Xavier was to my left, with Laura on the other side of him, and Allegra on the other side of Laura. Yuri paced before us as he told his cautionary tale. We could not envisage, he told us, the things that had happened to Přemysl Stojaspal, to the truth of that person’s life, from the moment Ava Kapoor had arrived at his father’s house and unseen him.
“All right, so Přem hadn’t yet learned stability. All right, so Přem was in essence a hitchhiker of sorts … actually, no, you know what, Přem was paying his way. We can compare him to an Uber rider … a slightly uncomfortable first-time Uber rider who was still getting used to the system. And then Ava Kapoor unsees him and his payment gets declined and his account deactivated. Of course he’s going to try again with a new account. Of course he’s going to look into other transport options! Of course he’s going to try everything he can until his dream comes true! What dream? The dream of a pedestrian existence, my friends. Stupendously pedestrian. Oh, and to appear in photographs. You can paint as many portraits as you please, but it’s photos that verify you people’s meetings. It’s photos that make your bonds irrefutable. Oh, are you laughing, Otto? Do it one more time … I dare you.”
Dare declined.
Each of us stuttered questions, but Yuri waved them away. He hadn’t come to engage with technical theories of Přem’s unseeing, nor the question of whether Ava had done it intentionally. He was here to force us to consider the effect of the unseeing. According to Yuri, Přemysl was far from the only person to have gone through this process, and that Ava was far from the only unseer.
“We’re trying to support each other,” Yuri said. “Trying to get back into the game. Together. So don’t ask me for my fucking surname. I’m here for Přem and Raúl and Tolay and the stories of their unseeing, which you will not be told now or ever. Because with people like you it goes in one ear and out the other until it actually happens to you. Then you’ll be googling for support groups and everything else.”
You’d think that afternoon we shared with Yuri was much more stressful in and of itself than the memory of it could ever be, but in fact I’ve had to abandon this account quite a few times already. I’ve had to drop my pen and hide from the page, only creeping back to it once Xavier sounds the all clear.
But at the time …
When Yuri had reached his “no more talking” phase, stopping in front of Laura and Allegra and fondling their scalps before clapping their skulls together. Neither woman screamed, but Allegra murmured something. I thought I heard “Ava.” “What did you say? What did you say, treacherous little bitch who saw what was happening to Přem and didn’t stick up for him even once?”
Allegra closed her eyes but didn’t shrink from Yuri. She said: “I don’t know what you mean.”
Her phrasing … she wasn’t telling him I don’t understand what you’re saying. The sense of it came through as I am unable to determine the meaning of you.
I can be this precise because I was looking on with a stomach flutter. A very low-level flutter, and that was it. I’ve mentioned my assumption that nothing is ever OK. Even on good days I renew my nothing-is-ever-OK subscription so the next day is covered. It’s a form of mithridatism. Once the poison is administered you still feel fear, but not as much as you might have, maybe. The other possibility is that the tension got so raucous that it blocked itself. Fear either gives you diarrhea or it really, horribly constipates you … something like that.
I remember hearing Xavier telling Yuri he was fucking trash, unrecyclable trash, and I remember Xavier toppling onto Laura’s lap in a failed attempt to throw himself in front of her, and Yuri bashed Laura’s and Allegra’s heads together a couple more times, seemingly to show that none of Xavier’s feedback bothered him.
I remember speaking, in a low and soothing voice. Not self-soothing; I was speaking to Xavier. I was saying, “Xavier, there’s this train that used to belong to some tea smugglers, and it’s called The Lucky Day. From the station platform it looks an outsized champagne sabre; a brass-and-silver curio with a snobbish tilt to its nose. Inside … well, there’s no one onboard. There never is. At each station the passengers always arrive too late for The Lucky Day. Now the train’s departing again … it’s already waited as long as it could, and nobody came.”
Xavier’s head had lolled onto my shoulder, and when I paused, he scraped his cheek against my collarbone and told me he didn’t understand a word, that at some point we were going to have to talk about my episodes of Czech speaking, but that for now I should go on. I might have, but if I did, I didn’t hear it. What I heard instead, a little while later, was my own name. Maybe the others had been saying and whispering it on and off for ages. Laura had put her teeth to work gnawing away at the knots that bound her wrists, so Allegra’s voice was the least garbled.
“Otto … Otto. What the fuck! Aren’t you a mesmerist! How did you let things get this far? Mesmerise him or something!”
“OK, no prob,” I said.
I looked up, down, to the left, and to the right, and didn’t see Yuri anywhere. For about two seconds, angels sang: Yuri is vanish’d, Yuri is vanquish’d, thou hast unseen Yuri, but then the man in the diving suit stepped back into the carriage with us. He was carrying a pirate sword, which revealed he’d been to the bazaar carriage. And he was fuming again. This time over Ava. He’d gone to the sauna car to check what was taking her so long and found that she’d moved on to the greenhouse car. So he’d hung around while she did a leisurely spot of greenhouse gardening, thinking she’d start worrying about her friends (“Wasn’t that a scream I heard?” etc.), but it looked like Ava was thoroughly fed up with us. Without even glancing behind her she’d proceeded into the library carriage, where she’d curled up with multiple books. At this rate she wasn’t going to come back this way for hours. But she had to. He didn’t have a single thing left to say to us …
Yuri’s diving mask was getting all steamed up. He slashed at the air with the blade of his pirate sword a couple of times.
Xavier blurted out a suggestion. “Send Árpád. Or Chela. Both. She may be wily enough to slip through the clutches of one mongoose, but she could never evade two.”
Yuri looked at the ceiling for a second, then shrugged and unlatched the cages. Árpád and our daughter-in-law were unsteady on their feet for a few heartbeats, but once they regained balance, it was all Yuri could do to lure them into the next carriage without a fatality (his own). Only the pirate sword saved him.
He stepped back into our carriage once more, the angel choir fell silent once more, and then, before he could pick up where he’d left off with the sword swishing, I said, “Why not let me mesmerise you while we wait?”
“Mesmerise me, then, Otto,” he said, and came over to deliver his stare. That nuanced stare that I’ve already told you about. The one that ended up mesmerising me. Listen, I think Honza was there in that gaze. There was a look he gave me often. A God, we’re so pathetic and I fucking cherish that look. As if we’d teamed up for a three-legged race and had the peculiar dignity of crossing the finish line behind everyone else on the planet. Yeah, Honza was there. All too briefly; I don’t think “my” Honza Svoboda would have given us the kicking Yuri Don’t-Ask-About-My-Surname did.
Very soon after the kicking, Ava Kapoor crossed over from the sauna car with a mongoose on each shoulder.
* Xavier disputes this recollection. However, since the kicking stopped immediately after this disputed statement was made, I’m leaving it in until Xavier is able to supply an alternative yet similarly influential factor.
20.
She stayed near the door for a few seconds, holding on to the button that held it open, and all four of us wriggled towards her, ducking blows from Yuri’s pirate sword, which he was using like a cricket bat, swinging away at our heads.
“Ava, look …”
“Ava, you’ve got to—”
“Ms. Kapoor, you must see this, you must see what he’s doing—”
“Ava—”
> What must that have been like for her? We probably looked and sounded like a pandemonium of parrots that had been cooped up for weeks. Our squawking contortions. Our bloodied drool.
At that point, even though she’d been so cold, bathing and reading books while Yuri bullied us, we still believed Ava was going to vanquish Yuri or take up our cause in some other way. So we wriggled on, preparing to lie at her feet until she relented. But Árpád and Chela held us at bay, and Ava made straight for her sleeping compartment, steering the widest possible berth around each one of us. Yuri lowered his sword and gave her a thumbs-up as she went. “Loving this new no-nonsense attitude,” he said to her. “Ava Kapoor, Ava Kapoor, the most rational girl in town!”
She hesitated before stepping into her cabin. “You’re not getting up?” she said to us. Xavier and I got death glares, but she was less sure she understood what was going on with Laura and Allegra. Her gaze trembled over and around their wounds.
Xavier raised his bound hands. “OK, but if you could just—”
“No, you’ve put on your little show, and you spoilt the bazaar, and you’ve made it clear what I’ll have to tell Dr. Zachariah tomorrow—”
(“What are you going to say to Dr. Zachariah?!” we all said, more or less at once. Yuri included.)
“… so get up, everyone, and let’s get going again. And as for you two Shins! You’re a disgrace. I’ve seen the state of dormitory carriage, and I expect those beds to be stripped by the time we drop you off. I mean it. You’ve had a whole two carriages for your private use and it wasn’t enough …”
“Oh, those two always want more, Ava,” Yuri said, nodding sagely. He walked over to the lounge area and took a seat. Árpád and Chela kept monitoring him, sizing up their chances of jumping him, but he never let go of the pirate sword.
Xavier looked at me and mouthed, What? I mirrored him, and Allegra rested her bruised forehead on her steepled hands while Laura made one more formal plea for Ava to look over her shoulder—just over there, at the chair that was now facing Ava’s sleeping compartment. Laura began to describe the details for Ava. The wetsuit, the full-faced diving mask, the pirate sword. She trailed off as she listened to her own description. But she’d briefly sparked Ava’s interest: “You’re seeing all that over there?”
She flicked a brief glance at Yuri. I mean, directly at Yuri. We all saw it. Disconcerted, he waved at her. Had eye contact been made, though? That was less certain. Ava turned back to us. “Come on, guys. I’m sorry if I worried you earlier. And this—it’s almost flattering that you’d go to this much effort … but … it’d be lovely if you’d just get up and we could put this behind us.”
Allegra, head still pressed to her fingertips, said faintly: “Ava. Beb. I don’t know how to describe this situation to you in a way that isn’t going to piss you off, but if you untie just one set of hands … doesn’t matter which … we’ll all be free very soon, and—and then we’ll be on our way to the doctor … within the …”
Ava was already at her side, an arm around her as she rummaged through floor-level drawers for a knife suited to rope cutting. We could see a number of questions occurring to her as she sawed away, but for the time being she contented herself with one.
“Allegra, who did this?”
Yuri leapt to his feet, excited. “Přem! Tell her it was Přem. Say: He sends his regards, and then burst into tears. Go on. I’ll give you a tenner.”
Ava touched her forehead to Allegra’s. “Allegra.”
“Allegra,” Yuri said. “Pssst, Allegra. Twenty pounds cash in hand if you tell her she’s the one who did this.”
Then he asked me if I’d lend him twenty pounds. Ava spun around when I told him to fuck off.
“It was someone named Yuri,” Allegra said, taking the knife. She tried and failed to cut through her ankle ties.
“Yuri?” Ava looked to the rest of us for confirmation.
“Yuri,” Laura declared, hands patiently outheld for her turn with the knife. “Yes, it was him.” Xavier said the same, and so did I. Yuri, it was Yuri.
Most galling of all, he was right about using the name Přem. When we swore to this new name, “Yuri,” it must have sounded as if we were trying to populate the train with various baleful spirits. But I really don’t know. I keep trying to allow for the doubts Ava must have had, but I still think that in her place I would have listened to us and believed us, just believed us. I would’ve done that first and then got the details in due course.
Though as Laura later pointed out, even if Ava had believed us, what could she have done about it? She still couldn’t see the fucker. And she’d already written that trying to behave as if he was visible to her hadn’t worked at all.
Once all four of us were unbound, Laura hobbled over to the kitchen table for her walkie-talkie. After minutes of white noise, she asked Ava: “But where are they, the maintenance team?”
“They said something about going for a walk along the coast. Understandably, they didn’t like you kicking them off the train without telling them why.”
“OK, but. The entire maintenance team?”
“It’s a close-knit crew, Laura.”
First aid kits were fetched out of a cupboard, tea was drunk, and strategies were signalled with our eyes. From the lounge area, Yuri surveyed us with—well, the diving mask obscured his expression. But he gave a grunt of contentment. Plus, wetsuits reveal all: he had a hard-on.
Ava watched us too. She watched as we gingerly rotated our ankles and jiggled our fingers. She was no longer annoyed with us—in fact I think it’s not an understatement to say that she looked miserable.
The two mongooses followed Ava into her sleeping compartment. Allegra showed every sign of wanting to go with them … to the extent that she began to crawl in that direction on her hands and knees. But Xavier whispered to her that she should just wait for the maintenance team. And then Ava, not in bed after all, began to play “For Přemysl at Night.”
She played it differently; this time the notes were granular and we heard them as hordes. A furore in the soil that buried us alive. Still, we sank with our arms wrapped around each other. Allegra, Laura, Xavier, and me. The less Ava liked us as a “we,” the tighter our hold. After a couple of moments, Allegra said: “Ow.” There were several issues her “ow” could have been addressing, but her main one was that Laura’s walkie-talkie was digging into her back.
Ava stopped playing.
“What’s that? What are you whispering among yourselves?” she called out.
“Nothing, Ava. Sorry.”
A scratchy silence followed, and for a few minutes it seemed as if Ava was going to leave that silence exactly as it was. She put on a sleeping mask. I saw this reflected in the carriage window across from her cabin, and it struck me as ominous. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to articulate reasons …
Partly it was Ava’s expression. The grim line her mouth was set in as she pulled the silk down over her closed eyelids. Partly it was Yuri’s reaction from his ringside seat, the way he rubbed his hands together. After about a minute just sitting quietly with her hands on her thighs, Ava elevated her arms and played from memory, beginning all over again.
A jumble of inner and outer matters followed: The clack of the exterior door as maintenance team members tried to access the carriage from the platform. Ava concluding her performance and walking blindfolded through our midst as we struggled upright, too timid to satisfy our craving to catch at her clothing. With the exception of Laura, we murmured, “Beautiful … Ava, that was really beautiful …” I remember wondering, mid-grovel, why we were being like this, but from this point in time I think we already knew what had just happened and were hoping against hope that it could be remedied.
The maintenance team redoubled their knocking efforts, but Ava stopped halfway to the exterior door and turned in our direction. “Guys?” she said. Her hands went to the sleeping mask, then she scowled. “What now? They ran off while I was playing?”
>
“Ms. Kapoor,” Laura said, in a very loud and very firm voice. “We were here listening, Ms. Kapoor. I assure you I would have run away if I had the strength.”
“Rude,” Ava said. “So fucking rude.”
We relaxed. Until she called out to us again. “Guys? Seriously? I’m giving you three seconds to answer me. I don’t feel like playing hide-and-seek right now. Three …”
Yuri sniggered. “Ah, so this is how it happens,” he said, getting up and walking over to Ava. He turned so he was facing us, just as Ava was.
“Two,” Ava said.
We bellowed in unison, at the top of our lungs:
“AVAAAAAAAAA …”
“MS. KAAAAAPOOOOOOOOR …”
Allegra Yu didn’t join us. She looked out of the window, in a trance, as if we were already on our way home.
“One.”
Ava lifted the sleep mask, and Yuri said: “Ciao, bambini. You’re all screwed.” That was the last we saw or heard of him. A very literal “missed his departure whilst blinking” situation.
We shouted and waved (somewhat feebly) as Ava walked backward, checking her sleeping compartment. Two sleeping mongooses in there, but that was all. She checked Laura’s compartment, and Allegra’s, even moving the pillows around on the beds. Several times her eyes met ours directly, but no, no sign of recognition, nothing.
“For fuck’s sake, Ava …”
“AVA, PLEAAAAASE. Please!”
“Four years we’ve lived together, Ms. Kapoor. Four years.”
“I’d have heard it if they’d left … I’d have heard it, wouldn’t I?” she said, flopping down on the ground next to Allegra.
Silently, Allegra turned to her. They almost bumped noses. Silently, Allegra took in Ava’s face, her gaze falling like a wave of honey. A leave-taking look. Ava kissed her; then, as the pounding at the platform door grew frantic, she jumped up to let the maintenance team in.
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