“God knows what they’re up to,” I said. “But I trust Árpád’s judgement. Let’s leave them to it.”
Xavier seemed dissatisfied with this, but I think we both had very clear recall of Laura’s smiley assurance that we’d be made prisoners if we created any further delays. Besides, he was still playing with the photos he’d taken of the white canvases in the gallery car, zooming in and out. As he did so, he asked me: “What have they got to do with us, these people?”
I no longer had the energy to keep lying, even though I knew that lying would set us free faster than any truth would. A break for calorie consumption would give us the strength to continue denying everything, so I borrowed Allegra’s “good question” remark and suggested eating before we tried to answer it. We’d eat, and then I’d ask Xavier how often I did that, chant “Come closer,” and if I’d done it last night. Hopefully he’d tell me he wasn’t talking about me, or that he’d only said it to take Allegra’s mind off her worries. I was happy for him to tell me anything he liked, as long as it reinforced our non-involvement with the situation onboard this train.
The track looped around an expanse of pale, glossy blue. I watched for ripples, thinking it was water at first, then deciding it was ice, even though the temperature was all wrong for it. The blue stood taller and taller as we skimmed its edge, but it only became a mountain as we left it behind. A mountain of blue quartz, foliage-free and so coolly translucent that sunset and moonrise washed along its peaks in one great wave. We silently gave each other a quick pinch; it wasn’t a dream. The smell of French toast drifted through from the pantry car and caressed our nostrils, and we gave each other another quick pinch. Still not a dream.
“Now this is how honeymoons are supposed to be,” Xavier said, ushering me food-ward.
Ava Kapoor was at the stove, transferring our extremely late breakfast from frying pan to plate. “Hello, Shin and Shin”—she accepted a swift kiss on each cheek and one of those flowery compliments beginning Madame, je suis ravie … from Xavier—“wearing each other’s clothes and looking as if you’ve never slept in your lives … I spy true romance! Please, sit, eat while it’s hot. Oh, and have you seen Chela anywhere?”
I said no, Xavier said yes, I lost the second staring match of the day, then Xavier said: “I think he meant to say that Chela’s with Árpád.”
“Ah,” Ava said. “If they’ve gone looking for the passenger you saw, we’d better get ready to meet him. He may be wily enough to slip through the clutches of one mongoose, but he could never evade two.”
The carriage had been scrubbed and wiped clean from top to bottom, and two plates stacked with French toast were already on the table, along with the cutlery needed to eat it in a civilised fashion.
Ava brought her own plate over, wiping her hands on her apron as she sat down with us.
“He’s here, isn’t he?” she said, without preamble. “Přem. You’ve brought him, or he sent you here without you knowing it. To try to drive me mad at the last minute.”
I fed a bite of French toast to Xavier and said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ava.”
Xavier picked up his own knife and fork, fed me a bite of French toast—an extra-large bite—and said: “Otto … you still don’t seem to understand that I’m not going to let you gaslight anybody.”
I choked (where was the Xavier who’d backed me up in front of Allegra, corroborating an encounter he hadn’t witnessed?), and Ava poured me a glass of water while my loving partner patted me on the back.
“Aside from his natural inclination towards deforming reality, there’s the fact that we’ve all but promised not to talk to you,” Xavier told Ava.
“You were just with Allegra?”
“And Laura. They told us about your friend’s will.”
“The will, the will … that’s all we’re living for these days. But about those two. Something tells me that all this has been too much for them. Suppose we succeed … Suppose I inherit after all, and as soon as the money side of things is sorted, those other two consider their duties done and go off together without me? They’ve had to play to each other’s strengths for an extended period of time—”
“So they respect each other,” I said.
“They’ve never felt it necessary to treat each other like invalids—”
Xavier shrugged, and so did I.
“And they’ve never flirted in front of me.”
“Oh.” I thought about the myriad ways in which friends can be flirtatious, cheekily saluting each other from either side of established boundaries. For those two not to flirt at all, when they had to have looked at each other and thought about it … oh dear.
“Maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick,” Ava said, sawing at her French toast. “Maybe they’re just tolerating each other, or they’re the kind of friends who … don’t happen to share a sense of humour? What did you think? Did it seem as if there might be something else between them?”
Xavier nodded, and after a couple of gulps of water I concurred. With great unease. Xavier might have thought I wanted to gaslight Ava, but I thought he was overestimating her ability to handle changes that might not be to her liking after an epoch of changes more or less handpicked to keep her happy.
Ava drizzled more maple syrup onto her toast; her hand trembled slightly, but all she said was: “It’s good to get an outside opinion.”
“Ava.” I fed her a bite of French toast too. “We’re only saying it’s not impossible. On the other hand, they seem fond of you. As far as we can tell, anyway.”
She scrunched up her face and dropped her fork onto her plate. “What is this superior feeding method that makes the French toast taste better? Do it again.”
I did, and Xavier asked her: “So did you really mean it when you told people you couldn’t see Přem, or what?”
Ava chewed, nervously and for a long time. She drank some water.
“The Přem question is the one that decides whether I inherit,” she said. “But I don’t know which answer is the one that confirms sanity. I’m not talking about the answer that satisfies Karel’s requirement, or Dr. Zachariah’s, but the one that satisfies mine.”
She accepted another bite of French toast, then stood, talking with her mouth full. “I’d better go. I’ve left a file in the bread bin … Laura and Allegra would never look in there. Read it and … add to it for me, OK?”
Her walkie-talkie buzzed in her apron pocket as she hurried away.
10.
What we found in the bread bin: a folder with the name Přemysl Stojaspal (in Ava’s handwriting). Inside, a sheaf of handwritten texts, each in a different hand, with a typed table of contents on top—names matched to page numbers.
Ava Kapoor
Allegra Yu
Laura De Souza
Zeinab Rashid
Beneath these names, Ava had written
Otto Shin
Xavier Shin
I flipped through the sheaf of handwritten texts looking for the entries pertaining to us, but Xavier said: “We’re meant to add to it ourselves. She wants it in writing … what we know about him.”
“What are you saying? You know about this guy?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But maybe, once we’ve looked at the rest …”
“People often don’t realise what they know,” I said, quoting one of my favourite books, “and only when it is explicitly stated does it become obvious to them. Something like that?”
He answered me with a kiss that counselled the wisdom of speaking to him in Ludvík Vaculík quotations, and we took the file back to Clock Carriage, where we read the accounts in order.
11.
AVA KAPOOR
I used to busk in what I think of as Newcastle’s town centre, Old Eldon Square. I’d get there early in the morning, set up my instrument, and start playing as the sun came up. I played facing the east, with St. George slaying his dragon behind me. Though really it is less of a killing happeni
ng atop that pedestal and more a depiction of some fascination—a courtship, possibly—between the saint and the serpent. George courteously offers the dragon a metal spike, the dragon just as gallantly ingests it, and both seem gratified that it’s going down so well. I played theremin-adapted reveilles until the shops opened, and when you do that, passersby really give you whatever they have to give. Sniggers and stares. Comments about noise pollution. Phone numbers. Doughnuts. Song requests. Applause. Impromptu dance routines. Spare change. A five-pound note “’cause I’m not sure exactly what you’re up to but it’s a ballsy move; girls like you remind me I wouldn’t want to live in any other city” …
I played for an hour and a half regardless. Then I’d go to work: online customer service for a few different companies, just me and my laptop logged into a few different company e-mail accounts, with a number of databases open so I could check the typical things customers enquire and complain about or contact somebody who could find out what was what. Phone calls were rare during the day, and I liked that because it meant I’d be able to answer immediately if there was anything about my dad.
In short: it was the standard life of a music scholar who’d love to play vocationally but can’t. Time, money, talent, and grit—I think I’d have been able to do more with my theremin if I’d been lacking only two of those four essentials. But I lacked all four. And what did I have instead? Realism. What a gift! Most of the time it’s as if my life is hiding from me, but as I play, note by note, I echolocate it.
One morning in Eldon Square, the most beautiful emergency I’d ever seen walked by, dressed in red from head to toe and chugging a can of Red Bull. She had her earphones in, but she pulled them out and listened to my playing. She didn’t stop walking, and I had to choose between looking at her and following the notation on the sheets in front of me, so I lost her. But she came by again the next day, and the next—each time dressed as if she was going somewhere special, or as if that day was a very important day. But when we spoke, she’d tell me she’d just come from picking up or dropping off packages and dry cleaning and things like that. And her name was Allegra Yu.
One morning she asked if I was OK with her recording my busking. I said I was, but that I didn’t want her to put it online or anything. She told me she needed the recording so that she could compose for me. Compose for me!
I didn’t see her for a couple of weeks; then she came and gave me what she’d written: an untitled, spinning-top sort of sonata that slowed down into an arch, darting, aching minuet. I was a bit scared to play it in public and wondered if that was how Prince had felt about performing sometimes. It felt like people might get pregnant just from listening to this. Men, women, everybody …
The “raunchy spaceship” song went down well, and over the following weeks Allegra Yu wrote me two more songs. The second song was a boozy, bluesy piece that made my theremin sound as if it was looking back on a long life of crime, and the third song was a dance tune that had all these charming little trips and falls in it, just like a row of dizzy ducklings. After the third song, realising that we’d already danced together and slept together and aided and abetted each other, I asked her out. She said I’d had her kicking her blankets at night, wondering if she was no longer a genius. “Usually it only takes one song …”
I brought her aboard my train, “The Lucky Day,” for a picnic dinner; I’d prepared all the food myself so we ended up sticking with wine. We lit candles, and even though I’d dusted that particular carriage just hours before, I saw that the dust helixes were back, in enhanced definition, as if determined to stop us from romanticising this evening on a broken-down train that hadn’t gone anywhere for over forty years. She announced that a smugglers’ train is never what it seems to be, blew the candles out again, and lay her head on my lap.
“OK … where are we going? Announce the stations,” she said.
That was my moment to sound well-travelled, or an imaginative match for her, but I had a lapful of runway model and couldn’t think, couldn’t think … yet I had to say something … and at that moment the spirit of Agatha Christie took over and made me name stations from “the 4:50 from Paddington,” all haphazardly: “Waverton. Haling Broadway. Barwell Heath. Change here for Roxeter and Chadmouth …”
She stopped me there, at Barwell Heath. We dallied at that station for quite some time, and left with love bites as souvenirs.
Empty room gig or no empty room gig, Allegra Yu is the one I play for. I’ve come to know her better than anyone, I think, and she me.
But there’s one matter that divides us—that divides me and everybody else who’s contributed to this file: Allegra has seen and interacted with Přemysl Stojaspal—several times this has occurred in my presence—while I look where she is looking, and listen to the silence before and after the remarks she makes, and I see and hear nothing. This is not good for my relationship with Allegra, or with anybody, really … when Přem enters our conversation as a subject … or not even as a subject, if we talk about anything even vaguely linked to Přem, we begin to lie to each other. We tell ourselves we’re being tactful, but it is more desperate than that. We’re trying not to lose each other.
There must actually be a Přemysl Stojaspal. Everybody—and I mean everybody—behaves as if there is … so to me Přem exists in that sense, and sometimes also in a vaguer sense of a listener, some reaction that forms when certain notes are mixed into air. I have no personal knowledge of him otherwise.
I can state that it was Allegra who introduced me to him, or at least, to his father. Allegra was Karel’s personal assistant and was supposed to be organizing the logistics of life so he had more time for his own projects. But he was all, “Oh, Allegra, if I was thirty years younger,” and she was all, “Mate … if you were thirty years younger I’d still be gay.” I’m the one Karel’s (conditionally) made sole beneficiary of his will, but Allegra’s the one who’d get phone calls from him at all hours of the day. “Hang up and don’t answer: I want to leave you voicemail,” he’d say, and fill her voicemail inbox with musings only she could decipher and the occasional blast of music so she’d “see what he meant.”
Karel’s son was somewhere in his thirties and lived with his dad. I’m not flagging that up as unusual—I’d be one to talk, since I was still living with mine. I had love reasons and health reasons as well as economic reasons for that, but I did pick up some subtext that Karel’s son was living with him mainly for health reasons. The son’s, not Karel’s.
My understanding of Přem’s condition was that he couldn’t be alone at night. That’s what Karel told me, without going into what was meant by “couldn’t.” From a very early age Přemysl got bad at night. Agitated, wouldn’t sleep, would get violent, other things. Karel did once tell me that Přemysl took especial issue with him, Karel, sleeping. He simply wouldn’t stand for it. Karel Stojaspal told me that as a boy Přemysl conceived a notion that he’d disappear unless somebody kept thinking about him, and that Karel and his wife had indulged that fancy until it had grown to unmanageable proportions. Medication didn’t work, therapy had worked for a while, but he tended to run through therapists like a swarm of termites through floorboards … (Karel’s terms underlined. He was very tired when he made that termite comparison, but it sticks with me as I’ve never heard anyone talk about their own child like that.)
A few months into our acquaintance, Karel stopped discussing Přemysl with me, and only reluctantly mentioned him. That was partly my fault. I just didn’t know how to look at him while he talked about his invisible son. We went through the stage where I’d laugh or smile; then the stage where I tried to treat it all as a sort of philosophical riddle; the phase where I got angry with Karel; the fearful phase, which still comes and goes. I almost had a panic attack when Karel gave me the paintings, quite publicly, at a restaurant lunch he held for my twenty-second birthday, with an empty seat at the table beside me. A seat our friends addressed as Přem, though from time to time they’d joke and laugh
with different fissures in the space all around me, and those fissures were also Přem Stojaspal. How they all admired the self-portrait … though he’d lost all that weight, so it wasn’t quite as accurate now, hahaha! I honestly couldn’t breathe at all. I couldn’t really look at the paintings for a few days, and when I did, I studied that face that our friends apparently recognized, and I considered moving to a different city, breaking up with Allegra, and getting new friends who’d never heard of the Stojaspals. But … abandoning Allegra and our people, the loveliest loves of both our lives, just because of some guy? As if.
It was OK when I was with Karel or the others and Přem didn’t join us—increasingly he didn’t bother, I’m told. “He loves you but has received your message of hate,” is how one friend put it. Of course I didn’t hate Přem (how could I?), but I made things worse when I tried to play along. One of the only times I’ve seen Karel look as sick as I felt at that birthday lunch was when I tried greeting him and Přemysl simultaneously one evening. Přemysl hadn’t yet arrived. Karel laughed, though he could tell I hadn’t been joking. Then he threw me out of his house and told me never to come back. He repented after what I’m guessing was one of the “bad” nights with Přem; Allegra played go between …
It was fine when I played at night, and it was, supposedly, just the two of us. Me and Přem. Don’t think I didn’t try to catch sight of him in mirrors and in glass—I was ready to believe he was a spirit, anything. But it was an empty room.
However, some things I remember Karel telling me before Přem became a taboo topic between us: When Přem had been younger there’d been games that used to amuse him through the night. But once he reached the age of putting away childish things, the nights were the worst ever. But he’d have good nights if Karel played for him all night. That worked for a while, but between theremin playing all night and sleeping all day, Karel was in a bad way and not really able to take part in his own existence. Concerned friends volunteered to play for Přem at night, and even drew up a roster, but Karel only wanted them to know the personable, multitalented daytime Přem who did his father so much credit. He also didn’t think they’d take the task seriously enough; they’d fall asleep, and then doom would befall. Or something.
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