by Yiyun Li
Listless, Moran stood up and said she would be back in a minute. Again Boyang pointed the way to the ladies’ room down the hallway, yet this time he seemed to be doing so in a dream, his eyes looking for something outside in the dusk. The sky had turned from the bright colors of sunset to a deeper gradient of red, magenta, and blue. Love can make an ordinary evening poetic. Sadness, too, can do that.
When Moran exited the office, she saw Ruyu standing next to the fume hood, and when she heard Moran’s steps, she turned to face her, both hands in her pockets. Instinctively Moran glanced at the brown bottles in the hood. The light and the fume switches were on. “Have you two had a good talk?” Ruyu said, and turned the switches off. “I didn’t want to disturb you, in case you needed some private time.”
Flustered, Moran said that they had been waiting for her.
Later in the evening, Moran waited at the bus stop for Ruyu. Boyang had gone to his parents’ apartment, but before he left, he had said several times that Moran was to meet Ruyu’s bus so that the latter would not get lost on the way home. How could she? Moran wished she could ask; the bus stop was only a ten-minute walk from the quadrangle, and it wasn’t late enough for any real safety risk. But she had agreed, promising that she would make sure all went well.
Ruyu looked tired when she stepped down from the bus, yet when Moran asked her to hop onto the back of her bicycle, Ruyu only shook her head. “Go ahead and ride home,” she said. “I’ll walk.”
Moran said she was not in a hurry in any case. She pushed her bicycle and walked next to Ruyu, knowing that she must be a nuisance in Ruyu’s eyes. After a moment of silence, Moran asked Ruyu what she’d thought of the university.
“What do you think?” Ruyu said.
“Beautiful campus, isn’t it?” Moran asked. When Ruyu did not say anything, Moran added, “It’d be wonderful if we could all go there after high school.”
“Do you really think so?” Ruyu asked, and stopped to look sideways at Moran.
What she thought of anything was a question she could no longer answer with confidence. It dawned on her that when people asked for her opinions, they were not truly interested in hearing them. “Why did you want to see the lab?” Moran said.
“Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. I thought you would be more interested in seeing the campus. I didn’t know you were interested in chemistry labs.”
“But we saw the campus, too.”
Yet Ruyu had not asked to see where Boyang’s father, who was a specialist in high-energy physics, did his research; this, though, Moran did not want to say just for the sake of contradiction. They walked across an alley, stepping on the crunching leaves with the same rhythm.
“Where do you think people go after they die?” Ruyu asked when they turned into another alleyway.
Moran paused and turned to look at Ruyu. Her eyes were limpid enough, and there was not the coldness Moran dreaded in them. She sensed that Ruyu was in a mood to talk about something, but Moran felt tired; all she wanted was to go home and curl up in her bed. “I don’t think they go anywhere,” she said. “They’re cremated, and that’s all.”
“But that’s only according to you atheists.”
“Do you—” Moran recalled the question she had never before dared to ask. “Are you religious?”
“Why, because my grandaunts are religious?”
“Why else did you ask the question? Where do you think people go after they die?”
“Nowhere,” Ruyu said, the weariness in her voice reminding Moran of an older woman. She had seen the exhaustion in people like Aunt and her own mother, defeated by a shortage of money and food or by unfairness at work and beyond. “Are you all right?” Moran said.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“But something must have made you ask the question,” Moran said. “About people dying.”
“People die all the time. Shaoai’s grandfather will die sooner or later. One day my grandaunts will die, too. Anyone could die anytime. Even young people. Even you and I. Today. Tomorrow. Who knows?”
Moran shuddered. They had both unconsciously come to a stop under an old locust tree, its canopy of leaves—it was too dark to tell what colors they had turned or how soon they would fall—sheltering them from the deep, clear sky. Autumn crickets sang in the grasses and in the cracks of the alley wall. From a house in a nearby quadrangle, they could hear a TV commercial for Maxwell House instant coffee, a brand that had just begun to be imported into the country. It would be followed by another commercial for Nestle’s instant coffee, also newly introduced. If she closed her eyes, Moran could see the steam rising from the mugs in both commercials, the actresses taking deep, dreamlike breaths. But what did coffee smell like? No family in the quadrangle would squander their money on a jar of either brand, and it occurred to Moran only then that she had never thought about what made the actresses look blissful. How many people watching the commercials would know the fragrance of coffee? Perhaps that’s what happiness is like, looking more real when it is scripted and performed by others.
The theme song of a popular TV drama came on after the Nestle commercial. Moran’s parents would be watching it, and they would be wondering what in the world could have made her miss the show. “Did you,” Moran started the sentence, and then wavered before she could gather the resolve. “Did you take something from the lab?”
Ruyu looked calm as she studied Moran. “You must have been brought up well, not to use the word steal,” she said finally.
“You did, didn’t you?”
“Did you see me do anything?”
“No, but I thought …”
“If you didn’t see with your own eyes, you can’t say what you think,” Ruyu said. “What you think or what anyone thinks does not count.”
“But won’t you tell me?”
Ruyu shook her head. “What’s the point of telling you anything?” she said in a quiet voice, yet rather than sarcasm, which Moran had braced herself for, the words seemed to contain a sadness she had not imagined Ruyu would be capable of showing to others.
“What did you take?” Moran asked gently.
Ruyu looked down at the tips of her shoes, and when she looked up again, the melancholy had vanished. “Are you going to report your suspicion to Boyang?” Ruyu said with half a smile.
Moran felt an acute pain she had not known before. If it were yesterday, she would have ridden into the city to find the last telephone stand open at this hour and dialed the number of Boyang’s parents; she would have weathered their questioning just to talk to him, to tell him her worries, but all, after today, had become impossible. What could she say to him, that the girl he had fallen in love with had stolen from his mother? But why, he would ask, and how did she know?—and Moran would not be able to answer. Ruyu was right. Moran had not seen anything, and she had no right to claim knowing anything. Boyang would shake his head to himself, too generous to say that he was disappointed in her, that her unfounded suspicion came from nowhere but that unkind place where jealousy fed dark imagination. The thought of living with people’s disappointments, his in particular, made Moran panic. She looked pleadingly at Ruyu. “I won’t say anything to him if you prefer that.”
“But whether you say anything to him or not should have nothing to do with me,” Ruyu said. “You can’t say you have done or not done something only for my liking. Isn’t that true?”
Moran felt overwhelmed by queasiness. “I won’t tell him. It’s my decision,” she said.
“Then that’s that,” Ruyu said. “Shall we go back? It’s late.”
“But wait. We can’t just yet,” Moran said. “Why did you take something from the lab? What are you going to do with it?”
“If I say I never took anything, will you believe me and forget about it?”
Moran took a deep breath but could not sense any relief. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”
Ruyu smiled. “People want things for different reasons. Some want
money to buy things; others want money that they never spend. Some want people to be their properties; others want to be properties of other people,” she said. “If your imagination were right, have you thought that I only wanted something that could make me feel better?”
“But how?” Moran said, seized by the fear that either she was losing her mind or Ruyu was. “You’re not thinking of killing yourself?”
Ruyu’s eyes, unfocused for a split second, narrowed with derision. “I don’t know how you came up with that silly idea, Moran.”
Only that morning she had been a different person, Moran thought; she’d felt sad, but the sadness was no more than a young girl’s mood. Even sitting in the office next to Boyang, watching the sky change its hue, she had still been that person, sadder but never for a moment uncertain about the world. Between then and now, what had been was no more, but why and how this change had happened she did not know.
“Are you worried?” Ruyu said. “Are you going to talk to all the grownups so they can be alarmed? The truth is, if anyone ever wants to destroy herself, there’s nothing you can do. But at least you should know that it’s a sin, according to my grandaunts, to commit suicide. There’s no redemption for people like that.”
Words like sin and redemption did not exist in Moran’s vocabulary. She did not know half of what Ruyu knew about life, and now, was it too late? “Are you feeling unhappy?” Moran asked, trying to steer the conversation in a less treacherous direction.
“You know, I notice that you always ask people if they’re happy or not.”
Did she? Moran wondered. She had not been conscious of it, but perhaps she did have the habit. Sometimes she ran into one of the younger kids in the neighborhood, and if he or she was crying, the first question she would ask was what made you unhappy?
“I don’t think people ask that question,” Ruyu said.
“They don’t?”
“No one has ever asked me that question,” Ruyu said. “You’re the first one, and the only one. And if you think about it—I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Moran—but if you think about it, that’s the most pointless question. If the person says yes, I’m happy, then what?”
“I would be happy for them.”
“And if he’s not happy?”
“If the person is unhappy, I’ll make an effort to change that,” Moran said.
Ruyu looked at Moran as one would look at a baby bird maimed by a feral cat, sympathy and disgust seeming to blend into something less distinguishable. Without another word, Ruyu began to walk.
To be brought to an understanding of her own foolishness like that was like walking into a wall she had never known to be there. The pain was so acute that for a moment Moran felt the urge to gasp.
15
Josef asked only for a cup of black coffee, and even that he did not touch while watching Moran eat her eggs and toast. She knew that her overthinking had fallen short again. The evening before, when she had called Josef from the airport, he had suggested a simple dinner, and she had flatly refused because she had not come to be hosted or taken care of in any way. She asked him what his next day would be like, and he said he had a visit to the hospital in the morning. She would pick him up and drive him to his appointment, she said, deciding for both of them as she had decided all the birthday lunches.
The hospital cafeteria would be too depressing at this hour, Josef had said, and she had agreed to go to a small café nearby for breakfast. But now—too late as always—it occurred to her that he could not eat anything: today he would have another chemo infusion; with all her consideration, how could she have forgotten that for a town this size, one would never need to leave for an appointment two hours ahead of time?
Josef, though, watched her eat as though nothing was out of place. His suit hung loosely; his cheeks, once round and flushed and called affectionately by her his “Buddha” cheeks, were sallow now, creased skin on sharp bones. He moved much more slowly than before, though with dignity. She wondered if his bones and joints troubled him, and whether it was a result of the illness or the chemotherapy—though did it matter? His back was straight when he sat next to her in the car, and he did not let himself slouch after the waitress had brought them their orders. He was one of those people who would meet death with an impeccable manner, shaking hands, thanking death for taking the trouble to come and fetch him, and, having put his affairs in order ahead of time, bidding farewell to his family and friends before journeying onward. “It’s ridiculous to sit here and wait,” she said, disturbed by the thought that his final departure was no longer hypothetical. “Next time we’ll leave for the hospital just in time.”
“This is the only time I go while you’re here,” Josef said. “So don’t worry about next time. By the way, Rachel said to thank you for your help today.”
That, Moran thought, was his cue for her to ask about Rachel, her children, and her siblings and their children. In the past, Moran and Josef had been talkative at his birthday lunches, each picking up a new subject before quietness set in: he would speak of the local orchestra concerts he’d attended, various construction projects in the city, his children and grandchildren; she would speak of new products at work, the colors she’d painted her bedroom, the pots of herbs she was cultivating on her windowsill. What she had failed to do in their marriage she seemed to have managed since, at least once a year: to assign interest to small matters. It takes courage to find solace in trivialities, willfulness not to let trivialities usurp one’s life. Trivialities, though, could wait now, or could be done away with forever. “There,” she said, “will be next time. I’m moving back.”
“Back, Moran, to where?”
Did she detect suspicion or even panic, however fleeting, in his eyes? The house she had known to be theirs—and before that, his and Alena’s—had been remodeled and sold two years earlier. Josef’s move to the condo, she had known at the time, would be only the beginning of a series of moves, each confining his world more. Indeed, back to where? But a more apt question would be, back to when? Over the years she had failed to offer Josef evidence of settlement: a new marriage, a love interest, an affair, anything to end their birthday ritual. It was kind of her to come, he said every year, his happiness and gratitude genuine because she was the one to rearrange her life once a year for him. But Moran wondered if he was only acting for her sake—his life would have been the same otherwise, children and grandchildren providing a solid reality for his memories of Alena, polished into perfection by time. Had Josef not preserved a place for her to alight, Moran would be a hapless bird lost in migration from one year to the next. Indeed, back to when: the moment she had asked for a divorce, or earlier, when she had convinced herself that a man with a loving heart would offer her a place in life, or even earlier, when they had first found affectionate companionship in each other?
“Don’t worry. I won’t install myself in your living room like an uninvited guest. I won’t be in your way when your children come to see you. Oh, no, don’t you worry, Josef,” Moran said, feeling her stomach tighten. She had meant to find the best time to tell him her plan, but five minutes into the breakfast, she was already losing her strategy. She could not bring herself to say that there must be times when he needed a driver, a hand to hold on to when he walked on the icy sidewalk, someone to listen to him reminisce while sleep eluded him, a lover of his good heart.
Josef was quiet, then said that it was comforting to know that, with a bit of food in her, Moran was her old self again.
He meant that impatience and irritation came easily to her when she was with him, part of herself that no one else was allowed to see. To the world, she was not unlike Josef: poised in an old-fashioned way. She liked to imagine that she carried with her something good from him, though at times she suspected she was one of those people who would latch on to what was not in their nature and set about making it their own: once upon a time, it had been Shaoai’s romantic vehemence about injustice and Boyang’s lack of concern f
or all things troublesome. (How had those two traits mixed in her? she wondered, but it seemed too long ago for her to understand.) There had been Ruyu’s imperviousness, a most alien quality, yet for years Moran had striven for it, as though by aligning herself with Ruyu, she could claim at least a small part of Ruyu’s impunity. But how does one tell where one’s true self stops and makes way for all the borrowed selves? To this day, Moran still sometimes woke from dreams in which she had laughed jovially. Often Boyang was in those dreams, and sometimes Ruyu, too, and the backdrop, however vague, was unmistakably one of her favorite corners of Beijing; in the first moment of wakefulness, the unconstrained happiness, like the lingering aftertaste of the locust blossoms they ate as children, was intensely real, until she remembered that she was no longer a person who had things to laugh about, or people to laugh with. Extreme disappointment seems a lesson one can never master: no matter how many times it had happened, the realization would still hit her like a fierce bout of physical illness, and for a moment she would be dazed, asking herself how it could be that her life had not turned out to be a place for that happiness.
“Did I offend you?” Josef said.
Always quick to admit wrongdoing, always ready to apologize—it was the same for both of them. How could two people like that make a marriage, which required a certain degree of irrationality, work? “I mean it, Josef,” Moran said. “I’m moving back to town.”
“Why?”
“That”—she stared at Josef—“is a stupid question.”
“But what will you do about your job?”
She could say she had arranged a leave to make him feel better, but the truth was she never lied to him. It wasn’t much, she knew: one can withhold many things and build a wall around oneself; one can have a graveyard of dead memories without speaking a word. But at least she was adamant about giving him the kind of love she had not given others: it is rare that one meets a person to whom one chooses never to lie. “I’m giving it up,” she said. “Don’t, please, Josef, don’t try to convince me otherwise. It’s only a job.”