The Toymaker

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The Toymaker Page 12

by Liam Pieper


  ‘Well, yes, there are options.’ Shubangi swivelled around in her chair and pulled up some files on her Mac. ‘How do you feel about Jakarta?’

  __________

  Tess, drawn away from Arkady’s hospital bed and into the office by the nagging fear that the company was collapsing in her absence, didn’t notice Adam slipping into her office until he’d slumped heavily into the chair opposite, startling her. She’d been googling vascular dementia, and had wandered for God knew how long between websites that spelled out in calm detail exactly how Arkady was breaking: his body, then his mind. She drifted from Wikipedia to dry government sites to earnest support groups to online forums and found herself lost in an endless round of people asking questions about symptoms that worried them, and responses, helpful at first, then meaning­less, then mean-spirited, then nuts. She wondered what it meant about the species that the internet was the pinnacle of human achievement and democracy, and it had become a giant scream of loneliness and insanity.

  ‘You look like shit,’ Adam said. ‘When was the last time you slept?

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Seriously, though, you look a little tired. How’d you sleep?’

  ‘What’s sleep?’

  ‘Touché.’

  In truth, she hadn’t really slept since the first night in the hospital. She’d spent every minute she could by Arkady’s bedside as he convalesced. His doctors assured her that he was making a strong recovery, but she couldn’t see it. He was asleep most of the time, and when he wasn’t he was sullen and uncommunicative. The idea that the old man was at death’s door had retreated, but the fact that he might not be the person he was before the stroke was just as bad, perhaps worse. The thought that Arkady was lost to her was never far from her mind, especially in the nights when sleep would not come, and her pills just made the world around her dull, her thoughts thick and grainy, but didn’t kill the anxiety, or bring oblivion. In the end, sleep would creep up on her unnoticed, and when her alarm went off at six she would crawl out of bed, unrested and barely able to rouse her son and get him ready for school.

  In spare moments, she worked remotely, tried to wade through everything she hadn’t finished the day before, and every night she found herself further away from the bottom of her inbox, a thousand little tasks lying scattered and forgotten somewhere on the desk. She hadn’t been so overwhelmed by her job since the day Arkady had first taken her under his wing. Until his illness, she hadn’t realised just how much she’d relied on being able to call him for advice when things got tough. All these years she thought she’d been doing the old man a favour by indulging his desire to keep on top of the business, but without his help, the work drifted in on her like snow, banked up and immovable.

  It was made worse by the zeal with which Adam had embraced his stewardship of the company since the night of Arkady’s stroke. He had been a blur of activity. In the past weeks he’d pored over catalogues of toys from suppliers in foreign markets and ordered dozens of new lines to be produced with Mitty & Sarah branding, items he seemed to have chosen more or less at random: pencil cases, water guns, teddy bears. Seconds earlier she’d been staring at an order form for ten thousand Mitty & Sarah yoyos and had a mild existential crisis executing it. She knew already that none of them were going to sell. People just didn’t buy those sorts of toys any more. Every harried parent had a device in their pocket that could summon one of a million entertainment options, and children were expected to play with a fucking yoyo? She put the order through anyway, too tired to argue. What she really needed was some time off.

  ‘I think you should take some time off,’ said Adam, leaning over the desk to take her hand.

  Tess burst out laughing, then caught herself. ‘Really? Do you have any idea how busy we are?’

  ‘Of course, but I’ll cover your desk. You’ve got more important work to do right now.’

  She was pleased to find, even after all these years of marriage, that Adam could still surprise her.

  Their relationship was built on surprises, starting with the happy accident that had turned out to be little Kade. Even now, years later, the very idea that she was married struck her as unlikely. In her childhood, as she watched her parents go through increasingly calamitous marriages, the whole thing had seemed like a terrible idea. Then, as a teen, she had discovered feminism, not the watered-down white-bread socialist varietal of her parents, but something a little less messianic, a little more applicable: Greer, de Beauvoir, Wolf, Madonna. By her late teens she figured marriage to be a cynical contract that exchanged currency for procreation. None of that for her.

  Marriage, or even monogamy, had always seemed impractical. Once upon a time she’d been callow and horny to the point of derangement. Back then, sex was pure pleasure, politically as much as physically, and through her undergraduate years she’d chosen her partners based on a complex algorithm of privilege, opportunity and guilt. An ex-con, a trans-woman, a black guy for whom she had learned to quote James Baldwin and to apologise profusely for refusing anything he wanted in bed.

  Back then, she had entertained a right-on perspicacity and she was particular about the words she used for sex. She remembered once shouting down a classmate in a college tutorial who had referred to a lover’s penis in her poem. ‘A lover doesn’t have a penis,’ she announced primly. ‘A lover has a cock.’

  Of course, nothing cures a bad case of arts degree faster than a decade of struggle, something she discovered as her youth, and her trust fund, waned. One does not want to headbutt against the world forever, no matter how idealistic.

  And then, just in time, Adam. Halfway through their business meeting in which he was supposed to be acquiring the rights to her puppet designs, Adam leaned across the table and kissed her, and it dawned on her that he was not actually interested in her puppetry, but in getting into her pants; hence, of course, the expensive dinner.

  As Adam broke off the kiss and settled back into his chair, she brought her hand up to her mouth to cover her shock, and then suddenly burst out laughing.

  Adam wasn’t laughing. He looked so crumpled and forlorn that she could see his hope that he would sleep with her that night leave him, so in that moment she decided to do it anyway. And then he had proven to be so much better in bed than she’d imagined, a surprising blend of instinct and utter selfishness.

  What a relief to meet a man who just wanted to be her friend, to rampage over her body like a toddler in a ballroom and then take her to the movies. He was unromantic in the best sense; a world away from all the boys who were determined to see her as a mysterious, irrational cipher, or, worse, those who claimed her as an intellectual peer and then immediately started to batter down her self-esteem for fear of losing her. Finally, after a lifetime of reparational sexual conquest, it was nice to just have something uncomplicated.

  For the first time in as long as she could remember, sex had stopped being a performance, and became fun. Adam had a guileness and playfulness in the sack that she’d sorely missed. He undressed her the way she’d once unwrapped Christmas presents, clumsy with eagerness, eyes alive with sheer gratitude as they feasted. A nice surprise, then a lull, a nap, and, when she opened her eyes later, everything in and around her had changed.

  So nearly a decade later another surprise, this one also kind of pleasant, and probably exactly what she needed. Adam sat in the chair across from her and, in a hangdog kind of way, apologised for his recent behaviour, his weird mania, all the extra work he’d caused her, and just generally under-appreciating her.

  ‘I’m sorry, basically. I haven’t really known how to deal with the situation with Grandpa, I’ve been trying to ignore it through work, and I haven’t acknowledged the toll that’s been taking on you. So I thought it might be good if you take some time off.’

  ‘Well . . . I mean . . . It’s impossible, all this . . .’ She waved her hand to indicate the invoices, the accounts, the world. ‘It’s too much to leave for someone else.’<
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  ‘I can handle it. If I need any help I’ll bring in some contractors.’ Until now, Adam had never taken Tess up on the many times she’d hinted, strongly hinted, near-begged Adam to bring in outside help to audit their finances.

  ‘Adam, I’m your wife, so don’t bullshit me now. What are you up to?’

  Adam looked down, bit his lip, used his leg to swivel back and forth on his chair. For a moment, he looked exactly like their son, and she felt a wave of affection for the ridiculous man sweep over her.

  ‘Okay, look, in all honesty, this company probably needs you more right now than it ever has before, but Grandpa needs you more. I know you two have a special relationship, and I would be by his side right now if I could be, but things . . .’ He gestured with his arms, a sweeping movement that could mean anything. ‘I can’t walk away from things right now. So I want you to take some time off. For yourself, and for Arkady.’

  She smiled, and Adam smiled back, and a lovely moment passed between them, the sort that had been common in the early days of their partnership, but were made all the sweeter now by their rarity. ‘Fine, okay. Good. I’ll do it, thank you. When would this happen, theoretically?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Oh, Adam, that’s not possible.’

  ‘Sure it is! Listen.’ Her husband outlined how her job would be covered. Further, that she would need the time off to take Kade to school as Adam had to fly to China for an emergency meeting at their suppliers. ‘Oh, that reminds me.’ Adam produced a manila folder and handed her a sheaf of pages. ‘You’ll have to sign this before you go on leave.’

  She glanced down at it, squinted, reached for her reading glasses. Adam leaned forward and put a hand on hers, bent down and kissed her. ‘Don’t bother reading it. It’s just the standard release form for our Shenzhen factories. I’ll sign on the plane and deliver it in person.

  ‘I’ll just have a quick look.’

  ‘No need, it’s boilerplate.’

  He put a pen in her hand and moved it to where a plastic tab marked where she should sign. She scribbled her name, and asked Adam if he sure that this was the best time to vanish overseas.

  ‘I know this is coming at the worst possible time, Tess, but I need you to look after Grandpa.’

  ‘What if he gets worse while you’re gone?’

  Adam waved this away like a fly. ‘He’ll be fine. He’s just had a little fall, it happens to heaps of guys his age. He’s had a couple of weeks to lie down, watch some TV, pinch a nurse’s arse. He just needed a rest and he’ll be right as rain. You know he will.’

  ‘Adam, he gets discharged from the hospital in a couple of days,’ she protested, but her husband was already on his feet, kissing her cheek, headed for the door.

  ‘I’ll only be gone for a few days, and he’ll be fine. He’s a tough old bastard. He’s been through worse before.’

  __________

  Hunger. Even when the pain eclipsed almost all else, there was hunger. When Arkady’s stomach shut down and the ache for food slipped away, it was replaced by another, for water, for a cool towel for his fever, for warmth, for kindness. When he surfaced from his delirium he could take stock for moments at a time and knew, again, that his life was over. The wound in his chest had gone bad and his blood was turning to poison. He could feel it when he was conscious, and even more so when he was not. As the fever surged and raged within him, memories of nights with Jan came to him, the way he smiled, the feeling of his fingernails caressing Arkady’s back, and he was surprised, amazed, to find that he was excited.

  Over breakfast one hungover Sunday morning before the war, a friend had wondered aloud why he always felt absurdly amorous when teetering on the brink of alcohol poisoning, and Arkady had joked that the body knew it was on the way out, and had summoned up the wherewithal for one last Darwinian stab at passing on his genes. Now, a few years later, dying in a bunk in a strange land, he remembered that. Sorry, Darwin, he thought, that was never on the cards anyway.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered in the dark, and laughed, and a voice from the darkness yelled at him to shut up.

  How absurd, how very like you, you wreck, you lech, was what Jan would say if he had been there to cluck his tongue and shake his head in mocking disapproval. But of course he would never see Jan again, let alone touch him. Jan was long dead, at the bottom of a mass grave or ashes on the wind. What he wouldn’t do to feel the man’s hands on him one more time.

  Not to worry, Arkady would be dead as well, soon enough. It was too dark to see the wound in his chest, but he could feel the burning in his blood and the itch creeping in where the stitches pierced his skin, eclipsing even the lice that crawled over him unchallenged. He was too weak to try to catch and kill them, too weak to do anything but wait.

  Darkness, sleep, then a voice, Dr Mengele at the foot of his bed, reading a thermometer. ‘This man has two weeks to live,’ he said. ‘If he has not died by then, or recovered, dispose of him.’ Arkady tried to rise to argue, but he was already gone. Mengele’s dismissal of him rankled, burrowed in deep. He was insulted. Until the Nazi’s appraisal, he’d been quite happy to die; now he vibrated between life and death, torn away from peaceful oblivion by pique.

  After the rage it was thirst. Who could have imagined such thirst? He dreamed of deserts, of waterfalls, of barren fields cracked by the sun, of taps. He startled out of sleep, and remembered that, at the end of the barracks where he lay, somewhere between five feet and a million miles away, there was a tap with cold running water.

  He rolled out of his bunk and landed heavily, winding himself. He lay there for a while gasping, and then started crawling. One metre, two, three. He welcomed death, but not until he proved Mengele wrong by reaching some water. The tap was awfully far away though. He decided to rest, just for a minute, and closed his eyes. For a moment he was in Prague again, and then there were hands on him, rolling him over, tugging at his boots, scrabbling at his coat and for a second he thought Jan had come for him, but then he was out again.

  For a long time Arkady drifted in the black, neither hot nor cold, not a bad place to be, and a much better place than the one he felt himself being pulled back to.

  It was touch that brought him back, a man’s fingers tracing his chest. For a warm, wonderful moment he thought of Jan, but no, Jan was dead, long dead. The hands on his chest weren’t a lover’s, they were too light. A doctor’s hands, gentle and impersonal as a mosquito as they felt about his ribs and palpated his chest. Still, they called him back – it had been so long since he’d been touched by another human being, except in anger, that he hadn’t realised how deep that hunger ran in him, deeper than the hunger of wasting muscle and bone, more profound than the thirst that had driven him across the barracks. He hadn’t known just how much he missed kindness.

  ‘Good morning,’ a familiar voice said, and Arkady opened his eyes to find himself staring into Dieter’s. ‘How do you feel?’

  Arkady tried to speak, but his voice was a cracked, pathetic thing. The doctor offered him a glass of water, helped him to drink it. He tried again. ‘You should have let me die.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Is that any way to say thank you?’

  ‘Pashol na hui,’ Arkady said.

  Dr Pfeiffer smiled. ‘My Russian is rusty, but you are welcome. I’m just sorry it took so long to find you. When you didn’t report for work in the morning I went searching for you at the Sonderkommando barracks. I have no idea how you ended up in the labs. I am sorry. Those responsible will be punished.’

  Arkady tried to sit up, failed. ‘Do you have anything to eat? Morphine?’

  Dr Pfeiffer brought bread and vodka. Arkady went for the bottle first, then tentatively started on the bread. Dieter watched with a wry smile on his face.

  ‘Better?’ he asked, when Arkady stopped to breathe.

  ‘As good as can be expected.’

  ‘You were dead, you know,’ Dr Pfeiffer said, lightly, his tone conversational. ‘For fully two
minutes. Of course, in this age death is a relative thing, but still, no pulse and no air for two minutes! It was something of a miracle for me to bring you back to life.’

  ‘I forgot you were so modest,’ said Arkady with a grunt. ‘I don’t believe in miracles.’

  The Nazi grinned at him. ‘No? This would be the time for it. They say there no atheists at the end of a gun.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I can tell you there are no gods in the middle of a war.’

  ‘The war will not last forever. And then where will God be?’

  ‘Wherever you Germans put him. You have science to justify anything, no? Your philosophers have killed him once. Surely you can drag him back to life like you did me?’

  ‘The world needs men like you more than God, I think.’

  ‘Is that why I’m here?’

  The doctor looked appraisingly at Arkady. ‘You are here because I need you. You’re the best pathologist I’ve ever worked with, and without you my research will founder. Help me and you will survive this war. You have my word as a German.’

  Arkady summoned up all the easy scorn he could in a mom­ent, which was plenty: ‘Great.’

  ‘My word as a doctor, then.’

  ‘Very good. Hardly worthless at all.’

  ‘As a pragmatist then.’ His tone, which had been wry until now was suddenly sober, and he leaned forward to lock his eyes on Arkady’s. ‘Right now you are the only thing keeping the children alive. Without you they will find no one to offer them anaesthetic, no one to tend to them after surgery, no one who cares about their survival.’

  Arkady’s eyes dropped from Dieter’s and rested on his food, which seemed suddenly unappetising. The German continued, his voice soft and serious. ‘I know you care about them. I know what you’ve been doing for them, with the toys.’ The Russian started at this, but didn’t look up. ‘And, Arkady, I know you’ve been stealing medicine and food from me to give to them. I don’t mind, not at all. I will even help you, if you help me. Let’s continue our work here, and I will give you all you need to help the children; food, medicine, proper tools to make their toys, if that’s what you want, and they will live. I can promise you that without your intervention, they won’t survive the war. Not because I will kill them, but because you will, by neglecting their care.’

 

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