“Don’t do this to me,” Yunsu said. “If you do, I won’t be able to die peacefully. Let’s say I do meet with you and go to Mass and obediently do everything the guards tell me to do to make them happy, and I sing hymns and pray on my knees, and I become a perfect angel. Are you going to save me then?”
It was unexpected. He bared his white teeth like an animal and spat the last words out. Aunt Monica’s face paled.
“So please,” he said, “stop coming to see me.”
“Okay, you’re right, I want to save you, but it’s not in my power. But just because I can’t keep you from being executed, that doesn’t mean I don’t need to meet with you. I don’t know how you feel about this, but we are all on death row. None of us know when we will die. So why is it wrong for someone like me, who doesn’t know when she will die, to meet with you, who also doesn’t know when he will die?”
Aunt Monica was no pushover. He stared dumbfounded at her.
“Why?” she repeated.
“Because I don’t want to hope,” he said. “That would be hell.”
Aunt Monica did not say anything.
“I don’t know how much more I can take,” he said. “I might go crazy.”
Aunt Monica started to say something and then stopped. After a moment, she asked him calmly, “Yunsu, what is bothering you the most right now? What do you fear the most?”
He looked up at her. A moment passed. His eyes were filled with animosity.
“The mornings.”
He sounded like he was being forced to confess to a crime before some final conclusive evidence proffered by a vicious prosecutor. His voice was quiet. He sprang up, as if he did not need to hear any more, bowed to her, and stalked out. Aunt Monica, who had been as stiff as a plaster statue, followed him.
“Wait a second! I’m sorry. Don’t be mad. If it’s hard for you, you don’t have to meet me. You can just go. It’s okay if you go, but at least take this. The pastries aren’t fancy, but I brought them for you. They’re not so bad. Officer Yi, I know it’s against the rules, but please, let him sneak in a couple inside his clothes.”
Aunt Monica held out a handful of pastries to Yunsu. Officer Yi gave her a look that said she shouldn’t. But Aunt Monica’s stubbornness was powerful, like the will of the Father being done on earth as it is in heaven.
“He must be so hungry all the time, alone there in his cell. A healthy young man like him must need a lot to eat. Please, Officer Yi!”
It was absurd: Who was the criminal and who was the rehabilitator? Who was pleading, and who was rejecting their pleas? I saw Yunsu look directly at Aunt Monica for the first time. His gaze seemed to quiver with the anxiety of being unable to grasp who she was and what she was doing. Aunt Monica stepped closer to him and shoved a pastry inside his shirt.
He looked shocked. He lurched his head back as if to keep her as far away from him as possible.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad we met today. Yunsu, I’m so happy to have met you. Thank you for coming to see me!”
She stroked his shoulder. He looked pained, as if he were being tortured. As he quickly turned away, I got a closer look at him and saw that he had a limp. Aunt Monica watched from the door until he disappeared down the long hallway. She looked as lonely as a goat standing on a cliff above the sea. She pressed her hand to her forehead. She looked fatigued.
“It’s okay. They’re all like that at first. That’s where hope begins. Saying he’s not worthy—that’s a good start.”
Aunt Monica was not so much talking to me as mumbling to herself. My tiny aunt looked like she was going to wither away and vanish on the spot. She looked like she needed to reassure herself. I absentmindedly glanced up at the print of The Return of the Prodigal Son hanging on the wall. In the story of the prodigal son, the younger of two sons brashly demands his share of his inheritance from his father. The son then squanders that fortune, and after being reduced to doing demeaning work on a pig farm, he returns home, even though he knows that he is no longer worthy of his place as his father’s son. Upon his return, he says, “Father, I have sinned against heaven.” He would have meant it sincerely. It was a Bible story. The painting depicted the love of the father forgiving his son and the son kneeling in repentance. I remembered learning in art history class that Rembrandt drew the father’s hands differently: one was a man’s hand, and the other was a woman’s, which represented the idea that God embodied both femininity and masculinity. But as for why that painting was hanging in this room, the reason was all too obvious.
“Is he still causing a lot of trouble?” Aunt Monica asked the guard.
“He’ll be the death of me. Last month, he started a fight in the yard. Grabbed the lid off of a charcoal brazier that was sitting to one side of the yard and threatened to kill one of the gang leaders. Spent two weeks in solitary and just got out yesterday. He acted up the entire time he was in there, too. If we hadn’t stopped him right away, he would have gone back to court. Not that it makes any difference. He’s already sentenced to death—they can’t very well increase his penalty. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but these death row inmates will be the death of me. It makes no difference to them if they kill another person while they’re in here, because they know it won’t change their sentence. They’re on death row, so what difference does it make how they die. The other prisoners are scared of them, so they act like kings. There hasn’t been an execution since last August, and they can tell another one is coming. That’s probably why they get more violent at the end of the year. That’s when the executions usually take place. Afterward, they quiet down for a few months. But Yunsu is the worst of them all.”
Aunt Monica was quiet for a moment.
“Nevertheless,” she said, “he came to see me today. And though he doesn’t write back very often, he does write back.”
Aunt Monica was like a detective desperately clinging to a tiny clue. The guard smirked.
“To be honest, I was surprised he came to see you. Last month, the pastor gave him a Bible. He ripped it apart and has been using the pages as toilet paper. I think he’s gone through three Bibles that way.”
I burst out laughing. If Aunt Monica hadn’t glared at me, I would have kept on laughing, but I shut my mouth and tried to look serious. It served her right. I felt like Yunsu had gotten revenge on my behalf for the way Aunt Monica kept mentioning the word garbage to me on the way there. He had torn up her favorite thing in the whole world, the Bible, and turned it into something even worse than garbage. But I couldn’t let on how satisfying it was to hear that. They both looked so serious.
“This morning, I went to his cell and told him you were coming and asked what he wanted to do. He thought about it for a moment and then asked how old you were. I told him you were in your seventies. He hesitated again, and then for some reason, he said he would come meet you.”
A look of joy stole over Aunt Monica’s face.
“Did he? They say good things happen when you get old. I guess it’s true. But, has anyone been to see him?”
“No. He might be an orphan. I think he said his mother is alive somewhere, but no one visits.”
Aunt Monica took a white envelope from her pocket.
“Please add this to his commissary account. And please, Officer Yi, don’t think too badly of him. Guards are also supposed to help rehabilitate them. You’re not trying to kill him faster, are you? Aren’t we all sinners in the end?”
Officer Yi took the envelope but did not say a word. On the way back to the subway station, Aunt Monica adamantly refused my offer to drive her all the way to the convent. I didn’t understand why she insisted on taking public transportation on such a cold day, but it was probably the pointless stubbornness that she and I shared.
While we were waiting for the light to change at an intersection, I asked, “What did he do?” There wasn’t anything else to talk about. She seemed lost in thought and did not answer.
“Did they put those shac
kles on him because he was meeting with us?”
“No, he wears those all the time.”
My heart sank just as it had when I saw him hunch over to eat the pastry. In the old folktale Chunhyangjeon, when the title character Chunhyang sits shackled in a wooden cangue, she looks plaintive and wistful, and perhaps even dignified. But that was just a narrative device, the more tragic the better, to set up the dramatic turn of justice when her beloved Mongnyong returns as a secret royal inspector and saves her from the lecherous local magistrate who imprisoned her for refusing his advances. Nowadays, with the twenty-first century just around the corner, the idea of keeping someone shackled around the clock was shocking.
“What about when he sleeps?”
“He wears them when he sleeps, too. Their only wish is to sleep with their arms outstretched just once. Some inmates have even broken their arms from rolling over on them while sleeping. After they receive their death sentence, they spend up to two or three years in shackles before they die.”
“How do they eat?”
“They can’t use chopsticks, so they lift the bowl to eat, or if there are several of them in a room, someone else mixes their rice for them so they can eat with a spoon. What’s more, the guard said he was in solitary for two weeks. When they’re in solitary, they don’t see so much as another person’s shadow. Their hands are shackled behind their backs, so they have to bring their mouths down to the bowl to eat. That’s why they call it ‘dog food.’ Since he was in there for two weeks, he must not be in his right mind. Sometimes they can’t even use the toilet. They just go in their pants. Two weeks…”
I sighed and resisted asking if they really had to live that way. I had been clueless before, but it was different now that I knew and had seen it with my own eyes. I felt a sense of foreboding, like when you accidentally take a step into a neighborhood where you would never want to live.
“He murdered someone, right? He said so himself. Who did he kill? And why?”
“I don’t know.”
Aunt Monica’s response was so simple and forthright that I doubted my own ears for a second.
“How did he do it? How many people did he kill? He was in the papers, wasn’t he?”
“I said I don’t know!”
Her tone was stern. I turned to look at her. She was staring at me as if there was something unusual about my questions.
“How can you not know? I saw that you’re a member of the prison ministry. Didn’t you bother to check his records when you started writing to him?”
“I met him for the first time today, Yujeong. Today was our first meeting. That’s it. When people meet each other for the first time, they don’t ask, ‘So what kind of bad things have you done?’ If he talks about it, then I listen. But I never saw him before today. To me, what we saw of him today is all there is to him.”
She sounded resolute. It felt as if each word struck me in the chest. I was reminded anew that she was a nun.
“Light’s green. Pull up next to that station entrance on the corner. I’ll call you later tonight.”
With that, she got out of the car.
O King! Do not weep. There are none who have not longed for death more than once in this short life.
– Herodotus, The Histories
BLUE NOTE 5
Misfortune poured down like a sudden rain shower. One day, I came home from school to find Eunsu as white as a sheet and crying. I asked him what was wrong, but he suddenly started to gag.
He said, Father made me drink something weird. I keep throwing up. I went into the room, and a strange scent pricked my nose. The smell was coming from a bottle of farm pesticide that our father had spilled while trying to feed it to Eunsu. I screamed at our father, Die! If anyone should die, it’s you! I don’t know if it was the force of my wrath, but he paused in the middle of drinking and silently turned to look at me. To my surprise, he didn’t try to hit me. He just looked at me through bloodshot eyes—eyes that bore a strange mocking gleam. It might have been a smile, or it might have been a look of bitter agony. I didn’t know if he was going to change his mind and come after us with a stick, so I grabbed Eunsu’s hand and ran away. We went to the same place we always did, a barn behind an abandoned house near the entrance to the village, and we spent the night there. When I went back home in the morning, the person that I used to call Father was dead. The bottle of pesticide that he had drunk was lying empty beside him.
PART 5
That night, after returning from that place, I didn’t exactly sleep soundly. I had met him, and I had looked at him. He had left, and I had dropped Aunt Monica off. Afterward, I had headed downtown, where I shopped for a few things that I needed for Christmas, and was getting back into my car in the department store parking garage when the image hit me: his shackled hands. It was like a pill that you took in the morning but that didn’t kick in until nighttime. Was it because the cold parking garage made me look in my purse for my gloves? I pictured the tips of his ears red with frostbite, the dark red scars on his wrists from where the shackles bit into his skin, and the way his firm lips had twisted into a sneer whenever he spoke. When he said he lacked the will or the hope to go on living, the nervousness in his voice struck me as familiar. I probably sounded that way all the time, too. I had said the same words to my family, screamed it at them, in fact: Just let me die!
The department store was packed. Men and women with more shopping bags than they could carry were loading purchases into their cars and leaving while more cars kept coming in. Christmas was on its way. I thought about how Aunt Monica had pleaded with him: If you hate yourself, then you’re exactly who Jesus came for. He came to tell you to love yourself, to tell you how precious you are. I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that he was not the only one who needed to hear that. If we had met him in the department store instead, Aunt Monica would have jokingly added, Jesus did not come to earth to tell you to shop. I thought about how I used to go to church when I was younger. Back then, I was a good kid. I wore the frilly clothes my mother dressed me in, politely helped my teacher, and never missed a day of Sunday school. I memorized every passage in the Bible and won awards at catechism competitions. And then, that day came when everything changed. The sun hid its light and never again shone brightly over my life. The sun rose and fell, but it was always the same night for me. I didn’t know why I was reminded of it while standing in a brightly lit department store parking garage after having met Yunsu. But after that fateful day long ago, I went to college, albeit not a good one, appeared on Daehak Gayoje, and won. It was a nationwide singing contest for college students, and winning it launched my career. The glory was brief, but I got to do concerts all over the country. Then I left to study art in Paris without a single worry about money, and when I returned, I was made a professor. Though the fact that I was so unqualified to be a professor was a secret known only to me and my family, I was nevertheless a decent member of society and, with the exception of my advanced age, good enough for a snobby lawyer to want to marry, even if he was a liar. At least, that’s how it looked to other people. How easy it was to fool others!
I drove out of the garage. The streets were packed with cars. Fancy Christmas lights twinkled from every tree, making it look like golden flowers had blossomed on the bare branches. In the seven years that I was gone, Korea had changed. It looked glamorous and wealthy and crowded. But if I walked behind the buildings that towered nearly high enough to block the sky, the wind was as strong and cold as ever.
When I returned home, I looked up his name online.
Jeong Yunsu. As soon as I searched for his name, news reports popped up one after the other. Judging by the date, it had happened a year and a half ago, while I was still in Paris. He was the main culprit in the so-called Imun-dong Murder Case. He and an accomplice had murdered a woman they knew named Bak, raped and killed her seventeen-year-old daughter who was sleeping in the next room, and then killed the housekeeper who was just returning fro
m market.
When I read that he had raped a seventeen-year-old girl, I stopped breathing. A sour, metallic taste, like blood seeping from between my teeth, filled my mouth. This was the person I had to visit with Aunt Monica for the next month? I felt humiliated to have thought that he and I had anything in common. I wondered why the government couldn’t hurry up and kill those people when they asked to be put to death. And I thought I would rather sit through therapy again than have to visit that ungrateful piece of trash who shamelessly demanded to be killed. I suddenly loathed Aunt Monica for giving him long underwear and packing pastries for him, and pleading, You have a good heart. No matter what your sins are, they are not all of you. I got up, went to the kitchen, poured a tall glass of whiskey, and drank it in one gulp. My racing heart seemed to slow a little. I went back to the computer, as if drawn to something, and sat down. Raped a seventeen-year-old girl… Her screams echoed in my ears. The terror and shame she felt were as clear to me as if I were watching them on a movie screen.
After he and his accomplice left with the money and valuables and ran away, the accomplice turned himself in, while Yunsu broke into a family’s home and took them hostage. Then the police shot him in the leg.
There were more articles. Editorials, even the society pages, went on and on about the case: “Murder Case Grows More Savage: Criminal Jeong Yunsu killed an older woman who had been helping him, stole her money and valuables, raped and killed her daughter, then killed the poor, innocent housekeeper, and still he shows no remorse.” My computer screen filled with the tut-tutting of sociologists, psychiatrists, and journalists who naturally understood all of the problems facing our society and therefore had no end of things to say when handed a microphone. I kept clicking.
Our Happy Time Page 4
