Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi [best life changing books TXT] 📗

was an unconnected thought that crossed his mind; anyway, he let go of my hand. I took a seat opposite him, dumping my jeans, shirt, and Saturday underwear on the neighbouring seat and cautiously tilting backward until my head met the wall, which was unexpectedly plush. I tried to think “velvet cushion” and not “padded cell.” Sunlight lined the bottom of the compartment door and the base of the window blinds, but apart from that, the figures of Xavier and Árpád were mainly distinguishable by size and silhouette. One much shorter than me, one taller. One with a tail, one without. Everything mellowed once we sat still, feeling the train in our backs and necks and feet, that affable and determined rattle of the axle within the round, the wheels beneath us carrying us away. I listened intently for a while, for footsteps or some other commotion in the hallway, or the crackling that precedes a tannoy announcement. But there was only quiet. And Árpád’s sweet slumber was making me bitter—he could at least have made a show of looking for a power socket or a way to open the window blind. I said as much, and Xavier stretched out his leg and crossed his ankle over one of mine. “It’s not too bad like this,” he said. “We can talk.”

I wiggled my toes. “Can implies ought, Mr. Shin.”

“In that case, Mr. Shin, I’ll get it all off my chest. I’m thinking about being eleven and twelve,” he said.

“Nice and specific …”

Veronica Park, Xavier’s mum, has saved his first passport, the one he used from the ages of two to twelve. We’ve looked at it together. Each page is a wall of watermarked squares and rectangles of smudged ink with entry dates and times written in them. Xavier was born during strange times for the Shins of Sangju. This was how Veronica prefaced his childhood situation when I asked her about it. Strange times for the country in general: a towering cream puff of an economic miracle sombrely nibbled away at the edges by martial law. But in addition to that tense prosperity—​only contentment is legal—there was a lot of pain for the Shins as a clan that just kept shrinking. Infertility, miscarriages, fatal paediatric illness, a terrible accident, cot death—Veronica ticked each vast sorrow off on her fingers and thumb as she told me what her husband’s sisters had endured over the course of nine months. And then Veronica gave birth to this sweet-natured little rosebud who bounced with health. He was baptised very quickly and named after the saint who’d converted one of his ancestors to Catholicism. Veronica tried not to like the rosebud too much. He’d hold on to her little finger and give her soulful looks, and she’d stare back, knowing, just knowing, there had to be a catch. By the time he was about four weeks old she was already panic plotting. She’d hide him somewhere. Yes, that’s what she’d do, that’s how she’d prolong the time they had together. Clownish notions, as if she was Death’s jester, thinking up ways to make her laugh by trying to escape her. Veronica and the rosebud stayed exactly where they were, attending all scheduled doctor’s appointments as faithfully as they did mass, and, to everyone’s surprise, the rosebud made it through his first year without major incident.

Then four of his aunts all but abducted him, squabbling between themselves as they passed him from country to country, each one instructing him to call her Mother, or Mamoune, or Omma. Nobody else in Xavier’s family could forget that these four sisters were mothers to children who had only almost been born, or had lived far too briefly. When you thought of that, you knew you didn’t have the right or ability to chastise. So Xavier and two of his cousins were dragged around between aunts for years. Do Yeon-ssi, the fifth sister, was the eldest of Xavier’s aunts. When she thought about what was going on, she felt weak with fear. It was all wholly ordinary and all utterly out of hand. She’d been keeping an eye on Xavier and surreptitiously comparing him to her friends’ twelve-year-old kids. He was all worn out from being given different names and not knowing what to call people or how much affection to show, or whether to bother saying anything at all to anyone since he didn’t know how long it would be before the next sister swooped in. Thinking about all this, Do Yeon-ssi had a talk with Veronica Park. She pointed out that her home was Xavier’s best chance of a stable environment. She’s a person whose sisters don’t love her but fear her, because of all the things she did to guarantee that when they were all growing up. This must be true, since the house of Shin Do Yeon turned out to be the only place Xavier’s other aunts didn’t dare try to take him from.

“Eleven and twelve,” Xavier said. “Those were the years when I was spending a lot of time in compartments like this. Only with people I didn’t know, or just me and a book. It mostly felt safe, but also, how do I put this …”

“Like some kind of incubator for intense encounters?”

“Yes! Even more than stations are. Is it that sticky mix of enclosure and exposure? The temporary privacy? You just get … involved with each other. Can’t avoid it.”

“And where was that? São Paulo?”

“Nope, São Paulo was the year before, I think. This was the route between Paris and Marseilles. By the way, are you completely naked underneath that dressing gown?”

“You’re too easily distracted. And you’re getting nothing from me until you tell all about this French train orgy.”

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“What?”

“I just rolled my eyes. Good, you didn’t see it. So if you do it too, I won’t know. This is perfect.”

When Xavier Shin was eleven years old, the Parisian couple he lived with at the time sent him