Playing a Part

by Daria Wilke

  Of course, we all tag along to see Lyolik.

  “Let’s run to the metro!” Sam shouts to us, thrusting the order restoring Lyolik to his post, with Olezhek’s hooked signature, into his bag. “Step lively!”

  It hasn’t started to grow dark yet — and of course there will be time to fix the puppets.

  At Baumanskaya Station, I touch the knee of the bronze pilot wearing the warm flight suit so everything will work out and Lyolik will come back to the theater for good.

  Sam is smiling privately at something. Sashok and I stand on the train with our noses pressed to the window that says, DO NOT OPEN. Someone has rubbed out a couple of letters to form the illiterate DO NOT PE. Not that it’s written for us, of course. We watch spliced cables turning into savage snakes and solitary lamps flickering, and we try to guess the mysterious stations and abandoned tunnels in the velvety, coal-scented darkness.

  All of a sudden, I say, probably hoping Sashok won’t hear me in the noise and whistling of the train going through the tunnel: “They call me a queer. Because I don’t kiss girls.”

  She moves away, and a puddle of steam melts on the window and slowly dissipates, as if someone has blown it off the glass. She glances at me sideways and mutters something — I think she says, “We’ll figure something out” — and presses her forehead back on the glass. Then she presses her hands to the glass too, as if she’s closing herself off from everyone. On her palms you can probably see lines like an endless mesh of roads….

  “No,” Lyolik says. “I left and that’s that.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to.” Sam sighs. “They even wrote up an order. Look.”

  He pulls the order with its signatures and seals out of his bag.

  But Lyolik still shakes his head no.

  “No. They threw me away like a broken puppet.”

  “Oh, Lyolik!” Sam says, now utterly hopeless. “Everyone, everyone down to the last actor, asked me to tell you that they want you to come back. Even Filipp.”

  “They shouldn’t have tossed me out.” Lyolik purses his lips sternly. “Then they wouldn’t have had to ask.”

  All of a sudden I burst.

  I start talking — and can’t stop.

  About how Sashok and I sat in the puppet room over the drawings and how afraid we were to break the puppets — and not to break the puppets.

  About asking their forgiveness.

  About standing in the doorway to the puppet room when we heard a sound like nuts cracking.

  About the theater dancing to jazz — even about the pilot at Baumanskaya whose knee I rubbed for luck.

  I spill it all — and fall silent.

  Then Lyolik stands up and goes to the vestibule — to put on his coat.

  That evening is like my birthday.

  Or New Year’s. Or my birthday and New Year’s rolled into one.

  There’s so much joy inside me, I think I might float to the ceiling like a balloon.

  Lyolik and Filipp look like surgeons: They concentrate on gluing, cutting, and pulling tight, they open up the puppet heads and miraculously turn the pieces back into a single whole; they replace springs and refasten the eye and mouth hooks to the control rods. Meanwhile Sashok and I stand by, loyal assistants, and mix glue and hand them the parts they need.

  Sam runs out to the store: “One foot here, the other foot there, it’s time to open the Candy Puppet Show!” Once again the workshops smell of chocolate, crisp wafers, nuts, and berry caramels intermingled with wood shavings and starch.

  The actors run into the workshop, grab the puppets that are ready, and fly back onstage in what seems like one continuous leap. Mama Carlo smiles happily.

  The music rumbles, lifting us to the clouds; the artificial candles on the holiday tree flicker onstage; there’s the smell of glue and lacquer, candies and the holiday; Sam turns the Nutcracker into a person, and the puppets act as if they really are alive.

  And no one in the audience even guesses that just that afternoon they were all hanging lifeless with closed eyes and dead arms.

  No one in the audience understands, probably, why at the curtain call, when all the actors are standing there, wearier than usual and happy, Sam suddenly drags out onstage a hook-nosed old man in glasses and a knit vest, who smiles in confusion and hides his hands behind his back like a child. Or why absolutely all the actors surround him and applaud him without stopping, so that the applause mounts, explodes up by the ceiling, and falls on the audience like invisible confetti.

  In any case, the audience stands up and claps — they clap for Lyolik — until the light onstage goes out and the heavy velvet curtain falls.

  SOMETIMES the most remarkable time is when the show is over and the stage is just mine and Sashok’s.

  For instance, if it’s Karurman: The Black Forest.

  Tomorrow they’re going to rehearse it again. They have to bring in another actor for Sam’s part.

  I never recognize Sam in the mask of Shurale, the forest demon, and it scares me every time: his warty chin, his gray wrinkly cheeks, and the terrible horn on his forehead.

  “New parts, always new parts,” Timokhin grumbles, and he nods at Sam. “And it’s all because of you. The same drag every day. I’m about to start dreaming my part!”

  “Go on with you, Seryozh” — and Sam smiles. And Timokhin — reluctantly — smiles back, because that’s the only thing that works with Sam.

  After the performance, the kettles are boiling in the dressing rooms, everyone comes from their own dressing rooms into one, and Mama and Sam get out tea bags and cups from the drawers — everyone gets their own. Sam’s has red polka dots, and Father Gapon’s is dark blue and so dirty you can see the unwashed brown coffee ring even on the dark blue. Mama’s and Papa’s are identical — white with malachite checks, but Papa’s cup handle is broken off. The actors change their clothes, spend a long time removing their makeup in front of the mirror, lifting their chins and aiming the light from the round light bulbs at their narrowed eyes, which makes their eyelashes seem longer, and dawdle over their tea. Someone’s got a cake, and Sam’s probably brought cream-filled doughnuts from the theater snack bar.

  When you bite into the fluffy wall of cake, you think there’s just emptiness with a light nutty flavor, but right away you taste the cool, lightly sweet-but-tart cream.

  Once I ran down to the snack bar during intermission, and even though Nina Ivanovna, the snack bar lady, wanted to let me go to the head of the line, I honestly stood the whole fifteen minutes, until the first bell — that’s how long the line was — and then carefully, so as not to drop them, carried a plate heaped with pastries down the hall. I set it down on Sam’s table, and when the show was over and he ran all over the theater searching for whoever it was who gave him the doughnuts, I sat there quietly and didn’t confess.

  There wouldn’t have been any point to confessing.

  The theater is now definitely ours, our good old theater. Lyolik reigns in the workshops once more, and even Filipp doesn’t seem out of place there. Only, something has changed in Sam’s dressing room. I don’t understand why, but I feel the change. Only when Sashok says “Dutch textbook” do I understand.

  The tables are covered with thin notebooks called cue scripts, which have all the cues for supporting the puppet’s arm or giving the actor a prop sword. There are black and white boxes of makeup that smell like sharp cheese. But Sam’s Dutch textbook isn’t on the table anymore. It used to lie right under the mirror, and it was already dog-eared, like an uncombed head of hair. When Sam had time, he would sit over the open textbook, clutching his head, covering his ears with his fingers, and moving his lips ever so slightly. If you looked closely, you could see his throat vibrating, and you could tell he was saying the Dutch words to himself.

  Now there’s no textbook on the table: Sam has taken it home.

  After Karurman, everyone goes to the dressing rooms. The mysterious black forest onstage won’t get dismantled until tomor
row. Sashok and I can crawl into the huge foam tree stumps wrapped in gnarled roots, and from there, from inside, look at the stage through a window in the foam covered with netting (for breathing) and imagine we’re actors. Or scramble across the huge foam vines, like tightropes, or take a flying leap at the foam backdrop entwined with braided branches.

  Karurman is all soft, all black and brown and swampy.

  “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” Sashok commands, and we fall backward into the cozy foam nest covered on all sides by soft vines hanging from grates. You can feel like a kid again. Like when you just lived without thinking whether you were one way or another.

  “Listen, what’s going on in school?” Sashok asks after she gets her breath back.

  “What do you mean? School’s the same as always. Only now, every time I see Anton, I think of my grandfather. And about how, when we were little, my grandfather liked Anton so much.

  “ ‘You hold on to him. He’s a good boy, a proper boy,’ my grandfather would say. Proper, improper — it’s all so easy for him. Either you’re proper or you’re not. It made me feel even more that I wasn’t quite the way I should be. Anton’s the right kind, and grandfather’s the right kind, and I ‘wasn’t really a success.’

  “What he meant by ‘success’ I still don’t know, but obviously Anton was a sure success, in my grandfather’s opinion.”

  Here, onstage, Sashok and I are basically waiting for Sam so that we can learn how to do a handstand. He does it better than anyone, and he’s the only one we can ask to teach us. Papa never has time; he’s either running out for a smoke or talking histrionically in the dressing room about how “it’s a mess everywhere!” Timokhin has gotten too fat, Father Gapon is lazy, and Sultanov doesn’t have the patience, and anyway he’s old.

  “Listen,” Sashok says all of a sudden. “What if the grown-ups suddenly find out you’re gay, like Sam? Or you don’t turn out at all the way they’ve hoped? They’ll feel uncomfortable right off, as if you’ve changed. But really, you’re just the same!”

  Children are a medal for them, I think. A medal for everyone to see. Something to hang on your chest and be proud of. Show off. But you don’t brag about ones like Sam. No one would understand. It would be better not to have children like that at all. There aren’t many who can be proud of you just because you’re a good person.

  Sam nods as if he’s read my thoughts and steps forward from the black velvet backdrop as if he’s materialized out of it. He walks over to us and sits in the foam nest too, crossing his legs.

  “It’s out of helplessness. They think looking closely at a puppet is silly and looking at a person to see his soul rather than his blueprint is hard. That’s why they latch on to what they’re used to, what they understand. A man. A woman. It’s simpler and not so scary. It’s the only thing they can see from the outside, the only thing they can grab on to. So they do, as if it were a life preserver. They think if they jump inside a person they’ll drown. I feel sorry for them.”

  They’re afraid of jumping inside a person and drowning, I repeat to myself.

  “How about it? Shall we give it a try?” Sam scrambles easily to his feet. A second before, he’d been sitting there Turkish-fashion and now he’s standing. I could never do that in a million years.

  “Let’s give it a try.” Sashok gives her kind permission.

  And we push off, nearly tearing into the foam backdrop threaded with swampy brown vines, and do a handstand the way Sam shows us. Your legs fly up, nearly toppling you, and in the first instant you’re very scared you won’t keep your balance, that you’ll fall and have no other choice but to land helplessly on your back, but your heels meet the soft wall and suddenly everything’s fine. Now you just have to stand there and not let your arms buckle too soon, and Sam comes over and corrects your heels and lightly touches your ankles so you keep your legs together.

  And then, when you’re not afraid anymore, you can try it in the middle of the stage, without the safety wall. Sam’s standing next to you and he’s got his arms stretched out to support you if anything happens. And then you suddenly have your own personal wall inside you. You feel the tips of your shoes stretching skyward, to the floodlights on the ceiling. You’ve turned into a tree and you can just stand there forever because Sam is right by your side.

  “I’ve decided not to sell my apartment,” Sam says out of nowhere, when we’ve run out of strength for our handstands and Sashok and I have plopped onto the padded floor. And for some reason he looks up, to where the mesh-covered lights blaze in the ceiling.

  “What do you mean you’re not selling it? What about the buyer?”

  “He came and I apologized and turned him down.”

  “You mean you’re not leaving?” Sashok is stunned.

  “No, no, I’m leaving,” Sam says quickly. “Just not for good. Not forever. The worst thing is to leave forever, after all” — he pauses — “in general. The worst thing is that ‘forever.’ It happens anyway when you’re not looking. But if you make that forever happen yourself … Basically” — Sam slaps his knee — “I’ll be visiting when I have a break in the theater. To look in on Lyolik and not leave him without anyone checking in.”

  There is school the next day.

  In the school stadium the snow from two days before has turned into a hard crust — it rained overnight and by morning it was frozen.

  The gym teacher huddles in his red tracksuit, but he still drives us on to run circles around the stadium. The sharp trill of his whistle is like a bird that’s suddenly woken up. My feet slip on the smooth snow, and the scariest thing is falling. I hate running in the stadium. I’d rather stand on my hands for half an hour. But no one cares about that in gym. Run until you get a stitch in your side and your heart rises so high in your throat you think it might slip out if you open your mouth. Today I suddenly have a very good idea of what Sashok must feel.

  I’m glad that after gym I’ll be leaving the school for the theater. That’s why I have to change fast, and now I’m trying not to talk with anyone in the changing room, especially Anton. I have no desire to know what they all think of me. And say about me.

  I want to toss my pack on my back and slip out past Zhmurik and into the hall as fast as I can. I’m not anywhere near him, but for some reason husky Zhmurik suddenly takes a step toward me, as if he’s about to attack me — and shoves me by the shoulder as hard as he can.

  “Hey! Watch it! He shoved me,” he sings out in a fake voice.

  “Our Grisha the queer is a troublemaker,” Botsman chimes in playfully. He’s short and has a unibrow, and he shoves me too. So hard I nearly fly into Anton.

  I lift my head and look into his eyes — I don’t know why. Maybe I thought that if I looked into my old friend’s eyes everything would instantly be all right.

  We look at each other for a second, and I see his eyelashes tremble very slightly, and I wait — but for what?

  Then he looks away, sticks his hand out affectedly, and says mincingly, “Ugh! How re-volt-ing you are!” And he shoves me in the chest. I probably could have shoved him back. Could have. And I could have socked Botsman in the face so that he’d remember it his whole life. My hands were trained. I probably could have, and like Sam — three against one.

  But right then my insides start writhing and twisting, and I smile pathetically and bleat, “What’s with you?” The Jester. The Jester making faces. The Jester prepared to fall on the floor and do anything to make them stop, but … But what? Do they pity me?

  What do I need their pity for?

  For the first time I feel like ripping the Jester out of me, tearing off the Jester’s cap that has frozen solid to my head, even if it takes my hair with it, all of it even — and stand up straight and pay them back. Hit them as hard as I can. Even Anton — right in his smiling bully face.

  But all I can do is bleat, “What’s with you?” and they guffaw and toss me from one to the next, as if I were a lifeless puppet — a real Jester. />
  They toss me around until Anton butts me so hard I fly backward into the changing room doors.

  My back strikes the door, it opens, and at the last moment I grab the doorframe to keep from flying headfirst into the tiled floor of the hallway.

  An empty hallway that Sashok is walking down toward the changing rooms.

  Sashok, who has never once been to my school and didn’t even seem to know exactly where I go to school.

  Actually, I don’t recognize her right away.

  I’ve never seen Sashok look like this.

  She’s put on some impossibly red coat and — for the first time ever — a skirt. A very short skirt. And boots. I didn’t even know she had boots. She’s also used gel on her hair to make it stand up as if she were a hedgehog — a very fashionable hedgehog. And she’s lined her eyebrows, for some reason. And put on lipstick. If you look closely — mascara too. All this makes her look like a puppet. A very pretty puppet, of course.

  All of them — Botsman, Anton, and Zhmurik — pour out after me into the hall and are now getting an eyeful of Sashok.

  “Who’ve you come for, my beauty?” Botsman asks insolently, and he smiles — and when Botsman smiles, he looks like a bony, earless mutt baring his teeth: He’s either going to bite or just give you a scare.

  “Not you, little boy.” Sashok cuts him off and arches her lined eyebrows as if playing a part known to her alone. “Here’s who” — and she comes up so close to me, I can see that the little fool has also applied something white in the corners of her eyes.

  “No stinkin’ way,” Anton says, and everyone looks at me.

  With respect — for the first time.

  Just because Sashok wearing makeup and a red coat has come by for me.

  And all of a sudden I see it. All of a sudden I understand: “Greasepaint makes everything easy as pie. Smear it on, and you feel confident. Think not? Just try it.”

  They’re all in greasepaint! It’s easier for them that way. One day they all smeared on greasepaint and now they can’t get along without it. Being themselves — without a made-up face that hides who you really are. That doesn’t let you smile and cry when you want to, like you did when you were a kid. It doesn’t let you be free.