Our Happy Time (23 page)

P.S. Please deliver this message to Sister Monica and Father Kim: Thank you, I am sorry, and I love you. They remind me of that poem about someone making griddlecakes with their tears. They always knew exactly when to turn the cakes to keep them from burning, they shared those warm cakes with us, and in the end they taught us all grace.

S
everal people were already in the hospital room. Father Kim greeted me when I walked in. He had put on a lot of weight since I last saw him, and his hair had grown back. “You got bigger,” I said. He laughed, patted his belly, and said, “Indeed, I keep getting fatter.” Things change when you’re alive. Sometimes they get worse, and sometimes they get better. In the seven years that had passed since Yunsu’s death, I had met many other Yunsus. I don’t think I was just imagining it. It didn’t matter whether you were a judge riding around in a fancy black sedan or a diabolical murderer, we were all equally pitiful and equal debtors in life from the point of view of a greater judge. No human being was fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. We all struggled to make it through each day. If there were a fundamental truth, it was that everyone fights death. This was our common thread, pathetic and as old as time, and it could not be severed.

Aunt Monica was wearing a white cap instead of her usual veil. It was a round sleeping cap edged with lace, like something you would see in a movie. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the cap, but Aunt Monica’s body was so tiny that she looked like a baby in a cradle. If her face were not so
old, it might have looked as if everyone was surrounding the bed to celebrate a new birth. She had been talking to Father Kim just before I walked in. She gestured to me to sit down and turned back to him.

“So like I was saying, he asked for a Bible. That means he agreed to meet with you, right? How was he when you saw him?”

I thought back to that snowy day when I had rushed to the detention center because Aunt Monica slipped and hurt herself, only to find her sitting there with a pink floral handkerchief wrapped around her head. Back then, I had looked at her and thought,
You win.
I felt the same way again today.

It sounded like Aunt Monica and Father Kim were talking about a serial killer who had just been sentenced to the death penalty.

“Well, he didn’t have much to say,” Father Kim said. “He must have had some experience with Christianity when he was young. He said he killed his victims in front of a window where a church cross was easily visible. Also, he said that he sees himself as evil and that he’s afraid to stop thinking of himself that way. But when I met him, he was just an ordinary person.”

Father Kim laughed bitterly. Aunt Monica closed her eyes, as if overwhelmed.

In 2004, there wasn’t a soul in Korea who didn’t know about that murderer. Because of him, voices calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty—which had been
abolished
after December 1997 in keeping with the president’s campaign promise—were gaining strength, and people’s legal sympathies toward death row convicts were growing cold. Even the other people on death row that I had been meeting with after Yunsu’s death said that they had read about him in the newspaper and caught themselves thinking,
He must be killed.
And they laughed, despite themselves.

Aunt Monica was in the middle of talking to Father Kim about the murderer when I came into the room.

“We don’t have the right to give up on someone,” Aunt Monica said, “no matter how horrible his crimes are, even if he is the devil incarnate. None of us are entirely good. No one is completely innocent. Some are just a little more good and some are a little more evil. Life gives us the
opportunity
to decide whether to atone for our sins or continue committing them; therefore, we do not have the right to stop that from happening. You have a difficult task ahead of you, Father Kim. I wish I could help you, but I think my time here is nearly up.”

Aunt Monica sounded calm. When she brought up dying, Father Kim looked like he was about to offer some clichéd words of comfort, but he stopped himself. Aunt Monica turned to me, the same expression in her eyes as ever. That playful look still glimmered there every now and then, but for a long time it had become harder for her to make jokes. After Father Kim left, I sat beside her.

“Dr. Noh called you?”

I nodded and gently stroked her face, just as she had done for me one winter long ago. She must have been thinking about that winter, too, because she smiled.

“So,” she asked, “now that you’ve made it this far without dying, how do you feel about it?”

“I guess I feel like I have more living to do.”

I wanted to cry. Aunt Monica looked like a candlewick about to go out. Once again, I thought,
What am I going to do without her?
I had been wondering that for a long time. But now I was sure of one thing: I would go on living, even if I felt like I was dying. I knew that saying such things as
I felt like I was dying
or
This isn’t really living
were
actually statements about life. It was the same with
I’m so hot I could die
and
I’m so hungry I could die
and
I want to die.
You could only feel like you were dying if you were alive and were therefore a part of life. So instead of saying I wanted to die, I had no choice but to change it to
I want to live well.

“How is your mother?” asked Aunt Monica. I told her she was in good health, and we both smiled.

“I found Yunsu’s mother,” she said.

The moment I heard Yunsu’s name, my throat locked up, and I could not respond.

“I found out she’s living nearby,” Aunt Monica continued. “One of the sisters from our convent was helping with the elderly who don’t have anyone to take care of them, and there she was. Who knows what has happened to her over the years? The sister thinks she might have Alzheimer’s. She contacted me after she checked her records.”

I took Aunt Monica’s hand without saying a word. She took out a cross that she had placed near her bedside, her hand trembling, and handed it to me. It was the cross that Yunsu had molded for her from rice paste before he died.

“Please take this there and give it to her. They said that whenever it’s not too cold out, she spends the whole day sitting outside waiting for someone. The nun asked her who she was waiting for, and she said her son. She asked what his name was, and the woman said ‘Unsu.’”

I tried repeating the name ‘Unsu’ after her and got a lump in my throat. It sounded like it was halfway between Eunsu and Yunsu. I took the cross. Aunt Monica was so weak that she closed her eyes again.

“Will you pray for me to die soon? I’m in a little bit of pain… Actually, I’m in a lot of pain. Even the morphine isn’t helping.”

I said I would.

“It’s strange. Before you got here, I dreamt that all of those boys I’ve seen executed were here in the room with me. Yunsu was here, too. They were all dressed in white. They were smiling so brightly, but they had black rope marks around their necks. I guess even in death, the marks don’t go away. It was just a dream, but it was heartbreaking.”

I couldn’t hold back anymore and burst into tears.

“Don’t cry, my beautiful Yujeong. When you survived, when you went with me to the detention center for the first time, when you struggled to understand Yunsu, when I heard you went to see your brother to try to save him… I was so proud. The truth is that I was always secretly keeping an eye on you, always with my heart in my mouth. You have so much passion in you, and passionate people always hurt more. But that’s never anything to be ashamed of.”

I cradled Aunt Monica’s face in my hands. Her face was very small and covered in wrinkles. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was. I wanted to tell her how frightened I was and that I didn’t know how I should live. Just like Yunsu, I had figured it out too late. For the first time in my life, I wanted to say those words that I had never been able to say before, the words could not be replaced with any others.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Monica. I’m so sorry I hurt you.”

She smiled lightly and stroked my hands.

“It makes me so happy to see our Yujeong all grown up,” she said.

Aunt Monica smiled, but the pain must have been bad because it turned into a grimace.

“Pray. Please pray. Not just for those on death row, not just for criminals. Pray for those who think they are without sin, those who think they are right, those who think they know everything and who think everything is fine. Pray for those people.”

I wiped the sweat from Aunt Monica’s brow and nodded—even though God had never once listened to my prayers, and this time would probably be no different. Since Yunsu had told me to trust him, and Aunt Monica was once more telling me to pray, I wanted to say that I would, but I couldn’t get my mouth to open. I felt that if I opened my mouth, I would fall to pieces. If that happened, Aunt Monica would be hurt, so I was trying to bear it. I had learned from Yunsu that love meant gladly enduring for another person, and that it sometimes meant having the courage to change yourself.

Aunt Monica smiled and took my hand. Her hand felt as rough as a broomstick that had spent a lifetime sweeping a courtyard. She smiled once more and then closed her eyes. She looked like she was asleep. I pulled her blanket up around her so she would not get cold, and her tiny feet poked out. Covered in white socks, they were as small as a child’s. She must have traveled to so many places on those feet. Over her lifetime of nearly eighty years, she must have seen so many dark alleys and abandoned woods that the rest of us simply turned our backs on, valleys of fear and deserts of truth, proud and merciless rivers. She must have realized how all of those rivers begin as tiny streams, each with its own name, and flow on until they reach the sea that has but one name, and that no one can stop those waters from reaching their destination. I straightened Aunt Monica’s blanket and kissed her pained forehead. I thought about the desire that had flashed through me when I took the camera from my sister-in-law, the day before Yunsu died. The desire to have a child. But Aunt Monica had cast away all of her desires to become a mother to those who had lost their own. Quietly, I whispered,
Rest now. I love you, my dear mother…

Gong Ji-young is one of Korea’s most acclaimed novelists. She has sold over 10 million books in South Korea alone. Her awards include the 2011 Yisang Literary Award, the 21st Century Literary Award, the Korean Novel Prize, the Oh Young-soo Literature Award, and the 9th Special Media Award from Amnesty International for
Our Happy Time.

“With its exploration of the social origins of crime and its philosophical and religious investigation of sin and salvation, this novel reverberates heavily. But the
writer
’s sensitive touch, particularly in the climactic scenes, will move readers to tears.”

– Choi Jae-bong,
The Hankyoreh
(newspaper)

“When it comes down to it, we might all be prisoners on death row, and our lives a farce in which those of us on death row sentence others to their deaths first. […] By exposing our pretenses, falsehoods, and ignorance as we stand before death, this novel wields the power to wrest tears of compassion from our eyes.”

– Jo Yong-ho,
Segye Ilbo
(newspaper)

“A superbly emotional and entertaining read. A
fast-paced
novel that focuses our attention on issues worth exploring,
Our Happy Time
melds the themes of victim and victimizer, crime and punishment, love and forgiveness, capital punishment and justice.”

– Jang Seok-su,
The Flâneur Takes a Stroll Through Books,
Yedam Publishing: 2007

“Knowing how to tease out what readers want and fusing those desires with the concerns that are universal to a generation—that is the strength one wants to have as a writer. Gong Ji-young catches two rabbits at the same time—emotional appeal and entertainment. Perhaps that is why she is so loved by her readers. She excels at fusing the symbols of our era into her stories. […] The publishing world is in a slump and Korean novels are being pushed out by Japanese novels, and yet her books—
Field
of Stars, Our Happy Time, Things That Come After Love
—continue to top the bestseller lists. She astonishes!”

“Gong’s intense gaze is both delicate and tenacious—she captures every detail of her characters, right down to the stains on their clothes and the drops of water clinging to their heels. […] Her love for her subjects is like a warm breath blowing life into her stories. […] That deep affection takes us to an even deeper place, where the essence of the story is hidden.”

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gong Ji-young is a magnificent storyteller.”

– Son Jong-eop,
Literary Resistance,
Bogosa Books: 2001