The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (39 page)

Deep in the middle of the night, Cousin and I are startled awake by Oldest Brother’s scream. He is sitting blankly in the dark. When I try to turn on the light, he says, “Don’t.”

“What is it,
Oppa
?”

He says he has pain in his chest, that he feels short of breath. He rubs his chest, sitting there in the dark room. As if she should
do something about it, Cousin turns on the light and gets a cup of water from the kitchen for him. Oldest Brother stops short of taking a sip and puts the cup down, as if he cannot manage even a drink of water. His hand is still rubbing his chest, but he tells us he’s okay, that we should get back to sleep.

On the radio playing in the inspection division, people are talking about eating lettuce wraps. The show is
Requests at Noon
. They are talking as if they see a scene from the countryside right in front of them, enjoying lettuce picked from the fields with rice and freshly prepared paste. “Adding chopped green peppers to the paste will enhance the taste of the lettuce with its zesty flavor,” the host said. To this, Cousin added, “Fresh garlic as well!” What catches my attention is not the green peppers or the fresh garlic. It is when the host says, “But make sure you don’t eat too much lettuce. It will make you sleepy!” Sleepy? Lettuce will make you sleepy?

One day, Oldest Brother stares blandly down at the dinner table. The table is practically a field of lettuce. Lettuce salad with spicy seasoning, lettuce wrap, lettuce soup.

“How come all you’re giving me is lettuce these days?” He tries a spoonful of the soup and asks what kind of soup it is.

“Lettuce soup!”

“First time I’ve tried soup made with lettuce.”

“. . .”

“Have we run out of money?”

Only then, Cousin lets out a laugh. “No, it’s because we heard that lettuce helps you sleep . . . You haven’t been sleeping well.”

“That’s why you made lettuce soup?”

“That’s right.”

Oldest Brother bursts into cheerful laughter. His laugh subsiding, he is about to put a lettuce wrap into his mouth when he
asks, as if he’s just remembered. “By the way, where were you coming from yesterday?” He is looking at Cousin.

“Me?”

“You were getting off the subway . . . You didn’t seem to hear me call and kept on walking.” The phone operator training school that Cousin is attending instead of school is located near the Bell Pavilion downtown. She takes the bus there from the factory and returns home on the subway.

“Yesterday, well . . . I had something I needed to do.”

“I don’t want the two of you going around alone at night. Even if one person runs a little late, wait so that you can come home together. The same goes for when one has something to attend to.”

Cousin quickly answers that she’ll do that. Sitting there next to her, I feel my heart pound.

My professor from college was staying at a place called Mureung, deep in the mountains. I visited him there last April, after publishing my first novel. A friend who came with me was busy weeding the garden and filling the fridge with side dishes for our professor, who had to handle his meals by himself, but all I did in Mureung was doze off into sleep here and there. I was caught dozing on a chair looking out at the river, then again while squatting outside the doghouse where a Jindo breed dog was lazing about, even while we had a conversation with our mentor.

Following them down the riverbank, I plopped down on the grass and dozed off again, only to be awakened by a baby goat pooping right next to me. Sleep coming over me, so intense I could hardly keep my head up. Finally, my professor said, “It’s you who needs a rest, not me.” I returned to the city, nodding and dozing.

This same professor called me on the phone.

“Professor!” I burst out. I was in the middle of washing my hair. Drops of water dripped onto the receiver from my hair,
wrapped up in a towel in a rush. What could he be calling about? I got to thinking that I hadn’t called or visit again after that visit to Mureung. Pulmonary emphysema. My professor had rented the house in the mountains to recuperate from pulmonary emphysema.

“Are you in Seoul?”

“No, I’m calling from Mureung. I called the day before yesterday but there was no answer.”

He had called the day before yesterday as well. What could it be about? I started getting nervous.

“I was visiting the country.”

“I see. That’s good. How long were you there?”

“About ten days.”

“So it was a pretty good stay?”

“Well, I managed.”

“That’s good. I was going to suggest that you come here for a few days and get some rest, but I guess there’s no need.”

I said nothing, waiting . . .

My professor continued a little later. “You seem to be writing too much these days . . . I was doing that at one point as well. Writing as if my life depended on it.”

“I am? Writing
that
much?” Without realizing it, I was speaking in a sullen voice. On the other end of the line, my professor once again stopped speaking. He had noticed my sullen voice.

“Well, a writer should write a good amount, but not in your case. For you, to write is to dig up your own flesh to eat. If you dig up too much, it will make you ill.”

Drops of water continued to drip, drip, from my wet hair.

“Is it disheartening, what I said?”

In the middle of the night, a flutter of anxious footsteps is heard from the alley. Doors banging shut here and there. Cousin is the first to wake up from the noise.

“What is that sound?” Cousin shakes me awake.

“What?”

“That sound.”

Oldest Brother wakes up as well.

The old shopkeeper woman is pleading, asking what this is about. Screaming, “Let go!” The sound of the bathroom door being torn off. The sound of a roller shutter pulled down in a hurry.

“Tell us what is going on!”

The crowd buzzing. Fearful screams exploding here and there. No one dares look out the window. Inside our lone room, Cousin and I pull each other close. What could be going on? When the stomping of military boots fades away, silence instantly falls on the alley, which seemed about to burst any moment.

In the morning, Cousin goes out to get a cube of bean curd, but comes back empty-handed. The storekeeper, who used to go off on his bike each morning to pick up a whole plate of bean curd, was taken away in the night, they say.

“For what?”

“They don’t know.”

“But he must have done something wrong to be taken away.”

“People say they took not just the storekeeper but also a man pissing in the alley.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Remember he had a scar from an old cut under his eye. And a tattoo on his arm. He was kind of scary.”

“What do you mean, scary? He used to give us the first briquette that was ready even before our turn.”

“That’s true . . .”

The storekeeper, whom Mom warned us not to get friendly with, disappears that night and does not return. The granny at the store sits there days on end, as if she has let go of her spirit, then closes up the store. She wanders here and there looking for the people who stomped in in the middle of the night and took her son. The store reopens and inside, the Virgin Mary figurines, which the
storekeeper shaped out of clay whenever time allowed, lie on the shelf, broken and fallen over.

“What about
ajeossi
?”

“He’s gone to some social purification training. I’m told that I should wait and he’ll be back.”

Left on her own, the granny no longer sells hot briquettes, even when winter arrives. She leaves the brazier, piled high with white ash, out on the street and sits there, gazing out toward where the alley ends.

A rite of blood, called on by lack of legitimacy.

One day as I was walking . . . It was 8
P.M.
, August 9, 1980. On my way to work I was taken into custody on the road by Dadaepo Beach by six police officers in combat gear, armed with carbines. Beaten up with clubs and bamboo sticks and kicked with boots, until I was close to death, I was taken to a Samcheong Training Camp in an army division somewhere in Changwon, with a serious injury on my back . . . This memoir, of a man who was taken away to a social purification program during that time and was now a pastor, opened with an introduction that began with the words, One day as I was walking . . .

One day as I was walking, I happened to come across a poster announcing a “showing of Gwangju incident videos.” The place I headed to, clasping my pounding chest, was the Church Without the Camp in Yeongdeungpo.

How I wept, watching on the screen the atrocities of the Gwangju incident, which I had only heard of. The distorted faces of the numerous corpses, fallen at the hands of the soldiers under martial law, cracking down mercilessly on the citizens, as if engaged in a street battle . . .

I was taken into custody not for a criminal act but merely for having a criminal record, and the places where I was interned
for two years and six months—the Samcheong Training Camp, the Samcheong Labor Service Camp, the military correctional facilities, the Cheongsong Protective Correctional Facility No.3—were nothing less than human slaughterhouses, unthinkable in a democratic state.

Nam-hong, who was taken at the age of seventeen to a valley somewhere near the frontlines in Gangwon Province, where he was shot in the side with an M16 while protesting his prolonged detention, meeting a bitter, regrettable death as he called out for his mom, his intestines pouring out of his body; Inmate Kim who was hit in the head by a gunshot from only several meters away, departing this world without a single cry; the desperate voices of fellow inmates begging to be spared, for the sake of parents and family back home, as they rolled in the sea of blood, beaten up mercilessly with boots, hoes, baseball bats, coming at them without control, without reason. These brutal memories . . .

When I came out alive of this hellish valley of death, blessed by the grace of God, I tried to erase from my memory the nightmarish past, never wanting to recall them ever again, and to forgive and forget all within the love of the Lord.

He wrote on.
However, however,
he was saying.

The images from the video of the Gwangju incident that I happened on that day presented me with great shock and helped me realize what it was I had to do for the people and history on the road to democratization. Numerous people were taken by force under the guise of social purification and struggled to survive for three, five years at the Samcheong Training Camp, a scene of bloodshed brought about by an unjust law that served to create a social atmosphere of fear in the course of the birth of a new regime. I plead, and pray, from deep in my heart that a campaign as tragic as the Samcheong Training will never take place again in this land, the way it did in 1980, a year when humanity, morality, and democracy were obliterated. I truly hope that this book will be read by many around the country, to ensure that
there will never again be another case where a great number of people are unjustly sacrificed for the glory of a single individual. I also hope that this book will contribute, in some small way, to restoring the honor of my many peers who died in that valley in the frontlines, unable to overcome the pain of being accused as a criminal without trial; those who were befallen by machine guns while engaged in bloody resistance; and the ten thousand men who endured the Samcheong Training Camp, coerced into sacrificing their dignity while suffering in silence.