"The direction of the light"

[breathedout]

(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

Comments

[brigdh]

Wow.