Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Thank God Joe was so uncharacteristically panicky and stupid that evening. I discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple: If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me…

—

AS FOR WHAT you saw of me — I think you saw a kid in a gray dress gawping at you like you were the meaning of life. You immediately began talking to me as if I were a child at your knee. You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need. You’d recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the clouds. “Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book — maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.’”

I got you to dance, and I got you to show me a few of the exercises you did for hand flexibility, and I got you to talk about your school and its classrooms full of students obsessed with attaining mastery of puppets. I liked the sound of it. Your eyes narrowed intently as you spoke of your final year there: The best two students were permitted to choose two new students and help them through their first year. It was in your mind to play a part in another puppeteer’s future, that much was clear. You believed in the work that puppet play can do — you’d seen it with your own eyes. Before your father began teaching, back in the days when he performed, you had seen a rod puppet of his go down on its knees before a girl who sat a little aside from his audience of schoolchildren. This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it. Man and long-bearded puppet left the stage, walked over to the girl, and knelt — the puppet’s kneeling was of course guided by your father’s hand, and every eye in the audience was on your father’s face, but his uncertain expression convinced everyone that the puppet had suddenly expressed a will of its own. “Princess, I am Merlin, your Merlin,” the puppet man said to the girl. “At your service forever.”

“Me?” the girl said, suspicious, on the edge of wrath— you just try and make me the butt of your joke —“Me, a princess? You, at my service?”

“It’s no mistake.” The puppet’s hand moved slowly, reverently; it held its breath despite having no breath to hold, the girl allowed that wooden hand to fondly brush her cheek — watching, you were absolutely sure that no hand of flesh and bone would have been allowed to come that close. “This is the sign by which we recognize you,” the puppet said, “but if you wish you may continue as you are in disguise.”

And your father and his puppet returned to the stage, never turning their backs on the girl, as is the protocol regarding walking away from royalty. The girl’s teacher cried, but the girl herself just looked as if she was thinking. She continued to think through the second act of the puppet play, but by the third act she was clapping and laughing as loudly as the rest of them. I really don’t know why I thought your reaching the end of that story would be a good moment to kiss you; I wasn’t entirely surprised that it didn’t work.

—

“YOUNG LADY, I’m flattered — and tempted — but — how old are you, anyway?” you asked. Then you said I was too young. Too young, not right for you, blah blah blah. Always something.

Joe and Arjun appeared with our coats, and you slid my book out of my coat pocket. “What’s this?”

Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them. Since people like getting around rules, there are various unofficial translations of my great-grandfather’s books floating around online, but all of them just seem to prove his point.

—

“JUST TELL ME the beginning of it, then,” you said, and I opened the book to translate for you. You liked the beginning — a woman opens her front door to find a corpse on her doorstep, but before the body can topple across the threshold of her home she says, “Oh no you don’t,” pushes it back out with a broom, and legs it out of the back door.

“Wait,” you were saying, as I walked away arm in arm with my brother—“Hang on, Radha, I need to know—”

“I’d say she’s at least an eight,” my brother said, surprised. (You have my permission to make him regret marking girls’ physical appearance out of ten.) When I got home the ghost immediately knew something was up. She said she’d been wondering when I’d meet someone.

“If I–I don’t know, if some sort of miracle happens and I have sex with someone, will I stop being able to see you?”

The ghost looked crafty for a moment, then relented and said no, I was stuck with her. And she was pleased for me when you phoned me the next day to ask me to translate the next paragraph of my great-grandfather’s book. You hung up as soon as I gave you the paragraph, but the ghost said you’d come back for more, and you did. You began to talk to me a little after each day’s translation, asking me questions about myself and my day and whatever music happened to be playing in my bedroom whenever you called. “Glad you like it — I don’t know what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here,” I’d say, and you’d laugh, thinking I’d made a joke.

The ghost observed that I was going to come to the end of my translation one day.

“Yeah, but come on. We’re only halfway through the second chapter. And after this book there are fifteen others by the same author.”

The ghost asked if I thought my great-grandfather would be impressed by this use of his hard work.

“Oh, ghost — what have you got against love?”

Nothing, said the ghost, sounding injured. She had nothing whatsoever against love. She was just saying.

The ghost showed that she was on my side when she heard you mention the news that you were one of the two final-year students who got to select a newcomer to mentor. “It’s going to be fun. We get to watch the applicants through hidden panels in a soundproofed room so they don’t hear us booing or cheering them.”

This terrified me, but the ghost breathed on the windowpane and wrote FOR GO IT on the misted glass.

“Who’s the other student?” I asked. “Not green-haired Joe?”

“Haha, no. Though he does put on interesting Punch and Judy shows. Dad says he’s going to be very good one day. The other student’s a boy called Gustav Grimaldi. I don’t like the way he performs; it’s scruffy. And I’d say his puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you’d understand what I meant by that.”

“Nihilistic, eh… sounds bad,” I said, pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I googled “nileistic.”

“Sometimes his puppets won’t perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they’d decide to keep their mouths shut forever. There’s no entertainment in it at all, and I don’t understand why he chooses this way to put on a show when he knows so many other ways. He shouldn’t be allowed to choose any new students. If there’s anyone bound to introduce unsavory elements into our group, it’s Grimaldi.”