The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

He is a loving husband, but love does not often lead to perception. 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.

I DID NOT TELL FABIENNE then that I thought our happiness should be like the pigeons M. Devaux kept. They went away, they came back, and what happened in between was no one’s business. Our happiness should not be rooted and immobile.

How do I measure Fabienne’s presence 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?

People are oftentimes hideous or tedious. Sometimes they are both. So is the world. We would have no use for myths if the world were neither hideous nor tedious.

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.

When you are used to the sharpness of a knife, you can safely run your finger along the edge or press your palm onto it with just the right pressure. You can even keep the blade between your teeth without cutting your lips or tongue.

You and I are like day and night.” “What do you mean?” “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.”

“We can write to each other,” she said. “It’ll be like us putting our hearts in the post.”

People like Mrs. Townsend, who are obsessed with keeping a full account of their lives, are like artists who create optical illusions. A year is a year anywhere, a day is a day for everyone, and yet with a few tricks these archivists make others believe that they have packed something into their days, something precious, enviable, everlasting, that is not available to everyone.

To call a place by another place’s name was a stupid trick that people never tired of.

I was not the first trespasser in paradise, but unlike other violators, my punishment was not banishment. Rather, my sentence was to testify to its marvels.

OF ALL THE PEOPLE in the world, how many of them, looking into their own conscience, can say with unwavering certainty that they have never betrayed someone in their lives—ten, five, none? If so, why do we often make a fuss about betrayal? So many movies and books, so many broken marriages and torn friendships. The knives we stick into one another’s backs—perhaps those knives have their own wills. They take a grand tour, finding a hand here and a back there. We cannot blame the hands, just as we cannot sympathize with the backs. They are equally recruited for the knives’ entertainment. The world is never short of knives.

Through her hands I had heard her pain: there was something immense in her, bigger, sharper, more permanent, than the life we lived. She could neither find nor make a world to accommodate that immense being.

To the world we were two girls getting older, duller, closer to marriage, childbearing, and the rest of life’s toil.

The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love—all monumental, all inconsequential. The world had no place for two girls like us, though I was slow then, not knowing that Fabienne, slighted, thwarted, even fatally wounded, tried to make a fool of that world, on her and on my behalf. Revenge is a story that often begins with more promises than the ending can offer.