What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Arkady could make no retort to that. She was only telling the truth. He thought that was the end of the matter, but as he was leaving she told him not to come back. She said jealousy lent people uncanny powers of detection, and that it was better not to be so close within the tyrant’s reach if he wanted to go on living. He protested—without the wages she paid him, he, Giacomo, and Leporello could hardly keep afloat—but she shook her head and motioned to him to be quiet, mouthed, For your own good, scattered a trayful of lokum on the floor, shouted, “That’s enough clumsiness from you” loudly enough for the guards just outside the door to hear, and sent him on his way, flinging the tray after him to complete the dismissal scene.

  He didn’t like that, of course, Lokum’s taking it upon herself to decide what was for his own good. He could drown if he wanted to. In the weeks that followed that unfillable gap in his funds drowned him anyway—unpaid bills and nobody willing to employ him without speaking to Lokum, who refused to show him any favor. Giacomo and Leporello spoke less and stared out of the windows more. Arkady knew that they weren’t getting enough to eat but Giacomo wasn’t the sort to complain and Leporello dared not. Giacomo’s fever didn’t take hold until Arkady missed three rent payments in a row and the trio were evicted from the building with the views that Giacomo was so fond of. Arkady was able to find them a room, a small one with a small grate for cooking. It was a basement room, and Giacomo seemed crushed by the floors above them. He wouldn’t go out. He asked where the door was and searched the walls with his hands. Leporello led him to the door of the room but he said, “That’s not it,” and stayed in the corner with his hands reverently wrapped around a relic, the key to their previous flat: “The key to where we really live, Arkady . . .” How Arkady hated to hear him talk like that.

  —

  GIACOMO AND LEPORELLO had stolen the key between them, Leporello putting on a full acrobatic display and then standing on his back legs to proffer a genteel paw to the landlord while Giacomo made a getaway with the key. In his head Giacomo pieced together all those views of the same expanse. Sometimes he tried to describe the whole of what he saw to Arkady, but his fever made a nonsense of it all. Arkady took the key from Giacomo to put an end to his ramblings, and he threw the key into the fire to put an end to the longing that raged through his body and vexed his brain. “This is where we really live, Giacomo, here in a basement with a door you say you cannot find.”

  —

  THEN ARKADY turned his back on Leporello’s growling and Giacomo’s sobs as he tried to snatch the key back from the grate. He fell asleep with the intention of kidnapping Eirini the Fair in the morning. The palace watchwords hadn’t changed; he had checked. He would be glib and swift and resolute and have the girl at his mercy before she or anyone grasped the situation. He would demand that the tyrant take his damn foot off the nation’s neck and let everybody breathe. Money too, he’d ask for a lot of that. Enough for medicine and wholesome meat broth and a proper bed and all the sea breeze his friends could wish for.

  —

  HE DREAMED of the key writhing in the fire, and he dreamed of faces coughing out smoke amidst the flames, each face opening up into another like the petals of a many-layered sunflower, and he was woken by police officers. They shone light into his eyes and pummeled him and ordered him to confess now while they were still being nice. Confess to what? The officers laughed at his confusion. Confess to what, he was asking, when the building he’d been evicted from had burned to the ground overnight and he’d been the one who’d set the fire. Almost half the inhabitants had been out working their night jobs, but everybody else had been at home, and there were nine who hadn’t escaped in time. So there were nine deaths on his head. Arkady maintained that he’d set no fire, that he hadn’t killed anybody, but he knew that he’d been full to the brim with ill will and still was, and he thought of the burning key and he wasn’t sure . . . he believed he would have remembered going out to the edge of the city, and yet he wasn’t sure . . . he asked who had seen him set the fire, but nobody would tell him. Giacomo and Leporello were so quiet that Arkady feared the worst, but when he got a chance to look at them he saw that one of the policemen had somehow got a muzzle and leash on Leporello and was making gestures that indicated all would be well as long as Giacomo stayed where he was. After a few more denials from Arkady his friends were removed from the room: Giacomo asked why and was told that his friend had killed people and wouldn’t admit it, so he was going to have to be talked to until he admitted it. At this Giacomo turned to Arkady and asked: “But how could Arkady do this, when he is so good?” Arkady forgot that his words could be taken as a confession, and asked his friend to understand that he hadn’t meant to do it. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know—Giacomo nodded at those words and said: “Yes, I understand.” Satisfied with Arkady’s self-incrimination, the officer holding Leporello allowed the dog to stand on his hind legs and pat Arkady’s cheek and then his own face; he repeated this a few times as a way of reassuring Arkady that he would be by Giacomo’s side until the truth came out. Leporello seemed confident that the truth would come out very soon, and Arkady remembered the vizsla puppy he’d tried to drive away and was glad he’d failed at that.

  —

  THOUGH ARKADY BROKE down and confessed after being shown photographs of the five men and four women who’d died in the fire, his confession was never entirely satisfactory. He got the timing and exact location of the fire he’d set wrong, and his statement had to be supplemented with information from his former landlord, who identified him as the culprit before a jury, pointing at Arkady as he described the clothing the police had found him wearing the morning they arrested him. The inconsistencies in Arkady’s account troubled the authorities enough to imprison him in a cell reserved for “the craziest bastards,” the ones who had no inkling of what deeds they might be capable of doing until they suddenly did them.

  —

  ARKADY’S MEALS were brought to him, and his cell had an adjoining washroom that he kept clean himself. He no longer had to do long strings of mental arithmetic, shaving figures off the allowance for food as he went along—after a few days his mind cleared, he stopped imagining that Giacomo and Leporello were staring mournfully from the neighboring cell, and he could have been happy if he hadn’t been facing imprisonment for deaths he dearly wished he could be sure he hadn’t caused. His cell was impregnable, wound round with a complex system of triggers and alarms. Unless the main lock was opened with the key that had been made for it, he couldn’t come out of that cell alive.

  —

  THE TYRANT held the key to Arkady’s cell, and liked to visit him in there and taunt him with weather reports. He hadn’t been interested in the crimes of the other crazy bastards who’d once inhabited this cell, so they’d been drowned. But as somebody who had by his own admission dispatched people and then gone straight to sleep afterward, Arkady was the only other person within reach that the tyrant felt he had a meaningful connection with. Arkady barely acknowledged his questions, but unwittingly gained the affections of the guards by asking a variant of the question “Shouldn’t you be staying here in this cell with me, you piece of shit?” each time the tyrant said his farewells for the day. As per tyrannical command the guards withheld Arkady’s meals as punishment for his impudence, but they didn’t starve him as long they could have. One night Arkady even heard one of the guards express doubt about his guilt. The guard began to talk about buildings with doors that could all be opened with the same key. He’d heard something about those keys, he said, but the other guard didn’t let him finish. “When are you going to stop telling old wives’ tales, that’s what I want to know . . . anyway no landlord would run his place that way.”

  —

  LOKUM AGREED to marry the tyrant on the condition that there would be no more drownings, and he sent Eirini the First and Eirini the Fair across the border and into a neighboring country so that he could begin his
new life free of their awkward presence. After a long absence, the tyrant appeared before Arkady to tell him this news, and to inform him that he’d lost the key to Arkady’s cell. The key couldn’t be recut either, since he’d had the only man with the requisite expertise drowned a few years back. Lokum had a point about the drownings being counterproductive, the tyrant realized. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Maybe it’ll turn up again one of these days. But if you think about it you were going to be here for life anyhow.”

  “No problem,” Arkady said. And since it was looking as if this was the last time the tyrant was going to visit him, he added casually: “Give my regards to Lokum.”

  The tyrant looked over at the prison guards, to check whether they had seen and heard what he’d just seen and heard. “Did he just lick his lips?” he asked, in shock. The guards claimed they couldn’t confirm this, as they’d been scanning the surrounding area for possible threats.

  —

  “HMMM . . . SPRING the lock so that the cell kills him,” the tyrant ordered as he left. The guards unanimously decided to sleep on this order; it wasn’t unheard of for the tyrant to rethink his decisions. The following day the tyrant still hadn’t sent word, so the guards decided to sleep on it another night, and another, until they were able to admit to themselves and to each other that they just weren’t going to follow orders this time. Their first step toward rebellion, finding out that disobedience didn’t immediately bring about the end of the world . . . the prison guards cautiously went into dialogue with their counterparts at the palace and at border crossings, and a quiet, steady exodus began.

  —

  THE NEIGHBORING countries welcomed the escapees, and with them the opportunity to remove the tyrant’s power at the same time as playing a prank on him by helping to empty out his territory. If the tyrant noticed that the streets were quieter than usual, he simply said to himself: “Huh, I suppose I really did have a lot of these people drowned, didn’t I . . .” It probably wouldn’t have helped him one way or the other to notice that as the living people left, the marshland stretched out farther and farther, slowly pulling houses and cinemas, greengrocers, restaurants, and concert halls down into the water. If you looked down into the swamps (which he never did) it was possible to see people untangling their limbs and hair, courteously handing each other body parts and keys, resuming residence in their homes, working out what crops they might raise and which forms of energy they could harness.

  —

  MEANWHILE THE TYRANT was congratulating himself for having dealt with Arkady. He had disliked the way Lokum had begged for Arkady’s life, and cared even less for her expression upon being told her pleas came too late. He didn’t think they’d had a love affair (that lanky pyromaniac could only dream of being worthy of Lokum’s attention), but Lokum’s behavior was too similar to that of the man Eirini the First loved. What was wrong with these people?

  —

  THE TYRANT set Lokum alight on their wedding day. Thanks to Arkady, fire had risen to the top of his list of elimination methods. He forced her to walk to the end of the longest bridge spanning the marshlands, and he drenched her in petrol and struck a flame. He’d given no real thought to decreasing his own flammability, so the event was referred to as an attempted murder-suicide. “Attempted” because when he tried to run away, the burning woman ran after him, shouting that she’d just that moment discovered something very interesting; he couldn’t kill her, he could never kill her . . . she took him in her arms and fed him to the fire he’d started. There was still quite a lot of him left when he jumped into the swamp, but the drowned held grudges and heaved him out onto land again, where he lay roasting to death while his bride strolled back toward the city, peeling blackened patches of wedding dress off her as she went. She put on some other clothes and took food to the prison where Arkady sat alone contemplating the large heap of questionable publications the guards had left him on their departure. Before Arkady could thank Lokum for the food (and, he hoped, her company) she said, “Wait a minute,” and ran off again, returning an hour later with his two friends. Leporello shook Arkady’s hand and Giacomo licked his face; this was a joke they’d vowed they’d make the next time they saw Arkady, and they thought it rather a good one. Arkady called out his thanks to Lokum, but she had no intention of staying this time either: “We’ve got to get you out of there,” she said, and left again.

  “It’s autumn, isn’t it?” Arkady asked Giacomo. He’d seen that Giacomo’s shoes and Leporello’s feet were soaking wet too, but he wanted to finish eating before he asked about that.

  “Yes! How did you know?”

  “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 whil
e 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.

  presence