Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

Once upon a time, cooking in the kitchen where for years Alena had made meals for her husband and their four children, listening for Josef’s car but not really waiting for him, Moran had made up a life for herself apart from Josef, as she later would make up lives for Grazia and the cobbler and the heartbroken shepherd. It was not disappointment in her marriage, as Josef had thought, that had led her to do that, but her belief in the imperativeness of not living fully in any given moment. Time is the flimsiest surface; to believe in the solidity of one moment till one’s foot touches the next moment, equally trustworthy, is like dream-walking while expecting the world to rearrange itself into a fairy tale path. Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope.

The life imagined in the kitchen of Josef’s house was not far from what Moran conducted now: loneliness and solitude had been rehearsed while she chopped vegetables. It had been her only defense against having her heart moved to a strange place, by Josef, by their marriage, by time. Sometimes when she did not hear the garage door, or her mind was lost in the hissing of cooking oil under a closed lid, she would be startled by the sudden reappearance of Josef. Who are you, and why are you here in my life, she had half-expected him to ask her, half-wondering whether he, catching in her eyes a momentary hostility, had been waiting for her to ask him the same question.

In her adult life, Moran believed, she had not failed to foresee what was going to happen: her migration to America, her marriage to and later divorce from Josef. People would say that she was simply living toward what she thought she had seen, but that was not true. One could have wrong visions, one could have vain hopes, but deceiving oneself is more difficult than deceiving the world. Impossible, in Moran’s case.

The odd thing, though, was that her clarity of vision did not apply to the past. Early in their relationship Josef had been curious about her life in China. She had been unable to share as much as he had wished for, and he had felt hurt, or at least saddened, by her evasiveness. But how does one share the memories of a place without placing oneself in it? Certainly there were moments that would stay alive for as long as she did. Her mother, before pulling Moran out of her fortress of quilts and blankets in the winter mornings, had rubbed and warmed up her own hands while singing a song advocating early rising for a healthier life. Her father’s bicycle bell, a rusty one that sounded as though it had caught a perennial cold, had been stolen one day; who, the family had wondered, wanted an old bell while there were plenty of shiny ones that rang clear and loud? Neighbors’ faces came to her, those who had died appearing vividly alive, those who had aged remaining young. In first grade, the district clinic had come to check the blood counts of the schoolchildren; she’d told Boyang to massage his earlobe so his blood would flow better, and he, trusting her as ever, was yelled at by the nurse afterward, because his red earlobe did not stop bleeding after it was punched by a thin needle.

But how could anyone, Moran wondered now, warrant the trustworthiness of one’s memories? The certainty with which her parents spoke of Ruyu’s culpability was the same certainty with which they believed in their own daughter’s innocence. Those seeking sanctuary in misremembering did not separate what had happened from what could have happened.

Moran had not believed — still could not believe — that Ruyu had meant to do anyone harm. A murder needed motivation, a plot, or else it needed a moment of despair and insanity, as, in her own imagination, the young shepherd had experienced when he drowned his own love along with an innocent child. Moran had not known Ruyu well when they were young; even in retrospect she could not say that she understood Ruyu: she was one of those who defied being known. She had shown no remorse or concern when Shaoai was found poisoned. Had that made Ruyu more culpable than others? But the same could be said of Moran’s own divorce: many among Josef’s friends and family believed her manipulative, saying she’d got what she wanted from the marriage and discarded it the moment she had accomplished her goal. The excuse she had given Josef was halfhearted, the reticence she had maintained in front of others defiant, which made her guiltier than if she had asked for forgiveness.

Yet forgiveness Josef had given her. “Survived by a caring ex-wife,” his words returned to her. Josef was dying, and Shaoai was dead: for the former, it was insufficient to watch from afar; for the latter, it was painfully confusing even seen from a distance. Moran quickened her steps. In three days she would be in Josef’s city, closer to him even though he was closer to death than ever.

Much of Ruyu’s existence in Beijing required explanations: Whose daughter was she? Where did she come from? What was she going to do with her life now that she was here? These questions, mixed with less demanding ones about her first impressions of the city and her previous life, were tiresome: either people asked questions they had no right to, or else they asked questions not worth answering.

When Ruyu could not produce satisfying answers, Aunt seemed to be both protective of her and embarrassed on her behalf; people would comfort Aunt, saying that Ruyu was still new among them, that she was shy, that by and by she would talk more. Ruyu tried not to stare at people when they said such things in her presence. She did not understand what they meant by her being shy, as she had never felt so in her life — one either had something to say to people, or did not. This idea, though, seemed unacceptable to the neighbors in the quadrangle, where life, from breakfast on, was lived in a communal manner, everyone’s business pertinent to the next person; nor did her silence please the old people who sat in the alleyways, in the shadows of the locust trees before the morning breeze was replaced by the unrelenting heat of the season, and who, tired of old tales, looked up at the unfamiliar face of Ruyu, hoping that she would break the monotony but not the serenity of their days by offering something fresh and forgettable.

Soon she became known in the quadrangle and around the neighborhood as the girl who liked to sit with a dying man. There was nothing morbid about watching a man die slowly, though this, Ruyu knew, was not something others would understand. The strangers who had quickly claimed her as one of their own — a friend, a niece, a neighbor — looked for an explanation for her disturbing preference and regained their equanimity when they found one: the girl, anemic, unapproachable at times, was an orphan after all. In time, they would instill in her some normalcy and transform her into something better, but until then they would have to treat her with extra kindness, as one would when looking after a sick bird. In this group effort, almost everyone in the quadrangle was enlisted — everyone but Shaoai, who was mostly absent, and her grandfather, so close to the end that the only thing desired from him, it seemed, was a speedier death than he could offer.

The bed-bound man was quiet most of the time, but when he was hungry or thirsty or needed the pad underneath him to be changed, he gathered what strength was left in his body and gave out wild shrieks; when help was not instantly delivered, he banged his upper body against the bed, producing a terrible noise. Accustomed, Ruyu imagined, to such violent communications, Uncle and Aunt were unhurried in their response, patience their only protest against a deterioration that had lasted too long. When the neighbors talked about the old man, they spoke of him as a skillful repairman of watches and fountain pens, and of his fondness for his two-string fiddle and tall tales, as though he — the man lying in the room, no more than a bag of bones — was only playing at being alive and should not be confused with the real man.