What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(35)

—

ONE DAY WHILE ARKADY was out working one of his three jobs Giacomo came home from a long walk, stopped on the wrong floor of their building, and accidentally opened the door to a flat that wasn’t the one he shared with Arkady and Leporello. The tenant wasn’t at home, so Giacomo could have seen or taken anything he wished. But what he sought was a view from a new window, and that was all he took. Ten minutes looking out to sea. And he soon discovered that the same key opened every door in the building; their landlord counted on it not occurring to any of the tenants to try opening doors other than their own. When Giacomo told Arkady of his discovery, Arkady was all for having their locks changed. They could be murdered in their beds! They could be robbed at any time! It was bad enough that they lived under the rule of a tyrant who was slowly but surely squeezing the life out of everybody, but now their neighbors could get at them too . . .

Giacomo just laughed and pulled Arkady into one of the flats that stood empty between tenants on a floor higher than theirs; Leporello came too, and barked at the moonlight as it washed over their faces. Their fellow tenants continued to identify their doorways with care, and were too busy and too tired to go anywhere but home.

—

HAVING SECURED Giacomo’s assurance that he’d be very, very careful with these trespasses of his, and Leporello’s assurance that he’d help Giacomo keep his word, Arkady’s worries were lessened for a time. One of his jobs was assisting the tyrant’s physician, who did not choose to be known by her true name—or perhaps was yet to discover it—and went by the nickname Lokum. Like the confection she left traces of herself about anybody she came into contact with—sweetness, fragrance. “Ah, so you have been with her . . .”

Lokum kept the tyrant in perfect health, and perfectly lovesick too. Like the tyrant’s wife, Lokum had no lovers: Anybody who seemed likely to win her favor was immediately drowned. Arkady swept and mopped Lokum’s chambers, and he fetched and carried covered baskets for her, and he also acted as her test subject—this was his favorite job because all he was required to do was sit on a stool and eat different-colored pieces of lokum that the physician had treated with various concoctions. He was also required to describe in detail what he felt happening in his body a few minutes after the consumption of each cube, and some of the morsels broke his cells wide open and made it all but impossible to find words and say them, though for the most part accurate description was no great task for him, and it paid more than his other two decidedly more mundane jobs. “Open your mouth,” she’d say, and then she placed a scented cube on his tongue. He’d warned himself not to behave like everybody else who came within ten paces of her, but once as the lokum melted away he found himself murmuring to her: I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair. Her usual response was flat dismissal—she all but pointed to the door and said, “Please handle your feelings over there,” but this time she took one end of the scarf she wore and wrapped it around his neck, drawing him closer and closer until her face was just a blur. “Listen, listen,” she said. “People have been drowned for saying much less.”

Arkady could make no retort to that. She was only telling the truth. He thought that was the end of the matter, but as he was leaving she told him not to come back. She said jealousy lent people uncanny powers of detection, and that it was better not to be so close within the tyrant’s reach if he wanted to go on living. He protested—without the wages she paid him, he, Giacomo, and Leporello could hardly keep afloat—but she shook her head and motioned to him to be quiet, mouthed, For your own good, scattered a trayful of lokum on the floor, shouted, “That’s enough clumsiness from you” loudly enough for the guards just outside the door to hear, and sent him on his way, flinging the tray after him to complete the dismissal scene.

He didn’t like that, of course, Lokum’s taking it upon herself to decide what was for his own good. He could drown if he wanted to. In the weeks that followed that unfillable gap in his funds drowned him anyway—unpaid bills and nobody willing to employ him without speaking to Lokum, who refused to show him any favor. Giacomo and Leporello spoke less and stared out of the windows more. Arkady knew that they weren’t getting enough to eat but Giacomo wasn’t the sort to complain and Leporello dared not. Giacomo’s fever didn’t take hold until Arkady missed three rent payments in a row and the trio were evicted from the building with the views that Giacomo was so fond of. Arkady was able to find them a room, a small one with a small grate for cooking. It was a basement room, and Giacomo seemed crushed by the floors above them. He wouldn’t go out. He asked where the door was and searched the walls with his hands. Leporello led him to the door of the room but he said, “That’s not it,” and stayed in the corner with his hands reverently wrapped around a relic, the key to their previous flat: “The key to where we really live, Arkady . . .” How Arkady hated to hear him talk like that.

—

GIACOMO AND LEPORELLO had stolen the key between them, Leporello putting on a full acrobatic display and then standing on his back legs to proffer a genteel paw to the landlord while Giacomo made a getaway with the key. In his head Giacomo pieced together all those views of the same expanse. Sometimes he tried to describe the whole of what he saw to Arkady, but his fever made a nonsense of it all. Arkady took the key from Giacomo to put an end to his ramblings, and he threw the key into the fire to put an end to the longing that raged through his body and vexed his brain. “This is where we really live, Giacomo, here in a basement with a door you say you cannot find.”