“Of course, candles, that’ll get rid of the smell.”
Whenever you told Jin-su there was something you needed—whether it be cotton cloth, wooden coffins, scrap paper, flags—he would jot it down in his notebook and within the same day, seemingly out of nowhere, it would materialize. He told Seon-ju that every morning he went to either Daein or Yangdong Market, and if there was something that couldn’t be got there, he went and hunted it down in woodworking shops, funeral parlors, drapers, all across the city. There was still a lot of money left over from the donations that had been collected at the meetings, and when he said he was representing the Provincial Office, many people chose to give him a hefty discount on whatever it was he wanted, sometimes waiving the fee altogether. Money, then, wasn’t the issue. But now the city had run out of coffins, so he’d got hold of as much plywood as they thought they’d need and a new batch was currently being assembled at the carpenters’.
The morning Jin-su arrived with five boxes of fifty candles each, and matchboxes, you scoured every nook and cranny of the building, collecting any drinks bottles you spotted that could be used to hold the candles. The bereaved queued at the table by the entrance while you lit each candle and inserted it into one of the bottles. They then carried the bottle over to their coffin and set it down at the head. There was more than enough to go around. Enough even for the still-unidentified corpses, and those coffins that had no one to watch over them.
—
Every morning new coffins were brought to the gym, where a group memorial altar had been set up. The new arrivals were those who had breathed their last while undergoing treatment at the hospital. When the bereaved families brought in the coffins, pushing them in handcarts—was it sweat or tears that made their faces shine?—you had to move the existing coffins closer together to make room.
In the evenings, people were brought in who had been shot in the suburbs, in confrontations with the army. They had either died instantly, from the soldiers’ gunfire, or while being taken to hospital. Many of them hadn’t been dead long and still looked uncannily alive; Eun-sook would be trying to stuff a jumble of spilled, opaque intestines back inside a gaping stomach when she’d have to stop what she was doing and run out of the auditorium to throw up. Seon-ju, frequently plagued by nosebleeds, could often be seen with her head tipped back, pressing her mask over her nose.
Compared with what the two women were dealing with, your own work was hardly taxing. Just as you had at the Provincial Office, you recorded date, time, clothing, and physical characteristics in your ledger. The cloths had already been cut to the appropriate size, and each scrap of paper had been attached to a clothes peg, ready to be pinned straight to the corpse once the number had been written on it. As the need arose for new places, you pushed the still-unidentified closer together, followed by the coffins. On nights when the influx of new arrivals was especially overwhelming there was neither the time nor the floor space to neatly rearrange the existing order, so the coffins just had to be shoved together any old way, edge to edge. That night, looking around at all those dead bodies crammed into the gym hall, you thought to yourself how much like a convention it seemed, a mass rally of corpses who were all there by prearrangement, whose only action was the production of that horrible putrid smell. You moved swiftly among this silent congregation, clasping your ledger under your arm.
—
It really is going to chuck it down, you think, drawing in a deep breath as you emerge from the dim, twilit world of the gymnasium. You head for the backyard, wanting to drink in more of that clean air, but stop at the corner of the building, worried about straying too far from your post. Now the voice coming from the speakers is that of a young man.
“We cannot just hand in our weapons and surrender unconditionally. First they have to return our dead to us. They also have to release the hundreds they’ve thrown in prison. And more than that, we have to make them promise to admit the true facts about what happened here, so we can recover our honor in the eyes of the rest of the country. After that, there wouldn’t be any reason for us not to return their firearms, would there? What do you all say?”
You sense that the cheers and applause that follow are coming from a much smaller number of people than before. You remember the assembly that was convened the day after the soldiers withdrew. Then, there were so many people that the overflow crowded onto the roof of the Provincial Office and the clock tower. The streets were laid out like a paduk board, with no vehicles permitted entry, and what had been the only available space had been taken up by the buildings. A great mass of people, more than a hundred thousand strong, surged through those streets with the rippling motion of colossal waves. Their voices joined together for the national anthem, the swelling chorus rising up like a tower, a story for every voice. The sound of their clapping was like thousands of fireworks being let off in succession. Yesterday morning, you listened to Jin-su and Seon-ju discussing what was going to happen. Looking serious, Jin-su had said that there was a rumor going around that when the soldiers came back, those who were gathering in the streets would all be killed, and so the demonstration was being hastily scaled down. “We need there to be more of us, not less, if we’re to prevent the army from reentering the city…the mood’s not good. Every day there are more coffins; people are starting to think twice about venturing out of doors.”
“Hasn’t enough blood been shed? How can all that blood be simply covered up? The souls of the departed are watching us. Their eyes are wide open.”
The voice of the man conducting the ceremony cracks at the end. The repetition of that word, “blood,” gives you a tightening feeling in your chest, so you open your mouth wide and suck in another deep breath.
A soul doesn’t have a body, so how can it be watching us?