Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel

by Yiyun Li

  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.

  6

  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.

  Whenever she found an opportunity, Ruyu snuck into the old man’s bedroom. A homemade wooden shelf stood at the end of the bed, empty but for a coil of bug-repelling incense, a jar of ointment for bedsores, and a framed family picture taken years ago: Shaoai, a toddler with pigtails, sat between her grandparents, and her parents, young and docile looking, stood behind. A folding chair—in which Aunt and sometimes Uncle would sit to feed the old man—leaned against the wall. A small window high up on the wall was kept open, though the air smelled constantly of stale bedding, wet pad, smoky incense,
and pungent ointment.

  The room, unlike the rest of the house, was not cluttered, and oddly it reminded Ruyu of her grandaunts’ place. They were pristine housekeepers, and Ruyu knew that they would not find it flattering to be associated, even in her most private thoughts, with the unseemliness of sickness and decay in Grandpa’s room. But her grandaunts would never ask for her opinions on such things, so they would not know what was on her mind.

  Ruyu had not found the silence of her old home extraordinary until she arrived in Beijing; here words were used as a lubricant of everyday life, and the clutter in people’s lives—meaningless events, small objects—offered endless subjects for a chat. In her grandaunt’s apartment, there were no potted plants to leak muddy water or to drop stale flowers as Ruyu had seen in Aunt’s house; there were no stacks of old brown wrapping paper to collect dust, no strands of plastic strings to get tangled, awaiting reuse. Twice a year—once before the summer, and again before the winter—her grandaunts brought out their sewing machine. During the next few days, the apartment took on a busy chaos that Ruyu never tired of: old skirts and blouses were carefully unstitched at the seams with a small pair of scissors, then rearranged and chalked, on top of paper samples, to become parts of new clothes; the small drum that dripped oil into every joint of the machine made soothing tut-tutting sounds when you pressed it; spools of thread, in different hues of blue and gray, were lined up to match the fabrics; when one of her grandaunts pedaled the sewing machine, the silver needle took on a life of its own, darting in and out of the fabric. But even during those festive days of sewing, Ruyu had learned the importance of calm and order. She helped her grandaunts thread their needles; she cleaned up small pieces of fabric and thread, and, when allowed by her grandaunts, sewed them into a small ball—yet her relish in doing these things she knew to hide: making their own clothes was, more than a necessity, a way for them to differentiate themselves from a world to which they did not conform; finding happiness in one’s duty was, to say the least, an act of arrogance before God.

  And it was God who had led her to Grandpa’s room, which made Ruyu feel at home: its emptiness was inviting more than oppressive, its quietness keeping the world at bay.

  At first Ruyu only stood at the entrance, ready to leave if the old man expressed any displeasure. Sometimes he turned his murky eyes to her, but most of the time he did not acknowledge her—she was never the one to come with food or drink or a pair of caring hands. When he did not protest in any noticeable way, she felt more at ease and began sitting next to the bed. She would bring a bamboo fan with her as a pretext, and a few times when she was found in the old man’s room by Aunt, she was cooling him down with the fan’s gentle movement.

  “You’re very good to Grandpa,” Aunt said when she came in one evening with a basin of water and a wash towel. “But I can’t say that I like you to spend so much time with him.”

  “Why?” Ruyu said. “Does Grandpa mind?”

  “What does he know?” Aunt said. “I don’t think it’s good for you.”

  The old man’s eyes showed little expression at the exchange. The fact that he was closer to death than anyone Ruyu had met made her wonder if he knew things that others did not; that he could not speak elevated him in her eyes, as the speechlessness must be a punishment for what he had gained in life. Watching Grandpa, she felt an inexplicable kinship: he, like her, must have the power to see through things and people, even if his silence was by now unwilling, and hers always a choice.

  When Ruyu remained quiet Aunt sighed. “You’re still a child. You shouldn’t spend so much time ruminating.”

  Ruyu moved over so Aunt could place the basin on the chair. “I don’t mind sitting with Grandpa.”

  “Your grandaunts did not send you here to nanny an invalid,” Aunt said.

  Ruyu, rather than a poor relation imposed on Aunt and Uncle, was a paid guest. Before she had left, her grandaunts had explained that they would be paying a hundred yuan a month for her upkeep, more than either one of the couple earned. That hosting Ruyu was a substantial financial gain for the family was not directly stated, though she could see that it was what her grandaunts wanted her to understand. “I’m not really doing anything for Grandpa,” Ruyu said. “I’m only sitting here.”

  “A young person should be with her friends,” Aunt said. “Why don’t you find Boyang or Moran and go out for a bike ride?”

  Ruyu did not know how to ride a bike—nobody, not even the nosiest neighbors back at home, would expect her grandaunts to run after a youth barely balanced on a bike, ready to catch her when she skidded and fell. This deficiency seemed to have perplexed Moran and Boyang at first—they were the real children of this city, growing up on bicycles as the children of Mongolian herdsmen were raised on horseback. For them, the buses and trolleys and subways were for the very old and very young, and for the unfortunate ones who, for whatever reason, were deprived of the freedom of a bike.

  Ruyu had spent much of her time with Boyang and Moran in the past weeks. Knowing the city by heart, they took Ruyu on the rear racks of their bikes in turn, riding through side streets and alleyways so that they would not be caught by the traffic police—two people on one bike was illegal. When they could not avoid a stretch of thoroughfare or boulevard, the two of them would push their bikes and walk beside Ruyu, pointing out old seamstresses’ shops and hundred-year-old butcheries and bakeries along the road.

  Ruyu did not mind being left alone, though others—Boyang and Moran, and the neighbors—seemed to find her ease with aloneness unnerving. To Aunt, any time Ruyu spent by herself bore an accusation of sorts. The desperateness of the world to make her less of herself made her look at it askance. Why, she sometimes thought, are people allowed to be so stupid?

  When Ruyu did not reply, Aunt said that it was unfair of her to think so, but compared with other kids her age, Ruyu had spent too much time with old people. But Boyang lived with his grandmother, Ruyu said, and Aunt said that it was different with him, meaning, Ruyu guessed, that Boyang had his parents. The fact that Ruyu came from parents unknown to her was on the mind of everyone who knew her story, because, to the rest of the world, a child had to be born to a pair of parents. A child could not sprout like a small plant from a crack in the road; but Ruyu wanted the world to believe that she was rather like that—a life dropped in the crack between her two grandaunts. That this was the most natural thing that had occurred to the three of them would never be understood by a person like Aunt.

  Ruyu turned to the old man, who had half closed his eyes out of boredom or exhaustion. She wondered if he understood that all the people around him but herself would be relieved, if not happy, when he died; she might be the only person to feel a sense of loss, though she did not know him at all.

  Someone told a joke in the courtyard and laughter erupted, accompanied by clapping hands that hunted bloodthirsty mosquitoes in midair. In the last light of the day, early-rising bats darted around, their high-pitched screeches, both faint and shrill, unlike any other noise made by a living creature. Ruyu had never seen bats before, and considered these strange animals, with their blind and frantic flights at dusk, one thing she loved about Beijing. Even inside Grandpa’s small cube, one could occasionally catch a glimpse of a bat or two changing directions the moment when they were about to bump into the window, so abruptly yet so confidently, never making a mistake.

  Aunt replaced an old coil of incense with a new one and lit it, the red tip the only live light in the room. Neither she nor Ruyu moved to turn on the light, and the old man’s gaunt face became less harsh in the falling dusk.

  “I’ve never really asked you,” Aunt said after a moment, her voice dry, as if she were not certain of her right to have broken the silence. “Your grandaunts, how are they doing?”

  “Good.”

  “Have you written them?”

  When Ruyu had first arrived, Aunt had pointed out the envelopes and stamps in the drawer of Ruyu’s new desk, though apart from
a telegram she had sent her grandaunts about her safe arrival, she had not sent a letter: it was not expected of her. She did not want to admit any absence of communication now, so she only nodded vaguely, wondering if Aunt or Shaoai would monitor the numbers of stamps and envelopes in her drawer. Did she get a letter of reply from them, Aunt asked, and added that they—Uncle and Aunt—had written but had not heard from Ruyu’s grandaunts.

  Ruyu said that she had not received a letter from her grandaunts, either, and found it annoying that Aunt seemed more disappointed by the silence from the province on Ruyu’s behalf than on her own. “They always know what they are doing. I’m sure they trust that you’re settling down well,” Aunt said. “Or the letter could’ve been held up somewhere. You never know.”

  “It’s all right,” Ruyu said.

  “Is there a phone stand near where they live? Will the people at the phone stand take messages, or will they be able to get your grandaunts for you? I can ask Uncle to take you to the post office to make a long distance call to them.”

  “I don’t think they like to be phoned,” Ruyu said. They would not like to be written to, either. At the entrance of their apartment building, letters and postcards and newspapers were twice a day jammed into a wooden box painted green. The building’s residents, other than Ruyu and her grandaunts, would stop and flip through the mail, reading headlines or stealing a glance at other people’s postcards, which, drab colored and stamped with the green emblem of the post office, cost less to send than letters, and were preferred when privacy was not a concern. Once, in first grade, Ruyu had felt an urge, with her newly gained reading skills, to peek into the box. The letter on top of the pile was for a family on the third floor, but apart from that, she saw little. The younger of her grandaunts, who was walking up the stairs in front of her, stopped and studied her. There was no reproach in the old woman’s eyes, nor was anything said, but right away Ruyu understood that what she had done out of pointless curiosity was beneath what her grandaunts had raised her to be. “It’s really all right,” she said now. “My grandaunts will write if they need to.”