“The chief justice will be here any moment now. If there’s so much as a squeak from any of you, you’ll be shot in your seat, got it? You just keep your heads down and your mouths shut until it’s over. Understand?”
They stalked between the benches with their rifles loaded and primed, and anyone whom they judged to be slumping got a butt to the back of the head. From outside the court building, the grasshoppers’ shrill cries reminded us that the seasons had turned. The blue prison uniforms we were wearing had been handed out that morning, and still gave off the smell of detergent. As I held myself rigid I mulled over those words, “you’ll be shot in your seat.” I held my breath as though I really was expecting to be executed at any moment. At the time, death seemed as though it would be something refreshing, like slipping on that clean new uniform. If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.
“The chief justice is present.”
It was then that my ears picked up a strange sound, coming from in front of me. I’d been bowing so low my chin was almost touching my chest, but that sound made me raise my head an inch, just enough so I could scan the rows in front. Someone was singing, though the sound was more like a stifled whimper. It was the opening bars of the national anthem. By the time I realized that the singer was young Yeong-chae, other voices had joined in for the chorus. Almost in spite of myself, my own voice was drawn out of my throat. We who had had our heads bowed as though we were already dead, who had been sitting there as nothing but loose agglomerates of sweat and blood, were for some reason permitted to continue our quiet song unchecked. The soldiers didn’t scream at us, didn’t drive their rifle butts into our heads, didn’t shove us up against the wall and shoot us as they’d threatened to do. We were left to bring the song to its close, the silence between each bar a perilous window of calm within the cool air of the summary court, laced with the grasshoppers’ chirping.
I received a nine-year sentence, and Kim Jin-su was given seven years.
Of course, those terms were meaningless. The military authorities continued to release us in batches, even those who’d been sentenced to capital punishment or life imprisonment, up until Christmas the following year. These releases were always officially justified as taking place “on amnesty.” It was almost a tacit acknowledgment of the absurdity of the charges.
—
Two years after we were released, as the year was drawing to a close, I saw Kim Jin-su again. It was late at night, as I was making my unsteady way home after a lengthy session downing beers with an old classmate from middle school. I saw a young man sitting in a shabby roadside shack, hunched over a bowl of hangover soup, and it stopped me in my tracks. That posture was so painfully familiar; the head bowed over the soupy rice, the spoon clenched tightly, to be wielded with the kind of diligence that kids reserve for their homework. Empty eyes framed by long, thick lashes, peering into the bottom of the soup as though its oily swirls of black oxblood were congealing to form a riddle, one whose answer would remain impenetrable.
When I entered the shack and sat down across from Kim Jin-su, the gaze he regarded me with was cold and dispassionate. Feeling the onset of a hangover, I smiled and waited for him to show that he forgave my intoxication. For the ghost of a smile to appear on his face, the smile of one who has just surfaced from sleep.
As we each inquired how the other had been, something like transparent feelers reached tentatively out from our eyes, confirming the shadows held by the other’s face, the track marks of suffering that no amount of forced jollity could paper over. Neither of us had managed to go back to university, and we were both still living at home, a burden to our families. Jin-su worked at his brother-in-law’s electric goods shop; I’d held down a position at my relative’s restaurant for a short while, but had quit some time ago. I told him I was thinking of waiting until New Year and then joining a taxi company, maybe even saving up to get my own taxi at some point. He made no response.
“My brother-in-law advised me to do something similar,” he said flatly. “He said I ought to study for an HGV license. After all, it’s not like an office job is an option. But how am I going to get a driving license? These days even simple sums are enough to make my head hurt. Some days it’s a struggle just to tally up the payments in the shop. The most basic addition. The headaches are so bad, it’s impossible for me to memorize anything for an exam.”
I told him that I frequently suffered from a toothache that didn’t seem to have any physical cause, that there weren’t many days when I didn’t have to take painkillers.
“Can you sleep?” he asked listlessly. “I can’t. That’s why I’m here chasing my hangover. I had two bottles of soju before this. My sister doesn’t like me to drink at home, you see. I mean, not that she gets angry or anything. She just cries. But then that only makes me want another drink.” He looked up from his soup. “How about a glass now? Just the one?”
We stayed there drinking until the streets began to fill again, with men and women hastening to work, the collars of their woolen coats turned up against the cold. We poured glass after glass of strong, clear alcohol in the vain hope that this would help us forget. My memory of that night is a series of jump cuts, which later collapsed completely. I can’t remember when we parted or how I managed to make it home. The only shards that have lodged themselves in my brain are the sensation of cold liquid dripping onto my corduroy trousers when Jin-su knocked over the bottle; the sight of him clumsily trying to blot the spillage with the sleeve of his sweater; the moment when he could no longer hold his neck up, and had to rest his forehead on the table.
—