by Yiyun Li
Nini’s father had married into the flat on the second floor. Having no place of his own and, worse, no job, made him a laughingstock, or, rather, his wife. It was said that she had fallen in love with him when she saw him play his flute in the park, a near beggar who, the neighbors used to say, “must have a short circuit in his brain to think of himself as an artist.” Much to her parents’ chagrin, she made up her mind to marry him and support him while he tried his luck getting into the National Conservatory. A year later they had a daughter, and his in-laws, with whom he and his wife shared the two-bedroom flat on the second floor, refused—unlike most grandparents—to take care of the baby. Nini’s mother worked as a clerk in a government agency, and while she was away, Nini’s father could be seen walking the baby around the neighborhood. It must have been disheartening for a man, once homeless, to be made homeless again, during the daytime, along with his child, but as a young girl I did not sense the agony of his situation. Rather, I was envious of his freedom, not belonging to a school or a work unit, and I wished to be his companion during his long hours of aimless wandering.
Nini was just learning to speak when I first began to visit Professor Shan. I was not the kind of well-raised child who knew to compliment a woman on her new dress or a father on his adorable daughter, but whenever I saw Nini and her father in the late afternoons, often playing in the small garden across the narrow lane from Professor Shan’s building, I would greet them. I praised the girl for the stick she held in her hand, or the pebbles she gathered into a pile. Her father thanked me, speaking on her behalf, and it became a habit for both of us to speak through his daughter. “Nini, have you had a good day with your baba?” I would ask her. “Tell your sister that we’ve had a good day,” her father would reply, and even later, when Nini was older and chose not to acknowledge either of our existences, we would still use the girl as an intermediary to exchange words.
I never saw Nini’s father play the flute. He had a gaunt look by the time I entered high school: Where there had once been a smile, there was now only a distracted look, his hair gray before its time, his back beginning to stoop. He spent less time with Nini then—the girl must have been accepted by her grandparents, as a few times I saw them walk her to a preschool. I wondered what he would do with his time now that Nini was in school. When I walked past their flat on the way to Professor Shan’s, I studied the green wooden door, the paint peeling off at the edge, a child’s doodle by the doorknob. I imagined the world behind the door, what Nini’s father, when he unlocked the door, would have to brace himself to face. At night I tried to remember his face and his voice, but hard as I tried, I was never able to recall enough details to make him a real person.
On an early November afternoon, when I was locking my bicycle in front of Professor Shan’s building, Nini’s father appeared quietly from around the corner.
“How are you, Nini’s Papa?” I said when he did not speak. “Did Nini have a good day?”
An old woman exited the building and gave a meaningful glance toward him before calling out to her grandchildren to come in and do homework. In a low voice, Nini’s papa asked if he could talk with me for a few minutes.
I followed him to the small garden. It was one of those mild autumn days, the last before the harsh winter would begin. The sun, half setting, was pinkish orange in the cloudless western sky, which was warm orange and pink and magenta.
The man stopped by a trellis of wisteria, the flowers long gone, the last leaves hanging on to the vine. “I want to let you know that I will be leaving the neighborhood tomorrow.”
I nodded, as if I had known it all along and was not surprised by the news. The streetlights, whitest blue, blinked to life with a collective buzzing.
“Nini’s mama and I signed the divorce papers today,” he said.
I had known Nini’s mother for as long as I could remember. She was fifteen years older, ordinary in all ways but for her marriage. She was too old to be part of my generation, but not old enough to become one of those ubiquitous women we called “auntie,” who claimed the right to yell at any child from the neighborhood, so our paths had never crossed. It occurred to me that I had never, despite all the time I spent imagining his life, thought of her as someone dear to him. I wondered if she had been forced to divorce him by her parents, or if she had, at long last, joined the world in condemning him as a useless man.
“I was waiting for you to come back from school,” he said. “You’ve always been kind to me, and I want to have a proper farewell.”
“Where will you be tomorrow?”
He looked lost at the question, and then said that there were ways for a man to manage.
“Will you still try to get into the conservatory?”
Perhaps he would, he said, but such things were not up to him. One should not give up, I said eagerly, quoting an old saying about fate allowing what is allowed, but it is one’s responsibility to fight for what one wants before it’s decided by fate. He smiled, and I recognized the derision. I must have sounded childish to him, but when he spoke, his derision was directed at himself. He had fought more than his share of fights against fate, he said; perhaps he should be a warrior rather than a flutist.
I tried to find other words of comfort, but it was enough of an effort to hold back my tears. He was about to say something when a sanitation worker, sweeping a pebble path nearby, began to whistle a love song from a Romanian film from the fifties. We both turned to look at the man. I wondered, for a moment, if my father, mopping the floor of the empty department store in the middle of the night, hummed old love songs to himself.
“Will you let me know when you get into the conservatory?” I asked after the sweeper had moved on.
Nini’s father raised his eyes as if startled by the question. Professor Shan is waiting to tutor me, I said.
He hesitated and held out a hand to shake mine. I wished I had more to say to him, and he to me. I took his hand; as soon as our fingers touched we both let go. “Farewell, Nini’s Sister,” he said.
“Farewell, Nini’s Papa,” I said.
Neither of us moved. A bicycle bell chimed and was followed by other chimes, none of them urgent—a child must have been walking past the bicycle shed and felt the urge to test all the bells. “Farewell, Nini’s Papa,” I said again.
He looked at me, and I wondered if he would come closer, and if I should push him away if he did. I wanted to ask him if he would miss me as I would him; I wanted to ask him if away from this sad neighborhood we could see each other again. But the love that was not yet love, the questions that were not asked thus never answered—in retrospect, I wonder if it was all mere fantasy in a lonely teenager’s heart. But there were things to be accounted for: the farewell that a man thought necessary for a girl he barely knew, the silence while listening to a stranger’s whistling, the hand that was raised to wipe my tears but that had paused midair and then patted my head. Be good, he said, and walked away into the dark shadows of the trees.
I was no more than ten minutes late when I got to Professor Shan’s flat. She opened the door before I knocked and looked at me quizzically. There was a traffic accident in Peace Road, I said, and she led me into the flat without acknowledging my lie. When she turned the pages to the place we had ended the day before, I stared at the yellow tassel on the bookmark. The man’s fingers had been cold to the touch; I clasped my hands together, and my palms felt feverish.
Professor Shan stopped reading. “You seem to have trouble focusing today,” she said, and replaced the bookmark in the book, putting it back where it belonged on top of a leather trunk.
I mumbled, but she waved in dismissal and told me to help myself to the fruits and biscuits she had laid out on the table. She walked to the only window in the room and parted the curtains. I wondered if she spent her days, when I was not around, studying the world from her fifth-floor window; and if she had caught me talking to Nini’s papa, on that day or previously.
“When one is youn
g, one thinks of love as the most important thing,” Professor Shan said, still facing the window. “It’s natural if you think so, though I do hope you’ve learned a few things from the books I’ve read to you. One could waste one’s life pursuing a flower in the mirror, a moon in the river, but that is not what I want to see happen to you.”
I looked at the back of her head, the impeccable bun that was pulled a little higher than an old woman’s, so that she looked like a ballerina, with her straight back and long pale neck, and when she turned around, for a moment her face looked cold and marble-like in the light. “The moment you admit someone into your heart you make yourself a fool,” she said. “When you desire nothing, nothing will defeat you. Do you understand, Moyan?”
SIX
I WAS CAUGHT by Lieutenant Wei one night reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I was close to finishing the novel; perhaps one more night would do. I had bracketed every sex scene and marked it with an arrow in the margin of the page, though I was not enjoying the novel myself. Duty propelled me to continue reading and, on top of that, curiosity about what Professor Shan might say about each of the characters. Toward the end I was overtaken by fatigue. Perhaps that was what made me less alert to the creaking of the barracks door. When Lieutenant Wei lifted the quilt from my head, I had barely enough time to hide the book under the makeshift pillow of bundled clothes.
“What are you hiding from me?” Lieutenant Wei asked in a low voice.
The early December night air was cold on my warm face, which must have looked flushed in the glare of her flashlight. I fumbled under the bundled clothes without lifting my head from the pillow. When I found the right book I raised it to the light. Lieutenant Wei grabbed it and told me to get dressed and report to her room in two minutes.
When I was certain that she had gone back to her room, I checked under the clothes again. Jie’s book was safe there, and I decided that I would smuggle it back to her first thing in the morning.
The confiscated book—a collection of Lawrence’s short stories—was lying open on Lieutenant Wei’s desk when I entered her room. She signaled for me to sit down on her chair. “What’s the book about?” she asked.
“A lot of things, Lieutenant.”
“Like what?”
“Men and women, Lieutenant,” I said. “And children.”
“What about them?”
What about them? I thought about the question and wondered what kind of punishment Lieutenant Wei would give me. The only time I had come to her notice was when I scored perfect marks during shooting practice. It was one of those useless talents you don’t ask for in life. Still, at practice I aimed and pulled the trigger with the utmost concentration, my mind calm; the care-taking of the rifle—disassembling it and laying the parts at perfect angles on a sheet of newspaper, then cleaning them with a soft rag and putting them back together with precision, all while the training officer timed us on his stopwatch—gave me immense satisfaction.
“Are they romantic stories?” Lieutenant Wei asked.
I would not call them romantic, I replied. What would you call them, then? she asked, and I said they were stories about mad people.
“Are they worth breaking the rule of internal affairs?”
“Not really, Lieutenant.”
“Are you lying?”
“No, Lieutenant,” I said.
Lieutenant Wei picked up the book, ready to tear the pages. I wished I could plead with her that the book was a present from a dear friend, but the truth was, I had always known that I would be punished for having it: Apart from the volumes of Essential English, which I had little interest in reading, Professor Shan had never allowed me to take a book away from her flat; I had stolen the stories of Lawrence when I decided not to go back.
“I can see you’re lying,” Lieutenant Wei said. She closed the book and studied the cover. “Do you want the book back?”
“No, Lieutenant.”
“Why not?”
“They are unworthy stories, Lieutenant,” I said.
She stared at me, and I tried to look as blank as I imagined I had in front of Professor Shan when I told her, a few days after the departure of Nini’s father, that my schoolwork no longer allowed me to spend time with her. For the briefest moment Professor Shan had looked disappointed, or perhaps even hurt. One has to do what she thinks suits her best, she’d said, and I mumbled that the coursework was heavier than I’d expected. I had wished to leave her with the impression that I would return once the summer holidays began, but she must have seen through me. She told me to wait and then left the room. I still cannot understand what I did next; I quietly took one of the story collections of Lawrence—the one we had just finished—and slipped it into my book satchel. A moment later, Professor Shan returned with a bar of Lux soap, which had just begun to be imported, the most expensive and most luxurious soap. It was wrapped in a piece of peach-colored paper with a beautiful woman printed on it, and I recognized the fragrance that I had always connected with her flat. Be good to yourself, she said, and before I could think of words of gratitude or apology, she waved for me to leave and told me to close the door behind me.
The soap and the book had traveled with me to the army. At night I slept with them, sometimes opening the book to a random page and imagining Professor Shan’s voice reading it. I had seen her around the neighborhood a few times after that, and she acted as if we had never known each other. I wondered then—and wondered again in the army—why she did not confront me about the stolen book. Could it be that she had stopped reading the stories after I left, so never realized her loss?
When Lieutenant Wei asked me if I was certain that I did not need the book, I replied that as far as I cared, the book could be tossed into the garbage can at this very moment.
Lieutenant Wei said that in that case, she would keep the book for herself. I wanted to remind her that she did not read English. “Who knows? Maybe one day I can learn English, too, so I can read the book myself,” she said, as if she had read my mind. “What do you think? Will I be able to read the book after I learn English?”
“I don’t know, Lieutenant,” I said.
“How long did you study English before you could read the book?”
The digital clock on her desk said quarter to midnight. I wondered how long she would keep me. A few years, I said, and shifted in the chair.
“A few years is not that long,” Lieutenant Wei said. “Maybe you can start teaching me now. Will I be able to read a little English by the time you leave?”
I did not know what kind of trap she was setting. A few of the girls from the platoon had become friendly with Lieutenant Wei, but I did not see the point of befriending an officer.
“I’ve had reports that you have received letters from your parents, is that right?” Lieutenant Wei asked.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” I replied. My father had written twice, both letters brief, saying that he and my mother were well and that they hoped I was, too.
“Why are you unhappy?”
“Unhappy, Lieutenant?”
“What’s bothering you?”
“I don’t understand the question, Lieutenant.”
“Did you break up with your boyfriend?” Lieutenant Wei said.
“I have never had a boyfriend, Lieutenant,” I said. I would rather she had ripped my book and sent me back to the barracks with a week of cleaning duty at the pigsties.
“When I enlisted,” Lieutenant Wei said, “my boyfriend saw me off at the train station and then sent a letter to the training camp to break up with me. The first letter I got in the camp. I was much younger than you are now. I was fourteen and a half. He was eighteen, and he did not have the courage to say it to my face. You think it’s the end of the world, but it is not. The army is a good place to sort these things out.”
I wondered if other girls, for different misdemeanors, were kept hostage at odd hours in this room and informed of the love history of Lieutenant Wei. It was ludicrous of her, I decided
, to think that any unhappiness could be explained by a breakup; more ludicrous if she thought she could, by recounting her own story of triumph over heartbreak, lessen other people’s pain.
“Apparently you have no interest in this discussion about feelings,” Lieutenant Wei said.
“I do my best to summarize my feelings in my ideological reports, Lieutenant,” I said. Every Sunday night, we read our weekly reports at the squad meeting. I always began mine that in the past week I had kept up my faith in Communism and my love of our motherland; I filled the rest of the page with military and political slogans that not even Major Tang could find fault with. I had been criticized by our squad leader for being insincere in my reports, so I learned to add personal touches. “In the past week I have continued my efforts to understand the invincibility of Marxism,” and “In the coming week I will work on The Communist Manifesto.”
Lieutenant Wei sighed. “I’m not talking about the feelings in your ideological reports.”
“I don’t have much feeling about most people, Lieutenant,” I said. There had not been a boyfriend and perhaps there never would be one—the man who had not wiped away my tears under the wisteria trellis had later done so, repeatedly, when my memories were revised into dreams, and he who had chosen not to claim the love had left no space for others to claim it: In high school there had been a boy or two, like there is a boy or two for most girls during those years, but I had returned their letters in new envelopes, never adding a line, thinking that would be enough to end what should not have been started.
Without a word Lieutenant Wei put the book in her drawer. I wondered how Professor Shan would have felt had she known that her beloved book had fallen into the hands of someone who, in her mind, was ill-educated. I felt a slight, vindictive joy, directed both at Professor Shan and at myself.
I saluted Lieutenant Wei’s back when I was dismissed, but before I opened her door she told me in an urgent tone to come back. We stood in front of her window, huge flakes of snow faling in the windless night. In a hushed voice, as if it were a secret that we needed to keep between us, she said without turning to me, “You know, I’ve never seen real snow.”