The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  The accoutrements of wealth he’d accumulated went unappreciated. He owned a Mercedes sedan that he’d bought new in the seventies and kept in pristine condition his whole life. He’d loved that car like a child, but it had been an age since he’d taken it out of the garage. In fact, he never took himself out, spending all day moping in his sprawling house by the river. A lady from a service picked up his laundry once a fortnight and came back the next day with racks full of neatly pressed suits and shirts, and a sweaty, harried man from another service delivered him frozen meals he ate straight out of the tray, then left them to pile up around the house until the cleaning lady came. As far as Tess could tell, Arkady had no interests, no friends beyond his business associates, all of whom had promptly vanished when he stepped down as director, and no interest in taking up a hobby. He seemed to have nothing to look forward to except the times he dropped by the office to double-check the books.

  The old man had worked fourteen-hour days, at least, every day for his whole life in Australia. According to Adam, he seemed to barely tolerate quality time with his family, even on the holidays his wife – a devout Jew, observant even though she had married an atheist, her faith unshaken, even after Auschwitz – insisted on celebrating, when he would fidget his way through her prayers, bolt down some gefilte fish, before heading off to the office again. Arkady had particularly despised Yom Kippur, the day of atonement when work was forbidden, and would sit in sullen silence in the lounge room until it was time to go to bed. When his wife passed away, he stopped observing the holidays altogether.

  In the months after Tess had finally mastered the business, Arkady had stopped coming in to visit and had abruptly gone downhill. He’d even stopped listening to his records and then stopped eating. After some debate about what to do with him, he had moved into one of Adam and Tess’s spare rooms. There were plenty of spare rooms – they’d bought a house with room for a much larger family than theirs but, without ever really discussing it, had decided that one child was enough for them. Arkady had moved in, his mood had improved, he’d become engaged with the world again, and, at her suggestion, started coming in to help her with the books again, although they both understood it was unnecessary.

  Truthfully, Tess had missed Arkady’s time in the office as much as he had. The most peaceful times she could remember that didn’t involve a handful of tranquillisers were the endless afternoons spent working in silence alongside Arkady, tilling their abstract fortunes into neat, fertile rows. That was happiness: the toddler bouncing on his great-grandfather’s knee, her husband in the next room making an elaborate sales pitch to some new clients, her mind slowly ticking over with steady, quiet accomplishment, and Arkady, friend and mentor, watching over the lot of them with a secretive half-smile on his face.

  One afternoon, there was a knock at the door and Shubangi, their head of product, entered. She and Tess had a brief conversation about overheads on the new toy line, and then Shubangi left. As Tess returned to her work, Arkady started laughing at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You talk like a different person when you’re doing business. Like a – what is the English? – a robot.’

  She blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

  Arkady made circles of his fingers, raised them to his eyes in a parody of her reading glasses. ‘Hello, Shubangi. Please come inside, and talk to me, Tess, about deliverables. Then we will discuss what learnings we have achieved from the outcomes. And then we will engage the stakeholder and also discuss the synergy.’

  ‘Hey, old man!’ She feigned outrage. ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘What is not fair,’ Arkady said, dropping his impression, ‘is what your generation of professionals has done to the poor English language. I speak five languages, and I have no idea what on earth you are saying.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. I’m sorry. It’s a bad habit. I never thought it would happen to me, and it has. I wonder how else this job has impacted me as a person?’ She put her hand to her mouth, gasped in mock horror. ‘Oh, God. I used impact as a verb. How can I go on?’

  ‘There there, Lubovka.’ Arkady reached over and patted her hand. ‘You’d be amazed what you can live with.’

  Arkady wasn’t in his bedroom, but he had been. His room, which, since he’d moved in and re-engaged with the world, he’d kept in a state of medical-grade cleanliness. Now, it was ruined. The bed, normally carefully made with hospital corners seconds after the old man woke up, was upended, the sheets scattered and torn, the mattress flipped onto the floor. The wardrobe door swung open on its hinge and the suits inside spilled half out and across the floor. It looked for all the world like the house had been knocked over while she slept. She felt a stab of fear, that someone had broken in, had left with her valuables, or, worse, was possibly still in the house.

  ‘Arkady?’ she called softly from the doorway. Feeling foolish about her wimpy little croak, she did it again with more confidence and stepped into the room: ‘Arkady?’ His turntable was spinning; the record had finished and the harsh scratch scratch scratch of the needle crept up her spine. She moved over to it and lifted the stylus, then, almost reflexively, slipped the record back into its sleeve and returned it to its spot on the shelf, where Arkady’s records rested next to his late wife’s, all jazz, all gathering dust. Arkady hated jazz, resolutely refused to listen to it: bebop, big-band, anything with a horn provoked his ire. If they were eating in a restaurant that played easy-listening, Arkady would slip away from the table and ask them to turn it off.

  In the silence that filled up the room, she could hear the weeping that had jolted her out of sleep again, and she realised it was coming from outside.

  Arkady’d had a magnificent garden at his old home, and, although it had been tended by a contractor, he’d seemed to enjoy it. When he’d moved in with them, Tess gently suggested that gardening might help him fill the days, and he had agreed. Now, rows of tomato and string-bean plants climbed stakes, basking in the watery sunlight that bounced off the swimming pool, and on nice days she would see Arkady out there, sweating in his shirt and waistcoat, picking caterpillars off leaves and muttering under his breath.

  That’s where she found him, crouched on his hands and knees, scrabbling in the dirt. It was raining, a soft, dismal fall that hid the tears running down the old man’s face, if not the sound.

  Arkady’s crying was clearly not meant to be heard by anyone; here were tears that had been stored somewhere deep for the longest time until they broke out again, geysered up under pressure to become a loud, animal wail which finally broke down to a whimper.

  Tess stood shocked for a minute, watching this man, who to her epitomised restraint and dignity, weeping face down in the mud. She stood, vacillating between wanting to put her arms around him and to slink off pretending she’d never seen this, while the rain picked up and the rising hiss of it hitting the pool drowned out the sobbing. She watched as he uncurled from a fetal ball and his hands plunged into the loose soil around the roots of the plants. Unsure what to do, she approached him slowly.

  ‘Arkady?’ she asked softly, then again, louder, ‘Arkady?’

  Arkady’s head snapped around, his eyes wild. They stared right through her.

  ‘Verzeih mir,’ he choked out. ‘Wir wussten nicht.’

  Tess approached slowly with her palms stretched out, making cooing noises. This is ridiculous, she thought, he’s not a dog. Still, it seemed to work, and he let her approach, then collapsed quivering into her as she put her arms around him. As he got close she realised, much to her surprise, that he stank of booze. Arkady, for the first time since she’d known him, was drunk, falling-down drunk.

  She got him inside, and, worried, wanted to call Adam. Where was he? What was she supposed to do?

  After thinking hard for a moment, she decided to do for Arkady what she would want should someone find her facedown in the garden, inconsolable. She gave him a valium with a glass of water, and he took it without questioning. She then l
ed him to his room, where she used a hand-towel to clean his face and hands before she made his bed and helped him get undressed. It felt indecent to be undressing the old man, who stood docile while she unbuttoned his vest and shirt, even raising his arms like a child to help her take off his sodden singlet. Underneath, stark against the sagging white skin, a mess of crosshatched scars covered his shoulders, down his back, stretching from his shoulder blade to his rib cage. A jagged surgical scar traced up his chest from navel to throat. She bit her lip to stop the swear words that crowded there, and the questions.

  Arkady had told her that he’d been hurt in the war, spent time in Auschwitz, but this was much worse than she had imagined. She helped him into a fresh flannel pyjama shirt, and as he threaded his arms into the sleeves she caught a glimpse of the crude, faded number tattooed into his forearm. She thought about whether she should remove his trousers, but they seemed dry enough and she decided against it, instead gently moving his legs to lever him into bed. She pulled the covers over him, and stroked his hair back from his face, making soothing noises like she did for her son after he’d had a bad dream. Soon, the old man’s face relaxed, and he slept.

  She craved a cigarette and fetched one from the pack she kept hidden behind the shelf of classics that Adam liked to talk about at parties, but, she suspected, had never read. Adam would be disgusted to know she still enjoyed the occasional sneaky cigarette, but fuck it, she thought, if he’s going to vanish on me at a time like this, then he doesn’t get a say in the matter. Walking outside, she inhaled furiously, and started pacing by the pool, wondering what she was supposed to do. Words jumped out at her in the darkness, serious words, words with consequence: stroke; aneurism; dementia. Where the fuck was Adam? She found her mobile and tried her husband, then finally, giving in to a nagging fear in the back of her mind, decided to call an ambulance to come take Arkady to the hospital.

  Her smoke had burned down to the filter, and she walked over the vegetable patch and threw it into the dirt. It landed in the mud and extinguished with a small hiss. Using the toe of her shoe, she pushed the butt into the mud to better hide it, and her foot nudged something hard. Squatting down, she reached into the mud and felt around, pulled up a parcel, something hard swaddled in a towel. When she unwrapped it she found she was holding a doll, the original design from Arkady’s empire, the hardwood, floppy-limbed Sarah doll.

  __________

  Dr Dieter Pfeiffer liked Arkady, found his assistance invaluable. There were gaps missing from his education, of course, cut short as it had been by the war, which Arkady had tried to fill with his own study. The results were mixed; some things you just couldn’t learn from books. Dieter would need to give him extensive training before he trusted him to perform surgery, for example, but autopsies, vivisections, pathology, removing blood and bone specimens from bodies – everything that the lab needed help with – he had a natural talent for.

  Arkady was a big man and when he sat at his station his hulking back hunched uncomfortably over to dwarf the desk, but if Dieter peeked over the man’s shoulder he would see him using his fingers, each a gnarled Slavic club, as gently as if he were rescuing a butterfly that had fallen in a pond. The way he prepared a blood slide was a thing of beauty, a perfect circle in the middle of the glass square, the platelets and the plasma dancing for the microscope. It was a rare day that went by that Dieter wasn’t thankful for discovering the Russian languishing in the Sonderkommando. He was above that grunt work; a good doctor, in the middle of a Europe where good men, let alone doctors, were in short supply. For Dieter, who was buckling under the workload as Mengele’s demands grew more erratic and outlandish, Arkady was a godsend. He needed all the help he could get.

  The Russian was a quick study, but better than that, he was kind. He had a bedside manner that soothed the children, made them more relaxed and easier to work with, could even coax a laugh out of a little girl, even after her siblings had gone to the research rooms and not returned.

  The start of their working relationship had been shaky. When Dieter had explained the scope and purpose of their research, Arkady had been outraged and refused to work, especially after he saw Mengele’s zoo, the special barracks housing the twins that the doctor was collecting for his comparative studies. Dieter had explained Dr Mengele’s scientific theories, and his method of using twins, one for the experimental factor you were testing, one for control. ‘This way,’ Dieter explained, ‘you have the perfect measure of the effectiveness of a treatment or a pathogen. With identical twins, the biological data is identical, the sociological data virtually identical. You have one factor influencing the result, the factor you introduce into the equation.’

  Arkady had been horrified. ‘They are children!’

  ‘They are subjects.’

  ‘They are human beings.’

  ‘Subhuman.’

  ‘I’m not going to be part of this.’ Arkady was quiet, but adamant, and Dieter frowned. He considered threatening Arkady, or summoning a guard to have him beaten, but he found all that distasteful. Besides, he suspected it would be ineffective. If he was to recruit Arkady he was going to need to appeal to him as a man of science, or as a humanitarian. And he knew a way to do both.

  The selections happened every time a new trainload of civilians arrived at Birkenau, where SS men with attack dogs would greet the arrivals and divide them into groups. The strongest were selected for labour and sent three kilometres down the road to Auschwitz where they were assigned to work details in the factories. Everyone else – the elderly, children, pregnant women – was sent to the gas chambers. Arkady had already seen a selection, of course, when he arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex himself, and he’d seen its aftermath. But this was the first time he’d seen one from the outside, all the faces streaming forward, blank, hopeless, frightened. He’d thought he would feel more for them, he knew exactly what they were going through, but he found it impossible to think of them as individuals. There were just too many. One poor person on the way to the gas chamber was a tragedy. A million was a statistic.

  A Nazi with perfect posture, a long white coat over his black uniform, strolled up and down the lines, a baton swinging at his side, whistling. Every once in a while he would stop, tap an arrival on the shoulder with his baton, gesture for them to get out of line.

  ‘That’s Mengele,’ Dieter told Arkady from where they watched on the sidelines. ‘He comes down here to pick speci­mens for his experiments: twins, dwarves, giants, anyone with an interesting mutation. He is a genius of genetics. Very famous in his field.’

  ‘Why does he come down here? Why doesn’t he just send soldiers?’

  ‘Because he is terrified of losing specimens to the gas chambers if he’s not here to catch them. One time they brought in a family of seven dwarves; seven! And sent them to the gas chambers! Luckily, we were able to catch them in time and save them for the zoo.’

  Together they watched Mengele make his selections from the children: a pair of twins; a little girl with heterochromia, one eye shining green, the other blue. The rest of the children not old enough to work were dragged away from their parents and marched towards the gas chambers.

  ‘You see,’ Dieter had said sombrely, as Arkady watched the young being escorted away, those too small to walk on their own being carried down the ramp by the older children, ‘there is no place for children in Auschwitz. They cannot work, so we have no use for them. It makes sense.’ The Nazi shrugged. ‘Some children will survive, perhaps, but not without your help. If you work with me, I can help you to save these people. At least the children, at least some of them.’

  Arkady weighed it up and made his decision. The war could not last forever, one way or another, and in the time he’d spent in occupied Prague he’d seen enough to know that it would not go well for the Germans. They were spread too thin; there was too little oversight of their worst excesses. The Third Reich was not the next age of mankind; it was a bunch of chicken farmers and thugs with
delusions of grandeur, running out the clock. He would wait, and he would survive, and he would save as many of the children as he could from this mad scientist.

  So he went to work, performing measurements and chest drains and bloodlettings on the children because he knew he would be gentler than anyone else.

  And in return for his compliance, Dieter made sure that Arkady was kept away from the worst of it. When a subject had a limb amputated for no reason but to test immune response, he sent Arkady to another ward to distract the children with games. On the days that Dieter injected chemicals into the eyes of living subjects to try to change their colour, he made sure that Arkady was sent out to run errands.

  Dieter had also started to think of Arkady as a friend, which he knew was stupid, knowing that the Russian would soon be dead and by his own orders. Still, Dieter liked him, he really did. The Russian was taciturn and gruff, but urbane. He had a dark, dry sense of humour and an encyclopedic know­ledge, not only of medicine but also of art and music and culture and literature. To pass the time while they waited for a slide to develop or a bacterial culture to bloom, they would have long arguments about books they’d loved and hated. Arkady would rhapsodise at great length about Chekhov – ‘a consolation prize for the rest of Russia’ – and in the next breath contemptuously dismiss Tolstoy, whom he despised, especially the holy Anna Karenina: ‘A 800-page pamphlet on agricultural reform and an argument about caviar by the most boring people to ever learn French.’ Talking to him, Dieter realised how much he enjoyed the company, and that until now he’d been frightfully lonely. He found that at night, after Arkady had finished his work and returned to the Sonderkommando barracks, his laboratory and the adjoining quarters seemed empty without him.