Our Happy Time (18 page)

“That thing you told me about last time when you were drunk in Itaewon.”

My heart sank. I lifted my wine glass and drank as slowly as I could.

“Yujeong, is it true?”

I lowered my eyes. I didn’t feel like talking anymore. I could understand why the families of murder victims refused to talk to Aunt Monica, and why she said that talking to the victims’ families was harder than rehabilitating death row convicts—the hardest thing, in fact, because the families did not want to listen to anyone consoling them about what had happened. I didn’t understand it the first time she told me, but now that I was in their shoes, I did.

“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep after you told me. I really had no idea. I didn’t. Mom told me that someone had teased you, and that you were sensitive to anything to do with sex because you were going through puberty. But I still can’t believe it. Our cousin pretends to be so respectable.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

When I picked up my cigarette, my hand was shaking. I accidentally put the cigarette in my mouth backwards and then dropped it once it was lit.

“Mom was right,” I said, not bothering to pick the
cigarette
back up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“So it was true.”

My brother was a prosecutor. He had probably dealt with thousands of liars. His eyes were slowly turning red.

“I asked a lawyer friend of mine. If you wanted… a civil suit…”

He stopped talking and puffed on his cigarette. It wouldn’t be easy. Sue my cousin for damages for a rape he had committed fifteen years ago? My cousin, the board member of a major corporation known around the world? My cousin, known for being a man of character? My cousin, the devout Christian? There would be an uproar. People would wonder which of us was lying.

The only evidence was my testimony. And since I was on record for having attempted suicide and nearly being an alcoholic, and having therefore received psychiatric
treatment
, there was a strong possibility I would be charged with libel. My brother couldn’t have been unaware of that.

“I gave it a lot of thought. If you want me to, I’ll file a suit for you. I don’t even care if I get fired for it, not that that would happen. I don’t even care if Mom goes ballistic, or if I have to resign and open my own law practice. I’ll do it. Yujeong, if it’s true, I have to do something. What he did was unforgiveable.”

He became overwhelmed with his emotions and stopped talking. I felt bad. I was the one it had happened to—or as my mother put it, I was a grown girl who had wagged her tail around and got what was coming to her—but my brother was the one hurting from it fifteen years later. He couldn’t change jobs over and over, flitting like a bat to a new roost each night, in order to protect his little sister, and I felt both sorry for and thankful that he wanted to do just that despite knowing better.

“I’ve always tried to make the right choices in my work. It’s not what you or our sister-in-law seem to think. Prosecuting people doesn’t mean turning poor little petty
thieves into ex-cons. I’ve talked a lot about justice in front of other people and, as a result, there’ve been many times when I’ve had to sentence someone and send them to jail even though it pained me to do so. But the reason I’m not ashamed is because someone has to be the bad guy. Because that is what has to happen in order for good people to receive legal protection. Because there is such a thing as justice. If you do something wrong, then it doesn’t matter how much money or how many connections you have. That’s why I’ve stuck with this job, so I can prove that.”

I felt like I could hear my heart beating. It was like he was prying open a very old wound and peering inside.

“It’s okay. Just hearing you say that means a lot to me. You don’t have to do anything.”

I meant it. I wasn’t satisfied, but it did give me some consolation. Having suffered the insufferable, I had become a liar. That was because the people I thought were there to protect me, love me, and defeat anyone for me had laughed at and ridiculed me instead. The incident itself had been horrible, but their reactions to it afterward left a scar I could not wash off. It was worse because I had loved and trusted them. But now my oldest brother said he hadn’t known. Maybe it
was
true, because there were things I hadn’t known either.

For example, I used to make fun of my youngest
sister-in
-law. When my mother sneered at her, saying, “I don’t care if she is married to a professor who makes barely any money, how can she go out dressed like that?” I used to agree with her. It had never occurred to me that my brothers might have their own struggles. And it would probably always be that way. Just like the shock I’d felt the first time I visited the detention center. I’d had no idea that some of the inmates were so poor that they didn’t have
even a thousand won to their names while incarcerated. I’d had no idea that a vicious criminal like Yunsu, who’d raped and killed, could smile so brightly or cry so bitterly. But I couldn’t do anything about things I didn’t know. When Jesus said, “they know not what they do,” not only was he referring to us, but we were not even aware that we were the ones he was talking about.

My brother looked anguished. I patted his hand to calm him down and forced myself to smile.

“Don’t make a decision right now,” he said. He sounded genuinely distressed. “Give it some thought.”

“Yusik, how do retrials work?” I changed the subject. He looked surprised. “Can people who’ve been sentenced to death live if they get a retrial?”

The anguish and compassion disappeared in an instant from my brother’s face and was replaced with a kind of fatigue. It was the same look my mother gave whenever she told me I was just like my aunt.

“Retrials only happen when the real criminal is found, or if some conclusive evidence is found that could overturn the case. Why?”

I hesitated before responding.

“Yusik, this guy on death row I’ve been talking to, Jeong Yunsu, the one who was involved in the Imun-dong murder case, he hasn’t said so himself, but I heard from other people that he took the blame for his accomplice’s crime. That’s not something he told me. The accomplice said so himself. The accomplice has been bragging about it, so it must be true. Right now, the accomplice is in Daejeon or Wonju. He only got fifteen years, and they say he could get out sooner if he’s lucky.”

My brother scoffed, as if to say,
Is that all?

“Why are you laughing?” I asked him. “If there is a way, then I’ll try to get him to tell the truth.”

He stared at me, his gaze that of an older brother looking down at his childish, pathetic little sister.

“The truth? Yujeong, that case is over. And the courts in this country are not that naïve. They don’t care about the lies those people tell.”

He picked up his cigarette pack and tapped it, feigning indifference, as if to say he was done talking.

“This person I’ve been meeting, he doesn’t lie. I found out about his accomplice from a prison guard. I’ve gotten to know him. He said when he was caught, he just wanted to die. When he first met Aunt Monica, he told her the same thing. He asked her to let him die. That must mean he took the blame because he was suicidal. I trust him. And you know I never trust anyone. But I know it’s true because I’ve wanted to die, too. I would have done the same thing. He’s not a liar. He may be bad, but he’s not a liar!”

“That’s enough.”

He cut me off, firmly, angrily, as if he could not hold back his displeasure. I felt like I’d fallen flat on my back, like we had been playing and having fun but he suddenly turned serious and shoved me hard. Five minutes ago, he said he would resign and endure public censure for me, but that man had disappeared and Mun Yusik, public
prosecutor
for the Republic of Korea, had taken his place. Didn’t the word
persona
originate from the Greek
theatrical
term for a mask or a role? In that case, which one was my brother’s mask?

“What’s so great about the courts? They’re not God. How can they know everything?” I demanded.

My brother gave me a stern look. His face said that he could forgive a lot of things, but not that.

“What kind of era do you think we’re living in?” He raised his voice. “Do you think we execute any criminal who asks for it? You think judges hear confessions and say,
‘Well, all right then,’ and hand down their verdicts?”

“But you never know. The only people who know the truth of the case are the people involved and God. They say that even countries like America have ten bad cases every year, and the real criminals are discovered only after the person has already been murdered. So how can you be so confident? Innocent people die unfairly. You can’t say they don’t!”

“It’s not murder, it’s execution!”

My brother sounded really angry.

“It
is
murder.”

“Execution!”

“But that’s murder!”

He sighed. I kept going.

“Execution still means killing a person. That guy who blew up the Hangang Bridge during the Korean War, Choi What’s-his-name, was wrongfully executed for following orders. Then there was O Hwiung, who was tortured into confessing to a murder, and the People’s Revolutionary Party incident, when those men were falsely accused of organizing a communist revolt and were tortured and executed. And there have been a lot of people who went all the way to the Supreme Court and were on the verge of being sentenced to death when the real criminal was found and they were released. Those real criminals were all caught by accident. The prosecutors and the courts aren’t interested in finding the truth!”

My brother sighed again. I could tell he wanted to get up and leave. I tried pleading with him.

“Remember that cop who was arrested for murdering his girlfriend? You heard about it, didn’t you? They spent the night in a motel, and he left for work the next morning at seven. After he left, she was found dead in the motel room. He knew he would be accused of her murder, so
he changed his timecard to make it look like he’d gone to work earlier. He manipulated evidence in a murder case and would have surely been given the death penalty. But then he said he killed her. Why do you think he said that? Because he knew police work all too well. He knew he had no way of getting out of it, so he confessed in order to get a lighter sentence. But then, some local thug happened to be arrested for petty thievery and was found with a motel key belonging to the cop’s dead girlfriend. That’s how they found the real killer, and the cop was released. And you know what else? There was that guy who was arrested for murder in Gyeongju. He insisted that it wasn’t him and that he hadn’t killed anyone, but the police pulled some tricks to come up with evidence that he couldn’t dispute and arrested him. That case was even added to the
text-book
for the Judicial Research and Training Institute as an example of an outstanding investigation, but later they caught the real killer and realized he was innocent. And that, too, was by chance!”

My brother looked appalled.

“When did you study all of that?” he asked.

I shook my head. I wanted to yell,
Why do you think so little of me
? It occurred to me that it was the same thing Aunt Monica used to say to me. I guess I really did take after her. Suddenly I wished I weren’t this new me but the old me who used to smash up all her vinyl records. Which one was my
true
persona? When I look back on it now, I know I wasn’t making any sense. Just five minutes earlier, I’d said I couldn’t forgive my cousin, but now I was acting like I was Yunsu’s mother.

“Yusik.”

“Even if I were president, I couldn’t do anything about it. And, to put it bluntly, did that asshole say he didn’t do it? Those people have no qualms about lying. Listen, Yujeong.
I know what you’re feeling, but you have to at least admit that I know more about those people than you do.”

“But not all convicts are liars. Just like sometimes we feel like dying, and sometimes we go a little crazy. Even if convicts do lie sometimes, you and I lie, too. If someone were to say that all Korean prosecutors are bad people, then that would be a lie, too. There are prosecutors in this world who are worse than murderers, and there are convicts who are like angels. There’s no such thing as homogeneity. Our lives are as different as our faces.”

He glanced at his watch. He looked tired. I knew that he wanted to get out of there as fast as possible and that he couldn’t understand why his own little sister was defending the scum of the earth.

“Can’t you just save him?”

My brother laughed again. He rubbed his eyes. The tiredness in his face said that he was wondering how the conversation had taken this turn when he had only come to comfort his little sister.

“I’m only asking you to spare his life, not to release him.”

My brother crossed his arms and slowly shook his head. He seemed to find the idea preposterous.

“He’s going to die eventually,” I yelled, “even if he is spared the death sentence! We’ll all be dead within the next fifty years at most. Are you that fond of life? Does it make you that jealous to spare his?”

While I was talking, I thought,
Have I really been this sad about it?
I stopped talking—or rather, stopped yelling. I had to acknowledge the fact that I was grieving over his plight. My tears were on the verge of spilling forth. My brother’s face hardened and turned pale. I looked at him again and spoke slowly.

“Yusik, I wanted to kill him!”

He stared at me. He looked shocked.

“That’s right, I did. More than once. I wanted to take a knife and go to our cousin’s house and kill him in front of his wife and children. His daughter must be about fifteen years old now, right? I wanted to kill that asshole in front of her. With a knife. Stab him to death in the most painful way possible. Because no matter how I think about it, that asshole, that prick, was not a person. And when that asshole’s family portrait came out in a magazine with a story about him going to church and praying, when I saw that article, I wanted to go right to his house and stab him.”