Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

It was the first time the Indian boys and the Thai couple had seen snow, so they all perked up, as though the afternoon had been a test they’d had to pass to earn this marvelous sight. The two parties soon disappeared, one trudging uphill, the other heading to the lake. For a moment, neither Moran nor Josef moved, both frozen in the dread of their separate loneliness. Then he asked her if she was all right, and suggested a cup of hot chocolate to recover from the dreadful tour.

At the café, Josef asked Moran where she had come from, what she was studying at the university, and whether she had experienced any cultural shock in America; Moran had a stock of ready answers to these questions, replies that would deter further questioning. When Josef ran out of questions, he told her that he did not belong to the church group, but that a couple who were longtime friends of his had been trying to interest him in the group’s activities. “I hope you’ve enjoyed others more than today’s,” he said.

Moran said she had not been to any other event.

“So you wanted to see a jail?” Josef said. “But not a football game? Not Oktoberfest?”

Moran did not have an answer prepared, so she only shook her head, as though she, too, were baffled. She had made acquaintances in the new town but had been unwilling to befriend anyone; another girl from her college had come to Madison, too, for engineering school, but Moran had declined when the girl had asked her to be her roommate. When Josef continued waiting for an answer, she said that perhaps she had a negative view of life, and was drawn to the dark side of the world. She did not say that Oktoberfest and college football games did not interest her because they were things you went to with other people.

Josef looked at her more attentively. She wondered if he would ask for explanations, which she could not, and would not, give him. But Josef only gestured at her name tag and asked if Lara was a common Chinese name.

She’d decided to give herself an English name when she’d arrived in America because she thought it might be hard for Americans to pronounce her name, Moran replied, though that was only partially true. In the program where she was studying for a PhD in chemistry, she was known as Moran; in the Westlawn House, a three-story building offering rooms to women in science and technology, where Moran had a bedroom and shared a kitchen, bathroom, and living area with eight other women — two from Poland, three from Ukraine, two from Jordan on an exchange program, and one Canadian Korean — no one had any trouble saying her Chinese name. She used Lara only with strangers, like the young man managing the grill at the student cafeteria, and the cashier at the grocery store who had a hook for a hand and who so loved waving at Moran that she could not avoid checking out at his register. He had once been an alcoholic, he told Moran; he had lost both children to his ex-wife when they divorced, but before that he had lost his arm when he drove his car into a wall. Never touched a drop after that, he had said cheerfully, and always wished Lara a good stay in America as he punched her total into the register with his good hand.

Josef asked her something, and Moran, having missed the question, asked him to repeat it. “How did you decide on the name Lara?” he said again.

“I wanted something simple.”

“But why Lara? Why not Lily or Nancy?”

Moran wondered if Josef was one of those tedious people who could grasp only things for which there were ready explanations. In college, Moran had halfheartedly dated two boys, and both had bored her with their efforts to reduce the world to a heap of things in need of sorting out. Moran wondered if Josef, in his youth, had likewise exasperated girls his age, but the man, unaware of Moran’s scorn, waited patiently, his eyes limpid. It was the first time Moran had seen a pair of blue eyes at close distance.

“I borrowed the name from a Russian novel,” Moran said.

“Not by any chance Doctor Zhivago ?”

Moran looked up, surprised. “I wondered when you said your name,” Josef said, and started to hum “Lara’s Theme.” His voice, just loud enough for the two of them to hear, astonished Moran: its beauty and sadness seemed to belong to a different era, when men were handsome and women were beautiful and romance was accompanied by its own tune and a well-timed fade-out was the only trace of death.

“A song from my youth,” Josef said when he finished.

“From mine, too,” replied Moran. In her bedroom in Beijing, there was a box of novels, Doctor Zhivago among them, that she had been unwilling to sell but that she knew she would never go back to reread. The books had been her loyal companions for the last two years of high school. By then, Shaoai and her parents had moved away from the quadrangle. Ruyu, still attending the same high school, had become a boarding student and never said a word to Moran when they saw each other at school. Boyang’s parents had taken him away, sending him to the high school affiliated with their university; on weekends, when he came to the quadrangle to visit his grandmother, Moran would either make up an excuse to be absent, or else stay in her bedroom, burying herself in one of the bulky novels translated from Russian or French. She had never been much of a reader of fiction before, but those novels, whose characters bore long and unmemorable names, had comforted her: even the most complicated stories offered a clarity that she could not find in the world around her, and each character came to an uncomplaining end, Doctor Zhivago giving up his life when he could not catch up with Lara in the street, Lara giving up happiness.

“You’re still young,” Josef said.

Moran wanted to retort that only a fool would look at age in such a simpleminded way. But the stranger was being kind, and being true to his observation. Moran was two months short of twenty-three. To be admired for one’s youth when one had seen the dead end to which youth led — one might find solace in the admiration, yet it was not a sufficient diversion. Josef, at his age, could withdraw to the sanctuary of his memories, but Moran still had years, decades, ahead of her. She wished she were as old as Josef — having to live on when one had lived enough made one a weary impersonator of all that she was not.

Moran wiped the tabletop around her cup with the paper napkin, thinking that there must be a right reply to Josef’s comment; only she did not know what it was. When she looked up again she realized that Josef must have said something, but the look on his face said that he didn’t want to embarrass her by repeating it. To fill the silence, she asked him if he had been to a jail before.

It was his first time visiting a jail, Josef said; he and all the people he knew were law-abiding citizens. “Not that there’s much worth to it,” he added.

A man like Josef would find amusement in looking into another world, feeling complacent in a life safeguarded by sensibility. But life was never as secure as he thought. A crime could be committed, or worse, half-committed, and an unfinished murder could be worse than a murder plotted out and accomplished coldheartedly. But all this Moran had not said to Josef then, or later.

After a moment, Josef started to talk about Alena, of his and her being crowned as the Bohemian prince and princess at a Czech festival in 1952; of her winning the state championship at an accordion contest the year after. Accordion? Moran murmured, not saying more, and Josef nodded and said accordion indeed, not your everyday instrument in this country, but both he and Alena played the instrument, like every child of Czech immigrants. Their grandparents had come to the new continent from nearby villages; their fathers had been drinking buddies, both fond of pickled cow tongue. The marriage between Josef and Alena, Moran could tell, had been a good one, children raised with their best interests in mind, friends maintained with loyalty, the history of the older generations treasured, decades of memories dutifully deposited in family albums. When Josef spoke of Alena’s accident, Moran watched his eyes dampen. Certain things are easier to share with strangers when one feels the nearness of farewell; death casts less of a shadow in the heart of a passerby.