by Daria Wilke
Showing my grandfather around the theater is like being punished. While Mama and Papa are dancing onstage, I’m walking next to my silent grandfather and picturing my parents and Sam working in the black theater. I picture the velvet backdrop the color of night, the actors dressed in black body stockings, their faces covered with netting. Only by their characteristic movements can you tell that this is Mama, this is Papa, and this is Sam. And then — then a miracle happens. When flowers suddenly appear out of the dark emptiness, they blossom one after the other — violet, blue, and ghoulish red — and then disappear just as quickly, only to blossom again a second later, their petals trembling, at the other end of the stage.
It’s so interesting to try to guess where my parents are standing at that moment and which flower they are manipulating.
“So,” my grandfather says, coming to a halt in the empty foyer — the audience has all taken their seats — in front of photographs of the actors, and looking at Mama in black and white, smiling, beautiful, like a famous movie star.
“So,” my grandfather says, looking over the shoulder of Lyolik, who’s carving an anonymous hand, a hand that is no one’s yet, out of wood.
“So,” my grandfather says, squinting to examine the puppets hanging on the special wooden stand by the stage, their heads hanging lifelessly on the crossbar.
His “so” makes everything seem foolish.
Usually it’s only outside the theater that I feel I’m not how non-theater people would like me to be. But next to my grandfather, everything about the theater immediately becomes totally ridiculous and frivolous. For a second you see everything through his eyes. Nothing marvelous, just a very old building and strange people who think they’re actors. Who think they’re special.
Then my grandfather says, “Queer.”
After the show, everyone sets the tables in the theater’s snack bar, and it’s noisy, merry, and a little tense, and Uncle Kolya — whom we also call Kalinkin or Father Gapon because of his thick beard and the cross around his neck, and also his ability to start arguments — is shouting hoarsely to someone, while Aunt Sveta — who is small and has a long braid that makes her look like a little girl from behind and who always plays girls — is setting out the plates, and Papa is walking between the tables. I keep thinking about what my grandfather said. Thinking and thinking.
What did I expect? What else could he have said? How can he like Sam just because I say he’s my good friend? How can I expect my grandfather to smell the theater smell, feel the theater magic, and love it the way I do?
And I answer myself: I can’t. I just hadn’t thought about it.
I never know what to say when someone calls Sam a queer. If it’s a stranger, then I can just turn and leave. But what am I supposed to do with my own grandfather?
I think about this so long my head starts to hurt and I barely hear anything. I barely hear everyone giving toasts, or Lyolik and Mama Carlo arriving, or Sashok darting around the table near me, or her whispering something in my ear about the new puppet master, whom she refers to by the childish nickname Filka instead of Filipp, out of spite.
I suddenly realize I’ve slept through it all when I see Olezhek holding his glass of champagne very pretentiously and looking at Lyolik. Everyone else is looking at Lyolik too.
“We are very grateful for everything you’ve done for our theater, Leonid Arkadievich,” Olezhek says with feeling. “You and your work — it will remain forever inside the walls of our temple of art.”
Sashok starts fidgeting beside me.
“You have earned a dignified old age and a rest,” Olezhek continues. “At last we can give you a proper send-off into retirement. A young replacement has arrived, a sapling, basically, and now there is someone to take your place with honor.” He nods in Filipp’s direction. “To your retirement, Leonid Arkadievich. We wish you a wonderful rest!”
Lyolik sits there looking as if he’s suddenly turned into one of his own puppets. Mama Carlo, motionless, stares at Olezhek.
And then I see Sashok’s face and get scared she’s going to sink her nails into Olezhek’s face. Or Filipp’s.
“Good thing he’s leaving soon,” Grandfather says when I show him where the bathroom is. Who’s “he”? I don’t get it.
“Oh, that Sam of yours. That faggot of yours. Good thing he’s leaving soon. The further children can be kept away from those perversions, the better.”
“But you’re old and you’re going to die soon, right?” Sashok asks insolently and loudly — where she’s popped up from I have no idea — and stares at my grandfather without blinking.
Once, at a celebration for some premiere, we were running around among the guests and the critics, and all those important people were eating sandwiches and drinking champagne, when suddenly we heard some fat lady critic speaking heatedly to someone else about Sam, who played the lead in the show: “He’s gay, but he’s a very good actor, as you can see!” Sashok stopped dead in her tracks, stared right into the lady’s eyes — when Sashok looks like that, everyone purses their lips and looks away — and said, “Oh, lady! You forgot to shave your mustache. Oh, no!”
I don’t know who I’m more ashamed of now: my grandfather; Sashok, who’s just been rude again; or myself, because I didn’t do anything to stand up for Sam.
“Why don’t you come up with something new for a change?” I growl at Sashok and elbow her in the side. At that moment I’m angry at everyone — Sashok, myself, my grandfather, Olezhek, Filka, and even Lyolik. Terribly and hopelessly angry.
Where had Sashok even come from? I recall they haven’t actually been introduced yet.
“Grandfather, this is Sashok.” I still think I can fix things. It makes Mama happy when I introduce everyone like a human being, and this is her premiere, after all.
“Sashok?” Grandfather raises his eyebrows. “Meaning, Alexandra?”
“Meaning, Sashok,” she emphasizes.
“That’s a boy’s name, not a girl’s.” My grandfather chuckles. “Do you play with boys’ toys too?”
“I’m Sashok because I like being Sashok.” Sashok speaks challengingly and raises her voice. “And it doesn’t matter, boy or girl.”
I start getting nervous. If Sashok gets wound up, there will definitely be trouble.
My grandfather doesn’t like people speaking disrespectfully to him.
“I understand, Alexandra,” and my grandfather smiles benevolently. Sometimes he looks an awful lot like a nobleman with the whole world at his service.
My grandfather nods haughtily, turns away, and heads for the bathroom. The back of his head says, “They’re just silly children, not worth wasting my time.”
Sashok turns green. Then white. Her lips are blue. And my palms start sweating.
“Hey, you!”
She grabs my grandfather by the sleeve and pulls as hard as she can — so that you can just barely hear the sleeve rip. My grandfather looks around in astonishment. But Sashok answers him in a muffled yet very distinct voice, “You! You can call your great-grandmother Alexandra, but not me. Is that clear?”
My grandfather leaves the premiere party before everyone else.
“Sodom and Gomorrah,” he says, as if he’s now finally clear about me, Mama, and Papa. He gives his brushy mustache a tug, picks his hat up off the table, and, bowing his head slightly as if giving his regards to friends, puts it on.
“Grisha will walk you to the metro,” Mama begins timidly.
But my grandfather sneers.
“No, thank you; you’ve already seen me off. I’ll find my own way.” And he leaves.
“Sodom and Gomorrah,” his back repeats.
“Sodom and Gomorrah.”
THE theater’s dark on Mondays. The theater’s day off. There are gray and brittle, lightly frozen autumn leaves, crumpled, as if an invisible giant had held them in his hand and thrown them away. There are iced-over puddles by the door. There’s air that smells of imminent snowfalls and is as crisp as
the first snowflakes.
I love the first snow of the year, but it always comes late. Life is never the way you wish it was.
And there’s school on Mondays.
There’s school every day, of course, but only on Mondays is it all-powerful, and there’s no getting out of it. Because there’s no theater in the evening.
And since there’s no getting out of it, the school day drags on endlessly and turns into tough rubber that sticks and winds around everything so that no one can breathe.
“Listen, Grishka,” Anton says. “Listen, you look really strange.”
“Shtrange-shtrange” — I almost sing it in a stupid voice, and I make a face. I know that right now I look like one of those figurines that jerks its head around; I think the figurine’s face is rubber too, so you can smoosh it and make it into anything you want.
“Shtra-a-ange,” I say in my best bass voice, like the gym teacher.
“Yes, yes, yes, shtr-a-a-ange,” I answer myself in the squeaky voice of the chemistry teacher, who sounds like she’s thirteen, not forty.
Anton laughs.
Inside I hate myself, and I’m ashamed of making faces and of my cowardice.
Because inside I bravely tell him, “Listen, Tokha. You’re the strange one. I’m just the same as I’ve always been.”
At least, I’m just the same as I was when we were kids and ran away from everyone, went up to the very top floor of the school, and looked down on Moscow. It was fun and awful at the same time. The city lay below, and the transparent air seemed solid, as if you could step on it and slide down.
Remember how we snuck into that old, half-destroyed building past the park and imagined that we were musketeers sitting in ambush, and if they attacked us, we would die for each other?
Everything was simple before. I was just me before. Now that’s not enough, for some reason. You have to give as good as you get and look strong. You have to brag that you go to the gym. Or that some girl kissed you. You have to be like everyone else — not just yourself. Because you always feel different. And it’s bad and shameful to be different.
That’s what I want to tell him.
Instead, I turn into the Jester. And my face becomes the puppet’s face.
“A puppet never just talks,” Sam once told me. “A puppet never has just words. It speaks and moves simultaneously. There are word-gestures and word-movements, but never just words.”
That’s why I make faces, and each face is a word. A word Anton can’t understand.
The last time he came up to me — everyone else came up to me. At first I didn’t understand what they were after. Only later did I understand.
“Come on, Grishka, kiss Katya!” Anton jeered through clenched teeth, and everyone laughed like horses, as if he’d made a good joke.
Katya has big bovine eyes under puffy eyelids, as if she’d just been crying, a heavy gaze, and a big bosom. Katya looked at me as if I’d made her a promise I hadn’t kept. Anton gave Katya a light shove, and she nearly fell on top of me — and very close up I could see her thick eyelashes and a birthmark somewhere almost at her temple, and her hair smelled like shampoo but also a little bit like the puppies that ran around the courtyard.
Everyone — I could feel their looks on my skin — stood there gawking at me as if I were an animal in the zoo. Waiting.
I looked at her mouth, which seemed very close — it smelled of something sickly sweet and weird — and I felt a little queasy, whether from the smell or the fact that everyone was staring at us and waiting.
I just stood in front of Katya and stared at the floor so I wouldn’t have to look into her cow eyes and see her right eyelid twitching. I examined the tips of my sneakers and listened to her breathe — I could even feel her breath on my face. She didn’t say anything either, but then she gave my shoulder a shove — hard, rough, not the way little girls shove — softly breathed out “jerk,” turned around, and walked off.
“You’re the jerks,” I threw out at Anton.
But today the Jester in me is trying to get in good with him, as if the whole thing were my fault. As if I ought to have kissed Katya — even though I couldn’t.
The Jester makes fun of Anton and disdains him. He laughs to keep from crying.
He makes faces so he doesn’t seem serious, no matter what.
The gym locker room smells of sweat and dirty jerseys. After a show at the theater, everyone rushes to the dressing rooms, wet too, of course, and changes clothes, tossing their shirts and pants on the old leather couches, but the theater also smells of glue, makeup, and perfume, the hot air from the lamps over the dressing tables, and hairspray. I love the smell of the dressing rooms after a show, and I hate the school locker room.
That’s why I change fast, to get out of there as soon as possible. But now Anton and I are the last ones left.
At first I don’t understand why he’s looking at me so strangely or why he suddenly turns away, as if he is shy in front of me.
“What’s wrong with you? Lost your marbles?”
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way. But, I don’t know — what if you really are gay? That’s what people say. It’s popular with you theater people.”
“People say?” I feel as if I’ve run out of air and have nowhere to get it to take a breath. “Who says?”
“Well, people.”
And Anton looks away. I look away too. I can’t look him in the eye — whether out of embarrassment, or because my face is all hot and red, or out of fear.
He just mumbles, “You’ve gotten so strange — weird, kind of. Not like us.”
Monday is loneliness, that’s for sure. If every day was a Monday, what then?
Even the saddest Tuesdays are better than cheerful Mondays.
Tuesday is Lyolik’s last day in the theater. I keep thinking Olezhek is going to change his mind at any moment and everything will stay the way it was.
“Grisha, take the sketches to the artists,” Mama Carlo says. Lyolik looks over his glasses as I take the thick folder with the time-ragged edges. He watches and smooths out a piece of glue-soaked newspaper that he’s sculpted on a clay mold. One day it will be a big-mouthed mask with enormous eyes.
Both Mama Carlo and Lyolik — if you looked at them, you’d never say that after tonight’s show he’s going to gather up his things and go home. Retire — for good. Oh, he might come by sometimes, but as a visitor, not the master.
Even Filipp, who’s sitting next to Lyolik like an apprentice, watching him work — “learning” — even he looks as if they’re going to keep sitting that way tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and for all eternity. As if Lyolik isn’t going anywhere.
Only the two old suitcases on the floor by the radiator give it all away. Two old suitcases heaped with patterns, drawings, and controllers, a few shabby old puppet heads, and some wires: That’s all Lyolik is taking with him.
This time, I don’t think it would help even if I ran through the whole theater at breakneck speed. To see Aunt Tanya, the wardrobe mistress, shouldering a huge pile of dresses with lace frills and a uniform, and Vanya, the light tech, carrying a heavy spotlight.
And to hear Boyakin, the actor who looks like a hero from a folktale with his curly hair, exhaling smoke in the smoking lounge, say about Sam, “Good thing it’s soon. Finally some decent roles will open up.”
And to stumble on the marble stairs and drop the file and bruise my knee badly.
The sketches go flying, fluttering down and off to the side like white birds, and fly into the corners, but Sashok catches them, as if they’re tame birds. As if she’s always waiting around here to leap out when you least expect her. Usually I don’t care, but when you’re lying there like an idiot on the stairs and your knee is stinging — it can make you crazy.
“Are you following me or something?”
“Are you some kind of fool? I’m helping you. Say ‘thank you’ and don’t be a pig!”
“Anyway, you’re a pig,” she sums
up when we leave the artists’ garret where you can see the park and bookstore out the narrow window and the Elokhovskaya Church in the distance.
Everyone is standing by the little door to the shortcut to the lobby and the coatroom. You duck your head and go down a secret passage, and from there it’s a couple of steps to Olezhek’s office. Kalinkin-Father Gapon, Aunt Sveta, Mama and Papa, Boyakin, Sashok’s papa, and everyone else.
And Sam.
“You just have to go and make it clear!” Sam is saying. “Just ask! What’s it worth?”
“You go make it clear,” Father Gapon says in his bass voice. “You go ask.”
“It’s easy for you to be brave,” Boyakin jeers. “It doesn’t cost you anything, naturally. You’re hightailing it out of here soon. But we have to get along with him” — and he nods in the direction of Olezhek’s office.
Sam purses his lips, turns, and pushes the low door. He bends over and strides into the secret passage. And all of them — Father Gapon; Boyakin; Aunt Sveta; Vinnik the actress; and Timokhin, who’s as plump as a roll; every last one of them — stand there and watch him go.
Then Mama steps into the passage. And Papa. And Sashok’s papa. And no one else.
The door springs shut softly as it runs into the foam that covers the doorjamb.
“Step on it!” Sashok whispers in my ear. And we step on it.
As though if we run fast enough, Lyolik will stay at the theater.
The door to Olezhek’s office is open. We can see Olezhek standing behind his desk, as if fending off Sam and Mama and Papa and Sashok’s papa.
“There’s nothing I can do, kid. Nothing,” he says almost pathetically. “I’m between a rock and a hard place, understand?”
Kolokolchikov raises a short eyebrow, and his eyes go flat.
“We’re all in the same boat. Kid, you have to understand, I got a request from there” — and he nods at the ceiling, as if someone lives there — “to give his son a job. What can I do?”
He spreads his arms helplessly.
“Why can’t there be two puppet masters? Can’t you spare the cash?” Sam is seething. “Where are you going to find another master like Lyolik? Filipp won’t be able to cope alone.”