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.

In the fullness of time the ritual concluded, leaving yours truly physically spent. I took a nap on a top bunk, and some people may have passed through the carriage then—or there was hubbub from the picture gallery next door. I heard people, but nobody tried to wake me.

When I did wake, of my own accord, it was with the thought that vital fluids wouldn’t be the appeasers in this situation. The one offering Honza was after was an answer to his questions about what I tried to do for that old man’s son. If I told him that, he’d finally accept our breakup and get lost.

Why had I rushed into the flames for this person I saw, or thought I saw? (What was that? Was it love? Agape, philia, or a passion felt at first [or final] sight?)

But Honza’s question can’t actually be answered. It’s a trick question, and he knows it. Answering it invalidates everything. What do I mean by “everything”? Everything everything.

I climbed down from the top bunk, gathered various far-flung pieces of clothing, got dressed, and crossed over into the bazaar carriage, too fuzzy-brained to register shame. I was sure the maintenance team were going to talk about the stains I’d left in that dormitory. I’d be lucky if they didn’t report it to Ava. I tried to recall the name of the male maintenance team member I’d heard Allegra talking to via walkie-talkie. Edwin? Oliver? I wasn’t sure what he looked like (there were eight or nine possible candidates), but I was going to pin this on him anyway. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about this, but why don’t you have a chat with Edwin or Oliver?” I’d say. “Maybe he saw something.”

The bazaar didn’t accept credit cards. I knew it before I was told. Some of the stallholders seemed to have resigned themselves to shopper no-show and were sitting on stools gossiping over cups of tea and shots of vodka. Those stallholders didn’t look my way, and neither did the ones who were painting each other’s nails and giving each other shoulder massages. Right beside the entrance, a black girl in her midteens was tending to a slate water wheel that stood in a stone bowl about the size of a Hula-Hoop. This girl, who’d been painted gold from head to toe, was the official beginning of the bazaar. She sent a very clear message to anyone who walked in wondering if their cards would be accepted here, this girl painted gold and dressed in a gold leotard and gold socks to match her Mary Janes. She’d set a cap of gold wire and pearls atop her cornrows, and the slate wheel sang to itself as she let water fall from the golden jug she held. She varied the force of each pour. A caress here; an injury there. When the spokes of the wheel idled to a sulky click click click, the girl poured steadily from two jugs at once and sang a round robin with the wheel, putting words to its glad tintinnabulations.

“Hello,” the girl said, when she noticed me.

“Hello. I’m Otto.”

We shook hands. The girl said her name was Paz. And she asked me if I wanted to buy the water wheel. “You’re one of the non-honeymoon honeymooners, no? Don’t you think it would make a romantic gift? It is very simple to operate and to sing with, as you have seen.”

The presentation of the wheel told you all you needed to know. It was the kind of item that could only be purchased with doubloons pulled from a treasure chest you’d wrenched out of the keeping of a deep-sea skeleton.

“Er . . . I’m actually not carrying any cash, but maybe Xavier—”

“Don’t you want to know how much it costs?”

“Go on, then. Tell me.”

She whispered the price in my ear, paused, then whispered an adjusted price that factored in a seven-year installment payment plan. I looked at the water wheel again.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to take this wheel off your hands, Paz,” I said.

“What a pity,” she said happily. She dipped her two gold jugs into the water at the base of the wheel and waved me onward, adding over her shoulder: “We accept cheques.”

Moving from stall to stall I sipped tea, watched a snail race, became referee of the snail race and arbitrated a doping scandal, sipped vodka, sipped tea laced with vodka, kept forgetting I don’t have a chequebook. I haggled half-heartedly over a pinhole camera I thought Spera might like, and almost bought moonstone and labradorite scrying balls for my mothers. Not because my mothers are especially into scrying or meditation, but because Dean, the holder of that stall, had gone to great lengths to source some of the pieces he’d laid out on display. Allegra had written to him months ago asking him to put together a scrying edit for Ava. Now that Ava was seemingly no longer bothered about looking into the future, I still thought Dean should have something to show for the time and care he’d put into gathering this row of globes. Each one was the flawed vessel of a perfect storm. But Dean said not to worry about it. He’d been fending off buyers for months. He wanted to give me a tip, though, for when I was doing my Christmas shopping and what not: “Bringing a scrying ball into a home that ain’t in touch with its own clairvoyance? That’s just asking for trouble. Just think about it, mate. You know it makes sense.”

“Non-honeymoon honeymooner!” Paz the Golden pounced before I could move on to the next stall. “You still haven’t bought anything,” she said, and showed me a handful of cut emeralds. “What about these?”

Emeralds . . .

She swirled the stones, and their colour crackled. I’d pictured stones like those the first time I’d heard a friend call an aubergine “garden egg.” Green shells that hatch long vines.

I recoiled without quite knowing why and asked sharply, too sharply, where she’d got them. Looking crestfallen, Paz lifted a dazzling arm and pointed to a stall near the end of the carriage. The stallholder was only dimly visible through a wall of cages. They were wearing a lot of costume jewellery.

“What’s in those cages, Paz? I can’t see from here.”

“Taxidermized animals,” Paz said. “They’re his speciality.”

“This guy sells emeralds and taxidermized animals?”

“That’s right. There’s this gigantic parrot that looks like it’s having a nightmare forever and ever.” She reflected a moment. “I really don’t like the parrot. But maybe you would? Since you don’t like the emeralds, and I do?”

“It’s worth a try,” I said. “Introduce us, please, Paz?”

“That’s the spirit! Be friendly to me, honeymooner. He’ll give you a good discount if he thinks we’re friends.”

I should have been looking ahead as Paz the Golden took my hand and led me past the other stalls, but we kept passing people and situations I couldn’t let go without one more glance. I had to turn and berate the stallholder who’d popped an unwanted Pallas Athena style helmet on my head. I had to turn and thank the person who removed the helmet and daubed my wrist with jasmine oil. I had to turn and ask for more information on the crunchy, spicy, and/or worryingly mushy tidbits that had just been popped into my mouth by one stallholder after another. The onboard train bazaar was in overdrive for its lone shopper. And then, just like that, we were at the counter of the emerald and taxidermized animal stall, Paz was pouring her handful of emeralds into the velvet pouch that had been left beside the sign, and I was standing nose to nose with a stuffed mongoose in a cage. Two mongooses, actually. They’d been sawn in half and sewn together.

This cannot, this cannot, cannot be.

Nose to nose, eye to eye. Chela I may not know so well; the feel of her paw in my hand, that’s already faded. But I know Árpád Montague XXX, from the downy tips of his ears to his graceful flanks to his balletic toes. It was him. It was them.

I didn’t speak for what felt like a few minutes but was probably only seconds.

Once I was absolutely sure I wasn’t going to throw up, I said: “Why are they in these cages.”

Paz jabbed a finger at the 15 MINUTES BREAK sign on the counter and said of the man who’d left it there: “According to him, they move sometimes. Bite, even!”

I put my fingers through the bars of the cage, to try to stroke the fur. Paz went quiet, but her sigh showed she now understood she probably wouldn’t be making a sale here.

My fingers and thumb brushed, tapped, then flicked the mongoose’s back. Papier-mâché and synthetic fibres, united so tenuously that one touch damaged them. Hence the cages. Ha! I only had a moment to take that in before I heard Xavier’s voice in the crowd behind me, but looking back I feel like that was the moment I broke faith with Árpád, with all the Árpáds who lived and died alongside the Montagues. When I looked at a not particularly well-made figurine and mistook it for Árpád and Chela. There’s just no excuse for it.

I moved in Xavier’s direction, listening to what he was telling the stallholders. He was clearing the premises, directing everybody in the carriage out onto the platform, answering questions and complaints alike with: “Sorry . . . I’m so sorry about this . . . We need everybody off the train . . . yes, maintenance team, too . . . Sorry . . .”

He told the stallholders Ms. Kapoor had asked him to assure them they’d get all their items back in good condition. She’d purchase any damaged items. Yes, any. She guaranteed it.

I found Xavier at the heart of the milling crowd and seized his hand.

“Awww, three cheers for the non-honeymoon honeymooners,” roared Dean from the scrying crystal stall.

The crowd obliged. Hurrah for love! And then the two of us (“Quick,” Xavier mumbled, “Quick, quick, quick—”) helped Paz relocate her water wheel to the stabling yard platform. At every stage she explained that really she was helping out, taking the wheel with her. There was no way our Ms. Kapoor could afford it.

Paz the Golden was the last stallholder to disembark. She waved at us with both hands, and I saw that the palm of her right hand, the one that had held the emeralds, was now She-Hulk green. She said something I didn’t catch, and couldn’t stay for, as Xavier had slammed the train door and was running ahead of me through the dormitory car, shouting that Yuri was here. Árpád and Chela had caught him and brought him to us.

By the time we reached the sauna car, Xavier was repeating himself on loop: Yuri’s here, Árpád and Chela caught him . . . and I was trying to ask: “Has Ava . . . Can Ava . . . ?” but it was as if this news had broken both our vocabularies.

The third steam cubicle was occupied; we both saw that quite distinctly as we passed it. One after the other, we said, “Ava?”

She sighed but made no other reply, just let us go by without a word.