Our Happy Time (19 page)

“Yujeong!”

My brother looked scared. I lowered my voice.

“Yes, I know. Murder is bad. That’s why I couldn’t do it. I lacked the courage and the opportunity. But what would have happened if I had? If I thought he deserved to die because he was scum, and I hanged him for it, would that have been murder? And if I was then arrested and hanged for murder, would that have been justice? In both cases, one human being is deciding that another human being deserves to die. It’s one human being killing another human being. But according to you, one is murder and the other is execution. One person is branded a murderer and dies for their crime, while the other gets a promotion. Is that justice?”

My brother stared at me silently. His face was hard. He laughed and said, “So visiting a prison has turned our little Yujeong into a good girl.”

Then he grabbed the check and left.

Is there really such a thing as fate? Maybe there is. That day, my friend’s friend and I decided we would knock over a jewelry shop in Uijeongbu. We got on the subway to go check it out. We were supposed to transfer lines at Dongdaemun, but we were so absorbed in talking that we got off at Dongdaemun Stadium by mistake. And that’s where I ran into that fateful woman. If I had remembered correctly where we were supposed to transfer, what would have become of me? Would I have been saved?

The woman was in her forties and ran a small bar that I used to go to back when I ran around with a bad crowd. She treated me well, like a younger brother, and sometimes even gave me spending money. Her behavior wasn’t very nice (although, what is “nice behaviour” anyway?). She used to flirt with me all the time. I could never have done anything with her since she was practically an older sister to me, but
for some reason I didn’t like her. I don’t know. Maybe I sensed some ill fate? She said it just so happened that she had the day off and invited us over to her house for drinks. I didn’t want to go because I couldn’t stand the way she was openly flirting with me, but the other guy gave me a look that said we should. It turned out that he knew she had a lot of money. But I interpreted the look to mean that he just wanted to have a drink. So even though I didn’t want to, I went to that woman’s apartment in Imun-dong.

As soon as we got into the house, the woman changed into a see-through skirt and brought out a bottle of alcohol. She asked if we could talk in private. I told the other guy to wait in the living room, and we went into the master bedroom. When I thought about how the woman I loved was hovering between life and death, pregnant with my doomed child, there was no time for small talk. I begged her to loan me three million won and promised to do
whatever
it took to pay her back. She listened to my whole story and then made me an offer: she would save the woman I loved but, in exchange, she wanted me to move in with her instead after the operation was finished. I looked at the woman who had invited us over just so she could
proposition
me, wasting my time in my moment of desperation, and I got angry. I lost my temper and told her there was no way I was going to do that. I stood up to leave. Just then, we heard a scream coming from across the living room.

S
ummer was ending in wind and rain. I looked forward to every Thursday the way the fox looked forward to the little prince’s arrival every afternoon at four. I avoided making any dates or appointments on a Thursday, and I spent my Wednesday nights wondering what Yunsu and I would talk about. When I thought about him waiting for me all week long in a place where no one ever came to visit him, I didn’t dare to even get sick on Thursdays. Yunsu was reading through books at a tremendous pace. Sometimes he even mentioned poets I had never heard of. When I saw him like that, I felt happy and afraid at the same time. My heart sank whenever I saw a news article about another criminal, and when people said,
They should all be killed,
I pictured Yunsu’s face. Several times, while talking to Aunt Monica on the phone, I started to say that I wanted to stop going, but then the thought would occur to me that the next Thursday could be our last, and I never said those words. I couldn’t leave him. I thought maybe this was how Aunt Monica had wound up visiting the same place for thirty years.

One Thursday, I was walking back down the long corridor of the detention center after meeting with Yunsu.
There were a few roses blooming in the lawn in front of the center, but it was no golden wheat field where the fox waited for the little prince. Officer Yi was walking with me, carrying the lunch bag I had brought along. Across the street from the detention center, there were already several fallen leaves that had wilted early.

During our meeting, Yunsu had told me that even though everything was still green, he could tell from the rustling of the wind that autumn was on its way. Everything might look the same, he said, but the sounds change. The trees may all be the same green, but they sound different in spring and summer and autumn. There was more than met the eye, he said.

Yunsu had sounded especially calm that day. He spoke more slowly, too. He reminded me of a lake in autumn. Though it was always the same lake, in autumn the color of the water seemed to settle into a deeper place. Likewise, something in Yunsu seemed to have settled.

“Did you know that I’ve been looking forward to Thursdays, too?” Officer Yi said.

“You have?”

I tucked my hair behind my ears and smiled. I felt a little shy. At school, the other teachers had been telling me that I’d changed.
You look happy,
they said.
Something good must have happened to you. You used to look so stressed out.
Though I wished they wouldn’t mention my looking stressed out, I liked the fact that they said I looked happy. Looking back on it now, Yunsu and I were mirroring each other. When he was at ease, I was also at ease, and when he was anxious, I matched his anxiety. Autumn would arrive, and then the end of the year, and we would have no choice but to think about death again. Considering how intense that anxiety was, for people on death row—as well as their friends and family—it must have been like being executed
day after day. They must have felt as if they had received a threatening letter from a giant monster that read, “Wait right there. I’m coming to kill you.” Every day, they were already in the monster’s clutches.

“When I first started this job, I was only thinking about the civil service examination. But now I’m grateful. Working here has caused me to think about what it means to be a human being, as well as what it means to die.”

It was the most that Officer Yi had ever said to me. This, too, seemed like a real conversation. He had worked here for ten years. He must have brought in dozens of death row convicts like Yunsu, and seen them go.

“Now that it’s fall, I’m getting nervous and having trouble sleeping. There weren’t any executions last year, which means there will probably be one this year. It must be even worse for the inmates. They tend to be on edge starting around this time and continuing until the end of the year, so we get more incidents. I’ll hear someone scream in the middle of the night, and when I go to check it out, they’re just having a bad dream. I guess they’re executed in their dreams as well.”

“How has Yunsu been?”

Officer Yi laughed.

“From what I hear, he’s practically a monk. He reads all night and prays. As for the money you’ve been putting into his account, he takes it out and gives it to whoever needs the most help. When Sister Monica came for Mass last time, she said that there are monks and nuns in the Catholic Church who spend their lives behind steel bars, and that some monks even live in caves. Then she looked at Yunsu and praised him, saying that he’s like a monk. Since I’ve been working here, we’ve had a former president, as well as one of the current presidential candidates, a national assemblyman, a government minister, a
chaebol
leader…
I don’t know that much about politics, but this place is like a glass house where you can see everyone’s lives stripped bare. It’s made me think about a lot of things.”

I didn’t ask him what kinds of things he had thought about. I don’t think I needed to ask. We passed through a door and then another door. When we were about to part ways at the entrance, I paused to ask him a question.

“About the executions, do they ever give you advance notice?”

Officer Yi hesitated before answering.

“We find out the night before. When that happens, all of the guards have to have a stiff drink to get through it. They may be criminals, but they grow on you after a while. When you see them in the newspaper, they’re animals. But when you get to know them, they’re people. And once you get to know a person, they’re all the same, deep down. After an execution happens, it takes a month of drinking to get over it. There’s a saying that people who witness a murder become pro-death penalty, while people who witness an execution become anti-death penalty. That’s another way of saying they’re both wrong. A moment ago, I said I was grateful for being a prison guard, but I always feel like
quitting
after an execution. A surprising number of people who work as prison guards wind up becoming missionaries and monks. It’s probably all for the same reason.”

“When we first met, didn’t you say that Yunsu was the worst of them all?”

Officer Yi laughed.

“Even if he is the worst,” he said, “he’s still a human being. No one is bad every day. I have my bad moments. Hey, I guess we’re having a real conversation, too.”

We parted at the entrance. On the way to my car, I turned to look back. Officer Yi was still standing there. I waved. He waved back. Suddenly I wondered what would
happen to him and me after Yunsu was dead. Would we be able to face each other without him? Then I realized that I had deluded myself into thinking that death only came to those on death row. The truth was that I would also die, and though we did not know when, Officer Yi would die, too. And even though her cancer had not in fact relapsed, my mother was lying in hospital, trying to stop a death that refused to come.

People dressed in suits and carrying briefcases were busily heading into a building where many black luxury sedans were parked. They looked like lawyers. They, too, would die. Even if there were no rush to die, not a single person here today would still be alive after a hundred years. And yet everyone was in a rush.
Hurry up and kill them,
they said. But my brother Yusik would get angry if he heard that. He would say,
It’s execution.

My cell phone rang. It was Aunt Monica. It had been a long time, and with autumn rolling in on a dry breeze, I felt like seeing her. She told me over the phone that someone in Seongnam had passed away and implied that I should meet her there. Another death. Of course, according to the Buddha, the most surprising thing in this world is that we forget that we can die at any time. I drove through Bundang to get to Seongnam. On a steep mountain slope on the side of the road, I saw a cemetery. I sometimes took that road on my way home from the detention center, but I had never noticed the cemetery before. Today, Yunsu had said,
I read in the newspaper that a Korean Air plane crashed in Guam. I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that two hundred people died, and I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know why God didn’t take a sinner like me instead of those innocent people. It makes me sad. Those people, they must have had people who loved them. It’s so heartbreaking.

A cemetery and a plane crash—that autumn seemed to be getting off to an ominous start.

Several white awnings had been put up in a vacant lot in an alley behind the marketplace where houses were huddled closely together. I parked the car at the entrance to the market and went to find Aunt Monica. A woman showed me the way. Aunt Monica was sitting with some other people beneath one of the awnings. As I walked up, she pulled me over to her.

There was a long line leading into the room where the mourners were paying their respects to the deceased. I wondered who on earth could have died in this rundown neighborhood that so many people should have flocked here. Most of the people in line were crying. They looked genuinely sad.

Aunt Monica held my hand and looked up at my face. In the clear autumn sunlight, the hair behind her ears looked white. I thought,
What am I going to do when she dies?
Aunt Monica’s hand was as small and rough as a
weathered
piece of wood. Before we knew it, we were at the front of the line.

Inside the room, a funeral portrait showed a smiling woman dressed in a traditional Korean gown. Her hair was parted down the middle and pulled back into a bun. The room—though I did not know if it was even big enough to merit being called a room—was five square meters. With the coffin, there was barely enough room for one person to sit down. Everyone else had to wait outside in line. I placed a flower before the funeral portrait and bowed. While I was doing that, Aunt Monica stood pressed up against the wall of that cramped room. In the corner where she stood, a stack of letters was piled up to the ceiling. There were other stacks all around the room.

There was an old saying about people who would cry
their eyes out at a funeral first and then ask who died—I wasn’t much better, bowing to a complete stranger. Aunt Monica led me out of the room. The line of people waiting to burn a stick of incense in front of the funeral portrait had grown while we were inside.

“These people have come from all over the country. Everyone who’s involved with the detention center knew her. She was widowed when she was still young, just over forty, I think. Her husband left her quite a lot of money, and they didn’t have any children. She sold everything they owned, rented this tiny room, liquidated all of their assets, and stored the cash in that armoire you saw in there. She went all over the country to meet prisoners and deposit money in their commissary accounts. You saw all those letters in there? People from all over the country sent her those. I asked her once what she was going to do if she got sick after she ran out of money. She said there was nothing to worry about. She said if she had work left to do, God would either provide more money or take her. At the time, I thought she was being irresponsible. She passed away this morning. They said she visited Daegu Prison yesterday. She had dinner with some people, and afterward she went home and died in her sleep. When they opened her armoire in the morning, there was exactly enough money in there for her funeral.”

I turned and looked back at the tiny room.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yes, really!”

“But why wasn’t this in the papers?”

As soon as the question popped out, I felt foolish for asking it. But I honestly couldn’t believe it. This wasn’t some fairy tale that you tell to children or a story about a miracle that you doubt is true and assume to be in part a lie. I felt a chill run down my spine. It wasn’t once upon
a time, it wasn’t the Middle Ages, and it wasn’t the West. It was Korea. It gave me a chill to wonder whether there really were people like her in this day and age.

“She would have loathed the idea of being in the papers,” Aunt Monica said without letting go of my hand. “Nevertheless, she was in the news once or twice. Just an article, no interview.”

“But why didn’t I hear about her?”

Aunt Monica didn’t answer. When I thought about it, I realized that I used to be the kind of person who had no idea people like her existed, regardless of whether she was in the papers or not. I wouldn’t have wanted to know. Because, as my uncle had told me in his sad voice, you had to hurt in order to be enlightened. And in order to hurt, you had to look and feel and understand. When I thought about it that way, a genuine life founded on
enlightenment
could not exist without compassion. There was no compassion without understanding, and no understanding without interest. Love meant taking an interest in other people’s lives. So maybe when my brother Yusik said he’d had no idea I was raped, it meant he didn’t really love me. He had carried me on his back, bought me ice cream, and said he worried about me all the time, but when he saw what was happening to me, his only thought was that he had no idea why. So perhaps the words
I didn’t know
were not an exoneration of sin but rather the antonym of love. They were the antonym of justice, of compassion, of
understanding
, the antonym of the true solidarity that everyone was supposed to show for each other.

“By the way, I called you here because Yunsu knew her, too. Last winter, when I went to see Yunsu without you, he told me all about her and said he wanted to meet her. I told him I would see what I could do, but she wound up dying before him. Of course, death doesn’t follow a particular
order. Now that I’m old, my mind doesn’t work as well as it used to, and I tend to forget things like that.”

We went to the end of the awning and sat down. Women in aprons were serving food and alcohol. An older man who had been standing nearby waved at us. He came over to where we were sitting and said, “Sister Monica, long time no see.” The man looked like he had greased not only his hair but his face as well. He looked fit and healthy.

“This is the former warden of the Seoul Detention Center,” Aunt Monica said. “He’s retired now.” When I introduced myself, he looked excited to meet me.