Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“Is this the first time you’ve seen snow?” Josef asked as they were waiting for the red light to turn green. She must have looked wide eyed, leaning forward.

She said no, and then asked him what was making the clicking sound.

“The engine?” he said, and turned off the car radio, which had been tuned to a classical music station at low volume. He listened. Strange, he said, he couldn’t hear anything. He had just had the car checked at the mechanics’ a few weeks earlier, he said, and all had seemed well then.

It turned out to be the blinking of the turn signal, for, after the light changed and the car turned, the sound went away. When the small mystery was solved, Josef seemed genuinely shocked, while Moran was rather happy. At the beginning of the semester, she had taken a ride with her lab-mates to a welcome picnic; sitting in the backseat among the more talkative Americans, she had felt baffled by the clicking sound, though she had been too shy to ask.

That winter — long, brutal, as everybody had warned Moran — seemed to be forever connected to the joint effort between Josef and Moran to understand each other through the gap between their ages, and between their origins. Nothing could be left unsaid or unexplored; everything deserved a closer look. Snow, which was simply snow in her mother tongue, gave rise to a new vocabulary, as Josef patiently explained when the season brought different forms of snow: as flakes, as powder, as sleet, as drifts. What the snow trucks and plows spread was a mixture of sand and salt, he explained, a novel practice to her, since back home the only way to tackle snow was to brandish a shovel, and sometimes a whole work unit or school had to pause for half a day to clean the road.

All she did was ask questions: anything else she said would have had some connection to Beijing, and it was to forget the other place that she had welcomed Josef’s friendship. The graininess of the sand and rock under her soles did not go away, even between snows, and the coarseness gave her an odd impression of a boldly announced uncleanness. Back in Beijing, winter brought another kind of uncleanness: dust, never settling and hurled everywhere by wind, gave the sky a tinge of yellow and covered everything with a layer of gray; on the days of dust storms, she had to cover her whole head with a gauzy scarf, and even then, when she arrived home, the first thing she would have to do was rinse her mouth and wash the dust off her face. Once, when she and Boyang had gone to a science exhibition, she had been both amused and appalled when, reaching their destination, even the folds of their eyelids were filled with fine dust. But such memories would have made no sense to Josef, and she always redirected the conversation when he asked her about China. She preferred being told about things she did not know, and in retrospect she wondered if her interest in even the most mundane details had been good for Josef that winter. He had not been a talkative person; all the same, it must have made a difference for him to have been listened to with such attention.

As the winter drew on, the town started to take on a grimier look. People, though tired of the snow, never seemed to tire of talking about it. At a café where they had gone a few times, the owner, Dave, joked about putting up a sign that said “no whining.”

Moran asked Josef to spell the word “whine” for her, and asked for the meaning. He thought for a moment and then took on a high-pitched voice: “Everybody crowds round so in this Forest. There’s no Space. I never saw a more Spreading lot of animals in my life, and all in the wrong places.”

She looked at him: the first glimpse of his jocular self changed him into a different person. When he asked her to guess to whom the lines belonged, she shook her head.

“Here’s the clue. I only did that to give you a sense of a whiny voice. What he really sounds like is this—” Josef pulled both sides of his face downward with his hands and lowered his pitch into a grumbling voice. “There are those who will wish you good morning. If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”

Moran smiled. There was a mischievous light in his eyes when he made his face morose.

“Have you heard of Eeyore?” Josef asked when she could not guess the answer.

“Eeyore?” she said.

“Or Winnie-the-Pooh?”

Moran shook her head again, and Josef seemed to be at a loss for words.

It must be a boring business for him when every subject needed an explanation, Moran thought, feeling self-conscious. So much could be left unsaid between herself and Boyang, as must have been the case between Josef and Alena, though the analogy made Moran uneasy. Neither she nor Josef had designated these weekend meetings — movies and coffees and sometimes a visit to a local museum — as anything consequential. She liked to believe that she was an international student he was helping to get to know America better. She could see, when she and Josef ran into his friends in town, that they approved of this side project of his because it was a distraction from grieving.

Josef explained that Winnie-the-Pooh was a character from a children’s book. He had read it so many times to his four children at bedtime, he said, that he could not help memorizing many parts. She imagined him acting out the book, though she could not envision him as a young father, nor his children at a young age. At Thanksgiving she had met his family, three sons and one daughter: Michael, whose wife’s name was Sharon, and whose children were Todd and Brant; John, who had come with his fiancée, Mimi; George, by himself; and Rachel, the only one still in college. They, including the two boys, both under age five, had intimidated Moran. She had tried to explain to herself that it was only her diffidence about her English that had made her ill at ease, though she knew that was not the only reason.

“If you like,” Josef said now, “I can bring the book to you next week. Or else we can stop by the bookstore to get a copy for you.”

How befitting, she thought, and all of a sudden felt angry. In his eyes, she must be a young woman raised in an underdeveloped country, exotic but also pitiable in her ignorance. Do you have chocolates in China? a friend of Josef’s had asked her once, with perfect kindness; or else: Did your parents bind your feet when you were young? Will they arrange a marriage for you?

Moran said that if Josef wrote down the title of the book, she could find it in the library. She did not know if he could detect the change in her voice.

Josef found a pen in his jacket pocket and wrote the title and the author’s name on a napkin, doodling a plump animal at the bottom. She watched him, both annoyed by him and ashamed at her annoyance. Her graduate advisor had been lending her the picture books his two children had outgrown — the best way to improve her English was to start with children’s books, he had said, and added that when he had been in graduate school, a woman from China in his lab, who had since become a professor at Arizona State, had read through the entire children’s section at the local library.

Moran had not minded her advisor’s giving her the exquisitely printed cardboard books. He was a good man, she knew, and he wanted her to thrive in this country. But to be offered a children’s book by Josef seemed a different matter. What happened to Doctor Zhivago , she wanted to ask. In her backpack was an English translation of the novel, which she had checked out from the university library; the last stamp had been from nine years ago. On the previous Sunday, they had talked about the novel. She had told him that there was a line toward the end of the novel that she had underlined many times in the Chinese translation, though when he had asked her what it was, she could not answer, and said she would look for it in the English translation.