Writings
Christmas Carol
by Kim Young Ha, translated by C. La Shure
Jeong-sik grabbed a few pieces of candy from the counter on his way out. As soon as he got into his car he tossed one of the candies into his mouth. He rolled it around a few times with his tongue before crushing it with his molar. In ten minutes he was home. Fortunately, the Christmas card was still in the mailbox. Jeong-sik’s wife didn’t know about Jin-suk, but she would certainly not be happy about the card. As he took the card out of the mailbox, someone appeared at his side.
“Jeong-sik Lee? Ah, yes. Would you come with us, please?” the detective asked. “What? In your home? Look here, Mr. Lee. Do you think you're so important that we’d question you in your home?”
Jeong-sik began to follow them to the car without a word when he stopped. He gently freed his arms from their grasp, so as not to give the impression that he was trying to run away, and walked over to the mailbox.
“Ah, I’m just going to put this back in. I think it’s for my wife.” He held in his hand the Christmas card from Jin-suk.
While one of the detectives put Jeong-sik in the car, the other detective strode over to the mailbox and took the card back out again.
“What are you doing with my mail?” Jeong-sik protested. “Put that back! Am I going to have to report you? Do you have a search warrant?”
The detective paid no attention to Jeong-sik’s protests, put the card in his inside coat pocket and climbed into the passenger seat.
“Let’s go,” he said, and the car slowly pulled out of the apartment complex.
“It’s a card from the victim,” the detective in the passenger seat said, smiling widely. He clearly enjoyed finding evidence of the victim. “Cuff him,” he ordered.
His colleague in the back seat handcuffed Jeong-sik. Jeong-sik realized that they now considered him a threat, one who might destroy evidence or try to escape. He softened his manner.
“Please, don’t do this. I haven’t done anything wrong. Let me ask you something? Why on earth are you doing this?”
Not one of the detectives in the car answered him. Just as the workers who carry the boxes of cola don’t speak to the cola bottles, just as the middlemen at a cattle market don’t speak to the cows, detectives don’t speak to suspects while they are being transferred. When they arrived at the police department the detectives brought Jeong-sik to the violent crimes department. Then they began to interrogate him for real, as he sat there.
The dark room, a swinging incandescent lamp, a typewriter... these are all just scenes from a movie—they don’t exist in a real police station. At a glance, the police station might have been mistaken for a tax office. People sat with obsequious expressions in front of bored staff members, earnestly explaining their situations.
“Age? Occupation?” Jeong-sik answered every question sincerely. Or at least he tried to give that impression. ‘I have nothing to hide, so ask whatever you want.’ But that strategy didn’t seem to be too successful. The more he tried to give that impression, the more his words sounded like forced excuses. Like in some fable, he felt as if the words that sprung from his mouth turned into snakes and frogs.
“Jin-suk, she was just a girl I knew long ago. That’s all. You know how it’s all the rage these days to meet with old schoolmates. She had returned to Korea after being abroad for a long time, and it was an opportunity to meet old friends, so we just got together. Why on earth would I stab to death an old schoolmate I hadn’t seen in such a long time? Hmm? Think about it.”
The detective stared at him blankly over the LCD screen of his notebook computer and then smiled. “‘That damn girl, I’ve got to kill her.’ You said that, right?”
“Ah, well... officer, you wouldn’t happen to have any candy, would you? I stopped smoking not too long ago, you see. Do you smoke? Ah, then you’ll understand. The withdrawal is killing me. If I don’t at least have a piece of candy I’m going to go insane. If you have a piece of candy, maybe....”
The detective shook his head from side to side.
“‘That damn girl, I’ve got to kill her.’ You said that, right?” he asked again, enunciating each syllable slowly and carefully.
“Yes, but that was just something I said when I was angry. If I had known she was going to die like this I probably wouldn’t have said that.”
“That night, you had a drink with Yeong-su Jeong, Jung-gweon Park, and the victim, Jin-suk Jo, and afterwards you went to the inn room where Ms. Jo was staying, correct?”
Jeong-sik lifted up his head. Letting out a pained breath, he said, “Officer, if you don’t have any candy, do you at least have a cigarette?”
The detective took out a cigarette. With the peculiar, servile expression of a turncoat, Jeong-sik awkwardly lit the cigarette and began to smoke it.
“I’m even starting to smoke again because of that damn girl. Yes, I went to her room. Haven’t you ever done anything like that, officer? If you haven’t, well, I guess there’s no explaining it. Jin-suk and I used to be like that. We were in the same club at school. So after having a drink we’d just slip out, meet at an inn and... well, you know, don’t you?”
“But that night, Mr. Park was already there, wasn’t he?”
“How do you know that? Jung-gweon isn’t here by any chance, is he?”
“You don’t need to know that. Just answer the question, please.”
Jeong-sik let out a breath. “Officer, you don’t know what it was like between us. I doubt you’ll understand even if I tell you. Jin-suk was, well, she was sort of public property between the three of us way back when. We didn’t know this at first, of course. We found out later when we were having a drink together. Yeong-su probably said something about it first. Anyway, we all found out that the three of us had been sleeping with Jin-suk at around the same time. In that sort of situation, men act in one of two ways. The first way would be to back off. Declare a sort of joint security area, so to speak.”
He chuckled at the thought. “If Jin-suk had been the least bit intelligent or pretty, that’s what we would have done. But the problem was that Jin-suk was a bit stupid. She was so stupid that the first time I did it with her she thought it was my finger inside her. She didn’t even know. I don’t know how such a girl made it to university.
“Oh, and the second way would be to pretend that the girl didn’t exist, that she still doesn’t exist. That is, no one talks about her, but the relationships continue. We could never all meet at the same time, of course. In a word, she was a ghost, and it’s quite a problem if everyone can see a ghost. Yes, you’re beginning to understand now, aren’t you? Because she didn’t exist, there was no problem with her being public property.
“This sort of thing used to happen in the countryside all the time. Every village had its wench., the kind of girl that everyone had a piece of, from the pig-tailed boy of fifteen to the old man of seventy. Nonetheless, there were no problems. That’s exactly what happened with us.”
The phone rang and the detective picked up the receiver.
“Yes. I see. That’s enough now.”
The detective hadn’t recorded a single word of Jeong-sik’s carrying on at the end. That sort of testimony was not fit to be included in a report, because only clear facts could be recorded in a report. Nonetheless, the detective listened patiently. He had already written down everything required for the report and was waiting for the results of the on-site criminal investigation by the National Institute of Scientific Investigation. Naturally, he would have to change his report based on the results of that investigation. Finally, he received the call telling him that the results of the primary criminal investigation were in. The detective spoke so that the suspect in front of him couldn't follow the conversation.
“Who did they say it was? Is that so? Are you positive? OK.”