The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  The setting for the story was a municipal swimming pool in a popular, not chic, Paris suburb, where, from time to time, I was something of an habitué. I would go there every day at 1:00 p.m., when most people were eating, and so the pool was not crowded.

  The building is long and squat, and its walls are of glass and brick. It was built in the late 1960s, and it opened in 1971. It’s situated in a small park where there are a few silver birches and weeping willows.

  From the pool when swimming you can see the willows high up through the glass walls. The ceiling above the pool is paneled, and now, forty years later, several of the panels are missing. How many times when swimming on my back have I noticed this, while being aware of the water holding up both me and whatever story I’m puzzling over?

  There’s an eighteenth-century drawing by Huang Shen of a cicada singing on the branch of a weeping willow. Each leaf in it is a single brushstroke.

  Seen from the outside, it’s an urban not a rural building, and if you didn’t know it was a swimming pool and you forgot about the trees you might suppose it was some kind of railway building, a cleaning shed for coaches, a loading bay.

  There’s nothing written above the entrance, just a small blazon containing the three colors of the tricolor. Emblem of the Republic. The entrance doors are of glass with the instruction POUSSEZ stenciled on them.

  When you push one of these doors open and step inside you are in another realm that has little to do with the streets outside, the parked cars, or the shopping street.

  The air smells slightly of chlorine. Everything is lit from below rather than from above as a consequence of the light reflected off the water of the two pools. The acoustics are distinct: every sound has its slight echo. Everywhere the horizontal, as distinct from the vertical, dominates. Most people are swimming, swimming from one end of the large pool to the other, length after length. Those standing have just taken off their clothes or are getting out of them, so there’s little sense of rank or hierarchy. Instead, everywhere, there’s this sense of an odd horizontal equality.

  There are many printed notices, all of them employing a distinctive bureaucratic syntax and vocabulary.

  THE HAIR DRYER WILL STOP 5 MINUTES BEFORE CLOSING TIME.

  BATHING CAPS OBLIGATORY. COUNCIL DECREE AS FROM MONDAY JAN. 5, 1981.

  ENTRY THROUGH THIS DOOR FORBIDDEN TO ANY PERSON WHO IS NOT A MEMBER OF STAFF. THANK YOU.

  The voice embodied in such announcements is inseparable from the long political struggle during the Third Republic for the recognition of citizens’ rights and duties. A measured, impersonal committee voice—with somewhere in the distance a child laughing.

  Around 1945 Fernand Léger painted a series of canvases about plongeurs—divers in a swimming pool. With their primary colors and their simple, relaxed outlines these paintings celebrated the dream and the plan of workers enjoying leisure and, because they were workers, transforming leisure into something that had not yet been named.

  Today the realization of this dream is further away than ever. Yet sometimes while putting my clothes in a locker in the men’s changing room and attaching the key to my wrist, and taking the obligatory hot shower before walking through the footbath, and going to the edge of the large pool and diving in, I remember these paintings.

  Most of the swimmers wear, as well as the obligatory bathing cap, dark goggles to protect their eyes from the chlorine. There’s little eye contact between us, and if a swimmer’s foot accidentally touches another swimmer, he or she immediately apologizes. The atmosphere is not that of the Côte d’Azur! Here each one privately pursues her or his own target.

  I first noticed her because she swam differently. The movements of her arms and legs were curiously slow, like those of a frog, and at the same time her speed was not dramatically reduced. She had a different relationship to the element of water.

  The Chinese master Qi Baishe (1863–1957) loved drawing frogs, and he made the tops of their heads very black, as if they were wearing bathing caps. In the Far East the frog is a symbol of freedom.

  Her bathing cap was ginger-colored and she was wearing a costume with a floral pattern, a little like English chintz. She was in her late fifties and I assumed was Vietnamese. Later I discovered my mistake. She is Cambodian.

  Every day she swam, length after length, for almost an hour. As I did too. When she decided it was time to climb up one of the corner ladders and leave the pool, a man, who was himself swimming several tracks away, came to help her. He was also Southeast Asian, a little thinner than she, a little shorter, with a face that was more carved than hers; her face was moonlike.

  He came up behind her in the water and put his hands under her arse so that she, facing the edge of the pool, sat on them and he bore a little of her weight when they climbed out together.

  Once on the solid floor she walked away from the corner of the pool toward the footbath and the entrance to the women’s changing room, alone and without any discernible limp. Having noticed this ritual a number of times, I could see, however, that, when walking, her body was taut, as if stretched on tenterhooks.

  The man with the brave carved face was presumably her husband. I don’t know why I had a slight doubt about this. Was it his deference? Or her aloofness?

  When she first came to the pool and wanted to enter the water, he would climb halfway down the ladder and she would sit on one of his shoulders, and then he would prudently descend until the water was over his hips and she could launch herself to swim away.

  Both of them knew these rituals of immersion and extraction by heart, and perhaps both recognized that in the ritual the water played a more important role than either of them. This might explain why they appeared more like fellow performers than man and wife.

  Time went by. The days passed repetitively. Eventually when she and I, swimming our lengths, crossed each other for the first time going in opposite directions, with only a meter or two between us, we lifted our heads and nodded at each other. And when, about to leave the pool, we crossed for the last time that day, we signaled Au Revoir.

  How to describe that particular signal? It involves raising the eyebrows, tossing the head as if to throw back the hair, and then screwing up the eyes in a smile. Very discreetly. Goggles pushed up onto the bathing cap.

  One day while I was taking a hot shower after my swim—there are eight showers for men, and to switch one on there are no taps, you press an old-fashioned button like a doorknob, and the trick is that among the eight there’s some variation in the duration of the flow of hot water until the button has to be pressed again, so by now I knew exactly which shower had the hot jet that lasted longest, and, if it was free, I always chose it—one day while I was taking a hot shower after my swim, the man from Southeast Asia came under the shower next to mine and we shook hands.

  Afterwards we exchanged a few words and agreed to meet outside in the little park after we’d dressed. And this is what we did, and his wife joined us.

  It was then that I learned they were from Cambodia. She is very distantly related to the family of the famous Prince Sihanouk. She had fled to Europe when she was twenty, in the mid-seventies. Prior to that she had studied art in Phnom Penh.

  It was she who talked and I who asked the questions. Again I had the impression that his role was that of a bodyguard or assistant. We were standing near the birch trees beside their parked two-seater Citroën C15 with a seatless space behind. A vehicle much the worse for wear. Do you still paint? I asked. She lifted her left hand into the air, making a gesture of releasing a bird, and nodded. Often she’s in pain, he said. I read a lot too, she added, in Khmer and in Chinese. Then he indicated it was perhaps time for them to climb into their C15. Hanging from the rear mirror above the windshield I noticed a tiny Buddhist dharma wheel, like a ship’s helm in miniature.

  After they had driven off I lay on the grass—it was the month of May—beneath the weeping willows and found myself thinking about pain. She’d left Cambodia after
Sihanouk had been ousted with the probable help of the CIA and in the year when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had taken over the capital and begun the enforced deportation of its two million inhabitants to the countryside, where, living in communities with no individual property, they had to learn to become New Khmers! Nearly a million of them didn’t survive. In the preceding years Phnom Penh and its surrounding villages had been systematically bombarded by U.S. B-52s. At least a hundred thousand people died.

  The Khmer people, with their mighty past of Angkor Wat and its gigantic, impassive stone statues that later were abandoned, damaged, marauded, and so acquired a look of suffering. The Khmer were, at the moment she left her country, surrounded by enemies—Vietnamese, Laotians, Thais—and were on the point of being tyrannized and massacred by their own political visionaries, who transformed themselves into fanatics so that they could inflict vengeance on reality itself, so they could reduce reality to a single dimension. Such reduction brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart.

  Gazing at the willows, I watched their leaves trailing in the wind. Each leaf a small brushstroke.

  Today Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, and 75 percent of its exports are manufactured in sweatshops producing garments for the brand-name rag trade multinationals of the West.

  A group of four-year-old kids ran past me up the steps and through the glass doors. They were going to their swimming lessons.

  The next time I saw her and her husband in the pool I approached her when she had finished one of her lengths and asked if she could tell me what it was that caused her pain. She answered immediately as if naming a place: polyarthritis. It came when I was young, when I knew I had to leave. It’s kind of you to ask.

  The left half of her forehead is a little discolored, browner than the rest, as if the leaf of a frond, once placed on her skin there, had slightly stained it. When her head is thrown back floating on the water, and her face looks moonlike, you could compare this little discoloring to one of the so-called seas on the moon’s surface.

  We both trod water and she smiled. When I’m in water, she said, I weigh less, and after a little while my joints stop hurting.

  I nodded. And then we went on swimming. Swimming on her front, as I have said, she moved her legs and arms as slowly as a frog sometimes does. On her back she swam like an otter.

  Cambodia is a land that has a unique osmotic relationship with freshwater. The Khmer word for homeland is Teuk-Dey, which means Water-Land. Framed by mountains, its flat, horizontal, alluvial plain—about a quarter of the size of France—is crossed by six major rivers including the vast Mekong. During and after the summer monsoon rains, the flow of this river multiplies by fifty! And in Phnom Penh, the river’s level rises systematically by eight meters. At the same time, to the north, the lake of Tonle Sap overflows each summer to five times its “normal” winter size to become an immense reservoir, and the river of Tonle Sap turns round to run in the opposite direction, its downstream becoming upstream.

  Small wonder then that this plain offered some of the most varied and abundant freshwater fishing in the world, and that for centuries its peasants lived off rice and the fish of these waters.

  It was on that day while swimming during the lunch hour at the municipal swimming pool, after she had said the word polyarthritis, pronouncing it as if it were a place, that I thought of giving her my Sho brush.

  The same evening I put it into a box and wrapped it. And each time I went to the pool I took it with me until they turned up again. Then I placed the little box on one of the benches behind the diving boards and told her husband so he could pick it up when they left. I left before they did.

  Months passed without my seeing them because I was elsewhere. When I returned to the pool, I looked for them but could not see them. I adjusted my goggles and dived in. Several kids were jumping in feetfirst, holding their noses. Others on the edge were adjusting flippers on their feet. It was noisier and more animated than usual because by now it was the month of July, school was over, and the kids, whose families couldn’t afford to leave Paris, were coming to play for hours in the water. The special entrance fee for them was minimal, and the lifesaving swimming instructors maintained an easygoing discipline. A few regulars, with their strict routines and personal targets, were still there.

  I had done nearly twenty lengths and was about to start another when—to my astonishment—I felt a hand firmly placed on my right shoulder from behind. I turned my head and saw the stained moon face of the onetime art student from Phnom Penh. She was wearing the same ginger-colored bathing cap and she was smiling a wide smile.

  You’re here!

  She nods, and while we are treading water she comes close and kisses me twice on both cheeks.

  Then she asks: Bird or flower?

  Bird!

  Thereupon she lays her head back on the water and laughs. I wish I could let you hear her laugh. Compared with the splashing and cries of the kids around us, it is low-keyed, slow, and persistent. Her face is more moonlike than ever, moonlike and timeless. The laugh of this woman, who will soon be sixty, continues. It is unaccountably the laugh of a child—that same child whom I imagined laughing somewhere behind the committee voices.

  A few days later her husband swims towards me, asks after my health, and whispers: On the bench by the diving boards. Then they leave the pool. He comes up behind her, puts his hands under her arse, and she, facing the edge of the pool, sits on them while he bears a little of her weight, and they climb up and out together.

  Neither of them waves back to me as they have on other occasions. A question of modesty. Gestural modesty. No gift can be accompanied by a claim.

  On the bench is a large envelope, which I take. Inside is a painting on rice paper. The painting of the bird I chose when she asked me what I wanted. The painting shows a bamboo, and perched on one of its stems a blue tit. The bamboo is drawn according to all the rules of the art. A single brushstroke beginning at the top of the stalk, stopping at each section, descending and becoming slightly wider. The branches, narrow as matches, drawn with the tip of the brush. The dark leaves rendered in single strokes like darting fish. And last the horizontal nodes, brushed from left to right, between each section of the hollow stalk.

  The bird with its blue cap, its yellow breast, its grayish tail, and its claws like the letter W, from which it can hang upside down when necessary, is depicted differently. Whereas the bamboo is liquid, the bird looks embroidered, its colors applied with a brush as pointed as a needle.

  Together, on the surface of the rice paper, bamboo and bird have the elegance of a single image, with the discrete stencil of the artist’s name stamped below and to the left of the bird. Her name is L—.

  When you enter the drawing, however, and let its air touch the back of your head, you sense how this bird is homeless. Inexplicably homeless.

  I framed the drawing like a scroll, without a mount, and with great pleasure chose a place to hang it. Then one day, many months later, I needed to look up something in one of the Larousse illustrated encyclopedias. And, turning the pages, I happened to fall upon the little illustration it contained of a mésange bleue (blue tit). I was puzzled. It looked oddly familiar. Then I realized that, in this standard encyclopedia, I was looking at the model—the two Ws of the blue tit’s claws were, for instance, at precisely the same angle, as were also the head and beak—the exact model that L— had taken for the bird perched on the bamboo.

  And again I understood a little more about homelessness.

  Yiyun Li

  Kindness

  1.

  I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself, in the same one-bedroom flat where I have always lived, in a derelict building on the outskirts of Beijing that is threatened to be demolished by government-backed real estate developers. Apart from a trip to a cheap seaside resort, taken with my parents the summer I turned five, I have not traveled much; I spent a year in an army camp in centr
al China, but other than that I have never lived away from home. In college, after a few failed attempts to convince me of the importance of being a community member, my adviser stopped acknowledging my presence, and the bed assigned to me was taken over by the five other girls in the dorm and their trunks.

  I have not married, and naturally have no children. I have few friends, though as I have never left the neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, most of them a generation or two older. Being around them is comforting; never is there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging.

  I teach mathematics in a third-tier middle school. I do not love my job or my students, but I have noticed that even the most meager attention I give to the students is returned by a few of them with respect and gratitude and sometimes inexplicable infatuation. I pity those children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives. It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else’s life.

  I have no hobby that takes me outside my flat during my spare time. I do not own a television set, but I have a roomful of books at least half a century older than I am. I have never in my life hurt a soul, or, if I have done any harm unintentionally the pain I inflicted was the most trivial kind, forgotten the moment it was felt—if indeed it could be felt in any way. But that cannot be a happy life, or much of a life at all, you might say. That may very well be true. “Why are you unhappy?” To this day, if I close my eyes I can feel Lieutenant Wei’s finger under my chin, lifting my face to a spring night. “Tell me, how can we make you happy?”

  The questions, put to me twenty-three years ago, have remained unanswerable, though it no longer matters, as, you see, Lieutenant Wei died three weeks ago, at forty-six, mother of a teenage daughter, wife of a stationery merchant, veteran of Unit 20256, People’s Liberation Army, from which she retired at forty-three, already afflicted with a malignant tumor. She was Major Wei in the funeral announcement. I do not know why the news of her death was mailed to me except perhaps that the funeral committee—it was from such a committee that the letter had come, befitting her status—thought I was one of her long-lost friends, my name scribbled in an old address book. I wonder if the announcement was sent to the other girls, though not many of them would still be at the same address. I remember the day Lieutenant Wei’s wedding invitation arrived, in a distant past, and thinking then that it would be the last time I would hear from her.