The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  Why was she not to tell Adam about the secret trust funds? Did Arkady not trust him to look after it? All that money, buried in all those backyards.

  Tess watched Arkady’s eyes flittering under their lids, as if he was watching something inside his mind that was a world and half a century away. She wondered what it could possibly be. Arkady had never talked much about his life, but Tess knew enough to know that wherever his mind had taken him, it probably wasn’t good.

  Downstairs in the study, Tess considered the photo, waiting to see what her reaction would be. She tried Adam’s phone again. It rang out once more, landing on voicemail. Suddenly furious, she threw her mobile against the wall in a clumsy overhand lob that bounced it ineffectually back at her and caught her on the toe. She swore, then, snatching up a pillow, pressed it against her face and screamed with anger at her useless fucking husband, at her tender feelings for the old man upstairs that had caught her by surprise, for the self-pity that racked her with sobs. Clutching the pillow she sank to the floor and brought her knees into the fetal position, and cried until she was empty and the pillow was ruined with tears and snot.

  Then she got up and walked to the computer, where she wrote Adam an email telling him that his grandfather was dying, and so was their marriage. It was over. She wrote in long and great detail of the mounting stress and woe he caused her and the fact that she thought he was a dud, and had never lived up, not even once, to the most fleeting of her lovers from before their wedding. She poured it all out, like she had to the pillow. When she was done, she read it all back, twice. Her finger hovered over send and then, with a click of the mouse, she deleted it.

  She washed her face, had something to eat, and by and by was feeling better. A memory came to her, of a time when she and Adam had embarked on a bitter, screaming fight about the possibility that little Kade, their special child, who was developing far too slowly, might actually have some kind of developmental disorder. Adam had been unwilling to listen, she’d been unable to back down, and it was only after he had stormed out of the house that she became aware that Arkady had heard the whole thing, and found her crying alone in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh God.’ She was mortified. ‘I’m sorry, we didn’t know you were here. God, you must think we’re idiots, fighting about nothing, after everything you’ve been through.’

  Arkady boomed with laughter. ‘Sadness is sadness. It’s a strange part of the Australian character that you make suffering a competitive sport. There’s a Catholic heart to this country and a Protestant head, which is why, after all these years, you have no idea who you are. It is a particularly Protestant foolishness to think that you can be more miserable than a Russian. Go and make up with your husband; have a good life. Promise you’ll do this much for me. Suffering will wait.’

  She smiled at the memory and went back upstairs. The room was dark and still, and even before she crossed the room and found his breath and pulse stilled, she understood that Arkady was gone. She closed her eyes, waited a long moment, opened them. Nothing in the room had changed. It seemed strange, that the world still spun on, indifferent.

  She pulled back the sheets and slipped into bed beside Arkady’s body, lay on her side next to him, pulled the quilt up over them both to make a cubby. Inside, the dark was perfect. She slipped her hand up under his shirt and traced the jagged lines of the surgical scar that bisected his chest, wondered again where, or who, it had come from, realised that now she would never know. The air grew stale, but she lay there with her arms around Arkady until the heat faded, and her fingers met cold skin wherever she moved them. Such a strange feeling, to feel cold skin on a human, but then, this was not Arkady, just the cold carcass of the man. Arkady himself was more than meat, had been something immortal and wonderful, and part of that was part of her now.

  But still, she would lie with him for another moment. Whatever she had to do next, it could wait, would wait, as long as she needed it to.

  __________

  One afternoon, the Sonderkommando rebelled. Using shovels and axes, they overpowered their SS captors and stuffed them live into the ovens, and, using gunpowder smuggled in by Jewish slaves from a munitions factory, they tried to blow up the crematoriums. Arkady looked up from his work, startled by the explosions, and left the medical building to investigate. From the entryway he could see smoke billowing from the direction of the gas chambers – more than the usual amount from the chimneys. He could hear machine guns, and the pop pop pop of rifle fire, the snap of grenades. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should join the fray. He knew where Dr Pfeiffer kept his pistol. This could be a chance to fight his way out, to take out the handful of Nazis that held them. He could help save the other prisoners. He could save the children.

  As he dithered, a young prisoner appeared. He was grizzled and bloody, hit in the stomach, a round which Arkady could see at a glance had gone through and exited the man’s back, just missing the spine. It would have been extraordinarily painful but he still held onto an automatic rifle. ‘Where are they?’ he screamed at Arkady. ‘Where are the doctors?’

  Arkady looked at the weapon, out across the courtyard, beyond the electric fences to the birch woods. He could run. It wasn’t far; it wasn’t insurmountable. Out the door and to the left, a sprint past where the firing squads worked, where not that long ago he’d been hung up and tortured, and on to the fence. A tiny stretch of dirt with rough-quarried gravel strewn through it to try to thwart the mud, but which only rendered the road a field of tiny knives that shredded the bare feet of the prisoners.

  Two rows of barbed wire threaded through bowed concrete posts, tall and thin, stooped towards him like a broken man, hardly taller, in fact, than a man. Sometimes the electricity went out. If the explosions down the road at Birkenau had taken out the power, then he could slip through and escape.

  Of course, that wouldn’t be an escape. It would only be a deferral. The posts were not the problem; the problem was what lay beyond them – thousands of billeted soldiers, and beyond that an endless indifferent wasteland, an enemy of infinite might and cruelty. A world that despised what he was, that would never accept him, whichever way the war ended. He was safest here. His home was with Dieter.

  He heard himself say, ‘That way! They are over there! Go and kill every last one of the sons of bitches,’ and he pointed towards the troop canteen. The prisoner looked in the direction Arkady indicated, then back at him. His eyes narrowed and he shoved past Arkady into the surgery. Dieter, who’d come in from the pathology lab to see what the noise was, saw the prisoner, then his gun, and realised that he was about to die.

  He stared at the barrel of the rifle, surprised at how large and black the mouth seemed. He’d never been on this end of a gun before. A second passed as the prisoner’s finger hovered over the trigger, enough time for Arkady to tackle the boy to the ground. The gun went off as they crashed, and a spray of bullets arced uselessly through the room. The prisoner landed heavily on top of his weapon, but Arkady hadn’t realised how weak he’d grown, and even with his gut-wound the boy shrugged him off with an elbow. He reached for his gun again, bringing it up to shoot the Nazi doctor, but Dieter had found a weapon, one of the heavy chair legs that Arkady was slowly turning into toys, and he brought it down across his assailant’s face.

  It took a few blows to drop the boy, and when he was done, Dieter stood panting over the mess, spattered with blood. He dropped the club and it clattered to the floor.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dieter heard himself say to the boy. ‘Forgive me.’ He kneeled to check the boy’s vitals. He would not be getting up again.

  Arkady crouched down next to him, put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, told him that it was okay. ‘He had been through hell, he was crazy, he would have killed you, and then me.’

  ‘Well,’ the German said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m not going to let them hurt you, Dieter.’ He smiled at his friend and said the thing that he told himself every night while he sat on
his bed and worked on his toys: ‘This isn’t our war. It is nearly over.’

  Soon the gunfire stopped as the SS retook the ruined barracks. There was a long pause as they lay the captured Sonderkommandos down on their stomachs on the lawn outside the barracks and, one by one, shot them in the back of the head. The first shots echoed through the camp, but soon they were drowned out by the bustle as everyone, from Dieter’s lab to the surviving crematoriums, got back to work.

  TEN

  The clouds that had threatened to break all through the funeral changed their mind at the last minute, dispersing and drifting off. The mourning party gathered by the graveside, now drenched in too-warm spring sunshine. To Adam, rain would have been preferable to the heat that beat down upon them, making people loosen ties and shed overcoats. He watched Tess’s brother, Pete, slip out of his jacket, and was furious to see he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt underneath, sweat stains blooming from his armpits. Adam had never liked Pete, thought him a small-minded bohemian dimwit who confused scruffiness, latent alcoholism and a disagreeable temperament with artistic ability. The fact that the man couldn’t find a shirt with cufflinks to wear while they buried Arkady was just too much.

  The whole thing was below his grandfather’s dignity and, scanning the crowd, for a moment his sombre mood coloured with anger at the pretenders who’d showed up. Then he nodded approvingly at a group of Orthodox Jews who stood in a clump near the grave, suffering stoically under their greatcoats and fur shapkas while their faces reddened and their sidelocks dripped with sweat. These Jews, friends of his grandmother’s come to pay their final respects, were his grandfather’s type of men, loyal, tough and pious, and he was touched that so many who knew his grandma from so long ago had come.

  The rest of these people, on the other hand, they could go fuck themselves. The graveyard was packed with those who were clearly only paying lip-service to his grandfather. They were there not because of who he was or what he had achieved, but, rather, because of what he had done for them. Paunchy, pale businessmen stood jammed between headstones, surreptitiously checking their phones, while a procession of representatives from the slew of charities that Arkady had supported filed in, made sure they were seen, then disappeared.

  Adam stood at the grave next to his wife, who was receiving mourners as they shuffled up, took her hand, murmured a few words and moved on. He glanced down at the coffin and felt a cold, sharp stab of grief tear through him; he looked away, swallowed hard. He would not cry, not here. ‘Just look at all these fucking imposters,’ he muttered.

  Tess looked at him, appalled. ‘Behave yourself, Adam,’ she hissed. ‘You’re not the only one who’s upset.’

  Her voice snagged on the last word, and she fished a tissue out of her sleeve to wipe her eyes. Adam was taken aback. As a rule, Tess didn’t let her emotions get the better of her.

  ‘What, Tess?’ he asked. ‘Am I supposed to be nice to these people, these . . .’ he searched for the word, ‘parasites, who feed off my family my whole life, longer than my whole life, taking advantage of Grandpa’s good nature, knowing that because of the things he went through, he would help anybody who said they needed help? Look around you: these people, too lazy to work, have come for one last feed and to see if they can squeeze anything out of the old man.’ His voice was rising now, he could hear the hoarse edge as the anger crept in, but he didn’t care. ‘He would —’

  Tess grabbed him by the arm, cutting him off, her nails digging in hard through the Italian wool of his suit. ‘Adam! Get a grip; this isn’t the time.’

  ‘Why not? When is there going to be a better time? Grandpa would be rolling around in that box if he knew that half the people turning up to his funeral are . . .’ here he pointed in turn at Pete and the closest woman, ‘faggots and sluts and . . .’

  Tess stopped him with a look and after a long, careful pause said, very quietly, ‘And when did you ever have a problem with sluts, Adam?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Never mind.’ Tess was already walking off, drying her eyes; she had a funeral to work.

  Adam stared after her. She was impossible to read, and he pondered the fact that, somehow, after so long, he was no closer to working her out. One moment he thought he knew her like his own reflection, but then she would turn, would say or do something to surprise him, and he would realise he barely knew his wife at all.

  Adam felt that he was supposed to chase after her, offer her more sympathy, but the procession of mourners kept coming, and he stood, smiling grimly, as punter after punter gave him their condolences. As the sun crept higher, his smile grew more strained, his temper worse with each supplicant. None of these people knew what he was going through, none of them really cared. They were sad, not because they had lost Arkady, but because they had lost his money. He half recognised some of the faces in the endless stream from when he was a child. None of them, he realised, were friends. There was nobody here that Grandpa would call for coffee and a chat; just cogs in some great commercial machine that he had kept running with his own sweat and blood. This realisation filled Adam with sorrow, even more than the fact of the coffin at his feet. Making an excuse, he ducked away to compose himself.

  He only returned as the crowd gathered at the graveside for the prayers. The coffin was lowered into the grave, in a space Arkady had bought decades ago next to his wife’s. His-and-hers burial plots had been the first purchases he’d made for him and Rachel after their wedding bands and their house. When Rachel’s friends had teased him about his Russian fatalism, he had held up his hand in a mocking Boy Scout salute and said, ‘Always be prepared.’

  A priest led the mourning prayer, and gave a eulogy that was heavy on praise for Arkady’s achievements and light on religion. In the past, Arkady had made it clear that he wanted God as far away from his death as possible. Still, despite his strict instructions not to bring the Bible into it, the priest broke into his theological boilerplate, reciting the parables you heard at every funeral – Jerusalem and Jericho, the Levite, the Samaritan.

  Adam stood sullen, brooding, his attention drifting from his annoyance at the priest fucking up his grandfather’s very simple burial wishes to the realisation that the final years of Arkady’s life must have been bitterly lonely. Why hadn’t Adam spent more time with him? At the end of the prayers, the mourners lined up in rows on either side of the grave, and Arkady’s relatives took their places.

  In deference to Rachel, even though they were not to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, they would follow the tradition that all the family would help shovel earth onto the coffin, and as the most senior mourner, the job first went to Tess’s father, Trevor. This is bullshit, thought Adam as Trevor Coughlin shuffled to the front. Poor Trevor, fat, bald, ineffectual Trev, who had never worked a day in his life, who had never provided for his family, who hadn’t shouldered the burden of history the way that Arkady had, who didn’t care half as much for the old man as Adam had – that he should be the first to throw the dirt was wrong, and his grandfather would never have allowed it had he been alive. Trev sunk the shovel in and flipped a smattering of dirt.

  ‘Fucking pathetic,’ Adam muttered under his breath, then found himself springing into action, moving towards the mound of dirt. One hand closed around the handle of the shovel, the other brushing the startled Trev away so he stumbled back and, for one awful moment, looked like he would topple over into the grave, but he righted himself just in time. Adam was already digging, a solid, satisfying shovelful of dirt, which he hefted up and onto the coffin. He watched it thump, full of force and weighty with feeling, on the oak, then went back in for another heaping of earth. Two, three, four shovelfuls, enjoying the feeling, the twinge in his muscles, the satisfaction of weight and movement, until the pile of dirt was gone and his shoulders ached and clicked with the heaving. He stopped, panting, and handed the shovel to the next in line, and then was striding off, oblivious to the people who shifted to get out of his way.

  __________r />
  Tess caught up with Adam in the car park, where he was pacing and checking his watch. She walked up behind him.

  ‘Adam, what’s going on?’

  Adam looked at her, looked at his SUV, pointed at the hearse, which was double-parked in the middle of the lot.

  ‘The hearse is blocking me in.’ He shrugged. ‘Have to wait for them to leave.’

  ‘No, I mean, where are you going? What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?’

  Adam turned to look at her, surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  She stopped for a minute, frustrated, not even sure where to begin, landing, in the end, on: ‘You just walked out of your grandfather’s funeral!’

  Adam started yelling. ‘That is not my grandfather’s funeral!’ he hollered, pointing up the hill. ‘My grandfather was a hero. He deserved a hero’s funeral, not a fucking day in the park.’

  Tess had grown up in a family that, deformed by wealth and artistic ambition, had used histrionics as currency. As the youngest daughter, she’d learned that she would never out-shriek or out-weep her elder siblings and parents, so she had learned to wrap her anger in calm, softly spoken couplets. She knew that the way to hurt someone bearing down on you with self-righteous anger was to sideswipe them with absolute, ice-cold calm.

  ‘How would you know?’ Tess asked, coolly. ‘Did you even know him?’

  Adam’s jaw set hard and he took a heavy step towards his wife. ‘How fucking dare you,’ he growled.

  ‘How fucking dare you!’ Tess stepped forward and jabbed him in the chest. ‘Where the fuck were you? Where have you been? You knew he was dying.’

  ‘I was busy . . . I had – business.’

  ‘You should have been there.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘You should have been there.’ Her composure slipped, and she was crying now, the tears hot down her face. Mourners were starting to file out of the cemetery gate and stopped when they saw the fight in progress, not able to leave without going past the couple and the conflict. Tess didn’t care, not at all, not any more. ‘You should have been there. I was there. I was there when you should have been.’