The Book of Goose

by Yiyun Li

His French is not as good as he thinks, but that has not stopped him from speaking the language to me in our most intimate moments. I always speak English to the people in my American life. I speak English to my chickens and geese.

It may be insensitive of them to call a childless woman Mother Goose, but I am far from being a sensitive or sentimental woman.

how did he decide which prayer he should honor?

Fabienne was, is, and will always be twenty-seven. 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?

Because facts do not make myths. And I was made into a minor myth by that visit. If I told people that I was once a myth, nobody would believe me. But is it a myth’s job to make you believe in it? A myth says, Take me or leave me. You 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.

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.

“Agnès Moreau,” Fabienne said. “We’ll use Agnès’s name for our book.” “Why not yours?” I asked her. “Because writing a book is my idea,” Fabienne said. “You have to give something, too.”

I will not pretend that I remember every word she dictated to me, but I know the first few sentences by heart. I can see Fabienne’s words in my neat handwriting. I was not bad at penmanship. She was not bad at speaking like a dead woman.

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?

“It’s foolish to let animals decide what they want,” Fabienne said. “Watch out, mademoiselle,” M. Devaux said. “You follow that logic, next thing you say is that it’s foolish to let people decide what they want.”

WHEN WE—M. DEVAUX AND I—FINISHED the second version, the stories felt different from the ones Fabienne had dictated to me. What exactly had happened I could not tell, but the new stories felt less like hers, more like mine. Not that it was me who had written them, I was only taking down what M. Devaux dictated. But if you put the new version next to Fabienne’s, it was like putting me next to her. Fabienne was savage. I was only crude.

Later, when the book was published, the press talked about the ferocious honesty on every page, and they called me a savage young chronicler of the postwar life with a mind drawn to morbidity.

It was not that I had any moral issue with lying, but lying to someone would only make that person important to me. 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.

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.

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.

Nothing is more inexplicable than friendship in childhood. It is not companionship, though the two are often confused. Childhood companionship is forced upon the children: two playmates whose parents like to share a drink on the weekend, a boy and a girl assigned to sit next to each other at school, families renting the neighboring holiday cabins every summer.

Childhood friendship, much more fatal, simply happens.

That was what I had feared. It was the first letter I had written in my life. Perhaps it is bad luck when a letter is not posted. 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 into the air. But my letter to Fabienne did none of those things. She had not even bothered to read it.

You’ve only learned to use my words, but you don’t really know how to make things happen for real.”

Pity did not bring me closer to the pitiable. I did not like the dogs, but they were good enough to give me some inspiration. That evening I wrote about a tiger and a fox living in a manor house, with dark framed windows looking over a fountain and a wide lawn like many shrewd eyes. The tiger was not fierce but coy, the fox vain but not pretty. They complimented each other’s good looks and intelligence. They called themselves the most fortunate animals in the kingdom. They lived in harmony, eating from two porcelain bowls side by side, and sleeping under woolen blankets softer than their own fur. Someday, I thought, a disaster would befall them, and one of them would have to eat the other so as not to starve.

But her personality, I now understand, was impaired by her desire to be good and to be right. To be good was in her nature. She took genuine pleasure in being good. However, where does the desire to be right lead one, if not to the wrong place?