The Toymakers

by Robert Dinsdale

  Well, Kaspar was not the only talented toymaker among them.

  Emil shook his boys until they awoke and, rubbing blearily at their eyes, they clambered out of the bed where their mother still slept. ‘What are we doing, Papa?’ one of them asked. ‘It’s a midnight adventure!’ the other announced. But, ‘A midnight raid,’ Emil replied, ‘and I wouldn’t let you miss it for the world. We’re going to end this thing once and for all. Your papa has a plan …’

  Nina would surely not approve, but Nina was still asleep, so Nina would never have to know. With his boys marching behind him, Emil made his way to the shopfloor. There, in the half-moon hall, a crate fastened with steel rivets was waiting where he had left it. Emil made his boys stand aside as he jimmied it open. Inside, wrapped in crêpe paper, were a hundred soldiers of his own design. ‘An elite guard,’ he announced. ‘Worthy to be generals, every one. Your uncle might have realised the wildest ideas, boys, but he never surpassed me with my soldiers – not when we were little, and not now …’

  ‘Is it going to be a battle, Papa?’ At four years old, the idea of a battle ought to have been the most thrilling thing of all, but since that night when the soldiers attacked all talk of battle had been banned by their mother.

  ‘My boys, it’s going to be a massacre. Your uncle has to learn that this Emporium isn’t his to do with as he pleases. It’s ours, it’s yours, and these soldiers of his have to be told. Wind them up, boys. I’ll prepare the way.’

  The boys scurried to their task as Emil crowbarred a piece of skirting away from the wall. Then, at his command, the boys released the soldiers and stood back as they marched into the brickwork, dividing into two columns as they went. If Emil had calculated correctly, they would fan out into the cavities he had mapped – and somewhere, in the unseen crevices around them, battle would be joined.

  ‘It’s happening, Papa! Listen!’

  In the walls around them, a thousand tiny footsteps could be heard. There came no battle cries, only the thud and crunch of wood against wood, the hollow pops of mahogany bullets letting fly. Emil whirled around, dancing on the spot. First, there was battle on his right; then, battle on his left; then, finally, pitched battle beneath the soles of his feet.

  Eventually, all around him was silence. For some time, not a toy soldier moved. It was a joyous sound; Emil had not heard silence like it in many long months. Some of his own soldiers would have wound down by now – but that had always been their fate, to fulfil the decimation for which they had been made, and slowly grind to a halt, down there in the dark. They were warriors, and would have been proud. No matter what Kaspar would say, to die for one’s country was a sweet and glorious thing.

  Emil counted slowly under his breath: one, two, three, four. Then, as he had planned, the footsteps started again.

  ‘Stand back, boys, it’s nearly time!’

  The boys reeled as toy soldiers burst out of the wall. Emil’s elite guard, those who had survived, streamed on to the shopfloor – and there, pursuing them, came the self-winding host.

  The trap was sprung. Emil reached out, pulled a cord at his side – and from a second silver crate sprang a patchwork wolf. The wolf was coiled so tightly it hurtled forward, skittling elite guard and self-winding soldier alike – but it had only one command. In the middle of the battlefield, the wolf wrapped its jaws around a soldier in glistening red and, when it came to deposit it in Emil’s hands, the jaws opened to reveal the Imperial Kapitan, his legs milling in wild panic.

  Emil took the Kapitan in his fist, held him up so that the fleeing soldiers might see. Some of them stopped on their way back into the skirting. How did they perceive him then, through their wooden eyes, their general dangling up above? ‘He’s ours now. Come on, boys. I’ll show you how we’re to sleep safely in our own homes.’

  The boys followed their father across the ravaged shopfloor, down the tapering aisle to the workshop at its end. Such a magical thing for the boys to come into their papa’s workshop. They held hands and gaped at the stars plastered across the ceiling, the nightjars on the shelf.

  At the workshop’s end, a brass birdcage stood on its stand. The boys recognised it from last Christmas, for this was the roost Papa Jack’s phoenix kept on the nights he soared over the shopfloor. Its wires were tightly meshed; a padlock dangled from a door where there was no real need.

  The Imperial Kapitan hung limp in Emil’s hand. Now, he wound him up and cast him inside. As he fumbled to lock the door, the Kapitan picked himself up. Perhaps Emil was only imagining the rush of feeling as life spread back through the Kapitan’s heart, along every piece of wire and catgut in his body. The toy soldier flexed his finger joints, threw a salute (was this mockery, or just confusion as his mind – if mind it truly was – came back into being?), and marched on the spot.

  ‘See, boys?’ Emil whispered, drawing them near. ‘He’s here now, and he’s here at our mercy. Without us, he’ll wind down. Without us, he’ll cease to exist. And if those other soldiers know what’s good for them …’ He took a broom handle and beat out a rhythm on the skirting, up and down the walls. ‘They’ll do as I tell them.’ He opened his mouth to roar out. ‘Go back to your walls! Live your doll’s-house lives! But stay away from the shopfloor or …’ He rounded on the birdcage again, and the Imperial Kapitan who had once been his friend. ‘Wind Down. Wind Down for you all!’

  How to explain what was happening in the walls? Days passed. Weeks and months. Sometimes the soldiers were quelled, but sometimes they grew confident, determined to win back their Kapitan – and that was when the workshop walls came alive with the tramping of a thousand wooden feet. Emil ran sorties when he discovered a build-up behind his workshop door. He built patchwork ferrets and sent them into the skirting to hunt; when they came back at all, it was with their backs pierced by wooden lances, their stuffing ripped out. So long did he spend conniving ways to stop the soldiers proliferating, blocking up holes in the skirting and cementing up the burrows his boys kept discovering, that for long months he made no new toys for the winter to come. All the while, Papa Jack worked long into the nights, so that the aisles might be full again by the time first frost came. And because he was locked away, with only his toys to confide in, nobody noticed the new cough that was wracking his chest, nor the way his fingers were finally – after decades of intricate work – beginning to seize up. They did not notice the first time his memory failed him, because he recovered of his own accord and continued to make stitches in the hides of his seaside serpents. They only went about their business, and he about his, and the only ones who truly knew were the soldiers standing dumbly in the walls.

  In Martha’s quarters that summer, when Mr Atlee came to give her lessons, the wind-up host gathered to listen. She took to opening the skirting board so that they could hear her teacher drone on about arithmetic and parables, kings and countries and the Proverbs of the Bible. Sometimes, she came back to her bedroom at night to find that they had scaled to the top of her reading desk and were marching up and down her thesaurus, as if trying to understand the mysteries written within. At night, she read to them from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – but of armies and soldiers, no matter what the sort, they didn’t want to hear. Instead, she read them Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, stories from the Arabian Nights. She read them Jules Verne and HG Wells. And when Cathy came to wish her goodnight, she was shocked (but not surprised) to see the soldiers perched on every shelf around the bedstead, the sounds of their constant motors turning all around.

  Stories, Martha thought. It was stories that could help them think …

  The first frost came late in that year of 1923 – so that, by the time the Emporium opened its doors, the ledgerbooks looked barer than ever, and when Mr Moilliet, the man from Lloyd’s, came to consider the annual accounts, he departed with a sombre look and promises in his ear that surely could not be kept. There was no grand spectacle that night. When the first families flocked through the doors, they were
not met with flying reindeer or cartwheeling stars, but only by a shopfloor half the size of the year before, its outer reaches boarded up to avoid the sense of empty shelves. There would have been more magic, the customers whispered, in a night at the Palladium, and this was a thing that had never been said before.

  If you had returned to the Emporium that Christmas (as so many men did, seeking reminders of earlier, more innocent times), you would not have recognised it as the Emporium of your youth. You would have turned into dead-end aisles, would have seen hollows where toys had been bought and never replenished; the Wendy House you used to marvel at would have seemed a grotty woodland hovel, its windows still boarded up; and, above all else, you would have floundered over the looping railway lines that had erupted all over the Emporium floor – for there had been an industrial revolution in the walls that winter, the toy soldiers seeking better ways to cross the vast distances between them and unearth stores of more inert soldiers they could fit with self-winding designs. Emil and what shop hands he could afford had spent days prising up the new railway lines, but as fast as they worked, the wind-up army worked faster. By the time the first frost came, Emil had already ceded the mezzanine, the carousel, half of the windward aisles to the soldiers, in the hope they might be satisfied – yet, at night, the hooting of train whistles filled the shopfloor, and each morning, the aisles were a little more ragged, another paper tree felled or another tow-rope severed, upending the cloud castle above. And if you had been like any of the other shoppers come to the Emporium that winter, you would have taken one look at the ruin and thought: is this it? Is this the place I used to dream about coming every year? Have I changed, or is the Emporium really gone?

  It had been a quarter of a century since Papa Jack last saw an opening night, but tonight he emerged from his workshop tomb and gazed out across the shopfloor. He watched his patchwork pegasi, threadbare after so many years, cartwheeling through the towers of the listing cloud castle and, closing his eyes, shuffled on his way.

  The Godmans’ quarters stood silent, Cathy, Martha, Emil and the rest attending to the shopfloor below, but here lay Kaspar, curled up in bed where Papa Jack had known he would be. When he slept there was still a way of believing he was thirty years younger – only now the demons that danced in his dreams were built out of memory, not childish fancy or imagination. Papa Jack lowered himself to the seat at his bedside.

  ‘Kaspar,’ he whispered. ‘Kaspar, my boy?’

  At Papa Jack’s touch, Kaspar turned toward him, as a child might reach out for their papa in the night.

  ‘Opening night used to be so special to you, Kaspar. I want it to be special again. Cathy asked me to talk to you. I promised I would, but until now I could never find the words. Because – how do you solve a life, my Kaspar? How do you solve a life like yours … and mine. A life is not such a very easy thing. So the weeks started passing, and then the months passed and the years, but … Kaspar, here I am, where I’ve always been, ever since I came back and found my boys. Here. I. Am.’

  In his sleep, Kaspar had reached out and threaded his fingers into his papa’s. Papa Jack’s hand dwarfed his. He held it fast.

  ‘I’ve dreamt of what I might say. I’ve longed to find it. I’ve thought for so long I don’t have any more time to think, so here it is, everything I have …’ He took a deep breath because this thing he had come here to say, it did not want saying. ‘You cannot go back.’ He paused. ‘When I left my katorga, I wasn’t the same man they snatched away when you were so small. I thought I could be, but I was wrong. And all that year, as I wended my way back into the west, as I stopped to make toys in the villages and bought favours and rides and a roof over my head with toy soldiers and ballerinas and bears, I understood it more deeply than ever. I wasn’t really walking back the way I had come, because this man that I was, he wasn’t the same man who’d made the trek east. With every footstep I was somebody new.

  ‘You’re new too, Kaspar. A man can’t go out and see the things you’ve seen, do the things you’ve done, and come back to his old place in the world. This Emporium of ours, it crystallises childhood. It makes us long for those days when all the world was a toy and all of life was the adventure you had when you closed your eyes and made it happen. But Kaspar, if you go on like this, there isn’t a happy ending. There’s just more of … this. I had to find a new way to be. I found my boys and I took them into new lands and I made something for us there. I made this Emporium. I got away from the wilderness by finding something else. And Kaspar,’ he whispered, and brought his head down to his son’s face, and planted a kiss on him there, ‘perhaps you must too.’

  A single tear rolled from Papa Jack’s eye to land intact upon Kaspar’s cheek.

  Papa Jack took the back way to his workshop, unwilling to look out over the shopfloor one last time. Once inside, he shut the door. Somehow Sirius had found his way within. The patchwork dog rested its muzzle in his hands. Then it lifted itself, lapped him once with its darned sock tongue, and whimpered as it left.

  Alone now, he studied his workshop.

  Eyes were watching him. This was another of those things he had carried with him all of his life; he could always tell when he was being watched. He made himself tea from the pine needles and samovar Mrs Hornung always left out and, as he was stirring through syrup, he saw the flickerings of movement in the edges of his vision. ‘I see you,’ he whispered, with a smile. ‘Yes, I see you now. You may come out, if that is what you wish. Your secrets are safe with me.’

  Without looking down, he retreated to his seat. The arms rose up to hold him and he realised, with a starkness he had not felt before, how good it was to be held. It had been so long since he felt the warmth of human arms. Desire did not die, not even after all this time.

  As he breathed in the scent of pine forest floating up on the steam, the scuttling arose at his feet. He felt them before he could see them. Then he was down on his knees among them, the wind-up soldiery milling around.

  There were ten of them. More gathered at the skirting where a loose board released them from the walls. Papa Jack lowered himself until they were of a level, staring into their delicately painted faces with his own of flesh and blood. ‘How handsome you are,’ he ventured, and extended a palm as if to invite one aboard.

  The soldiers milled frantically, uncertain of what they were being asked.

  ‘You may go back to your skirtings, should you like,’ Papa Jack began, ‘but I should be grateful of some company tonight.’

  As if emboldened (or was it in empathy?) the soldier closest to Papa Jack marched forward and set his little wooden jackboots upon his palm. Gently, so as not to topple him, Papa Jack lifted himself back into his seat. The sight of their brother at ease in the giant’s hand drew yet more soldiers from the skirtings. They lined up in battalions at Papa Jack’s feet.

  ‘My sons made such magic here. They made it together, if only they could see. I can see my Emil’s hand in your finish. I can see my Kaspar in how you … live. Yes, I believe I shall use the word, tonight. And at least I am not to be alone.’

  The soldier in his hand was winding down. It turned frantically, seeking out its brothers on the workshop floor – until Papa Jack whispered, ‘May I?’, and the soldier, nodding in spite of his panic, stiffened as Papa Jack twisted the key in his back.

  The soldier was renewed. The only soldier since the Rising to have been wound up by a man. ‘The honour,’ Papa Jack began, ‘is mine alone,’ and, setting the soldier back down, he reached into the trunk at his side. When he brought his hands out he was clutching twists of pinecone and grass, bundles of twig and dried bark.

  ‘It was with these that I bartered my life,’ he said, and lay them down. ‘The first toy soldiers a Godman ever made, but you should take them now. It is your ancestry, after all.’

  The soldiers gathered, and perhaps they saw themselves in the dried husks, in the same way a man might see himself in the skeletons of prehistoric apes strung together f
or a museum dais.

  The edges of the room were growing indistinct. Papa Jack closed and then opened his eyes. Look around you, he thought. There is nothing in the history of the world, no aspect of life nor of death, that is not being charted here, in this workshop, tonight. Half of Papa Jack’s life had been lived alone; what might life have been like if he had had somebody at his side, somebody to wind him up when his heart began to slow?

  In the air around him, memory and waking life merged. He was in his workshop and yet at the same time he was suckling at his mama’s breast. There was a bear he used to have, little more than a stitched-up fur, and he had carried it about the village where he grew up until it clean rotted away. He thought he would like to hold it now, to cuddle it or to play – but there was no need; toys didn’t need playing with any longer, for they were playing with themselves. And, ‘I would have liked to have seen what becomes of you,’ he said to the waiting host. ‘We have all come so very far.’

  Every man was a child in the moment that he died. Jekabs Godman closed his eyes and, with a hundred wooden faces watching, he slipped slowly from this world.

  THE LITTLE ACT OF A LONG GOODBYE

  PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM AND HIGHGATE CEMETERY, 1924

  Consider the Imperial Kapitan: born on a workshop lathe, given form by chisel and file; one Emporium soldier brought into this world to rule over them all. Tonight, if you had been wandering the deserted shopfloor, breathing in the dust and musk of the Emporium in summer, you would not have heard its screams, nor it pleading for mercy. Leave aside for a moment the fact that it has no voice. It is, after all, only a toy. (Or at least, keep telling yourself that, if you – like poor Emil Godman – still refuse to believe.) The Imperial Kapitan neither screams nor begs because it is not the way he was made. His pride is there in every groove etched into his face. Even if the mechanism that is his beating heart were designed to give him words, he would not scream, not for you and not for anyone else.