Our Happy Time (7 page)

Just like last time, the four of us, including the guard, sat in the Catholic meeting room. Aunt Monica took out the pastries she had brought and set them on the table. And just like last time, she put one in Yunsu’s hands, and he hunched over to take a bite. Since he always had his hands bound like that, whether sleeping or eating or going to the toilet, I thought it was not unreasonable to think death might be preferable.

“Did you stay out of solitary this time?” Aunt Monica asked.

He stopped in the middle of chewing and hesitated. Officer Yi spoke for him and said, “He took it easy this week.” The two of them laughed. Yunsu laughed, too, but only briefly.

“Thank goodness. Don’t go back there, Yunsu. It’s no
good for you or for anyone else. But most of all, it’s hard on you.”

He ate the pastry without saying anything. The look on his face said that the meeting would be too difficult to get through if it weren’t for the pastries. Aunt Monica sat close to him and touched his frostbitten ear. He grimaced from the pain.

“Poor thing. I brought you two blankets so you can bundle up at night.” Aunt Monica clucked her tongue and mumbled to herself, “Those judges and prosecutors should try spending a few nights in those unheated cells. Must be so cold.”

Yunsu swallowed a bite of pastry and coughed. Aunt Monica picked up his coffee and brought it to his lips. He reared his head back shyly.

“Drink it. It’s okay. If I’d married and had children, you would be about the age of my youngest. I wish we could unshackle you, but we can’t. It must be so hard. You’re holding up well, though. If you can endure this place, then you can endure any place.”

To my surprise, Yunsu obediently replied, “Yes, ma’am.” Aunt Monica carefully fed him the coffee as if she were giving milk to a baby. He drank the coffee she offered him just as a baby would. But he looked like he was in agony. I don’t think he could have looked more pained if I had been holding a piece of burning charcoal to his head.

“I got the books you sent me,” he said.

“You did? Did you read them?”

“Yes. I mean, I didn’t have anything else to do, and I was glad they weren’t Bibles.”

Aunt Monica laughed heartily. She seemed to have no intention of telling him what the other inmate had told her.

“That’s right,” she said, considerably more relaxed than
the last time we had visited. “Don’t read the Bible. Stay away from it.”

“That’s… the first time anyone has said
that
to me.”

“I know you won’t read it even if I tell you to, so what’s the point of wasting my breath? So, even if you feel like reading it, resist the urge!”

Aunt Monica laughed. He laughed along with her. The half-eaten pastry was still in his hand.

After a moment, he said hesitantly, “The judge sent me a Christmas card.”

“The judge? You mean Justice Kim Sejung? The one who presided over your case?”

“Yes.”

“Oh really?”

“The card said, ‘As a judge, I sentenced you to death, but as a human being, I pray for you.’”

He cleared his throat. I wondered if some judges were really that nice. It seemed like a kind thing to say.

“What did you think about that?” Monica asked, her face brightening.

“When I got the card, I thought… To be honest, I thought, ‘Why is everyone acting so nice all of a sudden?’”

He let out a long laugh that sounded like a tire going flat. He looked scornful. While I was thinking that it made perfect sense and was not at all clichéd, Aunt Monica was biting her lip and staring at him.

“It’s weird,” he said. “Right before the judge sentenced me, he asked me how I felt. So I told him I felt good. I could hear the reporters and the other people in the courtroom start whispering about that. I told him I knew I was going to get the death penalty, so I was glad that the state would kill me since I never managed to do it myself all those years, and I said that no one had ever paid any attention to me my whole life, so it felt good to have them scrutinizing
my every move now. After I was placed on death row, the registrar told me to pick one: P, B, or C? I asked him what he meant, and he explained that the prison had to assign a clergy member to all death row inmates. P, B, and C meant Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic. He said the other inmates pick either church or temple and attend services for a year or so, but I said no. I said it shouldn’t be like
separating
trash into plastic, bottles, or cans.”

“That’s right! It shouldn’t!” Aunt Monica chimed in. He looked at her for a moment in surprise and then kept talking.

“After you told me last time that meeting with you didn’t mean I had to convert, I did a lot of thinking. To be honest, I don’t need religion. I don’t believe in it, either. I’ve lived fine until now without it. Well, no, I haven’t been fine. I’ve lived like a dog, actually. But if there really were a God, a God of love and justice, then I wouldn’t have turned out to be a murderer.”

He swallowed hard and continued.

“A long time ago, I went to a Catholic service. It was after my little brother died and I was in jail again for maybe the third time. Probably about five years ago. I said I wanted to be baptized and was taking catechism classes. I liked it because the women who volunteered there treated us really nicely. They wrote us letters and gave us Bibles. They even brought Choco Pies and gave us good things to eat on holidays. One day, after Mass ended, an elderly death row inmate who was sitting next to me grabbed the hand of one of the volunteers. He did it before the guards could stop him. I saw the look on her face when that happened. That look said,
I will feed you, I will give you some money, and I will come to this prison in the dead of winter and hold Mass for you, but I will not hold your hand.
She didn’t say the words out loud, but the look on her face was clear
to me and to that inmate and to everyone around us. She looked like she was looking at a bug or a filthy beast that wasn’t even the same species as her. That night, I heard that old man crying like an animal and raging in the cell next to mine.”

He sneered again.

Officer Yi interrupted. “They don’t have that many opportunities to see other people, so they’re much more sensitive to outsiders.”

“That person, that so-called
sister
, probably went home and told everyone that she does volunteer work for the unfortunate. She probably thought she was a pretty good person. But she has no idea how badly she sinned against that old man. He may have taken someone’s life, but she trampled on his soul. He’s slowly dying in here day after day. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to go to another Mass. I made up my mind then that if you’re not one of us, then you better not talk to us and pretend that you care about us. It sickens me more than being looked down on or getting beat up. Since then, I’ve stopped trusting people who have money. We live in two different worlds. And even if there is a God, that God only watches out for the rich. He doesn’t live here with us, and He doesn’t so much as glance at people like us. Whenever I saw another churchgoer, I just wanted to throw up. They’re all hypocrites.”

No one spoke for a moment. I studied him carefully so as not to miss the expressions that crossed his face. He seemed like he had calmed down a lot since last time. If the looks that crossed his face then were icy, this time they were merely cool. I imagined him holding a knife. Then I tried to picture him lifting the skirt of a scrawny
seventeen
-year-old girl and raping her. But the actors in my head would not play their roles properly and just sat there vacant-eyed. I couldn’t stay angry.

“I’m so sorry,” Aunt Monica said, grabbing his shackled hands.

“Sister, it wasn’t you,” he said and tried to pull his hands free.

“No, but it could have been. It doesn’t matter who that woman was, she was still me. It was my fault. Yunsu, I apologize for her. I’m sorry, too, about the other man. When I think of how your heart must have ached to listen to him crying all night, my heart aches, too. I’m sorry for not paying any attention to you all those years, wherever you were in the world, and for waiting so long to come see you.”

He stared incredulously at her for a moment and then looked away.

“I don’t know if you’re doing this on purpose,” he said, “but you’re making me very uncomfortable. This is going to bother me all day, even after I go back to my cell. So please, don’t do this to me.”

He clamped his lips together and struggled to pull his hands free from her grasp. But Aunt Monica held on stubbornly with tears in her eyes. He was not the only one who would continue to be bothered by this. I was angry. I muttered to myself, “What a great way to
rehabilitate
someone. Let’s raise the flag high and pledge
allegiance
to it, then sing the national anthem while we’re at it.” I couldn’t look at them anymore and turned my head away. There was the Rembrandt again. When I saw it, I was reminded of a passage by my favorite writer, Jang Jeongil: “We must kill the prodigal son. He brings worse things with him. Nothing makes us feel quite so small as the son who has returned. The true prodigal son must go, with nary a drop of water nor a crumb of bread, without even a camel, he must go to the ends of the desert and die there. And not just there, but everywhere!”

He was right. I hated hypocrites. It was better that Yunsu remain a murderer, beautifully, to the bitter end. I wanted him to die mocking everyone, just as Gary Gilmore had before his execution in Utah. Gary Gilmore… While I was studying in France, President Mitterrand had
abolished
the death penalty, despite the public opinion polls that showed the majority of citizens wanted to keep it, and the political fallout was felt for a long time after. Everyone at my school in Paris talked about it, which was how I came to read the writings of people like Victor Hugo and Albert Camus, who vigorously opposed the death penalty, and how I learned about Gary Gilmore. He had shot and killed two complete strangers, and in interviews with the press, he smirked and said calmly,
If you kill me, then you will be assisting me in my final murder.
He was beyond the reach of the system. He mocked the incompetence and
contradiction
of trading a single murder for all of the violence that he had committed. Many young people wrote songs and made films in his memory after he died because of what he represented. And they weren’t clichéd about it. The shock of his execution moved us and made us think. But this trite scene playing out before me would have merely bored us and, to be honest, it would have bothered us a little, too, deep down inside. I wanted to get up and leave.

There were two other boys at our mother’s house, three and four years older than Eunsu and me. Our stepfather was quiet most of the time, but whenever he drank, the house would be turned upside down and smashed to pieces. What was wrong with our mother that she couldn’t free herself of the fetters of violence and alcohol? Her face was as black and blue as ever. The one good thing was that our
stepfather
got up every morning, strapped rolls of wallpaper to the back of his bicycle, and went out to wallpaper houses. But that was just the beginning. It was as plain as day that the two boys, the ones who had been living in that house from the start and who were now our mother’s so-called stepsons, did not like us. And I was already like a wounded porcupine, my body bristling with electricity, quills rippling like ears of rice in an autumn field at the slightest touch. Our mother started hitting us, too. Even when they beat up Eunsu, she hit us, and when I punched them back, she hit us some more. One day, our stepfather packed
up our things. We were tossed back into the orphanage.

We were taken back, as crushed as empty cardboard boxes. The morning we left, I watched the way our mother shoved Eunsu toward me and stalked off into the kitchen as he cried out for her, flailing his arms around, trying to find her through his blind eyes. We were abandoned again, and this time, it was different. It was, in a word,
irreversible
. Now we had nothing left to wait for. All of the light in the universe blinked out, not just for Eunsu, but for me as well. No sun would ever rise for us again.

I
was having a relaxed breakfast when the telephone rang. It was Aunt Monica. In an urgent voice, she said she had to go somewhere and asked me to pick her up. I checked the clock. It was not yet noon, and there was plenty of time before I had to be somewhere that evening. I picked her up at the convent in Cheongpa-dong, loaded a side of ribs that she had purchased into my car, and together we headed for Samyang-dong. There was nowhere to park, so I left the car in a pay lot near the entrance of a marketplace, and we began to walk. Since I could not ask my elderly aunt to carry the ribs, I was soon huffing and puffing. We walked quite a way through the market, but the address she had told me was nowhere to be found. In every alleyway, the snow that had fallen a few days earlier had lost its luster and was dirtied; in some places, it was mixed with the beige ash of used coal briquettes.

I knew without asking that it was a poor neighborhood. Was this really Seoul–part of the same city I had marveled over after returning from France and thought of as even more beautiful than Paris? Even in a place that looked like it was stuck in the 1960s, there were still swarms of people! I wasn’t entirely unmoved by it, and yet strictly speaking,
I felt nothing, and even if I had felt something, it was still just one part of a larger landscape.

Aunt Monica explained that we were on our way to visit the family of the housekeeper Yunsu had killed. She had tried to visit them several times after the incident, but they refused to see her. She said they seemed more open to meeting now, and so she wanted to bring them some meat since the Lunar New Year was approaching. That was why she was in a hurry.

I was dressed in a short skirt for a party with my old school friends later that evening and was walking uphill carrying a side of ribs, so I did not appreciate the looks I was getting from men passing by. I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell we were doing. It seemed like all murderers and all murder victims were poor.

“Why do they do that, Aunt Monica?”

“Why do they do what?”

“Why do they always talk about killing the rich when all of their victims are poor? I’m not saying it’s okay to kill rich people, but why do they do that?” I asked, panting for air. “What kind of justice is that? If they meant what they said, then they would load up bombs in trucks like the Arabs do and go blow up rich neighborhoods.”

Aunt Monica paused while making her way up a narrow flight of stairs and stared at me aghast.

“Load up bombs and blow them up? Then you’ll be the first to die. You and your mother and your brothers.”

“That’s not what I mean. They claim to be some kind of apostles of justice, doing what others can’t, but really they’re just killing people who are as poor as they are. It pisses me off.”

“You know the term ‘high-crime area’? That’s what they call poor neighborhoods. Rich neighborhoods have guards standing watch.”

“But don’t those guards live in these places? So while they’re guarding the rich, their wives and daughters are working late at night and getting attacked in these dark, narrow alleys on their way home. I hate that guy, Yunsu, but I agree with him on one thing. Even if there is a God, He doesn’t live here, and He only cares about the rich. I’ve had the same thought. What Yunsu says makes sense. That’s why I hate the clergy. Church, too.”

“My, you have all sorts of reasons not to go to church, don’t you? Do you really think you were both talking about the same thing? The comparison is preposterous. Wait a second. Is this 189-7?”

We had just come down an alleyway barely big enough for a person to pass through. Aunt Monica stopped in front of a building and knocked on the door before I had a chance to clarify whether she meant it was preposterous for me to compare him to myself, or myself to him. The door opened, and I saw a tiny kitchen and sundry household items
scattered
about. It was cold inside and smelled bad. The smell was like rotting fish or old kimchi. We were greeted by an old woman. She had barely a handful of hair left on her head, but it was pulled back into a bun and held in place with a traditional hair stick. She was not that short, but she was so thin that I could have wrapped my hand around her whole waist. Her eyes were swollen as if from too much crying, and her lips were cracked. I awkwardly held out the ribs, and her swollen eyes lit up.

The room was dark. It was maybe thirty-five square feet, and it was packed with discarded papers that she was in the process of tying into bundles. A stack of folded blankets in the corner looked as if it would collapse at any moment, and a window near the ceiling, no bigger than the palm of my hand, was covered with green masking tape as if to keep the cold out at all cost. But it was a window nevertheless,
and a faint ray of light made it through. Below that was an old, beat-up chest of drawers with a Virgin Mary
figurine
standing on it. As with all Virgin Mary figurines that you find in poor people’s houses, it had an ugly face. It was true. It was not the elegant kind of figurine that part of me wanted to buy when I was in Paris or when I traveled to Italy, despite having long lost my faith, but rather the ugly kind, the kind you hope no one ever buys you for a present, standing there with a face as dark as the house itself.

“Should I turn on the light?” the old woman asked.

“No, it’s okay,” Aunt Monica said. “It’s fine.”

The old woman laughed and said, “Electricity is
expensive
, Sister.” Her laugh contained a kind of abjectness that had to have been with her for a long time. We squatted in the dark like the people in Van Gogh’s
The Potato Eaters.

“Times have been hard, haven’t they?” Aunt Monica asked.

The old woman pulled a cheap cigarette from her pocket and put it in her mouth.

“I’m still alive. The church helped out for a while at first. Lunar New Year is coming, so they’ll probably bring me a bag of rice. But what brings you to this humble abode?”

She blew out a long plume of smoke. Aunt Monica glanced at the ugly Virgin Mary figurine, and the old woman was lost in thought for a moment.

“My daughter was Catholic,” she explained. “She never tried to convert us, though, and she hardly ever made it to church since she had to work every day, even Sundays. But every morning, she would sit there and mumble to herself before she left. After she died, I kept a black cloth over the face of Our Lady for a while. At first, I wanted to smash it to pieces. But the grandkids stopped me, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I covered her up instead and only uncovered her again a few days ago.”

The three of us filled the room. The smoke from her cigarette dispersed like dust particles into the hazy sunlight coming through the bars. The Virgin Mary just sat there, as if to say her hands were tied.

“I see. So what made you take the cloth off?” Aunt Monica asked.

“I had a bone to pick with her.”

The old lady laughed, revealing uneven teeth stained black from cigarettes. Aunt Monica laughed too but seemed taken aback.

“And did Our Lady give you a response?”

The old lady laughed again and even smiled shyly.

“You have to have faith to get a response. They say faith can move mountains, so faith should be able to make a Virgin Mary figurine talk, too, right? That would be easier than moving a mountain. No one would be surprised by it, and there’d be no inconvenience to the owner of the
mountain
. That’s why I’ve started taking catechism classes.”

“You have quite the sense of humor,” Aunt Monica laughed. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but it’s good to see that you can talk about it now.”

I had to agree with her. I remembered learning the same thing in Sunday school as a child. Did I believe it back then? When they said that faith can move mountains? But when I was crying like a young swallow in that man’s clutches, God didn’t listen to my frantic prayers. I know I had faith back then. I believed in heaven and hell and angels and the devil. But that day, the only one by my side was the devil.

“I’m not joking, Sister. I’m going to church because I think she might answer me if I learn the catechism and get baptized. And that way, I’ll feel less sorry about the priests who’ve been helping me. By the way, I heard the Father has cancer?”

“Yes. His surgery went well, and now he’s convalescing.”

“Things like that make me wonder if there really is a God. Why do all the good people get sick, and only the bad people live well? When I think about that, religion makes no sense.”

The old lady must have noticed the look on Aunt Monica’s face, because she stopped speaking her mind and quickly changed the subject. The obsequiousness of one who has spent her whole life surviving on seeds, walking on eggshells around others, like a slave sensitive to even the slightest gesture from the master, returned to her face.

“That sweet child lost her husband when she was only twenty-three, and she worked her fingers to the bone every single day after, sleeping no more than three hours a night, doing everything except selling her body to make sure the children and I had something to eat. Even if she had to die, why did it have to be at the hands of that man? That’s what I want to ask Our Lady. And Jeong Yunsu—I’ll never forget that name. I want to kill him, tear him apart with my own hands, make it more painful than what he did to my baby, more terrible, more shocking. Sister, I won’t sleep peacefully until I get to kill him with my own hands. I don’t care if it means I’ll go to hell. I’ll sleep well in hell. I’m doing all of this because I plan to ask Our Lady permission to kill him. If God has a conscience, then He will tell her to answer me. If God has a conscience…”

Her voice grew agitated, and her hand trembled as it clutched the cigarette. Her hands were like two rakes, dark and coarse. Her servile attitude had vanished and was replaced by something like the dignity of a roaring animal. Aunt Monica looked miserable.

I felt sorry for Aunt Monica. I hadn’t realized it, even when we went to the detention center and she threw herself at Yunsu’s feet to apologize, but I pitied her. Last time, she had begged for forgiveness on behalf of bourgeois
hypocrites, and today, she was like the team captain for murderers everywhere. She kept bowing her head like a special emissary from a cruel and unjust god. According to my mother, if Aunt Monica would just keep quiet, she could become the head of the convent and spend her time praying in a garden overflowing with beautiful, elegant hymns, or she could be the head of a Catholic-run hospital. I felt like asking the Holy Mother myself why my aunt had to be so feisty at her age.

“You’ve tried to contact me several times, but that’s why I didn’t want to see you. Each time you called, I couldn’t sleep afterward. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The police made me look at her face to confirm who she was. There wasn’t a single spot on her body that wasn’t sliced up. I kept picturing it and thinking about how bad it must have hurt and how scared she must have been. It was so unfair. Just the thought of it makes me so angry.”

Her tears were nearly dry, but she wiped hard at her eyes, as if they were bothering her.

“I don’t know what we did wrong—me or her or the grandkids—what kind of sins we committed in our past lives that God should be punishing us like this. It was only her third day working at that house. She used to work for some rich family, but those bastards claimed they were broke and didn’t pay her a single cent, not even any of the back pay they owed her. So she had no choice but to go to work on a construction site, putting up wallpaper. She hurt her back doing that and couldn’t work for several months. Then someone introduced her to that widow. It was such a good job. The widow had a bad temper, but still, she said it was better than doing wallpaper. The night before it happened, she didn’t sleep a wink, complaining that her back hurt. I told her to stay home, just one day, but she said it was her duty to go, and she left. And then that happened
to her. She should have skipped work that day to rest her back, and instead she died so senselessly.”

The tears started falling from the old woman’s eyes again. She wiped them away with fingers stained yellow from nicotine.

Aunt Monica waited a moment and then asked, “How are your grandkids?” She seemed to be trying to calm the old woman. The woman sighed and carefully extinguished the cigarette in a brass ashtray. I could tell from the way she carefully balanced the cigarette butt on the edge, despite her tears, that she planned to smoke the rest of it later.

“The youngest one, my grandson, is studying. He went to the library right after breakfast.”

“Your oldest is around twenty now, right? A girl?”

A dark shadow passed over the old woman’s face. Her lips trembled as she spoke.

“After her mother died, she left home. She sends me money once a month. I don’t ask what she’s doing. Even if I did ask, what could I do about it? She was doing so well in school, but after her mother died, she dropped out. She’s probably working as a bar girl now.”

Aunt Monica sighed. The old lady picked up the
cigarette
butt that she had so carefully stashed on the edge of the ashtray and relit it.

“Sister, I have a favor to ask.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s that son of a bitch. I want to meet him.”

It was an unexpected request. Aunt Monica’s face hardened.

“Let me meet him. I’m not joking.”

“Ma’am, he’s having a hard time right now, too. I’m not going to ask you to forgive him. God will understand. But please give it some time, a little more time, until you are both a little more settled.”

Aunt Monica sounded like she was pleading with her, but the old lady kept on talking as if she hadn’t heard her.

“It’s been almost two years. The priest who used to visit the prison came to see me once, and he told me about him.”

We were silent for a moment.

“The priest told me he was an orphan. He said that he had a younger brother who was blind and died in the streets, and that he lost his mother and father when he was young, so they grew up in an orphanage. That means he has no family of his own. After the people from the church left, I thought about it for a long time. I thought and thought, and then I thought some more. My
daughter
’s kids are also orphans, now. I know that even if I tell people my granddaughter works in a bar because she’s an orphan, they won’t be any more sympathetic toward her. I know how alone we are in this world. I’m an orphan, too. That man grew up without a mother. His little brother was all he had. Sister, I’ve been setting a little bit of rice aside each time I cook. Since it’s the holidays, I want to make a little rice cake from it and take it to him.”