Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“To pominulo; stejně může i tohle.” That went by; so can this.

The tree was right. This situation wasn’t unique. The children were most likely to run for their lives as soon as they saw her.

—

MYRNA SAW THE DEVIL before the Topol brothers did, and she approached without calling out. She read the name on the headstone and brushed a little lichen out of the devil’s hair. Her gentleness left the devil nonplussed. It was highly irregular for anyone to be curious enough about the feel of her to voluntarily touch her. And nobody had ever seemed quite so pleased by their findings.

The boys overdid their nonchalance, treating the devil’s shoulders as coat pegs. The girl’s front door keys were always falling out of her pockets, so she left them on the devil’s lap before chucking her under the chin and saying: “Thanks, Rowan.” A sequence of elaborate stretches followed, and then Jindrich and Kirill were ready to fight, with Myrna playing referee. It was a highly unusual afternoon for the wooden devil, who was intensely aware of the arm that Myrna had casually flung around her shoulders, as if they were friends who had come to that place together.

—

AROUND DINNERTIME the boys took their jackets back. But Myrna left her door keys, and didn’t miss them until she reached her front door and stuck her hand into the pocket of her jeans.

Her father was still at the theater, so the Topols took her in for the evening. After dinner Kirill adjusted the lamplight until he’d created the correct conditions for shadow play and Myrna put on a little show. Her makeshift shadow puppets quarreled among themselves, hands thrown up, what to do, what to do… a spoon-headed creature had suddenly appeared in their midst and befriended their youngest boy. I promised him he could live with us… The shadow mother forbade this. Absolutely not! Send this fellow on his way, son. The boy set up a tent in the garden and courteously asked the spoon-headed creature to enter and consider himself at home. The spoon-headed creature offered to go away, as he didn’t want to bother anybody, but the boy insisted. The shadow father was just puncturing the tent with a fork when the Topols’ doorbell shrilled. This was followed by urgent knocking and then the sound of very heavy clogs clattering away as fast as they could. Myrna and Mr. Topol ran out onto the street but all they found were ordinary soft-shoed citizens. The lights were on in Myrna’s flat; she knocked and waved goodnight to Mr. Topol, but when her front door clicked open, seemingly by itself, she knew that her father wasn’t at home. Her father was not a man to hide himself behind a door as he pulled it open.

She called out, “Dad?” anyway, but there was no answer. She only really started shaking when she saw her key ring on the hall table. She considered running to fetch Jindrich or Kirill or both, but she didn’t like to turn her back on that open door, and besides, Mrs. Topol had been complaining of an especially bad headache all evening and she didn’t know how many more times she could politely shrug off the woman’s surreptitious attempts to touch her before the situation became awkward. So she called Jindrich Topol on the telephone even though he was only a flight of stairs away; she talked about nothing and kept talking about nothing as she walked through the flat room by room. Everything was just as usual in every room except her bedroom, where, being well versed in horror story search procedures, Myrna looked under her bed last and found Rowan Wayland lying flat on her back, filled with loathing for keys. A key ring gets left in your care and you reject all responsibility for it yet can’t bring yourself to throw it away. Nor can you give the thing away — to whom can someone of good conscience give such an object as a key? Always up to something, stitching paths and gateways together even as it sits quite still; its powers of interference can only be guessed at. The wooden devil suspected keys cause more problems than they solve, so she followed Myrna with one plan in mind, to do her bit to restore order. Myrna’s home had seemed like a clever — and strictly temporary — hiding place. But with typical slyness the keys had let Rowan in and then been of no assistance whatsoever when it came to getting out.

—

ALL THAT SKINSHIP shared by friends, families, and lovers — Myrna had seen plenty of it and had proudly despised them for needing such comforts. Now that she had tried and liked a little of it — shyly, Myrna reached for Rowan again, touched her wooden wrist, and felt something like a pulse flicker through it — she feared it would be hard to go on without any more. It took time for Rowan and Myrna to understand each other’s words; they had to take hold of each other and think clearly, then know. Finder’s keepers. Zabaveno nálezcem … and humans only lived a few years, so afterward Rowan could go home again, back to half-sleep and voices that asked nothing of her. She and Myrna took their time presenting the situation to Professor and Mrs. Semyonov. They waited until the family was reunited in London, their chief concerns being that Mrs. Semyonova might call in an exorcist and the professor might try to find out how to make more living puppets by taking Rowan apart. But the Semyonovs weren’t like that. There were a few words of Neruda’s they were fond of:

I don’t know anything about light, from where

it comes, nor where it goes

I only want the light to light up…

Rowan took a little bow, to indicate that he’d told all that he wished to tell.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

He sighed. “I’m afraid Myrna is not turning out well. All she seems to have learned is a way to take pain away without touching anybody.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It is if your method involves causing the pain in the first place. But don’t worry, I’ll deal with her and Tyche both. But the main thing for you is that though you wish to alter your condition that wish will not be granted through me, if at all.”

I made no reply, since he’d given me much to consider.

(How much of this do I tell Radha?

As much as will change her feelings.

None of it, then.)

Rowan carried me home in his rucksack — to Radha’s house, not Myrna’s. Gustav answered the door. Behind him Radha was practicing a choreographed dance with Petrushka and Loco Dempsey, jumping in and out of different pairs of shoes.

“I’m sorry,” Rowan said, as he set me down on the doorstep.

“For what?” Gustav asked, laughing, but Rowan just plugged his earphones in and sauntered off.

—

TYCHE AND MYRNA came back from Scotland with tender new constellations, one tattooed on Tyche’s left arm and the other on Myrna’s right. They’d chosen a configuration of four brilliant stars collectively called the Chameleon. Rowan looked on impassively as Myrna tucked notes into Tyche’s locker for her to read later. Tyche whispered her replies into Myrna’s ear and Myrna smiled in a way that most onlookers took as confirmation of erotic intimacy, though knowing what I did about Myrna’s aversion to flesh I doubted it. As for Radha, the fight never quite went out of her — she admired the tattoos, continued to fluster Myrna by cheerfully calling her “wife” to her face, and invited Tyche and Myrna puppet shopping, though she returned from those trips empty-handed. Music was the only thing that exposed her; she found that she was too easily brought to tears by it, and skipped so many tracks on her playlists that I lost my temper and switched the music off altogether, leaving her to work at her desk amid a silence she looked grateful for. At times she held her head in her hands and laughed softly and ruefully. She found notification of a missed call from Gustav on her phone one night and made no attempt to return the call but stayed up late, very very late, in case he tried again. (He didn’t.) Ah, really, it was too annoying how bold these ones were when they were in each other’s company and how timid they were when apart. It was beneath me to knock all their pretty heads together and shout, “Exactly what are you trying to do with each other?” but it was my hope that Rowan would. Rowan was more interested in knitting a snowflake shawl, so Radha continued writing for Gustav’s puppets unhindered. She was scripting her contribution to the school’s end-of-term show; the working title was Polixena the Snitch and all that I was permitted to know about it was that it was mostly set in a karaoke bar for gangsters.