by Liam Pieper
Slowly, he picked through the crate, and echoes from childhood came back to him as his fingers wrapped around each of the toys. Old memories stirred in his muscles. Adam was distracted now, calm; suicidal intent forgotten as he started to play.
He recalled being given each toy by his grandfather during their summers together in Europe, a new scene springing to mind the second he touched one of them. He picked up and briefly played with a Rubik’s cube, a Ghostbusters figurine, a Ninja Turtle doll, and he thought of the hundreds of hours he’d spent staging elaborate battles between Donatello and the Foot Soldiers.
He remembered the fantasy worlds he used to build for these toys to live in. He would fill all the hours at home – his dad too busy to play, and no friends his own age because of the summers spent treasure-hunting in Europe with Arkady – planning commando raids behind enemy lines, just him and his toy soldiers. In these games, he would imagine himself as his grandfather during the war, and make long complicated lists of what kind of provisions they would need to escape occupied Europe: how many loaves of bread and jars of sauerkraut, how many bullets for his weapons, how many knives for Nazi throats.
Getting on his hands and knees and burrowing further into the crate, he found a handful of fur and the second he touched it he knew what it was, a Cheburashka. His grandfather had given him one on a trip behind the Iron Curtain many years ago, and Adam had fallen deeply in love with it, dragging it everywhere with him until the fur had grown mangy, and it had been patched up time and again.
Cheburashka was a stuffed toy, a bear of sorts, with big round ears, and a soft belly. He’d known nothing about the strange creature, but he’d loved it to bits and made up an elaborate backstory for it. Years later he’d learned that it was a mainstay of the Soviet childhood, had come with songs and cartoons and friends and a mythology he completely missed. As an adult he’d looked into picking up the intellectual property in Australia and found that it had become something of a cult item in former Soviet countries, the original dolls fetching huge sums on eBay, and he’d regretted not keeping his. After making the mistake of taking it with him to a school camp he’d had the shit kicked out of him by some kids for carrying around a doll, and on returning home he’d thrown it, tearfully, in the bin.
Here now, though, was Cheburashka, back from the grave, hand of God in play. Adam held it, stroking the stiff, dusty fur of its ears. The feel of the fur brought a memory back to him, the day he’d been given the doll, him sitting rapt on an office floor, stroking the toy’s big flopping ears, while in the background Arkady argued with some looming adult in German, growing more and more heated, until finally, the fight apparently won, he stopped yelling, and Adam looked up to see his grandfather closing an attaché case with a satisfying clunk. Before the lid was shut, Adam caught a glimpse of the stacks of bills that filled the case, all different sizes, all different colours, just like Monopoly money.
Every time they’d gone on a trip to Europe, Arkady had had one or two of those meetings, always in a European language, always somewhere dark and quiet, and never in the bright, fun toy stores Adam preferred to visit. One time he’d asked his grandfather about these special visits, and the old man had made him promise never to speak of them to anyone but him. He’d bought him the Cheburashka as a reward for keeping silent.
Getting up, Adam walked back, clambered over the guardrail, and returned to his office. He was well past debilitated now, in the eye of the drinking binge, having passed through all visible signs of intoxication and no longer showing symptoms, the perfect alcoholic clarity. He sat in the desk chair stroking the Cheburashka.
On the television, the image was still paused on a close-up of a little girl’s mangled hand, the fingers burned and fused together around a Sarah doll, the doll with its hair burned off but otherwise miraculously untouched. In its own tiny hand, the Sarah doll was clutching the little ‘An Aussie Company’ green and gold flags he’d ordered them to be packaged with.
Adam looked at the screen, and then back at the Cheburashka, with its matted and clumped fur, then at the screen again, at the footage of the corpses. Deep in his brain, boozy synapses rumbled to life. He went to the drinks cabinet and rummaged around until he found a little Australian flag cocktail umbrella, which he threaded into the Cheburashka’s little hand.
Holding it up to the light he saw that he’d had an idea, a little blurry, but one that would save the company and his marriage all at the same time, and muttered a silent prayer of thanks to his grandfather, who was still looking out for him from another world.
TWELVE
Then there was the fearful crawl across Europe, by foot and in the back of trucks, as he was passed from the Russians to the Americans, through Germany and France. A truck to Marseille across a bombed and broken country, a night boat through the Pyrenees, and finally the months in Lisbon, where he found a room below a tavern that was above the law, and beyond the conflict that had ruined the world.
Somehow, when all else was starvation and snow on stone, here the winter was warm. It was a place steeped in watery sunshine and sardines, salted cod, tart wine from stone jugs, more than he had imagined was left in Europe. Meat was available as well, despite the protestations of his landlady, who claimed fresh meat was as rare as kindness these days. At least, until he produced enough money and she brought him a great slab of marbled steak, fried in the German style with a glorious dab of wholegrain mustard on the side. His body thrilled as she placed it in front of him and the scent filled him up, until he cut into it and the blood welled up from the raw heart of the meal, the way it did on a surgical incision, and he was suddenly ill. He gave up on eating, concentrated on his wine instead, and slipped the steak to the whipped but optimistic housedog that lurked under the table.
In the cantina above his room he found that he could, for the first time in memory, relax, as long as his back was to the wall and his eye was on everyone entering the bar. He’d stopped panicking every time he saw an Allied uniform, or a face that could have been familiar, passing by on the street. He spent the days drinking until it got dark enough to walk the streets without fear, and he was amazed that the world still spun. Civilisation went on the way it always had, like it always would, as if it couldn’t be snuffed out overnight. How surreal to walk on cobblestones and under archways that hadn’t known artillery shells or fire-bombing, to see a teenage girl lean out of a second-floor window to flirt with her boyfriend, or to hear two Portuguese men arguing over the price of a fish in their weird slippery language. Elsewhere in Europe the slaughter hadn’t yet stopped. Here it was as if it had never started.
It took a few months to procure the papers he needed to follow Mengele to Brazil, and then at the last minute they fell through, leaving him stranded on a transit visa in London, unsure how to proceed. He flailed about, wasting a small fortune on useless bribes and false hopes from unscrupulous fixers, until finally one gave him a choice: America, Canada, Australia. ‘Canada,’ he said, half jokingly, ‘I hear that the life is good there.’ No, not Canada, too close to America; he would never be able to relax living next to that country of avenging evangelists that was, as far as he could tell, populated entirely by sharply tailored soldiers with clean teeth who survived on prayer and chocolate and cigarettes.
He knew nothing about Australia, but Australia it would have to be. On the boat over he stayed in his cabin as much as he could, reading books in English, expanding his vocabulary, getting his story straight. He worked late into the night rehearsing the conversation he would have with immigration officials when he arrived, preparing responses for every conceivable conversational cul-de-sac and practising them until they were perfect. He experimented with flattening out his English to make it more Russian. By the time he docked in Melbourne his accent sounded, to the bored customs officer who processed him, generically European, like an Englishman who had spent too long abroad.
The customs officer took the papers Dieter had bought at great cost and flicked throug
h them frowning.
‘Name?’
‘Arkady Kulakov.’
‘Age?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Profession?
‘Doctor. I am a doctor.’
‘Not any more you’re not.’ The man marked the papers and handed them back to Dieter. ‘Welcome to Australia.’
He felt keenly the weirdness of this place. The buildings looked like home; the cool blue cobblestones underfoot made his shoes ring with nostalgic notes. The sunlight here was different, though, starker somehow, and it hit the eyes at a different angle. The air too hot, too dry, it tore at his lungs while he fumbled to loosen his tie. Gentle waves pushed at the shore behind him, and ahead the streets stretched out, endless and foreign. Seagulls wheeled and cried overhead, banking gracefully, turning to keep one eye on the litter that piled up, the divine opportunists who inherited the beaches and rubbish dumps of the world.
Across the road from the docks, a fat man sweating under his hat clocked Dieter standing uncertainly on the brink of his new life, and waddled over to him.
‘Are you lost?’ the man asked him in German, which sent a jolt of pure fear through Dieter. He ignored the question, making a show of being baffled by the language. The stranger tried again, same question, but the German syllables softened into songful Yiddish. Again, Dieter looked confused, then responded:
‘Ruski?’
‘Da, nemnoga, angliyskiy?’
‘Yes,’ said Dieter, ‘Just a little.’
The man had an offer for him, a room in a boarding house nearby, and a job in a factory adjoining it where war had made workers scarce. ‘It’s not glamorous, but I’d say it’s a damn sight better than whatever you’re used to.’ His eyes flickered from Dieter’s face to his jacket, which was worn and grimy despite a long campaign to keep it clean on the journey over. ‘Life will be easier now, friend. A new set of troubles begins, but the worst is over.’
He offered Dieter a card for a bakery, a line-drawn sketch of a bagel, a name and an address.
‘Thank you.’
The man smiled, showing a mouth full of teeth, rotten where gold caps had been yanked out. ‘Nichivo. We must look out for each other.’
The bagel man clapped a fraternal hand on Dieter’s shoulder and moved on, approaching more stragglers from the boat who stood in uncertain clumps. Dieter studied the card for a moment, and, for lack of a better idea, approached a yellow cab that was idling by the road, the driver leaning against the bonnet, smoking a pipe.
The driver kept the pipe going as they climbed into the vehicle, so Dieter slid the window down, enjoying the breeze as the car wended down the beach road, making several turns before rolling up Chapel Street. Through the window Dieter stared at the Australians passing by, unnerved by the size of them, huge features, huge guts, ruddy and sweaty like they’d all just been disgorged from a sauna. From the back of this taxi, it seemed like the whole country was forever in a Bavarian beer garden, on the first day of summer, everyone drunk and jolly and sunburned by the afternoon.
He looked up and caught the driver watching him in the rear-view mirror, his wide blue eyes framed in the glass.
‘You look like you’ve been in the wars,’ he offered.
Dieter wasn’t familiar with the expression, and agreed. ‘Yes. I was in the wars.’
‘No shit? That must of been rough.’
‘Rough, yes. Terrible thing.’
‘Gotta lotta mates who went over there, whole lot less who came back.’
‘Yes.’ Dieter’s new proficiency in English was failing him. ‘It went badly for us all.’
‘Is it true what the papers are saying about Poland?’
‘I do not want to talk about it.’
‘Fair’nuff.’ The driver shrugged. ‘So you over here for family?’
‘No, there is nobody. Just me.’
The driver took the hint, turned back to the road.
The cab dropped him off outside a block of flats next to a factory on Chapel Street. Across the road, labourers in shirts and suspenders were loading crates of jam into a truck. Dieter climbed out of the cab, retrieved his suitcase from the boot and carefully counted out the pennies to the cab driver.
It took him a few minutes to find the right place. A sea of pedestrians parted around him as he stood in the middle of the footpath. The scent of South Yarra assailed his nose: the funk of horses as they clipped by dragging carts filled with produce up and down the road, bread baking and bacon frying, and above it all the heady, yeasty fug of alcohol that permeated the whole strange city.
Dieter paid for three months’ rent in advance and the landlady showed him up to his room, handed him the keys, told him, ‘If you need anything, Mr Kulakov, I’m just downstairs,’ then left him alone. The room was cramped and stuffy with the shutters closed, but when he threw them open the cacophony and light of the street crashed into the room. Nobody could see into the room, but just to be safe, Dieter closed them again.
A striped horsehair blanket lay at the foot of the bed. He picked it up and held it to his nose. It smelled clean. He placed his luggage on the bed and opened the lock, and the overstuffed suitcase sprung open, with all the things he’d saved from Auschwitz. A doll named Sarah, rough-carved from wood and dressed in rags, stared up at him. He picked it up, held it for a moment, then tossed it across the room, where it landed with an ugly wooden clatter. Dieter would not need it for a while.
He spilled the contents of the suitcase onto the floor, then, feeling around carefully at the bottom of it, he found the release for the false bottom, sprang it, and took stock. Most of the gold he’d set out with was gone, frittered away on too-expensive bribes at borders and checkpoints, or extortionate fees for the smugglers and forgers who’d sold him the documents he needed to get here. Terrified of getting caught with too much of the fortune he’d earned from Auschwitz, he’d spent the months leading up to the liberation salting the money away with friends in industry and banks. Now it was hidden across Europe, in vaults and companies that had grown rich on slave labour. One day he would go back to reclaim the money he’d had to leave behind, but first he would start a new life, here where nobody would think to look for him. This new country was good at forgetting, knew how to keep a secret, and would help him build a careful chrysalis to protect him from the things he’d done.
There would be a year spent as a factory worker, carving little wooden toys alone in his room at night, like he’d watched Arkady do for all those months they’d spent together. When the toys were passable, he started to sell them. Sometimes, he would play up his European charms to tap into the pretension of a Melbourne that was slowly becoming, under the weight of waves and waves of post-war immigration, more cosmopolitan. Other times, he would tell Arkady’s sad story of how he carved toys in the concentration camps to provoke sympathetic fingers to open wallets. The toys, he knew, weren’t good product, but he was, and he knew what people wanted to hear. He wasn’t selling toys; he was selling an idea of lost civilisation to homesick Europeans stuck at the end of the world.
Soon he would buy a shopfront, then a workshop, and then a factory. He would pay for each expansion of his business with some of the gold he’d stolen from Auschwitz, discreetly sold a little at a time over the years to avoid raising suspicion.
Each year he grew richer, and each year it grew harder to live with the mounting past. To keep it from crushing him, he would start drinking, and when that stopped working, he would start going to a synagogue near his first factory, an unobtrusive little building that was serene and solemn and gave no clue to the blinding heat and clattering trams outside. He would stand up the back of the service, swaying drunkenly a little. He liked the sermons, liked listening to the musical lilt of the Yiddish, which somehow helped his homesickness over his dead Europe, and made his guilt paw and tear at him, a pleasant, flagellant kind of ache, at the same time. Best of all he liked the prayers, the chants, the cantillations; the melody and the impenetrable He
brew would wash over him and empty his mind for a while.
One day, leaving the temple, he bumped into Rachel, a young Polish Jew who walked with a limp because she’d been crippled in the camps, and who worked as a cantor for the synagogue. Soon they would fall in love and raise a family, and when she died young because of the things the Nazis had done to her all those years ago, nearly everything he lived for would go with her, everything except his work.
Three decades would pass and, with his Adam, his sweet, idiot grandson, along to complete his disguise as a kindly Russian expat, he would travel back to Europe and track down all his old comrades who had come out of hiding, now working as doctors or executives for companies producing computers and luxury cars. Retrieving the money he’d hidden with them, laundering it through his toy company, he would expand and cement his wealth, and carve an unassailable empire for himself. He would be famous as a toymaker, never having made more than a handful of toys. His real trade he would carry with him to the grave.
That would take time, though, and for now, on his first day in Australia, Dieter picked up a handful of gold teeth, which gleamed darkly in his palm, even in the gloom. It wasn’t much, but if he found the right people to help, if he was careful, there was enough: more than enough to start again.
__________
Tess wasn’t sure exactly how Adam had managed, in the few days she wasn’t watching over him, to engineer an international humanitarian disaster with her fingerprints all over it, but there you go. The factory that he’d moved production to had burned to the ground taking hundreds of child workers with it, but not, sadly, the documents held within a fireproof safe in the factory office, documents detailing the transfer of hundreds of thousand of dollars from Mitty & Sarah accounts to an Indonesian bank and into the sweatshop deathtrap, documents that, unaccountably to her, held her signature of approval.