Our Happy Time

by Gong Ji-Young

  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 g
et 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.”

  Aunt Monica looked like she was trying to find somewhere she could back away to in that tiny room. I couldn’t believe it, either. Aunt Monica made a face to say it was a difficult favor to fulfill. The old lady grabbed her hand.

  “Sister, I’m not planning on doing anything bad. I just want to meet him before it gets any later and the state executes him. I have no education, and I don’t know anything, but I want to go to him and say, ‘I’m the mother of the woman you killed!’ I want to forgive him.”

  Aunt Monica’s face looked ashen. I probably looked the same.

  “I want to meet him so that I can forgive him. I grew up as an orphan, too. I had no flesh and blood to call my own. I didn’t even have a husband. It was just the kids and me, so I know how he feels. I know how lonely the holidays can be. A holiday is still a holiday, even to a murderer. And this could be the last holiday he ever sees. No one knows whether he will die today or tomorrow. When I think about him dying, I think, Good riddance! If killing him meant bringing my child back, I would kill him myself, even if it meant getting the death penalty a hundred times over. If killing him meant my grandchildren’s bruised hearts could heal, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. But that’s not how it works. That’s why I want to see him. I hate the thought of him dying peacefully, but still, if he could, even if he were the only one who could…”

  “The thing about forgiveness,” Aunt Monica said, “is that it’s not as easy as you think.”

  I had never seen my aunt so flustered. I had never seen her stumble for words. She looked as if she was going to start flailing her hands around. The old woman looked at Aunt Monica and made an expression that I could not decipher. Suddenly, she raised her voice.

  “Isn’t that what Jesus told us to do?” she yelled. “That’s what the priest told me to do. And the nuns. And all those people who keep coming to see me and handing me Bibles and singing hymns. They know everything, and they listen to God, and that’s what they told me to do. That’s what you all told me to do! ‘Forgive! Forgive your enemies!’ Seven times or seventy times, if you have to. That’s what they said!”

  Aunt Monica closed her mouth and pressed her hand against the floor as if she had lost her balance. I went to her side to help her, but she shoved my hands away. She was crying.

  I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

  For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

  For love would be love of the wrong thing.

  – T.S. Eliot, “The Four Quartets”

  BLUE NOTE 8

  Abandoned once again in the orphanage with Eunsu, I was still the most violent, still a troublemaker, but I had no more problems because of my brother. That’s because I was big and had ganged up with the other bad kids, which meant
that as long as I was in the gang and was strong, they wouldn’t mess with me—or rather, they wouldn’t mess with Eunsu. Sniffing glue was my Bible, and jerking off was my hymnal. The shoulders of my fellow gang members were my law and my nation. By the age of thirteen, I was already taking girls who had run away from home and putting them up in rooms with boys. I kept a lookout while the older boys took turns raping them. But one day, an older boy who was stronger than me started bullying me and trying to push me out of the gang because I wouldn’t steal things for him from the supermarket. They were too strong, and I couldn’t protect Eunsu, or even myself, for that matter. We were hungry, and with each day we were becoming the butt of the other kids’ jokes. So one day, I made up my mind. While all of the other kids were asleep, I beat the oldest boy to within an inch of his life, grabbed Eunsu by the hand, and ran.

  The night we ran away from the orphanage, we wandered the streets of Seoul. We were hungry and cold and hopeless. I had stopped beside a trashcan in a corner of a marketplace and was rummaging through it in the hopes that there was something we could eat, when Eunsu said he was scared. He said he wanted to go back. I got mad, but I bit my lip and suggested that we sing something instead. He liked singing. Since he was blind and never got to go to school, the only song he knew was the national anthem. That’s because we used to sing it during the morning assembly at the orphanage. So we sang the anthem. Until the East Sea runs dry and Mt. Baekdu wears away, God save us and keep our nation… Eunsu could remember all four verses. I remember how, on that cold night, the stars floated in the sky like cold popcorn as we raised our faces to the sky and sang the anthem. When we finished, Eunsu laughed and thought aloud, It’s a great country, isn’t it? Whenever I sing this song, I feel like we’re good people.