What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  —

  THAT YEAR it was Klaudie who chose the St. Martin’s Day goose. The three women went to market and Klaudie asked Pankrác the goose farmer which of his flock was the greediest—“We want one that’ll eat from morning ’til night . . .” All Pankrác’s customers wanted the same characteristics in their St. Martin’s Day goose, but Pankrác had his reasons for wishing to be in Dornička’s good graces, so when her goddaughter’s daughter asked which goose was the greediest he was honest and handed over the goose in question. The goose allowed Klaudie to hand-feed her some scraps of lettuce and a few pieces of apple, but seemed baffled by this turn of events. She honked a few times, and Alžběta interpreted: “Me? Me . . . ? Surely there must be some mistake . . .”

  “Thanks, Pankrác . . . I’ll save you the neck . . .” Dornička spread newspaper all along the backseat of her car and placed the caged goose on top of the newspaper. The goose honked all the way home; they’d got a noisy one, but Dornička didn’t mind. When Klaudie said she felt sorry for the goose and wished they’d just gone to a supermarket and picked a packaged one, Dornička rolled her eyes. “This city child of yours,” she said to Alžběta, and to Klaudie: “You won’t be saying that once you’ve tasted its liver.”

  The goose quieted down a bit once she’d been installed in Dornička’s back garden. She would only eat from Klaudie’s hand, so it became Klaudie’s job to feed her. It’s well-known that geese don’t like people, so the companionship that arose between Klaudie and the goose was something of an oddity. Klaudie spoke to the goose as she pecked at her feed, and stroked the goose’s feathers so that they were sleek. Dornička harbored a mistrust of the goose, since she pecked hard at the ground in a particular patch of the garden—the patch where Dornička’s infernal lump had been buried. No wonder Klaudie and the goose got along; maybe they had long chats about all the things they could smell. The goose was extraordinarily greedy too, Dornička’s greediest yet: “Eating us out of house and home,” Dornička grumbled when Klaudie knocked on the kitchen door to ask if there were any more scraps.

  Alžběta was more concerned about Klaudie’s fondness for the goose. “She might not let us kill it,” she said. “And you know I like my goose meat, Dornička!”

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Dornička said. “Trust me, that goose’s days are numbered.”

  She caught Klaudie in her bedroom again and almost fought with her.

  “For the last time, Klaudie, what are you doing in here?”

  Klaudie fluttered her eyelashes and murmured something about scraps. Any scraps for the goose, Dornička . . . ?

  That gave Dornička an idea.

  Again, let’s not dress anything up in finery, let’s speak of things as they are: While Klaudie and Alžběta were sleeping, Dornička fed her lump to the goose. The flesh was gobbled up without hesitation and then the goose began to run around the garden in circles, around and around. This was dizzying to watch, so Dornička didn’t watch. She dropped the key inside the empty chest and poured herself a celebratory shot of slivovice. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

  —

  THE NEXT DAY Klaudie was bold enough to bring the empty chest to Dornička and ask what had been in it.

  “Kids don’t need to know. Please feed the goose again, Klaudie.”

  But Klaudie didn’t want to. She said the goose had changed. “She doesn’t honk at all anymore, and she seems aware,” she said.

  “Aware?”

  Dornička went to see for herself; she took a bucket of waterfowl feed out to the back garden.

  The goose appeared to have almost doubled in size overnight.

  Her eyes were bigger too.

  She looked at Dornička as if she was about to call her by name.

  Dornička threw the bucket on the ground and walked back into the house very quickly.

  “See what I mean?” Klaudie said.

  —

  IT WAS THE EVE of St. Martin’s Day, November 10th. The first snow of the winter was close by. Dornička abandoned reason for a few moments, just the amount of time required to switch on her laptop and order another red cape. Child-sized this time. Express delivery. When it arrived she left it in the back garden with the waterfowl feed and said prayerfully: “What will be will be.”

  —

  SHE LEFT THE BACK door open that night, and when the St. Martin’s Day goose came up the stairs and into her bedroom, she wasn’t taken by surprise, not even when she saw that the goose was wearing the red cape and had Dornička’s car keys in her beak.

  “Thank you, goose,” she said. “I appreciate you.”

  She drove the goose to the foot of Mount Radhošt’ and watched her waddle away up the mountain path, a bead of scarlet ascending into ash.

  Thank you, goose. I appreciate you.

  Alžběta the goose-meat lover didn’t even complain that much in the morning. She just glared at Klaudie and told her to forget about choosing the Christmas carp.

  freddy barrandov checks . . . in?

  As I was saying, I’m an inadequate son. I didn’t really notice this until I reached the age my father had been when he was imprisoned for repairing the broken faces of clock towers without authorization. He’d incurred the wrath of those who require certain things not to work at all. That’s what the broken clock towers had been designated as: remembrances of a civil war that stopped time at various locations scattered across my father’s country. Fixing the mechanisms seemed political, though it was impossible to agree on the exact meaning of the gesture. When my dad saw his first splintered clockface he just thought it was a proud and beautiful work that, if restored, would take the mortal sting out of being told how late you are, or how long you’ve been waiting, or how much longer you’ll have to wait.

  —

  MY MOTHER affirms life in her own way: She did some of her most thorough affirmation on behalf of a government-sponsored literary award that posed as a prize sponsored by a company that made typewriters. One year the writer chosen to win the award declined without giving a reason and asked that her name not be mentioned in connection with the award at all. Unfazed, my mother congratulated the next best writer on his win, but was almost laughed off the phone line: “It’s sweet of you to try this, but everybody knows my book isn’t that good,” he said. He named another writer and suggested the prize go to her, but the recommended writer didn’t fancy it either. There had to be a winner, so my mother went through all the shortlisted writers but it was “Thanks but no thanks” and “Oh but I couldn’t possibly” all round, so she went back to the originally selected winner and made some threats that caused the woman to reconsider and humbly accept her prize.

  Even though all went on as before, Mum’s developed a sort of prejudice against writers; there are behaviors she now calls “writerly,” but I think she actually means uncooperative. Anyway, my mother agreed with my father about the clockfaces they saw; she wanted to organize the ruin away. So the newlyweds had worked at this project together, though he never allowed anybody to even suggest that she’d been involved, taking all the blame (and speculation, and, in some quarters, esteem) onto his own shoulders. In court my father pleaded that he’d thought he was demonstrating good citizenship by providing a public service free of charge, but was asked why he’d provided this public service anonymously and at dead of night . . . why work under those conditions if you believe that what you’re doing is above reproach? And then all he could say was, Right, I see. When you put it like that it looks bad.

  Another thing the law didn’t like: He’d broken into the clock towers, and left them open to people seeking shelter, attracting all sorts of new elements into moneyed neighborhoods and driving established elements out into shabbier neighborhoods so that it was no longer clear what kind of person you were going to find in any part of the city.

  —

  MY FATHER got a three-
year prison sentence and came out of it mostly in one piece due to his being a useful person; a sort of live-in handyman. He gained experience in tackling a variety of interesting technical mishaps that rarely occur in small households, and now works alongside my mother at a niche hotel in Cheshire . . . Hotel Glissando, it’s called, and it’s niche in a way that’ll take a while to describe. Dad’s Chief Maintenance Officer there. He more or less states his own salary, as the management team (headed by my mother) hasn’t yet found anyone else willing and able to handle all the things that suddenly need fixing at Hotel Glissando.

  As Frederick Barrandov Junior, there was an expectation that I’d follow in Frederick Barrandov Senior’s footsteps, that at some point I’d leave my job as a nursery school teacher and join Hotel Glissando’s maintenance team.

  —

  A MONTH or so after I’d turned thirty-three I learned that Mum had assured the hotel’s reclusive millionaire owner that I’d join the team before the year was out.

  She broke this news to me over lunch.

  “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked.

  My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery. Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year it is and why he was even born . . .”

  Would I have answered differently if I’d known that Mum intended this to be a proper talk about my future? Probably not.

  Mum was livid.

  “Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel? Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel?? If that’s the height of your ambition you and I are finished, Freddy.”

  “Come come, Mother . . . How can we ever be finished? I’m your son.”

  “I’m going to give you one more chance,” she said. “What are your plans for the next few years? What motivates you?”

  I spoke of the past instead of the future; a past, it turned out, I had neither lived for myself nor been told about. I remembered a sign that read REBEL TOWN, but not in English. I remembered people striding around with cutlasses, and a nursemaid who was a tiger—her lullabies were purred softly, and the melodies clicked when they caught against her teeth: Sleep for a little while now, little one, or sleep forever . . .

  “That was my childhood, not yours,” my mother snapped. “Yours is a pitiful existence. I had you followed for six months and all you did apart from turn up to play in a sandpit with infants was go to galleries, bars, the cinema, and a couple of friends’ houses. What kind of person are you? I spoke to your weed dealer and he said you don’t even buy that much. You are without virtue and without serious vice. Do you really think you can go on like this?”

  “What shall I do then?”

  “You’ll start working at Hotel Glissando next week.”

  “Will I? Can’t somebody else do it?”

  “No, Freddy. It’s got to be you.”

  —

  THIS WAS SEXISM; my younger sister Odette is much handier than me. I pointed this out, but my mother seemed not to hear and proposed that I shadow Dad at the hotel for a few months in order to acquire the skills I lacked. I told Mum that I wouldn’t and couldn’t leave Pumpkin Seed Class at this crucial moment in the development of their psyches. Mum told me her career was at stake. A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unscrupulous woman who was just below Mum in the chain of command was gunning for her job, subtly and disastrously leaving my mother out of the loop so that she missed crucial directives and was left unaware of changes to the numerous hourly schedules and procedures that it was her task to oversee and complete. I could see my mother’s stress as she spoke: It was there in her hair, which usually looks thoroughly done to a state-regulated standard. But now there were knots in my mother’s hair. I’d never seen that before.

  —

  HAVING SAID I’d sleep on my decision I went over to my sister’s flat and we talked all night. We both like the Glissando well enough. Discretion is its main feature: You go there to hide. The furnishings are a mixture of dark reds and deep purples. Moving through the lobby is like crushing grapes and plums and being bathed in the resultant wine. There are three telephone booths in the lobby. Their numbers are automatically withheld and they’re mainly used for lies. Once as I was leaving the hotel after running an errand for my dad I saw a man in a trench coat stagger into one of those phone booths. He had what looked like a steak knife sticking out of his chest and must’ve trailed some blood into the booth and lost a lot more at quite a rapid rate thereafter, though I didn’t see much of this. Blood’s a near-perfect match for the color scheme—each drop is smoothly stirred in.

  I lingered in order to provide assistance; the man with the knife sticking out of his chest picked up the phone, dialed, and explained to somebody on the other end that he was working late. “Heh—yes, well, save me a slice!” His voice was so well modulated that if I hadn’t been able to see him I wouldn’t have entertained even the faintest suspicion that there was a knife in him. Then he phoned an ambulance and collapsed. That man impressed me . . . he impressed me. As he waited for the paramedics his eyes darkened and cleared, darkened and cleared, but he gripped the knife and his grip held firm. He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care more for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it. To the boy gawping through the glass it seemed that this man strove to be a worthy vessel, to live on and on at knifepoint, its brilliance enmeshed with his guts. If he was a man without regrets then he was the first I’d seen. And I remember thinking: Well, all right. I wouldn’t mind ending up like that.

  —

  AT THE FRONT desk of the Glissando, guests can request and receive anything, anything at all. Odette was there when a man with very bad nerves had asked for a certificate guaranteeing that the building’s foundations were unassailable; this man was convinced that he was pursued by a burrowing entity that lived beneath any house he lived in and raised his floors by a foot every year, the entity’s long-term goal being to raise his quarry so high that he could never again descend into the world of his fellow human beings. Our mother made no comment on this man’s convictions but provided him with a certificate stating that there never had been and never could be room for any form of other dwelling beneath the Hotel Glissando. The only thing a hotel guest may not ask for is, for some reason, an iguana-skin wallet. The woman who requested one was told to “Get out of here and never come back.” And as the doorman threw the ex-guest’s luggage out onto the street he said: “An iguana-skin wallet? Where do you think you are?”

  As far as we know, that’s the only time a Glissando guest’s request hasn’t been fulfilled. For years Odette and I have felt that our parents’ dedication to taking care of Hotel Glissando’s guests borders on the unnatural. Odette has told me that in some way the hotel and its guests are like the broken clockfaces, except that Mum and Dad are compensated for their work instead of being punished.

  Even so: “They’ve given the best years of their lives to that place, and that’s their own business—but now they want to throw my life in too?” That was how I put it to Odette. Odette said she felt I was overlooking something: For as long as we’ve known our parents, my mum’s professional value has been dependent on my dad’s. She’s been treated as a facilitator for his talents for so long that she’s come to believe that’s what she’s here for. Mum brought Barrandov Senior to Hotel Glissando, so by hook or by crook she’ll bring Barrandov Junior there too.

  “I don’t know . . . if I give in to this won’t I be setting that image in stone? Is that really good for Mum?”

  Odette’s eyes twinkled. She said she thought I’d actually ruin the image, since there was no way I could match up to Dad.

  “Thanks, sis . . . many thanks . . .”

  “I, however, can match up t
o Dad, and maybe even outdo him.”

  Was Odette’s confidence well-founded? I thought so. She’d always wanted to learn all that Dad had wanted to teach us. And when we asked Dad which of us he’d prefer to work with he said: “Odette, obviously.” My sister was making a killing as a self-employed plumber, but she gave all that up to be there for my parents. She had no regrets either: said she loved the work and could see why our parents were so committed to the Glissando. I asked her to elaborate and she became so emotional that it made me feel lonely.

  —

  I, ON THE other hand, lost my way for a while. Mum took to behaving as if I’d never even existed: “Imagine if I’d only had one child . . . one child who’d throw my life’s work away in favor of Hayseed Class or whatever it’s called,” she told Odette. Dad and I spent Sunday evenings at the pub as usual, but it just wasn’t the same. I hadn’t realized how important it was for me to have both parents on my side. Mum did a lot for us when we were coming up. Just like all their other work, she and Dad split their share of raising us right down the middle, finding mostly trustworthy grown-ups to be with us when they couldn’t, keeping track of all our permission slips, hobbies, obsessions, allergies (both faked and genuine), not to mention the growth spurts, mood swings, the bargaining for their attention, and the attempts to avoid their scrutiny. I remember Mum repeatedly telling us we had good hearts and good brains. When she said that we’d say “thanks” and it might have sounded as if we were thanking her for seeing us that way but actually we were thanking her for giving us whatever goodness was in us. She didn’t believe I was giving my all to teaching and she was right. She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I’m not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.