Helen Oyeyemi - The Opposite House

I keep mistaking my heartbeat for his.

My heart

(his heart?)

my heart?

(mine)

my own heart,

beating me down like a belt.

I am still bleeding.

Shhhhhh. God already knows.

I am not special. Maja you are not special.

Sleep, then get up again, and so on.

The kitchen smells of toasted coconut; Mami has been baking before church. At the table, Papi has drawn up a chair and is sitting at Tomás’s shoulder, leaning his chin onto his fist as he watches Tomás write his homework. Usually Tomás fidgets and shrinks if someone is in his space for longer than a few minutes. But Tomás’s arm, spread over his paper to shield it, is gently touching Papi’s. Papi nods at us, and when Chabella and I come at him and Tomás from separate sides to kiss them, he says, ‘And how are my Kingdom Kids?’

Tomás looks at me directly and I see that his lip is swelling under a deep pink cut. There is bruising on his temple. I narrow my eyes at him, but Papi pulls me awkwardly onto his lap and asks, ‘How are you and Aaron? You know, last night I had a dream that I was in a big, cosy den in Lapland or somewhere, smoking my pipe —’

(Mami shouts and flaps a napkin at him)

‘— and it was snowing hard outside, so hard. But suddenly there was this tiny rap on my door, and I thought, Who could that be? So I opened up, and there were two beautiful children, one little boy and one little girl — the boy was sturdy, curly-haired, a little older, and quite a lot taller than the girl, who was so beautiful I couldn’t look at her for long. She was wonderful; a princess. If you’d seen her, Maja! Anyway, I let them in, and they warmed themselves, and I gave them cucuruchos and hot tea, and they said some very intelligent things about Communism, and then I said, “Now, who do you belong to?” and they said, “What do you mean, abuelo?” Abuelo! Imagine! “So,” I said. “So, so, so.” They called me abuelo! They were my grandchildren. .’

I hold myself very still. I am wrapped in layers, long jumper over long skirt, scarves, but any motion might bring Papi that smell that is all over me.

‘Hey, yeah, right, keep dreaming,’ I tell him.

Papi says, ‘You are breaking my heart. And you’re disturbing Tomás’s homework. You and Chabella need to clear out and let Tomás’s discovery of his love of history continue as before.’

‘History makes me want to kill myself,’ Tomás mumbles.

I take the seat next to Papi and look from him to Mami. ‘Papi, I have tickets to go back to Habana next month, but Mami says you don’t want me to go.’

Papi looks at Mami as well, as if my going is her suggestion and her fault. Papi taps Tomás on the shoulder to make him look up. ‘Tomás, I want you to listen to this as well.’

Tomás looks at me as if he wouldn’t mind if he died right now. Tomás looks at me like, stop this , but I won’t.

Papi turns his eyes to me.

‘Why do you want to go back?’

‘What’s wrong with me going back?’

I see Papi’s hands; they are quivering.

‘Do you think I brought you here for a joke?’ he asks me. His voice is very low. ‘Do you think that I just brought you over to England for a long holiday? There are reasons why we are not living in Cuba, Maja.’

‘And these are?’

‘That it’s not safe; that staying there is accepting the lies of a regime that in its aimlessness will destroy the country,’ Papi says. His tone is that of the teacher soothing a gormless pupil.

‘You want me to stay away to make a statement ? A statement that doesn’t affect anyone, that doesn’t reach anyone’s notice but mine?’

Mami wrings her hands.

Papi says to her, ‘I suppose you want to go, too?’ He says it with too much calm, and maybe that is why Chabella doesn’t reply. Out of respect for Papi, Tomás is not writing, but he is not looking our way either.

‘Why do you want to go?’ Papi asks me again, a hand to his forehead. This thing I want is a problem that he is trying to understand. There are no texts he can turn to for this problem.

‘If you were asking me about Turkey or Morocco or America or Spain, it would make more sense! Like if you were saying, why are you interested in going to Turkey, there’s nothing in Turkey for you, I’d understand. I’d still go, but I’d understand why you were asking me. But what you’re asking me now — I mean, how can you ask me why I want to go when I don’t understand what it means to have left?’

After that he will not let me speak.

‘It means that you are free. That is what it means. I brought you here so that you could live in a place where the people who are in government do not affect whether or not you can eat what you want to eat, see films you want to see, read what you want to read. I brought you here so you don’t live in a place where politics can actually bust your door down, or make you disappear. Turbulent times, Chabella and I know turbulent times.

‘Maja, unlike your mother, I did not grow up in a nice house. I grew up in a tenement in Habana Vieja, and when I turned fifteen, I didn’t have a nice party but I was happy because it meant that I could pretend I was sixteen a little bit more convincingly and ask for a better wage when I had finished washing restaurant dishes. Why are you testing me like this? The idea of a library that I could borrow anything from seemed like a dream to me.

‘When those boys came around, I believed more than anyone that what Fidel, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfugos, Juan Almeida and the others would do would be a great thing — the greatest thing for Cuba. I mean, Juan Almeida was black! A black revolutionary! My God, I thought, yes, we have a share in Cuba. They say it’s not a black man’s country, but it is! My heart overrode my mind. They were already saying suspicious things, those boys, saying things along the lines of “We don’t want to identify with any ideology because we want our worth to lie in our actions,” et cetera, but el corazón hace caso omiso de mi mente .

‘What they are doing now is bad, of course. Yes, go on, nod and shrug. You know, you know it all, and yet you want to go back — but just a few days ago, they detained a man just your age because he criticised the government for not doing anything about finding his schizophrenic brother who had gone missing. And they were probably the ones who got rid of his brother; after all, the brother left a note saying he was trying to leave the country via Guantanamo —’

(Who are They? )

‘Papi, I know all this. I know,’ I say. Tomás has left his chair and has wrapped his arms around Mami. Tomás looks at me and shakes his head; I am to forget this. It is my job to keep the peace and hold my peace and all the peace is on my shoulders.

‘Look. I’m not here to fight anybody. But I have the tickets and I am going. I just thought I’d tell you.’

‘No, Maja. You are not going. I say you are not going. Let it stand, let what I say stand. You say you know, you know — no, you don’t know anything. Look at Cecilio Haber, only just out of jail. Why? Because he did something that would be perfectly acceptable over here in a free election —’

We are talking over each other; my words slip into his, but I know he hears me. I’m saying:

‘I’m going, I’m going, I’m going, I don’t care what you say. .’

I sound like a person who doesn’t think. I am all fingers in my ears and la la la. It’s the hysteric doing it, or maybe just me, or maybe all along it’s just me. Today it’s hard to tell. Papi rubs his hands together — he has finished, he is certain. ‘I am sorry, querida,’ he says. ‘But let me tell you about the people of Abeokuta in Africa, where my family and your mother’s family, may once have come from.