The Toymaker
Page 13
Arkady raised his eyes now, which were furious. ‘What kind of offer is that?’ he growled. ‘What kind of monster are you?’
‘Not a monster, a scientist, and one who needs a good assistant.’
‘You are a parody of a scientist. You’re Frankenstein, maybe. A shit fucking doctor, in any case.’
‘Let me tell you a story, Arkady. All this talk of God and the Devil has reminded me of it. It is one of my favourites, from Hindu mythology. Siva the destroyer and Parvati the creator have a treasure, the greatest treasure they want to give to their favourite child. They call Skanda, the warrior, and Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, and tell them the prize goes to the first who can circle the world. Skanda immediately jumps onto his peacock and starts to race around the world. Ganesh, a little more thoughtful, a little less agile, simply walks a circle around his parents, who, as gods, are the world. Skanda, upon returning from his quest, is furious to find Ganesh has outsmarted him, until Parvati calms him down and reveals that he has been the treasure all along, just like Ganesh, just like all her children.’
‘What is the point of that story?’
‘The point is —’ Dieter leaned across the table to freshen Arkady’s drink ‘— sometimes you fight better when you don’t fight at all. Pick your battles, my friend.’
SEVEN
Adam was woken by the call to prayer. The wailing gibberish sliced through the thick air, through the din of the air conditioner, piercing his stupor. He was hungover, worse than he’d been in years, worse than in living memory. For a moment he didn’t know where he was and then he groaned when he remembered, thinking of the task ahead of him. Jakarta. Fucking Jakarta. While Shubangi had set up everything he needed to transfer the production of the Sarah dolls to Indonesia, he needed to inspect the factory in person, and sign off on it. He’d already printed off the necessary forms, and acquired Tess’s signature, but now he had to deliver them in person. He was kind of glad, actually; what he was doing was sensitive, and he didn’t trust anyone else to handle it with the requisite delicacy; nor, for that matter, could anyone know why he was doing it.
He’d arrived at the hotel after a gruelling twelve hours in transit. On his flight, he’d sat next to a plump middle-aged woman with a screeching western Sydney accent and the most frightening case of dandruff he had ever seen speckling the cloth of her halter-neck. They both dozed off during the flight and when he woke up he was slumped in her direction. He brushed a few stray flakes that had fluttered onto his lap, feeling ill. He did not like dirt, and he was not looking forward to Jakarta.
When he’d finally arrived, his taxi had crept through the choked streets, past the canals thick with rubbish and bordered by shacks built illegally over the rivers on stilts, just visible through the lamplight they cast on the water.
In years past, Adam had spent a half-dozen holidays in Bali, and thought of Indonesia as something seen from the window of a taxi, green and full of crumbling concrete statues of dragons and gods wrapped in cheerful black-and-white sarongs. Indonesia, as far as he knew, was a nation of smiling, helpful men in battered thongs who wanted to call him a taxi, bring him a beer, give him a massage. Jakarta was different. Here, the faceless, indifferent hordes in long pants and hijabs freaked him out. He had no idea what to make of this sprawling city; it felt as though he’d been lied to.
His first stop had been the bank where he’d arranged to have the money he would need in the next few days washed and converted into rupiah. It had taken a full hour and a half sweating through the traffic to reach his destination. He’d arrived at the bank shortly before close and had to argue his way past the security guards who spoke little English, only to confront a clerk who spoke none. It baffled Adam that anyone could run a bank without at least a basic grasp of English, but no matter how loudly and slowly he spoke, the bank man just stared blankly and blinked stupidly, little black dots of acne crowding his beady eyes further into fleshy cheeks, until he then unleashed a torrent of angry, impatient Indonesian. Adam, not used to being yelled at, was momentarily taken aback, but then raised his voice too. The clerk sighed, checked his watch, sighed again, and picked up a phone on his desk.
A manager was summoned from elsewhere in the building, a skinny, dark man who spoke with the singsong half-American accent of an international school, and fumbled with unfamiliar words in his struggle to keep up as Adam and the clerk barked at each other. It took half the night, and dozens of phone calls to Shubangi back in Melbourne, but Adam finally cleared the money and had it ready to go in the morning. Normally, this kind of thing was handled by Tess, so he’d no idea how stressful it was trying to secure something as simple as a bank transaction. His next appointment would be much easier.
From Australia, Adam had ordered an end to production at the Chinese factory that produced their flagship dolls, and across the world in Shenzhen, the factory floor was already being dismantled and reconfigured for some other enterprise. The millions of dollars he’d invested there had been redirected to Jakarta, where the cash would fund the production of the dolls in a cheaper Indonesian facility, minus fifty thousand dollars, which he would reroute back to Australia, and the account Tariq had given him. Time was running out. He did not believe the man would carry through on his threat if he was late with the money, but there was no point in pushing his luck
Adam had gone over the exchange with Tariq time and again, and each time it dredged up new feelings of hate and fear and guilt that his indiscretions had led him to this point, where some grubby stranger could barge into his office and demand his hard-earned. He brooded on it now, his mood growing darker as he waited for the bank to transfer the money into Tariq’s account, and when they handed him the receipt he studied it glumly.
Adam had been exhausted and grumpy when he’d finally arrived at his hotel, so to cheer himself up he upgraded to the penthouse suite, just a few metres from the infinity pool, and the swim-up bar, that overlooked the city. Slumped on a submerged barstool, cool from the waist down and a pleasant warm breeze tickling his chest hair, Adam watched the chaos on the streets far below. With nightfall, the smog seemed to have gone to ground, and fifteen floors below, the swirling traffic, screeching horns and yells of hawkers underneath tarpaulins blended into a hazy rumble that barely reached him. The skyline, made ragged by rolling blackouts, empty lots, crumbling tenements that were half ruins, was a rough expanse of darkness, punctuated by a few glowing skyscrapers. At the top of many of them, the lights of their own rooftop pools shone out, and in one or two he could see women sluicing mermaid-like through the water. He briefly wished that a lonely businesswoman would wander up to the pool whom he could chat to and perhaps seduce, but then nixed that thought. He was, after his brush with disaster over Clara, determined to be a chaste and true husband. While it was good to be the kind of quick-thinking alpha male who could seduce strange women when the opportunity arose, it was entirely different, and much better, to be the kind of man who could but didn’t. He was, he felt, searching inside himself, the latter.
He ordered another frozen margarita and let his bladder go, feeling the warm release of his urine into the pool. He had seen no reason to get up from his stool, and stayed there late into the night, ordering drinks and enjoying his own company, making plans for the morning, and all the mornings beyond that.
But now, at dawn, it was a different story. The rooftop room he’d insisted on meant that he was in the firing line of every loudspeaker tied to every mosque that broadcast the call to prayer. Sweating and grumpy, he pulled the pillow over his head to drown out the noise, and finally gave up on sleep. The wailing prayers gave way to a long religious sermon, where endless staccato sentences in Indonesian crashed against his hangover, followed by pregnant pauses for reflection. Adam cursed every prophet he could think of and looked at his watch. It was five in the morning and the sun, struggling to make itself known through the smog, was already unbearably hot.
He crawled naked from bed and, grabbing a towel
to wrap himself in, staggered to the pool. Nobody was around, so he let the towel drop and plunged in, diving deep and staying under as long as he could, swimming the length of the pool underwater with a few mighty breaststrokes.
After his swim, he called room service to bring him a bloody mary and sipped it, glaring from a lounge chair by the pool, out over the city and its repressive heat haze. His sweat fell off him in fat droplets, and every couple of minutes he had to wipe a thick film of grease off his face with a hand towel, which, seconds after he dropped it on the ground, would be replaced with a new one, freshly folded and refrigerated.
He couldn’t help but take the weather personally; the heat that smothered him to a degree that felt like waterboarding, while remaining dry enough to make his lungs and throat rasp, seemed out to get him and him alone. The toxic, obfuscating smog that hugged the city looked, from up here, like a physical manifestation of a deep hostility that he could feel directed at him and everything he stood for.
Far below, as the day heated up, the seething mass of cars lost focus through the smog, blurring out to a dangerous game of Tetris. Fucking idiots, he thought. Finishing the bloody mary, he decided another was in order and, settling into the poolside bar, selected a piña colada off the menu.
A line of ants was marching from the kitchen, across the length of the rooftop bar, to a bank of waxy pot plants clustered around the spa. Using a thumb, he closed the end of the straw to trap the drink inside, and using his makeshift pipette, dropped a blob of sugary cocktail onto the brick by the pool. Almost immediately a dragonfly peeled off from the buzzing miasma that hovered just above the water and landed next to it. Adam leaned in closer as it fed until his nose was centimetres away. It would plunge its tiny face into the sea of sugar and booze, stopping only to shake its wings once in a while, like it was rolling up its sleeves at the end of the workday.
‘Easy, mate,’ Adam told the bug. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury.’ He was bored now, and heaved up to get another drink. While he waited for the painfully slow barman to deliver, he pinched his belly between thumb and forefinger, and was dismayed to find a layer of flab had grown under his skin since he’d last taken notice of himself. He would, he resolved, hit the gym first thing tomorrow.
Back in his seat, he leaned over to toast the bug and found it dying. Pickled by the alcohol, it lay on its back, little legs twitching helplessly while the army of ants swarmed around it excitedly. Attracted by the sugar, they’d lapped it up, and then turned their attention to the helpless dragonfly. For a moment they tugged to and fro, each eager ant trying to grab a piece of the insect, a limb, a wing, until, at some invisible signal, the ants surrounded the bug and lifted the body, as one, off the ground. Together they heaved the insect off, mandibles sunk in sugary flesh, little legs trotting, taking him home to the nest.
Adam, watching and sipping his drink, felt inexplicably sad to see the little guy go – his mood was sour now, his drink too sweet. Moving again to the side of the building, he cleared his throat and spat a blog of saccharine glob onto the street below, and was relieved to see that the gridlock had untangled itself, the game of Tetris won, and traffic was running freely. He asked a waiter to call him a driver, then dived into the pool and stayed underwater as long as he could.
__________
After she parked outside the hospital, Tess sat for several minutes before going in. She waited first for the song on the radio to finish, then for her email to load on her phone, checked her makeup in the rear-vision mirror, and only climbed out of the vehicle when she was 100 per cent out of ways to delay the inevitable. The day before, the hospital had called and told her that Arkady had responded to treatment better than they could have hoped and was ready to go home. Since then she felt an inexplicable wave of dread that crested as she entered the building.
She didn’t know what ‘responding to treatment’ meant, but she certainly wasn’t full of hope. Vascular dementia wasn’t so much a disease as the end of the adventure. It was the mind failing an obsolete body, a wearing out of old parts that couldn’t be replaced. Arkady, elegant workhorse that he was, was breaking down.
Three weeks earlier, after she’d trailed the ambulance in her car, she’d more or less given up on Arkady. When she’d left him with the nurses, before they’d sedated him to run scans, he’d been violently confused. He’d tried to batter the nurses as they met him by the entrance and helped him into a wheelchair.
Struggling to stand, he’d yelled at the staff in German and Russian, guttural and angry to her ears, but it was when he switched to English that her ribs clamped around her heart in dismay. Arkady’s English was, if not perfect, perfectly formed, the vowels rounded and consonants crisp as his shirt collars. But as he bellowed profanity at the nurses, his speech was slurred, the emphasis dropping in and out.
‘Fuck you,’ he drawled at the muscle-bound nurse who held him firmly in his chair while another swabbed his bicep and jabbed him with a tranquilliser. ‘Fuck-fuck-fuck – yoouuuu.’ As the sedative had kicked in and Arkady relaxed back into his chair, the silence had done nothing for her anxiety.
In the time since the doctor delivered the diagnosis of dementia she’d been at a loss for how to react. How sick did that make him? Would he get sicker? Would his mind or his body give out first? And which was worse? She’d gone home that night and looked inside herself, taken inventory of her inner resources, and hadn’t been at all sure that she had enough compassion in her to continue to love the old man if he went, leaving only a shell behind.
The disarray with which her own family had scattered meant that she had not been close to her own grandparents, and had not been around to see them decline. She was afraid of what would happen next, and wondered if Arkady was too. Would he understand that he was dying? That his consciousness would start to fade, and dim, until it went dark? Would he be scared of it? Would he even be able to understand?
They’d put Arkady on medication to thin his blood and steady his heart, and the doctors were monitoring his condition closely. She’d gone in to visit him so many times in the days after the diagnosis, returning less frequently as work demanded more of her. While she’d seen little change in his condition, Adam visited just before his trip and reported back that although Arkady was embarrassed, there was nothing wrong with him beyond a stagnating boredom, and he’d started waging a charm offensive against the staff of the hospital to secure his release.
‘The last thing Grandpa would want is for us to faff about and let his company stagnate while he’s sick,’ Adam had told her. She noted Adam’s use of ‘his company’, rather than ‘our company’, or even ‘my company’, which she knew from long experience meant that he was trying to distance himself from something that was going awry within the firm. In the same way, little Kade was ‘her son’ whenever he was in trouble at school and needed bailing out, but ‘our son’ whenever he did something worthy of praise, or in those moments when they stood together watching the boy careen around the yard, and they would look at each other with mutual gratitude. No matter; whatever the problem was, she would let Adam handle it. She was busy being terrified that she would lose Arkady, right up until she opened the door to his hospital suite and saw him again.
The old man was sitting looking out the window, and as she opened the door he stood and smiled at her. He looked wonderful, better than she did after weeks of anxious nights. Although it was barely ten in the morning, he was dressed in a three-piece suit, his shoes shined, his watch glinting on his wrist where it peeped out of his shirt-cuff. He leaned lightly on a cane, which was new, but it matched his style so completely she tried to picture him without it and found already she could not. He grinned when he saw her, teeth huge and white in his craggy, handsome face. He was one of those men built like an American desert: majestic to begin with, but to whom the weathering of years had only been kind to.
‘Hello, Tess,’ he said, his voice clear. ‘I feel I must apologise for my behaviour of late. I was not m
yself.’
She grinned, wild with relief. Her fears had been for nothing. ‘It’s nothing, Arkady, really, it’s nothing to worry about. You just had a bit of a fall or a nightmare or something, and it happens all the time, and . . .’ Arkady held up a hand, and Tess stopped rambling.
‘Please, Tess. I’m fully aware of my condition. I was a doctor once, when I was a boy, and now I am not a baby. Please don’t treat me like one, just because I have let myself grow old somehow. It is serious, but I have medicine, and things will be fine, I promise you.’
‘Well . . . You look good,’ she declared, and Arkady smiled down at his suit.
‘I sent a courier to the house to pick up some of my things. I hope you don’t mind, but I charged it to the company account. Normally I would have called first, but I found myself without my wallet. If a man doesn’t have his dignity, what does he have, after all?’
Tess smiled. ‘Of course.’
Arkady started moving towards the door, slower than before, and with a slight clip in his gait when his right hip locked and he leaned into the cane. It was subtle, almost unnoticeable, like a gear sticking on a bicycle, and if she hadn’t been watching for it she doubted she would have noticed anything had changed. He reached the door and turned back to smile at her.
‘Now, if I can ask one more favour of you, would you take me to lunch? The doctors here are wonderful and I commend them on their professionalism and their kindness, but the kitchen staff are a different story.’ He nodded grimly at a tray on which a grey sandwich and a foil cup of fruit salad lay untouched. ‘I have not eaten so well since Auschwitz.’