Our Happy Time (21 page)

That year, Yunsu was baptized during the Christmas Mass. It was a Thursday. I attended his baptism. His baptismal name was Augustine, after the young heathen who consorted with prostitutes and led a life of debauchery until, one day, he was drawn by the sound of a childlike voice to open up the Gospel and read, after which he converted and became one of Christianity’s greatest saints. Augustine was also the son of Saint Monica, from whom Aunt Monica had taken her Christian name. During the Mass, I was seated in the choir with other women who volunteered at the detention center. Yunsu was sitting far away from me; he was wearing a set of white clothes given to him by the female volunteers. They made him look strange and new. Swaddled in fabric like a baby, Yunsu looked as excited as a little boy on his first day at kindergarten.

Before Mass began, I stepped forward to sing the national anthem. Aunt Monica had asked me to. Some of the people there recognized me; I could hear them
whispering
. In the past, the idea of singing in front of these people, in front of people who would be ex-convicts upon leaving this place, in front of fake believers who were only there to get free Choco Pies, would have been
unimaginable
to me, but I told Aunt Monica I was happy to do it. I was doing it for Yunsu. And when I thought about it, I was a bigger fake and hypocrite than any of those people. I had even gone so far as to join the prison ministry. Yunsu told me he couldn’t sleep at night at the thought that he was so
close to death and yet would be reborn through baptism. He said it was the first time in his life that he had been too happy to sleep. He said he could not believe that God would accept someone who was even lower than an animal. For Yunsu, I went to the front of the chapel and picked up a microphone for the first time in ten years. While the prelude rang out, I caught Yunsu’s eye. He was sitting with other death row prisoners in the very front pew. I gave him a quick smile, but he looked stiff. He was probably thinking about his little brother. I began to sing.
Until the East Sea runs dry and Mt. Baekdu wears away, God save us and keep our nation…
When I finished and stepped down from the pulpit, Yunsu had his head down. I could tell he was crying.

The last time I saw him, he had told me,
When the judge sentenced me—no, when I killed those people, I was already dead. But now I’ve come back to life because people helped me, because they held my hand and told me it was okay if I couldn’t run because I should start by walking.
I wanted to cry with Yunsu. My heart was cracking open like the soil in a dry rice paddy. Yunsu looked over at the choir through his tears. He seemed to be looking for me. Our eyes met. His white teeth flashed as he tried hard to smile. I was struck by the sight of the handcuffs that bound his wrists even as his white teeth and curly black hair were being reborn.

Mass ended, and the banquet began. Yunsu smiled broadly as his fellow prisoners congratulated him. While passing out Choco Pies, I asked him how it was. “Yujeong,” he said, “trust me. You’ve got to try believing in Christ. I promise you. It’s really good.” I didn’t say anything.

“I heard an ex-convict was elected president,” he said while eating a Choco Pie with cuffed hands. “He said there would be no executions while he’s in office. The other guys
think that means none of us will be executed, since he’s president now. That’s what he promised. Yujeong, I’ve been thinking. For the first time, I want to live. I didn’t used to. But for the first time, I thought, what if I could keep living here, writing letters to children even though my hands are cuffed, passing along the love that I’ve received from everyone even though my body is shackled, spending the rest of my life praying and atoning for the people I hurt? I could think of this place as a monastery. I know I don’t deserve it. It’s shameless of me to even think that way.”

That was the last time I saw Yunsu.

We split the money and ran our separate ways. In my typical fashion, I headed straight for a room salon where I blew my money on girls and had a good time. I didn’t find out until later, but the other guy went straight home. There, his wife convinced him to turn himself in. He went to the police and told them everything. But he switched the stories around so that what I did became what he did and what he did became what I did. Of course, what’s the point of explaining all of this now? I was put on the
most-wanted
list for raping and killing a teenager and killing two women. My photograph was shown all over the country, and I became a hunted man. I searched for the friend I had loaned money to in order to convince him to pay for my girlfriend’s surgery. He told me not to worry and said he would make sure she was okay after she got out of hospital. Then, that night, he and I went to another bar and drank and caroused with women to our hearts’ content. We fell asleep in a motel, and in the morning I awoke to the sound
of someone banging on the door. My friend had reported me to the police and run away. Maybe he thought that was the only way he would get out of paying me back the money I’d loaned him.

I pried open the motel window, jumped out, and ran into the first house I saw. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and forced the woman and her child into a room. Then I called my girlfriend for the last time.

The woman I loved was with my friend. He had gone to her the night before. She said that he paid her hospital bill and had her discharged. She said she owed him now, and since he had asked her to marry him… She said he told her he had loved her from the moment he first saw her at the beauty salon. She asked me why I did it. Didn’t she tell me from the very beginning how much she hated bad guys? The police tried to break down the door and get inside. I held the knife to the throat of the woman whose house I had broken into and taken hostage. The woman’s child cried, “Mommy, Mommy!” It reminded me of Eunsu when he was little. A bullet hit me in the leg, and I was arrested.

W
ith the end of the year approaching, there wasn’t much time left. I reserved hotel rooms in Gangneung, rented a bus for the kids, and had to make several phone calls to the principal of the branch school in Taebaek. All of the preparations were complete, but there was still the problem of the camera. I didn’t own one and couldn’t even remember the last time I had taken a photograph. I called my youngest sister-in-law. She was in the last month of her pregnancy. She agreed to waddle out to meet me to loan me her camera. While waiting for her in the lobby of a
department
store in Gangnam, I spotted her in the distance. Just as my brother Yusik had described, she had no makeup on and was dressed plainly. Since she was pregnant on top of that, who would have recognized her as the glamorous actress she once was? It was true that she looked haggard and wasn’t very pretty anymore. But instead her face
radiated
something like peace. She had the dignity and grace of a person who’s become perfectly centered in their body. I took the camera from her and handed her a shopping bag.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Clothes… for the baby. Just something pretty that caught my eye.”

She looked surprised. Despite all of the nieces and nephews that had been born, I had never once bought anything for them. If I ran into one of my brothers’ wives, I would say,
Congratulations, I hear it’s a boy.
But each time I did, it felt like asking someone who was clearly not in a good mood how he or she was doing. That day, I stared at my sister-in-law’s enormous belly and wondered for the first time what it would feel like to become a mother. I started to ask myself,
What if?
The idea of my being a mother was absurd; nevertheless, I thought I could hear something tapping inside of me, the desire beginning to sprout like a wildflower poking its way through the mortar of a brick wall and blooming there.

“Miss, I heard you’ve been doing some important
volunteer
work. It shows in your face—you’re glowing.”

She had an unaffected way of speaking. I used to doubt every word that came out of her mouth. I thought that behind her words were machinations and scheming. Or that she was a fool. But she was not the fool:
I
was. And the only machinations and scheming were the ones going on in my own mind. I was always scheming to see other people as bad, one way or another. And in the end, that was a foolish thing to do. It made me uncomfortable to be alone with her, as if I were a bad student who had suddenly been caught doing a good deed for the first time in a long while. I turned to leave but she stopped me.

“Miss, you should go see your mother. I think she’s waiting for you.”

Not that again,
I thought and started to walk away, but she added, “Your mother’s lonely,” although it was possible that I misheard her. I dragged my tired body through a few more errands and then went home.

It made me happy to think about how delighted Yunsu would be when I showed him the photos of the sun rising on
the first day of the year and the children’s faces like bright flowers. Aunt Monica had teased me about it. “Thanks to Yunsu, you’re finally doing something for others.” In the past, whenever I saw people who did things for others, I thought,
Hypocrites, you’re all just doing it to make
yourself
feel better, aren’t you?
But now I wanted to do things for Yunsu. If he was happy, I was happy. For the first time in my life, I realized that being a hypocrite could feel good, too.

I hummed as I took a quick shower. Then I made some tea and was grading my students’ work when a strange feeling came over me. I can’t explain exactly what it was, but it felt like a sudden restlessness. No matter what I did, the feeling would not go away, and my heart began to beat in a strange rhythm. The walls looked like they were bobbing up and down. I had never felt this way before. I went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine. I glanced out the kitchen window out of habit: the teenagers were back in the park behind the apartment complex. This time as well, there was a swarm of them, and they were beating someone up again. I looked at the telephone and debated what to do but wound up taking the wine glass and returning to my chair.

The winter sun was already hanging low to the west. The phone rang. It was Aunt Monica. From the way she said my name, I could tell that she was shaking. Even before she said anything, I thought,
No!
Everything went white before my eyes.

“Aunt Monica—”

“Father Kim just called. He was told to go to the
detention
center early tomorrow morning. Yunsu…”

I could not bring myself to ask. How could I say those words out loud? But it wasn’t the words. My mind went blank, and the space before my eyes seemed to lose its shape and wobble like tofu.

“I’m going to the detention center at dawn tomorrow,” Aunt Monica said. “Yujeong, you need to pray. Pray.”

It was the first time she had ever told me to pray.

After we hung up, I picked up my wine then set it down again. The color really did look like blood, and I couldn’t drink it. I went back to the living room, sat down, and then stood up again.
No
, I thought.
No, no, no.
I wondered what Yunsu was doing at that moment. He would have no clue. In that place where I could not call and could not visit, he was probably spending his last night without any idea that it was his last. That seemed crueler than dying. I called Officer Yi.

When he answered his phone, his voice sounded very distressed, and I could tell that he didn’t feel like talking.

“I’m heading over now. Please let me see him. Just five minutes—no, one minute.”

“I can’t do that. It’s against the rules.”

“You can. I’ll take full responsibility. Even if I can’t stop him from dying, he at least deserves to know he’s going to die! He needs to be ready. We can’t just let him spend the rest of the night not knowing what’s going on!”

Officer Yi didn’t say a word. Of course, Yunsu already knew he was dying. He had spent two and a half years knowing he would die. The only thing he didn’t know was whether it would be today or the next day. We all know it: that we will die some day. But even though he was on death row, was it right not to notify him of his death and allow him to prepare for it? But what could Officer Yi do?

I hung up and paced back and forth in my room. No. It was too mean and inhumane. It was murder. And then it occurred to me. The only type of death that can be predicted, and stopped, is a death by execution. Yet we were helpless to do anything about it.

I tried getting on my knees, but I couldn’t pray. It had
been too long. “Save him. Please save him,” I mumbled. “I know he did a bad thing, but if you would save him, if you would only save him…” At that instant, the memory came back to me. Fifteen years ago, in that brute’s room on the second floor of the head family’s house, when I cried in his grasp, not knowing what else to do, I had prayed just like this. My prayer had gone unanswered. I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. I stood up. I could hear the clock tick. It was five in the afternoon. The execution was set for ten the next morning. In seventeen hours, he would be gone. The clock ticked on and on, oblivious. I pulled the batteries out. A breathless silence filled the room as time stood still.

All of the hours that I had spent with him began to flash before my eyes. Not the times when he clenched his teeth and lashed out at Aunt Monica or when he scoffed at her, but rather the times he laughed and the times his tears fell. The time he shook and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” when he met the mother of the woman he killed. Would he shake like that when he entered the execution room and the noose was lowered? Just four days earlier, he had told me,
What if I could keep living here, writing letters to children even though my hands are cuffed, passing along the love that I’ve received from everyone even though my body is shackled, spending the rest of my life praying and atoning for the people I hurt? I could think of this place as a monastery. I know I don’t deserve it. It’s shameless of me to even think that way.

How many minutes had gone by? Time had lost all rhythm. A sudden anxiety came over me: What if the whole night had already gone by and dawn was approaching? I grabbed my cell phone to check the time. It had only been three minutes. It scared me all over again to see how slowly this parched hour was passing. Then I realized that maybe
it was better for Yunsu not to know. I realized it might be unbearable for him otherwise, and I started to feel a little better. I looked at my hands and stood up. Then I slowly walked over to the telephone.

I dialed information.

“I’m looking for someone named Mun Yuseong.” My lips kept twitching as I spoke. It was the first time I had ever said his full name out loud. Before it happened, I used to call him Brother.

“Mr. Mun Yuseong? What is the address?” I told the operator I didn’t know. I knew I was being stupid. But I couldn’t call my brother Yusik and ask. “There are many people named Mun Yuseong all over the country,” she said politely.

“He lives in Seoul,” I told her. “In a rich neighborhood. I’m not sure where.”

“I’m sorry,” the operator continued, “but I will need more information to locate his phone number for you.” She was friendly, but her voice was flat. I hung up and left the apartment. When I got in my car and turned the key, my hands were shaking. I clenched my teeth and put the car in gear.

My mother had her reading glasses on and was flipping through a magazine. She lifted her head as I came in. I stood in the doorway and stared at her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

When she said that, I wanted to turn around and leave. It would have been easier for me if she had at least looked a little more haggard, or just a little bit more pitiful. Or if she’d looked a bit lonelier, as my sister-in-law had said. But to my regret, my mother looked healthy and relaxed.

Mummy, it hurts, it hurts really bad.
She may have been my mother, but it was still hard back then for me, a grown girl, to show her my private parts. She had looked at me down there for a moment and then pulled my underwear back up. Then she had said coldly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I couldn’t believe it at first. When I had left the head family’s house, I had trouble walking because of the swelling in my crotch. I had walked down the street crying, a girl in a grown-up body. Each time I thought I could not go any further because of the pain that
threatened
to tear me in half with each step, I told myself that if I could just get to my mother, if I could just tell her what had happened, everything would be okay. I believed that I would be comforted and that he would be punished. But the moment I heard her words and saw the cold look on her face, a clear barricade seemed to drop like a guillotine blade and lodge itself between us.

“Cousin Yuseong called me into his room. He said he had something to tell me. So I went upstairs. He pulled off my underwear… Mommy, it hurts. I’m scared. It hurts so much.”

I was crying and overwhelmed with pain and fear and could not keep talking.

My mother went downstairs and returned after a moment. She handed me a tube of generic ointment.

“Put this on it and go to sleep. And keep your mouth shut. You got what was coming to you, wagging your tail around like that, a grown girl…”

I collapsed on the floor, the ointment my mother had given me clutched in my hand.

“You have no shame. Keep quiet and don’t go prancing around in front of your older brothers. Understand? You really do read too many storybooks!”

“No!”

I screamed as hard as I could. My mother covered my mouth. “No, no, no!” When I struggled, she slapped me on the cheek over and over. It was the first time she had ever hit me.

I walked over to my mother. With a scowl on her face, she turned over the magazine that she had been looking at and sat up. To my surprise, she looked scared.

“What’s wrong with you?” she yelled.