If We Exist

30.

Velvet draperies collecting dust in the viewing room. The buzzing of sewing machines, the rustling of pattern paper, and there, Eline's frame silhouetted against the light. Her audible click clacks on the chequered floor as she moves from one papier mâché mannequin to another, pinning together fabrics that given the right time and care will come together like 3D copies of the drawings spread out on her mahogany desk.

Ru, can you hand me more pins?

She's caught me watching again. She knows I'm bored and have nothing better to do. Outside the rain is pattering against the windows. Inside the musty scent of fur and dust wears down my attention span until I find myself entranced by the flurry of her movements. It's her space. Her room. And Eline is studious. Eline is a master at what she does.

I don't rise from my seat. We stare at each other, and I will my expression to convey just how little interest I have in becoming her ball boy.

No.

She lumbers over to the table herself, dragging the mannequin behind her. If she's exasperated; if she's holding back a sigh, or imagining the many ways she could poke my eyes out she doesn't let it show. Eline never lets anything I do show.

One day you'll cling to my skirt you'll love me so much. Just you wait and see.

It's easy to explain Eline. I picture opening my mouth and letting the words give form to the walls, the ceiling, the pillars, the chequered floor until I've constructed the viewing room around her. Until Ezra sees her as I see her in my mind. A slender woman with a ballerina's poise, blonde hair slicked back and pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, sewing pins held between her lips, the sleeves of her favourite, burgundy cardigan rolled up to her elbows. I could say something like: Eline designed the prime minister's daughter's wedding dress, and perhaps that would convey enough to leave out the chunk of information I can't say. But what is Eline without her studio, and what is her studio if not a viewing room—and indeed what is a viewing room if not a museum?

And how do I say that? How do I explain the presence of a single room in Ljerumlup dedicated to the myth of our superiority without outing myself as this...this alien? I can't. He thinks we're of the same strain, that when you cut us open and remove our organs, in our very cores, you'll find the same substance of generosity, and acceptance, and wanting to better humanity. He believes this because his father was once a Ukrainian refugee and sometime in his formative years it left an impression that when we, formerly lumped-together compatriots, wash up on Her Majesty's shores we must all do so as refugees in need of saving. When he tried to speak to me in broken Russian, I did not correct him. I liked how he looked at me. I liked his single-minded focus on salvaging the parts of me closest to the surface, those he could identify and name because it correlated with a narrative he understood. If you're fleeing war you can't be inherently bad because the presumption is that you oppose the corrupt structures and political mayhem driving you out of your country—you're the underdog, the little man with no voice.

He thinks I'm good, and I want to keep him stranded where he is, in a fog of ambiguity where even if he's figured out I'm Arash and that I'm from Dronesk, he'll remain blind; grasping for clues he'll rationalise away because he'll ultimately circle back to the assumption that we're the same.

How do I tell him it's not true? That it's a mistake to look at me and see a single individual when at any given moment, I'm a collective. I'm Bikjaru. I've never once wholeheartedly believed I could better the world, and the only refuge I seek is from him; his judgement when he realises he's let a poser into his home. I've lied and I've deceived, and I might just do it again because the truth is too absurd, and comical, and vile to be uttered out loud in his small living room—this far away from Ljerumlup and the pillars that would've supported it otherwise.