by Daria Wilke
Right now, Sam is about to start singing; today he has The Nutcracker, where he sings. Better not bother him. I should bug off, even though I’m dying to sit next to Sam and listen to him sing.
I love the shows where Sam gets to sing and doesn’t hide behind a curtain most of the time.
Because that’s when the mystery begins. Sam plays his voice like an organ, choosing each note with care. His voice gradually fills the entire hall, to the farthest corner. It twists and turns like an invisible scroll. It breathes and vibrates.
They are all busy — and I still haven’t checked on the Jester or taken my run through the theater. I need to check on everyone. Then the evening will go the way it should and I can just sit in the dressing room and eat cake from the theater snack bar and do my homework for tomorrow.
Sashok isn’t in the theater. I mean, she’s here somewhere, of course, but I can’t find her. She isn’t with Mama Carlo or in the dressing rooms. In the theater, everything is out in the open and everything is hidden from those who can’t picture how it’s arranged. I know that sooner or later Sashok will jump out like a devil from a snuffbox. But if I search for her specially, nothing will come of it.
I run through the theater, and the hallway floor flies under my feet like a turntable.
“Careful on the curves, kid.” Olezhek rustles reproachfully.
He’s turned the corner at just the wrong time. When he walks, he kicks his feet like a fly rubbing its legs — not like the artistic director of a Moscow theater passing through his realms — and flaps his short little arms. To Kolokolchikov, everyone is “kid”: Lyolik, Mama, Papa, Sam, even the wrinkly janitor, Albert Ilich. That’s why I feel sorry for Oleg Borisovich — no one takes him seriously. Everyone just calls him Olezhek, whether because only recently he was an actor like everyone else or because of those “kids.”
The wings, backdrops, and gratings are the borders of my territory. I run past them so fast the wind whistles in my ears. The house is boring, and so is the lobby. Farther on, past my border checkpoint, on the left, in the dark passageway behind the stage, there’s a little hidden door covered in foam rubber. You have to creep through it, bent over. I run down the narrow passage to the space under the stage and watch everyone getting ready for the Mouse King’s entrance. A mask with lots of evil mouse heads is hanging on a hook, awaiting its hour.
Then I run like mad back down the underground passage and then up the spiral staircase, past the sound man. And into the booth with Maika, the lighting tech, where I plop down on the worn-out chair in front of the huge console — it looks like a spaceship — and watch, holding my breath, as the Mouse King emerges from underground, as if from a dark abyss. If Maika lets me, I can slowly move the lever on the console and watch the abyss blaze up with devilish light. You’re almost God because your hand is resting on that tiny little lever.
Maika always smells of strong coffee.
All my life there’s been a green mug next to the console, so by now I imagine Maika has thick, black coffee running through her veins instead of blood.
“I knew it! I knew you’d be here!” Sashok shouts in a triumphant whisper. You’d think I was the one who disappeared, as if I’d been swallowed alive by the storage room. “Let’s go! Hurry up! Before the criminal escapes!”
She drags me to the balcony, and I don’t even have a chance, like I usually do, to look down through the floodlights’ safety nets, down into the dark and seemingly lifeless house, and then look up to see Misha the sound man sitting in the little window on the left and wave to him.
“Basically,” Sashok reports near the dressing rooms, “there’s a stranger there, downstairs. A criminal. And he’s probably looking to swipe our puppets.”
Everything in the theater is ours. The puppets, the old harpsichord in the hallway, the stiff, lacquered wigs on the wig stands.
Sashok likes to exaggerate. She likes to turn everything into a drama, so naturally I don’t believe there are any criminals. But I go, because if Sashok says, “Let’s go,” you’d have to be suicidal not to. You can’t not go if Sashok’s decided you absolutely have to go somewhere.
Downstairs means the Little Stage. Nearly in the basement. You have to take a steep black staircase, and you have to get used to the low light and huddle because everything’s so dark. And there really is a stranger in that low light. He’s standing right there by the puppets that are hung up for tomorrow’s matinee.
He’s skinny and nimble, like a scraggly grass snake. He has an earring and a tattoo that covers one whole chicken-wing arm and a neat little goatee. I dislike him right away. Because he’s holding the Jester. My Jester.
“Who gave you permission to take the Jester?” Sashok screams. If she screams, that means even she’s not altogether sure that she’s not going to get slapped. “Who are you, anyway?”
“What’s it to you?” the guy asks, in an almost threatening way.
“It’s a lot to us,” Sashok replies in the same tone. “We live here.”
The guy hesitates but finally says, “I’m the new puppet master.”
MY grandfather wouldn’t have guessed anything if Sam hadn’t put on his party jacket. When he puts on his party jackets, even a dimwit could guess.
Because Sam’s party jackets are bright green with black satin lapels or red sparkly ones. Today he puts on a jacket in a navy floral pattern.
It’s a handsome jacket.
“Papa, this is Sam,” Mama says happily when she introduces them to each other. She says it as if half of Moscow is wearing jackets like that and it’s not anything special.
My grandfather straightens up with a jerk, gawks, and looks at me — and I nod, as if to say, Yes, that’s Sam, nothing you can do about it — and then back at Sam.
And Sam smiles at him — broadly, joyfully.
Sam smiles and it’s impossible not to smile back because Sam glows like a furnace going full blast.
My grandfather says, “Mmm hmm,” and that’s it. Not even a “pleased to meet you,” or something else polite like you’re supposed to say in these circumstances.
When we’re alone in the dressing room — him and me, because I have to show him where he can change and leave his things — my grandfather says with disgust, “You’re always going on about your friend, your friend! I thought he was a regular fellow, but he’s … he’s just a queer.” And he frowns. “A queer,” he repeats disdainfully.
It’s as if I’ve been punched in the chest and my whole insides have contracted and squeezed in self-defense.
Because I want to tell my grandfather that Sam is the very best actor and now he’s leaving and I feel terrible. Sam can turn into a hundred different people onstage. Sam took Lyolik to the Home for Veterans of the Stage. Sometimes Sam seems like an entire world, much better than the rest of the world. I want to — and can’t.
Because my grandfather said “queer.”
At first I was really happy they’d be celebrating my Mama’s premiere at the theater instead of at home.
At home, once the guests have arrived, everything falls into place and Mama and Papa play the radiant hosts. But all morning, before the guests’ arrival, our apartment is an absolute madhouse.
Someone always forgets to buy something, and my parents spend a long time arguing over who should go to the store. And, of course, it’s Papa who always goes — “because you’re the man. Are you a man, or what?”
He goes, slamming the door as hard as he can, but just before that he shouts, “You don’t treat me like a human being here! I’m a … I’m a … I’m like Cinderella!”
Then he calls from the store ten times, probably stopping at every shelf. At first Mama smiles sympathetically, but by the fifth call her voice gets steely, and by the tenth she’s shouting into the receiver, “I can never count on you!” and she throws the phone on the couch in the kitchen, as if it were the phone’s fault that she can’t count on Papa and that she ever married him.
Later we’ll s
it in a circle around a big bowl to chop things up for salads, each with our own cutting board. It’s not too bad if my parents are just quarreling. If, for instance, Mama shouts, “Lazy goat! Brute!” and Papa goes crazy and throws his knife at the table so that it hits the edge of the plate of parings and it’s smashed to pieces — well, that gives him a scare and he quiets down.
It’s good if that’s what happens. It can be worse. Like last time — when Mama was stirring mayonnaise into the salad and in the heat of the moment Papa said something stupid. They stood there yelling at each other, and then Mama outshouted Papa: “You and all your guests can get out!” and she hurled the big bowl of salad at the wall.
I have no idea where she got the strength to do that. The salad flew all over the kitchen — onto the walls, the ceiling, the refrigerator, and the shelves — and there was even some mayonnaise-y shredded carrot on the windowsill, and potato, and egg yolk bits, and peas on the floor.
When something like that happens, they quickly realize they’ve gone too far with the drama (“They’ve screwed up big-time,” Sashok would say), and they make up then and there. They crawl around on the floor, pick up the peas and potato, wash the windows, and nudge each other with their elbows as if to make sure they’re still there. They hug and fuss — “Give me that rag, please.” “I’ll shut the window so you don’t get a draft.”
They’re so nice to look at, perfect lovebirds. As if they’d just been married yesterday.
No, I really have first-rate parents. No one else in school has anything like them.
Who else has a mama who can make you laugh, or who can suddenly start talking in the voice of the rabbit from the kiddie show? And then answer as the hedgehog. Or the fox. And go on and on, squeaking, then barking, then snuffling and snorting, until you’re having so much fun you start laughing like a nut?
Having actors for parents is like having a birthmark in the most obvious and unsuitable place. There’s nothing you can do about it. Everyone notices, but you shouldn’t complain.
Basically, it was good they decided to celebrate the premiere at the theater and not at our house. That’s what I thought until Mama declared, “Your grandfather’s coming. You’ll have to show him the theater sometime.”
And then on top of that, “Meet your grandfather at the metro. He’ll never find his way on his own.”
All the time Mama and Papa have been working in the theater, my grandfather has never once visited them at work. I’ve taken my classmates to the theater, and Sashok’s friends from the country have come to performances and backstage afterward, but my grandfather has never once come. A long time ago he got mad at Mama for going to drama school. And marrying an actor, on top of everything. So mad that he and Mama didn’t talk at all for three years. Only after I was born did they make up.
“Couldn’t you have chosen a normal profession?”
My grandfather thinks there are normal professions and ragamuffin professions. Mama should have been a bookkeeper, he thinks, or a dentist, or a lawyer, or at the very worst a teacher. But definitely not an actress.
I don’t think there’s anything ragamuffin about the theater. One day I’m going to be an actor, like Sam. Or a puppet master, like Lyolik.
Of course, Mama’s told me stories about how poor she and Papa were when I was little, that sometimes they didn’t have enough money to buy even a spool of thread. She would borrow some from the neighbor — “to sew your little pants.” But I don’t remember any of that. All I remember is the smell of wood shavings in Lyolik’s workshop and the thrill of the puppets coming to life again every evening.
The metro is closer to the theater’s public entrance, but I never use that entrance. It’s for the audience, the uninitiated. We have an actor’s entrance. It’s better to go all the way around the theater building than to destroy all the theater magic by walking across the lobby, down the marble staircases, past the cloakroom, and through the big glass doors, where posters in cases are hung a month in advance.
As you’re going toward the actor’s entrance, sometimes you remember what Sam says about our theater. He says old buildings are much older than they seem. The creaking floorboards, dusty corners, and dried-up beams in the attic, where no one goes for a hundred years at a stretch, give them completely away.
So do the mousy old patrons, the bricks quietly crumbling to dust in the walls, the antique glass door handles that look like thick, unmelted icicles. Even if old buildings get spruced up, even if people fill in the cracks with fresh mortar and smarten them up with new windows, their age still adds up, like the rings of an old tree. Age conceals millions of secrets.
The secrets of our theater are that it once held the Elokhovsky Electro-Theater, the first movie house, and they showed silent films. Before that, people lived in apartments here. It’s funny to imagine a kitchen where Sam’s dressing room is, for instance, or Lyolik’s workshop as someone’s bedroom.
You come out of an inconspicuous door — no windows or carved handles — and the first thing you see is the Elokhovskaya Church, which looks like a birch holiday tree ornament. It always seemed to me that the church’s name was a little like a pinecone, prickly and fragrant with resin.
Sam used to tell stories about the church and everything, absolutely everything, around it.
He seems to know everything about every building. Moscow is as familiar to him as the stage set for Karurman: The Black Forest.
Moscow has become a stage for Sam to walk across, as lightly as when he comes out of the backstage darkness into the phantasmal footlights. Moscow is not just a city but a theater full of mysteries and magic. Sam and I would walk down our street toward Razgulyay Square and come to a famous mansion with columns, and stand there, bewitched, staring at the mysterious metal rectangle between the second-story windows. I would feel chills run down my back and fight the urge to look around, I was so scared. Scared I might see Bruce, the sorcerer, who under Peter the Great either built a magic clock on the side of the building that he later cursed and covered up, or perhaps walled up his own wife there. We would imagine the invisible clock ticking away somewhere inside, if only we could figure out a way to put our ear to the wall up there, and think about how, as the legend goes, the plaque would turn red before times of bloodshed.
Meeting my grandfather at the metro is a completely different thing. It just means jumping over the puddles and the shiny black streetcar rails and waiting for the station entrance to appear with its stern marble columns. No magic at all. My grandfather would be standing by the columns wearing an expensive coat and a black hat.
“Well, now, they only send you out for death,” my grandfather mutters, and he takes a deep breath of the cold autumn air through his chiseled nostrils and wiggles his brushy, but neatly trimmed, gray-streaked mustache.
When I’m next to him, I always feel like something’s wrong with me. That I’m worse than I really am. That I don’t have what it takes to be good in his eyes. My grandfather makes me ashamed of myself — and ashamed of everything I love, too. Like it or not, that’s what happens when my grandfather is next to me.
“We have to make a real man of you,” he was always saying when I was little. What a “real man” was, exactly, I didn’t know, but I knew I didn’t want to be one if a real man was anything like my grandfather. “You’re raising a sissy,” my grandfather would say angrily if my mother gave me a hug.
Once, when they’d left me with him for an evening performance, he said, “Today we’re going to watch a movie. A very good movie.”
Naturally I wasn’t expecting there to be a catch. At first I didn’t understand anything I saw. I thought my grandfather had just turned on some movie for grown-ups. But then there was a dark street on the screen and strange people. They were beating someone about the head and back and knocking him to the ground.
A wave of fear washed over me and my stomach felt weird. I covered my eyes so I wouldn’t see and waited it out.
But it was still ve
ry scary because the guy they were beating kept shouting, so you could tell the kind of thrashing he was getting.
My grandfather suddenly rushed toward me and put his tough hands over mine and jerked them down.
“Look, look,” Grandfather snarled, and he held my hands so I couldn’t cover my face. “Look! You’re no sissy!”
I was so horrified I didn’t know where to look, where to turn so I wouldn’t see the face on the screen turning into red mush. Then I remembered I could just close my eyes — which I did — and I sat there, crying with closed eyes. My eyelids got all puffy and very, very big, and my mouth was twisted up from all the crying, but I just couldn’t stop.
Then my grandfather got scared and ran with me into the kitchen for water, but even there, where I could no longer watch, someone kept crying out in pain, and my insides kept feeling squeezed, and I burst out in convulsive hiccupping, until my grandfather realized he should turn off the television.
I cried all evening until Mama came and took me home. She never left me with my grandfather again — and I was very glad of that. Because I like staying at the theater much more. Sam helps me with my homework, Mama Carlo gives me tea, and Lyolik teaches me to sculpt mouse heads from modeling clay and cook glue for papier-mâché, and to me it seems that this is real life, comfortable and understandable.
With Sam or Lyolik you can just be quiet — and that’s fine. But if I’m quiet walking down the street from the metro next to my grandfather, it feels as if I’m doing something wrong. You have to say something — something he wants to hear. But I have no idea what he wants to hear because I don’t talk to him often enough. That’s why I rattle on about how it rained today and Mama’s very glad about him coming to her premiere. My grandfather is quiet and his silence is totally impossible to decipher. I can’t figure out whether he’s satisfied with me or not.