1.
Winter in Seocho-dong was cold. The ground was frozen and slippery. Unlike me, whose steps naturally slowed, the man ahead hastened his pace. The man walking precariously while holding a document envelope quickly disappeared into a building. Instinctively, I glanced up at the structure. Signs reading “divorce,” “registration,” “litigation,” “personal rehabilitation,” and the like hung in rows. Both sides of the alley were a paradise of billboards. On this street, law was bought and sold.
As I emerged onto the main road, the towering courthouse came into view. Winter days were short, and the street darkened quickly. The courthouse alley was relatively quiet even at midday, but past commuting hours, it was practically an empty street. Only those who made money using the law and those who had to stand before it existed here.
I deliberately chose to come out at this time. The courts were currently in winter recess. Not only the judges but even court officials had gone on vacation. When trials stopped, all related industries stopped. It meant this street would be empty. And I planned to quietly infiltrate while this place was at a standstill.
Unlike the courthouse with its lights off here and there, the prosecutors’ office building standing alongside it was bright. I used to always wonder—why are the courthouse and prosecutors’ office always attached? Ten years have passed since I first had that question, and I still don’t know. Apart from making prosecutors’ commute to trials short and convenient, I couldn’t find any connection. I dislike prosecutors.
I walked faster with my frozen hands stuffed in my coat pockets. The wind blew even harder. My cheeks stung.
A gaunt middle-aged man stood in front of the main gate. He looked like a jangseung—a traditional totem pole. The man was holding a picket sign. “Guarantee the right to survival.” “Stop forced evictions.” “Punish the thugs-for-hire.” It wasn’t anything new. Similar incidents repeated every year.
Eviction-related lawsuits had no chance. Time always belonged to construction capital, and they always won. But this cold changed things. Where were people being evicted in this cold supposed to go right now? Couldn’t they at least wait until the weather warmed up? Why did winter always return during such harsh times? I roughly adjusted my collar.
It was when I was passing through the massive courthouse doors. A black sedan exiting through the entrance stopped in front of me. The license plate was unusual. It was an official vehicle. Currently, the only person at the courthouse who could use an official car was the chief judge. The rear window opened, and a man with an intellectual, scholarly appearance leaned his face out. It was Tak Jae-hyun, Chief Judge of the Seoul Central District Court.
“Judge Mo. Hyo-kyung-ah.”
When I once asked myself how I should age, I thought of him without hesitation.
“Gyosu-nim.”
He had been my homeroom professor during my judicial training. It was a demotion-type personnel move. He had been the youngest warrant-exclusive judge at the Central District Court. He had issued an arrest warrant for a chaebol chairman whom no one in this country’s judiciary could bring before the court.
He always wore long coats in winter. An old-fashioned, worn woolen coat. His soft curly hair that slightly covered his ears, with white hair naturally settled by time, made him look even more intellectual. Watching his excessively frugal appearance, I realized something. When a man gains distinction with age, it has nothing to do with fine clothes, wealth, or power. He was the first adult I ever met.
“Hyo-kyung-ah, I heard you were coming.”
He got out of the car. Ten years had been long. He no longer wore worn-out cheap coats. He was the strongest candidate for the next Chief Justice. I grasped his extended hand and smiled sheepishly.
“You’ve been well. I’m sorry. I didn’t even contact you once.”
“No news is good news. I’ve always been hearing about you.”
The statement that he’d been hearing about me probably wasn’t true. I spent all ten years of my judicial career rotating through remote courts that everyone else avoided. There were no notable cases, nothing worth being on people’s lips.
He had as his protégés a special investigation unit prosecutor currently commanding the hottest management succession case in the business world and the lead attorney from the most successful law firm defending that businessman. There was no reason for him to be interested in an ordinary judge from a small-town local court like me.
“Your face is cold. Did you walk here?”
The warmth of our clasped hands now gently caressed my cold cheek. Even past thirty, I was still a child in my early twenties to him.
“Yes. I moved nearby. I’m planning to walk to work. Are you leaving for the day, Gyosu-nim?”
He had been silently observing my face the whole time, and for the first time, he smiled kindly.
“‘Gyosu-nim’—it’s been a while since I heard that. It sounds nice. No one calls me that anymore.”
He was now the chief judge of the Central District Court, the flower of the judiciary. No one would call him “Professor” so casually anymore. I quietly bowed my head without answering. Why was it? Somehow, in front of him, I kept feeling intimidated. It felt like returning to that time when I had nothing. To that anxious and precarious time.
“Judge-nim!!”
What broke the silence was a harsh metallic voice. A hand like a bare tree branch grabbed the professor’s arm. It was the man who had been holding the picket sign. I looked at the man. Madness suddenly swirled in his half-dead face.
“It’s unjust. Please help me just once. The provisional disposition lawsuit was wrong! Please stop the forced execution. If I’m evicted in this winter, I have nowhere to go. Are you telling me to freeze to death in midwinter!”
His voice, pouring out haphazardly, trembled severely. I looked at Professor Tak Jae-hyun—no, the Chief Judge—with a troubled expression. He looked down at the man who had rushed at him with a deliberately solemn expression. His face was calm, as if not surprised at all. Judges are excellent at hiding their emotions. Did the man know? That the judge he happened to grab was the head of the Central District Court, where the most talked-about cases in Korean society converged.
“You must be having a hard time in this cold.”
It was a calm and gentle voice. Chief Judge Tak Jae-hyun quietly wrapped his hands around the man’s hands, which were a mess from the cold. Soon, he took out a business card from his inner pocket and pressed it into those rough hands.
“Come to the civil affairs office when the recess ends in a week. Show them this business card, make an appointment, and I’ll listen to what you have to say.”
I could see the man’s Adam’s apple bob nervously as he read the business card character by character. Hope faintly spread across a face that had been half-resigned. The man suddenly swayed as if the tension had been released. My arm shot out without time to think.
“Are you alright?”
Before I knew it, I had firmly grasped the man’s collar. I felt the Chief Judge’s gaze on my pale hand. A certain thought I’d long suspected came to mind. He might already know. That I was more similar to this shabby man than to himself in his fine coat. The courthouse was blocked on all sides so that no one could pass through except the main gate. The high stone wall thoroughly separated inside from outside. I had never once been a person inside that wall.
***
My first trial was my father’s death sentence.
My mother was beaten to death by my drunken father. I was fifteen. He was already a human being steeped in gambling and alcohol. My mother’s death was a foreseen accident. I actually thought my mother had been liberated. Because the daily beatings had finally ended. My father, dressed in a blue prison uniform and bound with ropes, looked pathetically insignificant. His emaciated arms were covered with bruises from the ropes. I recalled my mother’s final moments when the bruises hadn’t even faded.
The court-appointed attorney told me to write a petition for my father. I wrote a petition. That I wished my father would disappear from this world.
If there was proper justice in the law, my father should rightfully be sentenced to death. I boiled with vengeance. The court-appointed attorney submitted my petition without even reading it.
The court-appointed attorney, who met my father exactly once, appealed to sympathy as expected. He said there was a young son left behind alone. That the still-young son needed protection. Even though I had never once been protected by that man called my father.
But the judge showed my father the law’s clemency. With the word “manslaughter,” he declared my mother’s death an accident.
Just before the verdict, the judge looked my way several times. I firmly supported my upper body, which kept trying to collapse, and met those eyes forcefully. That even if such a human being rotted in prison for life, I could live well. That I wouldn’t cry or grieve. I conveyed my will to the judge.
The judge sentenced him to nine years in prison. A death sentence was not handed down. My will was not conveyed to the judge. When the sentence was pronounced, my father was dragged out of the courtroom with both arms held. He struggled and roared. What could he have found unjust?
I didn’t cry. I just kept forcing strength into my eyes, which kept getting hot. Then a man in judicial robes approached. It was the judge who had sentenced my father to prison. He was holding a water bottle. I’d had my water bottle confiscated at the entrance. He apparently didn’t go through belongings inspection. He took out a handkerchief from inside his robes and handed it over together. He was an excessive sentimentalist.
“The law is bullshit.”
At my words, I think he laughed softly. A large hand stroked my head.
“It’s okay to cry. Children are supposed to grow up crying. I couldn’t take your father away from you too. Whether he’s a good person or a bad person. How about thinking that I gave you homework? You think you don’t want to live like your father, right? Prove it yourself. That will be the greatest revenge against your father.”
A business card was pressed into my hand.
“And come find me too. You need to have your homework checked.”
***
That was my real first meeting with Chief Judge Tak Jae-hyun. And ten years later, at the judicial training institute entrance ceremony, I received my appointment from him.
‘It’s been ten years.’
He remembered me. His eyes looking at me, who had grown so much, were filled with emotion. What must it have felt like to encounter again the son of a man he had directly sentenced to prison? He didn’t bring up the homework he’d given me. The judicial training institute appointment I received from him was the answer to that question.
