Page 78 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

people, holding hands for as long as she could. She tried to do the same on the

psychiatric ward but the security was tighter there. When she came home she
stayed near her mother, whose addiction to painkillers had already caused her to
injure herself for the sake of high-strength prescriptions. The woman’s nerves
tormented her so that only medication prevented her howling becoming a source
of public or even domestic disturbance. From the little that the woman had been
able to explain to her, the girl knew that her mother thought strange thoughts she
could never tell anyone. Graphic structures appeared on the insides of her

eyelids, a minute exhibition of X-ray photographs. There was affection between
mother and daughter, but they’d given up trying to express it; rather than force a
display they simply asked for each other’s good faith. And no matter how many
times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle
between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to

be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of
avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the
pills were better than holding the child’s hand.
—

THE GIRL’S father was a puppeteer, and there came a day when he was called to
perform in Prague; an honor it would’ve been difficult to disregard. He’d never

dreamed of being noticed by the puppeteers at work in that city, let alone
considered a colleague. The professor’s wife read this as a sign that she must
either break or bend. She told her husband it would be good for him to take their
daughter traveling, and checked into a clinic as an answer to her family’s
anxieties about her being alone. So the girl found herself living in Prague.
Rowan himself has no particular view of Prague, but I know it a little, and it was

fitting that the likes of Myrna Semyonova was let loose in a city whose streets
combined sepia-filtered rainbows and shapes of nightmarish precision. If I truly
remember the street Rowan mentioned, then Myrna and her father lived in a
building that looked like an avenue of concrete gallows welded together with
steel. Apart from enforcing her school attendance, her father left her to her own
devices; she was free to watch his rehearsals and performances or to improve her
graffiti skills, aggravate swans on the banks of the Vltava, or anything else that

seemed like a good idea. Myrna loved to watch her father with his puppets—he
showed her the influence it was possible to have from a slight distance—so she
spent a lot of time at the theater that became his second home. But she also
began a correspondence with her mother that pleased them and led to the