The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  He sometimes wondered at fate, at the mathematical improbability of life, of all the micro-decisions that had been made for Arkady to end up in this place, at this time, that they had found each other and become friends, of sorts. Physically, Arkady could have been his brother, with their shared blue eyes and jet-black hair. Intellectually, he could have been his peer, were he not deranged by his unfortunate illness.

  Dieter had applied for a placement fresh out of medical school because he’d heard rumours of the brilliant research happening in Nazi facilities, and believed it would be an ideal way to fast-track his career. He had realised too late that the Nazis were brutes and bores: cruel and cunning at best, but for the most part dull-witted, chaotic and mean. There wasn’t a day that passed when he didn’t regret coming here. The only upside that he could see was that as long as the camp stayed busy he would be kept away from the Russian Front. Dieter did not want to spend his life treating frostbite and self-inflicted gunshot wounds and risk being captured by the Soviets, whom he considered subhuman. He was surprised, then, to find he had such affection for a Russian. One day, he voiced his astonishment at the fact.

  ‘Believe me,’ said Arkady, ‘I am just as shocked to find a Nazi who knows what to do with a book.’

  Arkady appreciated the company too. He’d been lonely since Prague, hadn’t realised how much, even as bleakness coloured everything around him, he’d missed having someone to talk to. He’d made no friends in the Sonderkommando. The ones who didn’t go mad in the first ten minutes or take their lives after the first week were often a special type of man, the kind who could shrug off their humanity and wield cruelty and violence as adroitly as the tools for snipping hair, stripping cloth, pulling teeth. So in the evening, when the men would gather in the bunkroom, with their food and liquor and cigarettes, he would sit apart, and close his eyes and wait for the dawn alone.

  Some nights, though, after work, before Arkady returned to his barracks, he and Dieter shared a beer or a glass of cognac and talked. One evening, as a reward after a grim day performing autopsies on young men who’d died of gangrene, they got tipsy and Dieter found himself confessing his doubts about the war, about the Reich, how much he missed civilisation, how much he missed his family in Hamburg.

  ‘Do you have a large family?’ Arkady asked him.

  ‘Not very. One sister, my mother, and my father, for whom I am named.’

  ‘Dieter Pfeiffer? Your father had a name that unfortunate and still inflicted it on you?’

  It was a test, Dieter knew; the Russian was pushing the boundaries, trying to find out where he stopped being a prisoner and became a companion. He smiled, let it slide, and they went back to drinking.

  Later, Dieter stepped outside to piss, and when he came back inside, Arkady was bent over the table, packing up the surgical instruments.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Dieter said expansively, waving a drunken hand. ‘You go on to bed, I’ll clean up.’

  It was only when he was stowing his tools away in their leather case that he noticed a missing scalpel. He paused, swayed drunkenly, blinked several times to try and sober up. He checked under the benches, in the basket of medical waste. No, the scalpel was gone.

  Dieter felt rage, and, absurdly, stinging dismay, and found himself blinking back tears. He had thought that they were friends, truly, and he had not only trusted Arkady with his work, but with his life, turning his back on him while deadly medical instruments lay all about. He had been stupid. It was the height of foolishness to trust a prisoner, much less an untermensch, a degenerate.

  Dieter conducted a careful inventory of the lab. Half a dozen blades of one shape or another were missing, along with several wooden splints, which could, combined, make handy weapons. Dieter sat, brooding, trying to think clearly. Arkady was now a liability, a security risk, one that would have to be resolved.

  The doctor stewed for a moment, his thoughts now cold and clear if not sober, and made up his mind. He summoned a soldier who marched in, saluted, his heels tapping together and knocking snow over Dieter’s floor. He waited for orders. ‘Go to the Sonderkommando barracks,’ Dieter told the soldier, ‘and find prisoner Arkady Kulakov. His serial number is in my files. Take him to the Luftwaffe lab, and tell them he has volunteered for endurance testing.’

  FOUR

  Her phone was long dead. In the scramble to get out the door and follow the ambulance she’d forgotten to pack her charger. She’d nearly forgotten her son, too, had been backing out of the garage before she remembered, swore, and had to call around for a babysitter. She finally found one in her father, Trevor, who seemed overjoyed to head over in the middle of the night, a joy she wished she could ascribe to love for his grandson, rather than bald-faced salivation at Tess inheriting Arkady’s estate.

  She regretted running the phone battery down trying to reach Adam as she sat in the waiting room, forgetting time and again that it wouldn’t work, getting angry at herself for thinking irrationally, then realising it was fine to be mad, because her husband was off chasing fireflies or whatever he did, at one of the few times she needed him around.

  It wasn’t unusual for Adam to vanish for hours right when his presence was needed, but it had never been quite this impossible to reach him. Every time the call rang out then went through to his drawling voicemail message: ‘Hi, you’ve reached Kulakov. I’m busy, or just ignoring you, so leave me a message and I’ll hit you back.’ She’d been trying to get him to change it to something more professional for ages, and now, sitting and waiting for her father-in-law in the holding tank of this hospital, she felt a hot flare of rage as she listened to it yet again.

  She was checking her email for the hundredth time when her phone went dark, the little wheel spinning out into the black, and she only realised when it was completely dead that she couldn’t remember a single phone number off by heart.

  ‘Shit!’ she said, then, remembering where she was, tried to compose herself. Searching through her purse for distraction, she ate a whole box of Tic Tacs, crunching them before they could soften in her mouth, and when they ran out, a couple of valium.

  By the time the doctor came in, Tess was halfway hypnotised by the glare off the glossy pages of the waiting-room magazines and the soft hum of the fluorescent lights overhead, all the roiling stress submerged under a chemical mellow. When the doctor took her into an office to deliver her diagnosis, Tess reacted as she might if a waiter came back to the table to tell her they were all out of the salmon that day.

  ‘He’s had a stroke,’ the doctor said. ‘At this point it’s too early to know how bad it is, but it doesn’t look good.’

  ‘A stroke,’ Tess repeated, softly. ‘Yes, I thought it probably was.’

  The doctor was professional but sympathetic, and, thought Tess, unreasonably pretty for someone working the night shift in the emergency ward, even in a mood-lit private hospital like this. She looked like a sassy medico from a soap opera. When did doctors start becoming younger than her?

  Tess tucked her legs up under her in the chair across from the doctor’s desk and swivelled back and forth while the doctor talked, using long, worrying words that meant very little to Tess: cerebrovascular trauma, dilated cardiomyopathy, concerning imaging results. Her bedside manner was soft and firm, and her voice raked Tess’s scalp with pleasure, like being massaged by a hairdresser, even as she delivered the terrible news.

  ‘He’s had an embolism, most likely from a small blood clot breaking off from the heart and settling in the brain. It’s led to a lack of blood in the area, causing an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, or stroke.’ The doctor swung her computer around so that Tess could see, and called up a series of images. It struck Tess how much the inside of a person – the veins, the hydraulics, the surging thought and electricity – resembled the blueprints to any other machine. It could have been a schematic for a new product ready to be emailed to their factories in China.

  ‘And I’m afraid that while this cer
ebral incident was serious, probably triggered by some kind of extreme stressor, it isn’t Mr Kulakov’s first.’ The doctor pointed at some dark blotches on the glowing web of Arkady’s brain scan. ‘This is necrotic brain tissue, and it seems to indicate that Mr Kulakov has suffered a whole series of micro strokes over the past few months.’

  ‘That seems . . . I mean, why wouldn’t he say anything? Wouldn’t we have noticed?’

  ‘Maybe, but probably not. They may well have happened at night, and this is the first Mr Kulakov will have known about it. In fact, he probably won’t know about them. I’ll be frank: the prognosis is not great here. As he ages, these incidents are likely to occur again, and the accompanying confusion and incidents like you experienced tonight are going to increase. It’s not just this stroke – with the smaller incidents, you’re looking at the onset of vascular dementia. His mental condition is likely to deteriorate rapidly.’

  ‘So what does that mean? His brain is broken?’

  ‘Not his brain, not exactly.’ The doctor called up an image of Arkady’s heart, and pointed at a shadowy mess in the middle. ‘Mr Kulakov’s heart shows considerable stress, and we see evidence of significant scarring on the wall of the heart. Some is new, natural wear and tear that we’d expect in an older man, but some is decades old. The scarring and arterial constriction is consistent with someone who’s lived with hypertension and abnormal levels of stress for a long time. Basically, his heart’s walls have weakened, meaning it doesn’t pump as well as it should. This has allowed a thrombus – a clot – to form, and when bits break off, they have the potential to block smaller vessels. The brain doesn’t get enough blood, the blood enough oxygen, and eventually the body will just wear out.’

  ‘So how long does he have?’

  The doctor shrugged. It seemed to Tess that doctors shouldn’t be allowed to shrug, at least not during consultations. ‘The speed at which vascular dementia progresses varies from person to person. We can’t reverse the brain damage, but it might be possible to slow the progression of the disease. Medication, diet, exercise, all might help; but then, they might not.’

  Tess took this in, tried to parse what it meant, failed. It was all too new, too big, too sudden. ‘Can I see him?’

  Arkady was dwarfed by the size of the bed, which was itself dwarfed by the size of the room. It was much, much larger than she’d expected; larger, in fact, than her old apartment in New York. It was vast, a sprawling vista populated here and there with feature lamps and pot plants. A heart monitor beeped among the bank of life-support equipment that buttressed the bed.

  She’d seen a photo of Arkady in his youth, standing unsmiling in black-and-white at St Kilda Pier after being badgered into a family portrait – he was always strangely reluctant to be photographed – with his wife and son, and been struck by the bulging muscles fighting their way out of his sleeves, the unexpected pelt peeking out the top of his shirt. Now, his chest, bare and covered in monitor electrodes, was crumpled, the best part of it lost in the past, a balloon floating about long after the party had died. The doctor was tactfully silent for a moment, then cleared her throat and spoke quietly so as not to wake him.

  ‘The human body isn’t designed to hold up to the kind of stress that Mr Kulakov seems to have been under for some time. He’s strong, but the wear and tear on his organs suggest that he’s suffered from intense physical and emotional trauma for long stretches.’

  There was a moment’s silence in which Tess took Arkady’s hand, running a thumb across the topographical map life had carved into his flesh, where the callused ridges on his hands turned into papery dry skin. ‘He was in the camps, you know,’ she said at last. ‘In the war, over in Poland.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, that would explain some of the trauma on his internal organs. It could also explain his unusual behaviour. You see it a lot in older survivors of extremely traumatic life experiences; soldiers, medics, civilians caught in war zones may start to regress to previous traumas that they have repressed. In cases such as Mr Kulakov’s, where the onset of dementia has occurred, there’s the possibility of him becoming confused and returning to old behaviours. I’ve seen a lot of Holocaust survivors with dementia start to live in constant terror that they’ll be returned to the camps, becoming fearful, starting to shoplift from stores because in their mind they’re back in the forties, just trying to survive. That would all be consistent with the behaviour you describe: his wandering at night, his confusion, his hiding precious objects in the ground. I’m sorry to say, but these symptoms are likely to get worse.’

  ‘So there’s nothing we can do?’

  The doctor smiled sadly, and together they watched Arkady’s chest sink and rise with his breath. ‘I know this is a lot to take in, Tess,’ said the doctor. ‘If you feel comfortable we have a psychologist on staff who’s very good at helping to process the feelings that rise at times like this. We also work with a rabbi, who . . .’

  ‘Oh no,’ Tess said. ‘No, I’m not Jewish.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I just assumed that . . . Our files show Mrs Kulakov was in hospice care with us some years ago and she and the rabbi were very close.’

  ‘Yes. Arkady’s wife, Rachel . . . We never met.’ Tess had heard a great deal about Adam’s grandmother but she’d passed away long before Tess had come into the play. ‘She was very religious. Arkady, not so much. He was a gentile, in the camps for political reasons, and he never converted after he married Rachel. She was upset, but what could she do?’

  For reasons she had never fully understood, Arkady had very little to do with the Jewish community, although he had married Rachel, a fussy, fiery Polish girl who’d been in Auschwitz around the same time as him. In Melbourne, when they met, they had marvelled at the coincidence, courted and fallen in love, then conceived John, their only child, Adam’s father, and who had himself married a shiksa, which Rachel declared had broken her heart and would drive her into an early grave.

  Rachel had, in fact, died young, just a few years after her grandson was born. She’d been used as a medical test subject by the Nazis and one of the experimenters had injected her with something that had stunted her liver. It had never grown properly and childbirth had put too great a strain on it. When it became clear how serious Rachel’s illness was, Arkady had raged against the Nazis, against the doctors who couldn’t save her, against the God he didn’t believe in, except in moments of blinding fury when he needed a punching bag big enough to take his anger. But nothing worked, and she passed away. After she was gone, Arkady, who had never been very social at the best of times, drifted away from the community, and now had almost nothing to do with them.

  As Tess spoke about Adam’s family to the doctor, she realised that her husband still didn’t know his grandfather was in the hospital.

  She was still awake when he got in late that night, after the requisite hours in the slow, digital alarm clock–lit purgatory of their bedroom, in which sleep refused to come to her no matter how many breathing exercises she dredged up from a distant yoga class, or how viciously she brutalised her pillow searching for a cooler side. He tiptoed in, undressed quietly, and slipped into bed beside her. She went to speak, and found her voice tight with rage.

  ‘Where have you been, Adam?’

  ‘Out. Out with friends.’

  She considered herself a realist, and while she’d never managed to make a relationship last very long before Adam, growing up around her chaotic, fabulist parents had inadvertently educated her in exactly what a marriage was, which was a contract to be renegotiated time and again as the currencies brought to the table – sex, loyalty, companionship, family – waxed and waned. Yes, her husband could be one-dimensional, even simple-minded at times, evasive and daft at others, but he was, she thought, a kind man underneath it all. Disappointing at times, but reliably so, and a good father to Kade, whom he adored with a force that occasionally broadsided her, even after all these years. As petty and as bullying as he could b
e with his staff, he had never lost his temper with his son, or his wife. So, in return, she was as magnanimous as she could be about his frequent flakiness and not-brilliant evasions. Tonight, though, after his vanishing act when Arkady could have been dying, she’d had enough.

  ‘What friends?’

  ‘Just some guys . . . from school.’

  ‘And what was so important that you couldn’t stay at dinner?’

  ‘There’s a problem with our Chinese suppliers. I had to put out a bunch of fires.’

  ‘What kind of fires?’

  ‘There was a problem with a blueprint. It was urgent. Couldn’t wait until morning. What’s your problem?’

  Tess sighed heavily, and turned back over. Adam sat up. ‘What’s the matter, Tess? Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘Oh?’ Adam sat up in a huff, summoning as much easy outrage as he could at a pinch, which was plenty, and demanded, ‘So where do you think I was?’

  Tess rolled over and curled into a little ball. ‘I honestly don’t care any more. Just do what you need to.’ This sent Adam off on a long, angry screed about workdays and supply lines and duty, which she listened to until he paused to draw breath, when she calmly said, ‘I just wish you had told me where you were going, because your grandfather is in hospital,’ then paused, and, despite herself, smiled in the dark, enjoying the moral high-ground as she heard Adam derail mid righteous monologue, take a deep breath, and freak out.

  __________

  After Tess had filled Adam in on Arkady’s episode, he tried calling the hospital and lost his temper at the night nurse who kept asking him to call back in the morning. Adam lay next to his wife for ages, his mind ticking over, pinging like an overheated engine. Once he was certain Tess was asleep, her breath deep and regular, he slipped out of bed and padded, naked, down the stairs to the lounge room, through to the kitchen.

  He hit the lights, and the halogen bleached crawling afterimages into his eyes that he blinked several times to clear, before retrieving a bottle of vodka from the freezer. He took a belt straight from the bottle, and another over ice in a tumbler that sloshed through his stomach without dislodging the hard, fluttering knot inside it.