Free Our Happy Time by Gong Ji-young Page A

animal and raging in the cell next to mine.”
    He sneered again.
    Officer Yi interrupted. “They don’t have that many opportunities to see other people, so they’re much more sensitive to outsiders.”
    “That person, that so-called
sister
, probably went home and told everyone that she does volunteer work for the unfortunate. She probably thought she was a pretty good person. But she has no idea how badly she sinned against that old man. He may have taken someone’s life, but she trampled on his soul. He’s slowly dying in here day after day. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to go to another Mass. I made up my mind then that if you’re not one of us, then you better not talk to us and pretend that you care about us. It sickens me more than being looked down on or getting beat up. Since then, I’ve stopped trusting people who have money. We live in two different worlds. And even if there is a God, that God only watches out for the rich. He doesn’t live here with us, and He doesn’t so much as glance at people like us. Whenever I saw another churchgoer, I just wanted to throw up. They’re all hypocrites.”
    No one spoke for a moment. I studied him carefully so as not to miss the expressions that crossed his face. He seemed like he had calmed down a lot since last time. If the looks that crossed his face then were icy, this time they were merely cool. I imagined him holding a knife. Then I tried to picture him lifting the skirt of a scrawny seventeen -year-old girl and raping her. But the actors in my head would not play their roles properly and just sat there vacant-eyed. I couldn’t stay angry.
    “I’m so sorry,” Aunt Monica said, grabbing his shackled hands.
    “Sister, it wasn’t you,” he said and tried to pull his hands free.
    “No, but it could have been. It doesn’t matter who that woman was, she was still me. It was my fault. Yunsu, I apologize for her. I’m sorry, too, about the other man. When I think of how your heart must have ached to listen to him crying all night, my heart aches, too. I’m sorry for not paying any attention to you all those years, wherever you were in the world, and for waiting so long to come see you.”
    He stared incredulously at her for a moment and then looked away.
    “I don’t know if you’re doing this on purpose,” he said, “but you’re making me very uncomfortable. This is going to bother me all day, even after I go back to my cell. So please, don’t do this to me.”
    He clamped his lips together and struggled to pull his hands free from her grasp. But Aunt Monica held on stubbornly with tears in her eyes. He was not the only one who would continue to be bothered by this. I was angry. I muttered to myself, “What a great way to rehabilitate someone. Let’s raise the flag high and pledge allegiance to it, then sing the national anthem while we’re at it.” I couldn’t look at them anymore and turned my head away. There was the Rembrandt again. When I saw it, I was reminded of a passage by my favorite writer, Jang Jeongil: “We must kill the prodigal son. He brings worse things with him. Nothing makes us feel quite so small as the son who has returned. The true prodigal son must go, with nary a drop of water nor a crumb of bread, without even a camel, he must go to the ends of the desert and die there. And not just there, but everywhere!”
    He was right. I hated hypocrites. It was better that Yunsu remain a murderer, beautifully, to the bitter end. I wanted him to die mocking everyone, just as Gary Gilmore had before his execution in Utah. Gary Gilmore… While I was studying in France, President Mitterrand had abolished the death penalty, despite the public opinion polls that showed the majority of citizens wanted to keep it, and the political fallout was felt for a long time after. Everyone at my school in Paris talked about it, which was how I came to read the writings of people like Victor Hugo and Albert Camus, who vigorously opposed the