Playing a Part

by Daria Wilke

  I come out of my room, and it feels like surfacing from incredible depths where absolutely everything is different. Only the theater reminds me that it’s the same. Its heavy door shifts behind me, protecting me; its creaking floorboards whisper something, and it murmurs — but I have no time to listen.

  “Are you going to make it from papier-mâché?” Filipp asks skeptically after examining my modeling clay pieces, which lie cut-side down on the table like two apple halves. “I’d have carved them from wood. Wood is nobler.”

  That gets to me. “Go carve them yourself! Only do it yourself, get it?”

  Before, I probably wouldn’t have said anything, but this time I flare up. Once you’ve sculpted a puppet head yourself, everything changes.

  “What’s with you? I was just saying,” he fusses. “Do it your way. You’re the boss here.” He falls silent, looking at the modeling clay halves of the Jester’s head. “If anything comes up, I’ll help. If you want.” And he hurriedly repeats, “You know, if you want.”

  “I do,” I blurt out, to my own surprise. “Only, just a little.”

  “You’re definitely going to need lead,” Filipp adds pragmatically. “Otherwise the puppet won’t move well. Lead in the chin and lead in the backside, so his posture is right, lead in the hands and feet, in the heels, so the boots don’t point down and the puppet walks like a person. Definitely.”

  “Thank you,” I manage to get out. For some reason it’s very hard for me to say thank you, especially to Filipp. He’s a complete mystery to me, and I never know what to expect from him.

  “Nutcase. Nothing to it!” Filipp says with a wave of his hand, casually, and his skinny shoulder jerks, and his tattooed dragon winks its round eye at me.

  Filipp focuses on laying out lead weights on the table. “This for the chin, this for the hands, this …”

  I can’t stop myself: “Listen, there’s something I don’t get. Why are you doing this? Why should you help?”

  Filipp suddenly raises his eyes — which are very blue, it turns out — in surprise, as if he hasn’t expected such foolishness from me. And then, as if to say, Why am I even confiding in you? he grins, and the tidy beard under his lower lip shifts to one side.

  “I’m a selfish pig!” he says defiantly. “A pig, see? I thought I’d get some practice in at the same time, on your Jester, like a lab animal. It’s not like making puppets for a show. If it doesn’t work out, it’s no tragedy.”

  And for some reason, I don’t believe him.

  You’re always lying, I think. I’d swear to it. You’re lying!

  But Filipp, noticing, probably, that I don’t much believe him, adds passionately, “Why do you think I said that about the puppets? Why did I take all the blame? You think I’m good? Like hell. I’m a selfish beast.” He seems to like calling himself a beast an awful lot, and he blinks with satisfaction.

  “Why did you say that? You could have kept it to yourself.”

  “I wanted Lyolik to come back too. Only not like you did. Differently. I wanted someone to teach me to make puppets unlike anyone else’s. And only Lyolik can do that. I need a teacher and that’s it. No charity whatsoever. None whatsoever.”

  His eyebrows are dancing and his eyes are squinting so much that fine wrinkles form around his eyes like sunbeams and the dragon on his shoulder wiggles its black mustache menacingly.

  And all of a sudden I understand.

  I’m delighted, as if I’ve run into an old friend on the street, an old friend I haven’t seen in a very long time.

  I understand that Filipp is a Jester too.

  True masters do their papier-mâché over plaster, not modeling clay.

  They cast plaster forms from the head halves and paste the paper on the inside. Then, when the halves are still a little damp, you have to carefully pull them out of the plaster carcasses and secure them to the table with tacks, so that when the papier-mâché dries, there’s no shrinkage. “Don’t pull,” Filipp says, explaining it all to me. He isn’t being mean. I really would have pulled. After all, you have to make more than one puppet for it to come out right. That’s why I’m doing my Jester the simple way, pasting over a modeling clay half.

  Vaseline cools your hands. You can scoop it out, lay it on the halves of the Jester head in big swipes, spread it out, and cover every millimeter of the clay. You breathe in the smell of vanilla and powder.

  You have to have the Vaseline or else you’ll never pull the clay halves away from the papier-mâché.

  When you’re cooking the glue, you feel like a wizard. You sprinkle in the flour and mix it with cold water for a very long time, until you feel as if you’re not here anymore but somewhere else — and you see the water and flour turn into a thick white gel. You pound pieces of wood glue and pour water over them, like a real chef, and you put the old pot on the fire, the pot where Lyolik makes his glue. The pot has deep dents on the sides. How many puppets has it helped make in its day? On the burner, the pot dances from the heat, as if it wants to run away from the old burner. Then you mix your flour paste with the wood glue, which is as thick as porridge, and it doesn’t seem all that hard, making puppet flesh out of flour and water.

  You soak pieces of newspaper in the glue and overlap them on the convex clay head halves. Over and over you smooth out the wrinkles with your finger and then you lay down more and more, over the hooked nose and the eye sockets, on the forehead and the bumpy cheeks, hearing and seeing nothing but the Jester’s head growing millimeter by millimeter.

  Lyolik teaches me how to tell when the papier-mâché has dried through — and the next time I come back to the theater, I lightly flick a face half. It clinks very slightly, the way only dry papier-mâché can clink. Then you can place the apple halves back together, cut off the extra pieces of papier-mâché, and glue both halves together.

  The Jester. There he is: the Jester.

  The finished head still has to be pasted over with newspapers, but the most important part seems done.

  “You’re lucky,” Filipp says with irony. “Lyolik has plenty of arm and leg pieces; you won’t have to sweat away at those.”

  On the other hand, I have to make the crossbar you hang the Jester on for him to come to life. I sit over the drawings for hours. I cut out paper patterns, which I lay down on the thick veneer, and draw around them neatly so as not to be off by a single millimeter. I saw out the crossbar’s details: the yoke for the arms and legs, which goes into the base, like the pieces of a construction set. I sweat and worry inside because I’m so afraid of making a mistake and ruining everything.

  My head is filled with nothing but controllers. I am calculating where to drill the holes for the strings to make the hanger brackets for the arms and legs.

  In math class I imagine how the Jester is going to move if I hang him just right. I move my fingers imagining him taking a step and waving his arm.

  “Lost in nirvana?” Anton teases, and he elbows me in the side as hard as he can.

  And then, for the first time, the jester in me — the one that’s always inside me, the one that makes humiliating faces — disappears. Suddenly I can be myself, without being embarrassed or hiding.

  “Drop dead!” I burst out, and I elbow him back.

  He looks at me in amazement, as if seeing me for the first time, and so as not to appear the loser — Anton hates losing more than anything — he jokes, “Grishka bites!”

  “Yes,” I say, so loudly that everyone turns around. “Yes, I do now. And, basically, this is all so pathetic. You used to be interesting, Anton, and now you’re boring.”

  He looks at me steadily. “Idiot!” The math teacher moves toward us like an overloaded ship.

  “Anton, go out in the hall this minute!” she declares loudly. “I’ll teach you to interrupt my class!”

  “It’s not me, it’s Grishka,” Anton sasses back, slumping in his chair.

  The math teacher looks at me in surprise. But I just don’t care — and that’s why I stand
up, feeling that the jester hunch on my back is gone, my back is straight, and now it’s going to be just as straight as Sam’s when he dances onstage.

  “Well, yes, it was me, Maria Mikhailovna. And I’ll go out into the hall.” Botsman, Zhmurik, Anton, and everyone else look at me wide-eyed, as if they don’t recognize me. The only jester inside me now is the true Jester, who is more powerful than kings. I nod in jest to Anton — “See you later, your highness” — and I walk past Botsman, past Zhmurik, and through the quiet class, open the door to the hall, and know that behind my back Anton is pale as a ghost and distraught, like a little boy who doesn’t know what to do with his mama’s favorite teacup, which he’s accidentally broken.

  Then I just collect my things in the cloakroom. I don’t care what my teacher — or the principal — is going to say. I’m on my way to the theater, to finish the Jester.

  “You’re early today!” Filipp grins.

  “Uh-huh,” I say honestly. “I ran away from school. Listen, I keep wanting to ask you. Why do you need all these puppets anyway? With your father, you could work anywhere you like.”

  Filipp eyes me for a moment, as if checking to see whether I’m being serious or not.

  “You’re just like my dad. He wanted to ship me off somewhere. As far away as possible. To England, for instance. So I wouldn’t fool around.” Filipp suddenly catches himself. “No, I have a world-class father. Especially when he forgets he’s a boss. If he weren’t world-class, I damn sure wouldn’t have ended up here. One day I told him, ‘No, I want to make puppets and that’s it. I don’t want to be a lawyer or a diplomat.’ He nearly died. He shouted, ‘You idiot, you’ll be working as a security guard in a supermarket.’ He wouldn’t talk to me for a week. He was hoping I’d come around. Or get scared. But I started looking into theater studios. And he gave in. Another father wouldn’t have.”

  Filipp smiles crookedly and strokes an old control rod, lying all alone on the windowsill. “That’s why I’m frittering my life away here.” He smiles, probably so I won’t forget that he’s a jester too, in fact.

  Sometimes Lyolik hoists himself out of his armchair and comes into my corner. He looks closely at my Jester, turns it around, glances briefly at the old drawings, and then his crooked finger, which looks like an old tree knot, points to a spot on the drawings visible to him alone, and he says, “Reinforce it here, otherwise it won’t hold up.” After these words of Lyolik’s I suddenly see something I haven’t seen before. Something I haven’t understood before.

  I am still scared to smooth the finished head. I take the file from Lyolik and run it over the Jester’s forehead with the deep wrinkle, over the cheeks, and over the hooked nose. The head rustles and sputters — and you can see all the uneven spots being filed down. It’s pleasant once you’re polishing the face and brow with sandpaper; you’re not so scared you’re going to break everything.

  “The minute you start making a puppet, it ceases to be yours,” Lyolik always says. I’ve never understood what he was talking about. “You can create your own puppet world, and you can populate it however you like, but beyond that it’s out of your hands. The moment you conceive of a puppet, it’s no longer yours. It belongs to itself.”

  Only now do I understand what Lyolik is always talking about.

  I hold the Jester’s finished head in my hands and I can feel that he is his own self. I’m only here to make him the way he wants to be.

  I cook the gesso primer for the Jester’s face and skin, so he’ll come out the way he should, so he’ll be easier to draw on. Filipp is standing over my shoulder. He dips his fingers in the warm glue, folds them in a mysterious gesture, and immediately opens them. “Not enough glue,” he says, and he shakes his head. Then I add glue and cook it some more, and then I stir crushed chalk into the mix, and it starts looking like very thick sour cream. This is going to be the puppet face, and I’m going to paint it the way Sam painted his own face before every show.

  The Jester is starting to look more and more like himself.

  So am I. Somewhere inside, I too am becoming more and more like myself. Because until you’ve made a puppet, you’re not the real thing.

  I never thought a face and Jester’s cap would be nearly impossible. A face is a face; it’s always there. And the cap’s just a cap, an upturned crown with bells. Only now, all of a sudden, it turns out that you can’t, you can’t paint the face. After all, it’s so easy to turn a puppet into a monster; you just have to draw its eyes wrong.

  Or its eyebrows. Or pick up a brush, dip it in the carmine paint, and boldly run it along where the Jester’s smiling teeth should be.

  “A puppet never forgives hack work,” Lyolik always says. It doesn’t forgive hack work.

  I sit down at the table a few times, prepare my paints and brushes — and simply can’t bring myself to make the first stroke. As if with one single stroke I could kill the Jester forever.

  “Help?” Filipp finally takes pity on me.

  He straddles a stool, leans over the papier-mâché, dips a brush in the paint, and lightly runs it over the puppet’s still-eyeless face. He seems to be touching the head with a magic wand because all of a sudden the cheekbones emerge and shadows lie on the nostrils — and the Jester begins to breathe. A dimple appears on his chin and a smile line on his cheek.

  And then, when Filipp has stained all his fingers with paint and picked up the Jester’s head to make it easier to work, the Jester suddenly opens his eyes. Now he’s a real Jester, just the same as the one Olezhek gave to the unknown collector.

  “But I’m taking a pass on the cap,” Filipp says. “Try it yourself. Or come up with something instead of it. Just put some kind of cap on him.”

  “How’s your bird doing in there?” I ask Sashok, listening to her concentrated wheezing over the phone.

  “I’m sick of it already!” she responds.

  I should have gone long ago to see her in the hospital where she’s waiting for her operation. “When are you going to visit Sashok?” Mama kept asking. But I kept putting off the moment. I don’t know why.

  Maybe because I wanted to show up with the Jester and see her surprise. And then I’d tell her the whole story from beginning to end. And I’d add — I’m sorry, Sashok, I just couldn’t get the cap right. What kind of puppet master am I, anyway? I’m sorry, Sashok. I really did want to sew a cap, but I don’t know how. I tried, and there were lots of nights I couldn’t get to sleep because I was thinking about what to do. And never came up with anything.

  “Will you come visit me?” she asks me all of a sudden, desperately.

  And she falls silent, as if everything in the world now depends on me.

  “I’ll come, Sashok, I’ll come,” I reply hurriedly. “I’ll bring you a present for your birthday. You’re going to have the best present ever. From me. I’m going to make it.”

  “You fool,” Sashok concludes joyfully, and she laughs.

  The needle pricks my fingers. “Use the thimble,” Mama Carlo keeps growling. “You’ve completely maimed yourself.” The thimble is steel, and if you put it on your index finger, then you can’t feel the softness of the silk scraps you’re sewing together for the Jester’s clothes. Cornflower blue scraps, crimson scraps, scraps the color of gooseberries.

  “Before, Jesters wore only two colors,” Lyolik says. “Black and white. Like day and night.”

  I cut diamonds out of the different colors of silk and sew them to one another with tiny, very tiny stitches, the way Mama Carlo shows me. The seams look almost like straight paths in an invisible forest. I smooth the small seams on the inside, like Filipp said. I’m learning how to hold an iron properly — and the details that made no sense yesterday are transformed into pants and a jacket. I thread a needle with red-edged silk to give the Jester a fancy collar. And the world seems to have turned into the multicolored scraps of the Jester’s costume. The world is in color, of course, not black and white at all. Not like day and night.

  I have
to dress the arms and legs separately and then attach them to the Jester’s body. Out of nothing, someone suddenly appears. He hatched, formed out of small parts — the foot in the painted wooden boot, the pink hand, and the shoulder hinge. He is still stiff, the Jester. He still can’t walk and run, wave his hand, nod his head, or land onstage after a graceful leap. I need to teach him all that — so I attach the strings to the invisible hooks on the Jester’s body, hooks I spent two whole evenings screwing in. As soon as a string is attached and secured to the opening in the controller, it comes to life. It vibrates and sings. It trembles as if someone has just awakened it, rescuing it from a long sleep.

  I lift the controller, and the string-sinews shudder as they take on the Jester’s weight, and he jerks, trying to get up.

  “Something’s come for you!” Mama Carlo trumpets — and she waves a thin, grayish piece of paper in the air.

  Something’s come? At first I don’t understand that I’ve been sent a package. Or a packet. Or a letter. Like a grown-up would get.

  “Let’s go pick it up,” Mama Carlo suggests, and she straightens her suspenders, wraps herself up like a cabbage in an old woolen top, and slaps on her knit cap with the awful little pompons. “I have to go to the store anyway.”

  The package was sent to the theater, Mama Carlo says, but addressed to me. I can’t pick up packages at the post office myself yet because I’m not old enough, so I’m glad someone is going with me. Someone none other than Mama Carlo.

  She takes long, almost soldierly strides and avoids the sidewalk curbs, the islands of ice, and all the frozen steps at once. She digs around in her bag and takes out her dark red passport and the postal notification. Then my co-conspirator nods to the fat postal worker in the window, who smells of borscht and fresh, spongy black bread, and with a broad, almost regal gesture, signs for receipt.

  Then she says nasally, “Well, can you get back yourself? I still have to go to the store.”