“They’re all like that at first,” Aunt Monica said. “But Yunsu is a little bit better. There used to be one here named Kim Daedu. He was the so-called serial killer of his generation. He tore up ten different Bibles given to him by a pastor. But when he died, he turned to God and went like an angel. Then there was the Geumdang murder case. What was his name? That one spent his final years living like Buddha. And the one you just saw in the hallway cursed up a storm and refused to come into the room the first time the guard brought him.”
“No wonder you come here,” I said.
My words must have sounded barbed. Aunt Monica stared at me incredulously, as if she had felt their sting.
“You like it when sinners turn into angels. You and the other clergy members wave the word of God like a magic wand and see how it changes people, and that makes you feel godlier, right? There’s nothing weird about that. From where they stand, they could die at any time, so of course they’re afraid. They weren’t afraid when they killed another human being, but now that it’s their turn to die, they’re scared, so they turn good as fast as they can. I guess the death penalty is a good thing. Everyone gets a little bit nicer when they’re facing death. Like you told the guard last time, it really is the best way to rehabilitate them.”
Aunt Monica slit her eyes at me. I stared back at her at first, unwilling to back down either. But people’s faces, and the eyes especially, contain so many stories. They say so much more than any number of words can. Aunt Monica seemed to be saying, Think about your father when he died. Think about the tantrum your mother threw right before her operation. Most of all, think about yourself when you decided to commit suicide and end your own life. Being human does not mean that we change in the face of death, her eyes told me, but because we are human, we can regret our mistakes and become new people. I couldn’t stare into those old eyes any longer–those small and wrinkled, yet dark and impenetrable eyes–and I dropped my gaze.
Because of our argument, I wound up flustered and unprepared when Yunsu came in behind the guard. While Aunt Monica was taking him by the hand and welcoming him in, I was trying to remind myself of the humiliating fact that a murderer who raped a young girl had watched in thrall as I sang the national anthem at a baseball game. I thought about how I had ground my teeth all night because there was no reason scum like him might not have jerked off to the pictures of me that were printed in magazines back in my pop star days. But something kept blunting my anger. I couldn’t erase those stories from my mind: five hundred without a single cent and just as many with less than a thousand won in their accounts; making do with less than a thousand won for six months; a man on death row fasting until a priest was healed; his saying that God should take those with more sins instead; Yunsu giving all of the money Aunt Monica had given him to an elderly prisoner serving a life sentence… Every last grain of those millet-sized words rolled toward me like a gathering ball of snow and blotted out the words rape and murder of a seventeen-year-old girl. They faced off inside of me: on one side, a snowman lying on its side; on the other, bulls readying their horns.
His face looked paler than last time. A faint but awkward smile flickered around the corners of his eyes, which had not yet entirely lost their murderous gleam. I had zero intent of cooperating in this trite parade of so-called rehabilitation that Aunt Monica had been engaged in for the last thirty years, but I also didn’t want to agonize over it. After this, there were just two more meetings, and then I would never return to this place again. I had promised her a month. Afterward, I would go to my uncle and tell him that I had met with death row inmates in accordance with Aunt Monica’s program and freed myself of the neurosis of death while spreading the Gospel to them. Then my uncle would be happy. Because he was a good man. And because it was so easy to fool good people. The less they deceive others, the more they think others never deceive them. But I wasn’t sure if he was going to stare right back at me and say, I wish you would cry. If he did, then I would tell him I was sorry. Sorry, because, in any case, my uncle was a good man.
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.
Tell me what kind of person you are. And I will tell you what kind of god you worship.
– Nietzsche
BLUE NOTE 7
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 univ
erse blinked out, not just for Eunsu, but for me as well. No sun would ever rise for us again.
PART 7
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.
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