Our Happy Time (17 page)

“Also,” he said, staring down at the sweat-soaked tissue, “I’ve never used honorifics before. When I called you by the formal ‘you,’ I realized for the first time in my life that we have a really beautiful language.”

I opened the packet of
kimbap
that I had brought him for lunch and handed him the fork I had packed as well in case the chopsticks were too difficult for him to use. He didn’t eat much. All three of us just sipped green tea.

“Officer Yi.” I changed the subject. “It’s your turn to give us some real conversation. Yunsu and I aren’t getting paid for this, but you get to listen to real conversation
and
take home a salary.”

Officer Yi laughed and said, “I’m no good with words. I don’t have anything real to say, but if I did, it would be that—just like you two—I’m a real idiot.”

We all had a good laugh. It felt like the three idiots were becoming friends. In that moment, death, anxiety,
memories
of murder, fear, and times of curses all seemed to pass us by. Though it was clear they were only setting up camp behind us, biding their time until our own time together ended, we avoided talking about them. I was afraid. The season moved on, three hours a week at a time.

And then one day, I met a girl. She worked in a beauty salon close to where I lived. She was very popular among the guys in my gang. No matter how hard anyone tried to come on to her, she would not be won over. I went there to get my hair cut and liked her so much that I tried to pay her extra, but she said she didn’t take tips from bad guys like me. I had assumed from her crude way of talking that she’d been around the block, but she surprised me.

I fell in love with her. And though she didn’t show it, she seemed to like me, too.

I asked her to live with me, and she made a surprising suggestion. She said if I wanted us to live together then we should get married, and was I willing to throw away
everything
and run away with her and truly start a new life in order to marry her? She said she hated bad guys. I couldn’t
make up my mind. I had no skills. To be honest, I was worried because manual labor doesn’t pay even a fraction of what you can get from stealing a few times. You have to have a home if you want to get married, and you could work for a hundred years as a manual laborer and still not be able to buy one. But I felt like I could go anywhere in the world as long as I was with her. We ran away together. She found work in another salon, and I ran deliveries for a neighborhood market. They were hard but happy times. Then, she got pregnant. That joy, too, was brief. One night, her stomach started hurting, so I carried her on my back to the hospital. They told us it was an ectopic pregnancy. They said they needed three million won to operate. They said I had to hurry because her life was in danger. She looked at me and said she was scared. I was scared, too. I couldn’t let her die like Eunsu. I had no choice but to hunt down my old friends while she was in the hospital. I had once made some good money from a job I pulledm, back when I was on top of my game, and loaned it to one of them. My plan was to get the money back from the guy. But he was gone, and instead an older guy he had been close with made me an offer. One last job, he said. I had no other choice. And I was thinking the same thing: just one last job.

T
he water in the fountain was dancing in time to music. Children holding ice cream cones were running around the fountain, and people dressed up for a concert were walking by in pairs. I had arrived at the Seoul Arts Center a little early. Since I had time to kill, I was sitting at an outdoor café. The seasons were changing quickly. School had already been out of session for a week. As I watched people walk past me, I reached into my bag for my
sketchbook
and started drawing them. There were little girls in lace dresses that puffed out around their waists like tutus, little boys dressed in shorts and holding colorful balloons, and men walking hand in hand with women in sleeveless tops that revealed their slender arms. The summer evening was redolent with the heavy scent of trees breathing in the forest where the flowers had dropped their petals. I stopped in the middle of sketching and suddenly wondered if the people around me were happy. The old me would have stared at them like a vagrant looking up at lamp-lit windows from a darkened alley and assumed they must be happy. I used to think that if I could just get inside those windows, happiness would be waiting there like silverware set on a table. I used to toss and turn in bed every night,
awash in the sorrow of one cast out alone into the
wilderness
, walking barefoot along an endless night road. But then I realized all over again that people don’t live in either the land of happiness or the land of unhappiness. Everyone is both happy and unhappy to some extent. But then again, maybe that wasn’t true, either. Maybe if everyone in the world could be divided into two groups, one group would be people who were somewhat unhappy, and the other would be people who were completely unhappy. And there would be no way of objectively distinguishing which was which. As Camus might have said, there were no happy people, just people who were richer or poorer in spirit when it came to happiness.

I filled a sheet in my sketchbook and turned to the next page. It hit me that Yunsu was somewhere out there on the other side of the mountain behind the arts center. A professor who had spent many years in prison as a political dissident once wrote that while winter is a humane season in prison, summer made you hate the man next to you. I pictured Yunsu’s young muscles; him shackled in a tiny room, enduring the body heat of the other men, never able to remove the cuffs except when he was changing clothes. He had told me that he was sensitive to heat, and that it was probably because he had been used to sleeping in cold places for such a long time. The cuffs even got in the way when he tried to wipe away the sweat. The dark-red sores that formed where the edges of the cuffs rubbed against his skin festered in the hot weather. “It’s a little better now,” Officer Yi had told me while applying the ointment I had brought for his wrists. “An older co-worker of mine told me that one death row inmate’s wrists got infected with maggots in the summer.” Instead of ice cream cones,
children
, and the dancing fountain that looked like a symbol of happiness, Yunsu's hands appeared on the pages of
my sketchbook. His blue-tinged wrists, so pale that the veins showed because they never saw the sunlight except for thirty minutes of exercise every twenty-four hours. His scar-covered wrists and their gleaming silver cuffs. His eyes that he sometimes fixed on me before hurriedly casting them down. He had written in his letter,
Do you know how much I look forward to Thursdays? I wish every day was Thursday.
He was like a child. His
childishness
left me helpless. After meeting him, I felt bad for every warm ray of sun, every refreshing breeze, and every cool room in the summer. Whenever I drank a lemon soda filled with ice or a draft beer poured into a glass white with frost from the freezer, his face stopped me, and the degree of satisfaction I got from that sensual pleasure
plummeted
in inverse proportion to the money I had paid for it. There was a mother who had rented a room in front of the detention center after her son was put on death row. The room was as small as her son’s cell. She kept the heat off during the winter and the window shut tight during the summer. She was a devout Buddhist: she performed three thousand bows toward the detention center every morning and visited her son every afternoon. Was heaven moved by this? In the end, her son’s death penalty was commuted to a life sentence, and his true story became a legend in the detention center. A guy I dated once had told me about it, possibly over drinks one night when he was telling me stories from his time in the army. I remembered that he told me not to look down on the South Korean army. He had served as an intelligence officer while stationed in a forward unit, and he said the number one thing that disqualified a soldier from being assigned to patrol the DMZ, the military tinderbox where tensions ran higher along the border with North Korea, was if he had no mother. Maybe mother,
ultimately
, was just another word for love.

Someone tapped me lightly on the shoulder. It was my oldest brother Yusik, dressed in a dark-navy suit. With his necktie on in this hot summer weather, he looked a little pitiful. This, too, was just another type of uniform. “You’re early,” he said, but when he saw the wrists and handcuffs I was sketching, his face hardened. I closed the sketchbook. He fanned himself lightly with the envelope he was holding and said, “So you’re still seeing him.” His voice dripped with contempt. I was not unaware of what he meant by his statement. I took his arm without responding, and we headed into the air-conditioned restaurant.

After we ordered, I glanced at the envelope he had brought with him. It looked like he had reserved recital tickets. He must have noticed that I was looking at them because he said, “Your sister-in-law asked me to get them on the way here.”

“I guess Korean prosecutors make good husbands,” I said, and he laughed.

“What else can I do? Her nerves are so on edge before a recital that at times I feel like trials are a piece of cake in comparison. Anyway, it’s easier to just do what she tells me to do.”

The men in my immediate family, including my deceased father, were all nice to women. Or as my mother put it, they were too weak to get out from under their wives’ thumbs. At any rate, we were putting off the real subject at hand—our mother—for as long as we could. Our food had not come out yet, and we knew that we couldn’t enjoy the food and talk about her at the same time. In a way, we were starting off in our own demilitarized zone.

“Something happened to Yuchan’s wife,” he said.

Yuchan was the youngest of my brothers. His wife was Seo Yeongja, the former movie actress whose stage name was Lina but whose real name was Yeongja.

“She came to see me at the public prosecutor’s office. Didn’t even call first.”

I dipped a salmon canapé in sauce. Of the people in our family, Yeongja was easier to talk about than my oldest sister-in-law, the pianist, or the next one down, the doctor.

“Someone broke into their house last week, and the burglar has been taken into custody by the police. But she asked me to have him freed.”

“Someone broke into Miss Seo Yeongja’s house? Why does Miss Seo Yeongja want them to let him go? Was he an old boyfriend of Miss Seo Yeongja’s or something?”

He clucked his tongue at me. I decided to be a little more serious.

“The problem is that the kid was caught red-handed stealing her jewelry. But Miss Seo Yeongja—eh, now you’ve got me doing it, calling her by her full name–”

My brother gave me a stern look and laughed. For a moment, it felt like old times. Like that day long ago, before I turned fifteen, when he had just started working and celebrated his first paycheck by treating me and only me to an ice cream cone. That long-ago time felt like a fairy tale now.

“But she didn’t press charges. Not only did she not press charges but she fed him, bathed him, and even bought him a pair of shoes before sending him away. Yuchan had no idea what his wife was up to, and a few days after that
incident
, he came home to find the kid choking Miss Seo—I mean, our sister-in-law. Anyway, he found him
strangling
her on the living-room sofa. Strangling his pregnant wife! So Yuchan grabbed the kid and started hitting him. Turns out, he says he’s fifteen, but he looks no older than a third-grader. That was when Yuchan found out that she had caught the kid stealing from them the time before. Of course he wasn’t going to stand for that. So he dragged the
kid down to the police station. And now she wants me to set him free.”

I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. He laughed and drank a glass of the sherry that had come out as an apéritif.

“What I heard is that she’s well known all over the neighborhood. If a beggar walks past their house, she calls him inside, makes him take a shower, and fixes him a meal. If she sees construction workers eating on the ground, she calls them in and sets the table for them. The number of vagrants who’ve been through that house may not amount to a battalion, but we are talking about a squadron. Once, Yuchan even asked for a divorce and moved out of the house for a while because of her.”

My brother paused to light a cigarette.

“When she came to see me at the office, she had no makeup on, was dressed down… I almost didn’t recognize her. She addressed me formally as ‘Elder Brother-in-Law.’ It’s hard to believe she’s the same Seo Lina who used to be so attractive. Maybe it just happens with age?”

The moment was brief, but my brother seemed
bothered
that her beauty as a woman had faded. I remembered the day Yuchan, who was an economics professor, had told us, “I’m getting married, and her name is Seo Lina.” Our mother had said, “Are you crazy?” but our other brothers were oblivious, their faces filled with awe and jealousy. All they had to say about it was, “When are you bringing her home?”

“She told me something similar happened right after they were married. They were robbed by someone who took all of their wedding jewelry, and he was caught later by the police. But when they went to the station to identify the stolen jewelry, she cried and pleaded for clemency. She said she knew the kid and that she would take responsibility
for it, and she asked them to let him go. The cops
probably
recognized her from her acting days and went along with it because of who she is, and because the kid was so young. Then recently—I think she said it was sometime just last year—she happened to get in a cab, and the driver asked if she remembered him. She said she asked who he was, but he didn’t answer. She got to her destination, went about her business, and came back out to find the cab driver waiting for her. He got down on his knees and told her he was the one she’d set free in the police station. He blew off the rest of his fares for the day and invited her to his house. She went with him and met his wife and their one-year-old baby. The guy’s wife told her that he talked about how grateful he was to her every single day, and that he said he would never forget the kindness of the woman who had cried and pleaded for the police to let him go. He said it made a human being out of him. After that whenever life became difficult, he was able to overcome it by thinking about her tears. That’s what she told me.”

The food we had ordered came out, but we were both quiet for a moment.

“She’s an unusual woman. I had always thought of her as a glamorous actress turned traditional wife who somehow managed better than the other wives, including handling the ancestral memorial services and putting up with our mother’s temper… but this time I didn’t know what to think. She kept saying, ‘He’s so young. Can’t you do something to help him? Let him go just this once. What’s the point of arresting him and churning out another ex-convict?’ So I talked to the other people involved, and then I called Yuchan. I told him, ‘That wife of yours is a real saint.’ He sighed and then sighed again, and he said, ‘Brother, they say you have to destroy ten lives to produce one saint. I’m one of the ten. I’m going to wind up on the street.’”

We laughed. As I was laughing, I realized that I had actually been looking down on her all along as a loser who couldn’t even make it through college and as a pushover who only knew how to say yes. At the same time, I realized that I had been looking at her through my mother’s eyes. I had been measuring people by the same snobbish scale that my mother used, the one I could not stand—all while despising my family members for being snobs. She clearly had problems and was probably causing danger, and living with her would no doubt, as Yuchan had said, wear you down to the point that you dropped dead, but all the same, I had to acknowledge how wrong I had been about her, and regretted misjudging her all over again.

“This isn’t a good family for a prosecutor,” I said. “If everyone keeps this up, they’ll have to shut down the public prosecutor’s office.”

He laughed and then looked at me.

“You think prosecutors just throw everyone into jail? We take people’s situations into consideration. Recently, there was a woman who was caught stealing with her baby. She was so pathetic that I asked her, ‘You’re not going to do this again, are you?’ And I suspended her indictment.”

“I don’t believe it!” I said. He laughed. I twirled the pasta around my fork, but I could barely eat anything.

“Mom’s been through a lot.” He paused in the middle of cutting his steak and glanced up at me. “The doctor examined her again, but he said it’s not a relapse. She said she wants to stay in hospital anyway. They put her in a VIP room. She insists it’s a relapse, so what can they do? She says she feels better there. You should go see her. I stop by every day on my way home from work. Whether or not it’s a relapse, she’s definitely not going to last long.”

He was trying to reason with me. It caught me off guard. I had assumed that he had asked to meet with me in order
to scold me for not going to see her yet. He set his knife and fork down beside his plate, drank the wine he had ordered, and took a deep breath. It looked like we were about to have a “real conversation,” as Yunsu and I would put it. I suddenly found myself thinking,
He’s been a prosecutor for a really long time.
The look on my brother’s face just then—I had never been a criminal looking into the eyes of a prosecutor, but I had a feeling I knew what it would feel like.