Kinder Than Solitude (10 page)

“What’s the matter, Moran?”

Nothing was the matter, she reassured him. It had perhaps dawned on him over the years that she was no longer looking for a companion, though she could tell that he continued to hope otherwise, counting on the day she could no longer travel for his birthday because she had someone else’s feelings to consider. “I’m sorry I am nasty to you,” she said.

“You surely aren’t,” Josef said.

“Let’s not argue over this,” she said, though who else would she argue with? She told him to take care of himself, and she would see him soon. When the call was disconnected, she felt pressed in, as though his voice had left a crack through which loneliness flooded into her room. She remembered a story she had read when young, about a Dutch boy finding a hole in a dam, and putting his finger
into the hole to stop the ocean. In the story, the sea, which had once been a frolicking friend for the boy, murmured sinister seduction into his ear as the numbness from his finger expanded to his arm and then to his whole body. Why not, Moran said to the boy and to herself, let go of your heroic resistance and see what happens next?

But nothing happened. The silence, unlike the murmuring sea, did not engulf and drown her, and the woman in Modigliani’s painting watched on, merciful in her insouciance.

Moran put on her coat and then wound a scarf around her neck, and a minute later emerged into the street. Dusk was falling, the wind picking up, sweeping leaves along the sidewalk. Lamps lit up people’s windows, and here and there could be heard the opening and closing of a mailbox, the sound of a car engine coming to a full rest after the rumbling of a garage door, the buzzing of an erratic street lamp. The sound track of a suburban evening could be as deceivingly idyllic as that of a mountain village in Switzerland: the cars driven home were as eager to reach the end of their journey as were the sheep and cows trekking homeward; the barks here and there of dogs that had spent the day alone and now heard their owners’ approaching steps were as exuberant as those of the sheepdogs who, after a day of working, smelled warm fried food upon nearing the cottages. Behind each door, beyond the gazes of strangers curious or insensitive, another day’s happiness and unhappiness converged, adding or subtracting, modifying or concealing, leading or misleading those susceptible hearts to a place different, however imperceptibly, from yesterday’s.

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.