Kinder Than Solitude. Yiyun Li

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СКАЧАТЬ she had heard tales about neighbors in other quadrangles who did not get along and sabotaged one another’s life: uprooting newly cultivated flowers, adding extra salt to a neighbor’s dish where a kitchen was shared, swiping a frozen chicken left on a windowsill overnight in the winter, making unpleasant faces and noises to frighten small children the moment their parents turned away. These stories baffled Moran, as she could not see what people would gain from such pettiness. In the last year of middle school some of the girls in Moran’s class had become cruel, trapping other girls—the pretty ones, the sensitive ones, and the lonely ones—with a net of mean-spirited rumors. If there had been any harm intended for her—and there must have been at times, though Moran had Boyang, best friends for as long as either remembered—she’d hardly ever considered herself in a vulnerable position. Even within a family, people could behave viciously toward one another; the evening newspapers offered abundant evidence with their tales of domestic conflicts and unspeakable crimes. Still, for Moran, the world was a good place, and she believed that it would be a good place for Ruyu now that she was their friend. Yet the ease with which Ruyu had raised the possibility of deceit and abandonment regarding Boyang’s upbringing dispirited Moran, as though she, unprepared, had failed an important test to win Ruyu’s respect.

      “Are you offended?” Ruyu asked.

      Might it be natural for someone like Ruyu to doubt everything? Right away Moran felt ashamed of her own unfriendly quietness. “No, not at all. It’s only that I’m not used to the way you ask questions,” she said.

      “How do other people ask questions?”

      At least their conversation was not taking place in the quadrangle. Anyone overhearing them would think Ruyu unnaturally childish for her age, and, even if no one would admit it, Moran knew that a connection would be readily made between Ruyu’s background and her lack of tact. With a maternal patience, Moran explained to Ruyu that normally one did not ask questions that would cause others discomfort; in fact, she continued, one did not start a conversation by asking questions but waited for the other person to talk about herself.

      “What if people won’t tell you anything about themselves?” Ruyu said.

      “When people are your friends, they will tell you things. And when you’re with friends, you can also tell them about yourself,” Moran said. She wished Ruyu could understand that neither she nor Boyang would press Ruyu about her past. The truth was, Moran had believed—even before Ruyu’s arrival—that no matter what kind of a past Ruyu had, once she lived among them, she would become less of an orphan.

      Ruyu watched a bug move on the water, its slender limbs leaving barely perceptible traces. For a brief moment she found the insect interesting, but when she turned her eyes away, she forgot about it. “Why is Sister Shaoai always angry?” she asked. “She hates me being here, doesn’t she?”

      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?”

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