Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best manga ereader .TXT) 📗

Xavier said, after a moment. “Unless? We’re looking at white paint on white canvas or some similar abstraction?”

“Abstraction?” Allegra said tiredly. “No. Just tell me what’s in the paintings.”

I looked up and to the left, swivelled, then looked up and to the right. I saw white unbroken by even the faintest hint of an outline. Perhaps there was something notable about the smoothness and density of texture, but that wasn’t something you could say was “in” the paintings.

“Why don’t you just tell us?”

“No, you have to say it. Look at the one to the left and talk. Just say whatever comes into your head.”

I surrendered first: “OK, but all I can see is an axe about the length of my arm with a ribbon tied into a bow around the handle. What …?”

Allegra grabbed a fistful of her own hair and nodded.

Xavier stared up at the canvas too, closed his eyes tightly, opened them again and said: “Sorry, but I can’t see that the axe is sketched in grayscale, but the ribbon’s ruby red—”

“Wah,” I said. Because even after hearing his description and my own, all I saw was a white canvas … and, it seemed, an image that had utterly bypassed my eyes and flowed straight into words.

“And to the right?” Allegra said. “You can’t pause. Keep looking and keep saying what you’re thinking.”

“But, Allegra, what devilry is this?” Xavier said, eyes probing the canvas from corner to corner. “Does everybody you ask to look into this white box tell you it’s an utter blank in the centre of which is a gamine brown woman with an ecstatic smile and her hands in the air like she’s conducting a chorus of angels and they sound so good she’s dropped her baton?”

I faced the second canvas dead on. White light bounced off white material, and this is what I told Xavier and Allegra: “This is a white canvas. There isn’t a single gap in the white, it’s forceful in its very flatness, so how can Ava be layered on top with this downright exuberant finger-painted effect, playing an invisible theremin …”

Xavier made a confounded, delighted clucking sound in the back of his throat. He took a photo of each of the blank canvases, and Allegra and I leaned over his phone as he zoomed in and zoomed out again. The white got grittier when he zoomed in, but that was all.

“Yeah,” Allegra said. “I wish I’d asked Přem how he made these paint-less paintings. I think I held back because I thought I wouldn’t understand visual artist chat. Now I know I should’ve insisted he give me a term or something I could research. Because being left behind with works like this makes me wonder who he really was. Mind you, I didn’t wonder when I was with him. I felt like I just knew. This is a bloke I went to galleries and fashion shows with, and there’d be a stir when he showed up, like, Oh, it’s Přem … finally. He didn’t really do nights out, and he wasn’t on social media, but maybe he set out to perform some of its functions? On a day out we’d stop in at ten or eleven places before he went home. It was kind of like a culture crawl … he’d describe everyone he introduced me to as a beautiful mind. In a way he was too much of a super connector and hyperactive man about town to get caught on camera, d’you know what I mean? I’m getting sad that I keep saying ‘was.’ At least the paintings are a good likeness.”

She had some photos of the elder Stojaspal in good health. Karel at the beach, laughing with his feet buried in the surf. Karel in a sound studio with headphones on and pen in hand, taking notes on what he heard. Karel and Ava with forks crossed, fighting for the last meatball in a pasta bowl. She held her phone up against Karel’s side of the father-son portrait and put the painter’s representational accuracy beyond doubt.

There was a commotion at the doorway that connected the gallery carriage to the postal-sorting carriage; Allegra’s hand tightened on my arm while Xavier went to see what was happening. He came back with Laura, two chairs, and many exclamations.

“Laura De Souza,” he said, to me, to Laura, to the air. “What … why … how are the two of us travelling together again?”

Laura set down her own two chairs and gestured to us to sit. She had a folder tucked under her arm. “That’s what I’m wondering. What could he possibly be doing here, the little train schoolboy all grown up? Ordinarily I’d be happy to see you, but we really can’t have disruptions right now, and disruption does seem to travel with you, I’m sorry to say.”

“We doubt the reunion is a coincidence,” Allegra said, as she handed out round lollipops. We all took one.

Xavier and Laura spoke in French for a while. I caught “ton père” and “Limoges,” and Laura beamed momentarily before returning to English:

“Listen, gentlemen, before we start the train up again, we need to show you something. And if there’s anything you need to tell us afterwards, please come clean.”

Laura looked at Allegra, to see if she had anything to add. Allegra only shrugged, so Laura took a photocopied document out of her folder and handed it to Xavier, who drew his chair closer to mine so that I could read along with him. It was the Last Will and Testament of Karel Stojaspal as filed on August 31, 2014. The name of the executor was unfamiliar, but Ava Kapoor was the sole beneficiary—for her kindness to my son, he’d written. And her inheritance of his property, investment portfolio, status as musical copyright beneficiary, everything, was dependent on her undergoing a psychiatric evaluation that confirmed her as being of wholly sound mind on her thirtieth birthday. Should that condition not be met, half of the proceeds of