"The direction of the light"

(CW for genocide, child & infant death)

I read an account by a man born in this city, in which he claimed to have lived for as long as he could remember with the soul of his elder brother, who had died at the age of six in the Jewish ghetto. The child's voice came to him from time to time, he said, with neither form nor texture. In addition, the language was foreign to him, as he'd been adopted by a Belgian couple and grown up in the country, meaning he hadn't at first been able to tell that the speaker was his brother. It could only be a waking dream, he thought, in which everything is doomed to recur, or else a symptom of derangement. When, at the age of eighteen, he finally came to learn of his family history, he began to study the language of this country, to understand what this soul was trying to tell him. And thus he learned of his brother's fear, this brother both older and younger. That he was screaming the same terror-struck words, choked out when the soldiers had come to arrest him.

*

I slept badly for several days after reading this, unable to stop my thoughts from turning to the final moments of that six-year-old child, who would ultimately have been murdered. In the small hours of one such restless night, when the roiling inside me had finally calmed, it occurred to me that if I had been similarly visited myself, by my mother's first child who had lived just two hours, I would have been utterly oblivious. Because the girl had never learned language at all. For an hour she had held her eyes open, held them in the direction of our mother's face, but her optic nerves never had time to awaken and so that face had remained beyond reach. For her, there would have been only a voice. Don't die. For God's sake don't die. Unintelligible words, the only words she was ever to hear.

And so I can neither confirm nor deny that there are times when she has sought me out, hovering at my forehead or by the corners of my eyes. That some vague sensation I had known as a child, some stirring of seemingly unprompted emotion, might, unbeknownst to me, have been coming from her. For there are moments, lying in the darkened room, when the chill in the air is a palpable presence. Don't die. For God's sake don't die. Turned toward indecipherable sounds laden with love and anguish. Toward a pale blur and body heat. Perhaps I, too, have opened my eyes in the darkness, as she did, and gazed out.

—Han Kang, The White Book

Three white scenes by Han Kang

Frost

The day she was born was one of frost rather than snow, yet her father chose seol, snow, as one of the characters for his daughter's name. Growing up, she was unusually sensitive to the cold and resented the chill embedded in her name.

But she liked to tread the frost-covered ground and feel the semifrozen earth through the soles of her sneakers. The first frost, as yet untrodden, has the find crystals of pure salt. The sun's rays pale slightly as the frost begins to form. White clouds of breath bloom from warm mouths. Trees shiver off their leaves, incrementally lightening their burden. Solid objects like stones or buildings appear subtly more dense. Seen from behind, men and women bundled up in heavy coats are saturated with a mute presentiment, that of people beginning to endure.



Wings

It was on the outskirts of this city that she saw the butterfly. A single white butterfly, wings folded on a reed bed, one November morning. No butterflies had been seen since summer; where could this one have been hiding? The air temperature had plummeted in the previous week, and it was perhaps on account of its wings frequently freezing that the white color had leached from them, leaving certain parts close to transparent. So clear, they shimmer with the black earth's reflection. Only a little time is needed now and the whiteness will leave those wings completely. They will become something other, no longer wings, and the butterly will be something that is no longer butterfly.



Fist

Walking this city's streets until her calves had grown stiff, she waited. For something of her native language, sentences or even mere scraps of words, to surge swiftly to the tip of her tongue. She thought she might be able to write about snow. In this city, where they say it snows for half the year.

She kept a dogged watch for the coming of winter. Studied the shop windows, the reflections shown there not yet blurred by streaks of snow. The heads of others passing through the streets, still with no powdery dusting. Those slanting forms, not yet snowflakes, barely grazing the foreheads of strangers. Her own cold fists, which she clenched to white.

—Han Kang, The White Book