Our Happy Time (4 page)

I stupidly thought to myself,
I guess even death row convicts have their pride.

“Wait a minute, Yunsu! Wait!” Aunt Monica anxiously called out to him.

He turned to look at her. Tears were pooling in her eyes. He must have seen them, too, because I noticed that one side of his face looked contorted. It wasn’t so much a grimace as a kind of buckling, like one corner of his stiff mask had been torn away. But then it disappeared and the mocking look returned. Aunt Monica took something out of the bundle she had brought with her and handed it to him.

“It’s almost Christmas, so I brought you a present. It’s cold in here, isn’t it? I brought you some long underwear. Since you went to all this trouble to meet with me, I can’t very well send you away empty-handed. This will only take a moment, so won’t you sit for a little? I told you, I’m very old, and my legs ache.”

He stared at the package in her hands. A muscle in his jaw quivered. His brow was furrowed, and he looked irritated. He was probably thinking,
Why the hell are you giving me a Christmas gift?
But he sat down as if to say he would give her a chance since she was elderly and a woman.

“I’m not giving you a Christmas present to make you feel
obligated. I’m not telling you to go to church. I’m not here to talk about religion. Who cares if you believe or if you don’t believe? What’s important is that you live each day like a human being. I’m sure you don’t hate yourself, but if you do, then you’re exactly who Jesus came for. He came to tell you to love yourself, to tell you how precious you are, to tell you that if in the future you feel warmth from someone and think,
Ah, so this is what love feels like
, then that person is an angel sent to you from God. I’ve never met you before, but I know you have a good heart. No matter what your sins are, they are not all of you!”

When she finished speaking, he smiled. It was a sneer. The look on his face said it was ridiculous to tell a person who has killed and who could be hanged tomorrow for that crime how precious they are. But then, a nervous energy unique to those with strong emotions passed over his face. To my surprise, I felt like I understood him. Whenever I got a phone call from Aunt Monica after yet another stupid fight with my family and she spoke to me in the same tone she was using with him, it made me angry. In a way, it was like the body rejecting a blood transfusion. Whether it’s different blood or different emotions, we are only at peace when there is just one type present. Right or wrong, life makes sense only when the bad guys are bad and the rebels are rebellious.

“Don’t do this to me,” Yunsu said. “If you do, I won’t be able to die peacefully. Let’s say I do meet with you and go to Mass and obediently do everything the guards tell me to do to make them happy, and I sing hymns and pray on my knees, and I become a perfect angel. Are you going to save me then?”

It was unexpected. He bared his white teeth like an animal and spat the last words out. Aunt Monica’s face paled.

“So please,” he said, “stop coming to see me.”

“Okay, you’re right, I want to save you, but it’s not in my power. But just because I can’t keep you from being executed, that doesn’t mean I don’t need to meet with you. I don’t know how you feel about this, but we are all on death row. None of us know when we will die. So why is it wrong for someone like me, who doesn’t know when she will die, to meet with you, who also doesn’t know when he will die?”

Aunt Monica was no pushover. He stared dumbfounded at her.

“Why?” she repeated.

“Because I don’t want to hope,” he said. “That would be hell.”

Aunt Monica did not say anything.

“I don’t know how much more I can take,” he said. “I might go crazy.”

Aunt Monica started to say something and then stopped. After a moment, she asked him calmly, “Yunsu, what is bothering you the most right now? What do you fear the most?”

He looked up at her. A moment passed. His eyes were filled with animosity.

“The mornings.”

He sounded like he was being forced to confess to a crime before some final conclusive evidence proffered by a vicious prosecutor. His voice was quiet. He sprang up, as if he did not need to hear any more, bowed to her, and stalked out. Aunt Monica, who had been as stiff as a plaster statue, followed him.

“Wait a second! I’m sorry. Don’t be mad. If it’s hard for you, you don’t have to meet me. You can just go. It’s okay if you go, but at least take this. The pastries aren’t fancy, but I brought them for you. They’re not so bad. Officer Yi,
I know it’s against the rules, but please, let him sneak in a couple inside his clothes.”

Aunt Monica held out a handful of pastries to Yunsu. Officer Yi gave her a look that said she shouldn’t. But Aunt Monica’s stubbornness was powerful, like the will of the Father being done on earth as it is in heaven.

“He must be so hungry all the time, alone there in his cell. A healthy young man like him must need a lot to eat. Please, Officer Yi!”

It was absurd: Who was the criminal and who was the rehabilitator? Who was pleading, and who was rejecting their pleas? I saw Yunsu look directly at Aunt Monica for the first time. His gaze seemed to quiver with the anxiety of being unable to grasp who she was and what she was doing. Aunt Monica stepped closer to him and shoved a pastry inside his shirt.

He looked shocked. He lurched his head back as if to keep her as far away from him as possible.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad we met today. Yunsu, I’m so happy to have met you. Thank you for coming to see me!”

She stroked his shoulder. He looked pained, as if he were being tortured. As he quickly turned away, I got a closer look at him and saw that he had a limp. Aunt Monica watched from the door until he disappeared down the long hallway. She looked as lonely as a goat standing on a cliff above the sea. She pressed her hand to her forehead. She looked fatigued.

“It’s okay. They’re all like that at first. That’s where hope begins. Saying he’s not worthy—that’s a good start.”

Aunt Monica was not so much talking to me as mumbling to herself. My tiny aunt looked like she was going to wither away and vanish on the spot. She looked like she needed to reassure herself. I absentmindedly
glanced up at the print of
The Return of the Prodigal Son
hanging on the wall. In the story of the prodigal son, the younger of two sons brashly demands his share of his inheritance from his father. The son then squanders that fortune, and after being reduced to doing demeaning work on a pig farm, he returns home, even though he knows that he is no longer worthy of his place as his father’s son. Upon his return, he says, “Father, I have sinned against heaven.” He would have meant it sincerely. It was a Bible story. The painting depicted the love of the father forgiving his son and the son kneeling in repentance. I remembered learning in art history class that Rembrandt drew the father’s hands differently: one was a man’s hand, and the other was a woman’s, which represented the idea that God embodied both femininity and masculinity. But as for why that painting was hanging in this room, the reason was all too obvious.

“Is he still causing a lot of trouble?” Aunt Monica asked the guard.

“He’ll be the death of me. Last month, he started a fight in the yard. Grabbed the lid off of a charcoal brazier that was sitting to one side of the yard and threatened to kill one of the gang leaders. Spent two weeks in solitary and just got out yesterday. He acted up the entire time he was in there, too. If we hadn’t stopped him right away, he would have gone back to court. Not that it makes any difference. He’s already sentenced to death—they can’t very well increase his penalty. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but these death row inmates will be the death of me. It makes no difference to them if they kill another person while they’re in here, because they know it won’t change their sentence. They’re on death row, so what difference does it make
how
they die. The other prisoners are scared of them, so they act like kings. There hasn’t been an execution since last
August, and they can tell another one is coming. That’s probably why they get more violent at the end of the year. That’s when the executions usually take place. Afterward, they quiet down for a few months. But Yunsu is the worst of them all.”

Aunt Monica was quiet for a moment.

“Nevertheless,” she said, “he came to see me today. And though he doesn’t write back very often, he does write back.”

Aunt Monica was like a detective desperately clinging to a tiny clue. The guard smirked.

“To be honest, I was surprised he came to see you. Last month, the pastor gave him a Bible. He ripped it apart and has been using the pages as toilet paper. I think he’s gone through three Bibles that way.”

I burst out laughing. If Aunt Monica hadn’t glared at me, I would have kept on laughing, but I shut my mouth and tried to look serious. It served her right. I felt like Yunsu had gotten revenge on my behalf for the way Aunt Monica kept mentioning the word
garbage
to me on the way there. He had torn up her favorite thing in the whole world, the Bible, and turned it into something even worse than garbage. But I couldn’t let on how satisfying it was to hear that. They both looked so serious.

“This morning, I went to his cell and told him you were coming and asked what he wanted to do. He thought about it for a moment and then asked how old you were. I told him you were in your seventies. He hesitated again, and then for some reason, he said he would come meet you.”

A look of joy stole over Aunt Monica’s face.

“Did he? They say good things happen when you get old. I guess it’s true. But, has anyone been to see him?”

“No. He might be an orphan. I think he said his mother is alive somewhere, but no one visits.”

Aunt Monica took a white envelope from her pocket.

“Please add this to his commissary account. And please, Officer Yi, don’t think too badly of him. Guards are also supposed to help rehabilitate them. You’re not trying to kill him faster, are you? Aren’t we all sinners in the end?”

Officer Yi took the envelope but did not say a word. On the way back to the subway station, Aunt Monica adamantly refused my offer to drive her all the way to the convent. I didn’t understand why she insisted on taking public transportation on such a cold day, but it was probably the pointless stubbornness that she and I shared.

While we were waiting for the light to change at an intersection, I asked, “What did he do?” There wasn’t anything else to talk about. She seemed lost in thought and did not answer.

“Did they put those shackles on him because he was meeting with us?”

“No, he wears those all the time.”

My heart sank just as it had when I saw him hunch over to eat the pastry. In the old folktale Chunhyangjeon, when the title character Chunhyang sits shackled in a wooden cangue, she looks plaintive and wistful, and perhaps even dignified. But that was just a narrative device, the more tragic the better, to set up the dramatic turn of justice when her beloved Mongnyong returns as a secret royal inspector and saves her from the lecherous local magistrate who imprisoned her for refusing his advances. Nowadays, with the twenty-first century just around the corner, the idea of keeping someone shackled around the clock was shocking.

“What about when he sleeps?”

“He wears them when he sleeps, too. Their only wish is to sleep with their arms outstretched just once. Some inmates have even broken their arms from rolling over on them while sleeping. After they receive their death
sentence, they spend up to two or three years in shackles before they die.”

“How do they eat?”

“They can’t use chopsticks, so they lift the bowl to eat, or if there are several of them in a room, someone else mixes their rice for them so they can eat with a spoon. What’s more, the guard said he was in solitary for two weeks. When they’re in solitary, they don’t see so much as another person’s shadow. Their hands are shackled behind their backs, so they have to bring their mouths down to the bowl to eat. That’s why they call it ‘dog food.’ Since he was in there for two weeks, he must not be in his right mind. Sometimes they can’t even use the toilet. They just go in their pants. Two weeks…”

I sighed and resisted asking if they really had to live that way. I had been clueless before, but it was different now that I knew and had seen it with my own eyes. I felt a sense of foreboding, like when you accidentally take a step into a neighborhood where you would never want to live.

“He murdered someone, right? He said so himself. Who did he kill? And why?”

“I don’t know.”

Aunt Monica’s response was so simple and forthright that I doubted my own ears for a second.

“How did he do it? How many people did he kill? He was in the papers, wasn’t he?”

“I said I don’t know!”

Her tone was stern. I turned to look at her. She was staring at me as if there was something unusual about my questions.

“How can you not know? I saw that you’re a member of the prison ministry. Didn’t you bother to check his records when you started writing to him?”

“I met him for the first time today, Yujeong. Today
was our first meeting. That’s it. When people meet each other for the first time, they don’t ask, ‘So what kind of bad things have you done?’ If he talks about it, then I listen. But I never saw him before today. To me, what we saw of him today is all there is to him.”

She sounded resolute. It felt as if each word struck me in the chest. I was reminded anew that she was a nun.

“Light’s green. Pull up next to that station entrance on the corner. I’ll call you later tonight.”

With that, she got out of the car.

Misfortune poured down like a sudden rain shower. One day, I came home from school to find Eunsu as white as a sheet and crying. I asked him what was wrong, but he suddenly started to gag.

He said,
Father made me drink something weird. I keep throwing up.
I went into the room, and a strange scent pricked my nose. The smell was coming from a bottle of farm pesticide that our father had spilled while trying to feed it to Eunsu. I screamed at our father,
Die! If anyone should die, it’s you
! I don’t know if it was the force of my wrath, but he paused in the middle of drinking and silently turned to look at me. To my surprise, he didn’t try to hit me. He just looked at me through bloodshot eyes—eyes that bore a strange mocking gleam. It might have been a smile, or it might have been a look of bitter agony. I didn’t know if he was going to change his mind and come after us with a stick, so I grabbed Eunsu’s hand and ran away. We went to the same place we always did, a barn behind an
abandoned house near the entrance to the village, and we spent the night there. When I went back home in the morning, the person that I used to call Father was dead. The bottle of pesticide that he had drunk was lying empty beside him.