The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Profession?’

  ‘Farmer.’ A lie, but why not? If they thought he was a worker, it might keep him alive a little longer, for whatever that was worth.

  The baton waved to the left.

  A long night followed, cold as hell, running from one humiliation to another. He was stripped, his clothes confiscated and discarded, his watch pocketed by a grizzled kapo – one of the prisoners bumped up to overseer who did the Nazi’s dirty work for them – who spotted it shining on his wrist. He was allowed to keep his boots, which he was glad of, because then he was hustled through snow into a long, cold concrete room where he was shaved, head and body, and covered with acrid delousing powder, which crept into the thousand tiny cuts the blunt clippers had torn in his chest so that when a bucket of steaming hot water was thrown at him, it almost felt soothing.

  He found himself running, now through a long warehouse corridor, now through the snow, naked and absurd, and then standing in another room, being handed a pair of striped slacks and shirt by another kapo. Even at arm’s length, the funk of the garments, with months’ worth of fear and labour soaked into the cloth, made his nose wrinkle, which did not escape the attention of the kapo.

  ‘Is something wrong,’ he asked Arkady, ‘princess?’

  ‘These are dirty,’ he replied, in his ugly but functional German. ‘Do you have clean clothes for me?’

  The kapo grinned now and dashed the bundle from his hands. ‘You are too good for our clothes? You are a fancy man! A lawyer? A doctor?’

  Arkady shook his head. ‘A farmer.’

  The kapo reached out and ran Arkady’s soft hands between his own, the calluses grating on his soft, pink skin. ‘These hands have never touched dirt. You are some kind of professor, maybe? Someone important?’ The kapo’s finger pointed at his own shirt, where a green triangle pointed from his heart to the mud. ‘Do you see this? This means I am a killer. It means I am in charge here. It means the world is upside down. Do you understand what I’m saying, professor? Do you need an interpreter? Here it is.’ The man held up his fist for Arkady to admire, then sunk it into his solar plexus, dropping him. Although he hadn’t eaten in days, he vomited a little, to the delight of the kapo, who walked off laughing. Another kapo, this one a little kinder in the face, helped him up and escorted him to a sorting room.

  Two SS men prowled through the room, appraising the men, visually measuring their muscles, squeezing biceps, reaching into mouths to check the health of teeth and gums. One of the SS men noticed Arkady, came over to inspect. As the German poked and prodded him, Arkady realised that the muscles he had worked so hard to acquire, putting in endless hours with kettlebells and press-ups and sprints, were the reason he’d caught the attention of the SS. His friends back in Prague had always teased him, when he came back from a run breathless and ruddy, that his vanity was going to kill him one day. He almost smiled at the thought that they were right, but the kapo had already taught him how dangerous anything less than a blank facial expression was in this place.

  ‘You are strong. Can you work?’ the SS asked him. Arkady nodded. ‘Good,’ the SS said, then yelled over his shoulder in German, ‘one more! One more for the Sonderkommando.’

  He was taken to a new room and given a greatcoat to wear over his pyjamas. After checking their papers, he was held still by two kapos who tattooed a number into his left arm and attached a triangle to his shirt, just above his heart. Then they explained to him that he had been chosen for a special work detail – a Sonderkommando made up of the strongest men, where he would be rewarded for extra duties – and that he was very lucky. For a moment, flush with exhaustion and grateful for the coat after running through the snow all night, he almost believed it, until he was marched with the other prisoners into Auschwitz and he passed under the lie fashioned in wrought iron over the entrance, and marvelled at its cold practicality: how perfect the euphemism, how much sense it made when you learned the only freedom you could look forward to.

  TWO

  ‘Let me tell you a story about my grandfather. Arkady Kulakov was a hero, a survivor of the Holocaust who came to Australia to find a better life. He came to this country with nothing, nothing at all. He came with no money, with no English. He’d lost everything to the Nazis. In Russia the Communists took everything he had, so he went to Prague, trained to be a doctor, became a physician, and then had that taken from him by the Nazis. So do you know what he did?’

  Adam turned to his new assistant and repeated the question. ‘Do you know what he did?’ She shook her head, nervous, which pleased him. He liked to make people nervous. ‘He was a hero, my grandfather. When the other prisoners were sick, he healed them. When the other prisoners were hungry, he fed them with his own rations. When the other prisoners gave up, he kept them going. Do you know how?’

  The assistant shook her head again, and Adam was, for a second, annoyed at the bovine way she blinked, but he smiled and went on. ‘He made toys. He understood people, and understood that the only things keeping the adults going were their children, and if the children in the camps were to lose hope, all would be lost.

  ‘So he worked out how to keep the children going. He stole bits and pieces from the Nazis, and taught himself how to make things to distract the little ones from the horror. Stuffed toys at first, then simple carvings, then, finally, things of great beauty you would not believe could come out of a place so dark.’

  Adam warmed to the story, as he always did around this point, putting a little boom on the word ‘hope’, a little righteous scorn on the ‘Nazis’, and, as he came to the ‘things of great beauty’, he reached into the display case on the wall of the office and pulled out a doll, offering it to the assistant.

  She took it, sat it in her lap, blinked at it. It wasn’t beautiful, not at all. The doll resembled a little girl, but only in a rudi­men­tary way. Rough-hewn articulated arms and legs hung limp off a torso that was just a sanded-down block of timber, wrapped in a dress fashioned from rough wool. Running a finger over one of the arms, she could feel where a blade had whittled the wood down. The doll’s head, a rough wooden sphere, dangled from a crude ball-joint that attached it to the body. Its features, plump red lips and shining brown eyes, were painted unevenly over the face, but the hair was surprisingly lustrous and silky. The whole thing was covered in a patina of grime, and when she turned it over in her hand, she could see the edge of a yellow triangle peeking out of the fabric where it joined the seam of the dress.

  ‘She’s . . . beautiful,’ said the assistant, uncertainly.

  Adam grinned proudly. ‘That is Sarah. She’s the first real toy my grandfather ever made. She’s named after a little girl he looked after in the camps, and when he emigrated to Australia he left behind his whole past except Sarah, and everything she represented. Strength, charity, hope.’ Adam retrieved the doll and, opening the display case back up, carefully placed her on the shelf next to another doll, similar in design, but this one a boy. ‘In some ways, the Mitty & Sarah dream was born in the camps, a spark in the darkness, but it was only in Australia that it truly came to life. He survived Auschwitz, the worst place the world has ever known, and chose to come to Australia, but they would not let him practise medicine in this country. After everything he had been through, however, Grandpa Arkady was not going to let that hold him back.

  ‘Living out of his workshop in Melbourne, Grandpa carved these beautiful dolls by hand. The second he could afford to, he hired an assistant, Rachel, another survivor from Auschwitz. In time, they fell in love, and she became his wife, my grandmother. Together, they grew the company from an idea to a concern that has employed hundreds of people, most of them new immigrants, survivors from the war who came to Australia to start again.

  ‘This company is built on my grandfather’s hard work and sacrifice. He built it from scratch and made not only his fortune, but a dream that gave all of Australia hope.’

  Adam
finished his speech and beamed at his new personal assistant, who sat bolt upright, having slumped further into the chair as the spiel ground on. ‘That’s what this company is all about. That’s what we work towards every day.’

  He moved to a chair and spun it around so that he could straddle it and cross his arms over the back of it, facing her with his muscles flexed to assert relaxed dominance. This was a trick he’d learned from pick-up manuals but it worked just as well in the corporate sphere. ‘Do you have any questions?’

  He’d finished the dramatic part of the induction, so Tess took over and talked the new girl through the rest of it: how over the decades the company had grown from a boutique toy manufacturer to a key player in the worldwide toy market with partners throughout Asia, America and Europe; their annual turnover, their annual growth rates; all the dry, boring stuff. As they walked out, Tess listing some of the various lines of toys they sold, Adam’s eyes fell to the new girl’s arse.

  He had a good feeling about his new assistant. She was quiet, seemed competent enough, and was very plain. He made a point of hiring unattractive women because he wasn’t the kind of businessman who relied on a beautiful assistant to make him feel important.

  It was also designed to put Tess at ease. He wanted her to know that he could work late without the temptation of a wanton secretary, although he was sure that this one would be into it. With some girls you could just tell. He watched the new girl’s hefty buttocks wiggling as she took the stairs down to the factory floor, and imagined weighing them in his hands.

  It was important to him that Tess knew she was safe with him; that if he slept with other women from time to time, it wasn’t that he didn’t love her, quite the opposite. But not long into the marriage, in the months after the arrival of little Kade when he been unable to bring himself to touch his wife, he had been surprised and pleased to find that he didn’t feel guilty for cheating on her. He was, after all, a man of the old school, with a man’s desires, the need to let off steam, the pressure inside him like tectonic plates crashing and raising mountains. His straying didn’t hurt anyone, and he never let anything drag on for too long.

  In the murky past, in the hot, primordial months of their marriage, there had been situations where he had seen other women and let them get attached. He was smart enough now to concentrate on girls like Clara, young things sure of their beauty, vain enough to glory in seducing an older man, but too proud to boast about it to the wrong people. He’d found that perfect bravado of callow youth complemented his calculating predation.

  He would miss Clara. After the encounter with the peeping tom in the KFC car park, she’d overreacted, and they’d bickered, and finally he’d dropped her off around the corner from her family home, after a bitter goodbye.

  She thought he’d handled the situation badly, but what choice did he have but to take care of the little shit who’d pressed his face against the window during their congress. Perhaps she was right. But who would have expected the boy to bleed so much? Or Clara to freak out so much?

  He’d been furious and jumpy after the fight, but as his adrenaline had cooled he’d started to fret about all the attention the incident had drawn. It was only when faced with the spectre of being caught cheating on Tess that he felt any remorse. He began to imagine Tess’s tears and fury, the consequences and counterattack, the lawyers swooping and her taking his kid and his car and riding off into the sunset.

  So, with the night already ruined, he’d broken it off with Clara. He’d expected her to cry, or at least to be upset, but she agreed that yes, they should break up, and accepted that yes, he was too old for her, and yes, lots of boys were probably dying to be with her. She took his dismissal with such good grace that he was filled with sudden jealousy at the thought that she had another boyfriend. If he was honest with himself, it was not so much her teenage body that turned him on as the fact that she had chosen him over some muscled jock in her class, that his second-hand physique could still make a young girl happy.

  Slumping back into his office chair, he thought of Clara and thumbed idly at his budding erection, then, with the moral fortitude of a man who’s just reaffirmed his marriage by discarding his mistress, he decided against onanism and dropped to the floor for a brace of push-ups.

  While he was cranking out a quick hundred, he remembered the kid he’d caught spying on him. At first he felt a twinge of regret about the way he’d handled that, but as he rounded fifty and the hormones started to race through him, he found himself reminiscing about the satisfying crunch his knuckles had made on the boy’s eye socket and wishing he’d hit him harder. For the last ten push-ups, he fuelled himself by replaying the fight in his mind, this time throwing in a few meaty stomps with the heel of his R M Williams boot.

  He smiled to himself. There was work to be done, and the day was growing late. As he stood, he reached into his pocket for his phone, and realised that he had, at some point during the day, lost the fucking thing, and his mood crashed.

  __________

  Adam came into her office without knocking, startling her, and asked her if she’d seen his phone. She hadn’t but she called it, let it ring out, while Adam looked on, hopeful, then downcast.

  ‘I’ve probably left it in the car.’ He smiled then slipped out, and Tess returned to her accounts. She was trying to hunt down the person behind the abuse of the company charge card, or had been, but she’d become distracted by finding more and more fiscal misconduct. It wasn’t a few indiscretions – someone was systematically ripping off the company.

  She was having trouble tracking the extent of the problem. It might be achievable, even easy, if the company finances were more straightforward, but they were, like all else, a mess. Although she was ostensibly CFO, Adam insisted on approving every transaction – both their signatures were required to make money move. When she’d challenged him on the pointless bureaucracy, he’d confided that it was an exercise in ‘projecting power’. ‘I want every employee to know that I’m watching them all the time,’ he’d said. ‘The more afraid they are of me, the better productivity will be. I want them to know that if they step out of line they’ll be gone, like that.’ He’d clicked his fingers for emphasis, twice. Like. That.

  The company’s core function wasn’t complicated – they imported toys produced in factories overseas, processed them in the warehouse that sprawled behind their offices and shipped them out to toy stores – but administering it was a labyrinthine task, managed by a workforce whose jobs Adam made almost impossible with his oversight. He had an erratic way of jumping excitedly into a particular project, derailing it with his inspirations, then leaving it a smoking ruin.

  Tess had found herself running the company by default so gradually she didn’t notice it happening, picking up a new job here or there, until she seemed to hold the entire hierarchy like a bar of soap in the bath. Every couple of months a new batch of business cards would arrive for her, along with new duties that put her in charge of the minutiae, or, as Adam framed it, gave her ‘shared executive power’. The way he said it, he could have been tapping her on the shoulder with a sword, rather than bequeathing to her the endless chores that he was too busy buying magic beans to manage.

  She looked over at Adam rummaging through his desk drawers, oblivious to the world and, specifically, her, and the old loneliness began to wrap itself around her. So she did what she always did when she felt low, which was to call Arkady, waiting through the ringing for his thick Eastern European ‘Hchello’.

  ‘Arkady, it’s me.’

  ‘Lubovka!’ he boomed happily. His nickname for her, roughly ‘Little Love Thing’ – which, as he joked, was about as affectionate as Russians got. ‘How are you, my dear?’

  ‘Oh, can’t complain. How are you?’

  ‘Terribly shit!’ he exclaimed, and laughed long. ‘I’m a hundred years old. Of course I’m shit! Let’s talk about something else, anything else.’

  They talked for maybe an hour, this and that
, the weather, the family. She spent, probably, more time talking to Arkady than anyone else in her life. She loved her child, adored her husband, but Arkady was her best, possibly only, friend. He was the one she turned to when she had a problem, and she relied on his unflappable old-school charm to cheer her up and steer her towards a solution. So, conversationally, almost breezily, she brought up the abuse of the company cards.

  ‘I think we’ve got a thief in the company.’

  ‘Excuse me, Lubovka, what do you mean?’

  ‘Someone is stealing from us, the petty cash accounts . . . Some money has gone missing.’ There was a long silence on the other end. ‘Arkady?’

  His voice was serious now, solemn. ‘Do you know who it is?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Well then, relax!’ Arkady said, his voice jolly again. ‘It’s probably a misunderstanding. I’ll tell you what, put away your books and go outside and play. It’s a beautiful day! And tomorrow I will come into the office and help you track down this scoundrel.’ Arkady signed off, and Tess hung up.

  Not long after she’d first joined the company, she’d found herself trying to process a complicated set of invoices at Adam’s request, while he was away on a business trip in China. She’d been sitting at her desk trying to work it out, her child throwing a tantrum on the floor, she herself past the point of tears, when she’d looked up from blowing her nose and found Adam’s grandfather standing at the door, staring at her.

  Even though he’d passed the company he’d founded on to Adam, Arkady still dropped by occasionally, unexpectedly and unannounced, to go over the books. She stopped immediately, embarrassed and unnerved that the dapper old man, wearing a three-piece suit despite the sun beating down outside, his hat held politely in front of him, had caught her crying.

  She’d met him only briefly, in the run-up to their shotgun wedding, and didn’t even speak more than a few words to him on the day, although she’d felt his pale blue eyes following her, up the aisle, through the reception, across the dance floor and out to the limousine. It was a strange, searching look, not quite like the one she usually got from men; she couldn’t shake the feeling that the old man was weighing her. At the time she feared he’d marked her as a gold digger, some silly rich girl fallen on hard times and trying to get her hands on his family’s fortune. He’d given the same appraising look in the office as his eyes flicked from her tear-streaked face to the stack of orders before her.