by Yiyun Li
I remembered an older German woman, who had been Nikolai’s favorite preschool teacher. I had often thought of her as the most optimistic and efficient woman, calm and with good humor among three- and four-year-olds, all of them clamorous and demanding. She had once joked that her only contribution to America was to have adopted our family for Thanksgiving, an American holiday.
She taught me to play Nine Men’s Morris, Nikolai said.
Yes, I said. I found the board the other day.
Just wish I could see him again. When you come back please call me so we can cry together. I am so sad, the preschool teacher had written from California. I thought we prepared him to live.
She did a good job, Nikolai said. She taught me to garden and make cheese crisps and baked apples.
She also taught you that song we loved.
The little donkey song?
Yes, I said. The first time Nikolai had sung it at home, I had felt tears heavy behind my eyelids.
If I had a donkey
That wouldn’t go.
Do you think I’d beat him?
Oh, no, no!
I’d put him in a barn,
And give him some corn,
The best little donkey
That ever was born!
How ignorant and happy I was beforetime, Nikolai said.
Is beforetime a word?
As good a word as aftertime.
14
Consolation
I made a cake for Christmas Eve, I said.
Was it a success? Nikolai said.
Half of a success, I said. I made a Japanese cotton cheesecake. It’s a nice-looking cake, cheesy but not cottony.
So you failed the other half, he said. Now you understand my frustration as a baker.
Yes, but it’s okay. Sometimes the first draft of a story doesn’t turn out right.
Except you forget a cake is a one-draft story. You don’t get to revise.
But to rewrite? I said. I’m going to try again. Baking can’t be harder than writing, don’t you think?
You still don’t get it, Mommy. You can’t go back to make the cake twice. Like you can’t step into the same river twice.
Just as none of us could go back, re-measuring the ingredients that made up days and years, repeating the steps with more care, hoping to eliminate the errors, hoping not to make new mistakes, so that this story would have turned out differently. And Nikolai would still be alive.
I thought we were discussing baking, he said. Don’t make any unnecessary leaps.
One doesn’t, I thought, have to make a leap at all, when every time one looks up from a book or turns around in the kitchen or fills a vase with water, one bumps into that monumental absence.
Monumental? How clumsy, how cumbersome, how unwieldy you make me feel.
How you resort to redundancy to make a point, I said.
I know, he said. But really, monumental is a deathly word.
A friend of Nikolai’s had written, reminiscing that when they stood in a circle to talk, he bounced up and down as though he had springs in his shoes. Another friend had told me that when they had gone out for walks, he would jump into the air to pick the plums that were out of everyone’s reach. A mother of his classmate had written, telling me that he would always remain in her memory as the boy who had raced his friends down a street lit up by orange lights on an autumn night. How can one make a monument, granite or marble or bronze, lithe and nimble in flight?
I would say a cotton cheesecake is a more sensible quest than a monument, Nikolai said.
I told him that the word monument came from Latin monumentum, memorial, and monēre, to remind. I had looked it up, along with mind and memory and mourn. Many words had to be relearned since his death.
Do you need a monument to remember me? I would rather you were reminded of me by a piece of cheesecake.
Because you’re a baker, not an architect?
Because cheesecake is perishable, he said.
Oh, I said. I’ve never used perishable in my writing.
Better than that word you never tire of using, inevitable.
They are different adjectives.
I prefer a world made of the perishable, he said. Not the inevitable.
Inevitable makes time more bearable, I thought.
Time doesn’t make sense if not for the perishable, he said.
Okay, I said. We can have different opinions.
As long as you promise not to use monumental again, he said. You really need to sharpen your skills with adjectives.
I had a dream last night, I said, changing the subject. In my dream I was going to pick up Daddy and J. from a hotel, which was like the hotel we stayed at in London.
Were you driving?
I parked the car nearby.
You can’t drive in England, he said. You don’t know how to drive on the left side.
Oh it was a dream, I said. At the hotel entrance all of a sudden you were walking next to me.
In my dream Nikolai was wearing his favorite blue-striped T-shirt. Mommy, I’m hungry, he said to me. The moment I heard him I woke up. Before reality and unreality were separated like night and day, darkness and lightness, I lived over and again with his smile and his voice in my head.
I wish I could tell you I had had the same dream, Nikolai said. Then it would feel like it truly happened, no?
I thought about several people who had told me their dreams about the departed. Often the dreams were interpreted as signs of communication from the other world. Yet dreams are but prologue to days, epilogue to other days, written by our faltering minds.
It would be a terror, I said. People with their independent lives should not meet as independent entities in dreams, too.
Even when one of them is no longer alive?
That changes nothing about an independent life already lived, I said.
But then it’s unfair, Nikolai said. How do you know if someone wants to be in your dream?
Like how do I know you would rather be playing hide-and-seek with me at night than telling me you were hungry? I said. Alas, I don’t know. No one has a choice when others decide to capture him or her in their dreams.
So fundamentally dreaming is injustice inflicted upon whomever is being dreamed of?
Sometimes self-inflicted injustice, I said. People you want nothing to do with still come into your dreams.
Just like baking then, he said.
I thought baking was the opposite of dreaming, I said. You have a precise recipe, with everything in control, and you get the right product in the end.
Did you get everything in good control when you made the cheesecake?
No, but that was because I’m not an Able Baker Charlie as you are, I said.
Bad pun, he said.
What?
ABC, he said. American Born Chinese. You should know my friends and I never use the term.
Oh, I said. It’s never occurred to me. I only thought of Able Baker Charlie from Richard Scarry.
When Nikolai was little, I was fascinated by a Richard Scarry book, What Do People Do All Day? Once, while having an official coffee with a dean at a university where I used to teach, and not being able to decipher her words, which were seemingly pregnant with meanings, I blurted out without thinking: What do you do all day?
I’ve noticed that you like to ask people about what they do for a living, Nikolai said.
For a living, yes, but that’s a compromise, I said. What I really want to ask is: What do you do all day?
How meddlesome, how intrusive, how impertinent.
If days are where we live, I thought, I will always want to know how people live in their days.
Why? he said.
Don’t you sometimes have the feeling t
hat others have answers to questions you don’t have answers to?
But others may look at you and think the same, he said. What if I ask you, What do you do all day?
Oh the things you know, I said. Reading. Writing. Cooking. Looking out of the window. What do you do all day?
Oh the things you don’t know, he said. Dreaming. Dreaming. Thinking. Dreaming.
What do you dream about? What do you think about?
Not telling.
Oh, I said, okay.
We were quiet. I thought about the dream from the night before. There were old recipes I no longer cooked because they had been his favorites. There were new dishes I had made since. It was hard enough when a child said he was suffering and a parent could do little to help. It was beyond helplessness when a parent could do nothing to mitigate a child’s hunger.
Be careful, he said. Don’t overinterpret anything. I’m not hungry. You only dreamed of it.
Do you still suffer? I said.
That’s a worse question than What do you do all day, Nikolai said. Imagine greeting someone. Hello, nice to meet you. Do you suffer?
You’re the one who says we shouldn’t ask inane questions, I said. Do you still suffer?
He was quiet for a moment. Depends how you use the word, he said.
I looked up the word suffer. It comes from sub, from below, and ferre, to bear.
So, if you ask me whether I still have to bear the weight of living, he said, no, I don’t suffer anymore.
What do you have to bear? I said.
Things that are always with me, with or without a physical body, he said.
I rearranged a vase of half-withered hydrangeas on the windowsill. Sometimes when I felt agitated I walked from room to room. Each room was full of objects, still lifes in his new home. Still life, still part of this life. For years he had asked me: If you write about suffering, if you understand suffering, why did you give me a life? I had never given him an answer good enough.
Now we’re both sad, he said. We’re good at making each other sad.
I thought I was better at making you angry, I said.
True, he said. We do argue a lot, don’t we?
All the arguments we had, looked at from this side of death, had been about a promise a mother could barely deliver, and a wish that the child suspected would not come true. Often I had told him, Life is difficult but things will work out in the end, as long as we have patience. Patience, patience, he had said. Do you really think everything will be better someday, when I’m older?
I’m not mad at you anymore, he said.
I know, I said.
All those storms—I had thought we had weathered them together. But perhaps there is no true togetherness when some pains remain incomprehensible.
Oh, I forgot, I said. I did learn one thing when I was baking the cake. I figured out how to make the parchment paper stand in place.
How? he asked.
A few times when Nikolai made cakes, he and I had struggled to make the parchment paper stay upright in a perfect circle while he poured the batter in.
If only I could show him, I thought. Not telling, I said.
Come on, he said. There are a million things worth not-telling, but not a little trick in baking.
There are a million things worth living for, I thought, including a little trick in baking.
You don’t even believe it yourself, he said.
What if we don’t have to believe anything, I said. Perhaps living only requires resolutions.
Like New Year’s resolutions? I thought their whole point is not to last?
No.
Like finding an answer, a solution? You’re bad at giving answers, but I’ve found mine already.
Like resolving time: a year into days, a day into hours, an hour into minutes, I said.
But has it occurred to you that time thus broken down makes quicksand? he said.
Yes, I’m fully aware of that, I said.
And you still resolve to live on quicksand?
What you call quicksand, I said, is our reality.
Yours and mine?
Yes, our genes.
Why don’t we get to live like other people, on flat and solid earth before it was discovered to be round?
Other people live on other kinds of quicksand, I said.
Really?
I don’t know, but I like to imagine that is the case.
I don’t think so, he said. What’s underneath the quicksand?
What’s underneath? I said. I don’t know.
We don’t fall into an abyss for no reason, he said.
What if, I thought, we keep trying? What if an abyss can be made into a natural habitat? What if we accept suffering as we do our hair or eye colors? What if, having lived through a dark and bleak time, a parent can convince a child that what we need is not a light that will lead us somewhere, but the resolution to be nowhere, even if it’s ever and forever.
What then? he asked. That I would make do with my imperfections ever and forever?
No one is perfect, I said.
That’s an old line, he said. It means nothing to me.
Life is imperfect, but it does mean something, no?
Yes, it’s a consolation prize, he said. But I don’t live for consolation prizes, Mother dear.
15
Never Twice
It’s that time of the year, I said. I’m thinking about my New Year’s resolutions.
Do you remember last year’s resolutions, or the year before last’s? Nikolai said.
If I go back and look for them in my journal, I said.
Ha.
But I’m still making a list.
Let me see, he said. You’re going to bake a lot of cakes.
How do you know? I said.
Because I know how unimaginative you can be, he said. If you said horseback riding or beer-brewing or beekeeping or stargazing, I might not have guessed.
It doesn’t bother you, my taking up baking?
What do you think? Baking is my territory, he said. Cooking is yours.
But you are learning to cook, too, I said. I was keenly aware that we were both using present tense.
Baking is my meditation, he said.
I know, I said. He used to bake when he was agitated.
What is baking to you? You can’t meditate my meditation, he said.
Remembrance, I thought.
Baking doesn’t allow revision, don’t forget, he said.
Knitting does, I said.
You’re going to knit too?
When I was a small child, I had been trained to knit every summer, with old yarn that had already lost its elasticity. I had hated the rusty-red stringy yarn, scratchy on my sweating arms. I had hated that my mother would examine my work at the end of the day. And I had hated, most of all, that after the ball of yarn was used up I had to unravel it and start all over again. But these things I had never told him. The first time he discovered that I could knit he had been impressed.
Only because you don’t look like a knitter at all, he said.
Why not?
We knitters find joy and comfort in repetition, he said. Can you write the same sentence over and over?
What if life requires a certain amount of repetition, I said. I can’t write the same sentence or story over and over, but maybe I can use knitting to meet the requirement.
At least you’re better at knitting than baking, he said. It’s possible for you to knit and achieve something even if you can’t, like any self-help book would advise you, enjoy the process.
Thank you for your rare praise.
Remember the octopus you knitted? he asked.
I had almost forgotten. In middle school, for Secret Santa, Nikolai had asked me to kn
it an octopus. Two days, he had said. No way, I had said. Yes way, he had insisted. By the end of the two days I had given him an octopus, which had an opal-white body, light-blue tentacles, and beady eyes that did not match in color or size. The next day he had come home and demanded seven more octopuses for friends.
Octopi, he said now. I hate when people say octopuses.
Fine, octopi, I said. Etymologically we’re equally right on this.
Octopi sounds more erudite, he said. So you’re considering starting to knit again?
I did knit a little.
When?
Oh, a while ago, I said. For days and weeks after Nikolai’s death, I had spent much of my time in his room, knitting, unraveling, knitting, unraveling.
Which yarn did you use?
The canary-yellow.
What did you make?
Nothing.
What were you planning to knit before you made nothing?
I thought I would knit a scarf like you did, I said, but I kept messing up my counts and starting all over.
Nikolai had knitted several scarves. He had worn them in Tibet when he had visited there in the summer, and had planned to wear them this winter, too.
Sometimes you can revise as much as you want, but it still doesn’t come out right, he said. Which can make knitting worse than baking.
Your scarves all came out so nicely.
That’s because I’m good at counting, he said.
I helped, didn’t I? I said. He used to shout random numbers for me to remember. I still had series of numbers typed in my phone.
I don’t think you’re good enough to put those numbers to use, he said.
So should I put knitting on my list of New Year’s resolutions? I said.
I would say if you include both knitting and baking, that would be overly sentimental, he said. I expect more of you than that.
What about music? I asked.
Gosh, you’re too old to learn oboe!
Not oboe, I said. Piano.
So someday you can play Für Elise?
There was a time in my childhood when our doorbell and the doorbells of the two neighbors’ apartments all played Für Elise in the worst rendition, like old musical greeting cards running out of battery. I can’t stand that piece, I said.