by Daria Wilke
“So they really might give me the Jester,” Sashok says, and she cocks her head like a magpie.
Theater kids — it’s not just me and Sashok, after all. It’s the grown-ups too, I suddenly realize. Absolutely everyone who lives in the theater: Lyolik, Sam, Mama Carlo, Maika on lights, and even Nina Ivanovna, the fat lady at the snack counter with pink lips and blond hair whipped up like a fancy cake. And we may be all one another has. The theater too — we have that. The theater’s always here. Everyone can count on a piece of the theater — that’s a certainty. That’s honest.
Sam would surely have done the same, I decide.
The theater’s creaking stairs sigh: It’s the right thing to do.
I’ll give Sashok the Jester. How can I not?
“IF there is a puppet god, then it’s Lyolik,” Sam said once, a long time ago. Said it and forgot it. But I remember to this day.
Every time I see Sam in Lyolik’s workshop, I think that if Lyolik’s a god, then Sam worships him, for sure. If Lyolik needs wood brought up from downstairs or blocks or boards from the garage, Sam runs to do it like a little boy, as if the theater has no stagehands. If Lyolik suddenly and unexpectedly needs glue from the store, Sam darts off: “I’ll be quick!” With Lyolik, he’s not calm, grown-up Sam anymore. He’s someone like me or Sashok.
Once every two weeks Sam takes Lyolik to the Home for Veterans of the Stage to visit some old puppet master who used to work in our theater and taught Lyolik how to make puppets.
Like today. You can get so much done between morning rehearsals and the evening performance.
I run to the workshop so I won’t miss them, so they won’t up and leave without me. Every day now, all the time, it feels as though Sam is slipping away, as though tomorrow I’ll wake up and he’ll be gone. Never to return.
To get to Lyolik’s, I have to dash past the stage entrance, past the tiny door to the long, narrow passage under the stage, and past the smoking room and the dressing rooms on the second floor. “One day you’ll knock me down, Grisha!” Vinnik the actress shouts. She’s come out of the dressing room wearing a Bordeaux-red velvet dress with a crinoline petticoat and a violet-tinted gray wig — holding a cigarette at arm’s length and squinting helplessly without her glasses. Not very likely! I won’t knock her over. I’m no fool. If you grow up in the puppet theater, slipping through the crack between the crinoline and the wall is child’s play.
“Grisha, how’s about your tea?” Mama Carlo asks, or rather hollers, from her doorway, immediately answering for me. Mama Carlo is Lyolik’s sister. She’s top boss in the theater workshops, though you wouldn’t think so if you saw her. Mama Carlo looks like the pot-bellied grenadier from an old show: her hair tousled like a cap, suspenders the color of autumn leaves holding up her too-short trousers. A giant of a grenadier. An almost-granny wearing trousers to her ankles. Only she would have the nerve to wear clothes like that.
Sure, lots of other people work in the workshops too, but all I see is Lyolik and Mama Carlo, as if they were there alone.
Mama Carlo is perpetually behind because theater workshops are never calm. Sometimes she’s so behind, the hair on her head grows out too fast for her to notice. Today, for instance, half her head is gray. All of a sudden you look at Mama Carlo and it looks as though someone ran a sharp razor around the middle, and on one side it’s very gray, and on the other there’s the black dye she likes to use to doll herself up.
On the other hand, she always has time for tea — tea with Sam, or with me, or with anyone who turns up on her doorstep.
Tea with Mama Carlo is special. She brews it in an antique teapot with firebirds on the sides. That’s probably why it’s so fragrant, so honey-brown. It steams, and the steam draws patterns on the tea’s surface as if it were a small pond, not a cup.
With the tea she serves Lyolik’s Candy Puppet Show.
Lyolik pushes a worn fool’s cap, made for some old show, toward me and Sam, looks over his glasses, and winks — and the Candy Puppet Show begins. Each time, Sam seems tickled pink, as if he didn’t know it all by heart. He smiles, and even his eyebrows and nose smile, and a dimple you didn’t see before appears on his left cheek.
The game is, you have to reach into the hat and pull out a piece of candy — that one’s yours. It’s more fun that way. Everyone’s long since forgotten which candies they filled the cap with a hundred years ago.
Lying around on the table are twisted wires, hinges, screws, and dowels — so you have to be careful what you eat! (Dowels are the little wooden pins that get hidden deep inside the puppet and make its eyes move and its mouth talk.)
Right by the full cups of tea are some round fox heads. Lyolik was just rubbing them with his crooked fingers to make arcs in the modeling clay over the brows and to make sure there are clefts on their noses.
“Well, shall we get a move on?” Sam stands up and wraps his long scarf around his neck.
He flies up the stairs, but Lyolik is in no hurry to put his arms in the sleeves of his gray fall coat and take the string bag full of bananas and Mama Carlo’s savory pie out of the refrigerator that’s right in the middle of the workshop (“Proper workshops must have their own refrigerators!”).
“Do your parents know?” Mama Carlo suddenly remembers to ask when I’ve nearly run off.
“You tell them, okay?” I shout to her from the doorway, and Mama Carlo gestures vaguely.
“Going far?” Sashok always turns up at the wrong time, I think — and am immediately ashamed.
Lyolik and Sam have gone on ahead, to the door, to Sam’s car, and I really don’t want Sashok tagging along. It’s not that I don’t want her to go per se. I just want to have Sam to myself. And Lyolik. Sam is leaving for good soon, and Sashok will always be here and we’ll still have chances to go everywhere.
“Back soon,” I lie, and I slip out, not looking at her, to the passage, past Albert Ilich, the gray-browed janitor, who’s drinking tea and staring at a small TV.
The instant you walk out the stage door, you’re in Moscow. As long as you’re in the theater, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else but the theater. No stores with people busily putting milk in carts, no square and round loaves of bread, no flashing traffic lights, no racing cars. In the theater you don’t even need windows, because the theater is the theater and that’s all you need.
In the theater there is no fall or winter, no morning or night — it’s always its own season and day. The theater season, the theater day.
But walk through the stage door and there you are in Moscow — and it’s fall.
Fall means the theatrical season has only just begun.
Fall means a drift of leaves next to the door: lemon yellow, rusty brown, strawberry red.
“Hurry up!” Sam shouts in the distance. I can’t hear him but I can see his lips moving and his arm gesturing. Then I forget about the leaves and dash for the car — and the fall wind whistles in my ears and the Moscow streets roar.
Lyolik rides with dignity, the bag with the pie in his lap. Occasionally he turns to look at something out the window, and then from the backseat I can see that in profile he looks even more like the Jester, with his hooked nose and shaggy gray eyebrows.
When I was little, one day I suddenly realized I didn’t know where old actors went. I got very scared. Someone was just here, he went out onstage, he was a part of every day, you watched him magically transform himself to play a part, he shone, and all of a sudden — zap! — he was gone, vanished, like the puppets from decommissioned shows. And no one said anything, as if no one actually knew what happened to him.
I asked my mama, “So where do they disappear to? Where do the actors go who aren’t working in the theater anymore?”
“Here and there,” my mama said. “Some just go to live quietly with their grandchildren and water the cucumbers at their place in the country, and some move to the Home for Veterans of the Stage.”
I always thought that the Home was a kind of palace
where the rooms were furnished with antique vases and fancy lamps, and old men and women with hairdos like in the costume dramas lived. They sat at round tables and drank tea from saucers with fanciful monograms on the bottom, next to walls hung top to bottom with engravings and yellowed photographs in fancy frames.
The Home is somewhere in the forest. That I know for certain. Sometimes we would ride by it on the bus. And then — at the exact same place each time — my papa would say significantly, “And over there is the Home for Veterans of the Stage.” You can’t see it through the trees, even in winter when all the leaves have fallen, and I’ve always wanted so badly to take just a peek at the “palace.”
Sam parks the car and we start off through the autumnal park. It’s resoundingly quiet, as if we’ve fallen into another time, another world. There is a smell of acrid smoke: We can’t see who, but someone is burning fallen leaves in the long lanes.
“Now don’t you go running off,” Lyolik grumbles at Sam when Sam takes his string bag, even though it isn’t heavy.
All of a sudden, though there isn’t any wind, the plane trees shower us with translucent, pale yellow leaves. First, one falls slowly and cautiously. Then, spinning, another three, and then the black, wet-looking trunks are engulfed in a yellow swirl of leaves so big there’s no seeing where it stops. There’s no more ground, just amber leaves shuddering and shifting underfoot.
And in the lane, in that yellow shower of leaves, an old woman appears. Never in the world would I have thought she was an old woman if she hadn’t been leaning on a cane. I’d have thought she was a ballerina because of her perfect posture — as if something inside her were forcing her to stretch tautly — and her smoothly combed hair.
She’s walking majestically down the lane, and around her dance mute and weightless plane tree leaves. She doesn’t turn around when she hears steps, and only when we catch up with her does she glance at Lyolik and Sam, bow her head in formal greeting, and quietly say, “To see Efimovich? That’s good.”
As if she were the queen of the Home. The prima ballerina who shall always be the prima, even with a cane, even if her once-blue eyes are faded and each hair on her head is stitched with silver.
Turns out, the Home isn’t a palace at all.
It’s just a typical boarding house outside Moscow, with tall windows, I think, disappointed. A boarding house, not a palace.
Inside, it’s strangely quiet, as if no one actually lives in the Home.
And it has a smell. A strange smell. A school smells of cafeteria food and shoe bags. Dressing rooms, of powder and makeup. Home, of warmth and Mama’s jasmine perfume. But the Home has a strange smell — sort of sweet, too sweet, sort of as if you’d poked your nose into a laundry hamper.
The smell opens my eyes to the fact that there are pieces of parquet missing from the floor here and there where dirt has accumulated; that lacy, worn-out wallpaper dangles in the corners; and that the flowers at the hall window have dried out, curled up, and turned brown, nearly black.
On the second floor it suddenly gets noisy. Boom boom boom — drums are booming somewhere, many voices are producing something unimaginable, and saxophones are wailing.
Sam laughs and knocks so loudly I think I’ll go deaf.
Then again. And again — because no one hears him.
“Get lost already!” someone inside hollers.
I shrink. Why did we come if he’s going to attack us? What if he’s out of his mind?
“Go away!” The door clicks, rumbles, and swings open.
A band bursts out of the room and knocks us off our feet, and I think I’d better hang on to the doorframe.
On the threshold stands a skinny little man who reminds me of a turtle. His head is perfectly bald, and wrinkles seem to have gathered on the very top of it.
His eyebrows look like two hooks, as if someone has taken them off some puppet and attached them to his face.
He rushes to embrace Lyolik and Sam and then holds his hand out to me in a dignified way, as if I’m some sort of big shot. A minute later he’s forgotten all about me and is back at his table.
“Lyonechka, no, look, look at the controller they sent me from Germany. No, really, look what they’re doing, look!”
This is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone call Lyolik “Lyonechka.”
He runs to us from the table — which is buried under piles of patterns and sketches, new and old, and even ones so ancient the paper has yellowed and frayed — and back.
He points to the patterns and shows Lyolik his wonderful new controller.
“Look at how they reinforce the leg yoke. Can you imagine how it moves?”
He exclaims, he tries to outshout the horns and saxophones, he hops, he barely stands still for a second, and then he jumps up, runs to the cupboards, gets out some old puppets, and shows us things. He speaks breathlessly, as if he hasn’t spoken in a hundred years and now has finally decided to open his mouth.
From the way Lyolik looks at him, you can tell that this is the true puppet god.
Sam turns off the music and neatly folds the plans scattered over the table — so there will be somewhere to put the pie. Out of his pocket he takes a shiny new box with foreign letters curling over the lid and holds it out to Efimovich, who grabs the package like a child, with both hands, and gleefully eviscerates it — and instantly the room is filled with the sharp smell of tobacco. He stuffs his nostrils, gives his head a silly wag, screws up his eyes, winks at Sam, sneezes like a cat, and stuffs his nose with more tobacco. He ends up with two tobacco tracks down his lip, but he pays them no mind and has no intention of wiping them off.
There’s a delicate knock at the door. Efimovich frowns and freezes, as if newcomers from the Home might bring disaster to his room, which is hung with marionettes, rod puppets, masks, and posters.
“Well, come in, who’s there?”
The ballerina from the lane floats through the door — now without a cane, carrying a tray with steaming cups. For everyone.
“Tea,” she says, and inclines her head on her swanlike neck, which does not seem to bend at all. “I thought you would like some tea.”
Even queens bow to puppet gods, I think, as the ballerina, her back perfectly straight, walks out the door.
“She looks after me,” Efimovich says proudly, and he raises his hook-brows.
With obvious delight, he cuts himself a piece of pie, and you can see right away that the cabbage inside is bright green, and you can smell Mama Carlo’s trademark filling. Sam looks at Efimovich’s hands, and Efimovich catches his look.
“Oh, no.” Sam takes a step back in fright. “I’m not going to. This is for you.”
“And I won’t give you any.” Efimovich squints craftily, and his eyes drown in webs of infinite wrinkles. “Lyonechka, of course you’ll eat!”
He holds out a piece each to me and Lyolik.
“I thought the actors in the Home were like the decommissioned puppets,” I blab, and am instantly ready to burn up from shame. My head feels as though it has been plunged into a hot bath. Now Efimovich is sure to be mad.
But he only bursts out laughing.
“Decommissioned! No one can decommission you until you decommission yourself. As long as I have my puppets and plans, there is no retirement or old age, and death will have to wait outside.”
Now he’s giggling and cackling loudly.
“When I finally retire, I’ll come join you,” Lyolik says as we’re leaving, and you can tell this is their ritual, that he says this every time. “I’m not going to stay at home.”
My heart sinks.
Lyolik seems like he’s a hundred years old, and he just got his pension, but he’s still working anyway. He often says he’s going to work “until they carry me out feet first.” I hope they don’t take Lyolik out soon. Otherwise, who am I going to visit in the workshops when I’m sad? Jesters can be sad too.
But if he talks to Efimovich about retiring every time, and about going to
the Home, does that mean he really is planning to come here?
It’s quiet in the corridor again — as if the only life here is on the other side of the door, where the drums are booming away again and puppets hang on the walls.
“You don’t believe that yourself,” Sam says when we go outside. “You just say that. What do you need a charity home for?”
“A lot you know,” Lyolik answers angrily. “A lot you know! This is like a resort — you just stay until your life is over.”
“The only good thing to do in a resort is relax,” Sam says stubbornly and quietly. “You need a real home. A charity home is just charity, after all.”
And all of a sudden I understand. What an idiot I am. Of course, this is a charity home. An honest-to-goodness charity home. And I’ve been picturing some kind of palace. Or boarding house.
The autumn breeze quietly turns off the lights in the big city, the way the lamps get turned down in the theater, one by one: the heavy chandelier, then the sconces in the balconies. And then, cautiously, as if testing their powers, the lights are lit onstage. Phantasmal, fanciful. The kitchen and nursery windows we pass flicker with magical lamps; each window reveals its own scene, its own theater. The autumn moon shines like a dim floodlamp in the inky blue sky.
Only when Sam cuts the engine and says, “We’re here!” do I realize that neither one of them has spoken a word the whole time. Sam and Lyolik have been silent all the way to the theater, as if they are mad at each other.
When you go back inside the theater, it always feels like going home; everything is familiar and understandable. Outside, people have donned their masks and are scurrying home after work. But in the theater, masks are just masks, not an alternate face. Everything is done honestly. You don’t have to pretend here, even though you’d think it would be just the opposite.
Lyolik wanders toward the workshops, where he’s always supposed to be during the evening performance. Because only he can repair any puppet. If something breaks, they rush it over to Lyolik during intermission, and in fifteen minutes he’s figured out how to fix it. Or to bandage it up so it can perform the second act.