The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  Her attention rarely left Arkady through lunch, following his eyes as he read the menu, his hands as they gripped knife and fork – tight and efficient, wrists locked hard in the European fashion. She examined the set of his jaw as he chewed, trying to compare the man that sat before her with her mental picture of him before the stroke. She thought maybe he was moving a little more slowly, taking a little longer to eat. When Arkady read the menu she thought that something was wrong, that his eyes dragged a little, spent too much time moving from one side of the page to the other. Without looking up, Arkady spoke.

  ‘While I am touched by your concern, I do not require this level of scrutiny. I assure you that if I’m going to keel over dead, then I will give you some kind of warning.’

  She blushed, chastened. Even weakened, a little feeble, he still made her feel like a child when he told her off. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Do not be sorry. Your worry is good. Your worry makes me happy. I am Russian, after all. Without some kind of angst we feel lonely.’

  He flagged down a passing waiter and asked for the wine list.

  ‘Are you sure you should be drinking, Arkady? You just got out of hospital. And I don’t know if it will affect your medications.’

  He waved this away. ‘I have dementia. My brain is dying, Tess. A little wine will not hurt me now. Do you want me to die unhappy, as well as insane?’

  ‘Don’t tease me. It’s not a joke.’

  ‘Everything is a joke, Lubovka. If you had seen the things I have, you would know this.’ His smile was sad, but not unkind. ‘And besides, the whole idea that alcohol is bad for medicine is shit and lies. In the war, they were losing soldiers to the brothels, and a soldier goes to visit the women, he comes out with gonorrhoea, he gets sick and he cannot fight. They find that antibiotics will fix the soldier, but only so long as he stays out of the brothels. The second he gets drunk, he goes to the brothel, he gets reinfected. So, they tell the soldier that the antibiotics will not work if he drinks. So, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t go to the brothel, he is cured.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. It, like most of history, is a lie, but a good lie. And one which doctors keep up here, because Australians are animals, and if you do not take away their treat, they would never ever stop drinking.’

  ‘Animals? Isn’t that a little harsh?’

  ‘Children, then. If you do not tell them a fairy tale, to scare them, they will not do anything you tell them.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You can thank the war for that. For a great many things, actually: penicillin, amphetamine, the automobile. All the good things in life we owe to the great wars. As difficult as it is to admit, the things the Nazis explored pushed the world forward. The Americans gave amnesty to their physicists and got their nuclear technology. The rockets that made the Blitz possible also sent man to the moon.’

  Arkady’s tone was mild, but his eyes were steel. They drilled into Tess as she looked up from the menu, shocked.

  ‘How can you say that, after what happened to you? Aren’t you angry?’ As the words left her mouth she felt the insignificance of the word ‘anger’, its smallness next to the atrocity she was asking about.

  ‘Of course, forever, eternally.’ Arkady shrugged, a small smile playing across his lips. ‘But anger is unproductive. It is useful for a minute, if you need to flee, if you need to fight, but in the camps, neither of those things were an option, and in the aftermath, even less so. Those of us who survived had to learn to temper our hatred, or it would destroy us. We are not machines designed to be run red hot. We must rest, we must heal. If we cannot let go of fear and hatred, we will always be in the camps.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like an easy thing to do. How long did it take you to feel okay? After the war, I mean.’

  Arkady took a moment to answer. Without taking his eyes off Tess, he put down his knife and fork on the plate in perfect parallel, signalling he was done with food. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When did you stop feeling the weight of . . . what happened?’

  ‘I feel it every day. It never went away. It never will. Not for me or anyone.’

  ‘Oh.’ Tess had no idea what to say next. The space between them was a vacuum, a perfect void she had no idea how to enter. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I am too,’ said Arkady, softly. ‘More sorry than anyone could know.’ He paused again, then the silence snapped, was extinguished by Arkady’s booming voice, jolly, rounded, avuncular again. ‘But what can we do now but try to live? We survived; the bad guys did not. And you know, I met my wife through the camps, built a life. If it wasn’t for the war, I would not be here, I would not have Adam, or Kade, or you.’

  ‘Silver lining?’

  ‘My wife used to joke that Hitler was our matchmaker, that we would never have met without him. She got into a lot of trouble with her people for saying that – it is, of course, a terrible thing to say that anything good came out of the war, but there was that at least. Of course, he killed her in the end. Her poor liver.’

  ‘So how are you supposed to forgive them?’

  ‘They can’t be forgiven.’ Arkady put down the wine list and steepled his hands, thought deeply, put his words in order, moving the thoughts from one language to another. ‘If one looks at the rise of the Nazi state, though, one can begin to understand. The German people believed that they were the strongest, the smartest, the most cultured, the most noble in the world, really believed it with all their hearts.’ Here, the old man tapped his chest, and the memory of the scar over his heart came back to Tess. She pushed it away and reached for her drink. ‘But at the same time, they’d just been defeated in a war with an enemy they saw as inferior; not just beaten, but humiliated and impoverished, undeniable evidence that the German State was imperfect. So they had to hold two conflicting ideas in their heads, which is not something a human being can do, and when that happens the ideas begin to mutate, to become perverted, and you start to look for an explanation, a villain. And if you don’t have the strength to look outside your borders, you look for the enemy within. Historically, you take the portion of your society that you don’t understand, the portion that is visibly different and demonstrably parochial and direct your blame and hatred there. Historically, also, sadly, this means Jews. In Germany, in Spain, and England, all the way back to Egypt.

  ‘So, say you are young, say you are bright enough, but you are poor and frustrated and frightened by life. You grow up being told every day that you are poor because a Jew decided it should be so, that the Jews are after you, the Jews will take your job, the Jews will take your women. You believe it, of course, because you hear it enough times that it becomes fact, and facts become actions, become consequences. So you have a society built strong again, but its engine is hate, and like any engine it does what it is supposed to, which is run, day and night. To a machine, a Jew does not look different from a Gypsy, or a communist, or a homosexual, or a Russian. The machine runs on hate, and there is always something new to hate.

  ‘Can you forgive it? No, probably not, but if you don’t try and understand it, you risk it happening again.’

  Tess was a little unnerved. ‘Do you think it could? Happen again? Not today, surely?’

  ‘Every great evil in the world was done because someone thought they had the answer. Let’s civilise Africa, or colonise India, or close our borders to protect us from the evil outside them, or purge our cities of the evil people inside them. Then things will be better. Big ideas bring the world closer to its end. It would never occur to an evil man that he is evil, which is, of course, what makes him evil. Of course, that’s what made what happened in the camps all the worse. Normal men, scientists and the bureaucrats who thought they were building a better world by what they did.’

  ‘Surely the scientists knew better. They have no excuse.’

  ‘Science is a religion, like any other. Examine your texts long enough and you’ll find a rule that justifies exactly want you want to
do, even demands it. What I did learn in the camps, from those scientists, is that a human being is no different from a rat. It will run through a maze if you reward it. It will run fast for cheese, but faster if the punishment is pain. Avoiding death, horrible death, is a very nice reward. Even nicer than cheese.’ He opened the wine list. ‘But not as nice as wine.’

  __________

  The building where the belongings confiscated from each trainload of prisoners were sorted and processed had been nicknamed Canada, after the country, which was rumoured by the starving prisoners to be a place of untold wealth and luxury. A work detail of female prisoners went through the pockets and found the treasures hidden by the civilians arriving at Auschwitz: jewellery, gold and diamonds, watches, cash from a dozen countries, Bibles, the compact Chumashes taken on journeys, love letters, records, sweets and bottles of wine. All the priceless sentimental objects smuggled into the camp by people who couldn’t live without them, all now belonging to no one, all piled up to be truffled through by the Nazis.

  All valuables were supposed to be sent to Berlin to fund the war effort, but much of it was pilfered by the SS overseers, and some of it went to Dr Pfeiffer. Dieter had recruited a soldier who had become addicted to morphine after being injured on the Eastern Front, and now traded valuable liquor and handfuls of gold for vials of the stuff.

  Dieter instructed his man in Canada to look out for certain things he needed, either for his research, or for his comfort, and every few weeks he surprised Arkady with a gift. Now, instead of his striped uniform, he wore an immaculate three-piece suit, with only a tiny bloodstain on the lapel betraying its provenance. Tucked inside the suit pocket was a silver fountain pen, and on his wrist ticked a Swiss watch, a miraculous little thing that wound itself and kept ticking despite being dragged through time, travel, rain, snow, gas. At night, when memories of his torture in the Luftwaffe labs came back to him, Arkady held the watch up to his ear so that the reassuring tick tick tick drowned out his thoughts until his breathing settled and he could sleep again.

  Even if he hadn’t been a doctor, Dieter would have seen that his friend had changed since he’d been the subject of the experiments. He moved more slowly, as though his hulking body were a puppet dangling on loose strings; his delicacy with his tools was lost. Several times when preparing a blood sample his fingers slipped, cracking the glass and ruining the slide. Once, he cut his hand badly on a broken slide and sat staring as the blood welled up, dumb, as if he didn’t know what was happening. Dieter surmised that the pressure experiments had caused some lasting brain damage in the Russian. There was trauma too; if Dieter didn’t sedate him at night, he would thrash and cry out in his sleep. When awake he was fearful and would start at loud noises. Each time some evidence of the damage he’d done to Arkady presented itself, Dieter was overcome with regret and sorrow, and did what he could to make the man’s life more comfortable.

  Arkady never went back to the barracks above the crematorium. Instead, at the end of the workday, he would curl up on a cot in a corner of Dieter’s office, where often he would eat his dinner with the doctor. Dieter managed to secure extra food from Canada, staples and treats that the dead had smuggled in with them from their hometowns: bread and pickles, and canned vegetables and fish and cured meat, bars of chocolate and bottles of wine. The two men ate anything perishable for dinner, but Dieter hid the food that would keep deep in the back of his closet where they wouldn’t be found by any spot checks by the SS. When Arkady asked him what the point was of stashing food away when more than they could eat was coming through the door, Dieter smiled, held up his hand in the Boy Scout salute and said, in English, ‘Always be prepared.’

  A fortune in gold and cash was stored in ammunition boxes under a loose floorboard in Dieter’s quarters, waiting for the end of the war, which was coming closer all the time. The American planes were overhead more frequently now, and while the bombs hadn’t started yet, they would fall any day, he could feel it.

  It had been a mistake to come here. The doctors he worked with were not men of science. If they had ever been, that was long over now, along with all pretence of procedure, standards and recordkeeping. The scientific methods lay discarded along with the mounting pyramids of bodies that were taken away by the Sonderkommando every morning. They were less doctors than spoiled children, brutalising their toys, tearing the limbs off one, sewing them onto another, discarding them without a thought when they broke.

  They drank a lot, the two of them. They would finish work shortly after lunch and settle down to drink, talking or listening to records on the gramophone.

  One night, halfway through dinner and a bottle of Canadian cognac, Dieter asked Arkady about the dolls, apropos of nothing, just steering up to the subject out of a comfortable silence.

  Arkady was chewing, so he had time to think, swallow before asking, ‘What about them?’

  ‘It seems a strange thing for a doctor to do with his spare time.’

  ‘So does murdering children.’

  ‘Good point,’ Dieter smiled. ‘But I am still curious. Where does an educated young degenerate like yourself learn doll-making?’

  Arkady hesitated, finished his mouthful and pushed his plate away. He wasn’t very hungry, hadn’t been very hungry since his ordeal in the laboratory. Before the experiments he would have killed, literally, for the food that was in front of him every evening now, but he continued to waste away. His thoughts, too, were not as clear as they once were, his emotions not so easily controlled. He still liked cognac, though, so reached for his glass and told Dieter the story of his father.

  ‘My people came from Sergiev Posad, a little town about fifty miles outside of Moscow. My grandfather was a toymaker, as his had been, and his before that. We made matryoshka, you know, those little nesting dolls that fit inside each other. It was a procedure: cut the wood, it had to be the right wood, dry it for five years, no more, no less, then lathe it, lathe it, lathe it, eight times, then paint it. But they were beautiful, world class; the Tsar’s children would collect them.

  ‘But then, the revolution, and the Soviets nationalised the matryoshka. They became a point of national pride, you know, so handcrafting them was forbidden as inefficient, and all the matryoshka craftsmen were rounded up and moved to Moscow to work in factories that made these shitty, generic dolls. Of course, a craftsman is not a robot, and a man who could spend a week painting a doll is useless on a construction line, so Father could not find good work, and so he was poor, and disappointed to find himself in Moscow.

  ‘In his spare time he used to make me toys, not nesting dolls, he no longer had the proper tools or the will to do that, but little things: stuffed bears, these floppy wooden puppets.’ Here, Arkady put his arms out to mime a marionette. ‘Simple things he could carve, simple things he could teach me. We were halfway through a rocking horse when he died.’

  ‘That’s a sad story,’ said Dieter. ‘But least he could make you happy with what he could do.’

  ‘Yes. Although I suspect those toys made him happier than they made me. A man needs to be busy, especially when he’s sad. But it was time we spent together, so the memories are good.’

  Arkady’s eyes were glassy now, a little drunk. Dieter poured him another. Dr Pfeiffer was a practical kind of drunk; no matter how tight he got, he always kept his head about him, a fact that had served him well through life, and especially well since the war had begun and the world fallen apart around him. ‘So how does a toymaker from Moscow end up a doctor in Auschwitz?’ he asked, gently as he could.

  ‘Bad luck, of course, straight after good luck, which is the worst luck,’ Arkady said, and, after a moment’s hesitation he found himself telling the story he’d never thought he would tell anyone. About leaving Russia to study medicine in Poland, in part because he was drawn to paediatrics, a branch of medicine that had grown derelict in the Soviet Union, and partly because he wanted to put as much space between his family and the life he would live as possible. T
he story tumbled out of him, about falling in love with medicine, with Jan, a handsome young aristocrat he shared classes with, the walk through Krakow cemetery when Jan had kissed him, the anticipation and the terror of that, and the relief when he realised that the kiss wasn’t, after all, a trap, just a kiss.

  Then there was a whole new world that opened up as the two of them moved to a new life in Czechoslovakia. Prague was an epiphany, and there were long wild nights of beer and absinthe and smoky clubs where American musicians introduced him to jazz. And more than all of that, love, and the blindness that came with love, which meant he and Jan paid no attention as the world soured around them.

  While he spoke about Jan, Arkady kept his eyes on the table, not ashamed, not exactly, but careful. He looked up when he was done to gauge Dieter’s reaction, and found the German’s eyes boring into him.

  ‘That is disgusting,’ he said, levelly.

  ‘That I loved Jan?’

  ‘That you love jazz. I follow the research of a doctor in Denmark working on a cure for your homosexual condition, Arkady, but I’m afraid our best doctors cannot help with your taste in music.’

  Arkady laughed a little, surprised by the German’s levity.

  ‘And Jan?’ asked Dieter. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I try not to think about him. He was a Jew, as well as being . . . like me.’

  There was a long moment of silence. Even outside the office, the constant soundtrack of woe; screaming and gunshots seemed to recede, and the only sound was the tiny beat of Arkady’s watch. Dieter took Arkady’s hand and squeezed it, and then looked up to find Arkady’s eyes welling up.

  ‘I am so sorry, Arkady,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t have happened. None of this should. This is not your war. This is not our war. We are men of science. Neither of us should be here.’