Our Happy Time (10 page)

Then we lived on the streets, like wet garbage, using the city’s back alleys as our pillows. There were other kids like us. They were looked after by a man who looked like he was in his forties. He offered us a place to sleep, and in exchange, we fanned out across the subway stations and marketplaces to beg for money. People were more generous to us since Eunsu was blind. We sat up all night making flyers that read:
My little brother went blind after taking some bad medicine in the countryside when we were younger.
Kind-looking men and women gave us money. Then, one day, it was Eunsu’s birthday. I asked him what he wanted to eat, and he said cup ramen. The man, whom we all called Blackie, fed us instant ramen, but never the kind that came in Styrofoam cups. It was too expensive and not filling enough. So one night, I stole a box of cup
ramen from a corner shop in the market that I walked past every day, and I got caught.

The moment the owner shouted at me, I grabbed the box and ran, but in the confusion, Eunsu, who had been standing nearby, got caught instead. The owner started beating him for no reason. My brother cried and called out to me over and over. If I had been alone, I would have run as fast as I could, but I couldn’t bear to leave him behind. I went back, returned the box to the owner, and tried to plead with him. The owner said it was the tenth time a box of cup ramen had been stolen from him, and he took us to the police substation. They said brats like us needed a good thrashing before we would wise up, and no matter how we tried to tell them that it wasn’t us and that this was our first time, we were sent to juvenile detention centre for stealing ten boxes of cup ramen. Eunsu was my accomplice. Right then, I made a decision.

Never again would I beg. Never again would I plead. There was only one way to survive in this world, and that was by having money and having power.

I
t is amazing how memory reveals things to us that were not apparent when the original events happened. Like a pin light that shines on an extra who is making small gestures off to one side of the stage, memory not only brings that moment back to life but adds to it. And that addition can sometimes contradict what we have believed to be our memories.

Now I must return to the visitors’ room. The place where I have been meeting him. The place where our meetings would continue to follow the same script since we would never meet anywhere but that place. The place where life and death cross paths, where a single ray of light shines in the darkness. That place where crime and punishment and hope spill their blood on a lost battleground to defend a dying castle, where those who hold all of the power battle for supremacy, though that battle cannot be perceived with the human senses. It was my third visit to the prison with Aunt Monica. It was also the day that the old woman from Miari or Samyang-dong, or wherever it was, insisted on coming with us and bringing the rice cake she had made.

We were waiting for the guard to bring him. No one spoke. Aunt Monica was slumped in her chair and biting
her lips. The old woman was dressed in a light-blue
hanbok
. The color of the traditional dress clashed with her dark, wrinkled face. Inside a light-blue cloth wrapper on the table sat the still-warm rice cake. Outside the window, it was winter, but rays of sunlight as warm as the cake were shining down. Yunsu did not show up until thirty minutes after our appointed time. I have no idea what happened during that time between Yunsu, who was trying to avoid seeing us, and the guard, who was trying to make him come out. I could have guessed, but I didn’t have even a fifty-fifty chance of guessing correctly.

Yunsu came in, and Aunt Monica stood up. I could tell from the fact that she didn’t greet him that she was nervous. The old woman fumbled with a gauze
handkerchief
, her body stiff, as if the dress were binding her. It looked as if she hadn’t worn it in a long time. I realize now that the three of us were probably all wondering if we were doing the right thing.

Even Aunt Monica, who had devoted her whole life to love and forgiveness, was afraid of what was happening. We could tell that it was a frightening reality for her,
regardless
of whether the old woman said to Yunsu,
Your sins are forgiven, rise up and walk,
like a young Jesus from two thousand years ago, or whether it was all an act and she tore at his throat instead and raked her nails over his face as he sat there in shackles.

Yunsu looked pale. I could not find any trace there of the memory of our first and second meetings, when his face seemed to say,
I’m a human being, too.
I doubt he would have looked any more afraid if he were looking at the gallows noose. His lips looked blue and were twitching slightly.

This may not be the best expression, but the old woman was eyeing Yunsu as if he were a lost son who had returned:
she looked as if she didn’t want to miss a single detail of his face or body. Everyone—the old woman, Aunt Monica and I, Yunsu, and Officer Yi—stood around awkwardly.

“Please have a seat.”

Officer Yi was calmer than the rest of us. He filled the kettle with water and turned on the switch. He had a certain sense of virtue about him, the kind you often find in public servants who have studied hard for the civil service exam. When I saw him do that, I realized that Aunt Monica had skipped her usual step of preparing hot water the moment she stepped into the room. The silence in the room was so heavy that we were all grateful for the beeping of the
electric
kettle when the water reached a boil.

“Have you been well?” Aunt Monica asked.

Yunsu looked dazed. He said yes and started to smile, but his face crumpled like tinfoil. The old woman had her gaze fixed on Yunsu’s shackles.

“It must be so hard to be tied up all the time like an animal.”

The woman mumbled but the room was so quiet, and she was not composed enough to control the volume of her voice, that it sounded loud. It might have been the word animal, but everyone became even more uncomfortable.

“This lady is…” Aunt Monica stuttered. Her next words should have been, “the mother of the person you killed,” or to put it a little more precisely, “the mother of the person you murdered.” But she paused and swallowed hard.

“The person… whose death you caused…”

Aunt Monica swallowed again. I swallowed, too, in
reaction
to her. Sometimes words can be so concrete and so real, and therefore so cruel. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said the pen is mightier than the sword.

“This is the mother of that housekeeper.”

Yunsu’s head dropped as if his neck had snapped.
They say people on death row die six times: when they are caught, when they are sentenced at their first, second, and third trials, and when they are executed. The remaining death happens every morning. When the wake-up bell rings, they ready themselves to die. If they receive rations and get exercise time, it means they are not dying that day. They say that if footsteps ring out in the hallway before the morning exercise, men on death row turn pale. But Yunsu looked like he had already been executed. To put it another way, because this stubborn old woman was the mother of his victim, he was already burning in the fires of hell. He was sitting right next to me, and I could see his chin quivering. For the first time, I understood that crime, like words once they are uttered, does not go away. It does not vanish like a breeze that swells and then disappears.

“I came to see you!” the old woman said.

Yunsu’s shoulders were shaking. His entire body was trembling like a twig in a small breeze. A human being—that’s all he was. It occurred to me that all of us, even murderers, must tremble and shake, and I felt a little sad.

“Since it’s the holidays,” Aunt Monica said, “she saved up some rice so she could make you rice cake.”

Yunsu mumbled something with his head down.

“What was that?” asked Aunt Monica.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

I still think that human beings are a queer breed. Strictly speaking, the woman was the victim and Yunsu the attacker—and an attacker who had committed the worst crime one person can commit against another, at that—so there should have been no shame in him saying those words to her. But in that moment, I suddenly felt like Yunsu was the victim. At the same time, I thought about the man I had told my brother about when I was drunk, the one I had unearthed from my memory. Even when I
imagined myself killing him, he was still my attacker. I did not feel even the slightest trace of sympathy for him. Yet I felt the pain that Yunsu was going through as someone who had attacked another person.

“I didn’t know what kind of rice cake you like.”

The old woman slowly stood up and unwrapped the cake. The soft, flimsy sound of the cloth coming undone seemed to echo like thunder in that room. When I took a closer look, her hands were shaking too hard to untie the knot. Officer Yi got up to help her. When the wrapper opened, we saw white
baekseolgi
in a nickel bowl. She picked up a piece of the rice cake, which she had cut into bite-size pieces, and turned to Yunsu to give it to him, but she collapsed back onto her chair instead. Her lips were trembling like his.

Officer Yi’s eyes grew tense.

“Why did you do it?” she said. “Why? Why did you have to kill her? You bastard, you son of a bitch, you’ll die for this!”

The expressions on our faces said that the moment we had all been dreading had finally happened, and Aunt Monica’s turned to a look of regret. But there was nothing anyone could have done about it.

“Please, calm down.” Aunt Monica got up and tried to restrain her. The woman’s face had turned dark.

“How could you? You should have just taken the money and left her alone. Take the money, and let the person go. You can always make more money, but people don’t come back from the dead. They never come back. Our lives are so short as it is. Don’t take that time away from us.”

The old woman started to cry. Her sobs turned to a wail. Clutching her crumpled handkerchief and the piece of rice cake that she had not managed to hand to Yunsu, she curled over until her small body was even smaller. It
hit me then that she and Yunsu were wearing the same color. And they were both hunched over. It was a
coincidence
that her dress was that shade, but I found myself thinking that they were bound together by the same curse. Yunsu kept shaking. His hair looked as if it was glued to his forehead. He had broken into a cold sweat. If I had to use one of those clichés that I detest so much, I would say he was sweating buckets.

Officer Yi stood up. He looked as if he was planning to take Yunsu back to his cell.

“Wait. Please, just wait,” the old woman said.

Officer Yi sat down again, looking uncertain. Aunt Monica tried to get the woman to drink some water. Despite her own distress, the woman kept saying, “I’m sorry, Sister. I’m so sorry.” It was as if she had lived her whole life having to cater to others’ feelings first. Apologizing seemed to be a reflex for her—I had no idea what on earth she was sorry about. The woman slowly sipped the water and looked at Yunsu. His face was wet from the sweat sliding down his temples, and both armpits were soaked. The woman lifted the handkerchief that was damp with her tears and tried to wipe the sweat from his face for him, but a shriek snuck out from between his clenched teeth.
That’s right,
I thought.
That’s the cry an animal makes when it’s being dragged to the slaughterhouse.
A sad look stole over the woman’s face. She closed her eyes for a moment and then slowly started talking again.

“I’m sorry. I came here to forgive you. Sister Monica told me it was too soon, but I was stubborn and came anyway. I’m sorry. I can’t do it yet. I’m sorry, kid. When I look at you, I keep picturing my daughter, and I want to hate you. I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. I’m sorry. I want to grab you by the throat and ask why you did it. Why did you have to do it? Will you pray
for me? Kid, you look so kind and handsome, and you keep trembling, which only makes it harder for me. But I’ll come back. I will… until I’m ready to forgive you. It’s a little far and the bus fare is expensive, so it won’t be often, but I’ll come back every holiday. I’ll bring more rice cake. So you can’t… die… yet.”

She was shaking. Sweat was running down her face, too. During those few minutes, her hair seemed to have turned even whiter until her whole head was covered in gray. Aunt Monica also seemed to be ageing faster along with her for that brief moment.

“Sister, I’m sorry. I’m sorry to put you to all this trouble,” the woman said, bowing her head again. Then she turned to the guard. “Sir, I apologize. I made such a fuss and caused you all so much bother.”

Officer Yi was shocked. His face was contorted with misery. It was probably the first time in ten years of being a prison guard that he had witnessed something like this.

Yunsu got up to follow the guard. His head was still down. The old woman paused in the middle of wiping her tears with the crumpled handkerchief.

“Don’t die yet,” she said to Yunsu. “Not until I can forgive you!”

Yunsu’s face was a mess of sweat and tears. As he turned and walked away, his limp was more pronounced than usual.

“You’ve done enough,” Aunt Monica said, clasping the old woman’s hand. “You can’t forgive him any more than that. Even the greatest person could not do better. You did so well. I’m a nun, and I could not have done that.”

The old woman didn’t say a single word on the drive back. She seemed to have retreated into a room of deep silence that she had built herself, and like any human being deciding whether to face themselves honestly before a grave undertaking, she bore a look of dignity and poise that had nothing to do with her appearance or
education
or anything like that. After today, she would go back to stooping over to collect empty bottles and old
newspapers
and adding 3,150 won or 2,890 won to her
bankbook
, and if she saw people who had a lot of money and they brought her a bag of rice or a package of meat, she would have no choice but to lower herself, but for now, her face had a glow more radiant than that of any empress. In contrast, Aunt Monica looked very ordinary sitting next to her. The woman had, as naïvely and fearlessly as a child, taken on the word that Jesus, the Son of God, had barely squeezed out in his final moments—
forgiveness
. She had failed as a person, and she knew that arrogance was the reason she had failed. But at that moment, in my mind, she was already crowned with the laurel wreath of a saint. It had nothing to do with her past or with her future. Had I ever seen that in another person? The people I knew never changed but just kept on living the same way they always had. Including Aunt Monica.

What on earth made this old woman who, in her own words, had no education, no faith, and knew nothing, try to forgive him? What sort of foolhardiness made her take on something that human beings have never gotten past, though a million theologians could shout until the veins popped out on their necks, and a million books could be published calling for people to
forgive, forgive
? Was it a kind of grand simplicity?