Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude

“You mean you’d kill yourself? Didn’t you use that once as your defense?”

“You could call that a lie. I’ve never been suicidal. You either have that in you, or you don’t,” Ruyu said. “I don’t have that. All I’m saying is, I would have been much less lenient if I’d found someone like myself.”

“Have you ever found anyone like yourself?”

“People in general are kinder than I,” Ruyu said.

“But have you ever felt guilty?”

“About what?”

“About Shaoai,” Boyang said. And about Moran, and himself, all these people left behind.

“All I wanted to do was to mind my own business. If there was a poisonous drink I mixed up and left on my desk, it was my own business,” Ruyu said. “Shaoai’s problem, like many people’s, was not knowing how not to mind other people’s business.”

“Yes, she could be bossy. She could be unfriendly. But was that enough for her to suffer the way she did?”

Ruyu paused. “That, I have to say, was her bad luck.”

“Do you have a heart? Do you not have any remorse in you?”

“Point out to me one person who could benefit from my having a heart.”

Boyang stared at Ruyu. Her look, candid, without animosity, could have belonged to the most innocent person.

“Would you feel better if I lied, and said I felt some remorse?” Ruyu asked gently.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s what I thought,” Ruyu said. “No, nothing can be changed. You asked me to go visit Aunt. Do you think seeing me would do her any good? No, I don’t think so. What people deserve is peace, and I’m afraid I am not a person who can leave anyone in peace.”

“Then why did you come back to see me? Do I not deserve peace?”

“Would you prefer that I hadn’t come back?” Ruyu said, her voice softened. “Have you already found peace? Have I disturbed it by coming back to look for you?”

Boyang shook his head. Peace, he knew, was the last thing he wanted at the moment.

“It’s a good story, Moran,” Josef said.

“But?”

He sighed. “It’s a very good story,” he said. “It’s romantic and melancholy. But it’s not a real story.”

They were sitting on a lakeside bench. An early heat wave had confused all the trees and flowers into blossoms. Wait until the next snow, people kept warning one another, as though they needed to remind themselves, before hope was taken away, that it would not last. Yet the daffodils and tulips did not heed the warnings. There is no point in waiting, as every moment is the right moment.

“Why does it matter?” Moran asked. She had told Josef the story of Grazia, of her childhood in Italy, of her cold death — too early, too quiet — in Switzerland. It was the details she liked to describe to Josef: the dolls Grazia’s nanny had made for her; her French governess’s face, small and heart-shaped; the German musician who came to the house to give piano lessons to her and ended each encounter with a severe bow. In the days and weeks to come she would tell Josef other stories, too, of the Parisian cobbler and the Bavarian peasant, of the Russian maid riding in a coach with her mistress to Baden-Baden. “I like the stories.”

“I like them, too, but I would like it more if you could tell me something else.”

“About what?”

“Things I don’t know about you. Your parents, for instance. Your traveling with them.”

When they had gotten married she had told him that her parents had not been able to get visas; her father worked for a government ministry, which made traveling to the States complicated for him. Later, still in the marriage, the 9/11 attack made their traveling even less practical. She would not want them to go through stringent security checks, she had explained. Josef had agreed because it had seemed as though there would be plenty of time.

“But there is little to say about them,” she said.

“That must not be true,” Josef protested mildly.

Moran thought about it, and told Josef about when she and her parents were on a tour in Central Europe. In the old town of Zagreb a man was playing a Soviet song on the accordion, and her parents had come over to sing along, her father in Russian, her mother in Chinese, and the musician in a language none of them understood. “The Night in the Suburb of Moscow,” she said, a most romantic song that her parents had sung when they had been in their early twenties.

Josef waited for more, and Moran smiled apologetically. “This doesn’t work. I don’t think I can make up a good story about real people.”

“I’m not asking you to make up a story.”

“But I like myself more when I make up those stories,” Moran said. They were not her stories. They were not about her time, or her people, but what she had once found in these stories — escape — would eventually become her wisdom. Perhaps if she kept these tales going Josef would one day forgive her stubbornness in choosing solitude, because he, kinder than solitude, was always here for her.

On an overcast afternoon in late March, Sizhuo stood in front of the shop and watched a pair of swallows fixing their nest under the eave. Swallows were monogamous birds, she remembered reading, and a couple would return to their old nest year after year.

Stubborn creatures, she thought. Why come back to this polluted city when there must be a better place — fresher air, bluer sky — for their offspring? Yet at least they were bound to an old home. She herself had not grown up here, and she had little to claim in this place; still, she resisted decamping, struggling to make this unkind city her home.

A couple walked close. Sizhuo turned, and her face paled momentarily before she regained her composure. Boyang, accompanied by a middle-aged woman, had stopped a few steps away, both studying Sizhuo.

“Are you closed today?” Boyang said.

“No,” Sizhuo said.

A few months ago, after their disastrous meal at a countryside pub, she had sent him a text message, saying she had decided that it would be best for them not to see each other again. She had thought that he would call or stop by, to plead for himself, and she had been disappointed when he had sent a one-word reply: “agreed.” She had refused to believe that he had hurt her feelings, but now, facing him, she felt the coldness in her fingertips.

Boyang introduced the woman as an old friend, Ruyu, who had lived in America but who had come back to settle down. They had taken a walk around the Back Sea, he said, and he thought he would bring her to see if there was a new exhibition here.

There was, Sizhuo replied, and led the way back to the shop. She pointed out to Boyang and the woman the collection of minute crystal vases, with miniature still lifes of butterflies and orchids painted inside. She did not ask if they needed a tour, and they did not request one. From the way they walked together Sizhuo could see that they must have an intimate connection. If she herself had ever occupied any space in Boyang’s heart, she knew it was no longer there.

They did not stay in the shop for long, and before leaving, the woman looked into Sizhuo’s eyes and wished her good luck. Why, Sizhuo thought after they left; what would she need good luck for? She did not know that Boyang had presented her to the woman as a girl he might have loved; he could have made a life with the girl, Boyang had admitted.

Not anymore? Ruyu had asked.

Not now that Ruyu had come back, Boyang had answered.

Out of curiosity Ruyu had requested to meet the girl, and afterward they walked along the lakefront, not saying much. There would be a time when the girl’s face would come back to them, as every one of us has to unearth, at times, a face or two from the past — that of an earlier love, of a lost friend, or of ourselves from a bygone time, when we hadn’t learned that our faces could haunt others’ hearts, too.