Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi

Author:Helen Oyeyemi [Oyeyemi, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

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“Come here, you,” Irma said, crawling across Dušan’s lap to get to Leah. She cupped Leah’s face in her hands and stared into her eyes. “OK, so you tell us time is passing, and that we’re moving along with it. Are we going forward or backward? If . . . and I don’t need to tell you that that’s a gigantic ‘if’ . . . if anyone throws us a lifeline, isn’t it true that we’ll find ourselves tied to something equally disgusting, if not more so? And as for you, Leah Loew, isn’t it girls just like you who’ll make those guaranteed-piece-of-shit liberators feel just great about themselves? You’ll be throwing your arms around them and saying, Thank you, thank you so much, we never stopped believing that those dark times would come to an end and you’d get here at last! Stop lying for once, and tell me that you understand that we’re all damned to hell.”

Leah listened to all this without allowing herself to block any of it out. Irma’s terror. Irma’s revulsion. Then came Leah’s own: for a moment she felt a clammy phosphorescence on her skin, then under it. Some germ or scrap of gore that swerved straight into her guts and was extinguished there. Had that sensation stayed with Leah for a second longer, she would have been emboldened to strike Irma, or to grab something sharp and punch a hole in that bitch’s chest. The urge left her almost as soon as she’d noticed it, so all Leah did was stare back at the other woman and mumble that time was passing in some way that didn’t seem to be about going forward or going back.

The look in Irma’s eyes was awful; her pupils appeared to simultaneously drift and thicken, just like spots of activated charcoal. “Show us,” she said.

Horrible, horrible. But Irma was beside herself, that was all. Who wasn’t these days?

“Did you hear me, Leah? I asked you to show us that time is passing.”

Leah fumbled for an answer, but grew more confident as she spoke: “If we get hold of a ladder, I’ll try.”

A visit to one of the hotel’s storerooms yielded the showiest ladder possible; two golden palm trees with broad rungs running between them. It folded up nicely into a peacock-blue carriage they dragged out from under tarpaulins. There being no horses about just then, the four bound themselves to the carriage with long ribbons and marched across Old Town with the gilded ladder rattling around in the seat of honor. This procession caused no more of a public disturbance than the Ring cycle did. It stopped at the corner of Maiselova and Červená streets. Leah and Vojtěch held the ladder steady while Irma ascended the stuccoed facade of the Jewish Town Hall until she was level with the first of the two clocks, the one that marked the hours out with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

These were the clocks that had convinced

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