Our Happy Time

by Gong Ji-Young

  He sounded as if he had no choice but to say something. He lifted his cuffed hands and stroked one ear. His words were no longer barbed but were as mild as the changing seasons, as mild as the breeze that fluttered the hem of my skirt without aggression now that spring was here. Since I had started meeting him, he had been changing day by day, like a willow tree in spring. His growth was as rapid as a baby’s after its first birthday. Later, I came to understand that, unlike babies, feelings grow without regard for the rules of time.

  “So…”

  He and the guard looked at me in unison. I felt like I was standing in front of my students. Or before a priest who was ready to take my confession.

  “I’m not here because I want to be here. My coming to see you all this time hasn’t been because I wanted to.”

  He and the guard looked surprised, and I saw his face instantly darken. He lowered his head. He looked like he wanted to say, So, you’re a hypocrite, too. If I were to exaggerate, I would say he looked like he was thinking, I’m tired of being hurt by hypocrites like you, or perhaps even, I figured as much.

  “I don’t want to lie to you. I really hate predictable conversations. I hate clichés more than anything.”

  I struggled to keep talking. Yunsu kept his eyes down and did not say a word. Then something seemed to occur to him, and he raised his head.

  “It’s okay. I’m only here today because I thought Sister Monica was coming. I heard she couldn’t make it because she had to visit a cancer patient in the hospital. That person is probably going to die soon. So if you forced yourself to come here in her place, you can go ahead and go. You must have other things to do. Thank you for being honest with me, Professor.”

  When he finished, he stood up and looked at me coldly. A sneer crossed his face. The moment was brief, but the look of regret at having expected anything of me was clear to see. When he spat out the word Professor, there was a dark shadow over him that made me think, That’s probably what he was like in the streets. But it was followed by a pained expression. He looked hurt. Being accustomed to betrayal didn’t mean that betrayal didn’t hurt, and just because someone was used to falling didn’t mean it was easy to pick themselves up again the next time. I did not know until later that because he was locked up, he could not see anyone unless they came to see him, and if it did not take place in the Catholic meeting room, he could only talk for ten minutes from behind a sheet of acrylic with holes drilled in it, even if it were his own mother, and therefore he looked forward excitedly to every Thursday.

  But at the time, I felt a little angry and thought, He’s so impatient. I looked up at him and said, “I didn’t mean that I was going to leave. I’m here today in Aunt Monica’s place because I asked her to let me come. The cancer patient she went to see, the one who’s about to die, is my mother. I told her that since she was going to see my mother, I would come to see you. So she’s there, and I’m here.”

  He gave me the same look of surprise that I had given him. He started to get nervous, unsure of what I was going to say next.

  “I hate my mother. I know that if I go see her, I’ll want to kill myself again. That’s why I’m here instead. It’s not that I like you, but I don’t hate you either. You and I haven’t wanted anything from each other or cared about each other enough to hate each other yet. So, since we can’t hate each other, this is comfortable for me. Or maybe I should just say it’s better. Please don’t misunderstand. That’s not the whole reason.”

  I paused. I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about. Officer Yi looked confused, too.

  “This might sound weird, but the first time I met you, I thought you and I were very similar. It’s hard to explain why that is, but the first thing that came to mind was that maybe you hated your mother, too, and maybe you’d hated her for a long time.”

  Yunsu looked at me strangely and sat back down.

  “Why did you think… Did you read about me in the newspaper?” he asked.

  “I did read about you, but not until after I met you. What I mean is that for people who hate their mothers—let me rephrase that—for people who grow up without knowing a mother’s love, the part of us that can grow only when it receives the love that we are entitled to as children remains stunted somewhere deep inside of us. It’s like a premature baby that doesn’t get to grow up. I think it shows in our faces. And I think that’s what I saw in you.”

  It bothered me that Officer Yi could hear what I was about to say, but I decided to push on. Now he too would know that I was not a good person. It hurt a little. I figured he would go home to his wife again and tell her, Turns out, her reasons for visiting the prison aren’t so great after all. For a moment, I thought I could understand the fear and sadness that hypocrites must feel.

  “I’ve never told anyone this before. My uncle is a psychiatrist, but I’ve never even told him. On the way here, I kept wondering why I wanted to come, and I thought it was because I wanted to tell you. It’s not easy for me to talk about it. But if my mother winds up being in hospital for a while, then I’ll probably be coming to see you for the time being. If you don’t want to see me… then I’ll stop coming.”

  Officer Yi, who was quick to catch on, seemed to be doing his best not to listen in on the conversation. Yunsu’s eyes were boring into mine; in them, I could see some emotion arising that I had never seen in him before. I could also tell that he was trying to keep his doubts about me. He was staring at me with his neck craned forward, like a deer alert to every sound, trying to identify whatever was moving. But the doubt in his eyes also told me that he wanted to believe me.

  I swallowed hard and looked him in the eye.

  “In your letter, you said this could be your last spring… Because of you, I realized for the first time that spring only comes once a year, and that I will have to wait another year to see spring again. So I, too, feel like this is the first and last spring I’ll ever have. I never knew that a season, something that comes around at the same time every year, could feel that way. That it could be someone’s last. And that therefore every day for that person passes in yearning, like a kind of thirst. For you, it’s like you’re seeing everything for the first time—from the sap rising in the trees to the yellow forsythias that grow everywhere—and yet the moment you see them, you already have to say goodbye. Things the rest of us take for granted are probably stamped in your heart as both the first and last of their kind. I realized that because of you. I also realized because of you that though I have wanted to kill someone, that someone isn’t me. So I don’t want to have the kind of obvious, predictable conversation that religious types have on what could be our last spring day together. We don’t have time. Since we’re already here, I want to have a real conversation.”

  Yunsu looked nervous again.

  “What do you mean by a real conversation?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet. If you keep talking, it must turn real eventually. I can’t tell you only nice things, the way Aunt Monica does. She talked to the warden about making me a so-called member of the Catholic ministry, so for now I get to walk around wearing this badge. I don’t know the Bible, I haven’t prayed in fifteen years and, in that time, the only time I’ve gone into a church was to buy postcards when I was traveling in Europe. Of course, I’ve never repented for that. I’m supposedly a painter, but aside from a few paintings I did after returning to Korea and a single solo exhibition, I haven’t painted anything. And I’m called a professor, but the school I went to in France was worthless, the kind of place that anyone with money could get into. At work, the other professors look at me like they’re thinking, How did she get to be a professor? The students are more clever that that. They look at me like, ‘Her dad’s the chairman of the board. When you come from money, you get money and connections. That’s how it is.’ And when I think about my life, I agree with them. I was arrested for drunk driving recently. The cops said I was crazy. But I’m not crazy. I’m an idiot.”

  Yunsu
had been sitting there nervously but he laughed out loud at the word idiot. His laugh sounded like air escaping from a balloon. Even Officer Yi looked down and snickered. I didn’t know if it was because of their laughter, but the room suddenly seemed to fill with the yellow glow of spring. Having said the words out loud, it did seem kind of funny. They both looked amused.

  “I tried to kill myself three times. The last time was this past winter. I promised Aunt Monica that I would come here with her, in exchange for not having to go through therapy. In other words, I had no choice about coming here. But I’m not crazy. I just hated myself and wanted to die. The reason is that when I was fifteen…”

  Why I decided to bring that up, I still have no idea. But at least I was calm and not agitated. I could tell from his attitude that he was listening to me with his whole being. That was because that day could have been both the first and the last day of his life, and therefore I could have been the last person he ever saw. Had anyone in my life ever listened to me with their entire being before?

  “An older cousin of mine on my father’s side…”

  My throat closed up. I stopped talking for a moment so I could control my emotions. A pain, like my heart was splitting in two, ran through me. I waited for the pain to pass.

  “…raped me. My mother sent me on an errand to the head family’s house, where my cousin lived. He lived there with his wife and kid.”

  It was the first time I had ever said the words out loud. It was also the first time I had ever used the objective term for it—rape. But if I had to tell someone, I wanted it to be him, the man who was facing his final spring. I don’t know. There were so many ways in which I identified with him. It had been that way from the start. The most important thing we had in common, though, was the fact that, whether pushed or voluntarily, we had both longed to board the train of death. Everything had changed the moment I decided I wanted to board that train. Things I’d thought were important no longer were, and things I’d thought were unimportant became important. The desire to die distorted many things for me, but other things became very clear. Death contradicts ownership, which people hold above all other values. In this world, where everyone is crazy about money, money, money, death may be the only thing that enables us to laugh at it, and everyone has to face death at least once. I was sure that Yunsu would understand me.

  The room was so quiet that it may as well have been empty. Officer Yi and Yunsu were barely even breathing as they listened to me. I didn’t think about it until later, but Yunsu was probably more nervous than when the judge sentenced him to death. I had not given any prior thought to how he might react to hearing the word rape. It wasn’t until after I said it that I remembered he had raped and murdered a seventeen-year-old girl. But to my surprise, he was looking at me calmly, and in his face was a mixture of boundless compassion and sympathy along with the painful regret of being forced to look back on the past. I glimpsed a trace of terrible remorse in his eyes. It seemed that by exposing my wound, I had triggered his own. But I decided to push forward.

  “After that, I couldn’t have a normal relationship with a man. It was okay if I didn’t love him, but I couldn’t be with someone if I did. Once I fell in love with someone, I had to let him go. That’s why they all left me.”

  My eyes stung as I told him that. It was the first time I had ever tried to explain myself so concisely. I wondered why I had brought up relationships. My ears flushed red with shame. I thought of myself as someone who was cool and unaffected. When the break-ups happened, I acted like I didn’t care in the slightest. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. But it wasn’t until that moment that I realized it had hurt each and every time. It was true. I could tell that Yunsu was soaking my words up like a sponge—the truth about me and even the shame that I felt. I could tell because I was used to people not believing me, so I was sensitive to it. When I mentioned relationships, his eyes wavered, and my own heart wavered in response. We were like two people standing at either side of a ravine with a rope stretched between the two of us. If one of us trembled, the other person’s hand trembled, too. When I look back on it now, I think I wanted to console him. I wanted to tell him, You’re not the only one who has it hard, so stop acting like you’re already dead. It was true.

  “I read all of the articles about you.” I spoke slowly, with as little emotion as possible.

  “Hold on.”

  Officer Yi stopped me. Yunsu was grimacing.

  “You’re not allowed to discuss his case or anything related to his case in here.”

  Officer Yi looked at me apologetically. We were quiet for a moment. I paused. I felt like asking, Then what can I talk about? His case was the fatal event that had brought the two of us together, and if it were not for his case, he would have had no reason to meet with members of the ministry. But such were the rules. I was in no mood for predictable conversation, for grasping at clouds or saying this was why Jesus came to earth or how precious we all were. What I really wanted to talk about was why Jesus had come to him and me specifically, and who I was and who he was, and exactly how someone like him could be considered precious. Yunsu had his head down, as if he could not yet understand what I was getting at. Behind him was the print of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. Since entering the painting, the son had spent every single day on his knees. I stared at his feet. One sandal had fallen off, and his bare foot was exposed. The father was patting his son on the shoulder. Rembrandt had painted the moment of the son’s return. He did not draw the father forgiving the son or the feast he threw for him after. The prodigal son had returned and the father was patting him on the shoulder, yet for over a hundred years he had not been able to straighten his knees. He would never rise and walk about his home on his own feet. The sons who knelt in this room like the prodigal one would have the noose placed around their necks while on bended knees in the execution room as well.

  “Officer, I was only planning to talk about myself. I’m not a prosecutor or a reporter, and I have no intention of attacking him.”

  Officer Yi thought it over for a moment and then nodded wordlessly. I looked back at Yunsu. His eyes were filled with the tension and curiosity of a roomful of first-graders. He looked very nervous, and also afraid. He even had the slightly stupid look of someone seeing a tribe of people they have never come across before.

  “To be honest, I don’t know you. I never thought for a moment that the newspapers would tell me everything there was to know about you. Newspaper articles contain facts, but there’s no such thing as a fact created by a fact. The truth is what makes facts, but people don’t care about that. Intention precedes action. Let’s say that someone tries to stab a man to death but accidentally cuts a rope that’s wrapped around his neck instead, and he survives. And now let’s say someone tries to cut a rope wrapped around a man’s neck, but the knife slips and he kills him instead. The first person would be a hero, but the second person would be executed. The world only judges our actions. We can’t show our thoughts to other people, and we can’t read each other’s minds. So are crime and punishment really that valid? Actions are only facts, and truth is always what comes before actions. So what we really need to pay attention to is not fact but truth. You’re the reason I’ve started thinking this way. I thought about what would happen if someone wrote a newspaper article on me. I would probably come off worse than you. Mun Yujeong attempted suicide three times. She attempted suicide despite receiving psychiatric treatment. Nobody knows why. The end.”

  His eyes seemed to flash behind his dark-rimmed glasses. If I had never met him, and if I did not have Aunt Monica, I, too, would have remembered him only for what I read in the papers. A bad guy. The end. But there was no end. It was around that time that I was starting to think maybe even death was not an end. As Rilke once said, some people continue to grow even after death.

  “We’re only three years apart in age. Same generation. We’ve probably walked right by each other–somewhere, at some poi
nt. But when I came to the prison for the first time this past winter, I couldn’t believe that the men in here were really born in the same country as me and lived right beside me. To be even more honest, I used to think I was the only one in this world who was unhappy. It made me even more miserable to wonder why everyone else was happy while I was not. But coming here has made me confused, including about myself. I’m unhappy, and yet why am I not locked up, too? I couldn’t understand that. This place seems like a gathering point for all of the unhappiness in the world. I was surprised that so many sins could be committed by so many people and that there were so many types of unhappiness as well. I was surprised, too, that every day, without fail, more unhappy people who had sinned were being brought in here. I thought that if we had a real conversation—though I didn’t know what that was—about why I was outside and you were inside, then maybe I could understand myself. Maybe I could understand why I was unhappy and why I couldn’t be happy. Do you know what I mean?”

  Yunsu stared at me, as still as a statue. He slowly nodded.

  “I’m not here because I have free time. If I had a class on Thursdays, I wouldn’t have been able to come today. But this semester, as luck would have it, I don’t teach on Thursdays, and my mother is in hospital. So I used all of these coincidences to come here. I’ve never done volunteer work or given to charity. And I don’t want to, either. In fact, I don’t believe in such a thing as a pure heart. Well, even if some people do have a heart like that, I certainly do not. I don’t like to go away empty-handed. So that means it’s your turn to talk. If I'm going to come here, I should get something from you, too. That’s only fair, right?”

  That was how our meetings began that spring day. Every meeting was our last meeting because we did not know when his sentence would be completed. Death row prisoners were technically in limbo, as their sentences were not fully carried out until the day they were executed. That was why they were not sent to the same prison as other criminals but were detained at the center with prisoners who were still on trial. Even the name of the place contained an administrative lie: The Seoul Detention Center was not in Seoul but in Uiwang. Nevertheless, it was still called the Seoul Detention Center.