Our Happy Time (5 page)

T
hat night, after returning from that place, I didn’t exactly sleep soundly. I had met him, and I had looked at him. He had left, and I had dropped Aunt Monica off. Afterward, I had headed downtown, where I shopped for a few things that I needed for Christmas, and was getting back into my car in the department store parking garage when the image hit me: his shackled hands. It was like a pill that you took in the morning but that didn’t kick in until nighttime. Was it because the cold parking garage made me look in my purse for my gloves? I pictured the tips of his ears red with frostbite, the dark red scars on his wrists from where the shackles bit into his skin, and the way his firm lips had twisted into a sneer whenever he spoke. When he said he lacked the will or the hope to go on living, the nervousness in his voice struck me as familiar. I probably sounded that way all the time, too. I had said the same words to my family, screamed it at them, in fact:
Just let me die!

The department store was packed. Men and women with more shopping bags than they could carry were loading purchases into their cars and leaving while more cars kept coming in. Christmas was on its way. I thought
about how Aunt Monica had pleaded with him:
If you hate yourself, then you’re exactly who Jesus came for. He came to tell you to love yourself, to tell you how precious you are.
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to acknowledge the fact that he was not the only one who needed to hear that. If we had met him in the department store instead, Aunt Monica would have jokingly added,
Jesus did not come to earth to tell you to shop.
I thought about how I used to go to church when I was younger. Back then, I was a good kid. I wore the frilly clothes my mother dressed me in, politely helped my teacher, and never missed a day of Sunday school. I memorized every passage in the Bible and won awards at catechism competitions. And then, that day came when everything changed. The sun hid its light and never again shone brightly over my life. The sun rose and fell, but it was always the same night for me. I didn’t know why I was reminded of it while standing in a brightly lit department store parking garage after having met Yunsu. But after that fateful day long ago, I went to college, albeit not a good one, appeared on Daehak Gayoje, and won. It was a nationwide singing contest for college students, and winning it launched my career. The glory was brief, but I got to do concerts all over the country. Then I left to study art in Paris without a single worry about money, and when I returned, I was made a professor. Though the fact that I was so unqualified to be a professor was a secret known only to me and my family, I was nevertheless a decent member of society and, with the exception of my advanced age, good enough for a snobby lawyer to want to marry, even if he was a liar. At least, that’s how it looked to other people. How easy it was to fool others!

I drove out of the garage. The streets were packed with cars. Fancy Christmas lights twinkled from every tree, making it look like golden flowers had blossomed
on the bare branches. In the seven years that I was gone, Korea had changed. It looked glamorous and wealthy and crowded. But if I walked behind the buildings that towered nearly high enough to block the sky, the wind was as strong and cold as ever.

When I returned home, I looked up his name online.

Jeong Yunsu. As soon as I searched for his name, news reports popped up one after the other. Judging by the date, it had happened a year and a half ago, while I was still in Paris. He was the main culprit in the so-called Imun-dong Murder Case. He and an accomplice had murdered a woman they knew named Bak, raped and killed her seventeen-year-old daughter who was sleeping in the next room, and then killed the housekeeper who was just returning from market.

When I read that he had raped a seventeen-year-old girl, I stopped breathing. A sour, metallic taste, like blood seeping from between my teeth, filled my mouth. This was the person I had to visit with Aunt Monica for the next month? I felt humiliated to have thought that he and I had anything in common. I wondered why the government couldn’t hurry up and kill those people when they asked to be put to death. And I thought I would rather sit through therapy again than have to visit that ungrateful piece of trash who shamelessly demanded to be killed. I suddenly loathed Aunt Monica for giving him long underwear and packing pastries for him, and pleading,
You have a good heart. No matter what your sins are, they are not all of you
. I got up, went to the kitchen, poured a tall glass of whiskey, and drank it in one gulp. My racing heart seemed to slow a little. I went back to the computer, as if drawn to something, and sat down.
Raped a seventeen-year-old girl
… Her screams echoed in my ears. The terror and shame she felt were as clear to me as if I were
watching them on a movie screen.

After he and his accomplice left with the money and valuables and ran away, the accomplice turned himself in, while Yunsu broke into a family’s home and took them hostage. Then the police shot him in the leg.

There were more articles. Editorials, even the society pages, went on and on about the case: “Murder Case Grows More Savage: Criminal Jeong Yunsu killed an older woman who had been helping him, stole her money and valuables, raped and killed her daughter, then killed the poor, innocent housekeeper, and still he shows no remorse.” My computer screen filled with the tut-tutting of sociologists, psychiatrists, and journalists who naturally understood all of the problems facing our society and therefore had no end of things to say when handed a microphone. I kept clicking.

The article about his hostages included a photograph.

In the photo, he was wailing, his arm wrapped around the neck of a middle-class woman who looked like she was in her thirties. I took a closer look. His features were the same, but he looked completely different. He wasn’t wearing the black-rimmed glasses, and his hair was very short. During the half-day standoff, the police had sent in a Buddhist monk who made prison visits. An interview with the monk was included in a separate text box.

“I told him my name was Beomnyun and that I was a monk, and I was going to step inside. I asked him to let the woman go and said, ‘What has she done? If you want to kill someone, then kill me.’ Then he said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ So I told him again, ‘My name is Beomnyun, I’m a monk,’ and he said, ‘Well, nice to meet you. You monks and pastors and priests—it’s assholes like you that made me this way. Come on then, if you want to die! Come on! I’ll kill you, too, and then I’ll die, too!’ That’s what he said. The moment
I heard those words, my heart jumped. I was ready to rush in there, but the police officer held me back.”

I forgot all about how I had thought of him as trash and laughed to myself. I had already emptied half of the whiskey bottle. Even if he were trash, I was intrigued by what he said. I thought,
He thinks the same way as me!
I would never be able to forgive my family members, who were oblivious to even one-millionth of what I’d gone through, for turning their backs on me. My mother, who lied and said,
She must have had a bad dream.
My father, who didn’t want to hear any more about it. My brothers. The priests and nuns, who took my confession and pressured me to forgive. God, who ignored my desperate prayers to be rescued. Thanks to them, I was falsely accused of the sin of lying and of not forgiving. The only person who did not say anything to me at the time was Aunt Monica. I clicked on the next article. After Yunsu was arrested and taken to the hospital, he was questioned by reporters and said, “I regret not killing more. All those rich people in their fancy houses, I regret not killing more of them!”

The reporters blamed the gap between the haves and the have-nots and the extravagance and self-indulgence of the wealthy in our country. At the same time, they said that such anger was misguided. Everyone seemed shocked by the audacity with which he had brazenly said that he regretted not killing more people. The all-knowing scholars and experts each gave their two cents, saying that someone like him had to be given the severest punishment possible—it had to be the death penalty—in order to send a message to the criminals who were growing more shameless by the day. I poured the rest of the whiskey into my glass. I pictured him holding a knife. What would I do if he took me hostage to try to rape and murder me? Goose bumps stood out on my arm as I raised the whiskey glass. I would probably grab
the knife and kill him with it. Though I hadn’t had these thoughts since that fateful day long ago, I realized they had always been in the back of my mind. But would I grab the knife and think,
Uh oh, if I do this, I’ll get the death penalty, so maybe I shouldn’t
, as everyone who knows everything that’s wrong with our society seems to think people would do? Of course not! I would do whatever I had to do in order to get the knife away from him and kill him with it. I swear it. I would kill him using the cruelest method I could come up with. The old me would not have been able to do that, but the new me could. Back then, I was just a dumb kid, but now, I was someone who had long since stopped caring about death.

The phone rang. It was Aunt Monica. She asked me if I got home okay and suggested we return to the Seoul Detention Center after the holidays. I didn’t respond. I wanted to ask why we had to visit, of all people, someone who had raped a little girl? Did she really not know what he had done?

“And Yujeong, promise me one more thing.”

“What is it now?” I asked bluntly.

The fumes from the alcohol I had downed so quickly were rising into my nostrils and making me hiccup. If it were not Aunt Monica on the other end of the line, I probably would have lashed out drunkenly and said,
Well, aren’t you a saint? Go to heaven without me!

“Are you drinking again?” she asked. I said no. “Okay, that’s good. Since you agreed to help me out for a month, you have to promise you won’t kill yourself before then. It wasn’t easy getting your uncle to agree to this. Can you do that for me?”

I wanted to tell her,
No, I can’t
. I wanted to say I’d be better off in a mental hospital. But there was always something in Aunt Monica’s words that came from some
familiar place. Something that disarmed me. Was it the love that she had always shown me? Or was it the sadness of an aunt who wrapped her arms around me and cried? When sorrow is unmasked, it contains something
mysterious
and holy and urgent. It is both a thing wholly unto itself and a key that opens strangers’ locked doors. I could tell that Aunt Monica had been praying for me for a long time. For fear I would die—or rather, for fear I would try to die again. That was why she had been calling me every night and every morning for the last several days.

When I thought about the fact that someone genuinely wanted me around, a slow ache passed through a corner of my heart. It burned like coarse salt sprinkled on rotting fish. I did not want to admit it, but it had occurred to me nonetheless: the reason I couldn’t kill myself, the reason I could not finish the job and kept making failed gestures, the reason I never picked something truly fatal from among the various methods of suicide, like throwing myself off of the fifteenth floor of our apartment building, was all because of Aunt Monica. I was going to tell her no, but I was trying to keep from hiccupping and the word would not come out.

“Okay,” I said finally. “I promise. Even if I do decide to kill myself, I’ll wait until the month is up so I don’t let you down. Then I’ll do it.”

“Sure, that’s how we all live, one month at a time, until we die. I die, and then you die.”

I was speechless. I realized that I had never thought about her dying. What would I do without her? It was strange that I had never once thought about it even though she was over seventy. I didn’t think I could stand it. If she were gone, the only person who genuinely wanted me around would be gone. In other words, the only thing in my life that gave me hope would be gone. The thing that kept me from jumping from the fifteenth floor would be gone.
The person who was the first to rush to my side and hold me the first time I had tried to kill myself in high school. She had held me and cried and said,
You poor thing, you poor thing.
But if I were around to see her die, I still didn’t think I would be able to cry.

“Pray for me, Aunt Monica. Pray to keep me from wanting to die.” I said.

“I do. I pray every morning and every night. I’m old now, Yujeong, so you have to stop worrying me. Understand? You have to forgive. Not for anyone else’s sake, but for your own.”

It was the first time she had ever mentioned
forgiveness
. She must have sensed how tense I was, because she seemed to hesitate before speaking again.

“What I mean is that you have to stop letting what happened to you rule your life. You need to vacate that room inside your heart that he has occupied. Move out of that room. It’s been fifteen years, so everything is in your hands now. You’re over thirty.”

Aunt Monica said the word
thirty
like she was saying it to a fifteen-year-old child. I didn’t say anything.

Eunsu and I were sent to an orphanage. From that day on, I had to fight like a wandering warrior, and my nights were as sleepless as a guard’s in the demilitarized zone. I would come back from school to find that blind Eunsu’s food had been stolen by the other kids and his body was covered in bruises. I would track down the kids who beat and tormented him and punish them until their noses bled, and then I in turn would be beaten by the housemaster until my nose bled. I was a juvenile delinquent, the black sheep of the orphanage. While I was at school the next day, Eunsu would become the target of vengeance for the kids I’d beaten up, and upon my return, I’d get my revenge again. Then the housemaster would beat me even harder. None of us—not me, not the other kids, nor the housemaster—ever tired of it, and each day was another cycle of punishment and revenge. They were days in which I drew forth all of the blood and violence and screams and lies and defiance and hatred that I had inherited from my father and that
flowed through my veins and put them to practical use. I was an animal. I would not have known how to survive otherwise. If I had not at least been an animal, I would have been nothing. And then, one day, our mother came to find us.