What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

“Eight,” I said. “Maybe eight and a half. Though judging from the essay, she’s come round.”

  “Judging from the essay, Gepetta, the dislike currently exceeds ten. Myrna knows how to make people do what she wants, but she doesn’t know how to alter their actual thoughts. Yet here’s Tyche suddenly claiming Myrna’s aims as her own. Can’t you just smell burning in the distance? In a way it would be entertaining to just sit back and watch Myrna get out-manipulated for once. But I can’t do that.”

  “Why not? I would.”

  —

  ROWAN TOLD me about a girl who responded to all external stimuli except human touch. That, she did not feel at all, which was the reason why from an early age other people scared her and kept getting scarier and scarier until they became almost impossible to cope with. She could see and hear her fellow human beings but making physical contact was identical to grabbing at thin air. It was like living with hallucinations that would neither disappear nor become tangible. The worst part was having to pretend that this pack of ghouls was nothing to be concerned about. She quickly learned that getting upset was counterproductive because then there were attempts to comfort her with hugs and the like. She said whatever she had to say and did whatever she had to do to circumvent unnecessary physical contact, but her situation was further complicated by the effect that her touch had on others. She was walking pain relief. She didn’t cure or absorb the source of pain—it was more that she dismantled the sensation itself for a few hours, or up to half a day depending on the duration of skin contact. It didn’t matter what kind of affliction the other person suffered, if the girl held his or her hand pain departed and all other impressions expanded to fill the space it left.

  —

  THIS, MORE THAN her numbness, twisted her relationships beyond imagining. People in her immediate vicinity somehow sensed what she could do for them and reached for her without really thinking about it, then clung to her, friends, family, and strangers, making use of her without perceiving that they were doing so, clinging so tightly that her ribs all but cracked. It seemed everybody was in all kinds of pain all the time. Shaggy-haired young men camped on her doorstep with their guitar cases and the girl’s father resorted to spending a part of each evening standing backlit in the sitting room window with his arms folded so that the doorstep campers got a good view of his lumberjack biceps. The incongruous combination of white hair, beard, and powerful arms usually caused the boys to scatter with the muddled impression that Father Christmas was angry with them.

  —

  AS A FORM of escape from involuntary giving, the girl tried to identify those who were in the most pain and spent evenings at her local hospital just sitting with people, holding hands for as long as she could. She tried to do the same on the psychiatric ward but the security was tighter there. When she came home she stayed near her mother, whose addiction to painkillers had already caused her to injure herself for the sake of high-strength prescriptions. The woman’s nerves tormented her so that only medication prevented her howling becoming a source of public or even domestic disturbance. From the little that the woman had been able to explain to her, the girl knew that her mother thought strange thoughts she could never tell anyone. Graphic structures appeared on the insides of her eyelids, a minute exhibition of X-ray photographs. There was affection between mother and daughter, but they’d given up trying to express it; rather than force a display they simply asked for each other’s good faith. And no matter how many times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the pills were better than holding the child’s hand.

  —

  THE GIRL’S father was a puppeteer, and there came a day when he was called to perform in Prague; an honor it would’ve been difficult to disregard. He’d never dreamed of being noticed by the puppeteers at work in that city, let alone considered a colleague. The professor’s wife read this as a sign that she must either break or bend. She told her husband it would be good for him to take their daughter traveling, and checked into a clinic as an answer to her family’s anxieties about her being alone. So the girl found herself living in Prague. Rowan himself has no particular view of Prague, but I know it a little, and it was fitting that the likes of Myrna Semyonova was let loose in a city whose streets combined sepia-filtered rainbows and shapes of nightmarish precision. If I truly remember the street Rowan mentioned, then Myrna and her father lived in a building that looked like an avenue of concrete gallows welded together with steel. Apart from enforcing her school attendance, her father left her to her own devices; she was free to watch his rehearsals and performances or to improve her graffiti skills, aggravate swans on the banks of the Vltava, or anything else that seemed like a good idea. Myrna loved to watch her father with his puppets—he showed her the influence it was possible to have from a slight distance—so she spent a lot of time at the theater that became his second home. But she also began a correspondence with her mother that pleased them and led to the discovery that both strudel and currant buns remain on the edible side after delivery by forty-eight-hour courier service. From time to time they briefly discussed recovery, and Myrna began to hear a change in the language her mother used to describe her pain—they were words that spoke more of bending than breaking.

  —

  MYRNA HAD ASSUMED command over two boys who lived in the flat above her own: Jindrich and Kirill, the Topol brothers. Myrna was both boys’ grand passion . . . they called her “London” and longed for a chance to rescue her from some danger or other. Sometimes one brother would menace her so that the other could defend her, even though she’d emphasized from the beginning that all she required of them was that they both die for her if and when such endeavor became necessary. The Topols were in the process of teaching Myrna some Czech, so her instructions were mostly mimed, but the brothers understood her at once. Death frequently crossed their minds, and why shouldn’t it, when Myrna had become a participant in their Sunday afternoon wrestling matches in Olšany cemetery? Kirill was ferocious and Jindrich was fleet of foot, but Myrna was nimbler still, and her brutality was fed by her desire not to cheat. Instead of laying hands on her opponent she wove figures of eight until he was exhausted and some obliging tree branch gave her the height to safely grab Jindrich or Kirill with both feet and slam him to the ground, with the additional offense of forcing him to break her own fall.

  —

  WITH ITS TENS OF THOUSANDS of graves, Prague’s Olšany cemetery is a large village, a small town, in itself. I, Gepetta, have been there, and I know that something travels in that place, something passes among the trees. I cannot say what this traveler is, since we’ve never crossed paths, but what I’ve been able to see for myself is that in some of Olšany clearings leaves lock together and form shadowy bridges from branch to branch, and the barks of these bridged trees peel back to show a color that glistens with rawness and decay, sap and old bone. The Topols and Myrna followed this trail, switching wrestling arenas for about a month, scrambling through swathes of undergrowth, administering the occasional surprise fly-kick (no matter how many times it’s happened before, it’s always startling to be assaulted by a bush) before they discovered the little wooden devil. The wooden devil had been aware of them for weeks. She was carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”

  —

  THE WOODEN devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn’t even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they cou
ldn’t let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered. The wooden devil’s official duty was to guard the grave of an alchemist named Rowan Wayland. The grave was empty; in fact it was one of seven scattered across the continent, and the other six were empty too. As an alchemist, Wayland had liked the idea of implying that he’d excelled at his profession—this could only work if he left absolutely no evidence of having died. His plan had worked. Six centuries had passed and the residents of the streets surrounding the cemetery still didn’t feel they could rule out the possibility of his being around somewhere. Every fourteenth of July without fail the town council received a bag of antique gold from an anonymous benefactor; symbolic payment for Wayland’s burial plot. It was actually somewhat unlikely that this payment came from Wayland himself, since the main reason King Rudolf had ordered the alchemist’s execution was his failure to produce gold from base metal as promised. Wayland had good friends. They arranged for a wooden puppet to be buried in place of his body. The man himself had fled the Czech lands and lived to advance his career in other royal courts.

  The wooden devil had been through a lot since she’d been discovered to be the grave’s sole inhabitant—she’d been waxed and lacquered and pegged to the earth, frozen, drenched, and dried out again. She’d even seen the traveler in the trees: “Spinning, as a wheel does.” The life in the wooden devil was slight and vague, only a little more than that possessed by inanimate puppets, but it was maintained by the fact that the first impression she gave was one of humanity. Graveyard visitors approaching the wooden devil from behind tended to mistake her for someone about the same age as Myrna Semyonova was at that time, and would confidently strike up conversation, though they were either sheepish or oddly repulsed when they discovered their mistake. At any rate this persistence of address cultivated a silent response. The wooden devil had a good vantage point, and served as secret audience to a few Topol-Semyonova wrestling matches. The devil was slightly worried that Myrna and the boys would make a nuisance of themselves once they found her. But there was one tree that the wooden devil thought of as her mother, because this tree had murmured soothingly to her when she’d still been coming up as sapling. That tree watched over her still, and murmured what the elder trees at Olšany always murmured:

  “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.