by Daria Wilke
“I’m going where other people have made sure I won’t get called a homo or get beaten in an entryway. Other people — not me. Because I’m a coward. But I don’t know how I can go on here. I just don’t know. I can’t just go abandon Lyolik. And I can’t not leave. My resignation letter’s been signed. They’ve brought in others to take my parts. There’s a buyer coming tomorrow to look at the apartment. And that’s that.”
He falls silent. “That’s all of it. Except for the leaving.”
Suddenly, into the frosty silence Sam says angrily, “They’d probably remember him only if all the puppets broke at the same time.”
And at that moment it seems to me as if somewhere in the world a light has been switched on, and all at once I can see everything that has been hiding in the dark corners.
If. All. The puppets. Broke. At the same time.
“IN life, as onstage, if you do nothing, then nothing happens,” Sam likes to say.
“You’re nuts, Grisha.” Sashok doesn’t believe me at first. “Totally nuts,” she repeats, concentrating on tapping the spot between her thumb and pointer finger.
She’s picked up this gesture recently, and it drives me impossibly crazy. “It’s a kind of treatment,” Sashok explains, as if her stupid tapping could cure her heart.
We’re sitting on the iron stairs in the puppet room. Sashok calls the stairs the “roost.” Because they’re narrow, iron, and steep, but on top, like a metal nest, there’s a landing for props.
Right above our heads, on the shelves, are papier-mâché apples, pretzel braids that, if you look closely, are actually wound gauze bandages under the paint, wooden wagon wheels, and enormous spoons.
Below are the partitions hung with puppets and masks. You can make out the tops of the kings’ and queens’ heads, and their glued-on wigs, and the sharp noses with their skillfully chiseled nostrils — as if they’re alive. Lyolik’s puppets always come out totally alive.
Sashok and I like to climb up high and sit there, like the captains of the puppet ship, all alone among them.
“I’m so sick of them! All of them!” Sashok says angrily just as we sit down. She mimics, “Do you have a boyfriend? Who do you like? I feel like saying something nasty, just for spite.”
I nod. It’s true, I’m sick of some grown-ups.
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
As if the sky will fall on my head if I don’t. As if I’ll grow donkey ears if I don’t.
Even at the theater, Aunt Sveta or, say, the actress Vinnik, will come up and say, “Which girls do you like in school?”
Why don’t they ask what I’m reading, for instance?
I try to make myself scarce. I pretend I’m in a big hurry. I hate those stupid conversations.
“What do you tell them?” I ask Sashok. She shrugs.
“ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘you’ll faint; I fell in love with Shakespeare a few days ago.’ Then they laugh. I tell others, the stupider ones, Gabanek. Gabanek, of course, makes a bigger impression. At least he’s a foreigner, they think.”
What would you do without Gabanek, Sashok? I think. What would you do without the fat-cheeked dragon-marionette from the Czech fairy tale? What would you and I do without the theater?
“No, you really are nuts,” Sashok continues after she hears about the puppets. “Break them all?”
To be honest, I think I’m nuts too. I think about it every day, roll it around on my tongue like a caramel Sam has tossed me: “if-all-the-puppets-broke-at-the-same-time.”
After all, then Olezhek would have no choice. He’d have to ask Lyolik to fix them. Only Lyolik knows his puppets well enough to fix them all quickly.
They’ll have no other choice, I think. But then I go to the puppet room and pick up the slender hands of the courtiers and hunters, the dressed-up ladies and ethereal fairies, and the velvety paws of the foxes and mice. I look into their puppet eyes — huge or craftily squinting, subtly drawn right down to the specks around the pupils, or simple ones that look like ordinary buttons. And I have no idea how I could break them, even for Lyolik’s sake. How could I? Even if that would bring him back and keep him from the charity home forever? How could I break their arms, cut their straps and strings, and then look at their dangling, broken legs in their neat little boots, and their sunken, half-open, dead-seeming eyes?
After all, a puppet is alive — unless you break it.
“You can understand what’s inside a puppet, and you can learn how to operate it. But the puppet decides how you’re going to work with it. The puppet,” Lyolik once said.
“It won’t work for you to adapt the puppet to you. You can break it, but you can’t force it to be the way you want,” Sam repeated.
Sashok sits for a long time staring at the puppets’ curls and feathered hats, at their bald spots and straight puppet parts.
She’s probably thinking the same thing I am.
“What a mess,” she mutters, and jumps down from the roost, spreading her arms in Sam’s trademark gesture, as if an invisible and weightless parachute is opening over the ground.
“Fine, then,” I tell myself, so that Sashok won’t hear or guess. “Fine, then. I’ll do it myself. Alone. For Lyolik I can do it. All the puppets. Even if it’s hard.”
Sashok walks over to the slender-necked puppet Lyudmila, touches her rod, and straightens her dark green dress, unfolding its seemingly whimsical curl. And it looks as though Lyudmila is reaching her fragile hand out to me.
“Sashok, just don’t say a word to anyone later, that it was me. Please, Sashok!” That’s what I want to tell her.
Sashok turns around and sighs.
“Well, if you’re nuts, then so am I. Nuts.” And she busies herself with straightening Lyudmila’s dress again.
“Hmm” is all I can get out. And she, of course, has no idea how happy I am.
The theater has woken up and come back to life.
We go missing in the puppet room for days on end.
It’s like sitting in a besieged enemy town. Our battlements are the partitions hung with marionettes and Punches, with rod puppets and huge masks.
“We aren’t touching the masks,” Sashok says sternly. “There aren’t very many of them, anyway. They’re not important.”
We bring our parents’ books of drawings and patterns from home, and Sashok traces out with her finger: “Cut over here and over here.”
Sometimes we argue.
“What is it with you, you jerk?” Sashok boils up. “You have to cut it from the inside. Then Filka definitely can’t repair it — but Lyolik can. I’ll bring a good knife. My papa has one,” she says.
Sam peeks in — “Want to go to the snack bar?” — but we shake our heads. Later. Later. Though I know there won’t be a Sam later.
We tell the curious we’re just playing.
We examine the control rods — the puppet spines — the wooden rods hidden inside under the costume, to which the puppet mechanism is attached. I never knew before that they could be so different. That there could be pistol control rods, flexible ones, that there could be such clever joints. That the control rod handles the actor holds the puppet by are as varied as human hands — so they’re easy for everyone to work. That the dowels can just be square but some have a convenient hole chiseled out for the thumb.
We examine the lines and hooks and touch the rough dowels so we can understand how they’re all secured.
The puppets wink, throw out a little knee, bow their heads, shrug their shoulders, and clap their hands. That’s when I think that at the very last moment I won’t be able to, I won’t be able to cut the sinew-strings on a single puppet. I won’t be able to break what Lyolik has done, even if it’s to bring him back.
Sashok goes around downcast too. “I won’t be able to,” she says. And we’re silent. Then we go back to examining the drawings and working the marionettes’ levers over and over again, like practicing the piano. “If you cut it here and here, then you have to open up the head t
o repair it. Do you know how hard that is?”
When I picture having to open up a head — on my Jester, for instance — my fingers start to shake and I feel a nasty chill in my stomach. That’s when I start saying mentally, “Oh, forgive me, forgive me, but you have to understand. What else can I do?”
I still feel like a criminal, though.
“We have to do it all during the day,” Sashok reflects. “Then they’ll still have time to find Lyolik and bring him back to the theater. He’ll be able to repair the puppets before the evening performance.”
First we’ll go after the Nutcracker puppets, we decide. After all, they’re performing it this evening. I mean, if we can’t break them all, we’ll break the most important ones so they’ll have to cancel the performance. Or think of Lyolik.
The theater isn’t about to doze off and die after all. It’s sighing and sometimes even laughing, and the floor in the hall between the dressing rooms shakes ever so slightly. The theater’s iron railings rumble and the costumes rustle. The longest intermission ever seems to be coming to an end.
We’re walking from the workshops past the set storage room, and my palms are sweating. I think anyone we run into now must know that Sashok has a small knife in her pocket. And kitchen scissors, to make it easier to cut the straps.
I always like coming close to the puppet room. But today, for the first time, I’m scared. I’m afraid of the puppets. I’m afraid of myself and what I’m planning to do. And even more afraid that at the very last moment I’ll turn coward and not do it.
I wonder whether Sashok is thinking the same thing, when we stop at the door to the puppet room and then fling it open.
It feels as if we’re just about to jump from high up into a huge snowdrift.
The room is quiet. It’s never that quiet in the theater, I think.
Sashok and I stand in this quiet, and she says softly, “I’ll bet it’s going to start raining right now — right here, under the roof.”
And suddenly a crack in the corner breaks the silence. Sashok shudders.
Then there’s a crack in another.
Click-clack-click — as if some invisible person is cracking walnuts under the holiday tree.
Click-clack-crrrack.
Louder and louder, as if the whole room has all at once come to life and started knocking, cracking, and breaking, like a walnut shell.
And it seems — but only seems, of course — as if the puppets, every last one of them — Jester, Fairy, Hortensia and Javotta, Nutcracker, Tin Soldier — are smiling at us ever so slightly.
“Grisha!” Sashok whispers. “Look at that!”
She runs over to the Jester, raises his arm — and it hangs lifelessly. Not the way a resting puppet usually does, springy and tensed close to the body, but as if the Jester has suddenly lost all his strings.
As if we really had used Sashok’s papa’s knife to cut all the marionettes’ sinews and broken all their control rods.
“What a mess,” Sashok mutters, running from the mice to Losharik, from Lyudmila to Cinderella.
“They’re broken! All of them! The puppets! At the same time! Broken!”
We look at each other — and then start to laugh. Sashok clucks like a bustling hen, and I laugh so hard my stomach hurts. Our fear drains from us with the laughter. We laugh for joy, that we haven’t had to, we haven’t had to break Lyolik’s puppets.
“The puppets are broken!” Sashok shouts, as if she isn’t quite right in the head, and choking with laughter, she runs down the hall.
“The puppets are broken!” I repeat after her.
“The puppets are broken,” she gurgles for the last time into the fat belly of Timokhin the actor, who she’s slammed into near the men’s dressing rooms.
“Why are you shouting? What’s broken?” Timokhin asks with a puzzled look.
That’s when we come to our senses, we’re so happy, and I murmur, “There. All the puppets, all of them, are broken, just now” — and I nod toward the puppet room.
“That can’t be,” Sam says, and he looks at me very, very closely.
I just about drop through the earth, because only then do I realize what he must be thinking about me.
The theater starts murmuring, speaking, tramping, and rustling. It has conversations in different voices, it slams doors, it creaks open window vents, its steps snarl, and it laughs delicately, strumming the iron stairs. The dressing room doors creak and slam, as if they’ve decided to run a marathon and are rushing endlessly back and forth.
“That’s how it always is!” Father Gapon murmurs, and he gathers his beard in his hand. “The lords fight, and the peasants pay the price!”
“Hell’s bells! Hell’s bells!” Sultanov, a very old actor, repeats indignantly.
“That’s all right. The show must go on,” Sam says, trying to keep their spirits up.
“What?” Boyakin exclaims. “What? We’ll go on as the puppets? Where? Where has anyone seen that?”
“It’s time to retire,” Vinnik the actress says in her husky voice.
Aunt Sveta silently stirs sugar in her cup so hard it looks as if the spoon is about to smash the cup to pieces. They don’t hear the bell at all, they’re shouting so loudly.
“It’s a madhouse! It’s curtains! It’s a mess!” Papa exclaims tragically, and he runs out into the corridor to smoke.
“Something like this could only happen in this theater! This one! Mark my word! Theaters are theaters everywhere, but this one is a mess. A mess! I have to get out!” Timokhin hollers. “And go to a decent theater!”
“Has anyone invited you?” Mama gives him a dubious look.
“Well, I mean … in principle.” Timokhin backs down immediately.
Filipp runs up — and his already short hair seems to be standing on end. Striding into the puppet room, he dashes from one puppet to the next, examines the controllers, and tests the control rods.
“Exactly. Broken,” he says through his teeth, and he stares at Sashok.
“What are you looking at? Back off, you old goat,” she snarls as usual, but she turns away to escape his eyes.
Olezhek is moving down the hall with his awkward, rolling gait. His legs are rowing nervously, like flippers. His face is stark white, and his eyes have faded even more, to the point of complete transparency.
“Well, how bad is it?” He nods at Filipp and grabs his sleeve.
“What can I say?” Filipp responds sullenly. “All the puppets are broken. Including the ones for today’s show.”
The clamor and din start back up: “It’s a mess!” “In this theater!” “How can we act with dummies?”
“Actors always come last!”
“Who did this?” Olezhek screams, and from behind, you can see his head shaking ever so slightly.
It gets very quiet. No one is shouting anymore. Papa stubs out his cigarette. Even Father Gapon stands there very quietly.
The theater falls very quiet too.
Sam — I can see — is trying his hardest not to look at me.
Olezhek’s eyes dart from side to side, as if they’ll break at any moment, like on a tired old puppet.
And then they stop on Sashok.
“You?” Olezhek says softly. “Did you do this?” And he adds, “Your parents will have to pay for everything.”
“I did it!” I want to say, and even take half a step forward and inhale a full chest of air.
But I’m too late.
Because Filipp blurts out, “Oh, all right. It was me. I broke them.”
And everyone stares at Filipp: Sam, Olezhek, Mama and Papa, and Father Gapon.
Sashok’s mouth actually falls open. “Crazy!” she whispers admiringly, and I elbow her in the side as hard as I can to get her to pipe down. Olezhek is awful to look at. He turns pale, then red, then some impossible shade of yellow.
“You?” he helplessly asks Filipp. “But why? Why would you?”
“I realized I couldn’t cope, Oleg Borisovich,” Fi
lipp begins, as if suddenly inspired. “So I got mad. I’m pretty high-strung, Oleg Borisovich. My papa says I’m a psycho.”
“Your papa,” Kolokolchikov responds very softly.
Of course, there’s no way Filipp will be able to repair even half the puppets by the evening’s performance.
“Lyolik!” Olezhek’s face shines. “I’ll call him and he’ll help.”
“He won’t agree,” Sam says quickly. “Even if you pay well.”
“He won’t?” Olezhek repeats, stunned, and his lower lip starts trembling.
“Naturally,” Timokhin says bitingly. “You didn’t even give him a proper retirement party, Oleg Borisovich!”
Everyone starts clamoring.
“I’ll try to convince him” — Sam looks hard into Olezhek’s eyes — “but I doubt I’ll be able to.”
Olezhek grabs his sleeve.
“You’ll try? Tell him we’re sorry, well, that things worked out the way they did — without a proper retirement party.”
Sam gently removes his hand.
“Only nothing’s going to happen that simply.”
“That simply?” Olezhek seems to understand what Sam is talking about and is trying as hard as he can to delay the moment when he’ll have to say it out loud.
“Yes, that simply,” Sam repeats harshly. “Now, if you were to give me an order restoring puppet master Leonid Arkadievich’s position …”
“An order” — and Olezhek heaves a doomed sigh.
“I’m sorry. I completely forget there aren’t any extra wages,” Sam says sadly.
“Oh, we’ll find a wage, we will, kid!” Olezhek goes for it. “Please, Sam, will you speak to him?”
“I’ll try,” Sam says sternly, and he turns around. And we can see that his eyes are laughing.
“Tell him we’re all asking him,” Papa sums up. “Every last one of us!”
It’s absolutely as if the theater has woken up. It seems to be dancing to jazz music no one else can hear, and I feel like dancing with it, snapping my fingers and hopping around.