by Liam Pieper
These tied the company, and their request for additional workers and overtime which had stretched the capacity of the factory to breaking and caused the disaster, squarely to Adam and, as the CFO of the firm, to Tess.
She marvelled anew that, despite the myriad ways in which her husband had fucked up time and again during their marriage, he always managed to find ways to surprise her.
She had been hours, minutes, away from walking out completely to start a new life when ramifications began raining down; shit from a fan. In the hours and days after the fire, the media swarmed over the good name of the company and began to pick the meat from its bones. Whatever happened next, it seemed Mitty & Sarah was done for. The method by which they’d operated for decades, chasing ever-shrinking profit margins by buying cheaper and cheaper shit from the developing world, had imploded, almost literally. They could no longer make their money like that, which meant if she was going to survive, she had to find a way to rescue the company.
While the world watched, clucked its collective tongue, tweeted, waited for them to make their move, she realised that she was, in a practical sense, shackled to the company, and by default to Adam. He’d fucked up so badly that to simply leave would ruin her; even if she somehow escaped the criminal liability that the Jakarta documents might expose her to, what other company would hire her if she walked from the ruins of this one? No, she would have to fix it, for her own sake, and for her son’s, and because of her deathbed promise to Arkady. She’d realised too late that he’d considered her the only person in his life he could really trust and he’d groomed her for power because he wanted her to have it. Her husband had come very close to destroying everything Arkady had built, so now she was taking back what was his, and making it hers.
Arkady, who she now realised had cared for her more than anyone ever would, had asked her to keep his secret, which, she was sure, meant the money he’d secreted away in his safe havens over the years. She still had no idea how much there was, or where it was hidden; every time she followed the leads in the files Arkady had left behind, she found more, small fortunes spirited away from the Mitty & Sarah coffers, as well as occasional, inexplicably huge injections from private bank accounts in Europe. She still didn’t know what to make of it all. If she was going to keep her word to him, she would need to play the long game. Slowly, one day at a time, with the patience and diligence Arkady had taught her, she would find the money, move it from where Arkady had buried it to her own secret accounts. Once she’d found it all, she would bury it, as Arkady had instructed, a million miles away from the home she would continue to share with Adam, for now.
When she was ready, she would cut Adam loose. Until then, he would stay with her, a chelovek-karova, a man-cow she had taken with her to help her escape, the two of them scurrying away together across the ice, fast friends until the time came to butcher him.
The Mitty & Sarah Company as it had existed for half a century would close, the staff retrained, as the corporate entity shifted to become a charity. From now on, the company would be the Kulakov Foundation. They would no longer sell toys, not exactly. Instead, they would sell an idea.
Only one product would be sold, and that would be manufactured in small, community-run workshops in the parts of Jakarta devastated by poverty, before being imported to Australia where it would be packaged and shipped out across the world. Lubovka Bear was a plush toy, styled in the likeness of the late Arkady Kulakov, that came dressed in a three-piece suit, with a certificate detailing how the money spent on the bear would benefit the developing world; a pamphlet with statistics about malaria nets, the digging of wells; a picture of a smiling child.
It was actually Adam’s idea, in a final irony, the idea that would save the company after he’d destroyed it. Not long after the disaster, Adam had turned up at their house, reeking of vodka, ranting maniacally and clutching a manky stuffed bear and an Australian flag. The charity, the bear, the symbol.
Tess had engineered the pivot. Although she’d been overcome with loathing for him when he’d pitched it to her, she couldn’t help but admire it. Their profits had been falling for years and they weren’t going to come back. The only sales they made were from people who had grown up with the toys and wanted their children to experience some of the magic they remembered through rose-tinted nostalgia.
Listening to Adam rave about charity, waving the derelict toy in her face, Tess had realised that children didn’t use their imaginations any more, but every adult liked to imagine that they were a good person. Everyone wanted to make a difference, and by buying a Lubovka Bear, they could. Across the world, wars would continue to destroy countries, new ones would rise from the rubble, and in sweatshops and on farms and on streets everywhere the poor would struggle against time and disease and indifference to survive, and from their combined efforts, the money would slowly trickle up to Tess and her customers, who wanted nothing more than to feel good about themselves.
With the help of a crack squad of public relations people, they sold the story. They started with a few hand-picked journalists, who digested the story a piece at a time at a series of expensive dinners paid for by the Kulakov Foundation. By the time the news cycle came to an end, it was clear to the public that Adam Kulakov and his company were both victims of a great tragedy and heroes who would help make amends. Along the way, the buck had been passed, and in the public eye the former Mitty & Sarah Company were dupes, the victims of unscrupulous labour practices by Third World profiteers. This subtext, the same across all the papers that carried the story, helped soothe the rumbles against the Kulakov Foundation, told the world this new incarnation of their company would fight for better labour conditions in Jakarta. Australia already knew all about Indonesia, after all, a country of people smugglers and colonial oppression and child slavery. Unfair, undemocratic, sinister.
In the month since the disaster, Tess had set about quietly dismantling the company and putting it back together. The bears themselves would make, at best, a modest profit, but after liquidating the old company they would have more than enough to sustain the vast administrative fees required to run a not-for-profit, and still a little left over to throw to the third world, and for Adam to keep himself busy.
Adam was bashful, chastened, on his best behaviour, but she knew that his contrition would only last until the excitement of his new adventure wore off. Some cockroaches refused to die, no matter how hard they were stamped on, but they all went scurrying when you turned the lights on, at least for a while. He would need to be kept busy while she made her moves, and the Kulakov Foundation was a perfect role for Adam.
With each day, the world shrunk, and as it did every hour brought endless horrors, captured on phone cameras, uploaded instantly for all to see. Every time an Australian turned on the television they were hit with the deluge of war, famine disease, terrorism. So much suffering; all the lost children, starving, flies on their faces, drowning facedown on a foreign beach. Too much, too ugly too look at, but the Lubovka Bear was a nice, clean way to help, and behind it stood Adam Kulakov, handsome, charming, affable – the face of good old-fashioned Australian kindness.
Earlier in the day, she’d written his speech for him, helped him rehearse it, kissed him on the cheek and wished him luck. As Kade played on the floor not far from her desk, and she planted the seeds for her new life from the computer at the Kulakov Foundation office, Tess kept an eye on the television. Adam would soon be speaking at a press conference to outline his vision for the Lubovka Bear, asking for donations from business leaders, and from the wider public.
It was, she had to admit, the one thing he was really good at, standing in front of a room full of people and selling a very simple idea. Nobody could take a lie and believe it with such pure sincerity as her husband. He could spend the rest of his life at fundraisers and awards nights and public-speaking events, rolling out his charm, which he would always have in his limited, blowhard way, and basking in the attention, a happy child in a
playpen. Even after she was gone, he would, like she’d promised Arkady, be looked after, even if he would never know the extent of what he had missed.
There would be time for that, of course, but later, and for now, as on the monitor Adam took to the stage, she got up, stretched, then sat on the floor to play with her son. There would be time for that too.
__________
Although he’d been rehearsing the speech for days, he still felt nervous. He checked his reflection for the hundredth time, and practised a wink in the mirror, then realised that he had a smear of lipstick on his cheek, where Tess had kissed him good luck earlier, her lips cool on his skin. He wiped it off, smudged his foundation, and swore, picked up the compact to fix it.
‘Here.’ Shubangi, once head of product, now head of philanthropy, stood in the door, and moved to his side. She took the sponge off him and reached up to swipe it down his face. ‘Like this, you have to blend it in.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you nervous?’
He shook his head. ‘Not at all.’
‘Good. You’ll be fine. You’ve got this.’ She finished blending the foundation over his cheek and dabbed at it to finish it. ‘There, beautiful.’
He would be fine; he knew it. In the first few days after the accident, as the press had worked out who was responsible for the Jakarta inferno, he’d existed in a twilight state of misery and panic, but he’d soon started to enjoy his notoriety. After a lifetime of dreaming about being famous, there he was, his name splashed all over the front page of the papers, of the internet. As the press accrued, he stopped panicking as he read his name in damning news articles, started to enjoy the rush and plummet of his stomach as the adrenaline soaked up through his fingers with the newsprint.
Now, standing backstage, Adam paced nervously back and forth, then stopped, forced himself to take a deep breath, take stock. He realised that he had changed, was better. He’d been hard done by and had risen to meet the challenge, and along the way the feeling of flabby inferiority, of not being good enough for the line he’d been born into, had burned off. He felt lean, strong; he was, he decided, finally a man. He would nail this, and then he would go out and celebrate. Perhaps, he thought, if he could get away from Tess, he would call Clara, see what she was up to.
Stepping out from behind the curtain onto the stage he waved away the smattering of applause. Taking his place behind the podium, he unfolded his speech. ‘Let me start by saying that this isn’t about making money. This is not about taking money. This is about giving. It’s about giving back.
‘Please. Do not applaud me. Lubovka Bear, well, it was my idea, but it is just an idea. Like all big ideas, it takes work to make it a reality. I meet a lot of people with big ideas, ideas that will change the world for the better, but we must all work together to make it happen.
‘What happened in Jakarta was a tragedy, tragic, on so many levels. Our thoughts should be with the families of the dozens of women and children who lost their lives, and also with the thousands of people who have lost their livelihood. These people are the victims of those who would take advantage of their fellow men for profit, who stop at nothing to cut corners. As the CEO of the Mitty & Sarah Company, I’m ashamed to say that I, too, fell victim to these foreign profiteers, and invested in these factories of death. This is why the Kulakov Foundation was born, and this is what we will fight.
‘We must not let those who would take advantage of our generous nature, our way of life, the opportunities we offer, to stop us from doing the right thing for those who have suffered in this tragedy, both in Australia, and our friends overseas. You do not run from the past, you use it to make the future brighter, which is something the greatest man I’ve ever known taught me.’
When the applause died down he leaned forward and spoke into the mic. ‘Let me tell you a story about my grandfather.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In no particular order:
This project was supported by the Prague UNESCO City of Literature in consultation with the Melbourne UNESCO City of Literature Office. Special thanks to Kateřina Bajo, David Ryding and Justyna Jochym. Děkuji, thank you and spoko.
Michelle Garnaut sent me to India a million years ago where much of this book was born. Her generosity through the M Literary Residency program made it all possible. Thank you.
Additional support was provided by the Copyright Agency Creative Industries Fund, whose continued investment in Australian literature is vital and invaluable.
Everyone from Sangam House, especially Arshia Sattar, Rahul Soni, Pascal Sieger and Mangala.
Victoria Khroundina for teaching me the finer points of the Russian language. Olga Peshkova for the rest. Antonia Baum for similar reasons.
Werner Pieper, whose recollections and insights into the Third Reich were invaluable.
Chris and Jill Lunn and Marieke Hardy for lending me peaceful places to work.
Early readers: Hanna Silver, Paul Garland, Catherine McInnis, Adam Wajnberg, Elizabeth Flux, David Vaughan, Shane Pieper, Miriam Gregory, Leticia Gregory, and McCoo, even if to get her to read the manuscript, I had to cross out ‘The Toymaker by Liam Pieper’ and replace it with ‘The Conflicted Professional Woman by Shonda Rhimes’.
My agent Grace Heifetz, tireless defender of author’s rights who championed this novel.
Louise Ryan who not only championed this novel but sold copies, and so earns bonus points.
All the Penguins, including but not limited to: Melanie Ostell, Rebecca Bauert, Johannes Jakob, Tracey Jarrett, Alex Ross, Anyez Lindop and all the sales reps.
Special thanks as well to all the booksellers out there fighting the good fight. I love each and every one of you more than everyone, especially you, holding this book right now. Thank you.
Zelda Catzgerald, who I have neglected terribly these past years.
Nikki Lusk, copy editor extraordinaire and troll mate.
My editor, Cate Blake, who, I will admit, had some small part to play in creating this book. There isn’t enough space in these pages to thank her profusely enough for all she has taught, and continues to teach, me about writing. Besides, she will be so sick of repairing this thing line by line that she will probably be too tired to ever read this. Nonetheless, thank you.
Most of all, this book owes a debt to all the survivors of the Holocaust who lived to tell their stories, who ensured that we never forget, whose legacy will remain to remind humanity what we are capable of when we become proud of our indifference, then cruelty. In particular I must thank those who shared their memories with me, especially Raissa and Vladmir Glouzman whose generosity sent me to Berlin for the first time where the idea for this novel took shape, and Mietek Silver, whose wisdom I’ve tried to do justice to in these pages.
Thank you.
About the Author
Liam Pieper is a Melbourne-based author and journalist. His first book was a memoir, The Feel-Good Hit of the Year, shortlisted for the National Biography Award and the Ned Kelly Best True Crime award. His second was the Penguin Special Mistakes Were Made, a volume of humorous essays. He was co-recipient of the 2014 M Literary Award, winner of the 2015 Geoff Dean Short Story Prize and the inaugural creative resident of the UNESCO City of Literature of Prague. The Toymaker is his first novel.
ALSO BY LIAM PIEPER
The Feel-Good Hit of the Year
Mistakes Were Made
HAMISH HAMILTON
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa | China
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2016
Text copyright © Liam Pieper 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Lyrics from ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ words and music by Neil Finn © copyright Kobalt Music Publishing Australia Pty Ltd on behalf of Roundhead Music. All print rights for Australia and New Zealand administered by Hal Leonard Australia Pty Ltd ABN 13 085 333 713. halleonard.com.au. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Unauthorised reproduction is illegal.
Cover design by Alex Ross © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Text design by Samantha Jayaweera © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Cover photograph by V.K.K.V.
penguin.com.au
ISBN: 978-1-76014-273-5
THE BEGINNING
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