Our Happy Time (20 page)

“I heard you were registered as a clergy member. I wanted to meet you. When my children were younger, they really loved your song
Toward the Land of Hope.
”

Something about him rubbed me the wrong way. It was an instinct that people like me who weren’t so bright but had keen senses possessed. Particularly when it came to men, I had especially overdeveloped feelers. Whether right or wrong, I tended to judge men the moment I saw them. I’m sure it was because of my cousin. Whenever someone reminded me of him, my first reaction was repulsion. It was another of my scars. Aunt Monica was probably right when she said I needed to free myself of him. My cousin had been dominating my whole life through that one
incident
. All of the saints from every religion could have come up to me, and I would have judged them the same way. I felt a little bad for judging this man as well. He offered Aunt Monica a shot of
soju
. She hesitated before raising her cup.

“Sure, let’s have a drink,” she said finally. “The woman who passed away really liked
soju
, and she used to pester me to drink with her. Being a nun, I always refused on account of religious doctrine, but in the end, I missed out on a good opportunity.”

Aunt Monica looked genuinely remorseful. She slowly raised her cup as she spoke.

“She told me once that she wanted to become a nun, too, but couldn’t because of
soju
. She teased me about it. She said ordinary
soju
was closer to God than some sacred dress. She said the most egalitarian thing people had ever made was
soju
.
Chaebol
leaders and day laborers alike drink cheap six-hundred-won
soju
. Other countries rank their liquor, like whiskey and wine, but
soju
has no rank. She asked me how I could have grown old without knowing the taste of
soju
. And now that I’ve tasted it, it’s really good.”

She’d had less than half a shot, but she sounded like she was already drunk.

“She used to try to convince us to give a single shot of
soju
to our inmates on holidays,” the warden said. “I can’t tell you how much she made me sweat over that. Of course, I know she was only joking, but she said the same thing to me about
soju
. She said it was such a shame that our boys behind bars couldn’t enjoy that egalitarian drink. I am just so thankful to have lived in the same day and age as a woman like her.”

Aunt Monica didn’t say anything. There was a lull in the conversation.

“So what did you think of death row?” he said to me. “Our goal is rehabilitation, but the truth is that we’re short on manpower. Plus, if you do anything nowadays, people make a stink about human rights. Prison guards are having a really hard time because of it. You met Jeong Yunsu? Now there’s a real headache. Has there been any progress?”

His question caught me off guard. I found myself thinking that maybe he had not worked in the actual detention center but in some government department. If
I hadn’t been meeting him for the first time, I might have answered the way my old self would have:
If you’re that curious, why don’t you ask him yourself?

“Yes, thanks to him, my rehabilitation is coming along nicely,” I said.

He laughed out loud at my response. Then he changed the subject, as if it weren’t really the answer he had wanted to hear.

“I heard that Father Kim has recovered. Now isn’t that a miracle?”

“Medical science has come a long way,” Aunt Monica said. “The medication is working, and he himself has the will to fight the disease.”

It sounded as if she was the warden, and he was the nun. It was comical.

“Actually, the last time I visited Father Kim,” he said, “I urged him to forget about everything else and recite Psalm 23 over and over to help him get through it. Then he would get better. A friend of mine had cancer, and I gave him the same advice. It really helped.”

I thought I understood why Aunt Monica had brought up medical science. But I was curious about this
incantatory
passage from Scripture.

“What is Psalm 23? Is that a good remedy?” I asked.

The warden stared at me in surprise. The look on his face said he wondered how a member of the clergy could not know that. It probably didn’t help either that I used a word like
remedy
. I got a little worried. I wasn’t sure what to do if he were to ask whether I went to church. But I also wondered why he couldn’t just tell me what Psalm 23 was. Why did he have to be such a show-off? He didn’t respond and gave me an arrogant look that said if I really wanted to know I should go home and look it up myself.

Aunt Monica jumped in, as if to quell the tension.

“That’s the one that reads, ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters… Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ That one.”

It was not a difficult passage. Even if you weren’t a Christian, you would probably have heard that at least once.

“Oh, you mean the stuff written on those plaques that they put in all the restaurants!”

The warden’s face fell. He looked like I had wounded his pride by belittling the psalm, and after he had greeted me so warmly.

“Anyway.” Aunt Monica cut me off. She seemed alarmed by the way I was talking. Of course, since I was
accustomed
to causing trouble, I wasn’t surprised that she was embarrassed by it. “Members of the Catholic, Buddhist, and Protestant communities are talking about working together to campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. Would you be interested in joining us?”

“Abolish the death penalty? I don’t know about that. Even if you do campaign, it would still have to pass through the National Assembly. The assembly members might be tempted to support it so they can be seen as
progressive
and gain some popularity, but I’m not so sure how I feel about it. First of all, Sister, it would create a budget problem for prisons. Each death row inmate has to have a guard posted to him around the clock, so they would have to increase the number of guards. Who could afford that? And this is a more extreme issue, but does it make sense for the victims to have to pay taxes to feed the animals who killed their loved ones?”

“I guess that’s true,” said Aunt Monica. “When you consider the victims’ point of view, there doesn’t seem to be any solution.”

I butted in.

“So you’re saying we should kill them because it’ll save money?”

He stared at me as if to say it wasn’t money, it was an
expense
. Then he just turned away.

We ran out to the living room. My accomplice was coming out of the bedroom where her daughter had been asleep. He had raped the girl and stabbed her. His shirt was soaked with blood. Later, he claimed that he thought the look we gave each other in the subway station meant that we should go to the woman’s house, kill her, take her money, and leave. He assumed I went into the woman’s room to kill her, and that he was supposed to go into the other room to kill her daughter. I was shocked, but there was nothing I could do. I was a five-time offender, so no matter what I said, there would be no way out for me. The woman turned white. She couldn’t even scream. I only hesitated for a moment, but when I saw her backing away into her room, I got scared. My accomplice followed her and strangled her to death as she begged for her life. I thought about how she used to flirt with me and walk around with her nose in the air just because she had some money, and
I decided she deserved to die. I didn’t feel even the slightest bit of sympathy for that lecherous insect. I went over to the dead woman calmly and stole the rings from her fingers. I was filled with a courage I had never felt before, as if the demon that had been growing inside of me for a long time was finally goading me on and telling me I did well. All I thought about was how much money she might have. I hoped it was a lot. That was the only thing on my mind. We took the credit cards, cash, and jewelry from her dresser and were about to make a run for it, but her daughter came crawling out into the living room. She was still alive. In the heat of the moment, we had just assumed she was dead after he stabbed her. Do you know how it feels to be toyed with by fate? Then, to make matters worse, we heard a key turning in the lock.

“F
or the love of—you’ve got to start acting your age! You’re a professor now! It’s one thing to talk that way to me or to the rest of the family, but how can you be so outspoken in front of other people? Everyone’s been saying that you’ve settled down and gotten better lately, but now… Do you have any idea how much those people have helped us, or what they let us get away with? It’s technically against the rules for me to take pastries into the prison or for you to bring packed lunches. You’re over thirty now. When are you going to grow up? Do you want to be an idiot your whole life?”

Along the streets near the convent in Cheongpa-dong, the trees were already dropping their leaves. Aunt Monica was still getting over a bad cold, so I had driven all the way there to pick her up. I was the one who had called myself an idiot in the first place, and I told Aunt Monica over the phone that the three of us—Yunsu, the guard, and I—had started calling ourselves The Idiot Bunch after I used it with Yunsu, but nevertheless I hated the fact that she was throwing that word back in my face a full month later just to criticize me. I had spoken to Aunt Monica over the phone since the last time I saw her, but rumors must have been going around in the
meantime. The warden had started enforcing the rules more rigorously with the prison ministry.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I couldn’t stand the fact that he said executions save money. Yusik would insist that it’s not about money but about
expenses
. They’re all the same. Government officials are all the same. Anyway, it made me mad. Didn’t it make you mad? That was coming from a former prison warden!”

Aunt Monica sighed.

“Of course I was mad. Do you know why your mother says you take after me? If someone had said that in front of me when I was your age, I would have gone right up to them and smacked them over the head!”

I almost lost control of the steering wheel.

“Then why are you telling me not to say anything?”

Aunt Monica thought for a moment.

“Since I’ve spoken out before, I know that not only does it not remedy anything, it backfires on you. I almost got kicked out of the convent several times because of it. So that’s why I’m telling you to be careful.”

“Aunt Monica, are you sure you’re a nun?”

She laughed.

“I don’t know, Yujeong. I have no idea. Wearing a black dress doesn’t make you a nun, and carrying a Bible doesn’t make you a Christian. Now that it’s autumn, I don’t feel right. If I have to say goodbye to another of those boys this year, I don’t know how I’ll carry on. Last time, Father Kim attended the executions. The shock was so bad that he couldn’t do anything for three months. Maybe that’s where his cancer came from. We’re not just campaigning against the death penalty for those boys, we’re also doing it for our own sake.”

She sighed. Lately, each time I met with Yunsu, I pictured a round noose dropping down over his eyes. I
thought I could imagine how white his face would turn when that happened. But then again, Yunsu’s face was always pretty pale. Each time I pictured it happening, my heart screamed,
No! Don’t!
To be honest, I felt pathetic, wondering how on earth I had become involved with these people and been made to imagine things I shouldn’t have had to. I wondered, too, who had come up with the
expression
, “turning into the gallows’ dew” to refer to a hanging. Whenever I heard someone use it, I clenched my teeth and told them they shouldn’t call it “gallows’ dew” but rather “gallows’ blood and sweat”.

Officer Yi had told me that the noose they used in the execution room was stained black—most likely from the bodily fluids that were wrung out when the rope tightened around the prisoners’ throats—and he had added that they sometimes talked about getting a new rope but no one had taken the initiative yet. When the subject of the death penalty came up in conversation, one of my friends would invariably say that she or he had heard that execution by hanging was the least painful method, and I would retort,
Did you ask them yourself? Did you ask the dead whether that was the best way to die?
I would get all worked up for nothing, but in countries like the United States, which, along with Japan, is one of the few advanced countries to still have a system of capital punishment, executions by hanging have long since fallen out of practice. When given the choice between the electric chair, lethal injection, and the noose, no one ever chose the noose.

“Yunsu is donating his eyes. After he dies, they’ll go to someone else,” Aunt Monica told me. “He said the thought of a blind person being able to see through his corneas makes him feel like he’s atoning. He wrote me a letter asking me to sign the release form. He doesn’t have any family members to do it for him. He tried to locate his
mother, since she’s the one who’s supposed to sign the form. She’s listed as missing for now, and the priests have been asking around. But no one has found her yet.”

We walked back to the Catholic meeting room along a path swirling with fallen leaves. This time, when Yunsu saw Aunt Monica, he went up to her first and hugged her. The two of them stood there for a moment. Tiny Aunt Monica was crying in Yunsu’s big arms. She apologized for crying and said that she was getting silly with age, but Yunsu’s face darkened when he saw her tears.

We sipped coffee and talked.

“I saw an article in the paper about viewing the fall foliage,” Yunsu told us. “It hit me that falling leaves are really a form of death for trees, and yet people travel a long way to look at it and remark on how beautiful it is. It got me thinking. When I die, I want to die as beautifully as a falling leaf. I want people to see it and exclaim over the beauty of it.”

We sipped our coffee for a while in silence. Yunsu seemed excited, probably because he had not seen Aunt Monica in a while. Or maybe now that he had offered to donate his eyes, even his body had become lighter. He was more talkative than usual that day.

“After the incident, when they first brought me here, there was a seventeen-year-old kid who was doing time for petty larceny. They let him out on probation. He was really clever and nice, so I treated him like a little brother. When he left, I told him to never come back and that if he kept up his old ways, he would turn out just like me. But they brought him in again last week. Again, for petty larceny.
Seems he stole a cell phone. The prosecutor saw that he already had a strike on his record and went ahead and had him incarcerated. I asked him what happened, and he said when he left here the last time he stood alone outside for three hours.”

Aunt Monica clucked her tongue.

“What could he do? He had nowhere to go. He met up with his old accomplices again and wound up back in jail. I decided it can’t happen a third time, so I asked one of the CEOs in here to give the kid a job at his factory. It has a dormitory, so he’ll also have a place to stay. I think he likes me, because he agreed to do so.”

“You know a CEO?” I asked.

Yunsu smiled.

“We have a president, a government minister, and a
chaebol
leader in here as well. How could we not have at least one CEO?”

He smiled proudly. When he put it that way, it made sense.

“I was reading a book of poetry recently. This guard who bullies me every time he sees me said, ‘Who are you kidding?’ And he walked on by. Immediately, I thought,
I’m gonna get that asshole next time I’m outside.
”

He stared at us. Then he lowered his head.

“With my temper, I would have, too. But then I pictured your faces.”

He dropped his head further. The conversation seemed to be getting too heavy for him, because he pulled several letters out of his pocket instead of continuing.

“Sister, I’ve been writing letters to these kids lately.”

We spread open one letter and saw that it was from
children
living in Taebaek in Gangwon Province.

Yunsu had read a magazine article about children at a branch school in Taebaek who were struggling because
they could not afford school supplies. He had been
withdrawing
some of the money we put in his commissary account and sending it to them every month. The children had sent him a thank-you letter. An inmate awaiting death had become a pen pal with lonely kids living in a distant mountain village. I didn’t have to read the letters to know how ardent they were. Both the children and Yunsu were probably as lonely as caged deer.

While Aunt Monica and I were looking at the letters, Yunsu sheepishly said, “Sister Monica, I have a favor to ask. I’m in trouble.”

We stopped perusing and looked up at him in surprise.

“I accidentally promised them something.”

Aunt Monica smoothed the front of her dress and said, “Watch what you’re saying. You gave me a start when you said you were in trouble.”

“I asked them what they want to do more than anything else in this world, and they said they want to see the ocean. Where they live, it’s nothing but mountains, mountains, and more mountains. The ocean is only an hour away by train. They said that’s their wish. So I told them I would make their wish come true. They don’t know who I am, and my return address is a PO box in the Gunpo post office. They must think I’m some rich CEO who lives in Gunpo City, because they wrote to me to say they came up with a plan and decided to go to Gangneung to watch the sun rise on January 1. Sister, what should I do?”

I could tell that Yunsu was thinking about his little brother, whom he sometimes mentioned. Since he had told me his brother was blind, I knew he was thinking about him when he decided to donate his corneas. I didn’t ask him anything about it until he brought it up himself, but I’d had a feeling that was why he did it. Since all I knew about his little brother was that he had died in
the streets, I wanted to help Yunsu make those kids’ wish to see the ocean come true.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “I won’t get anything in return this time, which means I’ll be left empty-handed, but I’ll cover the expenses.”

He smiled brightly as if he knew I was going to say that.

“Since the balance is already tipped, I’ll add just one more favor,” he said. “Please take pictures so I can see it, too. The rising sun, the kids’ faces—please take big, clear pictures of all of it. I would love to go to the beach myself and see those happy kids. But if I can at least see the photos, I’ll be happy even if I can’t be there myself.”

I wrote the school’s address down in my notebook. While I was writing, it hit me that Yunsu would never go to the beach again. I wondered if he would still be alive when the children went to the beach, the sun rose on 1998, and the photos were printed.

“But I can make this fair,” Yunsu said.

He pulled something out from beneath the table and said, “Ta-da!” It was a cross. Two rough pieces of wood were criss-crossed, and hanging from them was a
dark-gray
, hand-molded Jesus. Aunt Monica and I looked at it in wonder, and Yunsu laughed.

“I’ll give you this in exchange. I saved a few grains of cooked rice each time I ate and used them to make this.”

We took a closer look. The gray color had come from the dirt that rubbed off of his hands onto the rice when he was molding it. To our surprise, the face looked like Yunsu’s—curly hair and a longish face.

“I’d like you to give this one to that lady.”

He meant the mother of the woman he had killed.

“She wrote me a letter recently. I don’t think she’s doing well. She said she slipped in the snow and hurt her back.
I’m making another one. I’ll give that one to you, Sister Monica. And this is for you, Yujeong.”

Yunsu pulled a necklace out of his pocket. It was a blue plastic cross hanging from a thin red cord. I reached my hand out, and he placed it in my palm and paused there for the briefest moment. His hand was very warm. I pulled my hand away shyly.

“I made two. I’m wearing the other one.”

I put the necklace on as a way of saying thank you. He explained that he had whittled the pendant without a knife by grating it against the cement. He had ground the plastic with his hands cuffed together. He had probably whittled away at it all day long and again the next day, grating it against the cement and blowing away the plastic dust.

“Now you two have matching necklaces,” said Officer Yi. We laughed.

Aunt Monica clutched the cross he had made for her to her heart without saying anything. She looked like she was praying. Yunsu and I looked at each other. I realized for the first time that the cross was also an execution tool. Crucifixion—the diabolical punishment devised by the Romans to control the people they had colonized. Since nailing a person to a cross was not enough to kill them, the person was usually tortured for several days first. The torture would last all night long. Beating the person nearly to death was standard, and sometimes their eyes were gouged out as well. The moment they were nailed to the cross, they were all but on the verge of death.

Nevertheless, the victims would survive for several more days, and since removing the body was forbidden on principle, they were picked apart by birds and wild animals. Jesus was a death row convict, too. Even if it had been put to a direct vote, he still would have been executed. After all, it was recorded that the angry crowds shouted,
“Crucify him!” But if Jesus had been hanged instead, then Christians would have spent the last two thousand years wearing nooses around their necks and hanging them from church roofs, and statues of Jesus would have dangled by their necks in every church. I suddenly felt thankful that Jesus was executed as a criminal. Otherwise, who would have dared try to comfort Yunsu?