The Brooklyn Rail

In Maureen Sun’s retelling of the Dostoevsky classic, the characters of Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha are loosely recast as sisters Minah, Sarah, and Esther. Their father, Eugene Kim, physically and emotionally abused the three daughters and their mother, Jeonghee, without consequence and “beyond repair.” Now, he stares down a terminal cancer diagnosis and has summoned his children to his side. This turn for the worse, which might be lazily read as the sort of divine order that Ivan adamantly rejects, opens a nuanced consideration of restorative versus retributive justice. This section of the novel follows Sarah as she alights on the idea that there is no justice for those insulated, “protected from their own guilt,” in one way or another, and in moments like these Sun reminds us of the vitality and endless relevance of the original.

Around the seminar table, the students were composing a response to the day’s reading.

It could be at once soothing and stimulating, like a purgative bath, to be in the midst of so much silent thinking. Thoughts were rising like gentle steam, carrying the temperature of the warm, organ-dark interiors in which they first began to churn. The contemplative silence was a surreal contrast to the unfolding melodrama of Sarah’s family life.

She was waiting for her students to respond to the conclusion of Open City. Throughout the novel told from his first-person perspective, the narrator Julius trains his discerning eye and ear on the people encountered during his peregrinations in New York, Brussels, and Lagos, while revealing little about himself. His voice is aloof, his reflections empathetic and unerringly intelligent. His own relationships are without deep intimacy, as he gradually reveals despite himself. In the penultimate chapter he is confronted by a woman, the younger sister of a childhood friend in Lagos, with the hour, ever seared in her mind, when he forced himself on her. He never mentions her again.

Nearly all the reviews she’d read were by men who thought this late disclosure was aesthetically awkward or simply described Julius as a keen observer of cosmopolitan life, making no reference to the crime or the sinister symptoms of self-inflicted moral damage haunting the entire narrative. Her question for her students was: How does the revelation of Julius’s crime affect your understanding of the novel?

It wasn’t lost on Sarah as she watched one student write with their head down in the crook of their arm, like a small child, that she resembled Julius. She was a hypocrite.

She was preparing to talk to the students about the ways the narration of this initially sympathetic character implicated them, the readers, in his crime. It was easy and no doubt satisfying to denounce this fictional character without considering the consequences of exclusionary judgment. But a community is composed of brothers and sisters, some of whom will commit crimes, and no community will survive if it not only denounces the crime but renounces the criminal. Judgment requires one person, who can choose to remain aloof; rehabilitation requires that the innocent and the guilty alike understand their ties to each other. Julius, at the age of fourteen, violated someone he should have treated as a sister. Before committing his crime, his own body was brutally abused by a teacher. Now, an only child become an adult, he has dreams of a younger sister.

Sarah had dreamt of her younger sister Esther only last night. At this coincidence of life and art she was both humiliated and defiant. Esther had flown in this week to stay with her so she could be closer to their father. Their father was a monster. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t raped them or beaten them, he had hurt her and her two sisters beyond repair. He was dying, and Esther wanted to be at his side. Sarah wanted him to suffer; she wanted him to die alone. She knew it was a cliché of hypocrisy to insist that the ideals you extolled were not applicable to your unique situation. But her experience was, truly, different. She judged her father. She wanted him to disappear forever.

She told the class to wrap up what they were writing. The classroom silence was becoming suffocating.

She wanted her father to suffer. She wanted her older sister Minah to suffer, too. Minah understood her better. They had become friends in recent years, and she too wanted nothing to do with their father. She had also been so unkind to Sarah as a child. She was older than Sarah, she should have loved her the way she loved Esther, but instead she made Sarah unhappier than she would have been without her. She even wanted her students to suffer. Rose, with her private school education and gleaming new phone and laptop, who judged in her abject essay that Emma Bovary’s “real problem” was her “materialistic bad attitude.” Amina, who disagreed: the problem was that Emma didn’t even try to love her husband.

These students had fallen under the illusions of a reverse narcissism according to which others should be capable of the goodness they saw at the core of their own souls, or else those others were to be judged. And they had perfect faith in the inviolability of their own souls, which circumstance would never touch. To have a soul was to see good and evil as distinct and absolute. To denounce evil made them feel good—it felt good to be good.

She saw Amina checking her phone under the table. The thought came to Sarah as clearly as if she’d uttered it aloud: May you find yourself trapped one day and be judged for it.

May my father suffer for what he has done to me.

May he suffer.

May he understand the evil of his nature and everything my sisters and I suffered and still suffer under him before he dies.

May this understanding make him suffer more than he can bear.

The students were thirteen girls, or young women, one nonbinary person, and one boy, or young man. Each year on the first day of class there were about five men, most of whom dropped out after Sarah said the first part of the course would be devoted to representations of women at home.

She asked them to share what they’d written. There was always at least one or two beats of silence before anyone volunteered to speak. The pause was a polite custom whose meaning was: I’ll speak only if you don’t want to.

“It made me rethink everything,” Piper said, “what he did to Moji.”

“His rape of Moji,” Sarah said. She was always the first to say the word “rape.”

“I felt like I read the book for nothing,” Genevieve said.

“Why? Say more.”

“I felt like everything he said before was a lie, and I just read a book by a liar and a coward.”

“Let’s keep in mind that the narrator is not the author. The author created a character named Julius, and he’s showing us how a rapist can only forget his crime if he loses his own humanity.”

“I know what you mean,” said Alex to Genevieve. “I felt like the book was a total waste.”

“But did you feel,” Sarah said, “before learning about the crime, that you could identify with him? I know I did. I felt like I was walking with him in these cities—I liked walking with him. So many of his thoughts on the people he met and the places he explored were sympathetic to me.”

“What?” Mia asked softly, though with visible alarm. She was a particularly thoughtful student. Her slouching figure snapped into a startled line. Did her teacher just admit to identifying with a rapist?

Sarah gave them her prepared reading of the book. She started by reaffirming that the crime was egregious and not to be diminished and concluded with reflections on the difficult and necessary demands of community. She spoke in a tone of moral seriousness that drew its force from her private turmoil, which she presented as a righteous passion for restorative justice. Some of the students who had nodded their heads in approval of Genevieve’s wholesale rejection of the book now looked distressingly confused.

There was more note-taking, and Sarah wondered what they were writing. She spent the rest of the session going over the requirements for their second essay.

She knew she would receive, once again, one or two papers whose main argument was that Julius was an evil sociopath.

After class she met Minah at a restaurant near campus. Minah had called her that morning to ask what else their father had said a few days ago, after she left, when the three sisters had gathered to see him for the first time since they were children. Despite Sarah’s answer that he’d done nothing but continue cursing his daughters from his sick bed, Minah was unsatisfied. She insisted on meeting that day.

Sarah was about to take the booth seat when Minah brushed past her and sat down.

“You know what I do for a living, right?”

“You’re a lawyer,” Sarah said, drawing out the statement with a sigh.

“You don’t even know what kind of law I practice, do you?”

“No. Tell me.”

“I work in wills and trusts.”

“Okay,” she said, intoning it as a facetious question. She could feel herself playing the part of the sarcastic, bratty sister. She was annoying herself, but she was also enjoying the role.

“So I know how inheritance law works. Are you listening or reading the dessert menu?”

“I’m listening, okay? You need to calm down.”

“Doesn’t it bother you at all that our father just told us this week we have a brother he’s hidden from us all our lives? Why does it seem like you don’t care?”

“Because he’s crazy and a liar. Because he’s been telling me since I can remember that he wished I were a boy, a son worth all his disgusting devotion,” Sarah said with rising resentment for having to revisit unhappiness to placate her sister. “And that was when he was in a good mood. He’s been threatening to disown me since I was eight and didn’t even know what that meant. So no, nothing he said was new to me. Anyway, what do I care if he does have son? He’s not part of my life, even if he exists, and I don’t want our father part of my life either. I don’t know why you’re surprised at all. We always knew he had another life of shady business deals. And then there were all those times he’d leave us alone at home for days. Why do you even care? Neither he nor my brother mean anything to me.”

“Listen. Listen! New Jersey is one of the few states where an illegitimate biological child can actually contest a will as long as he can prove that he had a relationship of some kind with the deceased during the deceased’s lifetime. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying he was threatening our inheritance. That’s what you’re saying. Again, I don’t really care. Besides, everything you’re saying about state laws seems irrelevant. So what if he said he was leaving everything to his son? Either he has a will that we can’t change or he doesn’t, in which case it seems unlikely we’d have any influence over him.”

“You don’t get it. You still don’t understand him. He was inviting us to persuade him to write it or change it. He wants you and Esther to persuade him by spending time with him. Taking care of him. What else did he say after I left?”

“Nothing, I don’t know, I don’t remember. He was rambling.”

She remembered feeling spellbound in that room, like a character in a book encountering her fate; like a character in a movie who loses all sense of self-preservation and does not flee but lingers to see if the one before her will indeed kill her. It was as if what was happening was not her life, but a story whose ending she needed to know. Yes—she, too, believed he was dying. She’d felt it in the room, in his uncharacteristic desire to take Esther’s hand. And she understood why he’d wanted Minah present. Minah was the only one of the three fluent in Korean. He wanted Minah there to translate in case Sarah didn’t understand the awful outpour of his dying heart.

“Do you at least see what’s he’s doing? And what we have to do?”

“No. Just tell me.”

“We have to make sure he writes a will that names us as the sole beneficiaries. The most his son can do then is claim a quarter of the estate. Fine. We couldn’t do anything about it if he collected enough evidence that Dad acted like a father toward him or played any role in his life—that all, by the way, with a DNA test, would pretty much guarantee that he’d have a claim after Dad dies, with or without a will. But if Dad doesn’t name us and gives everything to his son—then, strange as it sounds, we would be in the weaker position. Weaker than the illegitimate son would be if he was omitted from the will but had evidence of a relationship with the deceased. We would have to contest the will, and I know from practice that New Jersey is more likely to respect the will as the sacred intention of the deceased than the claims of the justly or unjustly omitted children.”

“I don’t understand. Why would we be in a weaker position?”

“The law often doesn’t make sense, especially in practice. In this case, it built upon existing tradition and lacked the imagination to anticipate a situation like this. We’re in danger of losing all claim to the estate to the son’s advantage if Dad writes a will that cuts us out. As he’s already threatened, in so many words. Even if he doesn’t name the son in a will that omits us, the son could reasonably inherit at least a fraction of the estate, if not everything. I know this, I’ve seen jaw-dropping, blood-boiling cases like this before. I can name a few sexist old judges off the top of my head who would hand half of the estate over to the son if Dad wrote a will that didn’t name either us or the son as beneficiaries but gave everything to some society for the reunification of Korea, as he once told me he wanted to do. The judge would say he had to respect Dad’s implied wish to deny the legitimate children—the daughters—an inheritance. He’d say that omitting us, whether in so many words or not, must be respected since legally recognized children are expected to inherit. He’d argue that an illegitimate son couldn’t be denied in the same way: Dad couldn’t be said to have expressly omitted the illegitimate son, even if the son wasn’t mentioned in the will, because unrecognized children aren’t expected to inherit from their father. Their father, not their mother. Do you follow me? It could happen.”

“Do you think he’s that clever? That imaginative himself?”

“I think he’s the devil and can imagine anything.”

Sarah had never heard Minah speak so articulately or so vigorously before. Her forceful intelligence seemed to clarify to Sarah, who was ever steeped in murky subjectivity, the ways of the hard real world. But as Minah continued to explain, Sarah couldn’t shake the estranging sense that they were talking about pure fictions. Human law was an obscure web of arbitrary constructions in which Minah was attempting to entangle her. She had never thought of Minah as either imaginative or analytical and was impressed and surprised she’d thought this matter through so thoroughly. Minah was drawing her into a predicament that featured all the vivid detail and emotion of a paranoid fantasy.

As a child Sarah had enjoyed elaborating minutely detailed fantasies of escape from her father until the requirements of a realistic fabrication became depressingly overwhelming. The means of escape without money: How far could she travel with a heavy bag? How long until she was found and returned home? The likelihood of finding loving and enlightened parents—white parents existing in a world apart from the everyday indignities and alienation and violence her family knew, whose energies were devoted to culture and pleasure—who wouldn’t prefer unblemished children of their own. The possibility of escaping what compelled escape: everyone said she looked like her father. They said the eyes, but her eyes were rounder and brighter; they scrutinized her further and said not the eyes themselves but something in the cast of the eyes under those dark brows. She feared and knew they saw, in the interplay of her features, the quickening of her father’s blood. Even the mouth that was undeniably her mother’s, full and slightly pouting, was like a pale ruby set in her father’s crown . . . The fantasies themselves became a labyrinth, ultimately reinforcing the very conditions of confinement to which they were apparently opposed.

“But … ” Sarah said, shaking free of her memories to face a situation that seemed no less vague and ungovernable.

“But what?”

Sarah was finding it hard to think. What was it that was nagging her now? “Okay. What if Dad dies and wants to leave everything to Planned Parenthood and the World Wildlife Fund?”

“Then we’d get nothing, not the three of us or the son. Unless we all try to contest it. But the state isn’t likely to challenge the written will in that case.”

“I think he’s more likely to do that after trying to have us compete like reality TV contestants for his money. Knowing the whole time that none of us would get anything for our pathetic efforts. Why should we play this game you think he’s proposing?”

“I don’t think that will happen. And I know the money would help all of us. I’ll speak for myself now. I need the money. I need to have a better life. You don’t want children. I do.” She was addressing Sarah in a different register now, no longer pressing and overwrought, but desperate, gentle, and profoundly weary. “I want a clean house for them. I want to feed them organic food and dress them in nice clothes and walk them every morning to a good school in my neighborhood. That doesn’t make me greedy. I make money, but all of it goes to my student loans and my apartment.

“You’re asking yourself why I left the serviceable apartment I shared with a nice roommate in Inwood and got a renovated studio in Chelsea overlooking the High Line. You don’t know how hard it is to find a good man in New York. Everywhere you turn there are ten beautiful, intelligent women for one eligible bachelor, a guy with a good income who’s still a selfish little boy at heart. They date you, sleep with you a few times, then leave you for one of the other women they’re already sleeping with who might have more money and a better job but somehow less brains and character and even looks than you. But she’s happier. People are drawn to happiness. Happiness brings good fortune, not the other way around. I moved to a better place and bought a whole new wardrobe as soon as I figured that out. It didn’t take long before I was being pursued by half a dozen men, including one who dumped me after a one-night stand but started calling again. He started thinking of me as promising wife material after I changed my life.

“But I didn’t do it just for the men. The clothes and apartment and nice sheets and vases with fresh flowers make me happier. Even if you’re not feeling good one day, living in a beautiful place makes you feel like you’ve stepped out of a painting. Some of the veneer of the beautiful and pleasant things rubs off on you, even when you’re waiting in line at a CVS, where one guy tried to pick me up. It’s not the monetary value of the lifestyle that makes you desirable. It’s that so much of it isn’t necessary to live. The flowers and the view that make you feel you’re human and not a caged animal.

“I want to have children who are radiant and happy like the women I can’t compete with, not without the luster and advantage of these things I can’t really afford. I want them to grow up safe and spoiled with enough childhood happiness stored inside them to last them their whole lives. You must have met people in your life who could never imagine what we’ve grown up with. They tell you, ‘You must be exaggerating, your father only did what he thought was best for you.’ I want my children to be like those people. Their happiness is the most beautiful in the world. It’s beautiful and ridiculous and priceless, like a Fabergé egg. You might find them absurd, but you could never bring yourself to damage one because it is priceless. Because the world is more beautiful with them than without. You will never convince me that what we suffered has given us greater wisdom or humanity. None of it was worth it.

“You’ve probably asked yourself before today why I can’t marry for love. I will love any children I have more than my husband. I know that already. So I’m not going to marry for love. I’m going to arrange a marriage for myself with a suitable partner and hope I fall in love, but if I don’t at least my children will have a decent father who will provide for us. I want to have a better life. I want to create a good life. That’s how I’m going to live. Please.” The request was a fist gently brought to rest on the table.

“Okay,” Sarah said with a gulp. Again, she felt humbled: she did not know she could be so moved by her sister. But something else was needling her. “I still don’t understand.” The coffee in her empty stomach was beginning to make her feel lightly panicked; she woke from the spell of Minah’s confessional. “You’re acting as if you can’t live without his money. I’d like more money, too, but I’ve accepted long ago that Dad’s unreliable. You know, he once called me at college drunk and weeping saying he wanted to build an orphanage in Seoul in his name. He’s more likely to make a grand gesture like that, which would also be a middle finger to us, than leave any of us money. I don’t understand why you’re suddenly acting like his money is indispensable. You’ve been living without it long enough. So have I. We’ve both grown up knowing we can’t rely on him.”

“Minah swallowed hard. Her eyes flashed with exasperation. “I know you don’t care as much about money as me. But you need money, too. You’re still adjuncting. What if you don’t get a full-time job next year either?”

Sarah flushed with shame at being confronted so starkly with her failures. Then shame gave way to anger at her sister.

Minah didn’t stop. “I don’t understand why you don’t understand. I sometimes think you have no understanding of money or class. That’s the problem. Dad paid for your college. I have debts. Serious debts. From law school and more. A lot more.”

Sarah could feel her anger mounting steadily, deep within her. She didn’t want to help her sister, much less listen to her anymore. She might even want to hurt her. “But what makes you think his money will change your life? As far as we know he hasn’t even paid off the mortgage on the house in California. I never understood how he paid for it. Or do you want to inherit that shithole we just visited?”

“You are so naïve. Are you really that naive?” Minah was no only contemptuous but offended by Sarah’s inability to see. “He’s worth over ten million. I think as much as twelve.”

“What?” Sarah gave a faint gasp.

“How do you think he bought so much property and real estate? That shithole’s just one of his places. By borrowing off his dingy little strip mall dry-cleaning business? After the accident with his hand he met some ambulance chaser and sued the company or the distributor of the cleaning chemicals. I was too young to understand all the details, but I heard all the phone calls. I saw letters from the lawyer. Somehow he got millions for it and then made millions more.”

Minah took a final sip of her coffee, dabbed her mauve-tinted lips with her napkin, and pushed her cup to the side of the table. These were not ordinary actions but performances for Sarah. They were imperious gestures that expressed the poetry of her charismatic unhappiness and the drama of her willfulness: the poetry and drama of her life concentrated, in that moment, in the hand that held steady. See, she was saying through them, this power and poetry is invisible, but it’s there, even when my hand doesn’t tremble and the cup doesn’t break.

Sarah cleared her throat. “All right,” she said. “I’ll try.”

Outside, the imminent rain made the air feel like chilled velvet. Minah held the collar of her coat close to her throat, like a woman in a photograph. Across the way a brown-skinned woman was pushing a stroller and holding the hand of a white child toddling beside her, and a man walking a stout dog with a joyful trot quickened his pace to overtake them. A woman, likely Korean, was wrapping flowers in plastic sheathes in front of a bodega. A young woman in sweats entered the store, and the next instant her arm extended from within, like the magical movement of a puppet, to open the door for the woman with the stroller and child. Sarah didn’t know whether she was in a world in which Minah was not grasping and insensitive but righteous and strong.

They walked toward the subway, both a little abashed by the strange and unexpected intimacy of the last hour. They got on the same train and sat down beside each other, and the awkwardness was still there.

As she was waiting at Penn station for her train back to New Jersey, Sarah received a text from Esther: I was going to make dinner for us but I think I need to stay with Dad tonight.

The station was drearier than usual. Furiously moving bodies appeared on the verge of internal collapse, like insects that emerged, mated, and died within the span of a day. She needed to pee; the line for the women’s restroom stretched into the waiting room, where more homeless people were huddled on the benches, more tourists were fascinated or disgusted by the degradation, more regular commuters were not only resigned but inured to the purgatorial setting. Armed guards in camouflage were toting guns the length of their arms; they looked to be the only ones laughing and fraternizing in the whole of the station. They were accompanied by German shepherds with glassy eyes. Like many working in the stores or waiting for their train, the dogs were at once lifeless and alert, projecting a strangely menacing sense of fragility.

The fetid airlessness of the underground arena was thick with the threat of outburst and abuse; Sarah felt herself swallowing it with the tasteless packaged food she regularly bought on her way home. She perceived all these things now more acutely because of her charged hour with Minah. She felt her anger, but she wasn’t sure if it was still directed at her sister.

The train pulled out of the dark cave of the tunnel into an expanse of wild reeds thriving in a dark marsh. A concrete bridge lofted above them and curved through the mist and steel-gray sky. The mist made the sunless sky opalescent, mysterious and beautiful above the wasted landscape.

She set down to marking the in-class responses. They were usually either more nuanced or starker and more assertive than any comments made by the writer in class.

We know that rape is unforgivable in the twenty-first century. But does Cole? Julius is a monster.

Alex was proving to be the kind of small-minded moralist who was also a bad reader, though she thought of herself as a left-leaning intellectual activist. Sarah shuddered to think of the abuses she would unleash in a reeducation camp.

She wondered whether she would have responded like Alex at her age. When she was younger she, too, was a moralist, but she was also full of self-doubt and curiosity and inclined to credit her teachers with superior insight. She admitted to herself that she took pleasure in causing Alex and Genevieve discomfort while undermining their narrow opinions. Was she not unlike the ugly moral crusader who, in her shameless egotism, makes no effort to inspire goodness but revels in provocations that lead not only to discomfort but the most dangerous defensiveness?

She returned to her work. Not all the responses to the book were so obtuse.

I didn’t understand why Julius would admit to something so awful and then never mention it again. It’s like he totally forgot about it and wanted to forget it. Reading the end made me nervous. Are there things I’ve forgotten?

The question touched her like a cool cloth on her nape. Lina rarely spoke up and always forgot to add her name to her work.

The train was lumbering past the urban stretches whose specific features she could never remember. She was fated to watch the sequence of electrical wires, parking lots, warehouses, rows of blank-faced condos, again and again, without their ever making a lasting impression on her. There were houses, but she never saw people. The soccer fields were empty and muddy.

How could Minah not have understood the sacrifice she was asking of Sarah? Her sisters were to persuade their father to write a will favorable to them all by taking care of him. He couldn’t stand Minah, and he preferred Sarah to Esther. And so she must be the one to serve him. She must be the one to make his dying easier.

Her father was dying. She wanted to believe in an afterlife. But hell couldn’t exist without justice, and justice wasn’t possible when the wrongdoer could never understand his sins. Her father was insulated in his essential evil. As if innocent, he was protected from his guilt.

Hell was as factitious as the novel she’d just defended, which said that criminals suffered the self-inflicted dehumanization of violating another’s humanity. How many rapists suffered not at all for their crime?

She hated the idea of poetic justice. She scorned the poets of beauty and truth who preached among themselves the ineluctability of justice, the redemption of art. Poetic justice was Dante’s hell, where suicides woke to find themselves embodying the trees from which they’d hanged themselves, condemned to speechlessness until someone broke off a piece of their bark: in their oozing words of blood, she read the perverse promise of paradise, the power of poetic words to change the story of the sinner and sufferer alike. But there was no poetry in the suffering the violator could never know.

There was no hell. There was only a purgatory in this world for the select few who learned what they were and what they had done. That was the only kind of justice that existed. It punished only the seekers of truth: those who tried to understand themselves.