seemed to have sunk into oblivion.

Sometimes I thought that there was nothing wrong with living with a strange woman. Living like a stranger. Or no, like an older sister who cooks, sets the table, cleans the apartment, or even like a housekeeper. But for a man my age, who is used to having sex with his wife regularly, even without much emotion, it is very difficult to endure prolonged sexual abstinence. It happened that, returning home late at night after a drinking binge with colleagues, under the influence of alcohol, I took my wife by force. Wringing her resisting arms, I pulled down her pants and at the same time felt an unexpected excitement. She resisted fiercely, but sometimes – on average once in three attempts – I managed, squeezing out foul language, to penetrate her. At such moments, my wife seemed to turn into one of the so-called comforters – sex slaves who served Japanese soldiers during the Second World War – and lay with a frozen face, staring at the dark ceiling. I would finish my business, and she would immediately turn away and cover her head with the blanket. While I was taking a shower, she must have been tidying herself up, and having finished playing her unenviable role, she would lie with her eyes closed as calmly as if nothing had happened.

At such moments I was overcome by a strange and gloomy foreboding. Although I was born thick-skinned and never experienced any forebodings, the darkness and silence of the bedroom made me shrink with fear. The next morning I looked with undisguised disgust at the tightly compressed lips of my wife, who sat at the table half-turned to me and did not react to my words. It was written on her face that she had been through fire and water, overcoming all the adversity that had befallen her, and I hated her.

It was the evening of three days before the scheduled meeting with her relatives. That day in Seoul there was a heat wave that broke all records, and all the buildings, big and small, had air conditioners. I returned home, tired of the cold air blowing through the office from morning until evening. Opening the front door, I quickly slammed it behind me when I saw my wife. This was because we live in a building in which the apartments are arranged like in a hotel, on both sides of the corridor, and I was afraid that someone might accidentally pass by at that moment. My wife, wearing only light gray shorts, with her top off, was sitting at a small table in front of the TV and peeling potatoes. Her breasts were visible under her protruding collarbones, almost invisible against the background of her thin ribs.

“Why did you take your clothes off?” I asked, trying to smile. Without turning my head, continuing to peel potatoes, my wife answered:
“It’s hot.”

“Raise your head,” I said to myself, gritting my teeth. “Raise your head and laugh. Show me you’re joking.” But she didn’t laugh. The clock was approaching eight, the door to the loggia was open, and it couldn’t be hot in the apartment. My wife’s shoulders were covered in pimples that looked like sesame seeds. A pile of potato peelings lay on a newspaper. Nearby, a mound of more than thirty potatoes rose.

“What are you going to do with this?” I asked as calmly as I could.
“I’ll put it out.”
“That’s all?
” “Yes.”

I forced a smile, expecting her to smile back. But she didn’t. Without even looking at me, she said:

– I’m just terribly hungry.

* * *

In a dream, when I cut off someone’s head, when it’s still dangling, not cut off completely, and I grab it and cut it further, when I put the slippery pupil on my palm and when I wake up after that… In reality, when I have the desire to kill the pigeons that, waddling from side to side, parade in front of me, when I want to strangle the neighbor’s cat, which I have been watching for a long time, when my knees buckle and a cold sweat appears, when it seems to me that I have become a different person, when another person appears inside me and devours me, all this time…

…At this time, my mouth fills with saliva. Passing by a butcher’s shop, I close my mouth. Because of the saliva that appears at the very base of my tongue and wets my lips. Because of the saliva that oozes between my lips and flows down.

* * *

If only I could sleep. If only I could forget myself for just an hour. At night, when I wake up every now and then and rush barefoot through the rooms, the house is already cold. Cold as cold rice, cold soup. Nothing can be seen through the black windows. The front door rattles from time to time, but there is no one to knock. Returning to the bedroom, you put your hand under the blanket and feel the cold. Everything has cooled down.

* * *

Now I can’t sleep for more than five minutes. As soon as I fall asleep, I see a dream. Or rather, not even a dream. Short scenes come, replacing each other. The glittering eyes of a wild animal, blood, a crushed head, then again those same wild eyes, as if rising from my insides. I wake up, trembling all over, and check my hands. Are my nails still soft. Do my teeth obey me.

The only thing I trust is my breasts. I love my breasts. Because they can’t kill anyone. After all, arms, legs, teeth, tongue, even a look are weapons that can kill and harm. But breasts are not capable of that. I have two such round breasts, and that means everything is fine. So far, so good. But why are my breasts getting thinner? They are not so round anymore. I wonder why? Why is my body drying out and drying out? What am I trying to pierce by becoming so sharp?

* * *

It was the seventeenth floor of a sunlit building facing south, with the view blocked by the neighboring building at the front, but a strip of forest at the back.

– Well, now we don’t have to worry about you. You got a very nice apartment, – said the mother-in-law, picking up chopsticks and a spoon.

My wife’s sister acquired this apartment because she had opened a small shop selling cosmetics before she got married. Before the birth of her child, my sister-in-law tripled the retail space, and after the birth of her son, she only came to her shop in the evenings. Recently, when my son turned three and went to kindergarten, she again began selling from morning until night.

I envied my sister-in-law’s husband. He had graduated from the University of the Arts and lived as an artist, but he was not very successful in making a living from painting. They said he had inherited money from his parents, but when you only spend money without earning anything, any fortune can end. Since his wife worked hard, rolling up her sleeves, my brother-in-law could obviously now live with peace of mind, making art. In addition, my sister-in-law, like my wife once, was a very good cook. Looking at the table set for dinner, all covered with delicacies, I suddenly felt hungry. Looking at my sister-in-law’s body, moderately plump, admiring her large eyes, listening to her soft voice, I thought with regret: “How much I must have missed in my life.”

The wife, without even saying the usual greetings for such a case, such as “What a nice apartment!”, “You cooked so much! Are you tired, I suppose?”, sat silently and ate rice with kimchi. Apart from that, there was nothing else on the table that she could eat. Her chopsticks did not even touch the delicious salads dressed with mayonnaise, because it contains eggs.

The wife’s face was dark from lack of sleep. If a stranger saw her, they would take her for a sick person. As usual, she was without a bra, in a light T-shirt, and if you looked closely, you could see her nipples through the thin fabric. A few minutes ago, as soon as we entered the hallway, her sister-in-law took her to the bedroom, but soon came out first. Judging by her upset face, the wife refused to put on a bra.

– How much did the apartment in this building cost?
– …Really? Yesterday I went to a real estate website and saw that the price of these apartments had already risen to almost fifty million won. They say that next year they will build a subway here.
– How lucky you are, – I turned to my brother-in-law.
– I have nothing to do with it. It’s all my wife’s merit.

While we were having a polite, friendly and pragmatic conversation, the children were noisily gobbling up food, teasing each other, so much so that it was ringing behind the ears. I asked my sister-in-law:

– Sister, did you prepare all this yourself?

She smiled slightly.

– Yes, I started cooking little by little the day before yesterday. And here are the oysters in a spicy marinade. I went to the market specifically for them, knowing how much Yeonghee loves them… And she didn’t even touch them.

I held my breath. It had finally begun.

– Wait. Yeonghe, are you still going on? I explained it to you, you should have understood…

Following the father’s angry reprimand, the sister-in-law sharply attacked the wife, reproaching her:

– Do you even realize what you’re doing? The human body needs to receive the necessary nutrients… And if you’ve decided to become a vegetarian, at least make up a proper menu for yourself. Just look at your face, what it looks like now.

And even the brother-in-law’s wife put in a word:

– I didn’t even recognize you at first. I heard something, but I couldn’t even imagine that you took up vegetarianism like that, to the detriment of your health.
– Stop being a vegetarian or whatever right now. And come on, this, this, this – eat, eat quickly! The times when there was not enough food are gone, now there is plenty of everything. Why did you suddenly decide to do this?

The mother-in-law tried to persuade her wife by placing in front of her plates of fried beef, pork in sweet and sour sauce, stewed chicken, fried cuttlefish with noodles under hot seasoning.

– Well, why are you sitting there? Eat, I say! – the father-in-law’s voice crackled, like from a locomotive’s furnace, and was insistent.
– Yeonghe, eat. Eat, and you’ll immediately gain strength. While a person is alive, he must fortify his strength. People who have gone to a monastery can do without meat, because they are righteous and live alone.

The sister-in-law still hadn’t lost hope of bringing her sister to her senses. The children kept their eyes wide with curiosity on her. And she looked from one relative to another in confusion, as if she couldn’t understand what was causing such a stir.

There was a tense silence for a few seconds. I looked in turn at my father-in-law’s face, tanned black, at my mother-in-law’s face, wrinkled so much that it was hard to believe she had ever been young, at their eyes full of worry, at my sister-in-law’s raised eyebrows in alarm, at her husband, sitting with the air of a detached observer, at the indifferent but dissatisfied faces of my brother-in-law and his wife. I hoped my wife would say something. Instead, she put her chopsticks on the table, and this was a silent answer that contained a single message, aimed straight at the faces of everyone gathered. A feeling of anxiety swept over the table. This time the mother-in-law grabbed a piece of pork with her chopsticks. Holding the meat close to her daughter’s mouth, she said:

– Come on, say “Ah-ah-ah”. Eat it.

Without opening her mouth, the wife looked intently at her mother with eyes full of bewilderment at such persistence on her part.

– Come on, open your mouth. Don’t want this? Then this.

The mother-in-law picked up a piece of roast beef with chopsticks. The wife still sat with her mouth closed, and then the mother-in-law put the meat down and grabbed an oyster.

– You’ve loved it since childhood. Once you even told me that you wanted to eat your fill of oysters…
– Yes, and I remember that. That’s why whenever I see oysters somewhere, thoughts of Yeonhe immediately appear.

The sister-in-law came to her mother’s aid, as if her younger sister’s refusal to eat oysters in hot sauce was the worst thing that could happen. The sticks with the oyster on the end were approaching the wife’s mouth, and she moved back.

– Eat quickly. My hand is tired of holding…

The mother-in-law’s hand was indeed shaking. The wife could not stand it and rose from her seat.

– I don’t eat that.

These were the first words she spoke clearly.

– What?!

The exclamations of the father-in-law and brother-in-law, who had the same sanguine temperament, rang out simultaneously. The brother-in-law’s wife quickly grabbed her husband by the sleeve.

– I look at you and my heart breaks. Do you not care what your father says? You were told to eat, so you must eat.

I expected my wife to reply, “Sorry, Father. But I can’t eat it.” However, there was no apologetic note in the indifferent tone with which she answered my father:

– I don’t eat meat.

The hopeless mother-in-law’s chopsticks dropped. It seemed as if her aged face was about to twist in a desperate cry. Silence hung over her, ready to explode. The father-in-law raised his chopsticks. He grabbed a piece of pork with them, walked around the table and stood in front of my wife.

Strongly built, hardened by daily work, he stood with his back to me, hunched over by the inexorable time, and held the meat right in front of his daughter’s face.

– Well, go ahead, eat it. Listen to your father, eat it. We are all trying for your own good. Well, why are you being stubborn? And what will you do if you accidentally get sick from all this?

His words were filled with such strong paternal love that my heart sank and my eyes involuntarily stung. Everyone gathered must have felt the same. With one hand, the wife pushed the sticks away from her face, trembling slightly in the air.

– Father, I don’t eat meat.

A moment later, the father-in-law’s powerful palm cut the air. The wife received a slap.

– Father! – the sister-in-law screamed and grabbed his hand. The father-in-law, still in a state of nervous excitement, stood there, twisting his lips. I knew that he had once had a tough character, but this was the first time I had seen him get violent with my own eyes.
– Jeong soban[5 – Soban is added to the surname of a married man. As a rule, this is an address to the younger one.] and you, Yeongho, both come here.

I hesitated, then approached my wife hesitantly. The blow had been so strong that her cheek was bloodshot. She was breathing heavily, as if she had just lost her composure.

– Hold her hands together.
– What?
– Just start, and then she’ll eat herself. Where under the sky can you find anyone now who doesn’t eat meat?

The brother-in-law rose from his seat, dissatisfied with his father’s order:

– Sister, try to eat it. It’s easy to say “yes” and pretend to eat. Why are you behaving like that in front of your father?
– What are you chatting about? Grab her hands. And you, son-in-law, too! – shouted the father-in-law.
– Father, why are you doing this?

His sister-in-law took hold of his right hand. He threw aside his chopsticks, grabbed a piece of pork with his fingers, and walked toward my wife. She began to back away hesitantly, but Yeongho grabbed her, stood her upright, and said in a pleading tone:

– Sister, let’s do it the easy way. Take it and eat it yourself.
– Father, please, no!

The father-in-law tore himself away from his sister-in-law’s grip with a force three times greater than the force with which she had pulled him back and with which Yeongho had held my wife, and tried to shove the meat into her mouth. My wife groaned through clenched teeth. It seemed she could not utter a word, afraid that the piece would end up in her mouth.

– Father!

Yongho screamed, asking his father-in-law to stop, but he himself, confused, continued to hold her tightly.

My father-in-law was forcibly pressing the meat into the lips of my painfully writhing wife. With his strong fingers he managed to open her lips, but with her clenched teeth he could do nothing.

Finally, with anger rising to the top of his head, he hit his daughter on the cheek again.

– Father!

The sister-in-law rushed to her father-in-law, grabbed him by the waist, but at that moment he managed to stuff a piece of pork into my wife’s mouth, who had unclenched her teeth. However, Yeongho, already tired of holding her, loosened his grip, and she spat out the meat in disgust. A scream, reminiscent of an animal’s roar, escaped from her.

– …Let go!

My wife, bent over, ran, as I thought, towards the hallway, but suddenly turned and grabbed a fruit knife lying on the dining table.

– Yeonhe!..

The mother-in-law’s voice, ready to break, cut through the deadly silence. The children could no longer hold back their tears and burst into tears.

The wife stood there, gritting her teeth. She looked into the eyes of everyone watching her and raised the knife.

– Stop her…
– Watch out!

Blood spurted from the wife’s wrist like a fountain. Crimson blood spilled onto the white plates like raindrops. The wife’s knees buckled and she sank to the floor. Her brother-in-law, who had been sitting there with an indifferent look, took the knife from her.

– What are you standing there for? At least bring a towel!

He skillfully, demonstrating the skills of a fighter who served in the army special forces, stopped the bleeding, and then lifted his wife onto his back.

– Go down quickly and start the car.

I was fussily looking for my shoes among the other pairs. I put my right foot into the left shoe. Finally, having put my shoes on correctly, I was able to open the door and leave the apartment.

* * *

…The dog that bit me on the leg is tied to my father’s motorcycle. I’m standing at the gate of the house with a tight bandage on my shin. Under the bandage is the singed fur from the dog’s tail, applied to the wound. It’s a sultry summer day. Sweat runs down your entire body, even when you’re just standing. The dog is also breathing with difficulty, its long red tongue hanging out. It’s a cute white dog, taller than me. Before it bit the owner’s daughter, everyone in our neighborhood considered it an intelligent animal. My father hung the dog on a tree and, having slightly singed its fur, said that he wasn’t going to beat it too much. He’d heard somewhere that the most tender meat comes from a dog that died from running for a long time. My father started the motorcycle and took off at high speed. And the dog raced along with him. They made two circles, three circles along the same path. I stand rooted to the spot at the gate and watch the white dog – how it gradually loses strength, how it gasps for breath, how its pupils roll. Every time our gazes meet, my eyes widen.

Nasty dog. How dare you bite me?

After the fifth lap, the dog is foaming at the mouth. Blood is dripping from his neck, tied with a rope. The dog is pulled by the motorcycle, dragging himself along, whining in pain. On the sixth lap, he vomits dark red blood. Blood is pouring from both his neck and his mouth. I stand up straight and look at the bloody foam, at two shiny eyes. The seventh lap, I wait for the dog to appear, and I see his stretched out body, thrown by his father on the back seat of the motorcycle. I stand and look at the dangling paws, open eyelids, bloodshot eyes.

That evening, a big feast was held in our house. All the men who knew my father and lived in the alley next to the market came for dinner. As I was told, to heal a wound from a dog bite, you need to eat dog soup, and I tried it. Or rather, I put boiled rice in the soup, stirred it and ate it all. A specific smell hit my nose, and even the aroma of sesame seeds could not completely kill it. I remember seeing shiny eyes in the bowl of soup – they were looking straight at me. These were the eyes of a running dog vomiting bloody foam.

Nothing happened to me, I didn’t get sick. Nothing really happened to me at all.

* * *

The women stayed home to calm their frightened children, the brother-in-law revived his fainting mother-in-law, and my brother-in-law and I rushed to the nearest hospital for emergency care. Only after all the necessary formalities had been completed in the emergency room and my wife had been placed in a regular two-bed room did we both realize that all our clothes were stained with dried blood.

My wife was sleeping, with an IV needle in her right hand. My brother-in-law and I silently looked at my sleeping wife’s face. We looked as if there was some answer written on it. As if this answer could be deciphered if you looked at it the whole time, without looking away.

– Go home.
– …Yes, I will.

My brother-in-law seemed to want to tell me something, but he held back. I reached into my pocket, grabbed two ten-thousand-won bills with my fingers, and handed them to him:

– You shouldn’t go looking like that, buy something in the store downstairs and change.
– And you?.. Yes, when my wife gets ready to come here, I’ll tell her to take some of my clothes with her.

The sister-in-law and Yeonho with his wife came to dinner. They reported that the father-in-law still had not calmed down. The mother-in-law kept trying to go to the hospital, but, according to the brother-in-law, he forbade her to even think about it.

– How could this even happen, and in front of children?

The brother-in-law’s wife had apparently recently been crying, either from shock or for some other reason, but her face had no makeup on and her eyes looked puffy.

– Your father got a little too excited. How can he beat his daughter right in front of his son-in-law? Has he ever done that before?
– He has a tough character… Yeong-ho is just like him, haven’t you realized yet? But my father seemed to have calmed down with age.
– Why are you slandering me? – Yeong-ho interrupted his sister, but received no answer.
– Besides, Yeong-ho has been obedient since childhood, she didn’t even dare to squeak in front of her father, so he was confused, not expecting this.
– The fact that he decided to force her to eat meat is, of course, too much, but why did my sister resist so stubbornly? And for some reason she grabbed a knife… I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I don’t know how to look her in the eye now.

While my sister-in-law was looking after my wife, I changed into my brother-in-law’s T-shirt and headed to the sauna nearby. The blackened blood that had dried on my body washed off under the shower. People around me cast suspicious glances at me. I felt sick from this. The whole situation was disgusting to me. It seemed like I was in some unreal world. I was overcome with hatred for my wife, and this feeling was stronger than fear and confusion.

After my sister-in-law left, there were only me, my wife, a high school student who had been admitted to the hospital with a perforated stomach ulcer, and her parents left in the ward. Sitting at my wife’s bedside, I felt their sidelong glances on my back, heard them whispering about something every now and then. But this long Sunday would soon be over, and Monday would come. And then I would no longer have to see this woman. Tomorrow my sister-in-law would take my place, and the day after tomorrow my wife would be discharged. Discharge meant that I would have to live in the same apartment with this strange and scary woman. It was hard for me to accept.

The next evening at nine I went to the hospital. My sister-in-law greeted me with a smile:

– They must be tired.
– And who is the child with?..
– Chiu’s dad didn’t go to work today.

If one of my colleagues had arranged a joint dinner and drinks, as we often do after work, I would not have been in the ward at such a time. But the week had just begun, there were no events planned for Monday. We had recently completed an urgent project, so there was no need for overtime either.

– How’s your wife?
– She slept all the time. Doesn’t answer any questions. She ate well… I think everything will be fine.

Her special kind manner of speaking, which always touched my heart, smoothed over my irritation a little. Half an hour after my sister-in-law left, I untied my tie and thought that I should wash myself, when suddenly there was a knock at the door.

To my surprise, my mother-in-law entered the room.

– …Please forgive us for everything.

That was the first thing she breathed out as she came closer.

– What are you saying? How do you feel?

The mother-in-law sighed heavily:

– I didn’t think that in our old age we would have to go through this…

And she handed me a plastic bag.

– What is this?
– I made this before I came to Seoul. Yeong-hye hasn’t eaten meat for months, so I thought she must have lost weight… This is for the two of you, take it together. It’s an elixir made from black goat meat[6 – In Korea, it is considered a healthy food supplement that helps strengthen a weakened body.]. If Chiu’s mother had known, she wouldn’t have let me in, so I left with this bag unnoticed. Tell Yeong-hye that this is a Chinese medicine, and try feeding it to her. It contains a lot of herbs and medicinal supplements, so there shouldn’t be any smell. She’s already completely dried up, and now so much blood has flowed out of her…

The inexhaustible motherly love discouraged me.

– Is there a microwave here? I’ll go to the nurse and find out.

My mother-in-law took a packet of tincture out of her bag and went out. Feeling the irritation that had subsided with difficulty thanks to my sister-in-law rising up in me again, I crumpled my tie.

It didn’t take long before my wife woke up. It was good that it happened in the presence of my mother-in-law, and not when I was alone. Only now did I realize how lucky I was that she had come here.

My wife first made eye contact with my mother, not with me, sitting at her feet. My mother-in-law was just entering the room and suddenly smiled happily; it was hard to tell what my wife’s face was expressing. She seemed quite calm because she had slept all day, and whether it was because of the IV or simply because her face had brightened, she looked better than she had the day before.

Holding the steaming tincture in a paper cup, the mother-in-law walked up to her wife and grabbed her hand.

– My dear daughter…

Her eyes filled with tears.

– Drink this. There’s not a drop of blood on your face.

The wife obediently took the glass.

– This is Chinese medicine. I made it for you so that you would get better soon. Remember, a long time ago, before you got married, you drank such an elixir to improve your health?

The wife sniffed the contents of the glass and shook her head:

– But this is not Chinese medicine.

Notes

1 Soju is a Korean vodka.
2 A popular Japanese dish consisting of thin slices of meat, mushrooms, vegetables and sauce.
3 A Korean version of Japanese rolls with various fillings.
4 A mixture of boiled rice, meat, vegetables, chicken egg, and hot soy sauce.
5 Soban is added to the last name of a married man. As a rule, this is an address to a younger person.
6 In Korea, it is considered a useful food supplement that helps strengthen a weakened body.

Human Actions. Han Gang (fragment)

At the height of the student unrest in Gwangju, a boy named Dongho is brutally murdered.

The memory of this tragic episode runs through a series of interconnected chapters, where the victims and their families confront repression, denial, and the aftermath of the massacre. Tonho’s best friend, who shared his fate; the editor who fights censorship; the prisoner and the factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; Tonho’s grief-stricken mother. Through their voices, full of sorrow and hope, a story of humanity in brutal times is told.

The award-winning and controversial bestseller Human Acts is a detailed snapshot of a historical event whose effects are still felt today; a story that, from character to character, is marked by the harsh stamp of oppression and the extraordinary poetry of humanity.

© Lee Sang Yoon, translation, 2019
© AST Publishing House LLC, 2020

Chapter 1
Little Chick

It looks like it’s going to rain.
I repeat this thought out loud:
What if it really does rain?

I squint and look at the trees in front of the Provincial Government building. They are ginkgo. It seems as if between the swaying branches the image of the wind suddenly becomes visible. Like raindrops that have been suspended in the air for a moment, suddenly sparkle like precious stones and remain glittering in the void.

I open my eyes. The outlines of the trees weren’t as blurry as they were when I squinted at them a few minutes ago. I should have ordered some glasses after all. My older brother’s broad face flashes into my mind. He wears rectangular, chestnut-colored glasses with horn frames. Soon his image is replaced by loud shouts and applause coming from the direction of the large fountain in the central square of the city. My brother used to say that his glasses always slip down the bridge of his nose, and in the winter, when you come inside from the street, the lenses fog up and you can’t see anything. But your eyesight isn’t getting any worse, so maybe you don’t need glasses?

– Listen, when they speak nicely to you. I want you to be home right now!

You shake your head to shake off your brother’s angry shout. The loudspeaker installed in front of the fountain is blaring the high-pitched voice of a young woman leading the funeral ceremony. You are sitting on the steps of the stairs in front of the sports school, where you can’t see the fountain. If you want to watch the ceremony from afar, you have to go around the building to the right. But you stubbornly continue to sit in your place, listening to the woman’s words.

– Attention! Our beloved citizens are now arriving here from the Red Cross hospital.

She starts singing the national anthem. The voices of several thousand people merge, one after another they form a united choir and, like a huge tower, they rush upward. Among them, you can no longer distinguish the host’s voice. You quietly sing along to this motif, tensely soaring upward, reaching a climax and sharply falling down.

I wonder how many there are in total, the dead people arriving from the Red Cross hospital today? When you asked Chinsu about it this morning, he answered briefly:

– About thirty.

While the chorus of this hymn, heavy as a huge tower, rushed upward and fell down, thirty coffins were lowered from trucks one after another. They will be placed next to the twenty-eight that you and your older comrades carried from school to the fountain in the morning.

Of the eighty-three coffins in the school, twenty-six had been prepared for the general funeral ceremony. However, relatives of the dead who came last night identified two more bodies. They were placed in coffins, so there were twenty-eight. You write the names of the dead and the coffin numbers in the ledger, enclose them in a long bracket, and then mark them with the words “General Funeral Ceremony – 3.” Chinsu had instructed you to keep careful records so that the same coffin would not appear on the list twice.

You wanted to attend the farewell ceremony at least once, but Jinsu told you to stay at school.

– What if someone comes while we’re gone? Look carefully.

All the older comrades who worked with you went to the square. The relatives of the deceased, who had spent several nights next to the bodies, slowly walked behind the coffins to the exit. A black bow was attached to the left chest of each, and the insides underneath seemed to be stuffed with sand or rags, like those of garden scarecrows.

Eun-sook didn’t want to leave you alone in this room until the last minute, but you calmed her down. You said you weren’t offended at all and hurried her. She smiled, revealing slightly protruding teeth, which made her expression – as in an awkward situation, and even when she was forcing a smile out of guilt – seem a little mischievous.

– Well then, I’ll just watch the beginning and then come back.

Left alone, you sat down on the steps of the stairs in front of the school entrance. You placed the account book in a rough black binding on your lap. You could feel the cold of the concrete stairs through your sweatpants. Having buttoned up your tracksuit jacket, you hugged your shoulders tightly and crossed your arms over your chest.

Hibiscus, three thousand li, beautiful mountains and rivers

You fall silent, no longer singing with everyone else. You repeat the word “beautiful” over and over again, and the sign ? that you learned in hieroglyphics class pops into your mind. It consists of many strokes, and now you are unlikely to be able to write it correctly. What does it mean – mountains where beautiful flowers grow, or that the mountains are beautiful like flowers? Mallow bushes flow into the hieroglyph. Tall, higher than your head. The ones that bloom in the corner of your yard in the summer. You close your eyes, wanting to properly imagine the long, straight stems, and on them – the blossoming buds, like white rag rosettes. You squint and see the ginkgo trees, still swaying in the wind. Not a single drop of rain has yet penetrated this windy curtain.

* * *

The anthem has ended, but the coffins have apparently not yet been properly placed. Someone’s muffled cry breaks through the noise of the crowd. And, apparently to fill the painful moments of silence, the woman at the microphone suggests singing the folk song “Arirang”.

My beloved, who left me,
will not pass even ten years,
before he feels pain in his legs.

The sobbing stops and the woman’s voice is heard again:

– Let us pray for our loved ones who have gone before us.

The hubbub of thousands of human voices suddenly dies down, and you are surprised by the unexpectedly echoing silence that hangs over the city center. Instead of praying, you stand up. Tuck the ledger under your arm, and climb the stairs to the half-open door of the school. You take a gauze bandage out of your trouser pocket and put it on.

They burn candles, but there is no effect.

You enter the gymnasium, where judo used to be practiced, and wince at the terrible smell. The weather is getting worse, so it seems as if evening has already come. At the entrance stand coffins that have already undergone a funeral ceremony, and by the wide window lie thirty-two bodies covered with white cloth. They have not yet been placed in coffins, because the relatives of the deceased have not yet come forward. In front of them, candles are quietly burning out, stuck in empty water bottles.

You go to the end of the room. You look at the elongated silhouettes of seven corpses in the corner. They are completely covered with white cloth, from the heels to the very top of the head, and you show their faces only to those who are looking for girls or girls. You show them for only a few seconds. They are so horribly mutilated.

The worst looking body is the female body in the very corner. When you first saw it, you thought it was the corpse of a short girl of nineteen or twenty-something. But the body, gradually decomposing, swelled to the size of an adult man. Every time you throw back the white cloth in front of relatives who have lost a daughter or younger sister, you are surprised at how quickly the corpse rots. On the girl’s face, from the forehead to the left eye, on the cheekbones and chin, as well as on the left bare chest and side, you see numerous bayonet stab wounds. The right side of the skull was apparently hit with a baton, and the brain is visible in the gap. Open wounds rot faster. Following them, the parts of the body where there are bruises and hematomas decompose. The toes with neat, transparently varnished nails are unharmed. But even they, clean, grow larger over time, become like thick ginger roots and then darken. The pleated polka dot skirt, which recently reached the calf, now barely covers the knees.

You return to the front door. From the box left under the table, you take out new candles and return to the dead. You light the candles from the stub flickering dimly at the head of the bed. As soon as the fire spreads to the wick, you blow out the stub and carefully, so as not to burn yourself, take it out of the bottle. You insert a new candle in its place.

You stand bent over, holding a still-burning candle in your hand. Enduring the stench that seems to make your nose bleed, you look at the flame. The dim flame of the candle, supposedly destroying the smell of a corpse, flickers and flares up. In the center of the flame, as if winking at you, an orange flame sways smoothly. You stare, fascinated, at the bluish-green glow around the flickering wick. It looks like a small heart or an apple seed.

Unable to bear the stench any longer, you straighten up. You look around the dark room, and the lights of all the candles that flicker at the heads of the dead stare at you like silent pupils.

Suddenly a thought comes to your mind: where does the spirit of a person go when the body dies? How long does the spirit stay with the body?

You walk towards the exit, checking along the way to see if there are any stubs left that need replacing.

When a living person looks at a dead person, perhaps his spirit is hovering next to the body and is also looking into the person’s face?

Before you leave the room, you look around. There are no spirits in sight. Only the silent dead and the unbearable stench of corpses.

* * *

At first, these people were not lying in the sports school, but in the corridor of the department for handling citizen appeals of the Provincial Administration. You looked at the two girls in confusion, one of whom was wearing a summer uniform with a wide collar, like a senior student of the girls’ school Sufia, and the other was in ordinary clothes. Both were wiping the dried blood from the faces of the dead with wet towels and trying hard to straighten their bent arms to lay them along the body.

“Why did you come?” asked the girl in the school uniform, raising her head and pulling her mask down to her chin.

Her round, slightly bulging eyes gave her face a pretty look, and her parted, braided hair was full of fluffy curls. Sweat had stuck her hair to her forehead and temples.

“I’m looking for a friend,” you answered, lowering your hand, which had been covering your nose from the terrible smell.
“Did you agree to meet here?
” “No. Maybe he’s among these people…
” “Well then, see if he’s here.”

You calmly looked at the faces and bodies of the twenty-odd people lying along the wall in the corridor. If you were going to check, you had to take a good look at each one. However, it was hard to keep your gaze on their faces, so you kept blinking.

– None? – asked the girl in ordinary clothes and straightened up. She was wearing a light green shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

At first you mistook her for a girl the same age as the girl in the school uniform, but when you looked at her face without the mask, you saw that she was about twenty-five years old. She seemed fragile because of her thin neck and yellowish, faded skin. However, there was strength in the cut of her eyes. And her voice sounded clear.

– No.
– And have you been to the university hospital and the morgue?
– Yes.
– Where are your friend’s parents, that you go and look for him yourself?
– His only other person is his father, he works in another city, in Daejeon, and my friend and his older sister rent a room in our house.
– There is no long-distance connection today either?
– There is no connection. I tried to call several times.
– Well, where is your friend’s sister?
– She didn’t come home on Sunday, and my friend and I went to look for her. But yesterday, when shooting started not far from here, one of the neighbors saw my friend get hit by a bullet.

The girl in the school uniform intervened in the conversation without raising her head:

– Maybe he is wounded and is in the hospital?

Shaking your head, you replied:

– If something like that happened, he would have let us know. He understands that we are worried.

The girl in the light green shirt said:

– Then come here in a few days. We were told that all the corpses will be brought here. They say that there are so many people shot that there is no room in the morgues.

A girl in a school uniform wiped the face of a young man with a wet towel. He had a bayonet through his neck and a red tongue sticking out of his throat. She closed the dead man’s bulging eyes, pressing them with her palm, then rinsed and wrung out the towel. Red splashes flew from the bucket in all directions. The older girl straightened up and said:

– Listen, if you have time, maybe you could help us at least today? We really need people. And it’s not that difficult… We need to cut the cloth folded over there and cover the bodies that are lying on the other side. If someone comes and, like you, starts looking for a relative, we need to pull back the cover and show them one by one. Their faces have changed a lot, so often a person is identified only after they’ve examined their clothes and the whole body.

From that day on, you became a member of their squad. As you had guessed, Eun-sook was a senior at Sufi High School. And Song-ju, a girl in a light green shirt with rolled-up sleeves, turned out to be a seamstress working in a workshop at a Western clothing store on Chung-jang Street. She said that as soon as the unrest began in the city, the owners of the store, a married couple, took their student son and went to the province to live with her parents. So she was suddenly left without a job. Hearing an announcement on the street microphone about people dying due to a shortage of donor blood, both girls, each on their own, went to donate blood at Chung-ju University Hospital. When they learned that the provincial government, which had switched to independent management, needed workers, they came to help. They, standing there in confusion, were assigned to care for corpses.

In a classroom where the desks were arranged according to the students’ heights, you always sat in the front row. In the third grade of middle school, when you entered puberty, you had grown noticeably taller and your voice had become a little rougher, but you still looked younger than your age. A young man named Jinsu, who came from the Provincial Government Coordination Center, saw you and asked in surprise:

– Aren’t you a first-grader? [1 – The compulsory education system in Korea includes elementary and middle schools. Jinsu means a first-grader in middle school. There are three grades in middle school. Most first-graders in middle school are 12 years old, and most of the last grade is 15.] The work here is hard, so you should go home.

To this handsome older comrade with big eyes and long eyelashes like a girl’s, he who came from Seoul during the cancellation of classes at universities, you answered like this:

– No, I’m in the third grade of high school. There’s nothing difficult for me here.

And indeed, your work was not hard. Songju and Eunsuk laid the corpses on boards made of plywood or foam, having previously laid plastic film on them. They wiped the faces and necks of the deceased with a damp towel, tidied up the hair with a fine-toothed comb, and then wrapped the corpses in film to reduce the smell of the corpse. Meanwhile, you noted the sex of the deceased in the log, their approximate age, what they were wearing and what shoes they were wearing, and then assigned them a number. Having written this number on thick paper and pinned it to the corpse’s chest with a needle, you covered its face with a white canvas cloth and, with the help of the girls, moved it to the wall.

Chinsu, who looked like the busiest man in the Provincial Office, would come running to you several times a day to collect the information about the dead that had been entered into the register. He would then write a notice and hang it on the door of the main entrance to the administrative building. You would show the dead body to those relatives who had read the notice themselves or had received this information from someone else, by pulling back the white cloth. If it was identified, you would move away and wait for the sobbing to stop. The relatives would dress the dead in good clean clothes and stuff their noses and ears with cotton wool when they had brought them back to a more or less bearable state. In this simplified manner, having completed the ceremony of placing them in the coffin, the bodies would be sent to school. Your only job was to record this fact in the register.

There was one thing you couldn’t understand about this case: why, during the short funeral ceremony, which was held without formalities, the families of the victims sang the national anthem. It also seemed strange to you that the relatives always unfurled the national flag and, having covered the lid of the coffin with it, tied it with a rope so that the cloth would not fly off. Why do they sing the national anthem to people killed by the military? Why do they cover their coffins with a flag? As if it was not the state that killed them.

When you asked Eunsook about it carefully, she opened her eyes wide and replied:

– But the military rebelled to seize power. Didn’t you see it yourself? In broad daylight, soldiers beat people, stabbed them with bayonets, and when they didn’t get their way, they started shooting. The military ordered them to do this. Can you really call this bunch of generals a state?

You were at a loss. It seemed as if you had been given an answer to a completely different question. That afternoon, more bodies than ever had been identified, and several coffin ceremonies were taking place in the corridor at the same time. While the singing of the anthem broke through the mournful sobs here and there, you held your breath and listened to the subtle harmony that came from the overlapping of one verse after another. As if in those moments you could understand what a state was.

* * *

The next day, you and the girls carried several particularly stinking corpses out into the courtyard of the Citizens’ Appeals Department – there was no room for the new bodies. Chinsu, who had come in with his quick gait from the Department, asked anxiously:

– What will you do if it rains?

Jinsu looked around the passageway in confusion, where there was no room to take a step because of the corpses piled up. Songju, taking off her mask, answered:

– It’s so crowded here that the only thing left to do is take them out into the yard. They’ll bring them back in the evening, and I don’t know what to do. What about the sports school? It’s nearby. Maybe there’s a free hall there?

Not even an hour had passed when four men sent here by Chinsu arrived. Judging by the rifles on their shoulders and the helmets they had gotten from the retreating special forces, they had been standing guard somewhere before.

While the men loaded the bodies from the yard and the passage into the truck, you and the girls collected the dead men’s belongings. You slowly walked towards the school after the truck had driven away. It was a clear morning. As you passed under the young gingko trees, you grabbed the low-hanging branches that touched your forehead without thinking, and then let them go.

Eun-sook, who was walking ahead, entered the school before everyone else. When you stepped over the threshold after her, she was looking around the hall filled with coffins, holding dark cloth gloves with blood stains in her hands. Song-ju, who entered after you, overtook you. She tied her shoulder-length hair into a tight knot with a scarf and remarked:

– They kept bringing more and more coffins, but I didn’t know how many there were in total… But when they brought them all to one place, it turned out that there really were a lot of them.

You saw the inconsolable parents of the dead. They sat with their knees touching each other. In front of them, on the lid of the coffin, stood a framed photograph. At the head of one of the coffins, two glass bottles from Fanta were placed. In one were stuck white wild flowers, and in the other a candle was burning.

That evening you asked Chinsu if you could get a box of candles, and he nodded confidently and replied:

– Yes, if you burn candles, the smell will probably disappear.

Anything that was needed, be it cotton fabric, wooden coffins, thick paper or national flags, he would immediately, upon request, write it down in his notebook and deliver it to them within 24 hours. He told Songju that he went shopping every morning at the Taein or Yangdong market, and if he couldn’t find what he needed there, he would go to carpenters, funeral parlor workers or fabric sellers. He said that this was not a big problem – there was still a lot of money left from the rally. Besides, people often gave away goods cheaply or for nothing when they found out that they came from the Provincial Office. He also said that all the coffins in the city center had already been sold, so they had to urgently get veneer and hammer them together in carpentry workshops.

In the morning, Chinsu brought matches and five boxes of candles, fifty in each. You went around every corner of the main administrative building and even the outbuilding, collecting empty drink bottles to make candlesticks out of. You stood in front of the table, lit the candles one by one and inserted them into the bottles. Then the relatives of the dead took them and placed them in front of the coffin. There were enough candles for everyone – they burned at the head of those who lay without relatives’ attention, and those who had not yet been identified.

* * *

Every morning new bodies were brought in and farewells were said to the deceased. The dead were brought here from large hospitals, and sometimes relatives with shining faces – either from sweat or tears – themselves brought the deceased on a cart. You found a place for each one, shortening the distance between the coffins.

In the evenings, corpses arrived from other areas where protesters had clashed with government troops. They were killed on the spot in gunfire attacks or died of wounds in the ambulance on the way to intensive care. The bodies of people who had died only recently did not yet look like corpses. Eunsook, who was pushing translucent intestines back into their stomachs, which kept spilling out, ran out into the courtyard from time to time, suffering from the urge to vomit. And Songju, who said she had often had nosebleeds since childhood, threw her head back and looked at the ceiling, pressing on the bridge of her nose covered by a mask.

Compared to the girls’ ordeal, your job was still simple. You did the same as in the Citizens’ Appeals Department: you noted the date and time in the log, wrote down what the deceased looked like, what he was wearing, and what shoes he was wearing. You cut the cotton cloth into sheets of a certain length in advance and stuck a safety pin into the thick paper so that you could immediately write the number on it. Whenever possible, you shortened the distance between the coffins and the unidentified bodies, making room for the new arrivals. One evening, when too many dead had arrived, there was neither time to prepare places for them nor any free space. So the coffins had to be pushed together as best they could, right next to each other, without even leaving a gap. That evening, looking around at the dead, completely filling the hall, you suddenly thought that they looked like a crowd of people who had agreed to gather in this place. With the ledger tucked under your arm, you moved quickly through this crowd of silent, motionless bodies that could only exude a terrible stench.

* * *

“It’s really going to rain,” you think as you leave the hall and inhale deeply. Wanting to breathe even cleaner air, you walk towards the courtyard, but the thought that you shouldn’t go too far stops you at the corner of the building. You hear the voice of a young man, amplified by a microphone.

“We cannot surrender unconditionally and return the weapons to the warehouses, as the generals order. First, they must show where the bodies of the missing citizens are. They must free the hundreds of people captured and thrown into prison. But above all, we must spread the truth throughout the country about the lawlessness that has taken place here, and obtain a promise that our honor will be restored. And only then can we return the weapons. Do you agree with me?”

You suddenly get the feeling that the cheers and applause of those gathered are no longer as loud as before. You remember the rally that began the day after government troops left the city.

People climbed onto the roof of the Provincial Administration building, onto the clock tower, and stood there in a dense wall. A crowd of hundreds of thousands of people seethed like a huge wave, filling all the free space of the streets, where no transport was now running. And this crowd sang the national anthem, erecting a dizzyingly high tower of hundreds of thousands of tiers from their voices. And they clapped their hands so loudly that it seemed like hundreds of thousands of firecrackers were exploding one after another.

Yesterday morning, you heard Jinsu telling Songju in a very serious tone:

– There are rumors that if the military enters the city again, they will kill all the citizens. That is why fewer and fewer people come out to protest – people are afraid. Although the more of us come out to the streets, the harder it will be for them to enter… Some kind of bad feeling. There are more and more coffins, and fewer and fewer people on the streets. They are sitting at home.

“Hasn’t too much blood been spilled? How can we just forget about it? The spirits of those who left this world before us have opened their eyes and are watching us closely.”

The man’s voice is hoarse by the end of his speech. The repeated word “blood” somehow makes your heart clench, and you open your mouth again and take a deep breath.

Spirits are incorporeal, so how can they open their eyes and spy on us?

You remember last winter, the last days of your maternal grandmother’s life. She spent about two weeks in the hospital with a common cold that turned into pneumonia. On Saturday evening, after passing your school exams, you went to the hospital with a light heart to visit her. Suddenly, your grandmother’s condition worsened sharply, and while your aunt and uncle rushed to the hospital by taxi, you and your mother stayed next to your dying grandmother.

When you were a child, you visited your mother’s parental home and you remember your grandmother. She, with her back always bent like a ?, “kiyok”, calmly says: “Follow me” – and you follow. You enter a dark room that served as a pantry. You know that your grandmother will open the door of the kitchen cabinet, take out rice flour cookies, smeared with honey and sprinkled with sesame seeds – something that is prepared for the table that is set for the ritual of feeding the spirits of the ancestors. Having received the delicacy, you smile happily and in response see how your grandmother’s eyes become very narrow. The last hour of your grandmother’s life was as quiet and calm as her character. She was lying with an oxygen mask, her eyes closed, and suddenly something like a bird flew away from her face. Looking at the wrinkled face of the departed grandmother, you were confused, not understanding where it had disappeared to – something that looked like a small chick.

Maybe the spirits of the people lying in this room suddenly flew out of their bodies like birds? Where did they go, these frightened birds? It doesn’t look like they flew off to some unknown land, to Heaven or Hell. You heard about them a long time ago in Sunday Christian school, where you went with your friends on Easter Day to eat a painted egg. It didn’t look like the spirits were wandering in the fog – with disheveled hair, in white clothes – as they sometimes show in historical films specially shot with scary scenes.

Raindrops fall on your short-cropped head. You lift your face up. The drops fall randomly on your cheeks, forehead, and quickly merge with each other, running down in streams.

The man shouts hurriedly into the microphone:

“Please remain in your places! The farewell ceremony for the fallen is not over yet. This rain is the tears that are shed by the spirits of our comrades who have gone before us.”

Cold streams of rain, penetrating the collar of your tracksuit, soak into your T-shirt and flow down to your waist. It turns out that the tears of spirits are cold. Goosebumps break out on your forearms and back. You hide from the rain under the canopy above the school entrance. The trees in front of the Provincial Administration building steadfastly repel the onslaught of rain streams. You sit huddled on the step of the stairs and remember the botany lesson you recently had at school. Now it seems that that fifth lesson, in which the students, exhausted by the heat, studied plant respiration, took place somewhere in another world. The teacher told me that trees breathe only once a day. When the sun rises, they breathe in its rays for a long, long time, and when it sets, they breathe out carbon dioxide for a long, long time. And now such a heavy rain falls on these mouths and noses of trees that were breathing so slowly and patiently.

If that other world had continued, you would have taken your midterm exams last week. The last day of exams is Sunday, so today you would have slept in and then played badminton with Jongdae in the yard. The passage of time in that other world, like all the memories of the past week, no longer feels real.

It happened last Sunday. You were alone outside your home, going to a bookstore to buy a maths book before school. Suddenly the street was filled with armed soldiers, and you, frightened by them, turned onto the path that runs along the river bank. A couple was walking towards you, apparently newlyweds – a man in a suit, holding a Bible and a book of Christian hymns in his hand, and a woman in a dark blue dress. A sharp shout came from the road above, and three soldiers, armed with clubs and guns, ran down the hill and surrounded the young couple. It seemed that they were chasing someone and had come down by mistake.

– What’s the matter? We’re going to church now…

Before the man could finish his sentence, you saw what they did to him. You saw what they can do to a person’s arms, back, legs.

“Save me!” the man cried out, gasping for breath.

They beat him with clubs until the man’s legs, twitching in convulsions, froze. What happened to the woman who was screaming in terror, grabbed by the hair, you do not know. Because, with chattering teeth, you crawled up the slope and found yourself on the street, where an even more unusual picture opened up before you.

* * *

You shudder with fear and raise your head – someone has lightly touched your right shoulder. So gently, as if a spirit had touched you with its fingertips through several layers of cold canvas.

“Dongho,” Eunsuk leans over you with a smile. Her white jumper and jeans are soaking wet. “Why are you so scared?”

You smile back, confused, looking at her wet pigtails, there is not a drop of blood on your face. A spirit cannot have hands.

– I wanted to come back earlier, but it started raining and I felt shy… I was afraid that others would start leaving after me. Is everything okay here?
– No one came, – you answer, shaking your head. – And there were no passers-by. – Not many people came there either.

Eunsuk sits down next to you, tucking his legs under him. From his jumper pocket he takes out a piece of biscuit in a rustling package and a bottle of yogurt.

– The aunties from the Catholic church were handing out some, so I took some for you.

Not yet realizing how hungry you are, you quickly rip open the package and stuff almost the entire biscuit into your mouth. Eunsuk opens the foil lid and hands you the yogurt.

– Now I’ll stay here, and you go home and change. Apparently, everyone who needed to has already been here.
– The rain barely wet me. You’d better go home and change, – you answer with difficulty, chewing a biscuit. Yogurt makes its way through your stuffed mouth to your throat.
– You smell strongly of sweat. After all, you’ve been here for several days and nights already.

Your cheeks are red. Every morning in the outbuilding you washed your head in the sink, and in the evening, shivering from the cold, your whole body, so as not to become saturated with the smell of a corpse. But, apparently, it was all in vain.

– I heard at the rally that government troops will enter the city tonight. If you go home, don’t come back.

Eunsook flinched at something. Maybe it was a ticklish hair that pricked her neck. You silently watched the movements of her hands, how she lifted her wet hair with her fingertips and laid it over her collar. Her face, which was plump and seemed cute to you when you first met, had become haggard in a few days. Staring intently at her sunken dark eyelids, you wonder. Where, in what part of the body, does that little bird live that flies out of a person after death? Maybe in that stern bridge of the nose, or maybe behind the crown, where the halo of saints shines, or maybe somewhere in the secluded corner of the heart?

Shoving the remaining piece of biscuit into your mouth and pretending not to hear Eunsuk’s last words, you say:

– The one who got caught in the rain and got soaked through should change. So what if I smell a little sweat?

She takes another bottle of yoghurt out of her jumper pocket.

– No one is taking it from you… Don’t rush so much. I wanted to give it to Songju.

You grab the bottle, pry off the cap with your fingernail and smile.

* * *

Songju doesn’t have the character to come up to you quietly and put her hand on your shoulder. From afar, she calls out to you in a confident voice and walks towards you. Coming closer, she asks:

– No one? Have you been alone until now?

Then he hands over a foil-wrapped gimbap and sits down next to you on the steps. You eat the stuffed rice rolls together, watching the rain gradually subside.

“And you still haven’t found your friend?” she asks, deliberately indifferently.

You shake your head and she continues:

– …it’s obvious that the soldiers buried him somewhere.

To keep the dry kimbap from getting stuck on its way to your stomach, you pat your chest.

– I was there that day too. The soldiers threw the dead that were lying nearby into a truck and took them away somewhere.

You interrupt her, not wanting to hear the words fly out thoughtlessly anymore:

– You got caught in the rain too. Go home and change. Eunsuk just went to change.
– Why? I’ll have to work tonight anyway, I’ll be all sweaty.

Sungju folds an empty gimbap wrapper in half, then several more times, until the piece of foil is the size of a pinky finger. She holds it in her hand and watches the rain fall. The profile of her face is so calm that you suddenly want to ask something.

Is it really true that everyone who stays here today will die?

You don’t ask, you hesitate. If there is a risk of death, then why can’t everyone just leave the Provincial Headquarters and hide somewhere? Why should some leave and some stay?

She throws a wad of foil onto the flower bed. She looks at her empty palms, then lifts her hands and rubs them hard around her eyes, cheeks, forehead, and even ears. As if a tired person were trying to wash their face, only without water.

– I can’t do anything, my eyes are closing on their own. I’ll go to the outbuilding… I’ll find a soft sofa, I need to sleep. And dry my clothes.

She smiles, showing her tightly spaced front teeth. And she tells you clearly, so you understand:

– There’s nothing to be done, you’ll have to bear the brunt of everyone’s woes.

* * *

I don’t know if I should believe Seongju. The military could have taken Jongdae away and buried him somewhere. But there could also be truth in what Mom said – maybe Jongdae is in the hospital after an operation, hasn’t come to yet, and that’s why he hasn’t called. Yesterday, late in the evening, when Mom and brother came to take you home, you stubbornly refused, saying that you had to find Jongdae, and Mom suggested:

– We should look in the intensive care units. Let’s go around all the hospitals together.

She grabbed you by the sleeve of your jacket:

– If you only knew how scared I was when I heard from people that you were seen here. Just think! You and so many corpses around… Aren’t you scared? You were a coward.

In response, you smiled slightly and said:

– If there’s anyone to be afraid of, it’s the military, but what’s there to be afraid of as for the dead?

A very stern expression appeared on his brother’s face. Since childhood, all he knew was to sit over his textbooks. All his years of study, he was considered the best in the class, but he failed the entrance exams to the university twice and was now preparing to enter for the third time. Resembling his father in his broad face, he had grown a rather thick moustache and beard. By the age of twenty, he looked much older than his years, like a married man. In contrast, his eldest brother, a minor civil servant working in the capital, was handsome, short and thin. When he came home for vacation and the three brothers gathered together, everyone took the middle son for the eldest.

– Do you think that well-trained government troops, with machine guns and tanks, are not entering the city because they are afraid of civilians armed with rifles from the Korean War? They have their own strategy, they are just waiting for orders from above. Stay here and you will die.

Fearing that your brother will slap you, you take one step back from him and say:

– Why kill me? I was only carrying out minor assignments here.

You forcefully pull away from your mother’s hands, which are clinging to the sleeve of your jacket.

– Don’t worry, I’ll stay here for a few more days, help people and then return home. And I’ll find Chondae.

With an awkward wave of your hand in farewell, you run off to school.

* * *

The sky, which had been gradually brightening, suddenly clears up with such force that it blinds your eyes. You get up, go around the building on the right side and look at what is happening in the street. From there you can see the empty square; the crowd has dispersed. Only in front of the fountain are the relatives of the victims huddled in small groups of three or four people. You see how men lift coffins, previously stacked under the podium, into a truck. You try to see who is among these men, squint, and in the bright light your eyelids begin to tremble slightly. This tremor is transmitted to your cheeks.

When you first met Eunsook and Seonju, you didn’t tell the whole truth.

That day, the demonstrators marched across the square in front of the station, and in the front row they were pushing a cart with the bodies of two executed men. There was a noisy sea of ​​people, among whom were old men in hats, children of eleven and twelve years old, and women with colorful parasols. But that day, it was not your neighbor who was the last to see Jongdae alive, but you. And not just saw him, but saw how a bullet hit him in the side. And before that, you had been walking together from the very beginning, holding hands. You were trying to get to the head of the column. Suddenly, deafening shots rang out, and everyone scattered.

“They’re firing blanks! Don’t be afraid!” someone shouted, but when one group turned back, there was a crush in the front ranks, and in the confusion you let go of Jongdae’s hand. Another volley rang out, Jongdae fell on his side, and you, forgetting about everything in the world, ran as fast as you could. You were only able to stop at the wall next to an electrical goods store, the doors of which were closed with shutters. Three adults were already standing there. A man, obviously from their group, was running towards them as fast as he could. Suddenly, blood poured from his shoulder, and he fell face down.

– Oh, my! What are they doing! From the roof… – the half-bald man next to you said, catching his breath with difficulty. – They shot at Yongyu from the roof.

Another shot was fired from the roof of the building nearby. The wounded man’s back, who was trying to get up with great difficulty, jerked sharply and he turned over. The blood that gushed from his stomach spread across his entire chest in an instant. You looked at the faces of the people standing nearby. Everyone was stunned into silence. The balding man covered his mouth with his hand, his body shaking with a fine tremor.

You squinted and saw several dozen people lying in the middle of the street. Suddenly, you thought you saw a pair of sky-blue sweatpants, just like the ones you were wearing. You thought you saw a bare leg twitching as a sneaker came off. You were about to rush to him, but a man standing next to you grabbed you by the shoulders. At that moment, three guys jumped out of a nearby alley. They grabbed the people lying under the arms and tried to lift them up, but then several shots rang out from the side of the square where the soldiers had taken up position. The guys went limp and fell to the ground. You looked at the wide alley on the opposite side of the street. About thirty people, men and women, were watching what was happening, standing close to each wall, as if frozen to them.

About three minutes after the shots were fired, a very short man ran out of the alley opposite. He ran as fast as he could towards one of the people lying on the ground. Shots rang out again, and the daredevil fell. The man standing next to you immediately covered your eyes with his broad palm and said:

– If you go out now, you will die in vain.

When he took his hand away, you saw two men from the alley opposite rush towards the lying young woman, as if drawn to her by a huge magnet. They grabbed her under the arms and began to lift her. This time they fired from the roof. The men fell backwards.

After this, no one dared to approach those who had been shot.

About ten minutes passed in tense silence. A group of about twenty men, walking in pairs, emerged from the ranks of soldiers. They began to quickly and skillfully grab the people lying in front of them and drag them aside. And, as if waiting for this moment, a dozen men ran out of the neighboring alley and the one opposite. They rushed to those lying further away from the soldiers, picked them up and hoisted them onto their backs. This time, no one fired from the roof. But you did not run to Jongdae after the others. The men standing next to you hurriedly disappeared into the alley, carrying the body of a fallen comrade with them. Suddenly left alone, you were afraid. Thinking only about not being seen by a sniper, without taking your eyes off the walls, you hurried in the opposite direction from the square.

* * *

The house was quiet that afternoon. Even at such a hectic time, your mother had gone to the Taein Market to visit the family’s shop that sold processed leather, and your father, who had recently injured his back while carrying a large box of skins, was lying in the large room in the inner wing of the house. You pushed open the half-closed metal gate and entered the courtyard. You immediately heard your middle brother’s voice, studying English words in his room.

– Is this Tonho? – Father’s loud voice rang out. – Tonho, are you back?

You didn’t answer him.

– Tonho, if it’s you, come here and trample my back.

Pretending not to hear your father, you went to the flower beds and started pumping water from the pump. The basin filled with clean, cold water. First you put your hands in it, and then you dipped your face. You raised your head, and streams of water ran down your face and neck.

– Tonho, isn’t that you in the yard? Come here.

You stood on the stone steps leading to the house’s covered terrace, your dripping hands on your wet eyelids. You took off your sneakers, walked across the terrace, and opened the door to the large room. It smelled of burnt wormwood[2 – A medical procedure called “cauterization” that involves applying a small lump of dried wormwood to the body so that the heat spreads throughout the body.], and your father was lying on the floor, on his stomach.

– Just recently my back got so twisted again that I can’t get up. Try to stomp a little there, below my back.

You took off your socks. Putting your right foot on your father’s lower back, you pressed half-heartedly.

– Where have you been? If only you knew how worried your mother was, calling several times, asking if you had come home. Don’t go anywhere where there are demonstrations, don’t even dare to come near. They say there was shooting at the new train station last night and people were killed… What’s the point of protesting? How can you go bare-handed against weapons?

With a familiar movement, you changed legs and carefully pressed on the area between your father’s vertebrae and the sacrum.

– Yes, here, here… Oh, how good!

You left the large room and headed for your own, which was located behind the kitchen. You lay down on the linoleum floor and curled up into a ball. You immediately fell into oblivion, as if you had lost consciousness, but only a few minutes passed, and you abruptly woke up from a terrible dream, the contents of which you immediately forgot. However, in reality, an even more terrible picture awaited you. In the outer wing of the house, where Jongdae and his older sister Chonmi rented a small guest room, there were no signs of human presence. Evening would come, but nothing would change. The light in Jongdae’s room would not turn on. And the key would lie, as it had been, at the bottom of a large clay vat standing next to the stone steps. In the silence, you remembered Jongdae’s face. Blue sweatpants, legs twitching in convulsions appeared in your memory. This scene almost suffocated you, as if a fireball was stuck in your solar plexus.

In order to breathe calmly, you began to recall another image of Jongdae and how he was in everyday life. You imagined him opening the gate and walking into the yard as if nothing had happened. Jongdae, still small in stature, no taller than an elementary school graduate. Despite their straitened circumstances, his sister Jeongmi ordered milk delivery in the hopes that it would help her brother grow. Jongdae, so unattractive that there were doubts about his blood relationship with his sister. Jongdae, whose eyes were small, like holes in buttons, and whose nose was flat. Jongdae, yet so charming that all he had to do was wrinkle that nose and smile, and everyone smiled back. Jongdae, dancing disco at a talent show on the day of the class trip to the countryside. At the same time, he puffed out his cheeks like a fugu fish, so funny that even the class teacher, known for his strictness, could not resist and burst out laughing. Jongdae, who wanted to earn money, not study. Jongdae, who was forced to prepare for admission to a high school for the humanities because of his sister. Jongdae, who secretly delivered newspapers from his sister in order to save money. Jongdae, whose cheeks burned brightly from early winter, and nasty warts appeared on his palms. Jongdae, who played badminton with you in the yard and sent you only smashes, as if he imagined himself a player of the national team in a big tournament.

Jongdae, as if nothing had happened, puts the sponge used to erase the blackboard into his backpack.

– Why do you need it?
– I’ll give it to my sister.
– Why does she need it?
– She has memories associated with this sponge.

Imagine, when my sister was in middle school, she liked being on duty in class more than studying. One day, it was April 1st, the students wrote all sorts of crap on the board. Just then, a young teacher came to school, so they decided to test him in action. And he yelled: “Who’s on duty?!”, well, that day my sister was on duty, so she had to diligently erase the board. While everyone in the class was cramming something, she opened the window in the hallway and knocked the chalk out of this thing with a stick. My sister went to middle school for two years, and in all that time she can’t remember another such cool day.

You braced your hands on the cold floor and stood up. Slapping your slippers, you crossed the narrow courtyard and stood in front of the main wing of the house. You felt around in the bottom of the clay vat, so deep that your arms sank into it up to your shoulders. From under the hammer and crowbar, you pulled out the jingling keys. Opening the lock, you took off your slippers and entered the room.

It was obvious that no one had come here in all that time. Not since that Sunday night, when you tried to calm down a tearful Jongdae, worried about his sister’s absence. On the low table lay an open notebook in which you had written down where Jongmi might have gone. Night school, the factory, the church she occasionally attended, a second cousin’s house in the Ilgokdong district. The next morning, you and Jongdae went to all the places listed, but your sister was nowhere to be found.

You stood in the middle of the empty room, rubbing your dry eyes with the back of your hand. Rubbing until your fingers felt hot. You sat at Jongdae’s desk, then lay down on the floor, your face feeling the cold wooden boards. You pressed your fist against your aching chest, in the middle of your ribcage, where the hollow was. If the gates suddenly opened and Jongmi walked in, you would rush to her and fall to your knees. You would go to the Provincial Office building together and look for Jongdae. And after what happened, can you consider yourself his friend? Can you consider yourself a human being? You will endure all the blows and screams that Jongmi will rain down on you until the end. And at the same time, you will beg her for forgiveness.

* * *

Twenty-year-old Jeongmi is also short. With her rather short bob from behind, she could be mistaken for a teenage girl who just graduated from elementary school. And without makeup, even if you look at her from the front, she looks no older than a high school student. And knowing this, Jeongmi tries to put on a little makeup. At work, she stands all day, and her feet must swell. However, she always goes to the factory and comes back in high heels. A quiet voice, a light gait – such a girl seemed not only unable to hit anyone, but also never even angry. However, Jongdae, clicking his tongue, confessed to you:

– You don’t know her at all. I’m more afraid of my sister than my father.

Almost two years had passed since Jongdae and his sister had moved into your home, but you had never had a chance to talk to Jongmi properly. The weaving factory where she worked never stopped even at night. Jongdae lied that he was staying late at the library, but he was delivering newspapers until late at night. So at the beginning of winter, the fire in their room often went out. Occasionally, there were evenings when Jongmi returned home before her brother, and then she would quietly knock on your door. You would open the door and see a tired face and short hair that she tucked behind her ear.

“Could you give me some coals…” she forced out with difficulty.

And every time you would run out into the yard at breakneck speed and rush to the stove, forgetting even to put on your jacket. Having picked out the still-burning coals from the embers, you would collect them with a poker in a scoop and give them to Chonmi, and she didn’t know how to express her gratitude.

The first time you had a heart-to-heart talk with her was one evening early last winter. Jongdae had run off to deliver newspapers after school, leaving his school bag at the entrance, and hadn’t returned yet. You immediately guessed that it was Jongmi knocking on the door. It was a soft, hesitant tapping sound, with fingertips that sounded as if they were wrapped in several layers of cold, soft silk. You quickly opened the door and ran out of the room. She asked:

– Did you happen to throw away your first grade textbooks from high school?
– …For the first grade?

Surprised, you asked again, and she answered sheepishly that she had been going to night school since November.

– At the factory they said that everything in the world is changing, and soon the owners will not be able to force workers to work overtime, no matter how much they want to. They said that the wages will go up. So I decided to go to school on this occasion. It’s been a long time since I went to school, so first I need to repeat everything from the first grade… And when Jongdae has holidays, I think I’ll be able to go through the textbooks for the second grade.

After asking for a moment, you went up to the attic. When you returned with an armful of dusty textbooks and a few study guides for the exams, you saw Jongmi’s eyes widen.

– Wow!.. What a conscientious boy you are! And our Chondae threw everything away.

While accepting the books, she ordered you:

– Just don’t tell Jongdae anything. He already feels guilty that I didn’t finish my studies because of him. And until I pass the general exam for high school, pretend you don’t know anything.

You looked at her face, confused, on which a smile was blooming like flowers in a field.

– Who knows, maybe after Jongdae enters university, I will be able to get an education too? I will prepare hard.

You thought then, “I wonder how she can study secretly?” Will she be able to block the open book with her small back in this tiny room? After all, Jongdae doesn’t go to bed early either, and sits up late studying.

At first you just thought about it for a while, but later you began to remember this conversation more and more often. Gentle hands leafing through your textbook at the head of the sleeping Jongdae. Small lips through which words fly out, repeating over and over: “Wow!.. What a conscientious boy you are!..” Welcoming eyes. A tired smile. A knock on the door, like a soft touch of fingertips, as if they were wrapped in several layers of cold, soft silk. All this made your heart squeeze, did not allow you to sleep soundly. And in the morning, as soon as the rustle of the opening door was heard, and then the light slap of bare feet on the wooden flooring, the hiss of the pump and the splash of water at the sink, you wrapped yourself in a blanket, crawled closer and, not even having time to open your sleepy eyes, caught every sound coming from her.

* * *

The second truck, its back completely filled with coffins, stopped in front of the sports school. Your eyes, narrowed even more by the bright sun, notice Chinsu sitting next to the driver. He jumps out of the truck, walks quickly towards you and says:

– The doors will close here at six o’clock. You go home at that time.

You ask hesitantly:

– …And who will guard those who remain inside?
– The military will enter the city tonight. We will also send all the relatives of the dead home. There should be no one here after six.
– The military will come where there is no one but the dead?
– They say that they consider even the wounded lying in hospitals to be rebels, and they are going to kill everyone. Do you think they will figure out who is a corpse here and who is looking after the dead? They will finish them off and that’s it.

As if angry, he walks past you with a firm gait and heads into the hall. He must be about to tell the same thing to the relatives of the dead. You clutch the account book in a rough black cover to your chest like a great treasure and watch Chinsu go. You look at his wet hair, his T-shirt, his jeans, you look at the profiles of the family members of the dead, how they shake their heads or nod in response to his words.

A woman’s high, trembling voice is heard:

– I won’t take a step from here. I’ll die here with my son!

Suddenly, your gaze falls on the unidentified people lying in the hall, covered with thick cloth from head to toe. You can’t take your eyes off the body in the corner. When you first saw it in the hallway of the Citizens’ Appeals Department, you immediately thought of Chonmi. The body, already starting to decompose, was difficult to identify because of the deep wound that ran across the face and mutilated all the features. But there were some similarities. It seemed like you once saw Chonmi in the same pleated skirt.

But aren’t girls in polka dot skirts rare? And there’s no way you could be sure that you saw Jeongmi leaving the house wearing that exact outfit on Sunday. Is her hair that short? Actually, only middle school girls wear that kind of haircut. And why would the thrifty Jeongmi, who saves every penny, paint her toenails when it’s not even summer yet? Although you haven’t really seen her bare feet. Jongdae should know if his sister has a bean-sized birthmark above her knee. Only he can confirm that the girl lying there isn’t Jeongmi.

But to find Jongdae, a sister is exactly what is needed. She would probably have gone around all the hospitals in the city center and found Jongdae, who had just regained consciousness after surgery, in the recovery room. Just like that time in February, when Jongdae flatly refused to enroll in a high school specializing in humanities, declaring that he would study in a middle school, in a special class with a vocational focus. He left home, and Jeongmi, not believing in success herself, found him in the reading room of a comic book store within 24 hours. Grabbing Jongdae by the ear, she brought him home. Looking at Jongdae, who had his tail between his legs in front of such a small and quiet sister, your mother and brother laughed for a long time. And even your calm and silent father pretended to cough, trying to hold back his laughter. That day, until midnight, the brother and sister talked in the guest room. When someone’s quiet voice became a little louder, the intonation of the other sounded quiet and gentle, when one raised the tone again, the other calmed down. All this time you were lying in your room next to the kitchen and listening to the heated argument of two close people, words of comfort, quiet laughter. When their voices gradually merged into one and it was impossible to distinguish who was speaking, you imperceptibly fell asleep.

* * *

Now you are sitting at the table at the entrance to the sports school.

You sit on the left side of the table, open the ledger, and in large handwriting write down on an A4 sheet the name of the dead person, registration number, phone number or address. Even if all the militiamen are killed tonight, their relatives must know about it. That’s what Chinsu said, so now you’re busy with this matter. You’ll have to hurry to write down all the names, check them and attach the paper to each coffin in six hours.

– Tonho!

Hearing your name, you raise your head.

Between the trucks you see your mother walking towards you. This time alone, without her brother. A grey blouse and loose trousers – she always wears them when she goes to her shop, like work clothes. The only difference from her usual appearance is her hairdo: her always neatly combed, curled hair is wet and tangled today in the rain.

You involuntarily get up, happy to see your mother, run up to the stairs, but suddenly stop. Mother quickly climbs the steps, grabs your hands.

– Let’s go home.

To free yourself from her grip on your hands, the kind of terrible grip a drowning person has, you twist, freeing your wrist. You unclench your mother’s fingers one by one.

– They say that the military will enter the city tonight. Let’s go home now.

Finally, you manage to unclasp all her fingers. You immediately run quickly into the hall. The path of your mother, who was trying to catch up with you, is blocked by a procession of people who decided to take the coffin with the body of a relative home.

– Mom, they said that at six o’clock all the doors here will be closed.

She shuffles and hops along the other side of the line of people, trying to meet your eyes. You shout, aiming at her forehead, wrinkled like a crying child’s:

– Once the doors are closed, then I’ll go!

Only after these words does Mom’s face smooth out.

“You must come,” she says, “before the sun sets! So that the whole family can have dinner together.”

Less than an hour has passed since your mother left, and you get up again, noticing from afar an old man in a traditional brown robe and a black hat of European cut. One glance is enough to understand how hot he is in this attire. Completely gray, he walks, leaning on a cane and moving his trembling legs with difficulty. To prevent the wind from scattering the sheets of paper, you put the ledger and a pen on them and go down the stairs.

– Are you looking for someone?
– My son and granddaughter, – the old man mumbles. All his teeth have fallen out.
– Yesterday I arrived from Hwasun, kind people gave me a lift on a cultivator. They said it was forbidden to enter the city on it, so I went around along a mountain path where there are no military posts. I barely made it.

The old man sighs deeply. Gray droplets of saliva have accumulated on the sparse hairs sticking out around his lips. You cannot understand how this grandfather, who walks with difficulty on a smooth road, was able to walk along a mountain path.

– Our youngest son, he’s mute… He had a fever when he was a child and hasn’t spoken since. The day before yesterday, a man returned from Gwangju and said that soldiers had beaten a mute with clubs in the city center and that it had happened several days ago. So I went here.

Supporting the old man by the arm, you lead him up the stairs.

– Yes, and our granddaughter, the daughter of the eldest son, studies at Chonnam University and rents a room not far from it. So, yesterday I went to see her, and they told me – she went missing… No one has seen her for several days, neither the owner of the house, nor the neighbors.

You enter the room and put on a mask. Women in mourning clothes gather water bottles, newspapers, ice packs and photographs of the deceased into bundles. There are also those in the room who argue with other relatives about whether to take the coffin home or leave it here.

The old man no longer needs your support. He walks forward, covering his nose with a crumpled gauze handkerchief. He shakes his head as he looks at the faces of the dead, one after another, standing out against the white cloth. The rhythmic tapping of his cane on the floor is muffled by the rubberized surface.

– …And who is this? Why is his face covered?

The old man points to a body covered with a cloth from head to toe. You stand there, hesitating, putting off this moment. It is part of your job, but you always act hesitantly. Behind the white cloth stained with dried blood and pus, a mutilated female body awaits you. When you pull back the cover, a face deeply cut by a bayonet appears, a cut shoulder, a decaying mound of breast visible through a torn blouse. At night, when you fall asleep on chairs pushed together in the dining room on the underground floor, this image bursts into consciousness, and your eyes open of their own accord. The bayonet is already plunging into your face, piercing it, tearing your chest, and you shudder from this nightmarish vision. You move forward, take a step toward the body lying in the corner. Your whole being involuntarily rushes away from it, as if you were being pulled back by some force as powerful as a huge magnet. Fighting the feeling, you tuck your head into your shoulders and move forward. You bend down to pull back the covers, and a dull trickle of wax, melted by the blue-green eye of the candle, drips down.

How long does the spirit hover next to its body?

Do his wings flutter like a bird’s? Does the candle flame tremble?

The thought occurs to you: “It would be nice if my vision deteriorated so much that I could only see vague outlines even up close.” But now everything is clear. Before you pull back the white cloth, you force yourself to keep your eyes open. Biting your lips so hard that blood comes out, you remove the blanket from your body. And even after you slowly cover it again, you keep your eyes open. “I would have run away anyway,” you think, gritting your teeth. “Even if it hadn’t been Jongdae who fell, but this girl, you would have run away. Even if your older brothers had fallen, even if your father had fallen, even if your mother had fallen, you would have run away.”

You turn around and look straight at the old man, watching his grey hair stand on end. You wait patiently for him to answer your silent question: “Is this your granddaughter?” I will not forgive. You look straight into the old man’s twitching eyes. Into the eyes of a man who has seen the most terrible thing anyone can see in this world. I will not forgive anything. And I will not forgive myself.

Chapter 2

Black breath

Our bodies are laid crosswise on top of each other.

Across my stomach lies a strange man, and across his stomach lies a strange young man, older than me. His hair touches my face, and my bare feet rest in the hollows under his knees. I can see all this because I am floating very close to my body.

They came. Hurriedly. In colorful military uniforms, helmets, armbands with a red cross on their sleeves. Standing opposite each other, they began to lift us by our arms and legs, and then throw us into an army truck. They acted mechanically, as if loading sacks of grain. In order not to lose my body, I clung to my cheeks, then to my neck, and climbed into the back. To my surprise, I was alone there. That is, I did not meet other spirits. Although many spirits hover somewhere nearby, I could not see or feel a single one. It turns out that an expression like “we will meet in the next world” has no meaning.

They silently threw all our bodies into the truck. My heart stopped from the massive loss of blood, but even then it continued to flow, and my face became like a sheet of writing paper, thin and transparent. I looked at my face for the first time, my eyes closed, and it all seemed completely unfamiliar to me.

The evening was approaching with every minute. The truck left the city limits and sped along a deserted road across a plain covered in darkness. As it climbed a low hill where oak trees grew thickly, a metal gate became visible ahead. The truck stopped briefly, and two guards saluted. The long, thin scraping of metal was heard twice – once when the soldiers opened the gate, and again when they closed it. The truck drove a little further up the hill and stopped in a vacant lot between a one-story concrete building and an oak grove.

They got out of the truck. They opened the hatch at the back and, working in pairs again, began to move our bodies, grabbing them by the arms and legs. Sliding and clinging to chins and cheeks, I followed my body. I was hovering over a one-story house in which not a single light was lit. I wanted to know what kind of building it was. I wanted to know where they had taken us, where they were now carrying my body.

They entered the thicket beyond the wasteland, where trees and bushes grew in disarray. At the direction of the man, who seemed to be a senior in rank, our bodies were again laid crosswise. My body was the second from the bottom this time, so, crushed by the others, it was flattened. But there was no blood left in it that could have flowed under such a weight. My head thrown back, my eyes closed, my mouth slightly open – my face in the shadow of the bushes looked even paler than before. They covered the body of the man, laid at the very top, with a straw sack, and now the tower of the dead had turned into the corpse of a huge monster with several dozen legs.

* * *

They left, and it grew darker. The last colors of the evening glow slowly faded in the west. I sat on top of the tower of bodies and watched as a pale crescent moon broke through the gray cloud that enveloped it… The moonlight cast a shadow on the thicket and imprinted a pattern on the faces of the dead, like a strange tattoo.

It seemed to be approaching midnight when I felt a very soft and gentle touch. I just waited for what would happen next, not knowing who this silent shadow without a face or a body belonged to. I wanted to remember how to talk to a spirit, but I realized that I had never learned how to do this. It seemed that this spirit did not know how to start a conversation either. We directed all our efforts to establish contact, but all we managed was to feel that we were thinking about each other. Finally, as if having lost hope, the unknown spirit flew away, and I was alone again.

As the night deepened, spirits began to appear more and more often. If I felt a soft touch on my shadow, I knew it was another spirit. We had no arms, no legs, no face, no tongue, so we just touched each other as shadows, wondered who it could be, and flew away in different directions, never able to speak. Every time another shadow slipped off me, I looked up at the sky. I wanted to think that the crescent moon, covered in a cloud, was looking straight at me, like someone’s pupil. But it was just an absolutely empty silver stone, a huge, harsh lump of rock where there was no life.

When this unfamiliar and strange night was already ending and the sky, hanging over us like a stain of spilled black ink, finally began to paint itself in the pre-dawn blue-green color, I suddenly remembered you. Yes, we were together, you and I. Before something like a cold stake suddenly crashed into my side. Before I went limp like a rag doll and fell face down. Before, in the confusion from the roar of gunfire, tearing apart eardrums, in the confusion of the tramp of people’s feet, from which it seemed that the asphalt was about to crack into small pieces, I stretched out my hand to you. Before I felt the warm blood gushing from my side flowing down my shoulder and behind my neck. Until that moment, you were with me…

* * *

Bugs and beetles began to stir in the grass, rustling, shaking their wings. Invisible birds began to chirp in high voices. The wind rushed past, and the leaves on the black trees began to tremble and rustle delightfully. I thought the pale sun was rising smoothly, unhurriedly, but it moved furiously forward, to the center of the sky. Under the hot rays, our bodies, piled up behind the thicket, began to rot. A swarm of dung flies and ordinary flies swarmed over the clots of blood. I hovered next to my body and watched them rub their front paws, crawl, fly up and sit down again. I wanted to look for you among the bodies piled in a tower, I wanted to know if your spirit was among those who touched me last night, but I could not leave the outlines of my body, as if some forces were holding me like a magnet. I couldn’t take my eyes off my bloodless face.

Time passed, and when the sun almost reached its zenith, a thought suddenly arose.

You are not here.

What’s more, you’re still alive.

So, if you are a spirit, you can direct all your mental powers to a person and find out whether he is alive or dead. However, you have no way to determine who is who among your fellows around you. I thought that out of the dozens of bodies rotting in this unknown thicket, there was not a single familiar one, and I became afraid.

But then I became even more scared.

I was filled with fear and thought about my sister. I thought about my sister as I looked at the blazing sun, tensely tilting further and further to the south. I thought about my sister as I looked at my face, my closed eyes, and I thought, thought only about her. I experienced unbearable suffering. My sister was dead. She died before I did. Moans and cries burst from me, but how can one sob without a tongue and a voice? Pain pierced me – I felt blood and pus oozing out of me instead of tears. I have no eyes, but where does the blood flow and where does the pain come from, making me suffer? I looked at my bluish face – it was dry. My dirty hands lay motionless. Red ants scurried quietly over my nails, which had turned a dark brick color from coagulated blood.

* * *

I no longer felt like a fifteen-year-old. Thirty-five and forty-five also felt like immature ages. Even if I were to say that I was already sixty-five, no, seventy-five, it would not seem strange. I was no longer that Jongdae, the shortest of my peers at my school. I was no longer that Park Jongdae, who loved his sister more than anyone in the world and feared her more than anyone in the world. A strange and hot force arose and lingered within me. It arose not because of death, but only because of the thoughts that kept running through my mind. Who killed me? Who killed my sister? Why were we killed? The more I thought, the stronger this unfamiliar force grew within me. It made the blood that kept flowing thick and sticky. Blood that appeared where there were no eyes or cheeks.

And the spirit of the sister must also be somewhere, but where, in what place? Now we have no bodies, and to see each other, we do not need to go anywhere. But how can I meet my sister without a body? How will I recognize my sister if she does not have a body?

My body continued to rot. Black insects covered the open wound. Dung flies crawled lazily on my eyelids and lips, rubbing their thin legs. When the sun began to set behind the horizon, sending orange rays into the gaps between the tops of the oak trees, I, exhausted by thoughts of my sister, began to think about others. Where are those who killed me and my sister now? Even if they are not dead yet, they must have spirits too. So, if I think and think, then maybe I will be able to touch them. I wanted to abandon my body. I wanted to break away from this force, to tear off this thread coming out of the dead body, which does not let me go. To tear it off, like a finely stretched web. I wanted to fly to where these people are. Why did you kill me? Why did you kill my sister? How did you kill her?

Dusk fell on the earth, and all the birds fell silent. In the grass, the night bugs and beetles began to flutter their wings. However, if you compare these sounds with those made by daytime insects, you will notice that the rustling of the night ones sounds more subtle. Pitch darkness fell, and, like the night before, someone’s shadow approached mine. Lightly stroking each other, we immediately parted. Probably, while the sun’s rays were scorching all day, we, numb, were here, thinking about the same thing. And, apparently, only with the onset of night did we receive enough energy from our bodies to tear ourselves away from it for a while. Until these soldiers appeared, we touched each other, stroked each other, tried to find out at least something about each other, but in the end we were unable to do anything.

The night silence was broken by the creaking of metal gates opening and closing. The roar of an engine was getting closer. Beams of light cut through the darkness. The headlights of a moving truck illuminated our bodies. The shadows of branches and leaves, lying like a black tattoo on each face, moved with the two streams of light.

This time there were only two of them. They grabbed the people they had brought by the arms and legs and quickly carried them one by one in our direction. Four of the victims had broken skulls, there were dark spots of blood on their clothes, and the fifth was wearing blue-striped hospital pajamas. A little further away, these two had formed another tower, much lower than ours, also stacking the bodies crosswise. Having placed the corpse in the hospital pajamas on top, they covered it with a straw sack and hurried back to the truck. Looking at their wrinkled noses and empty eyes, I understood. I understood that within 24 hours our bodies had begun to stink.

While they were starting the engine, I approached the new arrivals. I was not alone – shadows of other spirits were flickering around me. Water, stained with blood, was still dripping from the clothes of men and women with broken skulls. Judging by the fact that their eyes, lips, and noses were clean, water had been poured on their heads to wash the blood from their faces. The most unusual of the five was a man in hospital pajamas. He lay covered with a straw bag up to his neck, and looked very clean and well-groomed. Someone had washed his body. Stitched up his wounds and smeared him with healing ointment. In the darkness, a tight bandage on his head gleamed white. The body was dead, like all the others here, but it, preserving the traces of someone’s hands caring for it, looked noble. I felt a strange sadness and jealousy towards him. I felt ashamed of my flattened body, crushed like the body of some beast, at the very bottom of this high tower of corpses. I hated it.

Yes, from that moment on I hated my own body. Our bodies, like pieces of meat, carelessly piled up and stacked in a tower… Our dirty faces, rotting in the sun and emitting a stench…

* * *

If only I could close my eyes.

If only it were possible not to see our bodies, this great pile of flesh, like the corpse of a monster with many legs. If only it were possible to instantly forget ourselves in sleep. If only it were possible to now roll head over heels to the very bottom of dark consciousness.

If only I could hide, wrapped in sleep.

Or at least dive into the depths of memories.

For example, last summer, when I was wandering from corner to corner, waiting for you in the corridor in front of the classroom, where the evening meeting of students and the class teacher was going on for a very long time. At that moment, when I quickly put my backpack on my shoulders, seeing the teacher leaving the classroom. At that moment, when, not finding you among the students leaving, I ran into the classroom and loudly called out to you, wiping chalk off the board with a sponge.

– What’s wrong with you?!
– I’m on duty.
– But you were on duty last week.
– Some guy asked me to take over for him, said he was going to a rally.
– You idiot!

At that moment when we looked at each other and laughed carefree. When you were about to sneeze from the chalk dust that got into your nose. When I secretly put the sponge you had shaken the chalk off of into my backpack. At that moment when I looked at your embarrassed face and told you the story that happened to your sister, told it without bragging, without sadness, without embarrassment.

That night I lay with a light blanket wrapped around my stomach and pretended to be asleep. My sister came home as usual after her evening shift, and I heard her eating cold rice with cold water as usual, having set up a table on the sink. After washing and brushing her teeth in the yard, she tiptoed into the room, and I opened my eyes in the darkness and peeped through a crack as she approached the window. My sister wanted to check if the mosquito repellent was smoldering well, and then she saw the sponge placed against the frame and laughed. First once quietly, as if she were exhaling, and a few seconds later again, louder.

Notes

1. The compulsory education system in Korea consists of elementary and middle schools. Jinsu is referring to a first-grader in middle school. There are three grades in middle school. Most first-graders in middle school are 12 years old, and most last-graders are 15.

2. The healing procedure of “cauterization” consists of applying a small lump of dried wormwood to the body so that the heat spreads throughout the body.

Han Gang literature South Korea vegetarian