Kinder Than Solitude

Moran looked agonized. “No, she doesn’t. She’s just upset at the moment.”

Ruyu looked back at the water, but the bug was gone. She did not know the name of the insect; in fact, she had never spent much time looking at any bug, bird, or tree. Her grandaunts lived strictly indoors and only left the apartment when necessary; their home, pristinely kept, did not participate in the holidays with decorations of any kind, or in the seasons with plants on the windowsills; thick curtains, always drawn, kept the weather at a distance.

When Ruyu did not question further, Moran felt pained. She wished she could explain better to Ruyu Shaoai’s situation: she had been active in the democratic protest early in the summer and was waiting for her verdict, which she’d learn once school started. She hadn’t been a leader in the protest but would nevertheless face disciplinary action from the university; nobody knew whether this would be a general or a severe “political warning,” a suspension of her university study, or, worse, expulsion. Moran’s parents, when they talked about Shaoai, worried that her dismissiveness about her future would not help her; they did not say much, but Moran knew that they, and other neighbors too, wished Shaoai would recant the statement she had posted on the school bulletin board the day after the massacre, calling the government a breeding farm of fascists. But these things, Moran’s parents had warned her, were not to be discussed outside their house.

Moran turned around instinctively, but apart from a few pedestrians farther off on the sidewalk, she did not see any suspicious loiterers eavesdropping on them. “I know Sister Shaoai looks unfriendly sometimes,” she said. “But trust me, she is a good person.”

People asked her to trust them all the time, Ruyu thought, as though it never occurred to them that by so pleading, they had already proved themselves untrustworthy. Her grandaunts had never asked her to trust them, and, unfamiliar with the concept, she had once been deceived by the use of the phrase: a girl in first grade had often begged to be taken to her apartment; her grandaunts did not like visitors, Ruyu had explained, but the girl had pleaded to be trusted and promised not to tell a soul about the visit. After a while Ruyu had acquiesced, yet the day after the visit everyone in the class seemed to have learned something about her home, and even a couple of teachers came to ask her about her grandaunts’ books. But to have been betrayed by someone unworthy was less humiliating than having perturbed her grandaunts. They had waited for a few days before saying, as though making a passing comment, that they did not much care for the friend Ruyu had brought home. After that Ruyu had never allowed herself to be befriended by anyone.

“How can you be certain that Sister Shaoai is a good person?” Ruyu said.

Moran watched the boys splashing in the lake. It agonized her that she could not make Ruyu see the real Shaoai: when Moran and Boyang had been the boys’ age, Shaoai had been the one to take them to the lake, throwing them into deeper water to make them paddle, laughing at them when they swallowed water, yet all the time she had been within an arm’s reach. Even if Shaoai was not a nurturing kind of person, both Moran and Boyang knew her to be a reliable friend. “Have you heard the saying that the longer a road is, the more one is to learn about a horse’s stamina; the more time passes, the better one gets to see another person’s heart?” Moran said. “I think by and by you will know Sister Shaoai better.”

Ruyu smiled. Why would I, the thin smile said, want to know Shaoai better? Moran’s face turned red: the wordless dismissal, not of herself but of someone she respected and admired, made her more diffident in front of Ruyu than ever.

“When are we going back?” Ruyu said, indicating the setting sun.

Moran was disappointed with herself. She knew Ruyu did not trust her. Why should she? Moran thought as she pedaled her bicycle through an alley, so used to Ruyu’s weight on the rear rack that for a moment she forgot that it was her usual habit to chatter on while pedaling Ruyu around. Moran did not like unfinished conversations; for her, life was a series of ideal moments, all comprehensible, sometimes with small difficulties but always with a larger dose of joy. She did not like finding herself in a murky situation which she could not explain to another person, yet there was the loyalty toward Shaoai, whose trouble Moran had been told to keep to herself. If she stopped pedaling and better clarified Shaoai’s anger, would Ruyu understand it?

5

When Moran’s phone rang early Saturday morning, she dreaded taking the call, and listened while the answering machine clicked on. No message was left, and a minute later, the phone rang again. It was not yet six o’clock, too early for anything but calamity. Moran picked up the call and heard both her parents’ voices on the other end, and for a moment she could not concentrate while her mother talked about trivialities. “And you,” her father said when her mother seemed to have run out of small talk. “How are you?”

“Good.”

“Your voice sounds hoarse,” her mother said. “Did you catch a cold?”

“Only dry,” Moran said. “I was sleeping.”

“Listen,” her father said, and Moran felt a twinge of panic, as he was one who preferred listening to being listened to. “We’re sorry to be calling so early. But we just heard that Shaoai passed away ten days ago.”

Moran asked her parents to hold on for a second, and closed the bedroom door. She lived alone in a rental, and she was used to—and she was certain her house was also used to her—carrying out a life filled with everyday noises but not human conversations. Beyond the closed door was the uncluttered space where, other than a few pieces of impersonal furniture from IKEA, a small collection of objects kept her company: a single silver vase, to which she often forgot to offer flowers; a pair of metal bookends shaped like an old man in a top hat and billowing raincoat, bending low on his cane; a stack of handmade paper, thick, sepia-toned, too beautiful to write on; and a reproduction of a Modigliani painting—a portrait of a certain Mme. Zborowska, whose eyes, under heavy, sleepy lids, looked almost blind in their pupil-less darkness. None of these objects had come into Moran’s life with specific meanings; she had picked them up here and there while traveling, and had allowed herself to form an attachment to them because they were only souvenirs of places that did not belong to her, which she would never see again. In return, by quietly closing the door, she protected these things she loved from the intrusion of an early morning phone call. Later she would not once think of them as burdened witnesses of a death from a distant past.

“We thought you should know right away,” her father said.

It was not an unexpected death, she wanted to tell her parents; a relief for all, she wanted to assure them, but the words would be clichés her parents and their old neighbors would have already exchanged. Her parents had called to hear different words, and yet Moran had only silence to offer.

“We thought of paying a visit of condolence,” her mother said. “But what can we say to Shaoai’s mother? What would you say to her?”

Moran flinched. Unlike her father, who rarely confronted her, her mother was able to turn a simple narrative into a question that demanded an answer. “I would think, for everybody’s good, it’s wise not to visit,” Moran said, being careful with her words so that she would not open the door to more questioning.

“But that makes us coldhearted. Imagine someone in her position.”

It was hard enough for her mother to have an absentee daughter; to add, on top of that, another mother’s pain of losing a daughter who’d been more than half dead the past twenty-one years? “Don’t imagine,” Moran said.

“But how can one stop thinking about these things? I understand that I’m more fortunate than Shaoai’s mother, but what if you hadn’t got involved in the case in the first place? You would have been living in Beijing, and at least our family would have stayed together. I know you think of me as selfish, but do you see my point?”

“No, I don’t think of you as selfish.”

“I hope you understand that a mother has to be selfish.”

Ever so expectedly, the phone line, cracking just a little, spoke of her mother’s tears and her father’s reticence. They were in separate rooms, she knew, holding two receivers, because it was easier for them not to see each other’s eyes when they were talking to her. “I don’t suppose we should discuss these things now,” Moran said. “See, it upsets you.”

“Why shouldn’t I be upset? Shaoai’s mother at least knows who killed her daughter, but we’ve never known what took our daughter away from us.”

“Nobody knows what happened to Shaoai,” Moran said.

“But it was Ruyu. It had to be her. It could only be her. Am I wrong?”

Her parents must have often wondered about this between themselves, but they had never once asked Moran. Why ask now, when silence, already in place, should be left untouched; even death does not suffice as a pretext to disturb the past. “Nobody knows what happened,” Moran said again.

“But you did know. You covered it up for her, didn’t you?”

Moran’s father coughed. “You understand, Moran, that your mother is asking not because we want to blame you,” he said. “Nobody can go back and change anything, but your mother and I, you see—it’s hard for us when things don’t make sense.”

Where does one begin, Moran thought, to make sense of anything? The desire for clarity, the desire not to live in blindness—these desires are not far from the desire to deceive: one has to be like a sushi chef, cutting, trimming, slicing, until one’s life—or one’s memory of that life—is transformed into presentable bites. “Let’s change the topic, shall we?” she said. “I was wondering what you’d think of going to Scandinavia for a holiday next summer. I heard it’s beautiful there in June.”

“We’re tired of playing tourist,” Moran’s mother said. “We’re old now. Shaoai is dead. Someday we will die, too. Is it not time for you to come home and see us?”

Not wanting to grant her parents even the vaguest hope, Moran said that she was not ready to talk about that. She promised that she would call again in a week, knowing that by then, her father would have convinced her mother to be more strategic and not to pressure her. Moran ended the phone call before her parents could protest. They loved her more than she loved them; for that reason, she would always win an argument at the end of the day.

Her parents’ only child, Moran had not been back to Beijing since she had left for America sixteen years earlier. For the first six years, when she had been studying for a PhD in chemistry, she had not seen her parents once, citing the hassle for visa application and a shortage of traveling funds as the reasons for her absence. During that period a marriage, which had both distressed and embarrassed her parents, had taken place and then ended, yet that they had not crossed paths with her married life seemed to make it less real to them; at least that was Moran’s hope. To this day, she suspected that they had not told anyone in Beijing about her failed marriage, and they were relieved to have not met Josef, who was a year older than her mother.

After the divorce, Moran moved away from the midwestern town where she and Josef had been living, and, when she could afford it, she started paying for her parents to travel and meet her elsewhere—for a bus tour through central and western Europe, on which she dutifully accompanied them, taking their pictures with grand arches and ancient relics in the background, making sure she herself was not in any of the photos; for two weeks in Cape Cod, where they were an odd family on the beach and in the ice cream shops—she was too old to be a child vacationing with her parents, and they, having little to cling to in an unfamiliar town, marked their days by chatting with people their age who pushed baby strollers or built sandcastles with their grandchildren. There and elsewhere, Moran’s parents greeted grandparents warmly, their English allowing them just enough vocabulary to express their admiration of other people’s good fortune.

Moran took comfort in believing that, for what she had deprived her parents of, she had offered other things in return: Thailand, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Sydney, the Maldives, foreign places that crowded their photo albums with natural and manmade beauty. Over the years they had accepted that they would never be invited to see Moran’s everyday life in America, but they had not given up hope that one day she would return to Beijing, however short the visit might be. Always Moran turned a deaf ear toward the mention of her hometown. Places do not die or vanish, yet one can obliterate their existence, just as one can a lover from an ill-fated affair. For Moran, this was not a drastic action: one needs only to live coherently, to be one’s exact self from one day to the next, to make such a place, such a person, recede.

It took a long while after the phone call before she opened Boyang’s email. The message was brief, giving the cause of death and the date of the cremation, which had happened six days earlier. The paucity of details felt accusatory—though what right did she have to hope for more, when she herself had never deviated from the coldness of silence? Once a year, Moran wired two thousand dollars to Boyang’s account, her contribution to Shaoai’s caretaking, but she did not acknowledge his monthly emails. The bare bones of his life—his successful career as a businessman in various fields, the latest in real estate development, his unsuccessful marriage—she had learned from her parents, though her quietness in response to any news regarding him must have led them to a conclusion about her disinterestedness. They had not mentioned him when they had called about Shaoai’s death.

The phone rang again. Moran hesitated and then picked it up. “Just one more thing,” her mother said. “I know things are harder for you than for us. At least your father and I have each other. I understand you don’t want us to interfere with your life, but wouldn’t you agree that it’s time to think about marriage again? But don’t misunderstand me. I am not pressuring you. All I am saying is—no doubt you think this is a cliché—but maybe you should stop living in the past? Of course we respect your every decision, but we’d be happier if you found someone new in your life.”

It was odd that her parents, against all evidence, thought of her as living in the past, though Moran did not argue, and promised to consider their viewpoint. She wondered which past—and which set of people associated with said past—her parents considered the enemy of her happiness: her life in Beijing or her marriage to Josef? Her parents should have known by now that her problem, rather than living in the past, was not allowing the past to live on. Any moment that slipped away from the present became a dead moment; and people, unsuspicious, over and over again became the casualties of her compulsive purging of the past.

Moran lived the most solitary and contented life she believed possible for herself. She worked for a pharmaceutical company in Massachusetts, where she occupied a small testing room alone and operated an instrument that measured the viscosity of various health and hygiene products for quality control. Despite her extensive research background in chemistry, her work did not require much skill beyond a tolerance for tedium. Yet it provided her what she needed: a stable livelihood, and a reason to be in America. What else could she ask for? She had no children, and her concerns, when she read about climate change or carcinogens found in food or water, were not concrete, because she did not feel eligible to worry about the future of mankind. She did not have close friends, but remained friendly enough with neighbors and colleagues so as not to be considered an eccentric spinster. Though her life lacked the poignancy of great happiness and acute pain, she believed she had found, in their places, the blessing of solitude. She took a long and brisk walk every morning, rain or shine, and again after work; twice a week she volunteered at a local animal shelter, and other evenings she spent in the library, reading old novels that were rarely touched by others. Her job was soothing in a way she imagined most people’s work was not—she liked the samples of manmade colors and fragrances, the unchangingness of the protocols, the predictability of the outcomes. When there were idle moments at work, she daydreamed about places and times other than her own, in which strangers lived as vividly as she would allow them: a girl named Grazia, who had died from tuberculosis at fifteen and was buried in a Swiss mountain town, forgotten by all but her poor French governess; an aging cobbler bending over pieces of leather and dull nails in a Parisian shop, his eyesight deteriorating by the day, his heart skipping a beat or two; a young shepherd in Bavaria caught in listless pining for his next-door neighbor, a girl three years older and already engaged to the village butcher. Moran took the precaution of looking busy, in case someone peeked into the testing room, though she suspected that in her colleagues’ eyes, she, like the instrument she managed, was a well-tuned machine—a machine that, once trusted, could easily be forgotten. She did not hold this against her colleagues, most of them having stoically, if not happily, settled down to a suburban life. If they felt any superiority over Moran, she could not sense it, though this was likely a result of the safe distance she kept herself from them; nor did she feel any advantage over the others—her colleagues, she believed, enjoyed or weathered their marriages, parenthoods, promotions, and holidays as she herself weathered solitude. One would be foolish to consider oneself better, or even different, merely because one could claim something others could not. The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude—both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice—make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells.

Moran wished now to return to her Saturday routine, which had been disturbed by her parents’ calls and Boyang’s email, but the news of a death, any death, was enough to prove the flimsiness of a calm life. The last time Moran had seen Shaoai was before her departure for America; by then, Shaoai had already lost much of her sight and her hair, her sinewy body taking on a dangerous plumpness, her mind no longer lucid behind her clouded eyes. What would twenty-one more years have done to that prisoner in her own body, Moran wondered, but did not force herself to answer. It was easier to imagine Grazia lying in a cabin and looking at the snowcapped mountains: a pitcher stood on her bedside table, the morning sunlight trapped in the still clearness of the water; an unfinished embroidery sampler of a Goethe poem lay next to her, reminding Grazia of the day when she, at five, had started to stitch with pink and white threads chunky alphabets.

When Moran had first arrived in America, people from local churches had paid her visits. She had replied, not as a mere excuse, though it must have seemed a glib one, that she did not have the imagination to become a believer. She knew now it was not imagination she lacked. The cobbler in Paris had lost his only son in a street battle; he did not know whom to blame, fate or revolution, and his confused tears stung Moran’s heart more than her own parents’ sighs. The woman in Bavaria had married without regret, unaware of her young neighbor’s desolation. She’d died when she gave birth to a baby girl, and, some days, when Moran felt an icy animosity toward herself, she would let the young shepherd steal the baby girl and drown her and himself; other days, guilty about the violence she’d carelessly inflicted upon unsuspicious souls—for what reason but to make herself feel the pains that she did not allow in her life?—Moran would let the baby grow up, becoming more precious in the eyes of the brokenhearted man next door than she was to herself and the rest of the world.

Suppose one could allow oneself to be closer to the real world than to that of one’s imagination. Suppose she had had someone next to her at the moment her parents called, so that Shaoai’s death could be discussed. Right away Moran banged that door closed. To be caught at hoping—even if it was just by herself, but it could only be by herself—was like being caught once when she had timidly played a simple tune on a piano at a colleague’s party. A child, not yet four, not old enough for piano lessons as her older siblings were, came quietly into the room, where Moran had found a moment away from the guests. Hello, Moran said, and the girl studied her with a proprietress’ pity and annoyance. What right, her eyes seemed to be saying, do you have to touch the piano? Moran blushed; the girl pushed her aside and banged the keys with both hands, and despite the violent disharmony, the girl seemed to be satisfied by her performance. This, she seemed to be showing Moran, was how you played an instrument.

It was the girl whom Moran remembered now as she took her usual route to the neighborhood park, a grove that had not much to offer except an outdated playground with a metal skeleton of a train engine and a few squeaky swings, all rusty. Not everyone had the right to music, the girl’s eyes said, just as not everyone had the right to claim beauty, hope, and happiness.

An old woman, tightly bundled in an oversized coat and a scarf, waited patiently for her black poodle, clad in a yellow vest, to finish investigating a rock. Moran muttered a greeting and was about to pass the pair when the old woman raised her small face. “Tell you what, don’t ever forget the date of your last period.”

Moran nodded. When people talked to her, she always looked attentive, as though recognizing the significance of their words.

“Every time I go to the doctor’s they ask that question,” the old woman said. “Like it matters at my age. If I have one piece of advice to give, go home and write it down somewhere you can find easily.”

Moran thanked the old woman and walked on. Easily she could see herself lingering, listening to the woman retell the story of her long wait at the doctor’s, or at the vet’s office, or of a recent visit from her grandchildren, but such conversations with strangers had taken place enough times, in grocery stores and dry cleaners and hair salons and airports, that sometimes Moran wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details. Sympathy and admiration and surprise she dutifully yet insufficiently expressed, and afterward the others moved on, forgetting her face the moment she was out of sight, or else they would not have seen her in the first place: she was one of those strangers people needed once in a while to make their lives less empty.

When she returned, there was a message from Josef on her answering machine. Odd that more than one person had called her today. She waited until the evening to call back. She wanted him to think that she had things to do on a Saturday.

When Josef picked up the phone, his voice was frail. Had Rachel talked with her, he asked, and Moran felt her heart sink. Rachel was the youngest of the four children of Josef and Alena; two years earlier, when Josef had retired from his job as a librarian at a local community college, he had sold the house and bought a condo a few blocks from Rachel and her husband, as they were about to have their third child. Three years younger than Moran, Rachel had been the only one of Josef’s children to openly oppose her father’s marriage to Moran.

“Is there something Rachel needs to tell me?” Moran asked. She remembered her panic when her parents had called earlier. She had dreaded hearing that Josef was dead.

Moran had always known that someday a phone call would come, worst if from one of Josef’s children. Still, hearing it from Josef himself—about his multiple myelomas, new since they had last seen each other in June—did not make the message any less harsh. For a moment she was struck by the odd sensation that he was already gone; their conversation, a memory for the future, sounded unreal, Josef’s tone apologetic, as though he had erred and unwisely contracted cancer.