Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“I don’t know. Could you bring me some leaves? Just a handful…”

Giacomo brought armfuls of multicolored leaves, and Leporello rushed through them like a blizzard so that the richest reds and browns flew in through the prison bars.

“Giacomo?”

“Yes, Arkady?”

“Is it right for me to escape this place? Those people where we used to live—”

“There was a fire and they couldn’t get out. They would have got out if they could, but they couldn’t, and that’s what killed them. If you can escape then you should.”

“But am I to blame?”

Giacomo didn’t say yes or no, but attempted to balance a leaf on the tip of Leporello’s nose.

—

WHAT ABOUT EIRINI the Fair? For months she’d been living quite happily in a big city where most of the people she met were just as vague as she was, if not more so. She ran a small and cozy drinking establishment and passed her days exchanging little-known facts with customers in between attending to the finer details of business management. Her mother had drowned soon after their arrival in the new city: This might have been an accident, but Eirini thought not. The river Danube ran through her new city of residence, and her mother had often said that if she could drown in any river in the world she wished for it to be the Danube, a liquid road that would take her body to the Carpathians and onward until it met the Iskar as it crossed the Balkan mountains, washing her and washing her until she lost all scent of the life she’d lived. Then let the Iskar take her to lie on beds of tiny white flowers in old, old glades, high up on the slopes. Or if she stayed with the Danube, let it draw her along miles and miles of canals to collect pine needles in the Black Forest. As many as her lap could hold…

Thinking of her mother’s words, Eirini the Fair had journeyed farther up the river and given the ashes into its care. Arrivals from her father’s territory frequented her bar and freely cursed the tyrant’s name as they told tales that intrigued her. If what these people were saying was true, then the tyrant’s drownings had come to an end. It was said that her father’s territory was mostly underwater now, that there was no king, no flag, and no soldiers, that there were only cities of the drowned, who looked as if they were having a good time down there. Eirini the Fair heard that one of the only pieces of land yet to be submerged was notable for having a large prison on it. The man who told Eirini this paused for a moment before asking if he could buy her a drink, and she left an even longer pause before accepting. He was handsome but the scent of his cologne was one she very strongly associated with loan sharks. Even so, can’t loan sharks also be caring boyfriends, or at the very least great in bed?

“Hi, excuse me, sorry for interrupting,” a glamorous newcomer said, as she took a seat at the bar beside the probable loan shark. “Can we talk in private?”

—

ALL LOKUM wanted to know was what Eirini the Fair had taken with her when she’d left the palace. Eirini had neither the time nor the inclination to provide a list of articles to her father’s plaything. But Lokum rephrased her question to ask if Eirini had taken anything of her father’s while leaving the palace, and then Eirini remembered the key. Just a metal shape on his dressing table, bigger than most keys she’d seen, but still small enough to pocket while she bade her father farewell and hoped she’d managed to inconvenience him one last time.

—

JUST BEFORE she and Lokum reached the prison gates, Eirini the Fair looked over the side of their boat and saw that her mother had found her way to the drowned city that now surrounded the building. She wasn’t alone; there was a man with her, the one Eirini the Fair had never met but wanted to. They both waved, and Eirini the First held up a finger and then wistfully rocked an invisible baby, motions easily interpretable as an appeal for grandchildren. “Lovely,” Eirini the Fair murmured, drawing her head back into the boat and pretending she hadn’t seen that last bit.

Jill Akkerman’s husband had been wanting to have a talk with her for weeks, and she was 200 percent sure that it was going to be an unpleasant one. The signs were subtle, but she was a psychologist. So was he; she’d been warned that this would probably be her toughest marriage. In the month before their summer holiday he was so busy that she hardly saw him at home, and when he was in she used the unofficial zoning of their household to postpone the talk. No harsh words were to be said in bed, or in the kitchen. Neither of them had made these rules, but since this had somehow become part of their code of conduct, Jill and Jacob continued to do their bit toward keeping their meals and their dreams untainted. Conversation in the bedroom and kitchen tended toward the lighthearted, so she stuck to those rooms as often as possible when she wasn’t at work. Jacob had had the house renovated to her wishes; there weren’t many changes, just the addition of a few extra doorways. She preferred rooms with a minimum of two doorways, so you had options. You didn’t have to go out the same way you came in. In the bedroom she moved from the bed to the floor and back again with her books and gadgets. Sex was out of the question. He didn’t even raise the question, just watched her with a glint of amusement in his eyes. In the kitchen she cleaned diligently and sharpened knives until they broke. Jacob bought more and presented them to her with witty asides she heard only dimly beneath the louder fear that he might add: “Can I see you in the living room for a minute?”

—

HE DID CATCH her in the living room once but she ran so fast around the edge of the room and out of the nearest door that she toppled and broke a painted jug they’d chosen together on their honeymoon.

Jill wouldn’t have minded receiving some advice but ultimately opted not to mention this situation to anybody outside of the marriage. Not to her own therapist and certainly not to Lena or Sam. Jacob was about to leave her. She didn’t want him to, but this was her third marriage and his second; she knew how these things went. She’d met Jacob’s new colleague over dinner and the colleague, Viviane, was well dressed, husky-voiced, and generally delightful company, knowledgeable on a number of topics and curious about a variety of others. Jill had found herself joining Jacob in addressing her as “Vi,” and when Vi left the table for a few moments to answer a phone call Jill whispered: “You realize she’s got a crush on you?”

Jacob laughed and leaned toward her with his lips all smoochy, but she pushed his face away with a breadstick. “Did you hear what I just said?”

He leaned in again. Not close enough for a kiss this time, but close enough for her reflection to almost completely fill his irises. Portrait of cross forty-two-year-old with, hey, really nice boobs actually. “Yes, you said you think Vi has a crush.”

“I’m two hundred percent sure about that.”

“Two hundred percent? Oh. Even if you’re right it’ll pass, J.”

J. Vi. And he still called his first wife Dee.

“Why don’t you just make the most of it, run off with her, and be half of a beautiful black intellectual couple just like you always wanted?”

Husbands one and two, Max and Sam, were white — Sam was a few years younger than Jill, but both he and Max tended to look old stood beside her. Well, not elderly. Just older than her. Whereas side by side she and Jacob looked about the same age. What age was that? If you didn’t know them you couldn’t even give a rough estimate. Jacob picked up a breadstick of his own, crunched half of it, stabbed her in the arm with the other half, and asked: “Do you really think you can do this here?”