Kinder Than Solitude

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.

When Ruyu remained quiet Aunt sighed. “You’re still a child. You shouldn’t spend so much time ruminating.”

Ruyu moved over so Aunt could place the basin on the chair. “I don’t mind sitting with Grandpa.”

“Your grandaunts did not send you here to nanny an invalid,” Aunt said.

Ruyu, rather than a poor relation imposed on Aunt and Uncle, was a paid guest. Before she had left, her grandaunts had explained that they would be paying a hundred yuan a month for her upkeep, more than either one of the couple earned. That hosting Ruyu was a substantial financial gain for the family was not directly stated, though she could see that it was what her grandaunts wanted her to understand. “I’m not really doing anything for Grandpa,” Ruyu said. “I’m only sitting here.”

“A young person should be with her friends,” Aunt said. “Why don’t you find Boyang or Moran and go out for a bike ride?”

Ruyu did not know how to ride a bike — nobody, not even the nosiest neighbors back at home, would expect her grandaunts to run after a youth barely balanced on a bike, ready to catch her when she skidded and fell. This deficiency seemed to have perplexed Moran and Boyang at first — they were the real children of this city, growing up on bicycles as the children of Mongolian herdsmen were raised on horseback. For them, the buses and trolleys and subways were for the very old and very young, and for the unfortunate ones who, for whatever reason, were deprived of the freedom of a bike.

Ruyu had spent much of her time with Boyang and Moran in the past weeks. Knowing the city by heart, they took Ruyu on the rear racks of their bikes in turn, riding through side streets and alleyways so that they would not be caught by the traffic police — two people on one bike was illegal. When they could not avoid a stretch of thoroughfare or boulevard, the two of them would push their bikes and walk beside Ruyu, pointing out old seamstresses’ shops and hundred-year-old butcheries and bakeries along the road.

Ruyu did not mind being left alone, though others — Boyang and Moran, and the neighbors — seemed to find her ease with aloneness unnerving. To Aunt, any time Ruyu spent by herself bore an accusation of sorts. The desperateness of the world to make her less of herself made her look at it askance. Why, she sometimes thought, are people allowed to be so stupid?

When Ruyu did not reply, Aunt said that it was unfair of her to think so, but compared with other kids her age, Ruyu had spent too much time with old people. But Boyang lived with his grandmother, Ruyu said, and Aunt said that it was different with him, meaning, Ruyu guessed, that Boyang had his parents. The fact that Ruyu came from parents unknown to her was on the mind of everyone who knew her story, because, to the rest of the world, a child had to be born to a pair of parents. A child could not sprout like a small plant from a crack in the road; but Ruyu wanted the world to believe that she was rather like that — a life dropped in the crack between her two grandaunts. That this was the most natural thing that had occurred to the three of them would never be understood by a person like Aunt.

Ruyu turned to the old man, who had half closed his eyes out of boredom or exhaustion. She wondered if he understood that all the people around him but herself would be relieved, if not happy, when he died; she might be the only person to feel a sense of loss, though she did not know him at all.

Someone told a joke in the courtyard and laughter erupted, accompanied by clapping hands that hunted bloodthirsty mosquitoes in midair. In the last light of the day, early-rising bats darted around, their high-pitched screeches, both faint and shrill, unlike any other noise made by a living creature. Ruyu had never seen bats before, and considered these strange animals, with their blind and frantic flights at dusk, one thing she loved about Beijing. Even inside Grandpa’s small cube, one could occasionally catch a glimpse of a bat or two changing directions the moment when they were about to bump into the window, so abruptly yet so confidently, never making a mistake.

Aunt replaced an old coil of incense with a new one and lit it, the red tip the only live light in the room. Neither she nor Ruyu moved to turn on the light, and the old man’s gaunt face became less harsh in the falling dusk.

“I’ve never really asked you,” Aunt said after a moment, her voice dry, as if she were not certain of her right to have broken the silence. “Your grandaunts, how are they doing?”

“Good.”

“Have you written them?”

When Ruyu had first arrived, Aunt had pointed out the envelopes and stamps in the drawer of Ruyu’s new desk, though apart from a telegram she had sent her grandaunts about her safe arrival, she had not sent a letter: it was not expected of her. She did not want to admit any absence of communication now, so she only nodded vaguely, wondering if Aunt or Shaoai would monitor the numbers of stamps and envelopes in her drawer. Did she get a letter of reply from them, Aunt asked, and added that they — Uncle and Aunt — had written but had not heard from Ruyu’s grandaunts.

Ruyu said that she had not received a letter from her grandaunts, either, and found it annoying that Aunt seemed more disappointed by the silence from the province on Ruyu’s behalf than on her own. “They always know what they are doing. I’m sure they trust that you’re settling down well,” Aunt said. “Or the letter could’ve been held up somewhere. You never know.”

“It’s all right,” Ruyu said.

“Is there a phone stand near where they live? Will the people at the phone stand take messages, or will they be able to get your grandaunts for you? I can ask Uncle to take you to the post office to make a long distance call to them.”

“I don’t think they like to be phoned,” Ruyu said. They would not like to be written to, either. At the entrance of their apartment building, letters and postcards and newspapers were twice a day jammed into a wooden box painted green. The building’s residents, other than Ruyu and her grandaunts, would stop and flip through the mail, reading headlines or stealing a glance at other people’s postcards, which, drab colored and stamped with the green emblem of the post office, cost less to send than letters, and were preferred when privacy was not a concern. Once, in first grade, Ruyu had felt an urge, with her newly gained reading skills, to peek into the box. The letter on top of the pile was for a family on the third floor, but apart from that, she saw little. The younger of her grandaunts, who was walking up the stairs in front of her, stopped and studied her. There was no reproach in the old woman’s eyes, nor was anything said, but right away Ruyu understood that what she had done out of pointless curiosity was beneath what her grandaunts had raised her to be. “It’s really all right,” she said now. “My grandaunts will write if they need to.”

Aunt sighed and said certainly Ruyu knew them better. There was a tone of defeat in her voice, though Ruyu had inherited her grandaunts’ belief that people, especially the feebleminded, liked to see themselves entangled in minor pains and useless bewilderments; she had not the words to appease Aunt’s worry.

The old man, all the while breathing shallowly in the semidarkness, lost his patience. A deep grumbling threatened to become a full protest. Aunt switched on the ten-watt fluorescent tube dangling from the ceiling on two metal chains; the light made the bare room, its occupant, and its two visitors look ghastly pale. With the back of her hand, Aunt tested the old man’s bathwater, no doubt colder than lukewarm — but what difference would it make if it was not the perfect temperature? “Now you go and find your friends,” Aunt said. “Let me clean Grandpa before he gets irritated with me.”

Ruyu looked into the old man’s eyes once more before taking her leave, seeking an understanding she imagined to be there. She believed that he, like Ruyu herself, pitied Aunt, whose conversations with Uncle were often one-sided, with him nodding or mumbling agreement but never offering much in return. When Aunt talked to her daughter, Shaoai replied in a most unpleasant manner — if she replied at all — though Aunt seemed more resigned than offended by Shaoai’s sullenness. Why speak at all, Ruyu thought, when the people you were speaking with were either unfeeling walls or all-encompassing voids?

“Sometimes you wonder,” Aunt said to Grandpa when she heard the house door close behind Ruyu, “how that girl would’ve fared if her parents had left her at an orphanage instead.”

The old man listened. Living now with words locked away inside him, he liked to listen to his daughter-in-law talk. She knew it because on the days when she was not in the mood for talking, he would become agitated. Once upon a time he had not concealed his contempt for her chattiness, even though he’d been the talkative one in his own marriage. Nobody’s going to sell you off as a mute, he had often said to her, and had more than once told the neighbors that his son had married a woman afflicted with the talking consumption. But his own quiet, uncomplaining wife had long since died, his three married daughters were the caretakers of their own in-laws, and his son, who had inherited his mother’s reticence, was a poor companion: all he would do was clean and feed his father in silence. Sometimes Aunt felt vindictively joyful that she had not let her father-in-law shut her up. “I know, I know,” she said to him now. “It’s pointless to think that way. But still, wouldn’t you want to see a child like her be just a bit more normal?”

The old man made some noises in his throat, disagreeing.

“Of course you like her that way. What other child would have the patience to sit here with you?” Aunt stripped the old man of his undershirt and started to wipe his upper body, taking caution not to rub too hard on the half-dead skin or hurt the protruding bones underneath. Despite years of being a target for his mockery, she was fond of him, feeling a kinship that she had not felt toward her mother-in-law: quiet people kept her both in awe and perplexed. “And of course her grandaunts like her that way, too. They don’t bother to worry what she’ll be like when she goes out in the world because they won’t be around to see it. Just like you spoiled Shaoai, and now it’s me who’s to suffer the consequence.”

The old man closed his eyes, but Aunt knew he was listening.

“Why, you don’t want to hear it? All the same, where do you think Shaoai got the idea that she was free not to follow the rules? You didn’t teach your own children that, did you? You raised your daughters to be obedient,” Aunt said. She wondered if she, too, would one day instill some mischievous thoughts in her grandchild, so that together they could be conspirators against the child’s parents, but at once she chased away that fate-taunting thought like an unwelcome gnat. “Don’t think I’m chastising you for no reason. Do you remember the last time Shaoai came in to sit with you, to talk to you? For all I know, you and I and even her father don’t exist for her. Being a good daughter and granddaughter? Fulfilling her filial duties? What rotten ideas for her.”

The old man refused to open his eyes. Aunt took off his pants and underpants, and cleaned him gently around his crotch while holding her breath. When she finished, she told the old man that she would now turn him around. He did not make a sound, and she saw wet lines left by tears traveling from the corners of his eyes to both temples. Her heart softened a little, but right away a bleakness snuck in. She shushed him; it did no one any good to be sentimental. “Don’t you dare think too much of it. We must have done something awful to Shaoai in our last lives, so she’s here to make us suffer. Who knows? You might have done that girl Ruyu a favor in your last life for her to care about you,” Aunt said. “She must have done some good deed in her last life, so she has her grandaunts to see about her future rather than being left in an orphanage.”

But what kind of future would it be, Aunt wondered, shaking her head while putting an arm under the legs of the old man, who seemed to get lighter each day. She wished she had someone to talk to besides her husband and neighbors about Ruyu’s grandaunts, but to them the two women were only her distant cousins. That she had once been arranged to become their sister-in-law she had not told anyone.

The two sisters had been born to the third concubine of a successful silk merchant. Their mother had died while giving birth to their younger brother, and the two girls, aged twelve and ten then, had more or less raised the boy, fighting, without their mother’s shelter, to maintain as much of their status as they could within the large family, where four other wives and fifteen siblings vied for attention and wealth. As teenagers, they had converted to Catholicism, and Aunt had suspected that the Church, because of its connection to the West and with the power beyond the local government, had factored beneficially in their battle for themselves within the family. When their brother reached age fifteen, the two sisters gained independence and moved back with their brother to the home village of their mother. How they had managed to do this no one knew for sure, but when they had moved back — two spinsters with money but no prospect of marrying, and a boy handsome and educated yet too sophisticated for country life — the villagers treated them with suspicion and awe. Soon, the boy was enrolled as a cadet in a military academy in the capital, but before he left, the two sisters arranged an engagement between the boy and a cousin twice removed.

Sometimes Aunt wondered why she, among her sisters and cousins, had been chosen. At nine, she had not been the prettiest, nor the most gifted at needlework. Relocating, with a small bag of clothes and a pillow, to the sisters’ house across the village had not been too difficult a change — she was to celebrate her good fortune, her parents had explained to her. From the departure of a few playmates who had been sent to other villages as child brides, she knew things could have been worse. Living with strangers one did not understand could be a harsh experience for some children, but she had been known as the most cheerful and thick-skinned of her peers. She had never felt unhappy with her new guardians. Strict as they had been with her, they had also been fair, and had taught her to read, which had made everything possible when she had later decided to go to nursing school.

“The foolish are assigned the good fortune of the fools, the weak, the good fortunes of the weaklings,” Aunt said now, thinking of her own mysterious lot. These must be nonsensical words to the old man, but it comforted her to quote other people’s wisdom when she herself was perplexed. Her engagement to the young man had lasted five years, during which time she had seen him only twice when he had been on leave from the academy: shortly after graduating, he, serving as a cannoneer, had to flee to Taiwan when his side lost the civil war.

Compared to his sisters’ loss, hers had been negligible, even though some older villagers had shaken their heads at her fate, widowed before wedded. When it became obvious that the separation across the Strait could be lifelong, the sisters told her that it was pointless for her to stay with them. Not wanting to cling to them, yet not being able to stop thinking of herself as part of their life, she had moved on but had never entirely forgotten them as they had expected her to. Once a year she wrote to them; after her marriage and later Shaoai’s birth, she’d enclosed a picture of her family each year. They wrote back to her too, courteous letters bearing their goodwill toward her and her family and dutifully recounting changes in their lives — their taking up residence in a provincial city and joining a neighborhood workshop to produce embroidered silk scarves so they could be part of the working class, their retirement, and, a year later, their discovering a baby left at their door. The years she had lived with the sisters, she serving them partly as a handmaid, they in turn educating her, had never been brought up in the letters, the man who had connected her to them left unmentioned. Once, during the sixth year of the Cultural Revolution, a provincial official, one of those traveling investigators with menacing power, came to the clinic and asked to talk to Aunt. Had she heard anything about the women’s brother, who had fled China, he wanted to know, indicating that it was a serious matter, with some Taiwanese or American spies involved. Aunt had denied any knowledge; her lie to the stranger had hurt her conscience less than her decision not to speak of the stranger’s visit with her in-laws and her husband: a minor secret too late to be revealed could expand its roots. For a while Aunt had difficulty sleeping: the two sisters and her childhood spent with them taking up too much space in her heart, until she started to take sleeping pills to drive out old memories.

How the two women managed to pull through the many revolutions unscathed Aunt did not know — though who could be certain that they were unscathed? In their letters they did not mention any hardship, and after a while, when they continued to write to her once a year, she was happy that they had not been thrown into a prison somewhere and left to die. Perhaps their god had truly ensured their safety in a hostile world. When she had lived with the sisters, they, no longer having a church to attend in the village, had been carrying out their own rituals of worship; twice a year they traveled to meet their old priest, though his god certainly had not looked after him well, as he had been executed right around ’49 as a counterrevolutionary by the new, Communist government. What the sisters had taught Aunt about their faith had been partially absorbed as a superstition by her, so she would never say no, in her heart, to the possibility of a deity from above. Imagine, she could have been converted by them, had her fiancé not fled China; imagine, on top of being the wife of a Nationalist officer, she could have been a counterrevolutionary by being a religious person!

There was little sense in such brooding. Still, buttoning the old man’s shirt and tucking him under the blanket, Aunt wished she could tell him that it was his good fortune that she was taking care of him now, that she would be the one to see him off when it was his time to exit this world. She could have been married off to a young Nationalist officer and left the country with him; her siblings and cousins would have been questioned during the Cultural Revolution, and they would have thought it their misfortune to have a sister who was an enemy of the country. I could’ve been another person, she thought of saying to the old man, but he had already been upset once this evening. She patted his cheek and told him to rest before she came back with the evening meal.