Our Happy Time (16 page)

“I read all of the articles about you.” I spoke slowly, with as little emotion as possible.

“Hold on.”

Officer Yi stopped me. Yunsu was grimacing.

“You’re not allowed to discuss his case or anything related to his case in here.”

Officer Yi looked at me apologetically. We were quiet for a moment. I paused. I felt like asking,
Then what can I talk about
? His
case
was the fatal event that had brought the two of us together, and if it were not for his
case
, he would have had no reason to meet with members of the ministry. But such were the rules. I was in no mood for predictable conversation, for grasping at clouds or saying this was why Jesus came to earth or how precious we all were. What I really wanted to talk about was why Jesus had come to him and me specifically, and who I was and who he was, and exactly how someone like him could be considered precious. Yunsu had his head down, as if he could not yet understand what I was getting at. Behind him was the print of Rembrandt’s
The Return of the Prodigal Son.
Since entering the painting, the son had spent every single day on his knees. I stared at his feet. One sandal had fallen off, and his bare foot was exposed. The father was patting his son on the shoulder. Rembrandt had painted the moment of the son’s return. He did not draw the father forgiving the son or the feast he threw for him after. The prodigal son had returned and the father was patting him on the shoulder, yet for over a hundred years he had not been able to straighten his knees. He would never rise and
walk about his home on his own feet. The sons who knelt in this room like the prodigal one would have the noose placed around their necks while on bended knees in the execution room as well.

“Officer, I was only planning to talk about myself. I’m not a prosecutor or a reporter, and I have no intention of attacking him.”

Officer Yi thought it over for a moment and then nodded wordlessly. I looked back at Yunsu. His eyes were filled with the tension and curiosity of a roomful of first-graders. He looked very nervous, and also afraid. He even had the slightly stupid look of someone seeing a tribe of people they have never come across before.

“To be honest, I don’t know you. I never thought for a moment that the newspapers would tell me everything there was to know about you. Newspaper articles contain facts, but there’s no such thing as a fact created by a fact. The truth is what makes facts, but people don’t care about that. Intention precedes action. Let’s say that someone tries to stab a man to death but accidentally cuts a rope that’s wrapped around his neck instead, and he survives. And now let’s say someone tries to cut a rope wrapped around a man’s neck, but the knife slips and he kills him instead. The first person would be a hero, but the second person would be executed. The world only judges our actions. We can’t show our thoughts to other people, and we can’t read each other’s minds. So are crime and
punishment
really that valid? Actions are only facts, and truth is always what comes before actions. So what we really need to pay attention to is not fact but truth. You’re the reason I’ve started thinking this way. I thought about what would happen if someone wrote a newspaper article on me. I would probably come off worse than you. Mun Yujeong attempted suicide three times. She attempted suicide
despite receiving psychiatric treatment. Nobody knows why. The end.”

His eyes seemed to flash behind his dark-rimmed glasses. If I had never met him, and if I did not have Aunt Monica, I, too, would have remembered him only for what I read in the papers. A bad guy. The end. But there was no end. It was around that time that I was starting to think maybe even death was not an end. As Rilke once said, some people continue to grow even after death.

“We’re only three years apart in age. Same generation. We’ve probably walked right by each other–somewhere, at some point. But when I came to the prison for the first time this past winter, I couldn’t believe that the men in here were really born in the same country as me and lived right beside me. To be even more honest, I used to think I was the only one in this world who was unhappy. It made me even more miserable to wonder why everyone else was happy while I was not. But coming here has made me confused, including about myself. I’m unhappy, and yet why am I not locked up, too? I couldn’t understand that. This place seems like a gathering point for all of the
unhappiness
in the world. I was surprised that so many sins could be committed by so many people and that there were so many types of unhappiness as well. I was surprised, too, that every day, without fail, more unhappy people who had sinned were being brought in here. I thought that if we had a real conversation—though I didn’t know what that was—about why I was outside and you were inside, then maybe I could understand myself. Maybe I could understand why I was unhappy and why I couldn’t be happy. Do you know what I mean?”

Yunsu stared at me, as still as a statue. He slowly nodded.

“I’m not here because I have free time. If I had a class
on Thursdays, I wouldn’t have been able to come today. But this semester, as luck would have it, I don’t teach on Thursdays, and my mother is in hospital. So I used all of these coincidences to come here. I’ve never done volunteer work or given to charity. And I don’t want to, either. In fact, I don’t believe in such a thing as a pure heart. Well, even if some people do have a heart like that, I certainly do not. I don’t like to go away empty-handed. So that means it’s your turn to talk. If I'm going to come here, I should get something from you, too. That’s only fair, right?”

That was how our meetings began that spring day. Every meeting was our last meeting because we did not know when his sentence would be completed. Death row
prisoners
were technically in limbo, as their sentences were not fully carried out until the day they were executed. That was why they were not sent to the same prison as other
criminals
but were detained at the center with prisoners who were still on trial. Even the name of the place contained an administrative lie: The Seoul Detention Center was not in Seoul but in Uiwang. Nevertheless, it was still called the Seoul Detention Center.

We kept the words
last time
in parentheses each time we met, but we never forgot that those words were there. Each of our meetings lasted for three hours, from ten in the morning to one in the afternoon on Thursdays. That was 180 minutes that I could have shoved in the garbage, as Aunt Monica would say.

The following Thursday, we sat across from each other again. The world outside was filled with the pale light of spring, like sweetened condensed milk dissolving, but inside the detention center, it was always cold and dark. Someone had once described it as a place inhabited by death and, for all I knew, the brighter the light of the world, the deeper the shadows that covered the prison.

Yunsu looked cheerful.

“After I was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court, they put this tag on my shirt. One day, I was walking down the hallway when I saw someone coming toward me. I saw that he had a red tag, and my blood went cold. I thought he must be really bad if they put a red tag on him. I did
everything
I could to avoid making eye contact when we passed each other. I was afraid of him. I went back to my cell, ate, and was lying down for a moment, when it hit me. My tag was red, too.”

We both laughed. His cuffed hands held his coffee cup loosely.

“No one bothers you when you’re on death row. One morning, they served us rice cake soup. It must have been around the Lunar New Year. No one could eat it. Everyone was unhappy and thinking about the families they left behind, nearly crying over the situation they were in. One guy was crying because he had to leave his kids with no mother to care for them, and another guy was crying because his wife was sick. One guy was upset because his girlfriend dumped him for someone else. But then they all looked at me, and their faces changed. It was like they were thinking,
This guy’s going to die soon,
so their own worries seemed like nothing. They started to eat and, the next thing I knew, they were slurping it up. That’s when I knew: as a death row inmate, I could still do something nice for others. I’d never done anything nice for anyone else in my entire life, but now that I was on death row, I could. So, does this fit your idea of a real conversation?”

I couldn’t tell whether I should laugh or not.

“The last time you came, you said you didn’t like to go away empty-handed, and that you wanted to do this fairly. I wish you knew how happy that made me. I thought of myself as just an asshole—sorry, I mean, just a guy who
had nothing to give to anyone. My hands are bound, I don’t have a penny to my name, I don’t know anything, and I was taught even less. Not even my life is my own anymore. So to hear you say that you want something from this ass—sorry, again—to hear you say you want something from me, well, I guess you really are an idiot.”

All three of us laughed.

“Okay, now I’ll tell you something real. I decided to become a hypocrite. Just the thought of being a believer makes me sick to my stomach, but I decided to give it a try. I decided if I was still alive by Christmas, I would get baptized, and I started taking catechism classes. Father Kim was teaching them. You probably already heard—he’s the one all the guys on death row here were skipping lunch and praying for—but he had a miraculous recovery and came back. His hair had all fallen out, and he was really thin, but he said he was better. Everyone was clamoring that it was a miracle. More people started taking his classes because of it. Even I started thinking about miracles for the first time in my life. Sister Monica sent me a letter last week. She wrote that when stones turn into bread and fish turn into people, it’s magic, but when a person changes, it’s a miracle. I don’t believe in miracles, but I felt like experimenting a little, to see if someone like me could live a different life. So I guess that makes me an idiot, too.”

Officer Yi and I laughed. He had caught us off guard with that.

“But I’ll stop talking about religion, since you probably don’t care for it. That’s only fair. I, too, don’t like being left empty-handed, and I don’t like when others are either.”

“Fine,” I said. It sounded like Yunsu had remembered everything I had told him last time.

“After I saw you last week, I thought it over carefully, and I really like the idea of having a real conversation. I
don’t really know what a real conversation is, but I think I want to try. It’s because of you that I realized that there is such a thing as real conversation and fake conversation. It’s also the first time I realized that someone can go to school—and in some amazing place like France, at that—and study art and become a professor and be from a rich family, and still not be happy.”

He stared at me. He had an apologetic look in his eyes. I laughed quietly. My friends all said the same thing.
What on earth do you have to be unhappy about
? My mother said it, too. And my brothers. The only one who didn’t say it was Aunt Monica. Sometimes I heard her mumble to herself,
Those who have everything are the poorest of all.

“I couldn’t even imagine it. I used to hate people like that. I thought you could kill all those assholes—sorry—all those people, and they would die in peace because they’d already enjoyed everything they could possibly enjoy. I couldn’t believe a young woman who had so much would…”

Yunsu paused to read my mood. After a moment, he continued, avoiding any mention of the word
rape
.

“…would be in so much pain and want to kill herself.”

He sounded like he meant it. He stared at me with compassion-filled eyes. I had never been looked at with so much empathy by a man before. He lowered his head for a moment.

“It wasn’t until I met you that I learned a woman of your class could be suffering and wanting to die in a different corner of the same world as me. Even rich people can suffer. You can still know nothing despite being well educated. And forcing a woman… Raping someone can be crueler than killing someone. For the first time, I
realized
that as a man. I went back to my cell that day and felt bad. For several days I kept muttering apologies on behalf of that man. And when I felt apologetic toward you, I
thought of that girl who died, the seventeen-year-old girl…”

He stopped. He brought his hands up to his mouth, the cuffs glimmering around them, and buried his face in them. Since the cuffs forced his hands together all the time, he looked like he was praying.

“I felt so sorry. I know that saying sorry doesn’t make up for anything, but I
was
sorry. If I could atone for that by dying, I would die ten times over. I didn’t feel sorry back when the prosecutor was snarling at me. I was determined not to feel sorry, even if they were to hang me on the spot. But now I am, in spite of myself.”

He closed his eyes. Tears spilled from his closed lids. There was nothing clichéd about it. I had no intention of preaching to him, but he kept saying nice things and making me nervous. I was finding it harder and harder to think of the Jeong Yunsu I knew as the man who was behind the Imun-dong murder case that I had looked up online. I had even surprised myself during one of our meetings by suddenly wondering,
Could he really have raped and killed someone
? Whenever I looked him in the face, laughed, or drank coffee with him, I ached inside. It sounds stupid, but I wanted to ask him,
Couldn’t you have not done it
? I wanted to ask Yunsu the same thing Aunt Monica used to ask me:
Why did you have to do it?

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me, but when I think back on those times, I have no idea why I did it. It feels like I’m watching myself in a movie. Actually, I felt the same way when I took the woman hostage and when they arrested me, like it wasn’t really me. But the problem is that it was. I can’t take it back, and now I can’t say sorry or ask for forgiveness. Now I get it. It really was me!”

He was shaking hard. Officer Yi grabbed a tissue and handed it to him. He took it and wiped the sweat from his forehead.