Our Happy Time

by Gong Ji-Young

  Officer Yi’s eyes grew tense.

  “Why did you do it?” she said. “Why? Why did you have to kill her? You bastard, you son of a bitch, you’ll die for this!”

  The expressions on our faces said that the moment we had all been dreading had finally happened, and Aunt Monica’s turned to a look of regret. But there was nothing anyone could have done about it.

  “Please, calm down.” Aunt Monica got up and tried to restrain her. The woman’s face had turned dark.

  “How could you? You should have just taken the money and left her alone. Take the money, and let the person go. You can always make more money, but people don’t come back from the dead. They never come back. Our lives are so short as it is. Don’t take that time away from us.”

  The old woman started to cry. Her sobs turned to a wail. Clutching her crumpled handkerchief and the piece of rice cake that she had not managed to hand to Yunsu, she curled over until her small body was even smaller. It hit me then that she and Yunsu were wearing the same color. And they were both hunched over. It was a coincidence that her dress was that shade, but I found myself thinking that they were bound together by the same curse. Yunsu kept shaking. His hair looked as if it was glued to his forehead. He had broken into a cold sweat. If I had to use one of those clichés that I detest so much, I would say he was sweating buckets.

  Officer Yi stood up. He looked as if he was planning to take Yunsu back to his cell.

  “Wait. Please, just wait,” the old woman said.

  Officer Yi sat down again, looking uncertain. Aunt Monica tried to get the woman to drink some water. Despite her own distress, the woman kept saying, “I’m sorry, Sister. I’m so sorry.” It was as if she had lived her whole life having to cater to others’ feelings first. Apologizing seemed to be a reflex for her—I had no idea what on earth she was sorry about. The woman slowly sipped the water and looked at Yunsu. His face was wet from the sweat sliding down his temples, and both armpits were soaked. The woman lifted the handkerchief that was damp with her tears and tried to wipe the sweat from his face for him, but a shriek snuck out from between his clenched teeth. That’s right, I thought. That’s the cry an animal makes when it’s being dragged to the slaughterhouse. A sad look stole over the woman’s face. She closed her eyes for a moment and then slowly started talking again.

  “I’m sorry. I came here to forgive you. Sister Monica told me it was too soon, but I was stubborn and came anyway. I’m sorry. I can’t do it yet. I’m sorry, kid. When I look at you, I keep picturing my daughter, and I want to hate you. I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. I’m sorry. I want to grab you by the throat and ask why you did it. Why did you have to do it? Will you pray for me? Kid, you look so kind and handsome, and you keep trembling, which only makes it harder for me. But I’ll come back. I will… until I’m ready to forgive you. It’s a little far and the bus fare is expensive, so it won’t be often, but I’ll come back every holiday. I’ll bring more rice cake. So you can’t… die… yet.”

  She was shaking. Sweat was running down her face, too. During those few minutes, her hair seemed to have turned even whiter until her whole head was covered in gray. Aunt Monica also seemed to be ageing faster along with her for that brief moment.

  “Sister, I’m sorry. I’m sorry to put you to all this trouble,” the woman said, bowing her head again. Then she turned to the guard. “Sir, I apologize. I made such a fuss and caused you all so much bother.”

  Officer Yi was shocked. His face was contorted with misery. It was probably the first time in ten years of being a prison guard that he had witnessed something like this.

  Yunsu got up to follow the guard. His head was still down. The old woman paused in the middle of wiping her tears with the crumpled handkerchief.

  “Don’t die yet,” she said to Yunsu. “Not until I can forgive you!”

  Yunsu’s face was a mess of sweat and tears. As he turned and walked away, his limp was more pronounced than usual.

  “You’ve done enough,” Aunt Monica said, clasping the old woman’s hand. “You can’t forgive him any more than that. Even the greatest person could not do better. You did so well. I’m a nun, and I could not have done that.”

  The old woman didn’t say a single word on the drive back. She seemed to have retreated into a room of deep silence that she had built herself, and like any human being deciding whether to face themselves honestly before a grave undertaking, she bore a look of dignity and poise that had nothing to do with her appearance or education or anything like that. After today, she would go back to stooping over to collect empty bottles and old newspapers and adding 3,150 won or 2,890 won to her bankbook, and if she saw people who had a lot of money and they brought her a bag of rice or a package of meat, she would have no choice but to lower herself, but for now, her face had a glow more radiant than that of any empress. In contrast, Aunt Monica looked very ordinary sitting next to her. The woman had, as naïvely and fearlessly as a child, taken on the word that Jesus, the Son of God, had barely squeezed out in his final moments—forgiveness. She had failed as a person, and she knew that arrogance was the reason she had failed. But at that moment, in my mind, she was already crowned with the laurel wreath of a saint. It had nothing to do with her past or with her future. Had I ever seen that in another person? The people I knew never changed but just kept on living the same way they always had. Including Aunt Monica.

  What on earth made this old woman who, in her own words, had no education, no faith, and knew nothing, try to forgive him? What sort of foolhardiness made her take on something that human beings have never gotten past, though a million theologians could shout until the veins popped out on their necks, and a million books could be published calling for people to forgive, forgive? Was it a kind of grand simplicity?

  The following week was my final visit to the prison with Aunt Monica. The Lunar New Year had passed, and the weather was warming up as if spring were already on its way. Officer Yi tried three times to get Yunsu out of his cell, but he refused to see us. When he came back from his third trip to Yunsu’s cell to try to convince him, he shook his head sadly.

  “I think it would be better if you just go home for today. That last meeting must have been really hard for him to take. From what I’ve learned about him, he’s a very simple guy. After you left last time, he refused to eat, and when the head guard checked on him, he was pretty sick. The day before yesterday, they took him to the infirmary and forced him to accept an IV. The registrar got mad at me, too. He said it was because I made him meet that old lady. They have him on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch now. I took some heat from my colleagues as well.”

  “I’m so sorry for the trouble we caused you. Has Yunsu started eating again?” Aunt Monica asked weakly. Officer Yi laughed.

  “Yes, he’s eating a little bit. First time I personally saw someone on death row go on a hunger strike. It was more common back when there were political dissidents who had violated the National Security Law. It’s rare, now.”

  It wasn’t until later that I realized the comedy of sticking an IV in someone sentenced to die in order to keep him from dying. I thought to myself, ‘They saved him so they could kill him.’

  First kiss the earth which you have defiled, and then bow down to all the world and say to all men aloud, “I am a murderer!”

  – Fyodor Dostoevsky, a former death row convict, spoken by Sonja in Crime and Punishment

  BLUE NOTE 10

  I was surprisingly relaxed when we were put in the juvenile detention centre. It seems strange to me now, but maybe that was because, at the time, I thought I would no longer have to rack my brain for ways for us to survive each day. Nor did I have to worry about where we would sleep. No more standing with Eunsu in ragged tennis shoes and no socks to elicit more sympathy from people getting off the subway, people who scattered in all directions in a mere second or two, leaving us to feel like every last person on earth had vanished and it was just Eun
su and I left behind in this empty world. No more thinking about how we had nowhere to go. No more getting up in the morning and worrying about what we were going to eat that day. And maybe, too, it was because I thought there would be others like us there, kids who had been abandoned by their mothers and beaten by their fathers. But as usual, my hopes betrayed me.

  It happened our first night, when I went in holding Eunsu’s hand, right after the warden finished roll call. The kids surrounded us. I was afraid because, once again, we were among the youngest ones. I was accustomed to fighting, but we were locked up in there, and I did not yet know how everything worked. There were those who gave orders and those who did their bidding. One of them pointed at Eunsu.

  “I bet I could lift that runt with one finger. What do you think?”

  The other kids snickered. I didn’t know what he meant. In a flash, two boys grabbed my arms. I had a sinking feeling. One of the kids spread out a blanket and laid Eunsu down on it. The moment I tried to resist, their fists flew at me.

  “Hey kid, calm down. The boss is only going to lift him up a little.”

  The kids pulled off Eunsu’s pants. I had no idea what they were going to do to him. He was stretched out in front of them like a fish pulled from a tank. The one they called the boss proudly held up his forefinger and said, “One finger!” Eunsu, poor blind Eunsu, called out for me over and over. The boy put his finger on Eunsu’s pepper and started rubbing it. As Eunsu called out to me, the vowels and consonants began to drop out of his voice. His pepper swelled and rose, and the hushed cheers from the kids egged it on. Splayed out in front of everyone, my thirteen-year-old brother’s hips began to jerk up and down. Then a cloudy burst of semen shot from his pepper. He looked as if half of his body was off the ground. While the kids were busy snickering, I saw my opening and attacked the boss. I started strangling him without any warning. If the guards had not busted in just then and pulled me off of him, I might have killed him. I looked back as they were dragging me away to see a dazed-looking Eunsu staring into space with unfocused eyes, tears streaming down his face. I didn’t mind taking a beating, and in fact I was used to taking one, but the thought of leaving my blind brother alone in that room with those animals made me crazy. And like an animal, I howled.

  PART 10

  My meetings with Yunsu ended without me singing the anthem for him. I told Aunt Monica, and myself, that school was starting again and I had too much to do. Aunt Monica looked hurt, but I decided I’d had enough.

  But when Thursday rolled around again, I found myself waking up earlier than usual. The sky outside the window was overcast. I looked out and saw that it was snowing. It was a full blizzard. I wondered if Aunt Monica was having trouble getting to the prison. She had to take the subway to Indeogwon Station, transfer to a neighborhood bus, get off near the detention center, and walk the rest of the way. I wished my stubborn aunt would just take a taxi. What if she went all that way on a snowy day like this, and Yunsu refused to see her again? My head was so crowded with thoughts that I didn’t even have my usual morning cup of freshly ground coffee. It had gotten much colder, so I turned up the heat and filled the bathtub.

  I thought about the prisoners in the detention center—showering once a week for barely five minutes at a time, Yunsu’s clothes drenched in cold sweat. I undressed and slowly got into the tub. All at once, I remembered something I had seen while living abroad. I had gone to a party at the house of a Korean friend who was studying in Germany. Playing on the television was a show about four women living together in a kind of row house. It looked like an ordinary house with two bedrooms and a small kitchen. Each of the rooms had a bunk bed, and the women were cooking and laughing. They smoked constantly, and they were even filmed doing their makeup. When my friend told me it was a prison, I couldn’t believe my eyes. One of the people at the party took a swig of beer and said, What kind of prison is that? Someone else asked, Isn’t that the new model prison? No, my friend said, that’s a regular prison. Then, one of the women was shown being escorted to the door by a guard and going out. My friend explained that the woman visited her daughter once a month. She’s got a better life than we have, someone said. The woman met her daughter, and they ate hamburgers and played with dolls. Then she returned to the prison. Someone else asked, If our prisons were like that, wouldn’t one out of three Koreans want to be put away? The show cut to a scene of the woman crying after coming back from seeing her daughter. Right now she’s saying she doesn’t want to be there anymore, my friend translated. She said she wants to hurry up and get out of there so she can go back to her loving family.

  Just then, the telephone rang. I wasn’t going to answer it, but whoever it was seemed to have a lot of patience, as it showed no signs of stopping. I rushed out of the bathroom. To my surprise, it was Officer Yi from the Seoul Detention Center.

  “I imagine you’re surprised to hear from me. I got your number from Sister Monica. You had better come right away.”

  Even though I was concerned about Aunt Monica, the moment I heard the words you had better come right away, I felt annoyed and put off. Especially since I had just been relaxing in a warm tub. I asked what was wrong, and he hesitated before telling me.

  “Sister Monica had a little accident. Nothing serious, but she seems to have slipped on the ice on the walk here. I tried to call her a taxi, but it’s snowing really hard. I told her she should go to the hospital right away, but she insisted that I call you. If you show your ID at the front and wait for me there, I’ll come get you.”

  I had no choice but to get dressed and leave. Spring was supposed to be on its way, but winter had launched a surprise attack. Luckily there were not many cars on the road.

  I was normally an aggressive driver. I would slam on the brakes and pass other cars without a second thought. When I first started driving, truck drivers used to roll down their windows and shout things at me that I cannot bring myself to repeat. It was not that long ago, but even then, there weren’t many female drivers on the road. Feeling as if I’d just had garbage dumped on my head, I would try to avoid making eye contact with them. It made me scared and angry. Sometimes, I would squeeze past other cars, barely avoiding a collision, and a strange pleasure would rush over me.

  But that day, I drove very carefully. I didn’t know how badly Aunt Monica was hurt, but I had a feeling that if something happened to me as well, everything would be ruined somehow. I knew, too, that it was the first time I had ever thought that way: This car is on its way to transport the most precious passenger in the world. I can’t be careless. Those men are relying on Aunt Monica. The half-hour that I can just shove in the garbage could be the last thirty minutes of their lives. I realized that I was picturing Yunsu’s face. I could see him covered with sweat and trembling. Though I didn’t care about him, my heart ached when I pictured him. Was that the first time I’d ached like that and felt bad for anyone other than myself? I was gentle with the brakes and avoided overtaking anyone if I could help it. When other cars came racing up from behind with their blinkers on, I let them pass. I was in a hurry, but I reasoned with myself that the more impatient I felt, the more important it was to slow down. By the time I reached the detention center, my body was stiff. I realized then just how tense I had been the whole time I was driving.

  I followed Officer Yi into the meeting room. Yunsu and Aunt Monica were sitting across from each other. Aunt Monica had a handkerchief wrapped around her veil. From another point of view, it could have been a comical sight: an elderly nun with a pink floral-print handkerchief tied over a black veil. On the back of her head, the blood had dried to a dark patch. She looked like a militant labor unionist who had gone on the attack. The first thought in my head was, You win, Aunt Monica. Then I laughed. When they saw me laughing, Yunsu and the guard laughed too. So did Aunt Monica. My eyes met Yunsu’s for the first time. Without a moment’s pause, I thought, It feels good to laugh. It seemed like the first time that Yunsu and I were meeting as two ordinary p
eople. I saw that when he laughed, a dimple appeared in one cheek. At the same time, I could tell from the look in his eyes that he had been waiting for me. But I was more worried about Aunt Monica. When I touched the matted blood on the back of her head, she winced in pain. I let out a long sigh. She looked at me and told me to sit down. From the way they all waited impatiently for me to take my seat, it was obvious that I had interrupted them in the middle of an important conversation.

  “Keep talking,” Aunt Monica said.

  “So I was thinking…”

  Yunsu glanced at me as if my presence made him a little uncomfortable. I dropped my eyes. I did not enjoy feeling like an interloper. It was my original sin, the one I had committed by being born to a mother who already had three strong, beautiful sons. My mother said it was because of me that she’d had to stop performing on stage. Outside the barred window, a late snowstorm was turning the air white.

  “I realized that you’re not just here to try to fill up the church pews. I used to think that every word and every gesture from other people was meant to make fun of me and torment me, and that everyone was using me for their own personal gain. Since that was what I felt, all I thought about was not letting anyone take advantage of me. But now I know that the guards and the other prisoners—I mean, of course, there are still a few I can’t stand—they aren’t always thinking bad things about me. They’ve actually been very nice.”