blue

All I remember is the entrance to the hospital the following morning, the seemingly never-ending line of people queuing up to give blood; the doctors and nurses striding through the blasted streets, white gowns bloodstained, hands gripping stretchers; the women who handed up stale rice balls, water and strawberries to the truck I was riding in; the

Even now I find summer difficult to endure. When runnels of sweat trickle down over my chest and back, itching like the bite of insect mouths, that time when I was nothing but a lump of meat is suddenly back with me, the feeling unchanged, and I have to take a deep, steady breath. Grind my teeth together, and take another deep, steady breath.

Now do you understand? The kids in this photo aren’t lying side by side because their corpses were lined up like that after they were killed. It’s because they were walking in a line. They were walking in a straight line, with both arms in the air, just like we’d told them to.

You explained about the ‘psychological autopsy’ you wanted to conduct on Kim Jin-su, but I still couldn’t understand it. You wanted to record my testimony – what for? Would that bring Jin-su back to life? Our experiences might have been similar, but they were far from identical. What good could an autopsy possibly do? How could we ever hope to

Out of the corner of my eye I could see blood silently seeping from people I’d been speaking with mere moments before. Unable to tell who had died and who survived, I lay prone in the corridor, my face pressed into the floor. I felt someone write on my back with a magic marker. Violent element. Possession of firearms. That was what someone else

And the hunger, of course. How persistently it clung on, a translucent sucker attached to the nape of the neck. I remember those moments when, hazy with exhaustion and hunger, it seemed as though that sucker was slowly feeding on my soul.

Kids crouching beneath the windows, fumbling with their guns and complaining that they were hungry, asking if it was okay for them to quickly run back and fetch the sponge cake and Fanta they’d left in the conference room; what could they possibly have known about death that would have enabled them to make such a choice?

I don’t want to talk about what happened next. There is no one now who has the right to ask me to remember any more, and that includes you, professor. No, none of us fired our guns. None of us killed anybody. Even when the soldiers stormed up the stairs and emerged towards us out of the darkness, none of our group fired their guns. It was

Plain-clothes policemen were a permanent feature of campus life, and students who fell foul of them were forcibly enlisted in the army and sent to the DMZ.