Had that other world continued, you would have sat your mid-terms last week. Today being Sunday, and with no more exams to revise for, you would have slept in late before going out to play badminton in the yard with Jeong-dae. The time of that other world seems no more real, now, than does the past week.
It happened last Sunday, when you’d gone out alone to buy some practice papers from the bookshop in front of the school. Frightened by the sight of armed soldiers, who seemed to have materialised out of nowhere, you took a side alley leading down to the riverside. A couple were walking opposite you, the man wearing a suit and holding a Bible and hymn book, and the woman in a navy-blue dress. Something about the way they were talking made you think they must be newly-weds. A thin scream rang out several times from the top of the road, and three soldiers carrying guns and clubs raced down over the hilltop, surrounding the young couple. They looked to have been pursuing someone, and to have turned down this alley by mistake.
‘What’s the matter? We’re just on our way to church …’
Before the man in the suit had finished speaking, you saw a person’s arm – what? Something you wouldn’t have thought it capable of. Too much to process – what you saw happen to that hand, that back, that leg. A human being. ‘Help me!’ the man shouted, his voice ragged. They kept on clubbing him until his twitching feet finally grew still. The woman stood there and screamed when she should have just backed off; you saw them grab her by the hair, but you don’t know what happened after that. You were too busy crawling, trembling, into the next street, a street where a sight even further from your experience was unfolding.
*
You jerk your head up in alarm, startled witless by the hand that just brushed your right shoulder. A slender, outstretched hand which seems wound around with cold scraps of cotton, like some fragile apparition.
‘Dong-ho.’
Eun-sook, soaked to the skin from her braids to the hems of her jeans, bends down over you and laughs.
Your face white as a sheet, you muster a half-hearted chuckle in response. You dummy, what would a ghost need hands for?
‘I meant to come back earlier; sorry you got caught up in this rain … I was worried that if I left, the others would start leaving too. Has anything much happened?’
You shake your head. ‘No one came looking for anyone. No passers-by either.’
‘It was the same at the service. Not many people came.’
Eun-sook squats down next to you and pulls a sponge cake out of the pocket of her hoodie, the wrapper rustling. A yoghurt pot follows it.
‘The church aunties were handing these out, so I thought I might as well get some.’
You hadn’t even realised you were hungry; now you tear off the plastic wrapper and cram the sponge cake into your mouth. Eun-sook peels the lid off the yoghurt and hands it to you.
‘I’ll stay here for now; you can go home and change. If anyone was going to come, they would have been and gone by now.’
‘No, you go, I barely got wet,’ you say, mumbling around a mouthful of sponge cake. You swallow the cake and gulp the yoghurt down.
‘This place doesn’t have the home comforts of the Provincial Office, you know,’ Eun-sook says delicately. ‘And it’s hard work you’ve been doing …’
You blush; you know you stink of sweat. Whenever you go to wash your hands in the tiny annex bathroom you always try to give your hair a quick wash too. The putrid smell seems to have soaked into your skin, so at night you even splash the cold water over your whole body, teeth chattering and sneezing violently; now it seems you might as well not have bothered.
‘I heard at the assembly that the army are coming back into the city tonight. If you go home, stay there. Don’t try and come back tonight.’
Eun-sook draws up her shoulders, and the hairs escaping from her braids tickle the nape of her neck. You watch in silence as her fingers smooth her wet hair and pluck at her sweater. Her face, which had had a chubby cuteness to it when you first saw her, has grown gaunt in the space of a few days. You fix on her eyes, which have become hollow and shadowed, and think, whereabouts in the body is that bird when the person is still alive? In that furrowed brow, above the halo-like crown of that head, in some chamber of the heart?
You cram the last of the cake into your mouth and pretend you hadn’t heard what Eun-sook just said about the army.
‘What’s a bit of sweat?’ you say. ‘It’s people who’ve got drenched from the rain who ought to go and change.’
Eun-sook fishes another yoghurt out of her pocket.
‘This was supposed to be for Seon-ju … Take your time with this one, don’t just wolf it down. No one’s going to snatch it out of your mouth!’
You accept it greedily, peel back the lid with your fingernail and grin.
Seon-ju, unlike Eun-sook, isn’t the kind to creep up on you undetected and quietly put a hand on your shoulder. As she walks over, she’s still several metres away when she calls your name in her clear, strong voice.
‘No one came?’ she asks, as soon as she’s near enough not to have to shout. ‘You’ve just been here on your own?’ She plonks herself down on the steps next to you and thrusts a roll of foil-wrapped gimbap in your general direction. You pinch a piece between your fingers and pop it into your mouth while Seon-ju stares out at the gradually lessening rain.
‘So you still haven’t found your friend?’ The question is blurted out without any preamble, and you need a moment before shaking your head in reply. ‘Well,’ Seon-ju continues briskly, ‘seeing as you’ve not had any luck so far, the soldiers have probably buried him somewhere.’ You rub your chest; the dry chunk of seaweed-wrapped rice seems suddenly difficult to get down. ‘I was there too, you see. That day. The soldiers picked up those who got shot close to them and loaded them into a truck.’ You wait for the rush of words to continue, but there doesn’t seem to be any more.
‘You’re soaked,’ you say. ‘You should go home and change. Eun-sook’s gone already.’
‘What for? Once we start work again this evening we’ll be sweating buckets.’ Seon-ju folds and refolds the empty aluminium foil until it’s down to the size of a little finger, gripping it in her fist as she watches the rain coming down. Her profile makes her look composed and resolute, and a question bubbles up inside you.
Will those who stay behind today really all be killed?
You hesitate, and think better of voicing these thoughts. If it looks like that’s what’s going to happen, surely they should all clear out of the Provincial Office and go and hide at home. How come some leave and others stay behind?
Seon-ju flicks the scrap of foil in the direction of the flower bed, examines her empty hand, then scrubs vigorously at her tired-looking eyes, her cheeks, her forehead, even her ears.
‘I can’t keep my eyes open. Maybe I’ll just nip to the annex … find a comfy spot on one of the sofas and snatch a quick nap. I can dry my clothes while I’m at it.’ Seon-ju laughs, revealing her compact front teeth. ‘I’m leaving you all alone again, poor old Dong-ho!’
Perhaps Seon-ju is right; perhaps the soldiers took Jeong-dae away and buried him somewhere. On the other hand, though, your mother’s still convinced that he’s being treated at some hospital, that the only reason he hasn’t been in touch is that he’s still not regained consciousness. She came here with your middle brother yesterday afternoon, to persuade you to come home. When you insisted that you couldn’t go home until you’d found Jeong-dae, she said, ‘It’s the ICU you ought to be checking. Let’s go round the hospitals together.’
She clutched the sleeve of your uniform.
‘Don’t you know how shocked I was when people said they’d seen you here? Good grief, all these corpses; aren’t you scared?’
‘The soldiers are the scary ones,’ you said with a half-smile. ‘What’s frightening about the dead?’
Your middle brother blanched. Your brother, the straight- A student who’d spent his childhood studying as thou
gh nothing else existed, only to make mistake after mistake in the university entrance exams. He was currently on his third try. He took after your father with his broad face and thick beard, making him look much older than his nineteen years. By contrast, your eldest brother, a ninth-grade civil servant in Seoul, is much more delicately built – you could almost call him pretty. When he comes back down to Gwangju during the holidays and the three of you are together, it’s your middle brother whom everyone mistakes as the eldest.
‘Paratroopers from the Special Warfare Command, with their tanks and machine guns – you really think they’re quaking in their boots at the thought of a bunch of civilians who only have clapped-out rifles that haven’t been fired since the war? You think that’s why they haven’t re-entered the city? They’re just biding their time and waiting for orders from higher up. If you’re here when they return, you’ll be killed.’
You take a step back, worried he’s going to give you a clip around the ear.
‘What reason do they have to kill me?’ you say. ‘I’m just lending a hand with a couple of things, that’s all.’ You wrench his arms away and shake free of your mother’s clinging hands. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just finish helping out and then I’ll come home. After I’ve found Jeong-dae.’
You run inside the gymnasium, waving awkwardly over your shoulder.
The sky, which has been gradually clearing up, is dazzlingly bright all of a sudden. You stand up and walk round to the right-hand side of the building. The square is practically empty now the crowd have dispersed. There are only the bereaved left, monochrome figures clustered near the fountain in groups of two and three. The bereaved, and a handful of men transferring the coffins from beneath the rostrum onto a truck. Squinting, trying to make out individual faces, your eyelids tremor in the face of this harsh smack of light. Minute spasms travel down to the muscles in your cheeks.
There wasn’t a scrap of truth in what you told Eun-sook and Seon-ju, that first day at the Provincial Office.
In that same square you’re looking at now, where hordes of people gathered to demonstrate, from old-timers in their fedoras to boys of twelve and women carrying colourful parasols, that day when they loaded the corpses of two men who had been shot in front of the train station into a handcart and pushed it at the very head of the column, it wasn’t a neighbour who caught that last glimpse of Jeong-dae, it was you yourself. And it wasn’t as though you just caught sight of him from a distance; you were close enough to see the bullet slam into his side. At first the two of you were hand in hand, excitedly making your way to the front. Then the earsplitting sound of gunfire tore through the afternoon and everyone was pushing and shoving, trying to run back the way they’d come. Someone shouted, ‘It’s okay, it’s just blanks!’, one group tried to push back to the front again, and Jeong-dae’s hand slipped from yours in the turmoil. Another deafening cannonade of shots, and Jeong-dae toppled over onto his side. You took to your heels and fled. You pressed yourself up against the wall of an electrical goods store, next to the lowered shutter. There were three older men there with you. Another man, who seemed to be part of their group, was running over to join them when a spray of blood suddenly erupted from his shoulder and he fell flat on his face.
‘Good God, they’re on the roof,’ the man next to you muttered. ‘They shot Yeon-gyu from the roof.’
Another burst of gunfire rang out from the roof of the next building along. The man Yeon-gyu, who had been staggering to his feet, flipped backwards as though someone had pushed him over. The blood spreading from his stomach washed greedily over his chest. You looked up at the faces of the men standing next to you. No one said anything. The man who’d spoken was shaking silently, his hand over his mouth.
You opened your eyes a fraction and saw dozens of people lying in the middle of the street. You thought you saw a pair of light blue tracksuit bottoms, identical to the ones you were wearing. Bare feet – what had happened to his trainers? – seemed to be twitching. You tensed, about to dash over, when the man standing next to you seized hold of your shoulder. Just then, three young men ran out from the next alleyway along. When they shoved their hands under the armpits of the fallen and hauled them up, a burst of rapid-fire gunshot exploded from the direction of the soldiers in the centre of the square. The young men crumpled like puppets whose strings had been cut. You looked over at the wide alley adjoining the opposite side of the street. Thirty-odd men and women were pressed up against the wall, a frozen tableau, their staring eyes riveted to the scene in front of them.
Around three minutes after the gunfire had ceased, a strikingly diminutive figure dashed out, unhesitating. The man ran as fast as he could towards one of the people lying on the ground. When another burst of rapid-fire gunshot put paid to his efforts, the man who’d been keeping a firm grip on your shoulder moved his large, coarse hand to cover your eyes, saying ‘You’ll only be throwing your life away if you go out there now.’
The moment he took his hand away, you saw two men from the opposite alleyway run towards a young woman as though pulled by a huge magnet, grab her arms and lift her up. This time the gunfire rang out from the roof. The men somersaulted head over heels.
After that, there were no more rescue attempts.
Around ten minutes of tense silence had gone past when a couple of dozen soldiers stepped out of their column, walking in pairs towards those who had fallen nearest them. They worked swiftly and methodically, dragging them back to the other soldiers. As though this were the cue they’d been waiting for, a dozen men ran out from the next and opposite alleyway, to lift up those who had fallen further back. This time, no shots rang out. The men who’d been standing with you left the safety of the wall to retrieve a group who had breathed their last, then hurriedly disappeared down the alleyway. And yet, you made no move to go and help Jeongdae. Left alone, you were frightened and, thinking only about avoiding the snipers’ sharp eyes, shuffled quickly sideways along the wall, your face pressed up against the bricks, your back turned to the square.
The house was quiet that afternoon. Despite all the upheavals, your mother had still gone to open up your family’s leather shop in Daein Market, and your father, who’d injured his back a while ago carrying a heavy box of hides, was lying down in the inner room. You pushed open the main gate, which was always left with one half unlocked, the metal rasping against the stone. As you stepped into the yard, you heard your middle brother chanting English vocabulary in his room.
‘Dong-ho?’ Your father’s voice carried clearly from the main room. ‘Is that Dong-ho come back?’ You didn’t answer. ‘Dong-ho, if that’s you then get in here and give my back a trample.’
Giving no sign of having heard, you walked across the flower bed and pushed down on the handle of the pump. Cold, clear water crackled into the nickel washbasin. You plunged your hands in first, then scooped up the water to splash over your face. When you tilted your head back the water ran down over your jaw, along the line of your throat.
‘Dong-ho, that is you outside, isn’t it? Come in here.’ With your dripping hands pressed against your eyes, you remained standing on the stone terrace. After a while, you slipped your feet out of your trainers, stepped up onto the wooden veranda and slid open the door of the main room. Your father was lying prone in the centre of the room, which was thick with the smell of moxa cautery.
‘The muscle was giving me gyp earlier, and I couldn’t get up. Give it a trample down near the base.’
You peeled off your socks and lifted your right foot up onto your father’s lower back, careful not to press down with your full weight.
‘Where’ve you been gadding off to? Your mother kept phoning to ask if you’d got back. It’s not even safe to go around the neighbourhood, with this demo. Last night there was shooting over by the station, and some people were even killed … it doesn’t bear thinking about. How can anyone go up against a gun with nothing but an empty fist?’
You switched feet with a practised moveme
nt and cautiously pressed down between your father’s spine and sacrum. ‘Ah, that’s the spot, just there …’
You left the inner room and went into your own, next to the kitchen. You curled up into a foetal position on the papered floor. Sleep sucked you down so suddenly it was like losing consciousness, but not many minutes had passed before you started awake, jolted out of a terrifying dream whose details were already impossible to remember. In any case, the waking hours that stretched out in front of you were far more frightening than any dream. Naturally, there were no sounds of anyone moving around in the room Jeong-dae shared with his sister, a tiny annex off the main gate. Nor would there be when evening came. The light would stay switched off. The key would stay skulking at the bottom of the dark-brown glazed jar next to the stone terrace, undisturbed.
Lying in the hush of the room, you see Jeong-dae’s face with your mind’s eye. You see those pale blue tracksuit bottoms thrashing, and your breathing becomes constricted, as though a ball of fire has lodged itself in your solar plexus. Struggling for breath, you try to replace this image with that of Jeong-dae on a perfectly ordinary day, or right now, pushing open the main gate and stepping into the courtyard as though nothing had happened. Jeong-dae, who still hadn’t had the growth spurt that usually comes in middle school. Whose older sister Jeong-mi found a way to get milk for him even when times were tight, hoping it would make him grow. Jeong-dae, whose plain features made you marvel that he could be related to Jeong-mi. Who still managed a certain appeal in spite of his flat nose and buttonhole eyes, who could bring about general hilarity just by screwing up his nose and deploying his megawatt grin. Whose disco dancing at the school talent show, his cheeks blown out like a pufferfish, had made even the scary form teacher burst out laughing. Who was more interested in making money than in studying. Whose sister nevertheless gave him no choice but to prepare for the entrance exams for liberal arts college. Whose paper round was carried out behind the back of this same sister, the bitter evening wind whipping his cheeks red as soon as winter set in. Who had an ugly wart on the back of his hand. Who, when you played badminton together in the yard, was incapable of playing any shot other than a smash, seemingly under the illusion that he was representing the South Korean team in some international match.