—
From that day on, you became one of the team. Eun-sook, as you’d guessed, was in her final year of high school. Seon-ju, the woman in the green shirt, was a machinist at a dressmaker’s on the main shopping street; she’d been left in the lurch when the boss had decided that he and his son, who’d been studying at one of the universities here, should go and stay with a relative outside the city. Both Eun-sook and Seon-ju had gone to give blood at Jeonnam University Hospital after hearing a street broadcast saying that people were dying of blood loss. There, hearing that the Provincial Office, now being run by civilians, was short of hands, and in the confusion of the moment, they’d taken on the task of dealing with the corpses.
In the classroom, where seats were assigned in order of height, you were always the one at the very front—in other words, the shortest. Since March, when you’d started your third year at middle school, you’d finally hit puberty, resulting in a slightly lower voice and a fair-to-middling growth spurt, but you still looked younger than your age. Jin-su’s work mostly kept him confined to the briefing room; the first time he saw you, he looked surprised.
“You’re a first-year, aren’t you? This is no place for you.” Jin-su’s deeply lidded eyes and long lashes were almost feminine; the university in Seoul he was attending was temporarily closed, so he’d come down to Gwangju.
“No,” you told him, “I’m a third-year. And I don’t have a problem with the work here.”
This wasn’t bravado; there was nothing technically difficult about the tasks you’d been assigned. Seon-ju and Eun-sook had already done most of the heavy work, which involved covering plywood or Styrofoam boards with plastic, then lifting the corpses on top of these boards. They also washed the necks and faces with a cloth, ran a comb through the matted hair to tidy it a bit, then wrapped the bodies in plastic in an effort to combat the smell. In the meantime, you made a note in your ledger of gender, approximate age, what clothes they were wearing and what brand of shoes, and assigned each corpse a number. You then wrote the same number on a scrap of paper, pinned it to the corpse’s chest, and covered them up to the neck with one of the white cloths. Eun-sook and Seon-ju would then help you pull them over to the wall. Jin-su, who seemed to be permanently rushed off his feet, would come striding up to you several times a day, wanting to transfer the information you’d recorded in your ledger onto posters, to put up at the main entrance to the building. A lot of the people who came looking for someone had either seen those posters themselves or been told about them by someone else. In cases of a positive identification, you would retreat to a respectful distance to wait for the sobbing and wailing to pass. As the corpses had been given only a cursory treatment, it was left to the bereaved to stop their noses and ears with cotton wool and give them a fresh change of clothing. Once they had been thus simply dressed and placed into a coffin, it was your job to oversee the transfer to the gym, and make a note of everything in your ledger.
The one stage in the process that you couldn’t quite get your head around was the singing of the national anthem, which took place at a brief, informal memorial service for the bereaved families, after their dead had been formally placed in the coffins. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the national flag, being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place. Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.
When you cautiously voiced these thoughts, Eun-sook’s round eyes grew even larger.
“But the generals are rebels, they seized power unlawfully. You must have seen it: people being beaten and stabbed in broad daylight, and even shot. The ordinary soldiers were following the orders of their superiors. How can you call them the nation?”
You found this confusing, as though it had answered an entirely different question to the one you’d wanted to ask. That afternoon there was a rush of positive identifications, and there ended up being several different shrouding ceremonies going on at the same time, at various places along the corridor. The national anthem rang out like a circular refrain, one verse clashing with another against the constant background of weeping, and you listened with bated breath to the subtle dissonance this created. As though this, finally, might help you understand what the nation really was.
—
The next morning, you and the two women carried several of the most putrid bodies out to the yard behind the Provincial Office. So many new bodies were arriving, there was no more space to lay them out inside. Jin-su came marching from the briefing room, brisk as always, and demanded to know what you were planning to do if it rained.
He frowned as he scanned the passageway, where the corpses had their feet jammed up against the wall. Seon-ju unhooked her mask.
“It’s too narrow here,” she said, “there’s just no way. There’ll probably be more corpses arriving in the evening, so what’ll we do then? How about the municipal gym? Isn’t there space there?”
Four men showed up less than an hour later, sent by Jin-su. They must have been standing guard somewhere, as they had rifles slung over their shoulders and were wearing visored helmets, which the riot police had left behind. While they loaded the bodies into a truck, you and the two women packed up the sundries. You followed the truck over to the gym, walking slowly in the balmy morning sunlight. Passing beneath the still-adolescent gingko trees, you reached up mechanically to tug at the branches, the lowest of which brushed against your forehead.
Eun-sook led the way, and was first to enter the gym. When you went inside, you saw that she’d been brought up short by the sight of the coffins filling the hall. The cotton gloves she was clutching were dappled with dark bloodstains. Seon-ju, who’d been bringing up the rear, stepped around you and tied up her shoulder-length hair with a handkerchief.
“I didn’t realize they’d been bringing them all here…seeing them all together like this, my God, there’s so many.”
You looked around at the bereaved, who were kneeling practically back-to-back. Each family had stood a framed portrait photograph on the coffin they were watching over. Some coffins also had a pair of glass Fanta bottles standing side by side at their head. One of the bottles held a bunch of white flowers, and the other, a candle.
That evening, when you asked Jin-su if he could get hold of a box of candles, he nodded eagerly.