The Motion of Puppets

by Keith Donohue

  “Sit, lapochka, and tell us of the outside world. What news from the mortals?” Her voice dripped, low and rich, into the air.

  “How long have you been here in the Back Room?”

  “Forever and a day,” Masha said.

  “I do not know,” Irina said. “How long is eternity?”

  Olya shot them a glance that indicated they had said too much. “Pay no attention to these mopes. They have short memories. Things were not always thus.”

  “It is June,” Kay said. “Or at least it was when I arrived. The passage of time is hard to judge inside a box. We were just married, my husband and I, this past April, and we came here for work.”

  “Does this marvel have a name?” Olya asked.

  Unsure of the answer, Kay hesitated. “I have forgotten it for the moment, but he teaches French literature and is a translator, and I am an acrobat. A gymnast, really, but I thought it might be fun to spend the summer in Québec with the cirque.”

  Irina stifled a laugh. “I’m sorry. Expectations are often thwarted by the smallest accidents.”

  “An acrobat?” Masha smiled. “That will serve you well, pet, when it comes to the next puppet show. The Deux Mains adores a nimble doll. But your husband, tut. How careless of him to misplace you, to let you wander this way. Never enter a toy shop after midnight.”

  Kay thought of how she had entered this space, remembering being outside the toy shop looking in. The sensation of being followed. The lights on for the first time ever and at such a late hour. A twinge in her hand reminded her of turning the doorknob and stepping into the store in her bare feet. Where were her shoes? She must have taken them off to fool her pursuer, to erase her tracks. At last, she had come so close to the man beneath the glass. Darkness arrived completely as she’d lifted the bell jar. She’d shut her eyes and then awoke to find her life in pieces. Memory, what a strange thing, not bound to any time but to a place. This box of a room, alone with these weird creatures. The Russians were smiling at her. She wondered if the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains were nearby, in another room in the building, perhaps asleep in a bedroom in the upper story. Or tinkering below in the cellar. Or not there at all.

  “Tell me about the others,” Kay said at last, shaking off the dust of her own spell.

  “The old-timers,” Masha said. “Some have been here so long that they no longer have a name. Take the judges.” She gestured toward two large puppets arguing together over a chessboard. From the few pieces left on the board, it was impossible to tell who was playing black and who was playing white. “They are simply the Black Judge and the White Judge, but I can no longer tell who is whom. Do you know, Irina?”

  “They were in some farce together, ages ago, and I am not sure if either knows his proper title. What does it matter? They are made for disputations.” Catching her fingers in her strand of pearls, she pointed at another pair. On the bottom shelf, an elaborately decorated rod puppet with ram’s horns and a horrid black goatee, his crimson body filigreed with swirls of gold leaf inlaid in the finest teak, played at hide-and-seek with what looked like a bunch of sticks in a gossamer shirt to which had been affixed a pair of wire and lace wings. “The Devil seeks his due,” she said. “He is a foreigner, an Indonesian wayang, a minor deity of some lascivious intent, but we just call him the Devil.”

  Masha called out to the girl hiding behind a spool of twine. “Hey, girl, what do we call you these days? Is it Peaseblossom? Or Cobweb? Asphodel? Or perhaps we should just call you Twiggy.”

  “Get on out of that,” the girl said, angry that they had given her away. Her voice emerged from a bundle of sticks woven together in the shape of a face, and her eyes flashed like lit embers. “I am the Good Fairy, as you well know.” The Devil laughed and sprang to her at once, and she giggled in mock terror, sticks scraping on the wooden floor.

  When the Devil passed by, the Dog barked, the sudden motion startling an old woman rocking on the edge of the counter, her short legs dangling in the air. At her side was the girl who had been so curious about Kay’s hair, a mere waif in a rag dress, a thatch of brittle yellow straw standing up on her head, staring back at them. “The gramma is the Old Hag,” said Olya. “Don’t worry about hurting her feelings by calling her so. Deaf as a block of wood.” She dropped her voice to a whisper and hunkered in close to Kay. “And the little one is Noë. Be careful, dahlink, for she is med as a hetter. I will tell you a secret. Noë has tried to make her escape many, many times, and that is why old Firkin posts himself at the door. We cannot have such madness let loose into the world.”

  “And why does she want to leave?” Kay asked.

  The Sisters tensed and lifted themselves from their recumbent positions, sitting up like respectable ladies. Each gave the others a knowing look, signaling a tacit agreement to let the truth alone. Masha spoke: “Who knows why anyone goes crazy? The mind invents its own miseries. I myself prefer to be the very model of happiness. And I advise you to do the same.”

  Kay could not stop watching the straw-haired girl. At first she seemed merely still and self-possessed, but in time her inner enchantments began to leak out. Noë twisted her fingers together and pulled them apart. Through her thin shirt her clockwork heart beat like a dove’s. In a lull in the symphony of conversation in the room, she could be heard humming to herself, not unlike the mockingbird singing in the predawn world outside.

  “Come, zaichik,” Olya said. “And meet the Queen before the night is through.”

  Taking her hand, she stepped off the edge, floating to a soft landing. Still unused to walking after such a long spell, Kay had to lean on the Russian woman’s arm. Seated by the curtains dividing the Back Room from the toy store, on a throne made out of oatmeal boxes, the Queen was the most lifelike, the most beautiful of them all. Carved from tiger maple, the grain running lengthwise from brow to chin, her face and classical features were set off elegantly by a corona of jet-black hair cascading to her shoulders. Her robes were dyed pomegranate, and in one hand she held a scepter cunningly painted in shades of gold. At her feet sat a horrid creature, a green foam puppet, his misshapen head dominated by a large pair of plastic googly eyes, a primitive mishmash inspired by Picasso, the saddest face Kay had ever seen. He mewled like a kitten as she approached, covering himself under his mistress’s hems.

  “Pay no attention to that Worm,” Olya said. “His name is simply that, and he is more to be pitied than feared.” Five paces away, she kicked out her foot and the puppet slid farther beneath the Queen’s skirts, quivering and muttering complaints. They stopped in front of her and curtsied.

  “Majesty, may I present … ah, my little angel, I have forgotten your name, if I ever learned it.”

  “Kay,” she said and rose to face her. “Kay Harper.”

  The Queen tipped her chin in greeting.

  Olya bowed as well before continuing her tale. “She is the latest sent over to us by the Original in the Front Room. Stitched and sewn by the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains themselves in the last moon. Kay Harper comes from beyond. She is an acrobat, Majesty. A tumbler.”

  “You have been on the stage?”

  “I have,” she said. “Just recently in the cirque, but for some years before in both competitions and performance.”

  “That will serve you well, when the time comes.”

  “So I have been told.”

  “If you are chosen.” The Queen corrected herself with a beatific smile. “Remember your training, and you will have many a happy time with the puppeteers. I am afraid that some of us forget how to behave.” With her toe, she nudged the squirming Worm below the throne. “You will want some opportunity now and then to play a new part. Change is everything in this place.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  The Queen bent closer, looking Kay in the eyes. “If you follow a few simple rules, all will be as it should. We are free to move about after midnight and before the first light of day, as long as we are ourselves alone. And we do not leave the B
ack Room and certainly never venture into the Front Room. You must not bother the toys on the other side. Live simply and know your place.”

  A bell rang. From the vicinity of the beaded curtain, Firkin shook an old-fashioned school bell with great vigor and announced in a booming voice: “Time, ladies and gents. Places please. Rosy dawn is sticking her fingers in our eyes. Places. Time.”

  The Queen sighed and descended her cardboard throne, and Worm slithered away quick as a grass snake. All of the puppets were moving now, putting away their games and trinkets, scurrying about to return things to how they were. Noë shouted at the Old Hag with the news, and the Dog bounded across the shelf, burning away the last excess energy. Attending the Queen, the Judges fixed her wires to her wrists and ankles, and with a great heave ho they positioned her on a coatrack, where she was to hang, the life draining from her features after one wan smile in Kay’s direction. The others retreated to their places, their expressions, too, changing into frozen smiles or frowns. Olya pulled at her hand. “Dahlink, we must find and put you back where they last left you. Do you remember? Day is coming. Hurry, hurry.”

  * * *

  After three days, his feet fell off. Theo had walked the length and breadth of the Old City, from the first light at dawn till well into the night, looking for her. Mornings he would start on Dalhousie and work his way through the narrow streets, poking his head into all the small cafés and shops they used to frequent, and then ride the funicular to the city above and join the mobs of tourists crowding the squares, popping into the old churches and galleries, lining up for the changing of the guard at the Citadelle, or descending underground to the museum of buried streets near the Frontenac towering over it all. American accents filled the air, a woman’s voice turning his head once an hour. He saw her all the time in bits and pieces, the sweep of her hair, the figure of a girl in the back of a horse-drawn carriage, a pair of shoes peeking out from a sidewalk table. There, not there. The shopkeepers and the reenactors in the square—the merchants in their tricorne hats, the maids in their bonnets—came to recognize his constant presence, sadly shaking their heads to the question in his eyes. He would show them her picture on his phone again and again, “Have you seen this woman?” Following the police department’s advice, he visited the American Consulate on the Terrasse Dufferin, bringing with him her passport and his story, and the young bureaucrat behind the desk assured him of their concern and support. They offered him a cup of tea and promised to do everything they could. But all such promises failed to convince him that anyone was looking for her.

  She was gone. He could not eat, he barely slept, he talked to himself all the time.

  Worn to the bone, he retreated to the apartment in the late afternoon to steal a few hours’ rest. A half-dozen messages blinked on the answering machine, all from his mother-in-law, Dolores: “Is there any progress? Are you out looking for her? Where have you looked?” And more ominously: “Did you two have a fight? What have you done?” Just listening to her voice made him tremble, and he wished there was something he could do to reassure her, some way to bring her up, wheelchair and all, to the steep cobblestoned streets, to let her know that he, too, was going mad over Kay’s disappearance. What have you done? What did Dolores imagine he had done?

  His papers and books lay on the table, the French-English dictionary open at M for meurtre. Muybridge could wait. Next to the manuscript sat a stack of bills and letters Kay had asked him to mail, including a card for her mother’s birthday and a picture postcard to a friend from school. Her plate and coffee cup lay in the sink. One of his old shirts she liked to wear to bed peeked out from beneath her pillows. A paperback on her nightstand, placed facedown to mark her place. He flipped it over to save the spine. A closet of clothes and shoes, a dresser drawer crammed with underwear and socks, though most of their things were back home in New York. In the bathroom, her hairbrush lingered on the windowsill, her makeup and lipstick, and her toothbrush just where she left them in the medicine cabinet. Such paltry evidence that she had ever been there. He stripped off his wrinkled clothes and stood in the shower under a hot stream of water for a long time, trying not to think. Stepping out into the steamy bathroom, he draped a thick towel over his head like a hood and sat on the edge of the tub, holding in the heat. Wrapped in a cocoon, he very nearly missed the knocking at the front door.

  “Just a sec,” he yelled and threw on a robe as he flew to the front door, crying, “Don’t go, don’t go.”

  When he saw the two men standing on the threshold, his first thought was that they had come with the worst possible news. Dressed in dark suits and ties, they had the unmistakable aura of the police, and why else would they come to the apartment unless to break it to him in person? The older of the two had silver hair atop a world-weary face. The younger man remained yet to be wizened. He was as fresh and crisp as a soldier, one of the few black men he had encountered in Québec. Water dripped down Theo’s forehead, and he wiped his skin with the end of the towel.

  “Theo Harper? Sorry to disturb you, we’re with Sûreté du Québec. Permit me to introduce myself. I am Inspector Thompson and this is my partner Sergeant Foucault. May we come in?”

  “Is this about my wife? Have you found her?”

  As he stepped into the apartment, Thompson said, “No, no. We’ve come to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

  “That’s a relief, I suppose, if you haven’t found her body, there is still hope.” Theo ushered them in and closed the door behind them. “Can I throw on some clothes? You could make yourself a cup of tea, if you like, the kettle’s in the kitchen.”

  “Please, take your time, get dressed. Foucault, will you do the honors? A cup for you, Mr. Harper?”

  He was halfway to the bedroom and nodded over his shoulder. Behind the door, as he dressed, he eavesdropped as the two policeman talked to each other in French.

  “First impressions?”

  “He seems nervous,” Foucault said from the kitchen. “Avoir l’air coupable.”

  “Il a tué sa femme?”

  “It’s often the husband. Or the boyfriend.” Foucault was pouring the third cup when Theo emerged, and they sat at the dining table cluttered with his papers.

  “Excuse the mess,” Theo said.

  “Are you a writer, Mr. Harper?” Thompson asked.

  “A translator.” He watched their faces for any sign of embarrassment, but they might as well have been stones. “I am working on a translation from French to English of the life of Eadweard Muybridge. Do you know him?”

  “No,” Thompson said. “But you are here to translate a book? I thought you were American.”

  “Oui, je sais parler français. My publisher is here in the city, but I can work anywhere. We live in New York, where I teach college, but my wife was fortunate enough to land a role with the cirque for the summer. She is an acrobat, a performer.”

  Foucault was scrutinizing him while Thompson asked the questions. He began to feel like a man under the lamp. Thompson added a cube of sugar to his tea and stirred it casually. “And how do you find Québec?”

  “We love it here. Until she went missing.”

  “You were having no problems? Between the two of you? It must be a challenge to have a spouse in the theater, always being watched, admired.”

  “Inspector,” Theo said, “I know this is the routine, but I assure you, we are fine. I told all this to the desk officer when I filed my report.”

  “And her family? Why have they not come to join in the search?”

  “She only has her mother left, back in Vermont,” Theo said. “And Dolores is in a wheelchair these past five years. Doesn’t get about very well. But we are on the phone every day.”

  “Too hot.” Thompson blew across the surface of his tea. He set down the cup and held up both hands to put a stop to Theo’s objections. “No offense, Mr. Harper. Just some details, minor things to clear up to help us with the investigation.” He nodded to his partner.

/>   Foucault took out a small memo pad and flipped to the page he desired. “Tell me what you remember about the last time you saw your wife. Anything you may have forgotten to mention to the desk officer that you can remember now?”

  “It was the afternoon, right? One day like any other. We had slept in, and she had to go to the warehouse where they prepare for the show. But they perform outside, a few blocks away. She left, and I sat down to do a little work.”

  “You weren’t fighting? Arguing?”

  “Of course not. What makes you think so?”

  “Can you tell me what she was wearing when she left the flat?”

  He screwed his politeness back into place. “Blue jeans. Gray canvas shoes? A simple blouse, white I think. I don’t remember exactly. What she always wore on her way to the show.”

  “The show.” Foucault frowned. “And you said in your report she went to dinner with others from the cast? Did she come back to the flat to change her clothes?”

  “No, I would have seen her.”

  “You were here the whole time?”

  “No, I went out to eat. At the Brigands on the rue Saint-Paul, I’m sure they will remember me. Give me an alibi.”

  With a clatter, Thompson set down his cup into the saucer. “Alibi? There is no need to talk of alibis. You went to eat, you came home. Okay. Does she keep any clothes down at this theater? Perhaps a change of something nicer to wear. A sundress, perhaps?”

  “I suppose—”

  “You suppose,” Foucault said. “We went down there and checked, monsieur, and that’s exactly what we supposed. Her jeans and shoes and blouse were still in her locker, so if she went out, it was either in costume from the cirque or she had a change of clothes.”

  “Okay, so she changed her outfit before going to dinner. What difference does that make?”