Page 81 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

of address cultivated a silent response. The wooden devil had a good vantage

point, and served as secret audience to a few Topol-Semyonova wrestling
matches. The devil was slightly worried that Myrna and the boys would make a
nuisance of themselves once they found her. But there was one tree that the
wooden devil thought of as her mother, because this tree had murmured
soothingly to her when she’d still been coming up as sapling. That tree watched
over her still, and murmured what the elder trees at Olšany always murmured:
“To pominulo; stejně může i tohle.” That went by; so can this.

The tree was right. This situation wasn’t unique. The children were most
likely to run for their lives as soon as they saw her.
—

MYRNA SAW THE DEVIL before the Topol brothers did, and she approached

without calling out. She read the name on the headstone and brushed a little
lichen out of the devil’s hair. Her gentleness left the devil nonplussed. It was
highly irregular for anyone to be curious enough about the feel of her to
voluntarily touch her. And nobody had ever seemed quite so pleased by their
findings.
The boys overdid their nonchalance, treating the devil’s shoulders as coat
pegs. The girl’s front door keys were always falling out of her pockets, so she

left them on the devil’s lap before chucking her under the chin and saying:
“Thanks, Rowan.” A sequence of elaborate stretches followed, and then Jindrich
and Kirill were ready to fight, with Myrna playing referee. It was a highly
unusual afternoon for the wooden devil, who was intensely aware of the arm that
Myrna had casually flung around her shoulders, as if they were friends who had
come to that place together.

—

AROUND DINNERTIME the boys took their jackets back. But Myrna left her door
keys, and didn’t miss them until she reached her front door and stuck her hand
into the pocket of her jeans.
Her father was still at the theater, so the Topols took her in for the evening.
After dinner Kirill adjusted the lamplight until he’d created the correct

conditions for shadow play and Myrna put on a little show. Her makeshift
shadow puppets quarreled among themselves, hands thrown up, what to do, what
to do . . . a spoon-headed creature had suddenly appeared in their midst and
befriended their youngest boy. I promised him he could live with us . . . The