Our Happy Time

by Gong Ji-Young

  The moment he saw the bottle of medicine in my hand, my father’s eyes flashed. He wrenched the bottle from my hand and began hitting me. The ramen bowl flipped over, and I was caught in his strong hands and flung onto the narrow wooden porch outside. If it were not for Eunsu, I would have run away. I did not know where, did not know if there was a place on this earth for me to run away to, but that’s probably what I would have done. Each time my father’s fist came down on me, flames seemed to shoot up from my eyes. Then I passed out. When I came to, the woman from next door was feeding Eunsu and me broth. She told me she had saved some medicine made by an older man from a neighboring village and that she had given it to Eunsu. My father was passed out drunk, and I could hear the worried murmurs of our neighbors coming from the side porch.

  Eunsu was fast asleep beneath a blanket. The room had been straightened up. Eunsu’s lips and cheeks were flushed, and he kept muttering something. I didn’t want to hear what he was saying. I, too, wanted to call out for our mother. I wanted to ask why she had left us behind. Several nights passed, and then it was morning. I think maybe it was the third day. I decided to go to school, so I went over to check on Eunsu. His fever had broken.

  His curly black hair was damp with sweat and sticking to his pale forehead. After a moment, his eyes opened and he spoke.

  “Yunsu, the house is full of smoke. It’s full of smoke.”

  After that day, Eunsu’s eyes could not make out anything other than a faint light. My little brother had gone blind.

  PART 4

  I could see Aunt Monica in the distance. She looked angry. I was almost half an hour late. When I pulled up to the entrance of the subway station in front of the Gwacheon City government complex, she got into the car carrying a large bundle. It was so cold outside that the cool air rising off of her black veil eerily made me feel as if I were in front of an open refrigerator. Her lips were blue.

  “I didn’t know how I was supposed to dress for this,” I said. “If I’d known we were going to a prison, I would have bought a nun costume. I’m running late because I couldn’t decide what to wear. You should get a cell phone. Even monks and priests all drive nowadays. You should get a car, too.”

  I was making excuses for being late. Aunt Monica didn’t say a word.

  “I offered to pick you up at the convent, but you’re so stubborn,” I said, trying to shift responsibility as I always did whenever I felt guilty about something.

  “They wait all week for me,” Aunt Monica said. “Those boys don’t get to see anyone all week long. Because of you, thirty minutes of their precious time are gone. Wasted on you!”

  She paused, too angry to speak. Then she swallowed hard and started talking more slowly.

  “Those thirty minutes that you shoved in the garbage without a second thought could be their last thirty minutes on this earth. They are living this day like it might never come again! Can you understand that?”

  Her voice was low, but it was firm and hinted of tears. The words shove in the garbage got caught in my throat. Even though I used those words all the time to refer to how I was wasting my life away, it didn't feel good to hear them from someone else’s mouth. Since it was true that I was late for our appointment, I thought I had better not say anything. At any rate, it was my first day accompanying my aunt to the prison. But it was not shaping up to be a happy first day. Though I was the one who had brought up the idea of shoving my life in the garbage, it was the first time she had ever used my own words against me with such force. I told myself that Aunt Monica was just emotional because she was getting old.

  I had read about my aunt’s prison visits in the newspaper before I left for France. My second-oldest brother, a doctor, had come to the house to check on my mother after she’d called him in the middle of the night complaining that her head hurt. He opened the newspaper he brought with him and told us, Aunt Monica made the papers. Since it was a liberal newspaper, no one in our household would ever have known that our aunt was famous enough to be in the news if he had not brought it over himself. My mother, who started each day by yelling at the cleaning girl the way other people might say good morning, had given the girl her usual morning greeting and was sitting at the table. My brother said that Aunt Monica was visiting death row inmates, and my mother replied, How noble of her. That’s the kind of sacrifice you have to make when you’re a nun. So noble. Can you make an appointment for me with a neurosurgeon at your hospital? I need another check-up. Something must be wrong because my head is killing me. I didn’t sleep a wink yesterday. Those pills you gave me last time didn’t work. Whenever I take them, my makeup flakes. I must be getting old because I can’t sleep and I can’t take any more pills that are bad for my body. My skin is a mess.

  My brother, quiet as usual, didn’t say a word, while I ate a sandwich made with ham and lettuce on organic wholewheat bread next to our hypochondriac mother. My brother’s eyes met mine. Don’t worry, Mother, he said, his voice untiringly sympathetic. They ran several exams but didn’t find anything wrong with you.

  I added, Mom, he’s right. How on earth could modern medicine ever fathom a nervous system as sensitive and exquisite as yours? A refined woman such as you has no choice but to bear it.

  Breakfast that day ended as it always did, with my mother shouting at me. It was a typical morning. She screamed at me to quit my awful cabaret gigs and go study abroad or something. I said I would be happy to do so. By then, the fun of being a pop star for a year had been losing steam, and I thought if I left home, I would be able to enjoy a quiet morning for a change. I had grown tired of bellowing in harmony to my mother’s octave.

  “Sorry,” I said to Aunt Monica. “I messed up. I said I’m sorry.” Surrendering seemed better than continuing to stand my ground. I wasn’t sure why I thought so, but I was afraid she might start crying. “But Aunt Monica, you’re not really taking me to see those… is that right?… death row inmates? They’re not going to ask me to sing the national anthem, are they?”

  “That’s who we are going to see. If they ask you to sing the anthem, sing it. Is there any reason not to? Better to put that voice of yours to some good use rather than shove it in the garbage. Make a left at that fork in the road.”

  She’d said it again. Garbage. It felt mean of her to take the maudlin words I had said in the hospital and use them to provoke me, and I started to get a little angry. When I turned left, as instructed, I saw a sign for the Seoul Detention Center.

  Would singing the national anthem be better than sitting down with the young psychologist my uncle had brought along with him at that boring hospital and answering questions like, What are you so angry about? and Why did you get angry? and Did you have similar thoughts when you were a child? As usual, I calmed myself down by thinking, Who cares? Don’t think too much about it. At least the detention center would not be as boring as the hospital.

  We showed our ID cards at the front and stepped through a barred door. As we passed through, the door shut behind us. The moment the cold clang of metal against metal rang out in the dark, empty hallway, strange thoughts came into my head.

  The temperature inside that place was always a few degrees colder than outside—the chill lingered for a long time after. This was true not only in the winter but even at the height of summer. It was, as someone had once said, a place inhabited by darkness. We passed through another door and it too closed behind us. There was a large inner yard that didn’t look as if it were used by anyone. Several men dressed in blue prison uniforms were pushing a handcart on the other end of the yard, and further away, beneath a white plaster of Paris statue of the Virgin Mary, stood a small tree. Christmas tree lights in gaudy colors were blinking on and off in the winter sun. When I saw it, I realized Christmas was coming. I thought of Gaudete Sunday in Paris. Christmas lights filling the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, girls selling flowers on the street, red wine and the futile charm of soft, savory foie gras melting on my tongue, ending a night of drinking with argume
nts and vomiting…

  We turned several corners and were guided into a small room. Just a few square meters in size, the room had a crucifix on the wall next to a copy of Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. It was a simple room with one small table and five or six chairs. Aunt Monica set down her bundle and turned on an electric kettle. After a moment, we heard a knock at the door. I caught a glimpse of a light-blue prison uniform through a small glass window in the barred door.

  “Come in! You must be Jeong Yunsu.” Aunt Monica went over to the man who was being brought into the room by a guard and hugged him.

  Death row. He was on death row. A red nametag was sewn to the left side of his shirt. Except it was not a nametag. There was no name on it. In black letters, it read Seoul 3987. He seemed very uncomfortable with my aunt’s embrace. He looked like he was about five foot seven in height and had curly black hair and light skin; his eyes behind their horn-rimmed glasses were wide and penetrating. But the curly hair, which looked softer and darker than other people’s, spilled over his broad, pale forehead and lessened the sharpness of his features.

  To my surprise, the dark shadow that hung over his face reminded me of the young professors I had met at university. The look on his face was the same as the one on theirs when they complained about the school: Damn it, what does the foundation think it’s doing? Or when they had to listen to the chairman of the board say ridiculous things during faculty meetings: Our university’s primary goal this year is to create a university that studies. We need better students. Our foundation created this school for that purpose. The kinds of things that anyone in their right mind would laugh at. I momentarily deluded myself into thinking that the red tag on his chest meant he was a political dissident who had violated the National Security Law. It was probably the air of intellectualism that I had glimpsed in him for a moment that caused me to assume this. He looked like the kind of guy you would see in Paris wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the grim face of Che Guevara.

  How could I describe it? He was a being who transcended death, glimmering with some feral quality possessed by those who swear themselves in their youth to a lonely death in the wild. And it seemed to suit him better. To be even more honest, he didn’t look like what I had always imagined convicts to look like. But I enjoyed having my own clichéd ideas shattered without mercy. I began to feel curious about him.

  “Let’s sit down. Please, have a seat. I’m Sister Monica, the one who has been writing to you.”

  He sat down awkwardly. I noticed then the shackles that bound his wrists in front of him. They were fastened to a ring that hung from a kind of thick leather belt around his waist. It wasn’t until later that I even remembered they were called shackles, but when I saw them, my heart sank.

  “Please, Officer Yi, I brought some pastries for him to eat. Could you… Would it be possible to remove his shackles?” Aunt Monica asked carefully.

  The guard called Officer Yi, who was assigned to the Catholic prison ministry, smiled uncomfortably and did not answer. The look on his face said he was a man who played by the rules. Aunt Monica unwrapped the pastries. Cream buns, butter buns, sweet red bean buns. She poured hot water from the kettle to make instant coffee and set a cup in front of Yunsu. Then she put one of the pastries in his shackled hand. He lifted it wordlessly and stared at it for a moment. He looked like he was wondering if he was really allowed to eat it; at the same time, he gave off the sadness of a person gazing upon a food they have long hungered for. He stuffed the pastry into his mouth with difficulty. Because of the shackles, he had to bend over to get a bite. His body curled like a snail’s shell. He kept his eyes fixed on the table as he chewed.

  “That’s right, eat up. Have some coffee, too, to wash it down. And let me know if there’s anything you would like to eat next time. I don’t have children of my own, so you can think of me as a mother. I’ve been coming here for thirty years. You are all family to me.”

  He paused mid-chew to crack a forced smile when Aunt Monica said she didn’t have any children. Though I was probably the only one who saw it, there was a hint of mockery to his smile. I guessed that his weapon of choice was a scornful look, just as I smoothed over conflicts by laughing at people. Of course, I might have been imagining everything, but from the moment I first saw him, I felt like he and I were from the same family, in the Linnaean sense. My instincts were rarely wrong, but it nevertheless made me feel a little strange to think I might have something in common with a death row convict. I was hungry for a pastry, having skipped breakfast after oversleeping, but watching him eat with his body hunched over and his hands clasped together like a squirrel made me lose my appetite. I felt a flash of pity. I wondered what had happened to bring him to this point. Aunt Monica urged the guard and me to take a pastry but only drank coffee herself.

  “So, how is it in here?” she asked. “Are you getting used to it?”

  He had been cramming the food into his mouth, but he immediately stopped. A tense silence settled over the four of us; in the office where we sat, winter sunlight slanted in through the window. He slowly finished chewing.

  “I got your last letter,” he said. “I wasn’t going to come today, but I thought I should tell you in person. Officer Yi told me you’ve been coming here by subway and bus for the last thirty years, rain or shine. If he hadn’t told me that, I probably wouldn’t have come. So that’s why I’m here.”

  He raised his head. At first glance, his was a very tranquil face. But upon closer inspection, that tranquility looked as hard as a mask.

  “Okay,” said Aunt Monica.

  “Please don’t come to see me again. I won’t read your letters. I’m not worthy of them. Please, just let me die.”

  He clenched his teeth on the last words. From the way his chin quivered, he seemed to be biting down hard on his back teeth and grinding them together. It was alarming. The skin around his eyes had a bluish tinge. I felt a sudden fear that he would grab me by the throat and take me hostage, and I remembered seeing his name in the newspaper. He had killed someone and run away and then broken into a house and held a woman and child hostage. I could remember only the general details. I stared at the guard and my aunt. The sturdy shackles on his wrists were somewhat reassuring.

  “Yunsu… I’m over seventy years old now, so I can call you by your first name, right?” Aunt Monica was not ruffled in the slightest and spoke slowly and calmly. “Show me someone who hasn’t sinned. Even if you searched high and low, who would be worthy? I just want to spend time with you. We can meet once in a while, share a snack, talk about how your day was. That’s all I want, but—”

  “I don’t—” He interrupted her. He had the unusually calm voice of one who has thought for a long time about what he is going to say. “I have neither the hope nor the will to go on living. If you have the strength to spend on that sort of thing, then save it for someone else. I’m a murderer. It makes sense for me to die here. That’s all I came to tell you.”

  Yunsu rose as if to say he had no further business with her. The guard stood up, too; he didn’t look surprised. Yunsu’s impassioned appeal seemed to say, I may have to hunch over to eat like an animal eating food dropped on the ground, but I am still a man.

  I stupidly thought to myself, I guess even death row convicts have their pride.

  “Wait a minute, Yunsu! Wait!” Aunt Monica anxiously called out to him.

  He turned to look at her. Tears were pooling in her eyes. He must have seen them, too, because I noticed that one side of his face looked contorted. It wasn’t so much a grimace as a kind of buckling, like one corner of his stiff mask had been torn away. But then it disappeared and the mocking look returned. Aunt Monica took something out of the bundle she had brought with her and handed it to him.

  “It’s almost Christmas, so I brought you a present. It’s cold in here, isn’t it? I brought you some long underwear. Since you went to all this trouble to meet with me, I can’t very well send you away empty-handed. This
will only take a moment, so won’t you sit for a little? I told you, I’m very old, and my legs ache.”

  He stared at the package in her hands. A muscle in his jaw quivered. His brow was furrowed, and he looked irritated. He was probably thinking, Why the hell are you giving me a Christmas gift? But he sat down as if to say he would give her a chance since she was elderly and a woman.

  “I’m not giving you a Christmas present to make you feel obligated. I’m not telling you to go to church. I’m not here to talk about religion. Who cares if you believe or if you don’t believe? What’s important is that you live each day like a human being. I’m sure you don’t hate yourself, but if you do, then you’re exactly who Jesus came for. He came to tell you to love yourself, to tell you how precious you are, to tell you that if in the future you feel warmth from someone and think, Ah, so this is what love feels like, then that person is an angel sent to you from God. I’ve never met you before, but I know you have a good heart. No matter what your sins are, they are not all of you!”

  When she finished speaking, he smiled. It was a sneer. The look on his face said it was ridiculous to tell a person who has killed and who could be hanged tomorrow for that crime how precious they are. But then, a nervous energy unique to those with strong emotions passed over his face. To my surprise, I felt like I understood him. Whenever I got a phone call from Aunt Monica after yet another stupid fight with my family and she spoke to me in the same tone she was using with him, it made me angry. In a way, it was like the body rejecting a blood transfusion. Whether it’s different blood or different emotions, we are only at peace when there is just one type present. Right or wrong, life makes sense only when the bad guys are bad and the rebels are rebellious.