Our Happy Time

by Gong Ji-Young

  PART 18

  The Gwangtan-ri cemetery was cold. During the funeral Mass, I stood at the back and did not participate. I had prayed earnestly twice in my life. Both times were to ask for someone’s life to be saved. God should have listened to at least one of those prayers. But he didn’t. The woman who died at Yunsu’s hands had probably prayed as well. What was the point of holding Mass after someone is hurt and killed? Wasn’t it just so the living could comfort themselves? Yunsu had told me to trust him and to try to believe in Christ. Did I have to believe in a god who had probably never once listened to Yunsu’s prayers? I stared at the spot where Yunsu was going to be buried.

  Gwangtan-ri Catholic Cemetery Park. A liberal priest had donated a little bit of land that became a burial place for executed criminals. It was not a warm and sunny spot but the dark northern slope of the hill that even the sunlight skipped over. Yunsu had spent his life in the cold, and now that he was dead, he would be buried in the cold as well. Statues of the Virgin Mary and an angel stood close to where Yunsu would be buried. I asked Aunt Monica, “Why are the Mary and angel statues always so dirty where poor people are buried? Someone should clean them. Those statues are filthy. That makes me so angry.” But all Aunt Monica did was cry.

  Father Kim, who was present during Yunsu’s final moments, had come to see us right after the execution was over. His hair had fallen out from the chemotherapy, and he was wearing a black cap to cover up his baldness. He looked like he had not yet fully processed the fear and awe that come over someone who has witnessed a death. Aunt Monica went up to him and said, “Father.” He lifted his head, but I couldn’t exactly say that he was looking at her. Never before in my life have I seen such a troubled expression on a man's face.

  “He died peacefully.” Father Kim had struggled to get the words out for those of us who had been waiting. “When I went in, I was shaking. Yunsu said to me, ‘If you shake like that, Sister Monica will get mad at you.’ He told me to be a man.”

  Aunt Monica reeled backwards. I caught her.

  “I prayed, gave him communion, and asked if he had any last words, and he said he first wanted to offer one final sincere apology to those who had lost their lives because of him. He apologized to their families, too. Then he apologized to the mother of the cleaning lady. He said he was thankful to her, and that her courage enabled him to be reborn. Then he said that he forgave his mother. But he changed his mind and asked me to tell her instead how much he missed her, how much he had always missed her, and that he only wanted to see her one last time before he died. He asked me to pass that message along.”

  The women who had been volunteering at the detention center for a long time began to cry even louder.

  “Then Yunsu mumbled, ‘Father, it was so simple, all I had to do was love.’ He said he figured it out too late. I asked him if he felt like singing, as the prisoners from other denominations are allowed to do, and I asked if he knew any hymns. He said that since he was baptized recently, he did not yet know any. Then he said he would sing the national anthem instead.”

  I couldn’t listen to any more of it. Aunt Monica squeezed my hand.

  “So he sang it. The national anthem.”

  Father Kim paused, teary-eyed, as if it were difficult to keep going.

  “When the bailiffs made him kneel, he…”

  We were all staring at Father Kim.

  “He started to struggle. The last look in his eyes was of fear. The bailiffs rushed to cover his face with the hood, and Yunsu screamed, ‘Father, save me, I’m frightened. I’m still scared even though I sang the anthem.’ I couldn’t look at him anymore…”

  Father Kim was as pale as if he had been the one hanging from the noose.

  We went down to the basement to view the body. Yunsu’s eye sockets were empty—an ambulance had been waiting to take his eyes immediately after the execution. In death, Yunsu had turned as blind as his younger brother. But we comforted each other by saying that his corneas would enable another blind child like Eunsu to see. Aunt Monica rushed over to Yunsu’s body, which had not yet turned stiff, and embraced him. She stroked his neck. There was a black mark, like a skid mark on asphalt, around his throat. Aunt Monica patted his neck as if he were still alive, rubbed his cheek, and prayed quietly.

  I stood beside her and held Yunsu’s hand—a hand that was uncuffed only after he was dead. His skin was as cold as a candle. I remembered how his hand had hovered over mine, though only for a moment, when he gave me the cross necklace he had made. His skin was so warm then. Why didn’t I smile and take his hand? Why didn’t I tell him I loved him? As Yunsu said, it was so simple. All we had to do was love each other. And now that warmth was gone. If the fading of warmth signifies death, then the moment we lose the warmth in our hearts—that must be another kind of death. There was a time when he and I were oblivious to that knowledge and just wanted to die. Maybe that, too, was already a type of death.

  After Mass, Aunt Monica and I rushed to leave for Gangneung. She slept while I drove. Though I had neither eaten nor slept in two days, I was not tired. A strange feeling came over me while I was driving. My back grew warm, so I turned to look. The back seat was empty. But something definitely felt different. Yunsu had never been in my car or even seen it. Yunsu? I said his name quietly. There was no answer.

  We reached the ocean. Since it was the end of the year, the hotel was crowded. The principal of the branch school in Taebaek had arrived with eight students. The children chattered and ran around excitedly when they saw the beach for the first time. I realized that I had forgotten to bring the camera my sister-in-law lent me. Then I realized that I no longer needed it. Yunsu had said that he wanted to see the beach; maybe he was seeing it now. That’s what I wanted to believe. The sky was overcast. The ocean looked gloomy. But there was no telling how the weather would be tomorrow. Nobody knew that.

  A small, thin man headed over to where Aunt Monica and I were standing and introduced himself as the principal of Taebaek Branch School. He thanked us for arranging the trip and then scratched his head in bewilderment.

  “I got a phone call from the Seoul Detention Center today,” he said. “They said Jeong Yunsu was sending me money. I told them I heard he was executed yesterday, and they said he had asked the prison guard in advance to send any money left in his account to us if he was suddenly executed. I don’t want to use this precious money unwisely, so I wanted to ask for your advice.”

  The principal took a bankbook out of the breast pocket of his coat and showed it to us. It was a very small amount.

  “We’re currently installing a permanent awning next to the schoolyard. If it’s all right with you, we were thinking of putting the money toward that. The classrooms are spacious enough for us, but when the children are playing in the schoolyard, they have nowhere to go to get out of the rain, and in the summer, there’s no shade where they can just read a book or relax. It has been difficult for them. So we wanted to ask what you thought of putting the money toward the awning.”

  Aunt Monica whispered, “Oh Lord.” She and I were thinking of Yunsu’s journal, which we had read together the night before when we couldn’t sleep. We were both picturing little Eunsu crying in the rain like a motherless sparrow, waiting for his brother who was at school. Aunt Monica made the sign of the cross.

  “I’m so sorry,” the principal said. “If that’s not a good idea, we could put the money to some other use.”

  He seemed confused by the looks on our faces. We were crying as if in shock, so he probably thought it meant we disagreed with him.

  “Oh no, you have to use the money for that,” said Aunt Monica. “Don’t use it on anything else but that. Please put that awning up so they can keep dry when it’s raining and stay out of the sun when it’s hot. That way, if there’s ever a young child waiting there for his big brother, he won’t get wet in the rain, and his big brother won’t feel sad to see—” Aunt Monica couldn’t continue. She started crying again.

&n
bsp; I walked Aunt Monica, who was weak from not eating or sleeping for several days, back to the hotel. The day was growing dark. Aunt Monica suggested we turn in early so we could get up at dawn with the children. I asked her, “Will the sun rise tomorrow?”

  “It will rise,” she said. I pointed out that the kids were having a good time, and she said that they certainly were. On the way into the building, I suddenly stopped and looked back. The first line of the song that Yunsu and Eunsu liked so much, the national anthem, started with that ocean. Until the East Sea runs dry and Mt. Baekdu wears away, God save us and keep our nation… I knew it was just the sound of the waves, but from somewhere out there, way out past the water, I thought I could hear, very faintly, two young brothers singing beside a garbage can in an alleyway. It’s a great country, isn’t it? Whenever I sing this song, I feel like we’re good people. Blind Eunsu’s whispered voice seemed to follow the waves in, just barely reaching my ears. Out past the scampering children, the gray sea shimmered over the earth like brimming tears.

  I would always like to say just this one thing (it is almost the only thing I know for certain up to now)–that we must always hold to the difficult; that is our part.

  – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

  BLUE NOTE 19

  P.S. Please deliver this message to Sister Monica and Father Kim: Thank you, I am sorry, and I love you. They remind me of that poem about someone making griddlecakes with their tears. They always knew exactly when to turn the cakes to keep them from burning, they shared those warm cakes with us, and in the end they taught us all grace.

  PART 19

  Several people were already in the hospital room. Father Kim greeted me when I walked in. He had put on a lot of weight since I last saw him, and his hair had grown back. “You got bigger,” I said. He laughed, patted his belly, and said, “Indeed, I keep getting fatter.” Things change when you’re alive. Sometimes they get worse, and sometimes they get better. In the seven years that had passed since Yunsu’s death, I had met many other Yunsus. I don’t think I was just imagining it. It didn’t matter whether you were a judge riding around in a fancy black sedan or a diabolical murderer, we were all equally pitiful and equal debtors in life from the point of view of a greater judge. No human being was fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. We all struggled to make it through each day. If there were a fundamental truth, it was that everyone fights death. This was our common thread, pathetic and as old as time, and it could not be severed.

  Aunt Monica was wearing a white cap instead of her usual veil. It was a round sleeping cap edged with lace, like something you would see in a movie. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the cap, but Aunt Monica’s body was so tiny that she looked like a baby in a cradle. If her face were not so old, it might have looked as if everyone was surrounding the bed to celebrate a new birth. She had been talking to Father Kim just before I walked in. She gestured to me to sit down and turned back to him.

  “So like I was saying, he asked for a Bible. That means he agreed to meet with you, right? How was he when you saw him?”

  I thought back to that snowy day when I had rushed to the detention center because Aunt Monica slipped and hurt herself, only to find her sitting there with a pink floral handkerchief wrapped around her head. Back then, I had looked at her and thought, You win. I felt the same way again today.

  It sounded like Aunt Monica and Father Kim were talking about a serial killer who had just been sentenced to the death penalty.

  “Well, he didn’t have much to say,” Father Kim said. “He must have had some experience with Christianity when he was young. He said he killed his victims in front of a window where a church cross was easily visible. Also, he said that he sees himself as evil and that he’s afraid to stop thinking of himself that way. But when I met him, he was just an ordinary person.”

  Father Kim laughed bitterly. Aunt Monica closed her eyes, as if overwhelmed.

  In 2004, there wasn’t a soul in Korea who didn’t know about that murderer. Because of him, voices calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty—which had been abolished after December 1997 in keeping with the president’s campaign promise—were gaining strength, and people’s legal sympathies toward death row convicts were growing cold. Even the other people on death row that I had been meeting with after Yunsu’s death said that they had read about him in the newspaper and caught themselves thinking, He must be killed. And they laughed, despite themselves.

  Aunt Monica was in the middle of talking to Father Kim about the murderer when I came into the room.

  “We don’t have the right to give up on someone,” Aunt Monica said, “no matter how horrible his crimes are, even if he is the devil incarnate. None of us are entirely good. No one is completely innocent. Some are just a little more good and some are a little more evil. Life gives us the opportunity to decide whether to atone for our sins or continue committing them; therefore, we do not have the right to stop that from happening. You have a difficult task ahead of you, Father Kim. I wish I could help you, but I think my time here is nearly up.”

  Aunt Monica sounded calm. When she brought up dying, Father Kim looked like he was about to offer some clichéd words of comfort, but he stopped himself. Aunt Monica turned to me, the same expression in her eyes as ever. That playful look still glimmered there every now and then, but for a long time it had become harder for her to make jokes. After Father Kim left, I sat beside her.

  “Dr. Noh called you?”

  I nodded and gently stroked her face, just as she had done for me one winter long ago. She must have been thinking about that winter, too, because she smiled.

  “So,” she asked, “now that you’ve made it this far without dying, how do you feel about it?”

  “I guess I feel like I have more living to do.”

  I wanted to cry. Aunt Monica looked like a candlewick about to go out. Once again, I thought, What am I going to do without her? I had been wondering that for a long time. But now I was sure of one thing: I would go on living, even if I felt like I was dying. I knew that saying such things as I felt like I was dying or This isn’t really living were actually statements about life. It was the same with I’m so hot I could die and I’m so hungry I could die and I want to die. You could only feel like you were dying if you were alive and were therefore a part of life. So instead of saying I wanted to die, I had no choice but to change it to I want to live well.

  “How is your mother?” asked Aunt Monica. I told her she was in good health, and we both smiled.

  “I found Yunsu’s mother,” she said.

  The moment I heard Yunsu’s name, my throat locked up, and I could not respond.

  “I found out she’s living nearby,” Aunt Monica continued. “One of the sisters from our convent was helping with the elderly who don’t have anyone to take care of them, and there she was. Who knows what has happened to her over the years? The sister thinks she might have Alzheimer’s. She contacted me after she checked her records.”

  I took Aunt Monica’s hand without saying a word. She took out a cross that she had placed near her bedside, her hand trembling, and handed it to me. It was the cross that Yunsu had molded for her from rice paste before he died.

  “Please take this there and give it to her. They said that whenever it’s not too cold out, she spends the whole day sitting outside waiting for someone. The nun asked her who she was waiting for, and she said her son. She asked what his name was, and the woman said ‘Unsu.’”

  I tried repeating the name ‘Unsu’ after her and got a lump in my throat. It sounded like it was halfway between Eunsu and Yunsu. I took the cross. Aunt Monica was so weak that she closed her eyes again.

  “Will you pray for me to die soon? I’m in a little bit of pain… Actually, I’m in a lot of pain. Even the morphine isn’t helping.”

  I said I would.

  “It’s strange. Before you got here, I dreamt that all of those boys I’ve seen executed were here in the room with me.
Yunsu was here, too. They were all dressed in white. They were smiling so brightly, but they had black rope marks around their necks. I guess even in death, the marks don’t go away. It was just a dream, but it was heartbreaking.”

  I couldn’t hold back anymore and burst into tears.

  “Don’t cry, my beautiful Yujeong. When you survived, when you went with me to the detention center for the first time, when you struggled to understand Yunsu, when I heard you went to see your brother to try to save him… I was so proud. The truth is that I was always secretly keeping an eye on you, always with my heart in my mouth. You have so much passion in you, and passionate people always hurt more. But that’s never anything to be ashamed of.”

  I cradled Aunt Monica’s face in my hands. Her face was very small and covered in wrinkles. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. I wanted to tell her how frightened I was and that I didn’t know how I should live. Just like Yunsu, I had figured it out too late. For the first time in my life, I wanted to say those words that I had never been able to say before, the words could not be replaced with any others.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Monica. I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

  She smiled lightly and stroked my hands.

  “It makes me so happy to see our Yujeong all grown up,” she said.

  Aunt Monica smiled, but the pain must have been bad because it turned into a grimace.

  “Pray. Please pray. Not just for those on death row, not just for criminals. Pray for those who think they are without sin, those who think they are right, those who think they know everything and who think everything is fine. Pray for those people.”