Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Then Karel, mainly to stop Přem talking, I think, said that he was arranging things like this for Přem’s sake. He spoke with his eyes on the contract Přem had brought in, turning pages and checking them before signing. He told Přem he mustn’t look for a replacement, especially not in you, Ava.

  “You have to try to be on your own.”

  I just stared down at the document the whole time; I had an idea that if I looked up, Přem would start talking about giving me a present again. You see, the worst of it was that I did want it—the present he said he had for me. He’d offered it seventeen years before and had shown me nothing but politeness after I’d turned him down, but I thought about it every day—a few times a day, actually—I should have accepted his gift—why was I so frightened of it? Now that I’m fairly certain he and I won’t meet again, I can admit that I behaved somewhat awkwardly in Přem’s company because I couldn’t quite trust myself not to catch at his sleeve and ask for my present. An old biddy like me pawing at a strapping young man like him …

  Anyway, Přem didn’t speak to me that afternoon. Karel told him he had to try to be on his own, and he said something to the effect of “Karel, I will try to let go of her, but if I can’t, it’s not my fault.” Then he picked up the contract Karel had signed and left.

  Karel told me he didn’t come home that night. The next bit of news I heard about Přem was that he’d moved out of Karel’s house. They reconciled, or seemed to, about a year later, after Karel collapsed. Přem donated his kidney and was at home with Karel again for a while—they may have had “bad” nights again, because Karel couldn’t play for Přem, and you’d stopped coming. This is inference, though, not anything I heard. You do have to wonder about his nights after he left Karel’s house; I’m sure someone fitting Přem’s description has left the good people of Dulwich with many a weird tale to ponder. Then, five months or so after Karel’s transplant, there was Přem’s art fire. And now … I suppose if there is anything more to know about Stojaspal, we have to wait for your birthday.

  That said, I don’t believe Přemysl will intervene in the matter of this inheritance, Ava. He stated an intention not to trouble you—at least that’s what it sounded like to me. You’ve spent nights with him and been fine, so there isn’t anything he can do to you now.

  Write me back soonest.

  With love,

  Zeinab

  15.

  OTTO SHIN

  Hi Ava,

  I can’t provide as much of a profile of your Přemysl as Allegra and Ms. Rashid have. I say “your Přemysl,” because isn’t he yours? Or didn’t he want to be? It sounds to me like he was captivated by that treating-him-as-if-he-was-literally-nothing approach, and he went along with it as a way of ingratiating himself with you. Ah, true romance! (I have to get back at you a bit for saying that about me and X.) But seriously. You don’t mention your Přem contacting you. I mean e-mails, phone calls, etc. Though actually if I were him, I’d probably stop short of sending “hello, I exist” e-mails too. Denying that you’re a hipster makes you a hipster, and claiming that you exist means you don’t.

  I can make the claim for him, though. Přem exists. Existed? I saw him. I’ll follow Ms. De Souza’s lead and tell you about the sighting, and then, just like her, I’ll tell you about another meeting (well, another relationship, actually) that I think belongs here, though you may disagree.

  The sighting first: five years ago, I turned thirty-three. The entire year was a trudge; I had a master’s degree but couldn’t teach English Lit to save my life. A student I was tutoring said to me: “Er … have you actually read the book, Mr. Montague?” The thing was, I had. Tens of times.

  I couldn’t find any other use for my qualifications, and I was coasting along on handyman jobs I kept botching so noticeably that I’d have to halve my fee in acknowledgment of the fact that a real handyman would have to be called in next. It was standard practice for me to only get the house address right on my third try. That was how I happened upon the fire; I was wandering around Dulwich, looking for my client’s house, which I’d probably have found quite easily if I ever remembered to charge my phone with outings in mind. I approached a building hoping it was the house I was looking for. It wasn’t. It was a dead-end house that closed off a street of much smarter-looking ones. There was a stretch of concrete between that house and the house closest to it, and from chimney to doorstep the whole building just looked back to front. Gave you a sense that you shouldn’t come this way, that progress was behind you. But perhaps you already know this flat, Ava. Perhaps you visited, looking for your Přem somewhere in that mass of canvas ash.

  I saw someone standing in a window on the first floor. He was facing me but not watching the street; he had quite a faraway look on his face. It was the man in that self-portrait in the gallery car, Ava. I’m sure of what I saw, even if I’m not sure that he was there. He was older and a bit more bedraggled than he is in that painting, and he was wearing one of those nautical-stripe T-shirts—blue and white—and jeans. I saw and smelt smoke … chimney overflow or something, I thought. Get this … I also heard the fire alarm. But everything seemed so calm—there was no commotion whatsoever from the houses just a few steps away (maybe everyone was out?). Basically I told myself this was a household mishap that was probably already under control. Now very close to certain I had the wrong address again, I went up to the front door and saw that this building was divided into flats—I looked at the nameplates lined up beside the doorbells, even though I knew the client I was on my way to had the whole house to themselves. There were three names, but I didn’t see Přemysl’s, in case you’re wondering. I did see the name J. Svoboda, but more about that in a bit.

  The front door was ajar, and someone called out to me from inside: “Quickly, quickly!” I went in, and the hallway was crammed with smoke … dozy little me finally woke up to the fact that this was serious. There was an old man who shouldn’t have been in there breathing in that smoke; he was coughing and confused, and for a split second he thought I was a fireman, that the fire brigade was already there even though he’d only just hung up from calling them. He told me to help his son, or to stop his son, I still don’t know which. I just went back out into the fresh air, pushing the old man in front of me; I called an ambulance for him, and while I was on the line to the operator, I was looking up at the window and Přemysl was still there. There were flames behind him, quite close. I didn’t see them, but I saw the room changing colour. And Přemysl was looking at me. Very, very scared, yet determined to stay where he was. The old man—Karel—kept trying to hobble back into the building; I was having to sort of bear hug him to keep in place. And then the man in the window suddenly winked out of sight, and just like that I was in the hallway, then at the top of the stairs, then in through the open door of that first-floor flat … I didn’t decide; it was decided, and it was done. There were four rooms, I think. The kitchen was just after the entrance, smoky, but no flames yet. I ran a napkin under the tap and put it over my face, then went into the next room, and the next; rooms the fire wobbled around in rings; I never thought it could do that, act like rampant jelly. Or I saw it that way because my head was spinning and I was asphyxiating. Anyway, I saw canvases burning, flapping on their stands … I’m sure I’d have found it creepy if I hadn’t been struggling to breathe … I mean, they could’ve doubled as a field of scarecrows come to life, those burning canvases. But as we discussed earlier, Ava, there was no one in the flat. In the bedroom, clothes were laid out on the bed. A blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, jeans, socks where the feet would be. I have described this over and over (to myself, to concerned listeners, some of them professional listeners), but none of the details change. I kept saying to myself, Get out, get out, turn around, and I fell onto the bed. I think I said: “Oh gosh, sorry, sorry about that,” because it seemed like I’d hurt someone … why did I think that … there might have been a sound? A sucking in of breath, like when you stub your toe but want to avoid hi
strionics? There was no one there, but before I passed out, it felt like someone stepped on me. Yes, stepped on me. Not to cause me pain—more a kind of acrobatic manoeuvre … to reach the ceiling … God, what am I saying to you, Ava. A heel pressed down on my chest, and I winked out of sight too.

  It seems the firefighters burst in a couple of minutes after me—I got off very lightly in terms of physical issues. Everything else was a bit nightmarish for a while as the facts piled up … The entire building had been empty, not just the flat—the other two residents were out, and there were no witnesses regarding the arsonist. I really couldn’t understand that at all, given what I had so unambiguously seen in broad daylight. Karel went on record with a statement that he’d been there to collect his son’s post and hadn’t seen what had happened. He was quite clearly grappling with something terminal too, so I think any initial suspicion that he’d committed arson soon evaporated. As for me, there was a sense that I’d stayed in the fire, or that I might as well have. My friend Spera all but moved in with me for the next few weeks and looked after all three of us Montague boys. Palliative care for Árpád XXIX in the last few days of her long life, nutritious feed and frolics for her youthful successor, plus a similarly rigorous watch kept on me. Thank God for Spera, even though on her second day of residence she decided the very look in my eyes had changed … I now had “the eyes of a sleeping phoenix.” She kept snapping photos of me at inconvenient moments so she’d get what she called a candid expression. I put up with that and sought out cures for insomnia. Where were you and your theremin when I needed you, eh?

  One of my mums’ friends suggested hypnosis and recommended a therapist she was convinced had cured her own insomnia. The clinic was on Harley Street, so my mums had this reverence for it: “Can’t go wrong with a Harley Street treatment …” They offered to pay for a few sessions with this hypnotherapist, so I booked an appointment and went along to the clinic with an open mind.

  It was October 2014. The clocks had just gone backward, and I’d forgotten to inform my watch of this fact, my phone was dead … I’d missed my appointment by an hour … Oh, and the receptionist at the clinic was this naughty-looking, heavyset blonde with a deep voice that got me stiff and kept me there. He seemed about my age. A good sign, because, before him, age gaps exceeding seven years had been my personal recipe for heartache when partnering up with anybody. Something about the difference in life stages; that’s what I was told whilst getting dumped, anyway. Another good sign: after a couple of months of being too shaken up by the fire for Eros to bother knocking at my door, every not-so-innocent word that receptionist said filled me with yearning. His name was Jan, but he said I could call him Honza. On my way out I went through the “I might have got the wrong idea, or maybe you’re seeing someone, but here’s my phone number anyway” speech. I didn’t suggest friendship because I already knew that if I ever had another five minutes alone with him, I wasn’t going to be able to pretend that I saw him as a potential friend. I mean, maybe later, but first things first. He took the scrap of paper from me, picked up the phone on the desk in front of him, and dialled my number. We both listened to my voicemail greeting, and he said: “You’ll answer next time, right?”

  I was never more conscientious about keeping my phone charged than I was during my seven months with Honza Svoboda. He didn’t seem in any way aware of his drool-generating effect on pretty much any sexually available human being who crossed his path. He may have taken up the occasional offer—we never spent the night together, so I wouldn’t know … He left the receptionist job and got a night job as a security guard. The most I usually got to do with him at night was walk him to work; we’d arrive at around ten p.m. at the latest, he’d change into uniform and send me home. This was usually after spending the day together, so I did sometimes wonder if and when Honza slept at all.

  Honza was the one who instigated our monogamy discussion, and he was the first to say “I love you.” He was OK with me not being ready to say it back, but he got anxious about … I can’t remember his exact terminology—either being “enough” for me, or being “what I wanted.” He’d accuse me of looking elsewhere when I really wasn’t. I was his unemployed puppy who took everything he had to give me. Psychoactive substances, days-of-the-week underwear, mesmerism lessons. Yes, I’m a hypnotist because of Honza. I’d told him I needed something to do … not just for money, something that would put the fire and whatever had made me run into it very firmly in the past. He said, “Oh, if it’s a pastime you want, I have just the thing …” And he said it was easy to learn. Maybe it was for Honza. I may not be accredited, and he didn’t teach me to apply these methods therapeutically, but unless I’m dealing with the likes of my partner’s aunt, the stuff I learnt from Honza Svoboda works and has built me a substantial client base. I didn’t realise it while he was working on me (it probably wouldn’t have worked if I’d realised it) but this guy Honza did as much as Spera did—maybe more—in terms of putting me back on my feet, and in better stead than I’d been before. Everything in living memory that had ever worried me or caused me stealthy glee … I must have discussed it all with Honza S. He was interested, he cared, but he didn’t respond with his own stuff. I didn’t meet Honza’s friends, and I didn’t get to introduce him to mine; the plans kept falling through at the last minute. Árpád didn’t like him, but then Xavier Shin is the only boyfriend of mine Árpád has ever shown enthusiasm for. I could tell from the first night Xavier stayed over at my place that we were in a new era of acceptance; in the morning there Xavier’s shoes were, exactly where he’d left them by the door … unchewed and unshat in.

  Honza didn’t like Árpád either … I remember he never referred to Árpád by name; it was always “your friend the stoat,” “that marten that aspires to mongoosehood,” or “the vicious ferret.” Honza also said he didn’t need to meet my friends. He was happy with me as long as he was what I wanted. Or maybe it was “I’m happy with you as long as I’m enough for you.” I got uncomfortable when he talked like that, so I remember the “oh no, not this again” feeling more than I do his actual words. Whatever the exact wording was, it was cock deflating. I started looking elsewhere. Well, not just looking. Honza began to bring it up in conversation, the inevitability that I would do that “now that I’d got what I wanted” from him. He’d tell me I really didn’t need to do that, and that I could always ask him for more. Always. And when he talked like that, I went beyond uncomfortable … basically, the feeling Zeinab Rashid describes regarding being offered “a present” was familiar to me.

  That’s not why I’m mentioning Honza here, though. There’s no one reason for a breakup, but quite early on in the relationship I developed a suspicion of him that never went away. It wasn’t any of the irregularities I already mentioned … it was about the fire. He knew about it. It had happened in the building he used to live in. Honza was the J. Svoboda whose name I saw beside one of the doorbells. He told me there was a neighbourhood rumour that somebody had run into the fire. Why would anyone do that? he wondered. Whoever it was, he thought they should still be rewarded for what they’d tried to do.

  You might think that would have made me inclined to tell Honza what it was the heroic fool had thought he was trying to do, but I resisted talking about it for a couple of months. Then it got too difficult not to tell him; after all, we’d talked about everything else.

  Honza was dissatisfied with my account but didn’t seem able to explain why. He believed me, and yet …

  I told him all over again. I felt like I owed him at least that much. Honza got less and less satisfied with each repetition. Eventually it felt as if every conversation we had was a pretext for him to probe my memory of the fire. There were no slipups in his line of questioning … It was always about what I remembered and never about any memories of his … but I started to have strange thoughts. He was the arsonist, or he knew that there had been a man in the flat and he knew what had happened to the man, but he would never back up
my account, he preferred me to live in doubt of my own stability … thoughts like that. And like I said, I wanted the fire left in the past. I met up with Honza and told him this face-to-face, in a coffee shop, so there were plenty of witnesses in case anything happened. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but that step beyond discomfort when he’d insisted I could ask him for anything … I did have that in mind.

  Honza didn’t protest. I took that as his way of indicating I wasn’t “what he wanted” either. He thanked me for my honesty and left. I haven’t heard from him since. And I did miss him, but, Ava, I was so happy to be able to work and think and talk without having to keep putting together that jigsaw puzzle that always had the same piece missing … plus that truly maddening suspicion that this person who kept telling me he loved me had the missing piece in his pocket. The name “Stojaspal” never came up between us. So whether this truly is Přemysl-related or not is up to you, I suppose. But I do think we should assume that he will come calling very soon, your Přemysl. I’m not clear on his motive(s?), and I certainly don’t mean to scare or worry you, but I’m finding I can’t overlook a possible connection between your Přemysl and my Honza. Or, at least, a link I’m sensing between Přemysl’s disappearance and Honza’s appearance. Please understand that these aren’t things I would admit to anyone other than a fellow member of the Empty Room Club. We need to come up with a secret handshake.

  Ava, you’re here with five friends—Laura De Souza might say you don’t have that kind of relationship with her, but she’d be lying—and two of those friends are mongooses. Přem (or whoever) doesn’t stand a chance.

  O.