13.
LAURA DE SOUZA
Ms. Kapoor,
You have asked me to write down my recollections regarding Přemysl Stojaspal. In case we need to review some details, you say, without specifying what events might make this necessary. You will recall that I initially refused, but I am now complying because you’ve promised that if I do, you’ll stop the racket you’re making and let us sleep in peace.
I believe that I’ve seen Přemysl Stojaspal—or, at least, a man resembling the one whose portrait hangs in the gallery car of the Lucky Day—once.
I know … why this avoidance of clear confirmation … did I see him or not? Unfortunately, having to report activities onboard this train once a week has made me overly cautious. My employer values specificity over certainty.
Both Ms. Yu and I learnt to drive trains on the East Coast Main Line, at roughly the same time, though her pace was different from mine. We didn’t cross paths back then—this is something we’ve discovered through conversation. I showed up with a Canadian high school diploma and a robust resistance to being examined, so I wasn’t able to take Ms. Yu’s university graduate fast track … I trained part time whilst completing four years of railroad and rail station shift work instead. What did I do on the station and around the track? What didn’t I do! But here’s the bit you want: during my final six months of training I landed a shift as a conductor. I was living in Durham at the time, and the segment of the route that I checked tickets for passed from Durham through to Edinburgh Waverley. I’d eat something at the other end—or sometimes stay the night, depending on any station shifts that came back again. This was where I saw you, Ava, and the portrait look-alike—on the Edinburgh Waverley to Durham route. You see a lot of things on trains, but when I look back over those six months of train conducting, I’d say you getting on the train along with the portrait look-alike and the sleeping mongoose was the seventh or eighth most memorable sight. It was about half past six in the morning. You had the mongoose all swaddled up like a baby (fooling the sum total of zero fellow passengers, by the way), and it looked as if you were trying to get away from him without attracting attention to your fear. You took a window seat and huddled up with Chela, checking your phone every few seconds. Your companion was wearing silk pajamas underneath a trench coat, and he took the window seat directly behind you and stared at you, steadily and angrily, he was all, GRRRRR, at the back of your head. And two or three times, very hesitantly, he’d raise a hand up over your shoulder. I think he intended to snatch the mongoose! But then you’d cuddle her and the man would look all gloomy. After I checked his ticket, he did ask me whether conductors could arrest passengers in lieu of the police. I told him I would check and asked if there was a problem.
The man in the silk pajamas pointed at you, Ms. Kapoor, and whispered to me that you’d just stolen his mongoose. And he asked me what he should do. He looked as if he was at his wit’s end; I pitied him and asked if he’d tried talking to you about it. He said yes, he’d tried and tried. I asked if I should mediate, and he said no, no, there was nothing left to say, that I should either detain you or leave you be. You may indeed have stolen that mongoose, but you did not seem in any way a threat to other passengers, so naturally, I let you be. It was a very short trip. I checked your tickets at Newcastle, and when I came back around at Chester-le-Street, all three of you had gone.
The second incident I will mention is not a sighting of Přemysl Stojaspal but a sort of postscript regarding my change of career. I have a history of violence that renews itself whenever I come into contact with the general public; this is the conclusion drawn from almost every prior form of employment I’ve tried my hand at. There were two altercations with passengers during my time on the East Coast Main Line—one sort of blew over without any consequences, but the other was serious enough to bring about my dismissal. After the train job I worked as a nightclub bouncer for a few months, against the advice of everybody who knew me—they said I would end up in prison. And I did. It was a four-year sentence, and I got into fights while I was inside as well. Partly because I’m someone who just gets into fights, Ms. Kapoor. People piss me off with their bullshit, and I give them a smack—or vice versa. There is no point asking me why I get so angry. You should go to the people who are disrespectful until they get hit and ask them why they’re like that. But partly the fighting was a little bit calculated as well. I didn’t have the tolerance a person needs to be part of society, so I thought it would be for the best if I never returned to it. But it was only society I’d given up on, not life, so if I had to go, I’d have to be killed.
I don’t think like that anymore. Not after these years spent unseeing the world with you and Ms. Yu. But back then, towards the end of my sentence, I’d only fought with other inmates, so the conflict instigators were hardly ever revealed. The guards couldn’t pin anything on me, so on paper I was good as gold … and a few months before my sentence was up, I was offered opportunities to apply for jobs and start looking for housing on the outside. I wasn’t interested. I got a letter congratulating me on securing a position at a loans company that would begin seven days after my release. The letter also invited me to stipulate my own monthly salary; my first month would be paid in advance to cover any expenses I’d incur getting to work. It had been sent by airmail and had a Hong Kong postmark. I hadn’t applied for that job. Or any job. I threw the letter away. A couple of days later, one of the guards approached me with pen and paper, saying, “Mr. Lin’s waiting … Write down your salary …”
I guess I was supposed to tremble and go, “Oh my God, this Mr. Lin has eyes and ears everywhere!” But I was still in this state of apathy unless there was a chance of a proper fight. I didn’t ask any questions, just wrote down any old figure. The guard must have posted it. A few days later, Mr. Lin visited me himself, put the sheet with the numbers on it down in front of me, and said “That’s a bit high. Maybe after five years … but let’s talk about now.”
He wanted me to monitor the situation regarding a loan he’d paid out. We looked at Karel’s will together. The sums you’d been borrowing from Mr. Lin were getting larger and larger, but based on the size of the inheritance, he didn’t mind that. What if that equilibrium of yours didn’t pan out, though? Mr. Lin doesn’t think Karel made that a condition just for fun. And he does think Ms. Yu’s so soft that she’d just stand by going “Oh no!” while you lost your grip on reality. So it wouldn’t hurt to throw in a participating observer of his own—that’s what he told me.
I don’t remember my reply; something about it being nice of him to care about how you were doing. I do remember that after I said whatever I said, he asked me to look at him carefully. I did. His eyes strangled light. He said, “Laura, you can see it, right? That I’m not a good person. If you make me lose money, I will eradicate you from the earth. I’m a craftsman, and I never leave the work to an inferior practitioner. I do it all myself.”
Mr. Lin had a fancy smartwatch on—against visiting rules and regulations, of course. Holding his wrist beneath the table and inviting me to look down at the watch, he showed me some pictures that made it very hard for me not to throw up right there in the visiting room. He had them saved in a special photo album. He talked me through the processes depicted in a tone of humble absorption very similar to the ones you hear in art restoration video voiceovers. But he also told me he believed in consent. “I’ll tell you about the job, and if you don’t want to do it, you won’t hear from me again. I’m here because a friend recommended you. A close friend.”
I asked which friend, and he said: “Přem Stojaspal. Son of the guy whose will this is. Seems he’s anxious for this Ava to inherit. That or a detailed eyewitness account of whatever disaster befalls her. He’s a tricky one.” Tricky Přemysl Stojaspal may well be, but I’d never met him. Or so I thought. I didn’t exchange names with the man who boarded the train with you either … now you see why I told you I couldn’t help with your enquiries. Here they are anyway,
Ms. Kapoor. The notes of a former hothead who took a job based on the conviction that she’d finally met an opponent who could overpower her will to live.
14.
ZEINAB RASHID
Dear Ava,
I hope you and Allegra are pulling off that old sanity trick, all right; I think about you both often. I think about Karel, too, and Přem. I considered not writing this letter to you, and then I considered not sending it—I have a feeling this is a common reaction among those you’ve asked to try to put Přem in writing. In my case, there’s an additional sense of impropriety. It’s not right for the executor of Karel’s will to gossip and speculate about his state of mind when he wrote it. Anyway, if you’re reading this, I found a way to dismiss those scruples.
Karel was one of the first students to take my History of Music for Strings course, you know. And Allegra was one of the last. My first impressions of both students were so wide of the mark I can only laugh them off. I thought Karel needed a bit more self-confidence and Allegra needed a bit less. They both took an interest in my lecture on an eighteenth-century priest and an instrument he devised—a hypothetical instrument that could not be brought into actuality despite many years of labour. I didn’t realise the extent to which that story took hold of Karel Stojaspal’s imagination until I read “The Ocular Harpsichord”—have you read it, Ava, the novella Karel wrote? It’s all in there, in the chilling immediacy of Karel’s “I,” as he tells of Louis Bertrand Castel’s proposal to make music visible to the naked eye, and then every grain of the quicksand that drew him into its embrace as he failed. The ruin of his health and finances. The blighting of his view of Creation.
Allegra didn’t get it. She kept looking all around her during that lecture, seeking the point she was missing in the expressions of the other students. But then A’s viable ideas come in clusters; if one doesn’t ripen after all, there’s still a good chance one of the others will, so why get into a tizzy over the one concept? Karel adores breezy prodigal talents. He married one after graduation. A former classmate of his, in fact. Poppy Dixon. I was at their wedding, and then they moved to Newcastle once Poppy started as a 2nd Violin for the Royal Northern Sinfonia. Poppy was a bit too nice for Karel. No, what I mean is that Karel was too cruel for Poppy, but never allowed her to realise it. Karel’s cruel streak, his tendency to taunt and prod, so perplexed Poppy that he feared she wouldn’t put up with it. He hid that cruel streak from his wife and only showed it to his friends. Which was perfectly lovely for us, of course. However: I will let those stories die.
We frequently double dated when they were in town—me and Stefan, Karel and Poppy. We were just about old enough to be their parents, but we probably looked more like their grandparents. Those two had such a glow about them, and didn’t yet understand about mortgages and things like that. Karel said Poppy gave him music. She’d wake up humming, and he’d be off at once, setting what he’d heard into a composition. They had three years like that, then a very bad year—Poppy was so gravely ill—and we lost her.
My first point about Přem is that I don’t know anything about his mother. Karel would allow people to assume Přem is Poppy’s son, but he almost certainly isn’t. Of course, a downside of long-distance friendship is that it takes some time to become aware of a new factor in your friends’ life. I do, however, find it extraordinary that, after a decade of quarterly lunches without any mention of a new partner, fling, or any development falling between those two posts, Karel introduced me to Přem, who looked to be all of ten years old.
I asked the little boy how old he was, and he smiled at me and said, “Guess!”
Karel had been ill for about a month prior; he characterised it as a stomach complaint and told me his doctor found nothing wrong, and I believed him at the time, but I don’t anymore. I mean I believe Karel was laid low by what he called his stomach complaint, but I doubt he saw a doctor about it. He probably stayed at home all month, possibly feeling death draw near and shrinking away, and somewhere near the middle of all that Přem arrived. Dropped off by his mother, probably. I am volunteering this as a guess even though I don’t believe it. I’m not sure what I do believe concerning Přemysl.
I paid Karel an impromptu visit one evening. I didn’t tell him I was coming, I just took the train up to Newcastle and took a taxi to his house. That morning I had felt that something was the matter and that it might not be too late to fix it as long as I saw Karel that very day. Karel answered the door himself, looking better than I’d seen him in a while, and I felt as if I’d caught myself wishing bad things on him. I got a warm welcome and a cream tea from him, even though darkness was falling. We talked for hours. Přem was about seventeen by then. Karel was particularly pleased with how well he was doing at school, and was matter-of-fact about him continuing higher education close to home, so that he wouldn’t be out at night. I asked him if he didn’t think he was being too strict with Přem, and he began a circumspect answer, then his telephone rang upstairs. He excused himself; there was a call he’d been expecting all day. And almost as soon as he had gone, Přem was there. I don’t mean he had come in, I mean he was there. There was a lamp beside the chair I was sitting in; he switched it on and said, “Yes, Ms. Rashid, he is too strict. Thank you for being on my side.”
I may have simply gibbered for a moment; I just couldn’t get my bearings. He told me that, because I was on his side, he wanted to give me a present. I think that’s what he told me. Very strange, that night. When I think back to it, I think I must have … misunderstood somehow? “Misunderstood” doesn’t seem to be the right word, but he was saying nonthreatening things at normal pitch, yet everything he said scared the hell out of me. There had to be a misunderstanding somewhere. Anyway, he said he wanted to give me a present. And I thought, whatever this present is, I certainly mustn’t accept it. It was also beginning to be rather difficult to comprehend where exactly in the room he was. He switched on two more lamps and he seemed to be where they were and also by the bookcase and also, quite horribly, sitting at my feet with his elbows on my knees.
“A musician without an instrument,” Přem said. “A woman who will never marry … hmmm … I’ve got just the thing for you all the same. Don’t you want your present, Ms. Rashid?”
“No,” I gasped. “Go to bed.”
“But you’ll like it. The present. I can bring you someone. Anyone you want. Just think of someone and I’ll bring them.”
“Bring someone? From where?”
He switched on another lamp and said, “Anywhere …”
Karel got off the phone and came back, thank God. He gave Přem a hearty clap on the shoulder: “Bedtime, right?”
“Bedtime,” Přem agreed.
“I’ll just say goodnight to Zeinab, and then I’ll be with you.”
“Then you’ll be with me.”
I never visited Karel at home after dark again, even after he assured me that Přem was now “much better at night.” There are a couple of other stories about Přem from when he was ten or so; hearsay, so I’ll be brief with these. The first is that a pair of would-be kidnappers took Přem from the posh primary school Karel was sending him to, but returned him in the middle of the night. It’s the middle-of-the-night bit that made me think this actually could have happened; the kidnappers saw what he was and just took him home. There is this too: when Přem was asked for some description of the kidnappers, he said that one was a white man and the other was a white woman, that they were “not as old as my father,” and both of them made him sad. Why … had they harmed him somehow? “No,” he said, “they were fine at first, but then they started to look like this”—he drew two faces with upside-down smiles—“and after that they just kept crying and crying and crying … It was sad …”
The other bit of hearsay is to do with a violinist who Karel mentored for a while; a somewhat pudgy young man who was self-conscious about his weight. This violinist volunteered to play for Přem at night but couldn’t stay awake. At around six in th
e morning, Karel found the young man passed out in the second-floor bathtub with leeches writhing all the way up to his chin. Alive, fortunately, and later, the young man told a story (of sorts) about Přem “bringing the leeches because he knew I wanted to be skinny. He said it was the easiest way.” But Karel insisted this was “largely untrue,” whatever that means, and the violinist stopped telling his Přemysl tale once Karel threatened to sue. We’ll just have to shrug about that incident.
So far I have not been fair to Přem. As you will have seen for yourself, he was a great comfort to his father. His manner improved as he got older; at various points over the two decades I was in contact with him, I observed that he was getting kindlier, possibly sadder. He wasn’t musical, but I know that he pursued the visual arts with quite a lot of energy. I’ve heard quite confused descriptions of a series of “white paintings” he produced, but never saw one. And then he burned them all.
Before that there was a row about being cut out of the will, of course, but I’m not so sure it was about the money and property. I was there with Karel in his study. Přem came in with a contract for Karel to sign, threw the contract down, and said: “Change the will.”
Karel looked at him very coldly and asked what change Přem wished him to make.
“Leave it all to me. Your estate, or whatever it’s called.”
Karel snorted, but Přem said it again. “Leave it all to me. Unless … unless you think Ava’s right?”
Ava, you will have to refer to whatever argument/s you may have had with Karel and/or Přem here … I was hoping Karel would say something that hinted at it, but he just continued glaring until Přem said: “So I have to die when you die, do I?”
Karel looked at me and told Přem to be quiet. Ordinarily that was enough; with Přem, Karel’s word was law. But this time Přem went on. “It’s always like this … Why is it always … you will leave me, Ava will leave me …”
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