We kept the words last time in parentheses each time we met, but we never forgot that those words were there. Each of our meetings lasted for three hours, from ten in the morning to one in the afternoon on Thursdays. That was 180 minutes that I could have shoved in the garbage, as Aunt Monica would say.
The following Thursday, we sat across from each other again. The world outside was filled with the pale light of spring, like sweetened condensed milk dissolving, but inside the detention center, it was always cold and dark. Someone had once described it as a place inhabited by death and, for all I knew, the brighter the light of the world, the deeper the shadows that covered the prison.
Yunsu looked cheerful.
“After I was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court, they put this tag on my shirt. One day, I was walking down the hallway when I saw someone coming toward me. I saw that he had a red tag, and my blood went cold. I thought he must be really bad if they put a red tag on him. I did everything I could to avoid making eye contact when we passed each other. I was afraid of him. I went back to my cell, ate, and was lying down for a moment, when it hit me. My tag was red, too.”
We both laughed. His cuffed hands held his coffee cup loosely.
“No one bothers you when you’re on death row. One morning, they served us rice cake soup. It must have been around the Lunar New Year. No one could eat it. Everyone was unhappy and thinking about the families they left behind, nearly crying over the situation they were in. One guy was crying because he had to leave his kids with no mother to care for them, and another guy was crying because his wife was sick. One guy was upset because his girlfriend dumped him for someone else. But then they all looked at me, and their faces changed. It was like they were thinking, This guy’s going to die soon, so their own worries seemed like nothing. They started to eat and, the next thing I knew, they were slurping it up. That’s when I knew: as a death row inmate, I could still do something nice for others. I’d never done anything nice for anyone else in my entire life, but now that I was on death row, I could. So, does this fit your idea of a real conversation?”
I couldn’t tell whether I should laugh or not.
“The last time you came, you said you didn’t like to go away empty-handed, and that you wanted to do this fairly. I wish you knew how happy that made me. I thought of myself as just an asshole—sorry, I mean, just a guy who had nothing to give to anyone. My hands are bound, I don’t have a penny to my name, I don’t know anything, and I was taught even less. Not even my life is my own anymore. So to hear you say that you want something from this ass—sorry, again—to hear you say you want something from me, well, I guess you really are an idiot.”
All three of us laughed.
“Okay, now I’ll tell you something real. I decided to become a hypocrite. Just the thought of being a believer makes me sick to my stomach, but I decided to give it a try. I decided if I was still alive by Christmas, I would get baptized, and I started taking catechism classes. Father Kim was teaching them. You probably already heard—he’s the one all the guys on death row here were skipping lunch and praying for—but he had a miraculous recovery and came back. His hair had all fallen out, and he was really thin, but he said he was better. Everyone was clamoring that it was a miracle. More people started taking his classes because of it. Even I started thinking about miracles for the first time in my life. Sister Monica sent me a letter last week. She wrote that when stones turn into bread and fish turn into people, it’s magic, but when a person changes, it’s a miracle. I don’t believe in miracles, but I felt like experimenting a little, to see if someone like me could live a different life. So I guess that makes me an idiot, too.”
Officer Yi and I laughed. He had caught us off guard with that.
“But I’ll stop talking about religion, since you probably don’t care for it. That’s only fair. I, too, don’t like being left empty-handed, and I don’t like when others are either.”
“Fine,” I said. It sounded like Yunsu had remembered everything I had told him last time.
“After I saw you last week, I thought it over carefully, and I really like the idea of having a real conversation. I don’t really know what a real conversation is, but I think I want to try. It’s because of you that I realized that there is such a thing as real conversation and fake conversation. It’s also the first time I realized that someone can go to school—and in some amazing place like France, at that—and study art and become a professor and be from a rich family, and still not be happy.”
He stared at me. He had an apologetic look in his eyes. I laughed quietly. My friends all said the same thing. What on earth do you have to be unhappy about? My mother said it, too. And my brothers. The only one who didn’t say it was Aunt Monica. Sometimes I heard her mumble to herself, Those who have everything are the poorest of all.
“I couldn’t even imagine it. I used to hate people like that. I thought you could kill all those assholes—sorry—all those people, and they would die in peace because they’d already enjoyed everything they could possibly enjoy. I couldn’t believe a young woman who had so much would…”
Yunsu paused to read my mood. After a moment, he continued, avoiding any mention of the word rape.
“…would be in so much pain and want to kill herself.”
He sounded like he meant it. He stared at me with compassion-filled eyes. I had never been looked at with so much empathy by a man before. He lowered his head for a moment.
“It wasn’t until I met you that I learned a woman of your class could be suffering and wanting to die in a different corner of the same world as me. Even rich people can suffer. You can still know nothing despite being well educated. And forcing a woman… Raping someone can be crueler than killing someone. For the first time, I realized that as a man. I went back to my cell that day and felt bad. For several days I kept muttering apologies on behalf of that man. And when I felt apologetic toward you, I thought of that girl who died, the seventeen-year-old girl…”
He stopped. He brought his hands up to his mouth, the cuffs glimmering around them, and buried his face in them. Since the cuffs forced his hands together all the time, he looked like he was praying.
“I felt so sorry. I know that saying sorry doesn’t make up for anything, but I was sorry. If I could atone for that by dying, I would die ten times over. I didn’t feel sorry back when the prosecutor was snarling at me. I was determined not to feel sorry, even if they were to hang me on the spot. But now I am, in spite of myself.”
He closed his eyes. Tears spilled from his closed lids. There was nothing clichéd about it. I had no intention of preaching to him, but he kept saying nice things and making me nervous. I was finding it harder and harder to think of the Jeong Yunsu I knew as the man who was behind the Imun-dong murder case that I had looked up online. I had even surprised myself during one of our meetings by suddenly wondering, Could he really have raped and killed someone? Whenever I looked him in the face, laughed, or drank coffee with him, I ached inside. It sounds stupid, but I wanted to ask him, Couldn’t you have not done it? I wanted to ask Yunsu the same thing Aunt Monica used to ask me: Why did you have to do it?
“I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but when I think back on those times, I have no idea why I did it. It feels like I’m watching myself in a movie. Actually, I felt the same way when I took the woman hostage and when they arrested me, like it wasn’t really me. But the problem is that it was. I can’t take it back, and now I can’t say sorry or ask for forgiveness. Now I get it. It really was me!”
He was shaking hard. Officer Yi grabbed a tissue and handed it to him. He took it and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“Also,” he said, staring down at the sweat-soaked tissue, “I’ve never used honorifics before. When I called you by the formal ‘you,’ I realized for the first time in my life that we have a really beautiful language.”
I opened the packet of kimbap that I had brought him for lunch and handed him the fork I had packed as
well in case the chopsticks were too difficult for him to use. He didn’t eat much. All three of us just sipped green tea.
“Officer Yi.” I changed the subject. “It’s your turn to give us some real conversation. Yunsu and I aren’t getting paid for this, but you get to listen to real conversation and take home a salary.”
Officer Yi laughed and said, “I’m no good with words. I don’t have anything real to say, but if I did, it would be that—just like you two—I’m a real idiot.”
We all had a good laugh. It felt like the three idiots were becoming friends. In that moment, death, anxiety, memories of murder, fear, and times of curses all seemed to pass us by. Though it was clear they were only setting up camp behind us, biding their time until our own time together ended, we avoided talking about them. I was afraid. The season moved on, three hours a week at a time.
It hardly seems to exist, except for the man who suffers it–in his soul for months and years, in his body during the desperate and violent hour when he is cut in two without suppressing his life. Let us call it by the name which, for lack of any other nobility, will at least give the nobility of truth, and let us recognize it for what it is essentially: a revenge.
– Albert Camus, Reflections on the Guillotine
BLUE NOTE 14
And then one day, I met a girl. She worked in a beauty salon close to where I lived. She was very popular among the guys in my gang. No matter how hard anyone tried to come on to her, she would not be won over. I went there to get my hair cut and liked her so much that I tried to pay her extra, but she said she didn’t take tips from bad guys like me. I had assumed from her crude way of talking that she’d been around the block, but she surprised me.
I fell in love with her. And though she didn’t show it, she seemed to like me, too.
I asked her to live with me, and she made a surprising suggestion. She said if I wanted us to live together then we should get married, and was I willing to throw away everything and run away with her and truly start a new life in order to marry her? She said she hated bad guys. I couldn’t make up my mind. I had no skills. To be honest, I was worried because manual labor doesn’t pay even a fraction of what you can get from stealing a few times. You have to have a home if you want to get married, and you could work for a hundred years as a manual laborer and still not be able to buy one. But I felt like I could go anywhere in the world as long as I was with her. We ran away together. She found work in another salon, and I ran deliveries for a neighborhood market. They were hard but happy times. Then, she got pregnant. That joy, too, was brief. One night, her stomach started hurting, so I carried her on my back to the hospital. They told us it was an ectopic pregnancy. They said they needed three million won to operate. They said I had to hurry because her life was in danger. She looked at me and said she was scared. I was scared, too. I couldn’t let her die like Eunsu. I had no choice but to hunt down my old friends while she was in the hospital. I had once made some good money from a job I pulledm, back when I was on top of my game, and loaned it to one of them. My plan was to get the money back from the guy. But he was gone, and instead an older guy he had been close with made me an offer. One last job, he said. I had no other choice. And I was thinking the same thing: just one last job.
PART 14
The water in the fountain was dancing in time to music. Children holding ice cream cones were running around the fountain, and people dressed up for a concert were walking by in pairs. I had arrived at the Seoul Arts Center a little early. Since I had time to kill, I was sitting at an outdoor café. The seasons were changing quickly. School had already been out of session for a week. As I watched people walk past me, I reached into my bag for my sketchbook and started drawing them. There were little girls in lace dresses that puffed out around their waists like tutus, little boys dressed in shorts and holding colorful balloons, and men walking hand in hand with women in sleeveless tops that revealed their slender arms. The summer evening was redolent with the heavy scent of trees breathing in the forest where the flowers had dropped their petals. I stopped in the middle of sketching and suddenly wondered if the people around me were happy. The old me would have stared at them like a vagrant looking up at lamp-lit windows from a darkened alley and assumed they must be happy. I used to think that if I could just get inside those windows, happiness would be waiting there like silverware set on a table. I used to toss and turn in bed every night, awash in the sorrow of one cast out alone into the wilderness, walking barefoot along an endless night road. But then I realized all over again that people don’t live in either the land of happiness or the land of unhappiness. Everyone is both happy and unhappy to some extent. But then again, maybe that wasn’t true, either. Maybe if everyone in the world could be divided into two groups, one group would be people who were somewhat unhappy, and the other would be people who were completely unhappy. And there would be no way of objectively distinguishing which was which. As Camus might have said, there were no happy people, just people who were richer or poorer in spirit when it came to happiness.
I filled a sheet in my sketchbook and turned to the next page. It hit me that Yunsu was somewhere out there on the other side of the mountain behind the arts center. A professor who had spent many years in prison as a political dissident once wrote that while winter is a humane season in prison, summer made you hate the man next to you. I pictured Yunsu’s young muscles; him shackled in a tiny room, enduring the body heat of the other men, never able to remove the cuffs except when he was changing clothes. He had told me that he was sensitive to heat, and that it was probably because he had been used to sleeping in cold places for such a long time. The cuffs even got in the way when he tried to wipe away the sweat. The dark-red sores that formed where the edges of the cuffs rubbed against his skin festered in the hot weather. “It’s a little better now,” Officer Yi had told me while applying the ointment I had brought for his wrists. “An older co-worker of mine told me that one death row inmate’s wrists got infected with maggots in the summer.” Instead of ice cream cones, children, and the dancing fountain that looked like a symbol of happiness, Yunsu's hands appeared on the pages of my sketchbook. His blue-tinged wrists, so pale that the veins showed because they never saw the sunlight except for thirty minutes of exercise every twenty-four hours. His scar-covered wrists and their gleaming silver cuffs. His eyes that he sometimes fixed on me before hurriedly casting them down. He had written in his letter, Do you know how much I look forward to Thursdays? I wish every day was Thursday. He was like a child. His childishness left me helpless. After meeting him, I felt bad for every warm ray of sun, every refreshing breeze, and every cool room in the summer. Whenever I drank a lemon soda filled with ice or a draft beer poured into a glass white with frost from the freezer, his face stopped me, and the degree of satisfaction I got from that sensual pleasure plummeted in inverse proportion to the money I had paid for it. There was a mother who had rented a room in front of the detention center after her son was put on death row. The room was as small as her son’s cell. She kept the heat off during the winter and the window shut tight during the summer. She was a devout Buddhist: she performed three thousand bows toward the detention center every morning and visited her son every afternoon. Was heaven moved by this? In the end, her son’s death penalty was commuted to a life sentence, and his true story became a legend in the detention center. A guy I dated once had told me about it, possibly over drinks one night when he was telling me stories from his time in the army. I remembered that he told me not to look down on the South Korean army. He had served as an intelligence officer while stationed in a forward unit, and he said the number one thing that disqualified a soldier from being assigned to patrol the DMZ, the military tinderbox where tensions ran higher along the border with North Korea, was if he had no mother. Maybe mother, ultimately, was just another word for love.
Someone tapped me lightly on the shoulder. It was my oldest brother Yusik, dressed in a dark-navy suit. With his necktie on in this hot
summer weather, he looked a little pitiful. This, too, was just another type of uniform. “You’re early,” he said, but when he saw the wrists and handcuffs I was sketching, his face hardened. I closed the sketchbook. He fanned himself lightly with the envelope he was holding and said, “So you’re still seeing him.” His voice dripped with contempt. I was not unaware of what he meant by his statement. I took his arm without responding, and we headed into the air-conditioned restaurant.
After we ordered, I glanced at the envelope he had brought with him. It looked like he had reserved recital tickets. He must have noticed that I was looking at them because he said, “Your sister-in-law asked me to get them on the way here.”
“I guess Korean prosecutors make good husbands,” I said, and he laughed.
“What else can I do? Her nerves are so on edge before a recital that at times I feel like trials are a piece of cake in comparison. Anyway, it’s easier to just do what she tells me to do.”
The men in my immediate family, including my deceased father, were all nice to women. Or as my mother put it, they were too weak to get out from under their wives’ thumbs. At any rate, we were putting off the real subject at hand—our mother—for as long as we could. Our food had not come out yet, and we knew that we couldn’t enjoy the food and talk about her at the same time. In a way, we were starting off in our own demilitarized zone.
“Something happened to Yuchan’s wife,” he said.
Yuchan was the youngest of my brothers. His wife was Seo Yeongja, the former movie actress whose stage name was Lina but whose real name was Yeongja.
Our Happy Time Page 15
