I wasn’t frightened.
Death would have been welcome at that point, so what could there possibly have been to fear? When we met up again the next day, to wait for the butcher’s convoy, we were each wearing white mourning clothes. The day had hardly got started when the bastard really did show up. Our opportunity had come, to hurl slogans like stones with one voice, and all hell broke loose. We went into a frenzy of howling and fainting, tugging at our hair and tearing at our clothes. No sooner had we rolled out our banners than they were snatched away and the whole lot of us were hauled off to the police station. We were just sitting there in a daze until some young people were brought in; they’d formed their own association, of the wounded, and had been demonstrating at a different spot along the convoy’s route. Their faces were sullen when they filed in, until they saw us there.
‘Even the mothers are here too?’ one youth wailed, tears streaming down his face. ‘What crime have they committed?’
In that instant, everything inside my head got blanked out. It was blindingly white, as though the whole world had been painted white. I hitched up my torn skirt and clambered up onto the table.
My voice sounded so much smaller than usual. ‘That’s right,’ I stammered, ‘what crime have I committed?’
I jumped down, dashed over to the desk opposite and scrambled up before anyone had time to blink, the hem of my white skirt fluttering at my ankles. There was a photo of the murderer hanging on the wall – I pulled it down and smashed the glass with my foot. Something splattered across my face; tears, or maybe blood.
The blood kept spurting from my foot, so the policemen had to take me off to hospital. Your father came to the emergency department after they’d let him know I was there. While the nurse removed the shards of glass from my foot and bandaged the wound, I asked him to do me a favour. ‘Please go home and look in the wardrobe. There’s a banner I made last night but didn’t bring with me today.’
Around sunset that same day I hobbled up the stairs which led out to the hospital roof, leaning on your father’s shoulder for support. I steadied myself against the railing, unfurled the banner and screamed. Chun Doo-hwan, you murdered my son. Let’s tear that bloodthirsty butcher to pieces. I carried on screaming until the police came charging up the emergency stairs, seized hold of me, carried me back down to one of the wards and bundled me into a bed.
We met up frequently after that, determined to carry on the fight. Each time we mothers parted, we clasped hands and brushed shoulders, peering into each other’s eyes as we made arrangements to meet again. We even had a whip-round so that those who were having trouble making ends meet could afford to hire a bus to go to a meeting in Seoul. One time, some good-for-nothing bastards chucked a smoke grenade inside our bus and one of us collapsed, choking. When the riot police arrested us and forced us into one of those vans with chicken wire over the windows, they pulled over at a secluded spot by the highway and made one of us get out, then drove on for a while before evicting someone else … those bastards made sure we were well scattered. I trailed along the side of the road for what felt like an age, completely disoriented. I hadn’t the faintest clue where I was. Until finally I stumbled across one of the other women, her lips tinged blue like mine, and we chafed each other’s numbed hands.
We made a firm pact to carry on the fight until the end, but the following year your father got ill and I couldn’t keep my promise. Watching him facing death that winter, I was bitter. It’s all right for you, you’ll soon be out of it. I’m the one who’s being left behind, alone in this hell.
But I don’t have a map for whatever world lies beyond death. I don’t know whether there, too, there are meetings and partings, whether we still have faces and voices, hearts with the capacity for joy as well as sorrow. How could I tell whether your father’s loosening grip on life was something I ought to pity, or to envy?
Winter passes, and spring comes round again. Spring sends me into my usual delirium, summer brings exhaustion and an illness I find difficult to shake off. By the time autumn sets in it’s as much as I can do just to keep breathing. And then in winter, of course, my joints stiffen up. The ice that penetrated deep into my bones, into my heart, never leaves me. However sweltering the summer, I never shed a single drop of sweat.
My Dong-ho, I was thirty when I had you. My last-born. My left nipple had been a strange shape for as long as I could remember, and both of your brothers had favoured its properly formed partner. My left breast would still swell with milk, of course, but because they refused to suckle from it, it hardened in a way that was completely different to the soft right breast. It was unsightly, a cross I had to bear for several years. But with you, everything was different. You latched onto the left breast of your own free will, your tiny mouth pulling at that deformed nipple with an astonishing gentleness. And so both breasts developed identical soft contours.
My Dong-ho, I never knew a baby look so happy to be breastfeeding. Or the yellow faeces filling the cloth nappy to have such a strangely sweetish scent. You crawled all over the place like a puppy, and there wasn’t a thing on earth that you wouldn’t put in your mouth. Then there was the time you ran a fever and your face puffed up, you had convulsions and vomited a mess of sour milk onto my chest. After you were weaned, you sucked your thumb with such intensity that the nail wore thin and transparent as paper. You wobbled towards me one step at a time as I clapped and chanted, Here you come, here you come. Seven chuckling steps until I could fold you into my arms.
‘I don’t like summer but I like summer nights’: that was something you came out with the year you turned eight. I liked the sound of those words, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘He’ll be a poet.’ Times when you three boys sat out on the bench in the yard, sharing watermelon with your father on hot summer nights. When your tongue groped for the sticky-sweet remnants smeared around your mouth.
I cut out the photo from your school ID and put it in my purse. Day or night, the house is always empty, but still I like to wait until the early hours of the morning, when there’d be no earthly reason for anyone to drop by, before I unwrap it from the folds of plain writing paper and smooth out the creases lining your face. There’s no one around to overhear, but still I only let myself whisper it … Dong-ho.
On late autumn days after the rainy season has passed and the sky is startlingly clear, I put my purse in the inside pocket of my gilet and make my slow way down to the riverside, my hands on my knees. I inch along the path where the cosmos blooms in a riot of colour, and gadflies swarm on the coils of dead worms.
When you were six or seven, when your brothers were both off at school and the house was quiet even at one o’clock in the afternoon, you were so bored you didn’t know what to do with yourself. So each day the two of us walked along the riverside, all the way to the shop to see your father. You disliked the shadowed places where the trees blocked out the sun. When I wanted to walk there to escape the heat, you tugged me by the wrist as hard as you could, back to where it was bright. Even though your fine hair sparkled with sweat, and you were panting so hard you sounded as if you were in pain. Let’s walk over there, Mum, where it’s sunny, we might as well, right? Pretending that you were too strong for me, I let you pull me along. It’s sunny over there, Mum, and there’s lots of flowers too. Why are we walking in the dark, let’s go over there, where the flowers are blooming.
EPILOGUE
The Writer. 2013
I was nine years old at the time of the Gwangju Uprising.
That year, we’d just moved up from Gwangju to Suyuri, on the outskirts of Seoul. There, I would hole myself up and pore over whichever book I could lay my hands on, spend entire afternoons playing omok with my brothers, or sigh my way through various small tasks like peeling garlic or deheading anchovies – the kinds of chores I hated most, but which were the ones my mother reserved for me. It was during this time that I overheard snatches of the grown-ups’ conversation.
‘Was he one of yo
ur kids?’ my father’s sister asked him, one Sunday in early autumn while they were having dinner.
‘I wasn’t his form teacher, but I took him for some other classes. He always did a good job of the creative writing, I remember that. When we sold the hanok and moved, I introduced myself to the new buyer as a teacher at D middle school; the man was really glad to meet me, told me his youngest was in the first year there, but he had to mention the name several times before it clicked. I only really knew him to look at, from when I’d taken the register for their class.’
Beyond that, I don’t remember exactly what was said. I remember only the expressions on their faces; the struggle to get through the story while having to skirt around the most gruesome parts; the awkward, drawn-out silences. However many times the subject was changed to something a little lighter, the conversation always seemed to circle back around to that initial, unspoken centre, seemingly in spite of the speakers. I became oddly tense, straining to catch the words. I already knew that one of the students my father had taught had lived in the hanok after us; that was no great secret. So why were they lowering their voices? Why, just before that boy’s name was uttered, did an unaccountable silence wedge itself in?
It was a typical old-style hanok, with the rooms arranged around a central courtyard, sliding paper doors and a tiled roof. In the centre of the courtyard was a flowerbed with a stumpy camellia plant. Every year when the hot weather set in, rose creepers swept their carpet of blossoms up the wall, the petals so dark red they were almost black. Later, when the roses withered, the white hollyhocks surged up the wall of the annex to the height of a grown adult. The iron bars of the main gate were painted a pale straw colour; when you pushed it open to go out, you could see the top of the battery factory. I remember the morning we moved; my father and uncle padding the corners of the paulownia wardrobe with a quilt, their movements deft and skilful.
Seoul, January 1980 – I wouldn’t have believed anywhere could be so cold. Before moving out to Suyuri we spent three months in a tenement building, where the walls might as well have been made of plywood for all the good they did retaining heat. It was barely any warmer inside than out, and our breath puffed out of us in white clouds. Even huddled in a coat and with a quilt pulled around you, your teeth chattered audibly.
All through that winter, my thoughts kept straying back to our old hanok. Not that there was anything bad about the new house. I simply didn’t feel that attached to it, probably as we’d only lived there for a relatively short time. The hanok, on the other hand, was where I’d spent the first nine years of my life. My grandfather had bought it for my mother, his only daughter. If you wanted to step across from the veranda into the kitchen, you had to pass through my tiny room. In summer I lay there to do my homework with my stomach pressed against the floor. On winter afternoons, I would slide the paper door open a fraction and peer out into the court-yard, where a clean wash of sunlight was puddled on the paving stones.
It was early summer when they came to the house in Suyuri.
At some point between three and four a.m., Mum shook me awake. Get up, I’m switching the light on. The light flicked on before I even had time to blink. I sat up, rubbing my eyes. Two men were standing in the room, their broad shoulders outlined against the black rectangle of the open door. ‘These men have come from the estate agent’s,’ Mum told me. She was still in her pyjamas. ‘To look at the house.’
I was instantly wide awake. Clinging to Mum, I watched wide-eyed as the men rummaged through the wardrobe, searched under the desk, and climbed up into the loft, carrying torches. It didn’t make sense. Why would men from the estate agent’s need to look inside the wardrobe? And why would they come by in the middle of the night? After a while, one of the men came down from the loft and led Mum into the kitchen. When I hesitantly followed them, she turned and mouthed you lot stay here. Her eyes gave nothing away. When I looked back over my shoulder, I saw that my two brothers had wandered into the room in their pyjamas. The look on their faces was blank and uncomprehending. My father’s voice was low but resonant, coming from the main room. There was no door between the kitchen and my room, just a lace curtain, but whatever my mother was saying to the man, it was so quiet I couldn’t make out a single word.
When our extended family gathered for the thanksgiving festival that autumn, the grown-ups took care to keep their voices down whenever they were talking among themselves. So that my brothers and I, and even our younger cousins, wouldn’t overhear anything we weren’t supposed to. As though we children were spies.
My father’s brother was working at the defence industry at the time, and the two of them whispered together in the main room until the small hours.
‘Please, hyeong, be careful. I’m pretty sure they’ve tapped your phone line. These days, whenever I call you I can hear this kind of whooshing sound; that’s wiretapping. My friend Yeong-jun – you remember him, right? He’s decided to get out of it while he still can. The military police took him the year before last, and prised off every single one of his fingernails. Another round of that would finish him off.’
Hushed voices from the kitchen; the younger wives preparing food with my mother.
‘The guy who bought your hanok was renting the annex out to a couple of kids; the boy was in the same year as the landlord’s son. I heard that there’s three dead and two missing from D middle school alone … including both the kids who were living there.’
My mother merely bowed her head in silence. It took a while before she began to speak, and when she did her voice was so low I could barely make it out.
‘There was a young woman … She was waiting for her husband outside their house. Not long before her due date. They shot her in the middle of the head. She died instantly.’
In my impressionable child’s imagination, I saw a woman in her twenties standing in front of our old hanok’s main gate, her hands on her round stomach. A bullet hole opened up in the centre of her pale forehead. Wide as a surprised eye.
Two summers on, my father brought the photo chapbook home.
He’d been down to Gwangju on a condolence call, and had picked it up at the train station – they were relatively common at the time, though printed in secret and sold unofficially. Once the grown-ups had finished passing the book round, the silence that ensued was heavy as lead. Father put it away in the bookcase, up on the highest shelf so we children wouldn’t accidentally come across it. He even slid it in back-to-front, so that the spine wasn’t visible.
At night, though, when the grown-ups were all sitting in the kitchen and I knew I’d be safe at least until the end of the nine o’clock news, I crept into the main room in search of that book. I scanned every spine until finally I got to the top shelf; I still remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet. Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realised was there.
The floor of the gymnasium had been dug up.
I stood looking down at the exposed earth. Large windows were set into each of the four walls. The Taegukgi was still hanging in its frame on the wall. I walked over to the opposite wall, the semi-frozen earth packed solid beneath my feet. On the laminated A4 notice, a single phrase had been printed in cursive script. Please remove your shoes before exercising.
When I turned to look back at the main door, I noticed the stairs leading up to the first floor. As I walked up, my shoes left deep impressions in the thick layer of dust. The gallery was lined with rows of concrete seating, with a view of the entire gymnasium. When I sat down and breathed out, a cloud of condensation dissolved in the air. The concrete’s chill leached through the fabric of my jeans. Corpses wrapped in makeshift shrouds, plywood coffins covered with the Taegukgi, wailing children and blank-faced women, wavered briefly into view over the dark red earth.
I started too late, I thought. I should have come before they dug up the f
loor. Before the whole frontage of the Provincial Office was masked with scaffolding, with signs reading ‘Under Construction’. Before the majority of the gingko trees, which had borne mute witness to it all, were uprooted. Before the hundred-and-fifty-year-old pagoda tree withered and died.
But I’m here now.
I’ll zip up my hooded top and stay here until the sun goes down. Until the outlines of the boy’s face solidify. Until I hear his voice in my mind. Until his retreating figure begins to hover over the invisible floorboards, flickering like a candle’s guttering flame.
My younger brother still lives in Gwangju. Two days ago, I arrived at his apartment and unpacked my stuff. I arranged for the two of us to have dinner together when he got home from work, then went to see the old hanok while it was still light. I hadn’t lived in Gwangju since I was a child, so I wasn’t really sure where anything was. I got the taxi to take me to H primary school first, which I’d attended up to the third year. Turning my back on the main entrance, I walked over the pedestrian crossing then headed left, groping through memories for some sense of familiarity. The stationery shop I remembered was still there – or, if not the same shop exactly, then at least the same line of business. I walked a little further on, then, yes, that was it; I had to take a right. I chose the second right after the stationer’s, trusting to the spatial memory embedded in my muscles. The wall of the battery factory, which once seemed to stretch on forever, was gone now. Even the row of hanok buildings which used to face it had disappeared. Where that street joined the main road there’d been a quarry the length and breadth of a house, sharing a wall with our old hanok. There was no way a quarry, essentially just a tract of vacant land, would have been left undeveloped so near the centre of this city of now over a million inhabitants.