The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  In the light of the farmhouse doorway there hung a little girl, watching her father deposit grain for the horses who drew the prison wagons. Kneeling, Jekabs picked up a length of twig. He sat on a stump and, first with his thumb and then with an edge of stone, scored lines and dug grooves. Another twig, a length of briar, a ringlet of leaves and pinecone for a head – and then, when he set it down, a stick soldier stood to attention. The way the wind caught it and whisked it along gave the figure the appearance of marching.

  He was still gazing at the stick figure when a boot came down and ground it into the earth. Jekabs looked up to see a limping prisoner standing imperiously above.

  ‘You don’t sit with us, friend. Why do you never sit with us?’

  Jekabs said not a word.

  ‘What makes you think you’re better than me, carpenter? Your kind have always thought yourselves better than everyone else …’

  Jekabs Godman had heard it said before, even though the place he had been born and raised was in the heart of the Russian Pale. The blood of Abraham, the blood of Isaac, was in his father’s family and this did not, in itself, make him of the faith – but that had never stopped men like this forcing themselves into his face, telling him there was but one god, that his was false, that the ills of the world rested squarely on his shoulders.

  If he focused hard, perhaps the man would go away. Jekabs reached down to pluck more woodland detritus from the pile. His hands moved of their own volition, lining up three more soldiers to stumble haphazardly with the wind.

  The convict leant down and snatched them up. His face was pockmarked with the craters of old cankers, pointed and precise. ‘You can be my friend, toymaker,’ he said – only, now, one hand was cupped around his balls, the stubby protrusions tight against his trousers.

  ‘Please,’ said Jekabs Godman, and refused to wince when the torrent of phlegm caught him on the side of his jaw.

  Downwind from the barn a cauldron of fire was burning. A cry went up – ‘Chichikov!’ – and the prisoner, torn between Jekabs and the fire, at last chose the flames.

  ‘It was like that every night,’ Jekabs continued, beckoning Cathy to sit with him. ‘They’d come and they’d goad and, if ever one of us goaded back, that was it, we’d feel their fists, their boots – or worse. And I came to know: that was what was waiting for me in the east. More men like Chichikov. More nights like this. Two thousand of them between me and any chance of home. Those nights seemed enormous, yet tiny as a life. But later, when I dared look, that man, that Chichikov, he was sitting with others of his kind, and in the horseshoe of earth between them my three pinecone figurines gambolled backwards and forwards, colliding and spinning around each other while the bastards brayed. Tonight, those rapists and killers seemed like children, the same children I would have welcomed to my stall. I didn’t know it then, but I had learned – no, discovered – something that night, something it would take me long months to understand.’

  That night, somebody tried to run. He made it three miles but wasn’t brought back. ‘And let that be a lesson to you all,’ said one of the outriders as he returned from the hunt, haloed in the orange and reds of the border fires. The lesson was: no more second chances. Look around you – this wild, white expanse, this tundra and taiga to which we’re bound, this is your second chance.

  ‘Three months can pass in the moment between one breath and the next. We continued east, beneath the glowering eyes of Cossack fortresses, lined up against the old Khanates of the south. Two days of marching, one day of forced rest: that was the pattern of my life, every step one step further from home. But at least I had something to cling to now – not memories, not hope, because what use were they? No, I had my pieces of pinecone, the long nights I spent whittling my soldiers and setting them to march in the snow. Every night they were taken from me. And every night, there they were, the killers, playing again. Some nights they were so engrossed they didn’t steal anyone’s ration, didn’t force themselves on any of the weaker men when the outriders couldn’t see. And I would remember it for ever: Chichikov, the lowest of all men, sleeping soundly, untroubled by dreams, one of my pine-bark ballerinas curled up snugly in his fist.’

  Slowly, the old world faded. Memories of real life imploded, replaced only by the march. Jekabs watched the steppes, mountains and deep forests glide by, unable to absorb the vastness of the world. Every river forded was another river away from home, every barren plain another expanse in which his son, his wife, had ceased to exist. He could bear it all, all except those nights in the transit prisons when, shaven and deloused, he sweltered in the cells and had no curls of bark with which to make his soldiers. On those nights he sank into himself. He tried to hold his wife Sofiya, his son Kaspar in his mind, but all too easily their visages slipped away, replaced by Chichikov, Grigoryan, Grisha, all of the others who harried him and pressed up against him in the night.

  Somewhere along the way, his wife gave birth. He marked the occasion by making a doll out of larch wood and leaving it on the trail for some peasant farmer to find. Perhaps they would make a gift of it to one of their children. Jekabs was a father for the second time, but whether he had another baby boy or been blessed by his first girl he might never know.

  ‘It was December by the time we reached the timber camp we were to work, high above the Amur river. We came out of the forest and there it sat, our new home sitting on an escarpment shorn of all trees …’

  As Jekabs spoke, the winter exploded. The whiteness remained on the edges of Cathy’s vision – but here, here in the centre, was the valley of blackened stumps of which Jekabs spoke, and in its basin a small township of timber shacks. Ahead of Cathy, the convoy began to wend down the hill.

  ‘There’d been something reassuring about the march. I hadn’t realised it until then, but that march had become life. But there, at the bottom of the escarpment, well that was the future, cold and unknown …’

  That night, on a stump by the barrack walls, one of the camp superiors put shackles around Jekabs’ ankles and bound them with chain to the ones around his wrists. For the next six years they would stay that way, the chains relaxed only so that Jekabs could swing an axe or pull a hacksaw. Once the work was done, he was returned to the barrack house, where men made catcalls from the corners and crowed openly about which of the newcomers would be dead by morning, which in another man’s bed, which would flee first.

  ‘They came for me on the seventh night. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, we called them, the aides-de-camp. They’d been prisoners too, but they were here for life – and lifers, well, they had privileges over the rest of us men. I wish I could tell you that they never beat me. I wish I could tell you that they didn’t sell the timber I’d brought in to the other gangs and have me flogged for shirking. I wish I could tell you that the night I woke to find Ursa Major in bed beside me didn’t happen, but this was the end of the earth and I am not here to lie. They came for us all. Any man they found wanting. Any man too soft for this world.’

  The days were short this far north, but the work was long. The sun, when it came at all, barely roused the forest. Jekabs joined a work gang, where an old hand named Manilov showed him the rudiments of the hacksaw and axe. The first week was gruelling, the second an ordeal. By the third, Jekabs could feel his muscles hardening. Yet a vast hollow was opening inside him, and no amount of hard bread or thin soup could fill it. At least on the trail there had been forage. Here, his body was a chasm, and he himself was falling into it. On the cusp of the fourth week, he stopped on the sled trail, because the big black arc of the woodland was revolving. He could not tell the difference between the plain and the sky. It was only the threat of Ursa Minor’s birch rod lash that drove him on. In the days that followed, as his body accustomed itself to dizziness and retching, he dreamt up good reasons to freeze to death. Across the timber, he scratched out good reasons to stay alive. How craven he felt, for his children were not among them. Somewhere on the march he had passed through a ve
il; now he was working in some other world, where his children did not exist, except as figments of his imagination. Nothing as perfect as Kaspar, his firstborn, his son, could exist in a world which permitted this system of katorga to exist. Out here there was but one reason to stay alive: to spite that piece of you – that powerful piece whose influence grew day on day – which wanted nothing more than to lie down in the snow and wait for the end.

  ‘Cathy, can you be brave?’

  The world morphed around Cathy again, and the only thing that stopped her from panicking was looking back to see Papa Jack still there, turning the crank handle of the toy that had spirited all of this into being.

  When the world reappeared, she was out in the woods, and around her the men in shackles were working in teams to drag timber into the thawed river and send them sailing downstream.

  ‘I have to go now,’ said Jekabs, his hand slipping out of hers.

  ‘Go?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But remember, all of this happened in the very long a—’

  Jekabs did not finish the sentence, for at that moment two figures appeared from behind and, wresting him off his feet, dragged him into the trees. Cathy shrieked his name, hurried after. The world turned to mist around her, and then she was in the trees, Jekabs pinned on the earth with Ursa Major and Ursa Minor above him. She shrieked again, but her voice could not be heard, not in this world that was nothing but memory given form. ‘We know what you are,’ Ursa Major was bawling. ‘We know what you do. Trading for supplies with those little stick soldiers of yours. Well, who made them currency? We’re the only currency there is …’

  They had torn Jekabs’ coat off, made gashes in his shirt, when another cry came out of the trees – and there appeared Chichikov, his comrades Grigoryan and Grisha at his side. ‘Hands off the toymaker,’ Chichikov leered – and, when the Ursas only laughed, there was no second warning. Chichikov came forward, an axe in his hand, and the only thing that stopped blood being shed in the forest that day was the patrol who chanced across them, sending even the Ursas Major and Minor scattering into the trees.

  That night, Jekabs Godman found himself lashed to a stump on the forest’s edge, forced to face the night and all its howling demons. But he was not alone. For, his back still raw from the birch rod lash, there was Chichikov, staked to a stump beside him, and there was Grisha and there Grigoryan, all of them together.

  The night was vast. Sleep came, but the cold always woke them.

  ‘Why?’ Jekabs breathed, when he could stand the silence no more. ‘Why do that … for me?’

  Beside him, Chichikov reached into his pocket and produced one of Jekabs’ soldiers, plundered from him many nights before. ‘Have you any idea?’ he replied, his voice raw through the blisters. ‘When I line up your soldiers, toymaker, I’m a boy again. I’m with my papa and he’s lining up soldiers too. I’m in front of that fire, in Petersburg where we used to live, or I’m in the Gardens of Mars fighting with sticks. I’m … not here, and …’

  Cathy imagined him about to say ‘I’m not me’, but the sentiment was too much for a man like Chichikov. He hawked up phlegm, spat it into the snow.

  ‘No, toymaker, they won’t touch you, not again, not while we still live …’

  ‘And that is how,’ said Jekabs. ‘How I survived, and how I knew what toys truly are. I’d found a kind of … a magic, if you will. A way of reaching the soul of a man. Because even men like Chichikov, they would spend their nights parading my toy soldiers up and down. You won’t believe it now, but a year into our katorga, Ursa Minor himself pulled a toy soldier from the floorboards in our shack and, that night, I saw him marching it up and down his palm as he stood guard. And I came to know – there’s a shared heritage in toys. Take any man and show him a hobby horse, and a little piece of him will be a boy again, desperate to put it between his legs and take a ride. If you’re going to make a toy, you have to hold one truth as inviolable above all others: that, once upon a time, all of us, no matter what we’ve grown up to do or who we’ve grown up to be, were little boys and girls, happy with nothing more than bouncing a ball against a wall. That’s what I’d discovered in the East. I took something good from my katorga and it transformed my life.’

  Jekabs reached out a hand and clasped Cathy.

  ‘You must go now.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Back to the Emporium.’ He looked sadly at his blistered, frost-bitten hands. ‘I survive this, Cathy. I’ll be seeing you soon.’

  Behind Cathy, Papa Jack’s hand froze on the crank handle and, as the toy stopped moving, so did the walls of the study reassert themselves. The wilderness of white faded, Papa Jack’s ledgers returned to their shelves, and the cold that had worked in her body slowly ebbed away. The fur she had been wearing sloughed off her shoulders and vanished before it hit the ground. She heard the faint cries of Jekabs’ fellow prisoners growing fainter yet – and then it was gone.

  She turned around. Papa Jack sat slumped in his chair, his hand still on the crank handle though it moved no more. He looked spent, his face as white as the hair that fell around it. Cathy went to him and, kneeling down, took his hand. ‘Jekabs,’ she ventured. ‘Papa Jack?’

  He looked up.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he whispered, smiling sadly. ‘It’s not a story I’m fond of telling. You see, now, why I wanted you to know? This is not only my Emporium. This is my life. I could no more throw out a mother and child than I could denounce a man like Ursa Minor. We all started in the same place, no matter where we end. That’s how I’ve lived my life. That’s how I’ll die.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jekabs.’

  ‘You mustn’t be. The most terrible things can happen to a man, but he’ll never lose himself if he remembers he was once a child.’ Gently, he placed the toy back in its nest and the chest scuttled into its hiding beneath the shelving. ‘You must be tired, Cathy. Go. Get some rest. I’ll have Mrs Hornung bring you supplies. You might live in your Wendy House until the first frost of winter. By then, we’ll find you a place. A place you might stay …’

  She was still too disoriented to do anything but whisper her thanks. In that way, she teetered back toward the door, certain that the books were opening and closing their pages to usher her on the way.

  As she reached the door, a thought struck her. ‘Your advert,’ she said. ‘The one that brought me here. It cried out to me. Are you lost? Are you afraid? I’m right, aren’t I? It knew I needed help. That’s why you sent it out, into the world – to find people like me. Mrs Hornung said that’s what brought her here too. And when I looked at that advert – it was hovering, brighter than all the rest around it, and with that circle scribbled round it in ink. The advert that brought me here, it was one of your toys, wasn’t it? One of your … magics.’

  Papa Jack had lifted his needle and thread, returned to the cross-stitched cadaver at his side, but his eyes came back to her now.

  ‘The vacancy you came for, it was circled?’

  Cathy nodded, uncertain what to feel. ‘Your Emporium, a place to hide from the world out there, the world where bad things happen. A home for people who need it, people like you, people like me … It found me, didn’t it?’

  He lay down his needle and thread. ‘Cathy Wray, our advertisements are just advertisements. We need more shop hands every winter, even with those who come back year on year. There’s nothing more to them than paper and ink.’

  It couldn’t be. She had felt so certain. ‘But then …’

  ‘Whose newspaper was it, Cathy?’

  ‘It belonged to my father.’

  ‘And tell me, is your father the kind of man who reads that paper every night, looking at the situations vacant … just in case?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘And is he the kind of man who might know the right thing, even if he hasn’t the words to say it?’

  She thought, suddenly, of Jekabs Godman, of rapists and murderers, slavers and saboteurs: all of them, playin
g at toys; all of them, children in the once-upon-a-time.

  ‘He is,’ she whispered.

  ‘Then, Cathy, that advert you saw, that ink sketched around it, perhaps that was the oldest kind of magic there is. The ordinary magic: a father who loves his daughter, telling her in the only way he knows how …’

  ‘Love?’ Cathy said. ‘Papa Jack, they tried to give her away.’ She stressed the word, for that was what Martha was now: not the idea of a child, not some imagining of the future, but a person, flesh and blood with a heart separate from her own.

  ‘Cathy, I brought you here to listen. But you have to hear it too.’

  Papa Jack reached into his gown and opened his fist to reveal a pinecone figurine, one of the very same ones that Kaspar had shown her in the cabinet above. This was no soldier, but a girl’s ballerina, crafted out of dead grass and bark. And yet – how lifelike its features were. How daintily it twirled en pointe on the tip of his finger.

  ‘Whenever you feel that way about your mother, about your father, I want you to take this and remember: there was your own first frost, once. They’d have taken you to the step and showed it you, sparkling in the night. And there was a first set of clothes, a first birthday, a first present wrapped in ribbon that you couldn’t quite unwrap yourself. Let it take you back there. You don’t have to do anything, you never have to speak to them again if that’s what you choose – just so long as you remember.’

  Cathy took the ballerina, let it twirl around her palm and thought she knew what Papa Jack meant – for on the edges of her vision, she could see her old bedroom again, all of it reconstituted and only just out of reach. This was what had saved him, she remembered – this was the very same magic that had worked itself on Chichikov, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, all of the rest. She looked at him now and tried to picture how his life had been, in those places at the ends of the earth, bartering for his life with enchanted creations of dead grass and bark. What was it Kaspar had said? A toy cannot save a life, but it can save a soul. How many souls had Jekabs Godman saved, shackled in those frozen prison camps? Could it be real that the man sitting in front of her, the man she trusted entirely to cradle Martha in his hands, had spent so many years out there, among murderers and rapists and thieves, and turned them all into friends with the toys in his hands? She had seen so many magical things in the Emporium, but surely this was a magic too far. And yet, every time she fingered the pinecone ballerina, she felt the same as those prisoners had done. Tiny flashes of halcyon days forked across her eyes: walking along the tow paths with her mother and father (‘hold Mummy’s hand!’ she had shrieked, delighted, ‘hold Daddy’s hand!’), or watching from the kitchen table as her father stole another slice of cake and rewarded her with a corner for not giving him away. Birthdays and Christmases; a ride on a steam train; the smell of her father covered in talc or her mother’s cheap perfume. These little things, and more, exploded in those pockets of recollection hidden behind the eyes; and all her bitterness faded away.