The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

A French bride adds luster to his life, but a French bride chasing goats down a street would be an embarrassment.

When I met him, he thought I was a young woman with no secrets and few stories from my childhood and girlhood. Perhaps it is not his fault that I cannot get pregnant. The secrets inside me have not left much space for a fetus to grow.

in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

Fabienne believed that we must always test the limits of our bodies. Not drinking

can shrug, you can laugh at its face, but you cannot do anything about it. You are the one to change your mind, or not to change—either way, a myth is a complete thing, and you, a nonmyth, are a nonentity. No one is born a myth. All babies, whether delivered in a barn or in a palace, need the same things to stay alive. Later, some people are smart enough to turn themselves into myths. Some people turn others into myths. Yet what is myth but a veil arranged to cover what is hideous or tedious? People are oftentimes hideous or tedious. Sometimes they are both. So is the world. We would have no use for myths if

people don’t often know that they are sad and bored.”

Growing up required patience, but even if we had all the patience in the world, where would that lead us?

What’s the difference between knowing a story and writing it out? But the questions I should have asked, which I did not know how when we were younger, were: Isn’t it enough just to know a story? Why take the time to write it out? I now have the answer, for her and for myself. The world has no use for who we are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?

lived through her. What was left behind was only my shell.

M. Devaux was still sickly looking, but now that we knew him better, he looked less ugly.

not mine, but other people’s. My books described how we lived then, though I wonder if they are still around in the world. Where do dead books go? A graveyard somewhere? A crematory?

My mind was not morbid. It has never been. You have to be obsessed with death to be morbid, just as you have to be obsessed with love to be romantic. I am

But who can shorten the distance between two people so they can say with confidence that they have reached each other? In that sense perhaps Fabienne was one of the few who worked miracles. She made me her. She made us into one person.

What Fabienne wanted to do, what she absolutely needed to do, was to make things happen.

Can a wall describe its own dimensions and texture, can a wall even sense its own existence,

if not for the ball that constantly bounces off of

The single lie—or the variations of the same lie—I had told in those years was to Fabienne: I made her believe that I was like a vacant house, my mind empty of any thoughts of my own, my heart void of feelings.

We forgive many people for what they cannot do for us, but not our mothers; we protect our mothers more than we protect others, too. Sometimes I think it may be just as well that I cannot have my own children: I can count more things I would not be able to do for them than what I could; and I would rather march through life without the futile protection from my children. People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.

being Fabienne’s true friend: to stay still in her shadow, to be as empty as the air around

Fabienne’s day was lived as though from one squall to another. In comparison I felt like an idle cloud hanging in the sky all day long, not loftily high, not heavily low.

Didn’t Fabienne already know that was exactly what I did the best? I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

person. If the press felt there was something unfathomable about me, that was because they could never tell that I was not one girl. It was Fabienne who was unfathomable. All I did was display that mystery to strangers, adding a dose of pleasantness and sweetness when necessary.

believe. Paris was not real to them. Neither was my fame. The world Fabienne and I made together: it was as real as our nonsense.

Few of us would make a fool of ourselves in pressing the animals to give us serious answers about their lives, but we do that all the time to other people.

No one knows how to want something that does not yet exist.

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.

The bond, defying knowledge and understanding, either is there, or is not; once a bond comes into existence, no child knows how to break from it until the setting is changed. It baffles me that often songs and poems are written about love at first sight: those who claim to experience the phenomena have preened themselves, ready for love. There is nothing extraordinary about that. Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.

These are good questions, but we may as well ask a plane tree, Why can’t you keep your leaves in winter? or ask a wasp, Why weren’t you born more useful, like a honeybee?

In a minefield a blind person is not more likely to be killed than a person who can see.”

the truth is, some people can pretend so well that they cannot, in the end, tell the difference between pretending and being.

There is not that much of a difference between adapting and pretending.

“You speak like an adult,” Fabienne said. “It makes your skin feel leathery.”

A letter, written to remind the recipient of the sender, should arrive while the sender is at a distance. Words

in a letter, unlike words said, do not vanish

pretty. I knew she did not care what he thought of her, but it occurred to me that she had made the right decision not to put her name on the book cover. She would not have been able to do half as well as I had in Paris.

“Is there an hour that is neither day nor night?” she said. “No. So you see, you and I together, we cover all the time, we have everything between us.”

A French peasant girl going to an English finishing school as a child prodigy. That would make a good story, newsworthy and rich with potential.”

People like Mrs. Townsend, who are obsessed with keeping a full account of their lives, are like artists who

You see, an educator works like a sculptor. Whatever material comes my way, I’ll ensure that something is made out of it.

Yet in retrospect, with the present to vindicate the past, everyone can claim the illusory status of being a seer.

Then I turned him into an acrobat who moved around on a pair of stilts so he did not have to use a ladder when he was working in the orchard. He was good at keeping his balance, as the eggs never rolled out of the nest. He was kind to the mother bird who roosted on top of his head, and he slept sitting up in a chair when the mother was hatching the eggs. And then, when the chicks pecked out of their eggs, he would feed them when the mother bird had not returned in time for their hungry mouths. In this way he made friends with the chicks, and even when they were old enough to fly away, they never left,

They were heard—felt—more often than seen, like one’s own stomach. For

“I can never explain how an idea occurs. Some of our hens are good layers, but they cannot explain how they lay the eggs.”

“Yes, Kazumi,” I said, trying to look grave. Mrs. Townsend could not be helped if she did not know that the eggs from different hens did not look the same.

Someday, I thought, a disaster would befall them, and one of them would have to eat the other so as not to starve.

Jacques was better than any boy I had known: he had all the qualities of Fabienne, and he loved me more than Fabienne did.

But I knew even then that Fabienne asked my parents for the rabbit not because she missed me, but because she was hungry.

Can a zoo animal feel happier being observed in a cage than being allowed to roam among other animals in the forest?