Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

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THE GIRL he planned to kidnap happened to be a tyrant’s daughter. Hardly anybody disliked her; she was tall and vague… exceedingly vague. Her tendency toward the impersonal led to conversations that ended with both parties walking away thinking: “Well, that didn’t go very well.” If you mentioned that you weren’t having the best day she might tell you about certain trees that drank from clouds when they couldn’t find enough moisture in the ground beneath them. She was known as Eirini the Second or Eirini the Fair, since she had a flair for the judicious distribution of cake, praise, blame, and other sources of strife. In terms of facial features she didn’t really look like anybody else in her family. In fact she resembled a man her mother had secretly loved for years, a man her mother had never so much as spoken to until the day the tyrant decided to have his wife Eirini the First stoned for adultery. He did give her a chance, one chance. He asked her to explain why his eyesight kept telling him that his daughter was in fact the child of another man, but the woman only answered that there was no explanation.

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THE MAN EIRINI the First loved heard about the resemblance between himself and the child and came down to the palace to try to stop the execution. He swore to the tyrant that he and Eirini the First were as good as strangers, but the tyrant waved him away and signaled his executioners to prepare themselves, at which point the man Eirini the Fair resembled ran into the center of the amphitheatre where Eirini the First stood alone with her arms forming a meager shield for her face and chest. The man Eirini the Fair resembled stood before her with his back to the executioners and the tyrant and told her to look at him, just to keep looking only at him, and that it would be all right. It seemed he intended to protect her from the stones until he couldn’t anymore. This was intolerable to the tyrant; he could not allow these two to exit together. There was also a sense of having just witnessed the first words they’d ever said to each other. The tyrant feared a man who had no qualms about involving himself in a matter such as this, so instead of going ahead with the execution he had his wife returned to the palace.

—

AS FOR THE MAN Eirini resembled, he asked to see the child just once — he’d never been more curious about anybody in his life, he said — but his request was denied and the tyrant had him drowned, as had been the case with all other enemies of the tyrant’s state. All any citizen had to say was, “The last king was better,” and somehow or other Eirini’s father got to hear of it and then you were drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country, far from even the most remote farmhouse. The air was noxious where the drowned were. The water took their bones and muscle tissue but bubbles of skin rose from the depths, none of them frail, some ready for flight, brazen leather balloons. Houses throughout the country stood empty because the tyrant had eliminated their inhabitants; the swamp of bone and weights and plasma also had house keys mixed into it, since many had been drowned fully clothed along with the contents of their pockets. Eirini the Fair was aware of the keys. She visited the marshlands as often as she dared, crossing narrow stone bridges with a lantern in her hand. She went there to thank the man she resembled for what he had done, but he couldn’t be separated from the rest of the drowned; Eirini the Fair swung her lantern around her in a circle and when her tears met the water they told their own meaning as they flowed from eye socket to eye socket.

Among those the tyrant hadn’t had drowned yet there was a great eagerness to be rid of him, and Arkady knew that if he went through with his plan to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter he would not be without support. The tyrant had started off as an ordinary king, no better or worse than any other, until it had occurred to him to test the extent of his power. And once he found out how much power he really had, he took steps to maintain it. A ration system was in place, not because resources were scarce or because it was necessary to conserve them, but because the tyrant wished to covertly observe the black market and see what exchanges people were willing and able to make. Not just goods, but time… How much time could his subjects bear to spend queuing for butter? What about medicine? This was the sort of thing that made life for his subjects harder than life was for citizens of neighboring countries.

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EIRINI THE FAIR was sure that her father was detested. He was a man who only laughed when he was about to give some command that was going to cause widespread panic. She didn’t doubt that if anybody saw a way to annoy her father by harming her, they might well do it. But she was well guarded, and it escaped her notice that she was being intensely observed by the kind of person who would melt a key.

—

THE TYRANT had orphaned him, had had Arkady’s mother and father drowned in the middle of the night, so that the boy woke up in an empty house wondering why nobody was there to give him breakfast. Young Arkady prepared his own breakfast that day and continued to do so until there was no more food, and then he went out onto the street and stayed there, leaving the front door open in case anybody else had a use for his family home.

Two companions crossed his path — the first was Giacomo, the one who came to depend upon him. Arkady had happened to overhear a grocer trying to make Giacomo pay three times the going rate for a bar of soap. “I know this soap looks just like all the rest, but it’ll actually get you thrice as clean…” Giacomo was cheerfully scraping coins together when Arkady intervened, inquiring whether the grocer was enjoying his existence as a piece of garbage, whether it was a way of life the grocer felt he could recommend. Giacomo was not a person who knew what a lie was or why anybody would tell one; his mind worked at a different speed than usual. Not slower, exactly, but it did take him a long time to learn some things, especially practicalities regarding people. Light felt like levitation to Giacomo, and darkness was like damnation. How had he lived so long without being torn apart by one or the other? He was so troublesome, taking things that then had to be paid for, paying for things that shouldn’t have cost anything; he taught Arkady patience, looking at him with wonder and saying: “Arkady is good.” It was Giacomo who was good. His ability to give the benefit of the doubt never faltered. The swindlers didn’t mean it, the jeerers didn’t mean it, and those who would stamp on a child’s hand to make her let go of a banknote she had been given, those people didn’t mean it either.

Their other companion was a vizsla puppy, now a deep gold — colored dog, who began to follow Arkady and Giacomo one day and would not be shooed away, no matter how fierce an expression Arkady assumed. Since Giacomo’s alphabet and numerical coordination were unique to him, it was rare for him to be gainfully employed, so the dog merely represented an additional mouth for Arkady to feed. But the vizsla’s persistence and tail-wagging served him well, as did his way of behaving as if he had once been a gentleman and might yet regain that state. The vizsla waited for Giacomo and Arkady to help themselves to portions of whatever meals they were able to get before he took his own share, though sometimes Giacomo pressed the dog to begin, in which case he took the smallest portion and not a bite more. Giacomo named him Leporello. On occasions of his own choosing Leporello turned backflips and earned coins from passersby. And yet he couldn’t be persuaded to perform on demand; no, he would give looks that asked Arkady to perceive the distinction between artist and mere entertainer.