“She came to see me at the public prosecutor’s office. Didn’t even call first.”
I dipped a salmon canapé in sauce. Of the people in our family, Yeongja was easier to talk about than my oldest sister-in-law, the pianist, or the next one down, the doctor.
“Someone broke into their house last week, and the burglar has been taken into custody by the police. But she asked me to have him freed.”
“Someone broke into Miss Seo Yeongja’s house? Why does Miss Seo Yeongja want them to let him go? Was he an old boyfriend of Miss Seo Yeongja’s or something?”
He clucked his tongue at me. I decided to be a little more serious.
“The problem is that the kid was caught red-handed stealing her jewelry. But Miss Seo Yeongja—eh, now you’ve got me doing it, calling her by her full name–”
My brother gave me a stern look and laughed. For a moment, it felt like old times. Like that day long ago, before I turned fifteen, when he had just started working and celebrated his first paycheck by treating me and only me to an ice cream cone. That long-ago time felt like a fairy tale now.
“But she didn’t press charges. Not only did she not press charges but she fed him, bathed him, and even bought him a pair of shoes before sending him away. Yuchan had no idea what his wife was up to, and a few days after that incident, he came home to find the kid choking Miss Seo—I mean, our sister-in-law. Anyway, he found him strangling her on the living-room sofa. Strangling his pregnant wife! So Yuchan grabbed the kid and started hitting him. Turns out, he says he’s fifteen, but he looks no older than a third-grader. That was when Yuchan found out that she had caught the kid stealing from them the time before. Of course he wasn’t going to stand for that. So he dragged the kid down to the police station. And now she wants me to set him free.”
I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. He laughed and drank a glass of the sherry that had come out as an apéritif.
“What I heard is that she’s well known all over the neighborhood. If a beggar walks past their house, she calls him inside, makes him take a shower, and fixes him a meal. If she sees construction workers eating on the ground, she calls them in and sets the table for them. The number of vagrants who’ve been through that house may not amount to a battalion, but we are talking about a squadron. Once, Yuchan even asked for a divorce and moved out of the house for a while because of her.”
My brother paused to light a cigarette.
“When she came to see me at the office, she had no makeup on, was dressed down… I almost didn’t recognize her. She addressed me formally as ‘Elder Brother-in-Law.’ It’s hard to believe she’s the same Seo Lina who used to be so attractive. Maybe it just happens with age?”
The moment was brief, but my brother seemed bothered that her beauty as a woman had faded. I remembered the day Yuchan, who was an economics professor, had told us, “I’m getting married, and her name is Seo Lina.” Our mother had said, “Are you crazy?” but our other brothers were oblivious, their faces filled with awe and jealousy. All they had to say about it was, “When are you bringing her home?”
“She told me something similar happened right after they were married. They were robbed by someone who took all of their wedding jewelry, and he was caught later by the police. But when they went to the station to identify the stolen jewelry, she cried and pleaded for clemency. She said she knew the kid and that she would take responsibility for it, and she asked them to let him go. The cops probably recognized her from her acting days and went along with it because of who she is, and because the kid was so young. Then recently—I think she said it was sometime just last year—she happened to get in a cab, and the driver asked if she remembered him. She said she asked who he was, but he didn’t answer. She got to her destination, went about her business, and came back out to find the cab driver waiting for her. He got down on his knees and told her he was the one she’d set free in the police station. He blew off the rest of his fares for the day and invited her to his house. She went with him and met his wife and their one-year-old baby. The guy’s wife told her that he talked about how grateful he was to her every single day, and that he said he would never forget the kindness of the woman who had cried and pleaded for the police to let him go. He said it made a human being out of him. After that whenever life became difficult, he was able to overcome it by thinking about her tears. That’s what she told me.”
The food we had ordered came out, but we were both quiet for a moment.
“She’s an unusual woman. I had always thought of her as a glamorous actress turned traditional wife who somehow managed better than the other wives, including handling the ancestral memorial services and putting up with our mother’s temper… but this time I didn’t know what to think. She kept saying, ‘He’s so young. Can’t you do something to help him? Let him go just this once. What’s the point of arresting him and churning out another ex-convict?’ So I talked to the other people involved, and then I called Yuchan. I told him, ‘That wife of yours is a real saint.’ He sighed and then sighed again, and he said, ‘Brother, they say you have to destroy ten lives to produce one saint. I’m one of the ten. I’m going to wind up on the street.’”
We laughed. As I was laughing, I realized that I had actually been looking down on her all along as a loser who couldn’t even make it through college and as a pushover who only knew how to say yes. At the same time, I realized that I had been looking at her through my mother’s eyes. I had been measuring people by the same snobbish scale that my mother used, the one I could not stand—all while despising my family members for being snobs. She clearly had problems and was probably causing danger, and living with her would no doubt, as Yuchan had said, wear you down to the point that you dropped dead, but all the same, I had to acknowledge how wrong I had been about her, and regretted misjudging her all over again.
“This isn’t a good family for a prosecutor,” I said. “If everyone keeps this up, they’ll have to shut down the public prosecutor’s office.”
He laughed and then looked at me.
“You think prosecutors just throw everyone into jail? We take people’s situations into consideration. Recently, there was a woman who was caught stealing with her baby. She was so pathetic that I asked her, ‘You’re not going to do this again, are you?’ And I suspended her indictment.”
“I don’t believe it!” I said. He laughed. I twirled the pasta around my fork, but I could barely eat anything.
“Mom’s been through a lot.” He paused in the middle of cutting his steak and glanced up at me. “The doctor examined her again, but he said it’s not a relapse. She said she wants to stay in hospital anyway. They put her in a VIP room. She insists it’s a relapse, so what can they do? She says she feels better there. You should go see her. I stop by every day on my way home from work. Whether or not it’s a relapse, she’s definitely not going to last long.”
He was trying to reason with me. It caught me off guard. I had assumed that he had asked to meet with me in order to scold me for not going to see her yet. He set his knife and fork down beside his plate, drank the wine he had ordered, and took a deep breath. It looked like we were about to have a “real conversation,” as Yunsu and I would put it. I suddenly found myself thinking, He’s been a prosecutor for a really long time. The look on my brother’s face just then—I had never been a criminal looking into the eyes of a prosecutor, but I had a feeling I knew what it would feel like.
“That thing you told me about last time when you were drunk in Itaewon.”
My heart sank. I lifted my wine glass and drank as slowly as I could.
“Yujeong, is it true?”
I lowered my eyes. I didn’t feel like talking anymore. I could understand why the families of murder victims refused to talk to Aunt Monica, and why she said that talking to the victims’ families was harder than rehabilitating death row convicts—the hardest thing, in fact, because the families did not want to listen to anyone consoling them about what had happened.
I didn’t understand it the first time she told me, but now that I was in their shoes, I did.
“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep after you told me. I really had no idea. I didn’t. Mom told me that someone had teased you, and that you were sensitive to anything to do with sex because you were going through puberty. But I still can’t believe it. Our cousin pretends to be so respectable.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
When I picked up my cigarette, my hand was shaking. I accidentally put the cigarette in my mouth backwards and then dropped it once it was lit.
“Mom was right,” I said, not bothering to pick the cigarette back up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“So it was true.”
My brother was a prosecutor. He had probably dealt with thousands of liars. His eyes were slowly turning red.
“I asked a lawyer friend of mine. If you wanted… a civil suit…”
He stopped talking and puffed on his cigarette. It wouldn’t be easy. Sue my cousin for damages for a rape he had committed fifteen years ago? My cousin, the board member of a major corporation known around the world? My cousin, known for being a man of character? My cousin, the devout Christian? There would be an uproar. People would wonder which of us was lying.
The only evidence was my testimony. And since I was on record for having attempted suicide and nearly being an alcoholic, and having therefore received psychiatric treatment, there was a strong possibility I would be charged with libel. My brother couldn’t have been unaware of that.
“I gave it a lot of thought. If you want me to, I’ll file a suit for you. I don’t even care if I get fired for it, not that that would happen. I don’t even care if Mom goes ballistic, or if I have to resign and open my own law practice. I’ll do it. Yujeong, if it’s true, I have to do something. What he did was unforgiveable.”
He became overwhelmed with his emotions and stopped talking. I felt bad. I was the one it had happened to—or as my mother put it, I was a grown girl who had wagged her tail around and got what was coming to her—but my brother was the one hurting from it fifteen years later. He couldn’t change jobs over and over, flitting like a bat to a new roost each night, in order to protect his little sister, and I felt both sorry for and thankful that he wanted to do just that despite knowing better.
“I’ve always tried to make the right choices in my work. It’s not what you or our sister-in-law seem to think. Prosecuting people doesn’t mean turning poor little petty thieves into ex-cons. I’ve talked a lot about justice in front of other people and, as a result, there’ve been many times when I’ve had to sentence someone and send them to jail even though it pained me to do so. But the reason I’m not ashamed is because someone has to be the bad guy. Because that is what has to happen in order for good people to receive legal protection. Because there is such a thing as justice. If you do something wrong, then it doesn’t matter how much money or how many connections you have. That’s why I’ve stuck with this job, so I can prove that.”
I felt like I could hear my heart beating. It was like he was prying open a very old wound and peering inside.
“It’s okay. Just hearing you say that means a lot to me. You don’t have to do anything.”
I meant it. I wasn’t satisfied, but it did give me some consolation. Having suffered the insufferable, I had become a liar. That was because the people I thought were there to protect me, love me, and defeat anyone for me had laughed at and ridiculed me instead. The incident itself had been horrible, but their reactions to it afterward left a scar I could not wash off. It was worse because I had loved and trusted them. But now my oldest brother said he hadn’t known. Maybe it was true, because there were things I hadn’t known either.
For example, I used to make fun of my youngest sister-in-law. When my mother sneered at her, saying, “I don’t care if she is married to a professor who makes barely any money, how can she go out dressed like that?” I used to agree with her. It had never occurred to me that my brothers might have their own struggles. And it would probably always be that way. Just like the shock I’d felt the first time I visited the detention center. I’d had no idea that some of the inmates were so poor that they didn’t have even a thousand won to their names while incarcerated. I’d had no idea that a vicious criminal like Yunsu, who’d raped and killed, could smile so brightly or cry so bitterly. But I couldn’t do anything about things I didn’t know. When Jesus said, “they know not what they do,” not only was he referring to us, but we were not even aware that we were the ones he was talking about.
My brother looked anguished. I patted his hand to calm him down and forced myself to smile.
“Don’t make a decision right now,” he said. He sounded genuinely distressed. “Give it some thought.”
“Yusik, how do retrials work?” I changed the subject. He looked surprised. “Can people who’ve been sentenced to death live if they get a retrial?”
The anguish and compassion disappeared in an instant from my brother’s face and was replaced with a kind of fatigue. It was the same look my mother gave whenever she told me I was just like my aunt.
“Retrials only happen when the real criminal is found, or if some conclusive evidence is found that could overturn the case. Why?”
I hesitated before responding.
“Yusik, this guy on death row I’ve been talking to, Jeong Yunsu, the one who was involved in the Imun-dong murder case, he hasn’t said so himself, but I heard from other people that he took the blame for his accomplice’s crime. That’s not something he told me. The accomplice said so himself. The accomplice has been bragging about it, so it must be true. Right now, the accomplice is in Daejeon or Wonju. He only got fifteen years, and they say he could get out sooner if he’s lucky.”
My brother scoffed, as if to say, Is that all?
“Why are you laughing?” I asked him. “If there is a way, then I’ll try to get him to tell the truth.”
He stared at me, his gaze that of an older brother looking down at his childish, pathetic little sister.
“The truth? Yujeong, that case is over. And the courts in this country are not that naïve. They don’t care about the lies those people tell.”
He picked up his cigarette pack and tapped it, feigning indifference, as if to say he was done talking.
“This person I’ve been meeting, he doesn’t lie. I found out about his accomplice from a prison guard. I’ve gotten to know him. He said when he was caught, he just wanted to die. When he first met Aunt Monica, he told her the same thing. He asked her to let him die. That must mean he took the blame because he was suicidal. I trust him. And you know I never trust anyone. But I know it’s true because I’ve wanted to die, too. I would have done the same thing. He’s not a liar. He may be bad, but he’s not a liar!”
“That’s enough.”
He cut me off, firmly, angrily, as if he could not hold back his displeasure. I felt like I’d fallen flat on my back, like we had been playing and having fun but he suddenly turned serious and shoved me hard. Five minutes ago, he said he would resign and endure public censure for me, but that man had disappeared and Mun Yusik, public prosecutor for the Republic of Korea, had taken his place. Didn’t the word persona originate from the Greek theatrical term for a mask or a role? In that case, which one was my brother’s mask?
“What’s so great about the courts? They’re not God. How can they know everything?” I demanded.
My brother gave me a stern look. His face said that he could forgive a lot of things, but not that.
“What kind of era do you think we’re living in?” He raised his voice. “Do you think we execute any criminal who asks for it? You think judges hear confessions and say, ‘Well, all right then,’ and hand down their verdicts?”
“But you never know. The only people who know the truth of the case are the people involved and God. They say that even countries like America have ten bad cases every year, and the real criminals are discovered only a
fter the person has already been murdered. So how can you be so confident? Innocent people die unfairly. You can’t say they don’t!”
“It’s not murder, it’s execution!”
My brother sounded really angry.
“It is murder.”
“Execution!”
“But that’s murder!”
He sighed. I kept going.
“Execution still means killing a person. That guy who blew up the Hangang Bridge during the Korean War, Choi What’s-his-name, was wrongfully executed for following orders. Then there was O Hwiung, who was tortured into confessing to a murder, and the People’s Revolutionary Party incident, when those men were falsely accused of organizing a communist revolt and were tortured and executed. And there have been a lot of people who went all the way to the Supreme Court and were on the verge of being sentenced to death when the real criminal was found and they were released. Those real criminals were all caught by accident. The prosecutors and the courts aren’t interested in finding the truth!”
My brother sighed again. I could tell he wanted to get up and leave. I tried pleading with him.
“Remember that cop who was arrested for murdering his girlfriend? You heard about it, didn’t you? They spent the night in a motel, and he left for work the next morning at seven. After he left, she was found dead in the motel room. He knew he would be accused of her murder, so he changed his timecard to make it look like he’d gone to work earlier. He manipulated evidence in a murder case and would have surely been given the death penalty. But then he said he killed her. Why do you think he said that? Because he knew police work all too well. He knew he had no way of getting out of it, so he confessed in order to get a lighter sentence. But then, some local thug happened to be arrested for petty thievery and was found with a motel key belonging to the cop’s dead girlfriend. That’s how they found the real killer, and the cop was released. And you know what else? There was that guy who was arrested for murder in Gyeongju. He insisted that it wasn’t him and that he hadn’t killed anyone, but the police pulled some tricks to come up with evidence that he couldn’t dispute and arrested him. That case was even added to the text-book for the Judicial Research and Training Institute as an example of an outstanding investigation, but later they caught the real killer and realized he was innocent. And that, too, was by chance!”
Our Happy Time Page 16
