Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  My mum’s chronicles would probably be quite different. She wants to give the pilfered fortune back to those it was taken from; it’s just that she has to find it first. So off she goes around the world, chasing clues and visiting charlatans who promise to help her reclaim our family honour. We haven’t spoken for years. This Sichuan Affair of ours is a truly deep-rooted daftness.

  Respectfully speaking, R. Pan D (just as respectfully as you wished we’d crash and burn), I’ve told you all this because seeing a train and getting yourself hyped up about some 1737 events you don’t really understand is not too far off from using your mouth as a gemstone safe.

  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and so on,

  Ava Kapoor

  “Which part of this is most likely to make R. Pandey grind their teeth to dust?” Xavier asked, waving his hand over the pages like a gleeful conjurer.

  I rubbed my chin. “Well, Xavier, I’d say it’ll be the relentless misspelling of the surname. You?”

  “I reckon it’ll be the overall tone … you know … the explainingness of it all. Let’s just live quiet lives, OK, shithead?” He kissed his fingers at the sheets of paper before slipping them back into the envelope. Then we rolled up our sleeves, more than half-convinced that the scavenged millions were hidden somewhere on the train. Maybe even in this very carriage …

  We were just uncertain what currency it would be in. Maybe it was millions of won worth of emeralds?

  “Never mind the format,” Xavier said. “There’ll be a lot of it, and that’s how we’ll know we’ve found it.”

  We called out to Árpád and Chela, hoping elite search abilities were a characteristic that mongooses shared. Árpád Montague XXX doesn’t give up until he finds what he’s looking for. His approach is very in-depth, though, so you have to be resigned to the things around you never looking the same again after the search. It was probably just as well that a couple of seconds after Xavier called in the mongooses (and they failed to appear) Allegra Yu’s voice came through the tannoy speaker above our heads, proposing we meet her in the picture gallery car in five minutes.

  8.

  The picture gallery was just next door, and windowless. A low-hanging lightbulb simulated wintry sunshine; each of the canvases were bathed in white. There was one on each wall, and they were paired. The two blank, unframed canvases faced each other, and so did two scratchily pigmented paintings, both portraits. It looked as if the painter had tried to scrape away every other line he laid down. But this discordance was gentle; the colours pledged to settle at the touch of a hand. Xavier approached the head-and-shoulders portrait first; quite confrontationally, I thought. I could see what was making him nervous. The subject of the portrait looked as if he was somewhere in his early twenties, his clean-shaven cheeks heavy with puppy fat. He appeared to be leaning back and to the side, deliberately avoiding either the centre of the frame or the light in front of it. He also appeared to be looking at Xavier. There was merriment and malice in those unblinking sloe-black eyes. I tucked my hand into the back pocket of Xavier’s jeans, and we stood almost nose to nose with the portrait, trying to stare it down together. The man in the painting was dark haired, ruddy of skin, and bushy of eyebrow. Whichever way I tilted my head, Xavier was the only one of us I could catch him looking at. A lock of hair fell over his left eye, just like a lock of mine fell over my right eye. I’d sometimes tuck or blow the lock out of the way, but this guy would probably just have stared at you through it. The white shirt he wore was mostly unbuttoned, revealing that he either waxed his chest or hadn’t bothered to paint the hair in. I bet that was a constant—starting things you couldn’t finish, I thought. Then wondered about my confident use of the past tense, and my verdict that this was a self-portrait. One more thing: I’d seen him somewhere. One, two, three, the facts I knew.

  “Was he giving you the eye like this when you were here yesterday?”

  Xavier nodded. “The expression was a bit different, though. Probably just my mood.”

  “Different how?”

  Xavier didn’t answer.

  I turned to face the portrait that was hanging on the opposite wall. It was of a father and son. Their resemblance was unmistakable, and the setting was presumably the father’s study; there were lots of books and box files, and a theremin dimly visible behind the desk. The father was seated with an arm thrown proudly around his son, who was standing and looking at him with a mixture of affection and reserve. The son was the subject of the self-portrait behind me, and in this portrait with his father he was younger still. About ten. They’d been much older when I saw them in the flesh, but I had seen them both. Five years ago.

  Not together like this, smiling at each other—

  Their faces loomed before me, stretched, contracted. In a whirl of black hair and blue tulle, Allegra was there, both hands beneath my elbow, propping me up and twisting me away from the canvas. If she hadn’t, I’d have staggered into it head-first.

  Xavier’s back was to me, and he looked round. “Who are they?” he asked. His face showed … I’m not sure. Not worry, exactly. Sadness. Seriousness.

  “That’s Přemysl Stojaspal,” Allegra said, pointing at the self-portrait and at the ten-year-old portrayed standing beside his father. “And that’s his father, Karel. Both painted by Přem. You seem to recognize them, Otto?”

  “I’ll tell you, but tell me something first—”

  “No, Otto.” Allegra was shaking her head. “I’m afraid not, mate. You don’t get on a train, put us behind schedule with a search for a jumper there’s no trace of, then get to set the pace of the questioning.”

  “So you didn’t find anything. That was what I wanted to know.”

  Just as it had been with the man in the fire. The one I’d rushed in to rescue. At least that was how it had seemed at the time: it felt like I had to get him out of there, I had to because nobody else could. I’d seen him in the window—a motionless figure. Přemysl. He had seen me, had given me a look of terror. I thought, Why doesn’t he run? Maybe fright had glued him to the ground, inflating his eyes and the “o” of his mouth, hollowing his muscles and pouring itself through them. He stared down, I stared up, a cupboard fell (on him? behind him?), and I ran in through the main door of the house—which was where I’d seen Karel, his father, on the stairs. The wheezing, grey-faced man, thrusting his cane further up along the banisters to try to speed his progress, the flies around him—I will always remember them as having flown out of his open jaws, even though I know that can’t have happened. The old man’s breath in my face as he pulled at my jacket and said: “My son. Please …” I’m not sure what he said next. I talked about this with the psychiatrist I got referred to afterwards; it’s fairly similar to Xavier wavering between readings of Ava’s sign. I think the man said, Please help my son, but I also heard Please stop my son. The psychiatrist said I might have conflated meanings into one word. Meanings that disorganised my hearing. I’d stopped the discussion there, because both of the meanings were moot; the flat was empty, and running in there didn’t help or stop anyone.

  “Otto? It seems as if you’ve seen Karel and Přem before?”

  “You already said that,” I muttered.

  “I’m giving you another chance to answer while it’s just us. Laura’s on her way over, and there are things it’s better not to discuss in front of her. So if you know anything, Otto, it’s important to say so now. Please.”

  Watching her as she spoke, I saw what I’d missed in our first encounter, when she’d mostly been listening. A current flickered across that billion-facet face; the kind generated by habitual flow between two opposing thoughts (or future events?). One troubled her, and the other got her all overjoyed. She couldn’t choose which would prevail, so she made preparations that removed her from the present and placed her one step ahead of us. But only one. She exhibited the top two characteristics I look for in those who book hypnotism sessions with me: marked inattention towards immediate surroundings
and heightened sensory arousal. It’s even better (from a lazy hypnotist’s perspective) when one is linked to or caused by the other. In short, Allegra Yu was highly suggestible.

  “They’re friends of Ava’s, aren’t they?” I said. “The composer and …”

  “They were friends of mine too. Přem’s a dabbler, but mostly he ran the publishing house his father set up. Until he disappeared.”

  “When was that?” Xavier asked.

  “Well, the last time anybody we know of spoke to him in person was about five years ago. The summer of 2014. There’ve been e-mails and phone conversations since, mostly to do with the publishing house, but the house has had to drop him because they’re almost sure the person e-mailing and taking calls isn’t actually him, and they can’t really work with a mystery publisher, no matter how efficient. When did you see him, Otto?”

  (The summer of 2014. The fire was in July.)

  “Who? Přem? I’ve never seen him,” I said.

  The firefighters had found no one in the flat, and the man who’d called them, the same man who’d asked me to help or stop his son, told them he was there to collect post; he said he’d known his son wasn’t at home. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said to me, but he thought it must have been something like That’s my son’s flat. I couldn’t let myself believe that that old man was lying, but it felt even less possible that he was telling the truth. And actually I didn’t need to know what kind of event I had experienced that day, as long as it was never revived or repeated.

  “If only you knew how much you sound like Ava right now.” Allegra reached up, took off my sunglasses, and continued unfazed by my devil-red eyes: “That’s why Karel gave her these paintings; she kept asking what Přem looked like. She wouldn’t speak to Přem, and she’d look at a chair he was sitting in or an area he was standing in, then say there wasn’t anyone there. It got a bit creepy. I think Přem was freaked out by it as well, so the atmosphere was a bit prickly until she finally let the joke go.”

  Ava had told me about playing her theremin to a vacant room. Now it sounded like she’d never stopped considering the room vacant; she’d only stopped mentioning that aspect to those who were uncomfortable with it.

  Allegra paused when Xavier asked about photos of Přem. “If you give each other significant looks after I say this I’m kicking you both off the train right now, but … when Přem went missing, we tried to dig up photos of him, and there aren’t any.”

  “Not a single photo, eh,” I said.

  “Of someone who walked this earth for over thirty years,” Xavier said.

  It was only the viewpoint that had changed; I’d moved my whole body, not just my head. Xavier had switched positions too. That was why the self-portrait now appeared to be looking at Allegra. Those were the reasons, the very good reasons, for the apparent alteration; Přemysl was not going to look at me next, no, no, nothing of the sort.

  I copied his focus on Allegra, who was telling us: “Look, now that we don’t spend time together anymore I feel like there’s something fishy about the lack of photos as well. And other things come to mind, all sorts of niggling things I suddenly want to bother him about and have him explain away. For example, look at those paintings … Přem made them too. He got rid of all the others, so these are the only ones left.”

  She gestured towards the two blank canvases, a narrow streak of white above each of the connecting doors.

  “They’re not paintings,” Xavier said, after a moment. “Unless? We’re looking at white paint on white canvas or some similar abstraction?”

  “Abstraction?” Allegra said tiredly. “No. Just tell me what’s in the paintings.”

  I looked up and to the left, swivelled, then looked up and to the right. I saw white unbroken by even the faintest hint of an outline. Perhaps there was something notable about the smoothness and density of texture, but that wasn’t something you could say was “in” the paintings.

  “Why don’t you just tell us?”

  “No, you have to say it. Look at the one to the left and talk. Just say whatever comes into your head.”

  I surrendered first: “OK, but all I can see is an axe about the length of my arm with a ribbon tied into a bow around the handle. What …?”

  Allegra grabbed a fistful of her own hair and nodded.

  Xavier stared up at the canvas too, closed his eyes tightly, opened them again and said: “Sorry, but I can’t see that the axe is sketched in grayscale, but the ribbon’s ruby red—”

  “Wah,” I said. Because even after hearing his description and my own, all I saw was a white canvas … and, it seemed, an image that had utterly bypassed my eyes and flowed straight into words.

  “And to the right?” Allegra said. “You can’t pause. Keep looking and keep saying what you’re thinking.”

  “But, Allegra, what devilry is this?” Xavier said, eyes probing the canvas from corner to corner. “Does everybody you ask to look into this white box tell you it’s an utter blank in the centre of which is a gamine brown woman with an ecstatic smile and her hands in the air like she’s conducting a chorus of angels and they sound so good she’s dropped her baton?”

  I faced the second canvas dead on. White light bounced off white material, and this is what I told Xavier and Allegra: “This is a white canvas. There isn’t a single gap in the white, it’s forceful in its very flatness, so how can Ava be layered on top with this downright exuberant finger-painted effect, playing an invisible theremin …”

  Xavier made a confounded, delighted clucking sound in the back of his throat. He took a photo of each of the blank canvases, and Allegra and I leaned over his phone as he zoomed in and zoomed out again. The white got grittier when he zoomed in, but that was all.

  “Yeah,” Allegra said. “I wish I’d asked Přem how he made these paint-less paintings. I think I held back because I thought I wouldn’t understand visual artist chat. Now I know I should’ve insisted he give me a term or something I could research. Because being left behind with works like this makes me wonder who he really was. Mind you, I didn’t wonder when I was with him. I felt like I just knew. This is a bloke I went to galleries and fashion shows with, and there’d be a stir when he showed up, like, Oh, it’s Přem … finally. He didn’t really do nights out, and he wasn’t on social media, but maybe he set out to perform some of its functions? On a day out we’d stop in at ten or eleven places before he went home. It was kind of like a culture crawl … he’d describe everyone he introduced me to as a beautiful mind. In a way he was too much of a super connector and hyperactive man about town to get caught on camera, d’you know what I mean? I’m getting sad that I keep saying ‘was.’ At least the paintings are a good likeness.”

  She had some photos of the elder Stojaspal in good health. Karel at the beach, laughing with his feet buried in the surf. Karel in a sound studio with headphones on and pen in hand, taking notes on what he heard. Karel and Ava with forks crossed, fighting for the last meatball in a pasta bowl. She held her phone up against Karel’s side of the father-son portrait and put the painter’s representational accuracy beyond doubt.

  There was a commotion at the doorway that connected the gallery carriage to the postal-sorting carriage; Allegra’s hand tightened on my arm while Xavier went to see what was happening. He came back with Laura, two chairs, and many exclamations.

  “Laura De Souza,” he said, to me, to Laura, to the air. “What … why … how are the two of us travelling together again?”

  Laura set down her own two chairs and gestured to us to sit. She had a folder tucked under her arm. “That’s what I’m wondering. What could he possibly be doing here, the little train schoolboy all grown up? Ordinarily I’d be happy to see you, but we really can’t have disruptions right now, and disruption does seem to travel with you, I’m sorry to say.”

  “We doubt the reunion is a coincidence,” Allegra said, as she handed out round lollipops. We all took one.

  Xavier and Laura spoke in French
for a while. I caught “ton père” and “Limoges,” and Laura beamed momentarily before returning to English:

  “Listen, gentlemen, before we start the train up again, we need to show you something. And if there’s anything you need to tell us afterwards, please come clean.”

  Laura looked at Allegra, to see if she had anything to add. Allegra only shrugged, so Laura took a photocopied document out of her folder and handed it to Xavier, who drew his chair closer to mine so that I could read along with him. It was the Last Will and Testament of Karel Stojaspal as filed on August 31, 2014. The name of the executor was unfamiliar, but Ava Kapoor was the sole beneficiary—for her kindness to my son, he’d written. And her inheritance of his property, investment portfolio, status as musical copyright beneficiary, everything, was dependent on her undergoing a psychiatric evaluation that confirmed her as being of wholly sound mind on her thirtieth birthday. Should that condition not be met, half of the proceeds of Karel Stojaspal’s estate were earmarked for such medical treatments as Ava Kapoor might require for the rest of her life, and the other half would go to the institutions that had moulded him: the Prague Conservatory and the Royal Academy of Music.