Our Happy Time (8 page)

Aunt Monica looked like she was trying to find
somewhere
she could back away to in that tiny room. I couldn’t believe it, either. Aunt Monica made a face to say it was a difficult favor to fulfill. The old lady grabbed her hand.

“Sister, I’m not planning on doing anything bad. I just want to meet him before it gets any later and the state executes him. I have no education, and I don’t know anything, but I want to go to him and say, ‘I’m the mother of the woman you killed!’ I want to forgive him.”

Aunt Monica’s face looked ashen. I probably looked the same.

“I want to meet him so that I can forgive him. I grew up as an orphan, too. I had no flesh and blood to call my own. I didn’t even have a husband. It was just the kids and me,
so I know how he feels. I know how lonely the holidays can be. A holiday is still a holiday, even to a murderer. And this could be the last holiday he ever sees. No one knows whether he will die today or tomorrow. When I think about him dying, I think,
Good riddance!
If killing him meant bringing my child back, I would kill him myself, even if it meant getting the death penalty a hundred times over. If killing him meant my grandchildren’s bruised hearts could heal, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything. But that’s not how it works. That’s why I want to see him. I hate the thought of him dying peacefully, but still, if he could, even if he were the only one who could…”

“The thing about forgiveness,” Aunt Monica said, “is that it’s not as easy as you think.”

I had never seen my aunt so flustered. I had never seen her stumble for words. She looked as if she was going to start flailing her hands around. The old woman looked at Aunt Monica and made an expression that I could not
decipher
. Suddenly, she raised her voice.

“Isn’t that what Jesus told us to do?” she yelled. “That’s what the priest told me to do. And the nuns. And all those people who keep coming to see me and handing me Bibles and singing hymns. They know everything, and they listen to God, and that’s what they told me to do. That’s what you all told me to do! ‘Forgive! Forgive your enemies!’ Seven times or seventy times, if you have to. That’s what they said!”

Aunt Monica closed her mouth and pressed her hand against the floor as if she had lost her balance. I went to her side to help her, but she shoved my hands away. She was crying.

Abandoned once again in the orphanage with Eunsu, I was still the most violent, still a troublemaker, but I had no more problems because of my brother. That’s because I was big and had ganged up with the other bad kids, which meant that as long as I was in the gang and was strong, they wouldn’t mess with me—or rather, they wouldn’t mess with Eunsu. Sniffing glue was my Bible, and jerking off was my hymnal. The shoulders of my fellow gang members were my law and my nation. By the age of thirteen, I was already taking girls who had run away from home and putting them up in rooms with boys. I kept a lookout while the older boys took turns raping them. But one day, an older boy who was stronger than me started bullying me and trying to push me out of the gang because I wouldn’t steal things for him from the supermarket. They were too strong, and I couldn’t protect Eunsu, or even myself, for that matter. We were hungry, and with each day we were
becoming the butt of the other kids’ jokes. So one day, I made up my mind. While all of the other kids were asleep, I beat the oldest boy to within an inch of his life, grabbed Eunsu by the hand, and ran.

The night we ran away from the orphanage, we wandered the streets of Seoul. We were hungry and cold and hopeless. I had stopped beside a trashcan in a corner of a marketplace and was rummaging through it in the hopes that there was something we could eat, when Eunsu said he was scared. He said he wanted to go back. I got mad, but I bit my lip and suggested that we sing something instead. He liked singing. Since he was blind and never got to go to school, the only song he knew was the national anthem. That’s because we used to sing it during the morning assembly at the orphanage. So we sang the anthem.
Until the East Sea runs dry and Mt. Baekdu wears away, God save us and keep our nation…
Eunsu could remember all four verses. I remember how, on that cold night, the stars floated in the sky like cold popcorn as we raised our faces to the sky and sang the anthem. When we finished, Eunsu laughed and thought aloud,
It’s a great country, isn’t it? Whenever I sing this song, I feel like we’re good people
.

W
hen I woke up, my head was splitting. Yellow rays of sun passed through the white lace curtains and shoved their way deeper into the blankets. For a moment, I wondered where I was. I could see a tall magnolia outside the window. But the first thing on my mind wasn’t what I was doing in my old room at my mother’s house, but rather that I was thirsty. I thought about the first time I tried to commit suicide: I had slit my wrists in this very room. Of course, I knew then that what I was doing was wrong. Ever since I was young, I had been going to church, and I never hesitated to mark the box for
Catholic
on the
questionnaires
they handed out in school. When I was christened in the church that my father carried me to in his arms right after I was born, I was given the name Sylvia in addition to Yujeong. In those days, the Catholic Church was still so strict that they did not allow a funeral Mass to be held for suicides. People who committed suicide were regarded as murderers who mistook their God-given lives as their own to take. During catechism class, the nun explained to us why suicide was murder.

Raise your hand if you decided to be born,
was how she began the lesson.
Raise your hand if you decided whether
you would be male or female. Raise your hand if you think you can die whenever you want to.
In the throes of puberty, I was ardent on the subject of suicide. I had drawn my own conclusion about it, which was that I did not have the right to kill myself. Above all, my life was not created by me. I didn’t know why the hormones I had learned about in biology class were released at certain times and went away at others, or why my stomach was refusing to digest food, or why my period had to start. I didn’t know why I got diarrhea, or why my stomach hurt, or why my heart was beating. The territory I governed was smaller than my own brain. Back then, I had a folder with a Descartes quote printed on it that said the only thing about ourselves that we can control are our own thoughts. So I, too, had come to the conclusion that since I did not own myself, it would be murder to kill myself. But then I slit my wrists in this room. Back then, I felt only one thing: knowledge could not ward off despair. And I realized something else: Descartes was wrong. Not even my own thoughts were under my control, and I had even less control over them than everything else in my life combined.

I got up and headed downstairs to get some water or juice to drink.

Around the time I started high school, my father bought land in this neighborhood that was now towering with high-rise buildings and built a house on it. Back then, there weren’t that many high-rises yet, and it was the kind of out-of-the-way spot that was crowded with cheap motels bearing old-fashioned names. Yusik, my oldest brother, had moved out of the house with his wife. It was right around the Lunar New Year, so I had gone on an errand for my mother to the head family’s house, where my father’s eldest brother lived. I went alone. That wouldn’t seem like a big deal nowadays, but at
the time, I had already grown to my full height and was very tall for my age. Once, I had even been approached while out running errands. It was summer, and I was wearing a dress. I think I was in the seventh grade at the time. An army officer in full uniform came up to me. His breath reeked of alcohol, and he said,
Excuse me, miss, care to join me for a drink at that café?
I told him I was only in middle school, and he looked flustered for a moment and then looked up at the sky and laughed in amazement. I laughed, too. When I got back home, I told my mother,
Someone flirted with me. But he was a soldier.
I don’t remember what my mother said. I’m sure it wasn’t nice. My brothers teased me about it:
He must have been really drunk. He was blacked out, wasn’t he? Maybe he deserted his post and wanted to take a kid hostage to keep from having to go back.
Now that I look back on it, I was as tall as a grown woman. I had hips and, though they were not yet full, my breasts were showing. Since I was no longer a child but a young lady, I didn’t mind being approached by a man, but I felt strange that it had to be a drunk soldier. Was that to be my fate?

On my way downstairs, I kept thinking about the man who had made me want to kill myself. Each time I walked down those stairs, I used to think about all the ways I could die. What if I did it this way? What if I did it that way? At the bottom of the stairs, the telephone was ringing.

“Yujeong? I think she’s still asleep. Oh, no, here she comes.”

My mother saw me coming down the stairs and shoved the phone toward me. It was my brother Yusik. When I said hello, he let out a long sigh. I couldn’t help but sigh as well.

“Do you remember what happened last night?”

He sounded as if he had been waiting a long time to ask me that.

“Yeah, I meant to thank you.”

He sighed again.

“I was planning to give you a piece of my mind, but since it’s Mom’s birthday today, I’ll hold off. It’s only been a month and a half since her operation, and I’m worried she might collapse again. I didn’t say anything to anyone else in the family.”

“Thanks.”

“Also, since we’re both grown-ups, I didn’t want to say anything to you, but let’s talk again later, around
dinnertime
. Mom’s sick, so don’t throw another one of your tantrums. Just hold it in until dinnertime. I called Aunt Monica. I don’t think you should keep meeting those death row—or whatever—inmates. Stop going there.”

“What are you talking about?”

He hung up without answering me. Despite thanking him, I didn’t actually remember what had happened the night before. As I poured myself some juice, I tried to call up all of my memory circuits. I had met my old friends from elementary school for drinks, and we went from one bar to another, and another. I remembered getting into my car and insisting that I could drive, even though someone tried to stop me. Then I remembered the police station, and yelling my head off. A detective, a short man who looked to be over fifty, had said to me,
What kind of woman goes out drinking in the middle of the night? Girls like you should all be rounded up and shot.
That was when I lost it. I think I must have screamed at him,
So what? Yeah, so I broke the law, but at least I have character. You want to shoot me? Is that what a police officer of the Republic of Korea’s “Civilian Government” is supposed to say? Take my blood! Take my blood!
I remembered screaming my head off in the police station. It all came back to me: I must have called my brother. Then he showed up and I
asked him how he knew I was there. The other people in the station clucked their tongues at me from behind my brother’s back and said I was crazy, so I got mad at them. When I thought about it, I couldn’t believe that was me. As much as I enjoyed complaining, I wasn’t the type to get drunk and make a scene in public, let alone a police station, of all places. I would never be able to show my face in Itaewon again. As the alcohol in my blood receded like the tide, standing in its place were memories, as stark as rocks on the seashore.

It must have been close to dawn when he picked me up. I think I cried… I say I
think
I cried because all I could remember was having heard a woman crying in the car. My brother and I were the only ones there, and since my brother isn’t a woman, the crying must have been coming from me. Did that fit into my uncle’s definition of the crying he wished I would do? I don’t know if the tears helped to sober me up, but I chose that moment to pick a fight with my brother. I think I started babbling, without any sort of preamble, about prisoners who had to survive on less than a thousand won for six months at a time, and how I was going crazy. I told him,
They’re driving me crazy, Yusik. Help me! I’m dying because of them!
My brother could not have felt good about having to pick up his little sister from the police station—his little sister who was nearly booked with drunk driving, who had broken off an engagement with his younger colleague, and who had attempted suicide not long ago. After my father, Yusik cared about me the most. We were so far apart in age that he doted on me as if I were his niece; when I was little, he used to carry me on his back. I could still remember his warm, strong, young back.

Whenever I see those guys in my line of work,
my brother had said,
guys who rape children and kill old
people, and don’t show even the slightest remorse in court, I hate the idea of having to breathe the same air as them! The death penalty is too good for them! I look at them and wonder whether they’re even human or whether they’re just animals. That may be a bad thought, but it seems like there really is a devil, and those people are marked from birth. They don’t deserve to live. They’re animals.

It was just an inference, but as I drank a glass of cold juice and stared out at the warm sunlit garden of my mother’s house, I figured my brother had said what he did because his little sister who never cried had suddenly fallen apart and bawled that she was losing her mind because of death row prisoners. He was probably worried that I would go into further shock while following Aunt Monica around and die for real. I told him the men on death row were killing me and, to try to calm me down in my drunkenness and my indignation, he said in return that Aunt Monica was killing him.

I understand what she’s feeling,
he said,
but she keeps coming to see me to ask why he can’t get a retrial, and she pressures me to petition the minister of justice to commute his sentence. She’ll be the death of me.
I knew he was only saying that to calm me down.

He was a good man, too. A conscientious prosecutor, he was famous for never accepting favors of any kind. He had made a name for himself faster than any of his peers. Though it was just the effect the alcohol was having on me, the way he called them all animals weighed on my heart.

“Back when I was in college,” I said, “I visited you at work one day at the public prosecutor’s office. But I didn’t go into your office. As soon as I got to the door, I could hear someone inside screaming. Do you remember that? I found out later what the sound was. Someone had been hung upside down from the ceiling, spun around, and
tortured into confessing. You were surprised to find me shaking outside your door. You took me to a teashop on the first floor and tried to tell me you weren’t one of
those
prosecutors. I asked you to put a stop to it, and you said it was ‘that damn section chief’ again. But Yusik, you didn’t run back upstairs to tell him to stop torturing that person. At the time, I wondered whether you, the section chief, and the prosecutors—the ones you said you weren’t like—were people or animals.”

He stared at me in shock.

“I’ve had that question a lot, whether men like that are human beings or animals. I think about it every time I see those men who go to room salons and do things in front of others that should only be done in private—not that it has anything to do with intimacy between human beings—like shamelessly shoving their hands up girls’ skirts and feeling them up just because they paid for it, and throwing their money around. I think about it every time I see them at school, too. Those professors who get up in the morning and drone on and on about the
sanctity
of education and the unequal division of wealth with the smell of a whore’s genitals still on their lips. They swarm to brothels and use those poor young girls who have to sell their bodies for cash. They strip their clothes off and stick them on top of tables and watch them slice bananas with their vaginas or open bottle caps—anything and everything that can be done with the human genitals. When I lived in Paris, I felt so ashamed every time a French person asked me if it was true that democracy activists in Korea were being taken away and tortured by the KCIA—or the Agency for National Security Planning, or whatever it was—having their arms dislocated or being stripped naked and beaten and, since that wasn’t enough, female students just a little older than me being tortured sexually. Back
then, as well, I wondered whether they were people or animals. Murderers? Animals, of course. Why even ask? Of course they’re animals. But now it’s your turn to answer. Of the types of people I just described, which one is the most likely to evolve into human beings?”

Like a typical drunk, I must not have been paying any attention to my brother’s reaction. He didn’t say a word to me. I kept going.

“I’ll give you a hint. One at least acknowledges that they did something wrong, while the other not only refuses to acknowledge it but thinks they are decent human beings. The first are punished for the rest of their lives for a small number of sins, while the second repeat those sins over and over, all the while believing that they are pretty good people. So, who do you suppose are the ones who think they’re innocent?”

“You haven’t changed a bit! How old are you?” my older brother said angrily.

“Fifteen.”

I laughed out loud. He looked at me with pity, just as the cops had at the station, and lit a cigarette. I grabbed it from his mouth and took a puff. He sighed and said nothing.

“Fifteen years ago, on Lunar New Year, when I went to the head family’s house to run an errand for Mom, and that thing happened to me, no one in the family cared. Do you know why I’m like this? Why I swallowed pills and cut my wrists three times? The thing I could not understand, what I really could not forgive, was the fact that everyone acted like nothing happened—Mom, you and our brothers, even Dad! It was swept under the rug, the same way my drunk driving charges never happened because my big prosecutor brother showed up and made them go away. I thought I was going to die—I wish I had died—and
meanwhile
everyone just closed their mouths and pretended
that nothing happened. It didn’t take me long to figure out why you all did that. If it hadn’t been for our uncle—Dad’s brother, the big-shot National Assembly member for the ruling party—the family business would never have survived. If he hadn’t been watching out for us, Dad wouldn’t have been able to embezzle all that money and commit malpractice and put in illegal bids and evade taxes. That’s why!”