Playing a Part

by Daria Wilke

  I understand what Sam meant, and I start to feel sorry for them — Anton, Botsman, and Zhmurik. And my grandfather, who’s in greasepaint too.

  They’re so easy to fool. That’s why I feel sorry for them.

  Sashok grabs me by the collar, pulls me toward her with a jerk, and presses her lips to mine. Her lips are as cold as a corpse’s.

  Anton, Botsman, and Zhmurik stare at us as if we’re tigers in a circus ring.

  Sashok pulls away slightly and whispers softly, “Look at me, idiot. Don’t look to the side.” And she sticks her lips to mine again.

  And all of a sudden, for no reason at all, I realize that Sashok is a Jester too. Definitely. With an upturned crown on her head. And when you’re a Jester — a real Jester, not like me, just making faces — you’re more powerful than any king.

  Then she pulls away and runs her finger across my cheek with a tenderness that doesn’t suit her at all, shakes her nonexistent bangs, and looks triumphantly at the dumbstruck Anton.

  She waves good-bye to the guys — “So long, boys!” — puts her arm around my waist, and leads me away.

  The next day, Anton says with respect, “That’s quite some girl you’ve got.”

  I REMEMBER the Jester puppet right before Sam leaves.

  I realize it’s been a week since the show’s been decommissioned.

  And the reason I remember is probably just that Sashok is spending less time at the theater now — going to pre-op appointments.

  “Don’t you get up to any tricks without me,” she said in her funny way when she was leaving for her very first workup, and she looked at me pretty seriously, her eyes turning the color of asphalt.

  “She’s waited a long time.” I pat the gym bag at my side and go to the puppet room to pick up my Jester. Decommissioned already. So he’ll become Sashok’s Jester at New Year’s. Maybe she’ll even take him to the hospital. I imagine him sitting on the table by her bed, and if she ever wakes up in the night — it seems to me that people do wake up in the night in hospitals — she’ll see the Jester’s smile and be happy. And fall soundly back to sleep.

  The door to the puppet room is open, as always, and you can skip across the threshold with a single bound and land imagining you’re in a show onstage.

  The imp with the red horns and stuck-out tongue, Lyudmila in her marsh-green dress, Losharik, the Hussar, and Hortensia and Javotta — Cinderella’s stepsisters. Javotta, Hortensia, and Cinderella in a fancy gown. There are two Cinderellas in the show: one in a sacking cap and a dirty cotton dress, with soot stains on her cheeks; the other in a fancy white ball gown with the hem fastened to her elegant hand so you can see the tips of her glass slippers.

  The King, the Queen, Cinderella in her ball gown, Hortensia, Javotta …

  I keep counting and recounting them because it seems as though, if I count them again, they will show up, Cinderella in her sacking apron and the ever-smiling Jester.

  But they’re not here.

  They’ve been hung somewhere else, I guess. That’s it! Hung somewhere else!

  Someone probably wants to take the Cinderella with the sooty cheeks home too. And they’ve hid them so no one else will take them.

  When you climb up to the Roost, the steps shake and the railings hum lightly, and up top the prop fruits and weightless, fake farmers’ yokes lie there deaf and dumb.

  The Jester and Cinderella aren’t here either.

  “Are you playing a game?” Tanya the wardrobe mistress smiles good-naturedly and doesn’t understand why I grab her hand.

  “Tanya, have you seen the Jester? The one from Slipper? The one that was decommissioned?”

  Tanya furrows her brow. “Ask Olezhek. I think he gave away some of the puppets.”

  My heart thuds to my feet, which are suddenly heavy and weak. You want to go somewhere, but can’t.

  For the very first time — even if my feet won’t obey — I’m not afraid of going alone, without Sashok, straight to Olezhek’s office. Running into him in the hall isn’t scary, but going there as if he called you in is a very different thing. After all, in his office even Olezhek is a boss.

  On the way, you suddenly notice everything you usually don’t: a crack that runs the full length of the wall next to the staircase, a broken-off piece of marble stair, a forgotten pile of dusty trash in a corner. The letter v in “Kolokolchikov” on the door plaque seems to have swollen, as if from rain.

  “Come in, kid!”

  How does Kolokolchikov manage to seem to be looking at you and past you at the same time?

  “What did you do with the Jester?” My palms start sweating, and, trying to look casual, I rest them on my jeans.

  “The Jester? From Slipper, you mean?” Olezhek sounds surprised. “The day before yesterday he and Cinderella were taken into a private collection.”

  He says “private collection” in such a deferential way, you’d think it was some famous museum. And he adds, boasting, “Not every theater has its puppets bought by collectors, kid. Oh, no, not every theater.”

  He says it as if he personally had once made the Jester. And also, his crowning glory: “And now the money will go toward new puppets.”

  His voice rises like a rooster’s, and you can hear how impossibly proud Olezhek is of himself.

  My voice gets husky.

  My voice gets hoarse.

  I want my voice to be more persuasive, but it comes out just like some kid’s.

  “But you promised!” I say pathetically. “You promised me!”

  Olezhek looks at me with sympathy.

  “Really? Well, all right, kid. Go take any of the other ones left” — and he nods briefly, as if he’s figured out how to feed all the hungry people of the world and is terribly pleased with himself. Like, “That’s the way the cookie crumbles, kid. Go on, kid. This conversation’s over, kid.”

  I leave Olezhek’s office and don’t even know where to go.

  For some reason I go to the men’s room the audience uses. I realize this is the wrong way. I wander to the street exit. Only at the exit do I realize it’s cold. Snow is falling — stinging, more like sleet than snow.

  Elokhovskaya Church doesn’t look like a pinecone anymore.

  It’s ugly now.

  Because Olezhek has given away my Jester to some collector, and now I have nothing to give Sashok. And no one is going to sit on her nightstand by her bed and smile at her if she suddenly wakes up in the night — and in hospitals people must always be waking up in the night.

  Then I stop in my tracks, run all the way around the theater, and slip through the actor’s entrance — and Albert Ilich stares and shakes his head when he sees my red hands. “Mad as hatters, these theater kids.”

  At first my hands are totally numb, then they feel as if they’re being stung by a thousand needles, and then they’re flooded with heat — as if I’ve spiked a very high fever.

  Then I decide I can’t leave it at this. First I decide to kill Olezhek. So he’ll know.

  So he’ll know what happens when you make a promise and then do what he did. It’s all Olezhek’s fault! If not for him, I’d have the Jester in my bag right now — for Sashok.

  Only, how can I kill him? How do you kill someone?

  I pace and think — and just can’t see me killing Olezhek.

  Then I suddenly imagine telling Sashok this, in an ordinary voice, calmly — there, I killed Olezhek because he sold the Jester.

  Only that won’t bring the Jester back. Even if I kill Olezhek, it won’t.

  And I can’t tell anyone about the Jester. After all, Sashok doesn’t have to know the Jester isn’t in the theater anymore. Especially since she’s having her operation soon.

  When you keep something to yourself for a long time, it starts seeming as though no one cares about you, that they even set things up specially this way, so you’d be afraid to tell them everything.

  New Year’s is coming. Mama makes trips to some stores and comes back looking mischievo
us and saying, “Oh, my, I can barely drag my feet!” Papa is preparing for the holiday party — and so is everyone in the theater: Father Gapon, Timokhin, and even old Sultanov.

  Holiday trees are a big deal at New Year’s, and before the holidays it seems to me there are more trees in Moscow than children.

  Papa is learning the part of Father Frost, so the whole apartment is littered with pages from scripts. Mama goes into the attic and takes out an antique suitcase with tooled leather corners. I know what’s in the suitcase, of course: a dark blue, full-length fur coat with silver snowflakes, a matching cap, and a white beard.

  Mama spends a long time cleaning the coat and beard and yelling at Papa: “You’re as lazy as your mother! You could have washed this makeup off a year ago. Now it’s all stuck on! You can go to the devil with your beard now.” She doesn’t mean anything of the kind, of course. She’ll comb out the beard to make it fluffy.

  And by New Year’s Papa will lose his voice because he’s been moonlighting, Father Frost-ing from school to school and kindergarten to kindergarten and using his voice improperly, not the way they were taught at the theatrical institute, and he’ll lose his voice, and Mama will say contemptuously, “Mr. Fine Actor, the unlucky hack.” And he will just croak, “You be quiet” — and she’ll wave her hand at him.

  Everyone has holiday trees. Or presents. Even the round lights in the metro look like big tree ornaments. The only thing on anyone’s mind is the holidays.

  Except for me. The only thing on my mind is the Jester.

  Eventually I realize that if I don’t tell someone about the Jester, and very soon, I’ll burst like a fine glass ornament dropped on a tile floor. I’ll shatter in every direction, and that’s all there is to it.

  “I can steal it,” I tell Sam. I don’t care that Filipp is sitting right there. “I’ll find the collector’s address in Olezhek’s office and steal it. That would be the right thing. Or something else. Sort of like that.”

  Sam looks at me and says nothing. Nothing. And I feel myself getting smaller and smaller inside.

  But I don’t want to be smaller. I’m angry. At myself and Sam. I’m just about to shout something awful at him: “It’s fine for you. You’re so perfect. You’re leaving the day after tomorrow anyway, and you don’t understand anything!”

  I’m about to open my mouth to blurt that out and see if his face changes from hurt.

  But instead, for some reason, I say, “Well, it’s not as though I can make another Jester — for Sashok! A new one. Just the same.”

  “No?” is all Sam says. “No?”

  I get very hot. And then very cold.

  Because that scares me.

  Because it turns out that deciding to break a puppet isn’t nearly as scary as deciding to make one myself. In horror, I mumble, “Well, even if I could … what about the cap … I could never sew the cap myself.”

  Sam leaves during the evening performance. “Bye!” he says, and he smiles so hard his dimple shows. And he raises his hand in salute, as always. Only the fact that he’s taking a suitcase is unusual.

  “Why so few things?” Sashok wonders, touching the new tag with Sam’s name — unrecognizable, because it’s so unlike our real life.

  Even the address — the tag has a strange address, written in a strange way, and below, in English, “Holland.”

  And because of that, both the suitcase and everything else seem unreal — because Sam is the same.

  He smiles the same way: with his eyebrows, eyelashes, almost alien cheekbones, and even the lobes of his neat ears. He tosses his long white scarf just as nonchalantly over his shoulder.

  “I sent the rest on ahead,” he explains to Sashok.

  Then Sam drinks tea with everyone in the changing room and runs off to see Lyolik and joke with Mama Carlo. He’s waiting for the third bell and all the actors to take their puppets off the wooden rack and run out onstage.

  “You should do it. You’ve already decided,” he says in parting.

  He gives me a hug. And in the second my cheek brushes his rough cheek I’m able to smell — and remember for a long time — the smell of Sam’s cheek: the salty sea and pears, for some reason.

  I don’t watch him walk away, pulling his dark blue suitcase like a fat dog. I hate watching people walk away. I just sit down on a step of the iron staircase leading to Maika and the sound men so that all I can hear is the music from the stage. The old theater sighs sadly, its slender railings shuddering under my palms.

  “Kurskaya … Taganskaya … Paveletskaya …” Sashok says at five-minute intervals, tapping her finger for each metro station Sam might be passing through right then.

  I really want to tell her to shut up, but I don’t. I myself would be repeating the names of the streets if I could swallow my heart, which gets stuck at every breath.

  I imagine Sam sitting in the airplane and watching the MOSCOW sign glowing purple and the white snow moths whizzing around in the light of the airport’s dandelion floodlights. And the cars and trucks crawling across the airfield like beetles with Russian signs on their snowy white sides.

  Then he’ll skip over the forests and rivers and the country houses below, and lots and lots of towns — some bigger, some smaller — and see more beetle-cars crossing airfields, and you can tell, even in the darkness, that the writing on them is in different, foreign letters.

  Sam will continue on, taking a taxi through the night-time city, and the wet snow will turn into autumn rain on the windshield, and the taxi’s dashboard will glow green in the dark. And then Sam might press his round forehead to the tear-stained glass — like me and Sashok that time in the metro — and get to thinking about the last bell before the start of the show, about Lyolik’s gnarled hands and the Jester’s smile, about the polka dot cup filled with freshly brewed tea during intermission, and about all the bustle. Sam may even get to thinking about Kolokolchikov there, in Holland.

  And about me.

  WHEN it lies idle, it’s stiff, firm, and dry. In short, dead. I take the old pieces of modeling clay, which are all different colors and don’t look very good, and hold them in my hot hands. Then the pieces come to life. They become soft and warm. They breathe. They lie down on each other like petals, like patches, and when you smooth them and pinch them they are softer than silk. They aren’t stiff, ugly pieces anymore; they’re transformed into a clay sphere in your hands, into a warm, smooth sphere.

  And it seems to me that I’m holding the whole Earth in my hands, the whole past and future, and there, inside, is everyone who has sculpted puppet heads like this before me.

  Light from the street comes streaming through the window. Outside, the streetcars are running down the rails and glowing in the dark blue winter’s evening, like magic boxes. Millions of little lamps flood and sparkle on the pre-New Year’s side streets, and light from the holiday garlands fills the room.

  I am standing there, and in my hands is a head. What will be a head. The most important part of a puppet.

  Mama always said I had talent; she always said one day I’d sculpt something. I don’t know what it feels like when you have talent. I am just holding a warm clay sphere, and lying on the table are very old drawings, yellowed with time, which Lyolik has found for me in the heat-cracked cupboards. From the drawings, which smell like ancient books, the Jester looks at me — full face and in profile.

  I’m holding a smooth sphere, and you could toss it up and juggle it, as if you were in a circus, you could put it on the table, and you could sculpt a jester’s head. My fingers touch the modeling clay and they know, they can feel it. Press here for the eye sockets and here for the hooked nose. The drawing on the table flows into my hands like languid music, and my hands repeat all the bends and curves of the Jester’s face. They gently pull out the nose, and with a light movement, as if chopping down a sapling, they mark the arched brows, and then the fingers pinch out the clay and then smooth down the sharp cheekbones and the nose’s hook.

  I a
m holding a head, and there is already a hint of the Jester’s crooked grin, and that makes me feel uneasy.

  Now for the very hardest part. Now I have to cut the clay head in half, to make it easier to glue on the paper for the papier-mâché. Cut the face from top to bottom, straight through the forehead and nose. Lyolik does this with a sharp wire with handles on either end for easier holding. He calls it his string. I do the same, of course. I don’t know any other way. Lyolik lent me his string. “Don’t break it,” he said, and he looked over his glasses and suddenly smiled because how could anyone break it? There’s nothing to break.

  Cutting the face is scary too, because the Jester is almost there already. What if you spoil something, something there’s still no trace of?

  Neatly put the clay head on the old oak partition, which smells like the storeroom, hold the slender handles, stretch the wire as far as it will go, take aim, and then plunge the string like a knife into the soft modeling clay, and, not believing your luck, not believing it worked, cautiously separate the round, knobby head into two halves. And you think: It’s just like an apple cut by a knife, just exactly like an apple.

  In the little room behind the workshops the world seems to have shrunk to the size of the table and the window opening on the square.

  “You really want to work there?” Lyolik asked immediately when he learned about the Jester.

  I didn’t know that another work station could be set up behind the small door, in the little storeroom.

  It’s calmer working around Lyolik and Mama Carlo.

  I know they are there if anything happens. I know I have to make the Jester myself, alone, no matter what. Still, it’s more peaceful being next to them.

  Sometimes Mama Carlo pokes her head through the doorway and says, “Time for tea,” and then I suddenly realize that this time I didn’t even hear her put on the water or brew the tea.