Page 92 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

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