The article about his hostages included a photograph.
In the photo, he was wailing, his arm wrapped around the neck of a middle-class woman who looked like she was in her thirties. I took a closer look. His features were the same, but he looked completely different. He wasn’t wearing the black-rimmed glasses, and his hair was very short. During the half-day standoff, the police had sent in a Buddhist monk who made prison visits. An interview with the monk was included in a separate text box.
“I told him my name was Beomnyun and that I was a monk, and I was going to step inside. I asked him to let the woman go and said, ‘What has she done? If you want to kill someone, then kill me.’ Then he said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ So I told him again, ‘My name is Beomnyun, I’m a monk,’ and he said, ‘Well, nice to meet you. You monks and pastors and priests—it’s assholes like you that made me this way. Come on then, if you want to die! Come on! I’ll kill you, too, and then I’ll die, too!’ That’s what he said. The moment I heard those words, my heart jumped. I was ready to rush in there, but the police officer held me back.”
I forgot all about how I had thought of him as trash and laughed to myself. I had already emptied half of the whiskey bottle. Even if he were trash, I was intrigued by what he said. I thought, He thinks the same way as me! I would never be able to forgive my family members, who were oblivious to even one-millionth of what I’d gone through, for turning their backs on me. My mother, who lied and said, She must have had a bad dream. My father, who didn’t want to hear any more about it. My brothers. The priests and nuns, who took my confession and pressured me to forgive. God, who ignored my desperate prayers to be rescued. Thanks to them, I was falsely accused of the sin of lying and of not forgiving. The only person who did not say anything to me at the time was Aunt Monica. I clicked on the next article. After Yunsu was arrested and taken to the hospital, he was questioned by reporters and said, “I regret not killing more. All those rich people in their fancy houses, I regret not killing more of them!”
The reporters blamed the gap between the haves and the have-nots and the extravagance and self-indulgence of the wealthy in our country. At the same time, they said that such anger was misguided. Everyone seemed shocked by the audacity with which he had brazenly said that he regretted not killing more people. The all-knowing scholars and experts each gave their two cents, saying that someone like him had to be given the severest punishment possible—it had to be the death penalty—in order to send a message to the criminals who were growing more shameless by the day. I poured the rest of the whiskey into my glass. I pictured him holding a knife. What would I do if he took me hostage to try to rape and murder me? Goose bumps stood out on my arm as I raised the whiskey glass. I would probably grab the knife and kill him with it. Though I hadn’t had these thoughts since that fateful day long ago, I realized they had always been in the back of my mind. But would I grab the knife and think, Uh oh, if I do this, I’ll get the death penalty, so maybe I shouldn’t, as everyone who knows everything that’s wrong with our society seems to think people would do? Of course not! I would do whatever I had to do in order to get the knife away from him and kill him with it. I swear it. I would kill him using the cruelest method I could come up with. The old me would not have been able to do that, but the new me could. Back then, I was just a dumb kid, but now, I was someone who had long since stopped caring about death.
The phone rang. It was Aunt Monica. She asked me if I got home okay and suggested we return to the Seoul Detention Center after the holidays. I didn’t respond. I wanted to ask why we had to visit, of all people, someone who had raped a little girl? Did she really not know what he had done?
“And Yujeong, promise me one more thing.”
“What is it now?” I asked bluntly.
The fumes from the alcohol I had downed so quickly were rising into my nostrils and making me hiccup. If it were not Aunt Monica on the other end of the line, I probably would have lashed out drunkenly and said, Well, aren’t you a saint? Go to heaven without me!
“Are you drinking again?” she asked. I said no. “Okay, that’s good. Since you agreed to help me out for a month, you have to promise you won’t kill yourself before then. It wasn’t easy getting your uncle to agree to this. Can you do that for me?”
I wanted to tell her, No, I can’t. I wanted to say I’d be better off in a mental hospital. But there was always something in Aunt Monica’s words that came from some familiar place. Something that disarmed me. Was it the love that she had always shown me? Or was it the sadness of an aunt who wrapped her arms around me and cried? When sorrow is unmasked, it contains something mysterious and holy and urgent. It is both a thing wholly unto itself and a key that opens strangers’ locked doors. I could tell that Aunt Monica had been praying for me for a long time. For fear I would die—or rather, for fear I would try to die again. That was why she had been calling me every night and every morning for the last several days.
When I thought about the fact that someone genuinely wanted me around, a slow ache passed through a corner of my heart. It burned like coarse salt sprinkled on rotting fish. I did not want to admit it, but it had occurred to me nonetheless: the reason I couldn’t kill myself, the reason I could not finish the job and kept making failed gestures, the reason I never picked something truly fatal from among the various methods of suicide, like throwing myself off of the fifteenth floor of our apartment building, was all because of Aunt Monica. I was going to tell her no, but I was trying to keep from hiccupping and the word would not come out.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I promise. Even if I do decide to kill myself, I’ll wait until the month is up so I don’t let you down. Then I’ll do it.”
“Sure, that’s how we all live, one month at a time, until we die. I die, and then you die.”
I was speechless. I realized that I had never thought about her dying. What would I do without her? It was strange that I had never once thought about it even though she was over seventy. I didn’t think I could stand it. If she were gone, the only person who genuinely wanted me around would be gone. In other words, the only thing in my life that gave me hope would be gone. The thing that kept me from jumping from the fifteenth floor would be gone. The person who was the first to rush to my side and hold me the first time I had tried to kill myself in high school. She had held me and cried and said, You poor thing, you poor thing. But if I were around to see her die, I still didn’t think I would be able to cry.
“Pray for me, Aunt Monica. Pray to keep me from wanting to die.” I said.
“I do. I pray every morning and every night. I’m old now, Yujeong, so you have to stop worrying me. Understand? You have to forgive. Not for anyone else’s sake, but for your own.”
It was the first time she had ever mentioned forgiveness. She must have sensed how tense I was, because she seemed to hesitate before speaking again.
“What I mean is that you have to stop letting what happened to you rule your life. You need to vacate that room inside your heart that he has occupied. Move out of that room. It’s been fifteen years, so everything is in your hands now. You’re over thirty.”
Aunt Monica said the word thirty like she was saying it to a fifteen-year-old child. I didn’t say anything.
He who has never eaten his bread with tears, who, through nights of grief, has never sat weeping on his bed, knows you not, heavenly powers.
– Goethe
BLUE NOTE 6
Eunsu and I were sent to an orphanage. From that day on, I had to fight like a wandering warrior, and my nights were as sleepless as a guard’s in the demilitarized zone. I would come back from school to find that blind Eunsu’s food had been stolen by the other kids and his body was covered in bruises. I would track down the kids who beat and tormented him and punish them until their noses bled, and then I in turn would be beaten by the housemaster until my nose bled. I was a juvenile delinquent, the black sheep of the orphanage. While I was at school the next day, Eunsu would become
the target of vengeance for the kids I’d beaten up, and upon my return, I’d get my revenge again. Then the housemaster would beat me even harder. None of us—not me, not the other kids, nor the housemaster—ever tired of it, and each day was another cycle of punishment and revenge. They were days in which I drew forth all of the blood and violence and screams and lies and defiance and hatred that I had inherited from my father and that flowed through my veins and put them to practical use. I was an animal. I would not have known how to survive otherwise. If I had not at least been an animal, I would have been nothing. And then, one day, our mother came to find us.
PART 6
I realized I didn’t keep my promise.
A letter from Yunsu arrived at Aunt Monica’s convent the following week, before our second visit to see him at the Seoul Detention Center. Aunt Monica was stubbornly intent on going, regardless of whether he agreed to see us or not. The old year had ended; it was 1997.
Aunt Monica looked ecstatic as she handed me the letter. As for me, I was beginning to think that I wanted to face him for a different reason. Was that because I was sensing that the person I really wanted to face was myself? I still can’t say.
I completely forgot that I wrote Sister Monica a letter a long time ago and told her I wanted to meet that singer, the one who won Daehak Gayoje and sang the national anthem at the opening ceremony for a baseball game in 1986. My little brother, who’s no longer with us, loved her voice. He was really fond of the national anthem. I thought that if I could tell him I met her, he would feel happy up there in heaven. But I didn’t recognize her when she came that day. When I got out of solitary, I was feeling hopeless again and wanted to destroy everything and end it all. After I got back to my cell, though, I thought, my little brother wouldn’t have liked how rude I was. I used to think that everything ends when you die, but now I think I might be wrong about that. I’m sorry. Also, the long underwear you gave me is very warm.
It was a short letter. Aunt Monica was in a hurry to get to the detention center. She couldn’t very well show up without me—the one-time singer, the one he said his brother had liked, the motivation behind that letter. We waited for Officer Yi to come meet us at the entrance, and the three of us walked into the detention center together.
“When I met you last time,” said Officer Yi, “I wasn’t sure if it was really you. I’m excited to meet you. I was a huge fan back in school. When I was taking Yunsu back to his cell, he told me you were that famous singer who sang Toward the Land of Hope. It’s such an honor.”
Every now and then, when I was walking down the street, or applying for a credit card at a department store, or boarding a plane, people would recognize my name or face. Around ten years ago, I had performed a song called Toward the Land of Hope. The records flew off the shelves like they had sprouted wings, and I did appearances anywhere and everywhere I was called. Now, ten years later, I didn’t mind being recognized. But I wasn’t so sure I liked being recognized at a detention center.
“I told my wife that you came with Sister Monica. She was so impressed. She said you’re such a good person. She said she knew you were glamorous but didn’t know you did good things as well.”
As far as I was concerned, I was never going back to that prison again once the month was up, and I was far from being a good person, but still, I couldn’t bring myself to say, Well, this is what really happened. I didn’t know what to say. If he was going to keep it up, then I would have no choice but to act like a good person. It would take too long to explain to him why I wasn’t who he thought I was.
“By the way,” I said, changing the subject, “why are some inmates wearing light-blue uniforms and others are wearing dark blue? The dark-blue ones look cold.”
“The dark-blue uniforms are provided by the state, but they can buy the light-blue ones for themselves.”
“It’s so cold. Why don’t they buy the warmer ones? Are they expensive?” Since there wasn’t really anything else to talk about while walking down that long hallway, I kept asking him questions.
“They cost twenty-thousand won.”
“That’s not that expensive.”
Officer Yi looked at me as if he were taken aback.
“We have four thousand inmates here,” he said. “We check their commissary accounts periodically. There are usually about five hundred who don’t have a single cent for half a year at a time.”
I stopped and stared up at him.
“It makes sense,” he said. “They made their living off of crime, so now they have nothing. In those cases, we have to assume they also have no family. Or that their families have turned their backs on them.”
“Five hundred without a single cent?”
“There are just as many who have less than a thousand won for six months. But think about it. Why would people with money wind up in here?”
I thought about how much I had spent on liquor at the department store a few days ago. I felt like saying, But when I was in Paris, the plazas were packed with more and more Korean tourists every day, and every summer, the other Korean students and I would joke about how we had to head for the countryside to get away from them. I assumed Korea was wealthy because all those tourists refused to stay anywhere but five-star hotels… But I kept my mouth shut. Five hundred people with less than a thousand won to their names, for six months or more at a time. How were they able to buy toilet paper and long underwear? As I followed Aunt Monica down the hallway, I felt as if my feet weren’t touching the floor.
We passed a short, bald man dressed in a light-blue uniform walking in the custody of a prison guard. Just as I noticed that he also had a red tag on his uniform, he stopped and said, “Sister Monica.”
Aunt Monica said, “Look who it is!” and hugged him. They looked like an aunt and her nephew greeting each other after a long time apart.
“I heard you met Jeong Yunsu.”
“Word gets around fast. How have you been?”
“We don’t have any secrets from each other in here. My sister is here to see me. I’m on my way to meet her. But how is Yunsu? He must be in pretty bad shape after solitary. Is he giving you a hard time? Don’t give up on him, Sister. Just think about the first time you met me, how I used to scream and cuss at you.” The inmate laughed bashfully.
“That’s true,” Aunt Monica said. “You were a handful.”
“Sister, someone told me his accomplice framed him. He must have made a false confession. That accomplice of his, I heard his family is rich. He only got fifteen years, and now he’s been transferred to Wonju. None of the guards like Yunsu, but we think he’s a good kid. You know that money you put in his commissary account? There’s an elderly man here who’s serving a life sentence. Yunsu gave all of his money to him. The old man had nothing in his account, so he couldn’t even get proper medicine. But Yunsu told him to use the money to get medicine from outside the prison if he had to. It’s hard for Yunsu, too, to get by without any money.”
“Is that so?” Aunt Monica’s face brightened.
“I bumped into him yesterday in the prison yard, and he asked me if I had a Bible. So I loaned him one right away. I did good, didn’t I, Sister?”
“Yes, you did. You did really well, my boy.”
Aunt Monica patted him on the back, and he beamed proudly, like a child. I watched him and my aunt from a few steps away and thought, Is that really a death row convict who has killed people? There was no end to the unexpected and surprising. Not in this place.
“By the way, did Father Kim get that operation?”
“Yes, he did. That’s what I heard.”
The inmate’s round eyes darkened.
“Me and the other guys on death row were talking about it the last time we were together. We decided to pray. We prayed to God to take those of us with more sins first, instead of him. What did he do to deserve it? We also decided not to each lunch until his cancer goes away. We wanted to make a sacrifice. We found out that he kept coming here to offer us
Mass right up until the day of his surgery. He never said anything to us about it.”
His eyes were wet with tears. Aunt Monica bit her lip.
“That would be an enormous sacrifice for you to make. Eating must be your only pleasure in here… A great pleasure and a diversion… Thank you. I’ll tell Father Kim about it. God, too, will look favorably upon you for giving up your lunches. Keep up your promise to Him, but make sure you sneak in some snacks from outside. I’ll take the blame for that one and ask Him for forgiveness.”
The inmate laughed out loud. The guard who was with him looked uncomfortable.
“I should get going,” the inmate said. He started to walk away, his hands shackled and the tips of his ears red with frostbite just like Yunsu’s, but he turned suddenly and said, “Officer, wait! Sister, I miss you. Sometimes I miss you more than I miss my real sister. Even more than I miss my mother, who passed away when I was young. Come see me. I’ll write to you.”
There wasn’t even the slightest trace of pretense to his words. Was that the power of someone facing an impending death? When I saw how easily, how like a child, he said the words that I was too embarrassed to say, I was struck by the feeling that he, not I, was Aunt Monica’s true kin. And, to my surprise, I felt a little jealous. For a moment, I wondered, if I were Aunt Monica, whom would I have cared about more, me or them? Had they hogged the love that I should have been receiving while squandering my life for the past thirty years? When they cried out, begging to be left alone to die, did Aunt Monica cry, too, and cling to them the way she did with me, and say, You poor thing, you poor thing?
The inmate was led away by the guard. Aunt Monica paused in her steps and sighed heavily, as if it was too much to bear, and muttered to herself, “I wish I had three bodies, or that I could just move in here and live with them.”
We waited for Yunsu again in the Catholic meeting room. Unlike on my first bewildering visit, this time, I felt like I had come armed with a well-honed knife. When I thought about the fact that I was meeting the type of man who had raped and killed a young girl of seventeen, the desire to die went away and a strange will to fight surged up in me. My whole body was trembling with electricity, but I didn’t mind the feeling. Even if it was just hatred, and even if there were an evil intent to my observing him, it had been a very long time since any kind of desire had welled up inside me. When I had woken that morning, profanities that I had never before uttered were buzzing inside my mouth. An unfamiliar pleasure seemed to have raised my body temperature a degree. I felt like I had been looking forward to this day with the heart of a trapper awaiting a snared animal. Maybe I had finally started to realize that the murderous impulse I had been pointing at myself all that time was actually intended for someone else.
Our Happy Time Page 5
