Our Happy Time

by Gong Ji-Young

  Officer Yi didn’t say a word. Of course, Yunsu already knew he was dying. He had spent two and a half years knowing he would die. The only thing he didn’t know was whether it would be today or the next day. We all know it: that we will die some day. But even though he was on death row, was it right not to notify him of his death and allow him to prepare for it? But what could Officer Yi do?

  I hung up and paced back and forth in my room. No. It was too mean and inhumane. It was murder. And then it occurred to me. The only type of death that can be predicted, and stopped, is a death by execution. Yet we were helpless to do anything about it.

  I tried getting on my knees, but I couldn’t pray. It had been too long. “Save him. Please save him,” I mumbled. “I know he did a bad thing, but if you would save him, if you would only save him…” At that instant, the memory came back to me. Fifteen years ago, in that brute’s room on the second floor of the head family’s house, when I cried in his grasp, not knowing what else to do, I had prayed just like this. My prayer had gone unanswered. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. I stood up. I could hear the clock tick. It was five in the afternoon. The execution was set for ten the next morning. In seventeen hours, he would be gone. The clock ticked on and on, oblivious. I pulled the batteries out. A breathless silence filled the room as time stood still.

  All of the hours that I had spent with him began to flash before my eyes. Not the times when he clenched his teeth and lashed out at Aunt Monica or when he scoffed at her, but rather the times he laughed and the times his tears fell. The time he shook and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” when he met the mother of the woman he killed. Would he shake like that when he entered the execution room and the noose was lowered? Just four days earlier, he had told me, What if I could keep living here, writing letters to children even though my hands are cuffed, passing along the love that I’ve received from everyone even though my body is shackled, spending the rest of my life praying and atoning for the people I hurt? I could think of this place as a monastery. I know I don’t deserve it. It’s shameless of me to even think that way.

  How many minutes had gone by? Time had lost all rhythm. A sudden anxiety came over me: What if the whole night had already gone by and dawn was approaching? I grabbed my cell phone to check the time. It had only been three minutes. It scared me all over again to see how slowly this parched hour was passing. Then I realized that maybe it was better for Yunsu not to know. I realized it might be unbearable for him otherwise, and I started to feel a little better. I looked at my hands and stood up. Then I slowly walked over to the telephone.

  I dialed information.

  “I’m looking for someone named Mun Yuseong.” My lips kept twitching as I spoke. It was the first time I had ever said his full name out loud. Before it happened, I used to call him Brother.

  “Mr. Mun Yuseong? What is the address?” I told the operator I didn’t know. I knew I was being stupid. But I couldn’t call my brother Yusik and ask. “There are many people named Mun Yuseong all over the country,” she said politely.

  “He lives in Seoul,” I told her. “In a rich neighborhood. I’m not sure where.”

  “I’m sorry,” the operator continued, “but I will need more information to locate his phone number for you.” She was friendly, but her voice was flat. I hung up and left the apartment. When I got in my car and turned the key, my hands were shaking. I clenched my teeth and put the car in gear.

  My mother had her reading glasses on and was flipping through a magazine. She lifted her head as I came in. I stood in the doorway and stared at her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  When she said that, I wanted to turn around and leave. It would have been easier for me if she had at least looked a little more haggard, or just a little bit more pitiful. Or if she’d looked a bit lonelier, as my sister-in-law had said. But to my regret, my mother looked healthy and relaxed.

  Mummy, it hurts, it hurts really bad. She may have been my mother, but it was still hard back then for me, a grown girl, to show her my private parts. She had looked at me down there for a moment and then pulled my underwear back up. Then she had said coldly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I couldn’t believe it at first. When I had left the head family’s house, I had trouble walking because of the swelling in my crotch. I had walked down the street crying, a girl in a grown-up body. Each time I thought I could not go any further because of the pain that threatened to tear me in half with each step, I told myself that if I could just get to my mother, if I could just tell her what had happened, everything would be okay. I believed that I would be comforted and that he would be punished. But the moment I heard her words and saw the cold look on her face, a clear barricade seemed to drop like a guillotine blade and lodge itself between us.

  “Cousin Yuseong called me into his room. He said he had something to tell me. So I went upstairs. He pulled off my underwear… Mommy, it hurts. I’m scared. It hurts so much.”

  I was crying and overwhelmed with pain and fear and could not keep talking.

  My mother went downstairs and returned after a moment. She handed me a tube of generic ointment.

  “Put this on it and go to sleep. And keep your mouth shut. You got what was coming to you, wagging your tail around like that, a grown girl…”

  I collapsed on the floor, the ointment my mother had given me clutched in my hand.

  “You have no shame. Keep quiet and don’t go prancing around in front of your older brothers. Understand? You really do read too many storybooks!”

  “No!”

  I screamed as hard as I could. My mother covered my mouth. “No, no, no!” When I struggled, she slapped me on the cheek over and over. It was the first time she had ever hit me.

  I walked over to my mother. With a scowl on her face, she turned over the magazine that she had been looking at and sat up. To my surprise, she looked scared.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she yelled.

  I couldn’t open my mouth. My lips trembled. I wanted to turn around and go home.

  “I didn’t know what else to do. So I came here… to tell you… I forgive you.”

  My heart felt like it was being sliced into a million pieces. Tears sprang from my eyes, as if the blood that had congealed in a corner of my parched, cracked heart had started moving again. My eyes ached.

  “I couldn’t forgive you before. And even right now, at this very moment, I don’t want to! What you did was even more unforgiveable than what he did. But I’m here today to try to forgive you.”

  My mother still had no idea what I was talking about, but she snorted like it was nothing.

  “You sure find all sorts of ways to worry me. Your mother is dying and you don’t even visit once. But now you show up—and for what? Who should be forgiving whom?”

  “I should forgive you!”

  My mother pushed her blanket away and sat up straight.

  “Are you crazy? Do we need to call your uncle? What’s wrong with you?”

  I wept loudly like a child. The crying I could not do at fifteen, and the crying I did not do even once after that day, was forcing its way up my throat. I felt I would suffocate to death if I did not let it out.

  I tugged at the blue crucifix necklace Yunsu had given me. Even that seemed to be choking me. Is this what it would feel like to hang from the gallows? The face is covered in a white cloth hood, and the rope is looped around the neck. The order is given, and five bailiffs pull five levers. I read that only one of the five actually works, but the purpose is to lessen the sense of guilt for the bailiffs. When the real lever is pulled, the floor opens up beneath the kneeling prisoner, and he is hanged. Often, his feet are still shaking, even after he has been hanging for fifteen to twenty minutes. After the doctor presses a stethoscope to the prisoner’s chest to verify that the heart has stopped, he is left hanging for another twenty minutes. Some people are still not dead even after all of that, and sometimes the r
ope breaks or is too long. Others just fall and wind up bruised and bloodied. If that happens, they start over from the beginning. Such is the ceremony they call an execution.

  My tears would not stop. My throat ached from crying for the first time in fifteen years. It ached as if I were being throttled.

  My mother tried to sneak around me toward the door. Though my mouth had spat out the word forgive, my eyes were probably brimming with murder, just as Yunsu’s once did, and just as mine had for a long time. But I thought maybe it would be better if my uncle were there, as she had suggested. Then maybe he would say, That’s right, Yujeong, go ahead and cry. You should cry. Then I would probably tell him, I’m sorry, Uncle. He would ask me what I was sorry about. And I would say, I don’t know, I don’t know why I am sorry.

  “I don’t want to forgive you,” I said to my mother. “But I think I’m supposed to. I think maybe I’m supposed to make a sacrifice of my own. And it should be the hardest thing there is for me to do, the thing I’d rather die than do. That means forgiving you!”

  My brother Yusik opened the door and came in. He must have been stopping by on his way home. My mother ran over to him.

  “Yusik! Something’s wrong with Yujeong. How am I supposed to die peacefully when she keeps acting like this? That poor thing. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  She started crying, too. Was she afraid? I had no idea. Was she hurt because of me? I thought maybe so. She was probably thinking the same thing I was: Why the hell does the world keep angering me and refusing me even the tiniest sliver of peace and happiness? It was just a guess, but I figured she was crying out of anger.

  Yusik sat her down in a chair and tried to calm her down. Then he came over to me. He grabbed my arm hard, and I staggered. “I need to forgive her,” I muttered. He dragged a chair over and sat me down in it. “I came here to forgive her,” I said stubbornly.

  “The execution is tomorrow,” I told him. “They’re going to kill him! I thought if I did something I don’t normally do… I know it’s stupid, but there was nothing, not a single thing, that I could do. I thought that if there really is a God, then he would know how hard this is for me, he would know that this is something worse than death, and he would look kindly on me and maybe, just maybe, a miracle would happen. Can you understand?”

  He let out a long sigh.

  “Everyone expected Father Kim to die, but he got better. So I thought this was what I was supposed to do. We need to open our eyes… Yusik, what am I supposed to do? It’s not fair. I tried to kill myself more than once, so God should take me instead. I’m just as much a sinner.”

  He grasped my shoulders, his face filled with patience.

  “I… I was going to love him. Since I can never be with any man anyway, I thought it would be okay if Yunsu were alive, even if he had to stay in prison forever. I just want him to live.”

  My brother seemed to understand everything at once. He shouldn’t have understood it, or accepted it, but he at least knew what I was trying to say. Yunsu wasn’t gone yet, but since there was nothing I could do to stop the execution from happening, my brother probably felt reassured that there wasn’t any real danger.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” he asked gently.

  “Would you have tried to save him if I did?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Yusik, I haven’t told anyone else.”

  I lowered my head. I had failed again. I had done a foolish thing.

  It was a long, long night. I still remember that night. Everything was so vivid and yet so numb at the same time. I kept flipping back and forth between both extremes. And then dawn came. I had fallen asleep. When I woke up and looked out, the sky was hazy. The air was cold. I felt ashamed for having fallen asleep at a time like that. I couldn’t shake the thought that I was alive while he was about to die. I ran out and got into my car. When I look back on it now, I was like a shaman dancing on knives. I was neither tired nor hungry. Everything felt unreal, like the time I smoked hashish in France and time and space seemed to drift around. The only difference between now and then is that back then I was powered by drugs, whereas now I was powered by suffering. When people reach an extreme, they all feel the same thing: numbness.

  Aunt Monica was already waiting outside the execution room. She looked like she had shrunk into a black ball. The execution was scheduled for 10:00 am. I checked my watch: 9:50 am. She held a cloth bundle in her hands. He was not dead yet, but we were already holding his mementos. Aunt Monica closed her eyes, her hands clasped around her rosary. I took the bundle from her hands. The simple bundle held everything he had owned in his twenty-seven years. I looked through it. A Bible, underwear, socks, a blanket, and some books. And a blue spiral notebook. I pulled it out. Written on the cover in black marker were the words: Jeong Yunsu’s Diary. I clutched it to my heart as if it were Yunsu himself.

  A Buddhist monk, a pastor, and a priest filed into the execution room, while the family members and volunteers stayed outside. One person had already fainted and had to be carried out. A woman dressed in the gray robes of a Buddhist hermitage approached Aunt Monica and took her hand.

  “Sister, be strong.”

  Aunt Monica nodded weakly.

  “Those boys are barely even human when they come in here,” the woman said as she cried, “but they are angels when they leave. We kill them after they become angels. Sister, let’s stop this. I can’t take it anymore.”

  Aunt Monica patted her on the back.

  The Buddhist woman hugged Aunt Monica and cried. I moved to a corner. A woman I had seen several times in the detention center came over to me and asked, “Are you okay? Your lips are white.” I told her I was fine, and she said, “Don’t be sad. They’re going to heaven today.” I wanted to snap, “I bet you wish you could send them there yourself,” but I didn’t have the energy. I walked away from her. She pressed her hands together, raised them up in the air, and mumbled something. Then she came over to me again with a bright look on her face. I would’ve preferred it if she weren’t there.

  “Don’t cry,” she said. “They’re going to heaven today. Their suffering is over. You’re the inmate’s older sister, right? I think I’ve seen you here a few times.”

  “No, I am not his sister!”

  I shouted at her and walked away. As I did so, I spotted someone in a uniform hovering on the other side of the room. It was Officer Yi, looking like he could not bring himself to come over and join me but could not quite leave either. The moment my eyes met his, he dropped his head and avoided my gaze. His eyes were very bloodshot. Suddenly, I thought about how I had said I was not Yunsu’s sister. I stood next to the wall and wept. I wept like Peter when he denied knowing Jesus three times. It was 10 o’clock.

  Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord GOD, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live?

  – Ezekiel 18:23

  BLUE NOTE 18

  Before I started writing these notes, I wrote a letter to my accomplice at his prison in Wonju. I told him I forgave him. I forgave him for switching our stories and hiring a lawyer and making me the main culprit. And I forgave the police for not investigating the case properly and wrongfully accusing me of rape and murder, the public defender who only came to see me twice in eight months while my three trials were taking place, the prosecutor who treated me like an insect rather than a human being, and the judge who pretended to be cool, as objective as a god, even while enraged at me for committing murder. I wrote that I forgave them all. I forgave my father who ended his life like a helpless animal. And, before the merciful Lord, I forgave myself. I told Him I forgave myself for beating up my little brother Eunsu, for not singing the national anthem for him even though it was his final wish, and for cursing in his face and running out on him when he was sick. And, for participating in the murder of three innocent people. Only then was I finally able to get down on my knees and beg for forgiveness from th
e two women and the helpless girl who died because of me. I was able to kiss the earth and exclaim: I am not a human being. I am a murderer.

  The reason I was able to do this is that, after coming to the detention center, I have been treated as a human being for the first time in my life. I understand for the first time what it means to be human and what it means to love. I know finally how people can speak to and treat each other with respect, and love each other with trembling hearts. Had I never murdered anyone and wound up here, I might have been able to extend my physical life, but my soul would have wandered forever through maggot-infested sewers. I would not have even known that they were maggots and that I was in the sewer. After coming here, I have experienced happiness for the first time. Waiting, getting excited about meeting someone, sharing a real conversation with another human being, praying for someone, meeting without pretense—I understand now what that all means.

  Only someone who has been loved can love. Only someone who has been forgiven can forgive. I understand that.

  Probably no one will find this notebook until after I am dead. If the president who used to be on death row puts a stay on further executions as he promised, then I will have to say all of this myself, even though the words have so far refused to come out of my mouth. Nevertheless, if I do die, then please, whoever is reading this, please pass it along to Sister Monica’s niece, Mun Yujeong. I wanted to tell her everything and have more real conversations with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I was afraid she would be disappointed in me. I was afraid she would be disappointed and leave, like everyone else in my life. If she refuses to take this notebook, then please tell her one thing for me: The times we spent together, the instant coffee we drank, the little pastries we shared—those few hours each week enabled me to bear any insult, withstand any pain, forgive any grudge, and truly repent for my sins. Tell her that, because of her, I have had so many warm and precious and happy times. And tell her that, if she were to allow me, I would do whatever it takes to comfort her wounded soul. Finally, if God permits me to before I die, I want to tell her the words that I have never once said to anyone else in my life: I love you.