About the eye in the photograph Tolay asked me to steal: it turned out to be Otto’s. The photo is part of a series Spera Kendeffy captured while Otto was recovering from something that happened to him. He was in a house fire. Spera stayed with him and looked after him, but was also his sickbed paparazzo …
And now he’s right here opposite me, scribbling, frowning, biting the end of his pen, and exuding kissability. I think it’s time to stop writing about him. Time to interact!
Just a few more thoughts:
Ava, all may yet be well if we can find out what your Přem wants, or wanted. The subject of this file may (or may not) “bring leeches,” inculcate wholescale plagiarism, and get up to all sorts of other things that make him hard to handle at night, but … I think we can see these outbursts as being linked to excessive enthusiasm. It’s easy to overdo things in the sincere pursuit of tranquility.
Your entry continually links him to Karel, but try to recall what it was like when it was just the two of you, you and Přem … isn’t he seeking something exactly like that?
X
17.
It was late afternoon by the time we’d finished our contributions to Ava’s file on Přemysl Stojaspal. Xavier lay down on one side of the carriage, and I sat cross-legged on the other, both of us covering sentences with our wrists and casting sidelong glances at each other as we composed our thoughts, both of us looking out the window during extended periods of deliberation, working out what to tell and what to shut up about.
We passed pages from previous file entries back and forth. Allegra Yu’s and Zeinab Rashid’s were Xavier’s most requested. He didn’t believe their accounts, or didn’t agree with their over-and-under interpretations of the information they had, or something. At some point during his fourth or fifth rereading, he pointed out A and Z really seemed not to like that their lonely widower had a descendant. Had one, or had wanted one. This cryptic son made his father’s home peculiar and his behaviour even more so.
“I did pick up a bit of a tone there,” I concurred. “An ugh, if you will. A suggestion that they would have preferred it if Karel’s second attempt at family life hadn’t taken this particular form. They didn’t know what to make of the sudden son. And neither Přem nor Karel really gave them anything to go on.”
“Right,” Xavier said. “That tone we both picked up on isn’t aimed at the fresh start but at the form these two”—he tapped Allegra’s and Zeinab’s entries—“saw it taking. Between them they make sure that form—Přem’s form—is thoroughly hidden. What’s left is a vaguely unsavoury lump held captive by their distaste for his supposed function. Bam, A and Z remove Přem’s prefect badge and pin it to Ava’s blazer. Their message to Ava: You’re the appropriate protector and beneficiary of this man’s worldly goods, and we hereby appoint you to this position. You’re the one who fits into the tale of the artist who leaves nothing of artistic merit behind. You, Ava, saw that nothingness. Now take this money and this power. Vision is thicker than blood! With an extra dose of chagrin on Allegra’s part for initially trying to follow Karel’s formula.”
I blinked. “Are you making this about men and women? Are you saying that childless females are enraged by males who only have male children because they can’t stand witnessing the patriarchal power handoff right before their eyes? Or are you saying that females get upset with males who behave as if they’re able to reproduce asexually? Bow down before the womb? Or what?”
Xavier drank some water, then made a face at me. “I said ‘money and power’ and you heard ‘men and women.’ Which words correlate with which in that fevered brain of yours? I wonder. No, the move I think Zeinab and Allegra are making in these accounts is the move titled Art Is Made by Other People. Or maybe even Art Is Made of Other People. We’ve got a teacher who, perhaps unconsciously, expresses and transmits a nonnegotiable criterion for art … that it speaks to posterity. It has to be born of isolation, then … at a distance from contemporary concerns. For this reason, and several others—yes, some of which are related to historical access, the teacher has neither the ability or the permission to make the kind of art she respects. Her impressionable students glean these views from her, and some of them are wounded in the same spot as Zeinab is. Allegra, for example. But others—for instance, Karel—feel no constraint at all. He had the resources to ascend to Olympus, but ultimately he couldn’t hack it.”
“Right under A’s and Z’s noses, he opts out of isolation and dialogue with posterity and opts into a bit of an inscrutable domestic situation, fair to middling film scores, and a prose piece he doesn’t even finish …”
“Unforgivable,” Xavier said. “And the figure of the son becomes a problem for them. A personal one.”
I was listening, but glanced sideways while thinking about what he was saying. We were passing a billboard; had in fact been running alongside the advert it displayed for about thirty minutes, and every now and again we’d been hazarding guesses as to what was being advertised. Xavier allowed himself another sideways glance too. The advert (about four metres high and miles and miles and miles wide) was in its entirety, an inexorably repeated LOL in an italicised typeset. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL … Oh, and punctuation appeared in the middle of each O, so that some represented smiling faces while others frowned, screamed, appeared to be verklempt or caught in the throes of anhedonia. We allowed the billboard to LOL at us for a while.
Xavier was the first to rouse himself.
“Otto. What was I saying?”
“Art Is Made of Other People …”
The train slowed, then stopped altogether. We’d pulled into a redbrick stabling yard. We watched as the merchants boarded, along with swathes of bazaar paraphernalia—baskets, banners, hampers trailing sequined scarves, rolled-up rugs. Allegra and a couple of members of the maintenance team were in conductor mode, checking passports and ticking off names as each new passenger walked up the train steps. After a few minutes, Laura joined them.
“Quick question, guys—” Ava said from the corridor. We both screamed. She’d braided her front hair into a lustrous little tail that wagged when she moved her head—I could picture Allegra tying the lilac ribbon at the end and issuing a decree that this was to be worn until nightfall. It was the same as with the black hearts drawn onto Allegra’s cheekbones: even if these were little attentions each had paid to herself, they somehow seemed to have been undertaken on each other’s behalf. Ava wagged her braid of front hair and held an envelope and was not in any way a fearsome apparition. We just hadn’t been expecting her; she’d crept down the carriage so quietly, under cover of the bazaar commotion. She repeated herself once we’d calmed down. “Quick question. Do the names”—she glanced at two lines of black text scrawled across her left palm—“the names ‘Honza Svoboda’ and ‘Raúl Mateus’ ring a bell at all?”
In silence, we handed her our written accounts, along with the other four.
“Thanks,” Ava said, sliding it all back into the folder and then stuffing the folder up under her jumper. “I was just in the postal-sorting carriage, you see …” She handed me the envelope and, beckoning Xavier, leaned on my shoulder as we inspected it. Ava’s name was written across the front, and where a postage mark would have been, the words Agency for Introducing a Sense of Proportion into Novel Writing were stamped in blotchy red ink.
There were three sheets of paper inside the envelope. Letters; all three in more or less identical handwriting. I took them out one by one and read them aloud.
The first:
Dear Ava,
You’d better not listen to them. They’re a bad influence.
Yours sincerely,
Honza Svoboda
The second:
Dear Ava,
You’d better stop talking to them. You’re a bad influence.
Yours sincerely,
Raúl Mateus
The third was unsigned.
Nothing to add. Except—Ciiiiiiiiiiaoooooooo bambini!
*
I tried to return the letters, but she wouldn’t take them.
“Oh no … you keep them, please. I—Hang on.” She raised a hand, frowning. “They’re coming. Three … two … one …”
The connecting doors on either end of the carriage rolled open. Allegra came upon us from the direction of the library, and Laura from the direction of the pantry. Not smiling, exactly, but the mood they brought with them was lighthearted and low-key. A little too uniformly so.
“Ready to do some shopping?” Laura asked, shaking a pair of imaginary pom-poms.
“Chop chop, Ava,” Allegra said. “All this is for you. Maybe you can find a nice present for Dr. Zachariah. Who will be with us tomorrow. Remember?” Laura and Allegra cast cheery glances at each other, then at us, then at their most important passenger, blithely ignoring the document-shaped bulge that lay across her bosom.
I got to my feet and checked for my wallet, unsure what was in the air or why this had been brought here to us in Clock Carriage, but ready to leave them to it. I was still holding the communication from the so-called Agency for Introducing a Sense of Proportion into Novel Writing, and after a few more moments’ deliberation, I pushed the envelope and its contents out of the nearest window. “The, er, bazaar, does accept credit cards, right?” Xavier asked.
“Ah yes, Dr. Zachariah! What do you think I should buy for the doctor who’s been such a rock all these years?” Ava turned to us with her arms spread, stage musical ingenue style.
Xavier began edging out of the compartment without a break in his musings regarding financing options for the bazaar. “I do have some hard currency—euro and pound sterling, and I always carry some Korean won, for sentimental reasons …”
Laura and Allegra had already moved aside for us, and I would have followed Xavier if only Ava hadn’t been looking at us with … I’m not sure what, something like drunken amazement. As if she was trying really hard to get us into focus but the situation was really out of her hands and would therefore depend on us. Stay there … I mean here … please just stay.
“But cards are probably better because we might not be … in a place where pounds or euro or Korean won are in circulation,” Xavier muttered. He stayed where he was, out in the corridor with Laura and Allegra, and I stayed where I was, with Ava, who swayed on her feet and said: “I think we’re all just tired, aren’t we? Do you think it’ll be OK with the merchants if I shop lying down?”
Laura said: “It’s your bazaar, Ms. Kapoor. If the merchants mind you lying down, they can get lost …”
Allegra tilted her head, observing, then moved past Xavier and reached for Ava. I wasn’t sure of her intentions—probably tender? But Ava very clearly baulked at this advance, so I gave Allegra a little tap with my elbow to keep her away. The chain reaction to this: Allegra walked backward until she bumped into the furthest wall. Laura tutted with disgust and stepped forward to administer a chop to my windpipe. Xavier, probably finding that a bit of a disproportionate response to what I’d done, took firm hold of Laura’s wrist. I raised my own hand and gave my best impression of someone who had no qualms about slapping his attacker silly. Xavier grabbed the hand I’d raised with his other hand. Laura, Xavier, and I crossed arms and palms in a textbook Baroque dance figure, only with more glowering. Ava tried and failed to suppress a giggle. Laura peered at her, then stepped back with a shrug. And then we all got out of Ava and Allegra’s way.
Allegra cleared her throat. “Ava … we’re so close,” she offered finally. “Just one more day. Could you—”
Ava’s laughter got noisier, and the file on Přem slid back down her jumper in bits and pieces. Paper poured down her legs and covered her feet. Allegra looked down and read some of her own words; her gaze travelled back up to Ava’s face eventually, but it was a very halting process.
“It might have been OK if you hadn’t mentioned the doctor,” Ava said. “God! It feels like you’re obsessed with the optics of sanity.” She knelt and gathered up sheets of paper. More paper rained down. She shook the rest out of her jumper and started all over again. She took deep breaths; the laughter died. “Anyway, you don’t need to worry about it anymore. I already passed the evaluation.”
Allegra moved towards her again, and Ava’s cheeks twitched, but she maintained her composure, concentrating on reorganizing the file.
Very softly, Allegra said: “Ava? What are you doing, beb? Can you tell me what’s happening?”
“Everything we wanted is happening,” Ava said. “Everything we wanted. We’re going to be rich. Dr. Zachariah boarded a few hours ago … we talked for ages … just ask her …”
Allegra’s gaze swiveled to Laura, who lifted her clipboard, flipped some pages, and said: “No. The doctor will join us at ten a.m. tomorrow.”
“What do you mean, ten a.m. tomorrow?” Ava giggled. “There she is.”
“Where?”
“There. Right behind Laura.”
We looked where Ava was pointing; we looked at Laura’s shadow waxing and waning amid the motes of sunlight that flickered all along that otherwise vacant corridor. We looked at each other looking at Laura’s shadow and satisfied ourselves that there was in fact a We, a We for whom the corridor was empty. A We that Ava Kapoor was, for the moment at least, not part of. And for the duration of that group mind illumination we kept silent, since none of us had the faintest idea how to proceed.
“Well?” Ava asked, still pointing.
Allegra swallowed hard. “That’s a different doctor,” she said, turning from us so that she was looking only at Ava.
“Different? Different how?”
Allegra shook her head, still refusing to look our way. We had a bit more silence, then Laura ventured: “To be more specific, Ms. Kapoor—it’s a different Dr. Zachariah.”
“Again … different how?”
“The main thing,” Allegra intervened, “the main thing is that the pressure’s off you now, beb. Our plan was too … heavy. I should have seen that. Can we—”
Ava gave a huge, horsey snort. “Ah … I can’t keep this up. I was only fucking with you, sweethearts. Your faces, though! If you could all see yourselves right now …”
Her smile disappeared the split second Allegra swung for her. The first punch flew wide, but the second grazed her temple, and she scrambled to her feet and took the advice Allegra was doling out with additional blows: “Run, Ava! RUN. Get the fuck out of my sight right now. If I catch you I’m gonna tie you to the train tracks …”
Ava bolted for the library carriage, braid and ribbon whirling about her ears. We heard unrepentant whooping once she’d reached a safe distance. Also: “No, stop following me! Go away.” Those words were for Xavier, but he paid no attention to them. We’d come back to it later, but I was reasonably sure of his take on Ava’s little prank: some of it was just for laughs (her own, if nobody else’s), and some of it was not. Now we had the beginnings of an inkling of what it’s like to look on as everyone you know is all Oh hiya, Přem, and What’s the goss, Přem, chatting away to a chair, a doorway, a poster on a wall.
Laura detained Allegra in Clock Carriage, pushing at her tear-splashed fists until they lowered and Allegra herself could be held and hugged and whispered to.
And me? I went shopping. Somebody had to.
18.
The bazaar was a faraway land I walked aeons to reach. Through the pantry car and the shower car and the postal-sorting carriage and the picture gallery car. The self-portrait of Přem ignored me, and the ground seemed to lick at my feet until I let that conveyor-belt sensation propel me into the dormitory car, with its many rows of bunk beds, each mattress a lily-white altar to innocence or incarceration. Notions came to me; mostly to do with Honza Svoboda. I won’t put them into words, but some of those notions were so strong that they removed me from this sleeping carriage and placed me right in Honza�
�s arms. My blood bobbed and weaved within me until I had to sit down on one of the beds and close my hand around the thin jerking of the pulse in my neck. I tried to conceive of offerings I could make in order to finish this thing with Honza. I’m not claiming that I deserve to be able to go through life with stanzas from the poem that is Xavier Shin on my lips and in my heart. It’s not about merit … this miracle can happen because Xavier likes having me around as well. For all I know, this is his favourite hobby: colliding with somebody who had made their mind up, taking that person by the hand and casting such an abundance of moonlight that the one he’s with begins to perceive evidence they’d overlooked when preparing their estimation of this dingy world. Evidence that makes the verdict unjust.
“Honza,” I said, in case he could hear me. If he could, he might write me a mocking letter about it. “Leave us alone.”
All of the offerings that occurred to me involved the spilling of vital fluids. If there’d been a suitable object at hand, I would have made a cut. An interior voice—quite a nasty one, I think—asked about the depth of the intended cut and insisted that if I chose to make a blood offering I should do it properly and be sure to slit my throat from ear to ear. The harangue ended when I admitted that even if I had a knife in a hand, I wouldn’t have made a cut. But there was a backup offering, a sort of negotiation with the memory of our bodies together, mine and Honza’s. I closed my eyes and saw our combinations: I knelt before him, knelt above him, straddled him, stretched forward for him, swung from the bunk bed ladders. I was a one-person ritual masturbation tournament, and those rows of bunk beds had probably never seen anything quite like the rampage I went on among them. Or so I like to think. I painted the bed linen, white on white, just like Přem’s canvas, and I hid shivering under blankets every time I thought I heard one of the others heading in the direction of the dormitory car. I couldn’t let anybody catch me doing this. Even if Honza himself had arrived the offering would’ve been ruined.
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