Our Happy Time (11 page)

The following week was my final visit to the prison with Aunt Monica. The Lunar New Year had passed, and the weather was warming up as if spring were already on its way. Officer Yi tried three times to get Yunsu out of his cell, but he refused to see us. When he came back from his third trip to Yunsu’s cell to try to convince him, he shook his head sadly.

“I think it would be better if you just go home for today. That last meeting must have been really hard for him to take. From what I’ve learned about him, he’s a very simple guy. After you left last time, he refused to eat, and when the head guard checked on him, he was pretty sick. The day before yesterday, they took him to the infirmary and forced him to accept an IV. The registrar got mad at me, too. He said it was because I made him meet that old lady. They have him on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch now. I took some heat from my colleagues as well.”

“I’m so sorry for the trouble we caused you. Has Yunsu started eating again?” Aunt Monica asked weakly. Officer Yi laughed.

“Yes, he’s eating a little bit. First time I personally saw someone on death row go on a hunger strike. It was more common back when there were political dissidents who had violated the National Security Law. It’s rare, now.”

It wasn’t until later that I realized the comedy of sticking an IV in someone sentenced to die in order to keep him from dying. I thought to myself, ‘They saved him so they could kill him.’

I was surprisingly relaxed when we were put in the juvenile detention centre. It seems strange to me now, but maybe that was because, at the time, I thought I would no longer have to rack my brain for ways for us to survive each day. Nor did I have to worry about where we would sleep. No more standing with Eunsu in ragged tennis shoes and no socks to elicit more sympathy from people getting off the subway, people who scattered in all directions in a mere second or two, leaving us to feel like every last person on earth had vanished and it was just Eunsu and I left behind in this empty world. No more thinking about how we had nowhere to go. No more getting up in the morning and worrying about what we were going to eat that day. And maybe, too, it was because I thought there would be others like us there, kids who had been abandoned by their mothers and beaten by their fathers. But as usual, my hopes betrayed me.

It happened our first night, when I went in holding Eunsu’s hand, right after the warden finished roll call. The kids surrounded us. I was afraid because, once again, we were among the youngest ones. I was accustomed to fighting, but we were locked up in there, and I did not yet know how everything worked. There were those who gave orders and those who did their bidding. One of them pointed at Eunsu.

“I bet I could lift that runt with one finger. What do you think?”

The other kids snickered. I didn’t know what he meant. In a flash, two boys grabbed my arms. I had a sinking feeling. One of the kids spread out a blanket and laid Eunsu down on it. The moment I tried to resist, their fists flew at me.

“Hey kid, calm down. The boss is only going to lift him up a little.”

The kids pulled off Eunsu’s pants. I had no idea what they were going to do to him. He was stretched out in front of them like a fish pulled from a tank. The one they called the boss proudly held up his forefinger and said, “One finger!” Eunsu, poor blind Eunsu, called out for me over and over. The boy put his finger on Eunsu’s pepper and started rubbing it. As Eunsu called out to me, the vowels and consonants began to drop out of his voice. His pepper swelled and rose, and the hushed cheers from the kids egged it on. Splayed out in front of everyone, my
thirteen-year
-old brother’s hips began to jerk up and down. Then a cloudy burst of semen shot from his pepper. He looked as if half of his body was off the ground. While the kids were busy snickering, I saw my opening and attacked the boss. I started strangling him without any warning. If the guards had not busted in just then and pulled me off of him, I might have killed him. I looked back as they were
dragging me away to see a dazed-looking Eunsu staring into space with unfocused eyes, tears streaming down his face. I didn’t mind taking a beating, and in fact I was used to taking one, but the thought of leaving my blind brother alone in that room with those animals made me crazy. And like an animal, I howled.

M
y meetings with Yunsu ended without me singing the anthem for him. I told Aunt Monica, and myself, that school was starting again and I had too much to do. Aunt Monica looked hurt, but I decided I’d had enough.

But when Thursday rolled around again, I found myself waking up earlier than usual. The sky outside the window was overcast. I looked out and saw that it was snowing. It was a full blizzard. I wondered if Aunt Monica was having trouble getting to the prison. She had to take the subway to Indeogwon Station, transfer to a neighborhood bus, get off near the detention center, and walk the rest of the way. I wished my stubborn aunt would just take a taxi. What if she went all that way on a snowy day like this, and Yunsu refused to see her again? My head was so crowded with thoughts that I didn’t even have my usual morning cup of freshly ground coffee. It had gotten much colder, so I turned up the heat and filled the bathtub.

I thought about the prisoners in the detention center—showering once a week for barely five minutes at a time, Yunsu’s clothes drenched in cold sweat. I undressed and slowly got into the tub. All at once, I remembered
something
I had seen while living abroad. I had gone to a
party at the house of a Korean friend who was studying in Germany. Playing on the television was a show about four women living together in a kind of row house. It looked like an ordinary house with two bedrooms and a small kitchen. Each of the rooms had a bunk bed, and the women were cooking and laughing. They smoked constantly, and they were even filmed doing their makeup. When my friend told me it was a prison, I couldn’t believe my eyes. One of the people at the party took a swig of beer and said,
What kind of prison is that
? Someone else asked,
Isn’t that the new model prison
?
No,
my friend said,
that’s a regular prison.
Then, one of the women was shown being escorted to the door by a guard and going out. My friend explained that the woman visited her daughter once a month.
She’s got a better life than we have,
someone said. The woman met her daughter, and they ate hamburgers and played with dolls. Then she returned to the prison. Someone else asked,
If our prisons were like that, wouldn’t one out of three Koreans want to be put away
? The show cut to a scene of the woman crying after coming back from seeing her daughter.
Right now she’s saying she doesn’t want to be there anymore,
my friend translated.
She said she wants to hurry up and get out of there so she can go back to her loving family.

Just then, the telephone rang. I wasn’t going to answer it, but whoever it was seemed to have a lot of patience, as it showed no signs of stopping. I rushed out of the bathroom. To my surprise, it was Officer Yi from the Seoul Detention Center.

“I imagine you’re surprised to hear from me. I got your number from Sister Monica. You had better come right away.”

Even though I was concerned about Aunt Monica, the moment I heard the words
you had better come right
away,
I felt annoyed and put off. Especially since I had just been relaxing in a warm tub. I asked what was wrong, and he hesitated before telling me.

“Sister Monica had a little accident. Nothing serious, but she seems to have slipped on the ice on the walk here. I tried to call her a taxi, but it’s snowing really hard. I told her she should go to the hospital right away, but she insisted that I call you. If you show your ID at the front and wait for me there, I’ll come get you.”

I had no choice but to get dressed and leave. Spring was supposed to be on its way, but winter had launched a surprise attack. Luckily there were not many cars on the road.

I was normally an aggressive driver. I would slam on the brakes and pass other cars without a second thought. When I first started driving, truck drivers used to roll down their windows and shout things at me that I cannot bring myself to repeat. It was not that long ago, but even then, there weren’t many female drivers on the road. Feeling as if I’d just had garbage dumped on my head, I would try to avoid making eye contact with them. It made me scared and angry. Sometimes, I would squeeze past other cars, barely avoiding a collision, and a strange pleasure would rush over me.

But that day, I drove very carefully. I didn’t know how badly Aunt Monica was hurt, but I had a feeling that if something happened to me as well, everything would be ruined somehow. I knew, too, that it was the first time I had ever thought that way:
This car is on its way to
transport
the most precious passenger in the world. I can’t be careless. Those men are relying on Aunt Monica. The
half-hour
that I can just shove in the garbage could be the last thirty minutes of their lives.
I realized that I was picturing Yunsu’s face. I could see him covered with sweat and
trembling. Though I didn’t care about him, my heart ached when I pictured him. Was that the first time I’d ached like that and felt bad for anyone other than myself? I was gentle with the brakes and avoided overtaking anyone if I could help it. When other cars came racing up from behind with their blinkers on, I let them pass. I was in a hurry, but I reasoned with myself that the more impatient I felt, the more important it was to slow down. By the time I reached the detention center, my body was stiff. I realized then just how tense I had been the whole time I was driving.

I followed Officer Yi into the meeting room. Yunsu and Aunt Monica were sitting across from each other. Aunt Monica had a handkerchief wrapped around her veil. From another point of view, it could have been a comical sight: an elderly nun with a pink floral-print handkerchief tied over a black veil. On the back of her head, the blood had dried to a dark patch. She looked like a militant labor unionist who had gone on the attack. The first thought in my head was,
You win, Aunt Monica.
Then I laughed. When they saw me laughing, Yunsu and the guard laughed too. So did Aunt Monica. My eyes met Yunsu’s for the first time. Without a moment’s pause, I thought,
It feels good to laugh.
It seemed like the first time that Yunsu and I were meeting as two ordinary people. I saw that when he laughed, a dimple appeared in one cheek. At the same time, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he had been waiting for me. But I was more worried about Aunt Monica. When I touched the matted blood on the back of her head, she winced in pain. I let out a long sigh. She looked at me and told me to sit down. From the way they all waited impatiently for me to take my seat, it was obvious that I had interrupted them in the middle of an important conversation.

“Keep talking,” Aunt Monica said.

“So I was thinking…”

Yunsu glanced at me as if my presence made him a little uncomfortable. I dropped my eyes. I did not enjoy feeling like an interloper. It was my original sin, the one I had committed by being born to a mother who already had three strong, beautiful sons. My mother said it was because of me that she’d had to stop performing on stage. Outside the barred window, a late snowstorm was turning the air white.

“I realized that you’re not just here to try to fill up the church pews. I used to think that every word and every gesture from other people was meant to make fun of me and torment me, and that everyone was using me for their own personal gain. Since that was what I felt, all I thought about was not letting anyone take advantage of me. But now I know that the guards and the other prisoners—I mean, of course, there are still a few I can’t stand—they aren’t always thinking bad things about me. They’ve
actually
been very nice.”

“I see. Well, it’s true. Even when you were a bad guy, you weren’t only thinking bad thoughts all the time.”

I lifted my head. I wondered if you could really get away with calling a bad guy a bad guy, and I wanted to see how Yunsu would react. To my surprise, he was smiling. It wasn’t a happy smile. It bore a trace of shame, but also the sense of respect or keenness that one feels when an archer’s arrow has hit its mark dead-on. Officer Yi and I laughed.

“So what else did you realize?” Aunt Monica looked as if she was listening to the first monk in the world to ever reach enlightenment.

“For the first time, I thought maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I was the one who gave others a reason to treat me that way, because I thought others were bad and started those fights first. To my surprise, that made me feel better. And I also thought about that volunteer I told you
about. The first time you grabbed my hand without asking, I was caught off guard, too. So maybe she wasn’t looking at the inmate like he was a bug. Maybe she was just startled. Maybe I was just making things up the whole time.”

Aunt Monica smiled brightly.

“I really enjoyed the book you sent me,
Greek and Roman Mythology.
At first, it was confusing because the names were so difficult, but once I got used to them, I was staying up all night to read it.”

“Really? Who did you like best?”

“Orestes.”

“Orestes? I don’t quite remember him. You didn’t like the stories about Zeus killing bad guys with wind and lightning?”

Yunsu smiled again.

“So why did you like Orestes?” she asked.

Yunsu hesitated a moment. He looked at me again, so I did my best to look like I was completely fascinated and couldn’t wait for him to keep talking. That was when I noticed that his shackles had been changed to handcuffs. The prisoners called them “steel bracelets for your trip to hell.”

“The other names were too hard. Orestes was some kind of a prince. His grandfather conspired to become more powerful than the gods, so the gods cursed Orestes’ family for several generations. The first to receive the curse was Orestes’ father, Aga—”

Yunsu hesitated.

“Agamemnon? Oh, so Orestes was the son of Agamemnon,” said Aunt Monica.

“Yes, and Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Orestes’ mother. She and her lover had conspired to kill Agamemnon. Back then, according to the laws of the land, it was a son’s duty to kill his father’s murderer. So Orestes
killed his mother for killing his father. But the Furies despised people who killed their own parents. The Furies started sending bad noises and visions to Orestes. All day long, he hallucinated about killing his mother and had to listen to the curses sent to him by the Furies, until finally he was nearly insane with guilt over killing her and wandered all over the world.”

Yunsu paused in the middle of talking and glanced at me. I knew what he was doing. I knew he was doing his best to get on Aunt Monica’s good side, and that he had practiced this story over and over again last night. At the time, I thought it was kind of pathetic and also comical. But in the light of memory, it strikes me now as sad.

“Apollo—he’s the god of the sun, right?—he called a meeting with the other gods and defended Orestes. He said that Orestes had been cursed by the gods, and that they were being too cruel because his grandfather was the one who had sinned. Orestes never had any choice in the matter. Apollo said that since they had cursed him, it was up to them to forgive him. Orestes was there when this all happened. He looked at Apollo and said, ‘What are you talking about? You’re not the ones who killed my mother. I was!’”

Yunsu bowed his head.

Outside the barred window, the snow was still falling. When Yunsu lifted his head again, his eyes were bloodshot. He looked nervous. He swallowed and kept talking.

“I never wanted to be a god, but ever since I was a child, I wanted to be strong. If you’re strong, you can do anything. You can kill all the bad guys. That was what I used to think. But then I met you. I wondered why a nun would bother to come to a place like this and cry and plead with someone like me. That old woman who came with you that day—I wouldn’t have blamed her for killing me. But to see her cry
and apologize for not being able to forgive me—I would rather hurry up and die than have to see that. If someone asked me if I would rather die or see her again, I would prefer to go to the gallows. If there is a God, then He has given me the worst punishment of all. Death doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not afraid of dying. I never was, not even when I was a little kid. But for the first time, I started thinking that maybe I had it all wrong. I used to think life wasn’t fair, that my environment made me the way I was, that anyone would have done the same if they were in my shoes, and I wanted to say to everyone,
Let’s see how well you do.
But Orestes—even though he only did what the gods made him do—he took the blame.”

Yunsu stopped. Aunt Monica grabbed his cuffed hands and closed her eyes. She stroked the backs of his hands as she spoke.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said. “That was a lot for you to think about. But you really gave it a lot of thought. I’m proud of you. Yunsu, those are wonderful thoughts.”

Yunsu’s face fell, and his bloodshot eyes filled with tears. He pressed his lips together and closed his eyes.

“I wanted to kill my father,” he said. “My mother, too. I thought I was cursed. And as long as I believed that I was cursed, I wasn’t afraid of anything. I thought I could end the curse by killing them all and then killing myself. Since I thought of it as ending a curse, I didn’t feel any guilt. But now that you say you’re proud of me…”

The snow was falling harder but made no sound. The world was very quiet.

“It makes me realize that I have never heard those words from an adult in my entire life. I felt really bad that you slipped and hurt yourself while coming all this way in such terrible weather. I thought to myself,
That must have been really painful.
Then I wondered if I had ever felt that
way about someone else before. I don’t think I have. Other than my little brother and the woman I was in love with, I’ve never, not even once, looked at another person and thought,
They must be hurting. I wish they weren’t in so much pain.
”

Twenty-seven-year-old Yunsu bowed his head again. His tears fell onto the shiny metal handcuffs.