The Toymaker

by Liam Pieper

  He filled the glass and walked to his grandfather’s room, surveying the disarray Tess had seen earlier. Since he’d moved in, Arkady’s mind had run on rails, his habits on clockwork. In the mornings he would be at the table early, drinking a heavily sugared black coffee and frowning over the newspaper, having bathed and shaved long before anyone else had risen.

  This mess seemed a far more damning diagnosis that something was profoundly wrong than anything a doctor could tell him. That word, dementia, was just a concept, an idea. This, the confusion that had led to the desecration of his grand­father’s discipline – this was something to worry about.

  Adam had been robbed once, back when he was at university. He’d gone out drinking and come home to find the back door smashed in, the whole house tossed. The thieves had wrecked the place, pulling out every drawer and dumping them upside down looking for valuables. He’d lost his computer and all his CDs, but the mess was what really bothered him. He could buy a new computer, but the sanctity of the place was ruined. The state of Arkady’s room reminded him of that feeling, a physical revulsion, a crawling revolt under the skin. His grandfather would be appalled by the mess when he came back from the hospital, Adam knew, and he decided to clean the room for him.

  Adam squatted down and started to gather up the spilled items when something caught his eye. A dull metallic gleam shone from the back of the wardrobe, invisible from eye level behind the hems of Arkady’s old-school European greatcoats. Adam shuffled forward on his haunches and pushed the coats aside to reveal a stash of food. He reached into the back and started pulling out tins of canned carrots, pickles, beans, a large jar of vinegar stuffed tight with rolls of pickled herring – all the gross, fresh-off-the-boat food that Arkady insisted on keeping in the pantry.

  He’d read about Holocaust survivors doing this, regressing to the camps and hiding under their beds at night, or hoarding food in the present while their ruined minds wandered the bombed-out ruins of Europe. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he muttered. ‘Poor Grandpa.’

  One by one he retrieved the cans and stacked them on the floor. To get right to the back he pushed aside a pile of junk that he’d hastily shoved into the wardrobe when the old man was moving in and his hand connected with his old jewellery box. Although he had long since forgotten its existence, the second he touched it, fingertips tripping over the fine engravings in hardwood, he knew what it was.

  The jewellery box had been a gift from his mother on his sixteenth birthday, antique, probably priceless, utterly inappropriate for a teenage boy. It was characteristic of her in that it was expensive, tasteful and in no conceivable way something he would be interested in. She tended to buy things she liked on impulse, then, when bored of them, pass them on as gifts.

  As a teen, Adam, who had never shown an interest in collecting either jewellery or antiques, had been crushed when he unwrapped the box, hoping against hope for the keys to a brand-new dirt-bike, or a Nintendo, or even a roll of cash for him to decide for himself, rather than this bullshit. He’d taken it to his room and cried, the tears hot and silent and muffled by his pillow, as he would be horrified if his parents knew he was weeping, even though he wanted them to understand how bitterly they had disappointed him.

  He’d thrown the box against the wall in a fit of rage, wanting it to shatter, but the ancient hardwood bounced off with an unsatisfying bonk and fell open on the carpet, displaying the velvet interior with all its little compartments for rings and chains. When he picked it up he found the spring-loaded false bottom, and, delighted, immediately started hiding his drugs in there, congratulating himself on getting one up on his aloof, indifferent mother. Some nights, listening to CDs and blowing smoke out the window of his bedroom, he wondered whether his mum had known about the false bottom of the box and how much mileage he was getting out of the stash-spot, and, if so, whether that actually made the gift surprisingly thoughtful.

  Lost in thought, Adam sat on the floor of the games room cradling the box, then on a whim, popped the false bottom to find a long-forgotten joint he had rolled on some late-night video-game binge and never smoked. Gingerly, he poked the dry, flaky paper to test its stability, and, satisfied, slipped out to the backyard to smoke it.

  After a couple of puffs, Adam found himself calming down, the vodka in his belly now warm and soothing, the pot straightening out his tumultuous thoughts. He looked out over the backyard, where the pool lights made the water shimmer and throw twisting glowing ribbons across his property. His gaze came to rest on Arkady’s little vegetable garden, some of it uprooted by the confused old man, the rest already looking untended, unloved, doomed.

  Adam thought of the company. When he’d inherited it, it had been in similar shape to the garden, everything carefully planted and latticed, but growing out of control. His own father, John Kulakov, Arkady’s only son and heir, had never shown any interest in running the family company, instead pursuing a career in the law. Adam’s dad had met his mum, Sandy, at university, finished his articles while his mum carried him to term, and made partner by Adam’s third birthday. By Adam’s tenth birthday, John had worked himself into a paragon of achievement and a textbook example of obesity-related hypertension, and before Adam’s twelfth birthday John Kulakov’s heart had exploded, leaving Sandy unable to cope. She did the best she could, despite her grief and the stress of having to raise Adam alone, which she’d treated with a regime of benzodiazepines and booze. It was a diet she kept secret until one night when it made her fall asleep at the wheel on the lonely road back from the family beach-house, a little under a decade later.

  He rarely thought about his parents, except sometimes in dismal insomniac hours like these. Adam knew that people thought his devotion to his grandfather was strange, but they didn’t know what Arkady meant to him. His parents’ marriage had been an unhappy one; they both drank too much, and would have loud, melodramatic fights during which either would use Adam as a weapon to batter their belligerent spouse with. His happiest memories from his childhood were of playing alone in his room, or better yet, with Arkady, who would regularly stop by, shame John and Sandy into acting like adults, and whisk little Adam away to the park, or the zoo, or, best of all, Europe.

  Every year of Adam’s childhood, Arkady had embarked on an annual buying trip to Europe, where he would visit the factories and workshops of storied old-world toy and game companies to scout for new products to bring to the Australian market. When Adam was old enough, Arkady started to plan these trips to coincide with school holidays, and together, while Australia baked and sweated, Adam and Arkady would tour Europe, which seemed to Adam to be one endless winter playground. His happiest memories were of long trips cruising winding European roads to factories in far-flung parts of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, ever further east as the Iron Curtain rusted, warm and sleepy in a German limousine, listening to his grandfather mutter and crinkle the newspaper, while snow tapped against the windows.

  As an only child, with few friends, these trips were a reprieve from the loneliness that hung heavy over his whole early life and, years later, in an effort to thank him, Adam had bought Arkady a Rolex to replace the scuffed vintage model he wore on his wrist. Arkady had taken the gift, read the accompanying card and burst into hysterical laughter until, finally, regaining his composure and dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief, he’d explained: he had taken Adam to Europe as a guinea pig.

  To better understand what would appeal to children, Arkady had taken Adam to all those foreign showrooms as a tester. He would just hang back and watch little Adam run out to play. Whatever he got fixated on, that’s what Arkady would buy. Adam was Arkady’s bellwether; he just had to go in the direction the boy took him.

  When Adam had told Tess about this discovery, she’d laughed, and commented that, while that was kind of brilliant, it was also borderline psychopathic, wounding Adam. She did not understand Arkady like he did. Nobody did. He had been, and remained, the single greatest guiding force in Adam’s development.


  As a grown man, Adam sometimes felt a twinge of regret that he’d never really had an adult relationship with his mother, who’d already become a slightly floaty, ethereal presence by the time he emerged from adolescence, yet he had nothing but a smouldering resentment for his father.

  Adam had barely known John Kulakov at all, and looking at photos from his childhood he could summon no memories of the man that didn’t paint him as a short-tempered, burned-out workaholic. He remembered one incident when he’d burst into John’s study seeking someone to play with, and his dad had looked up from his phone call and yelled at him that he had no time for games and to go play with his fucking toys. Later, John had gone to find Adam in his room, snuffling into his pillow, and apologised, or gave as much of an apology as he could.

  ‘You know not to disturb me while I’m working.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so mean to me,’ moaned Adam. ‘Grandpa works too, and he’s nice.’ John had sighed then, and frowned, and finally moved into the room and sat heavily on the end of Adam’s bed. He said nothing for a long moment. Adam kept his face buried in the pillow, but heard the bedsprings creak under his dad’s bulk, could hear the unhealthy wheeze of his breath, could smell the afternoon bourbon on it. Finally, he said, ‘Adam, I know you think the sun shines out of Grandpa’s arse, and maybe he’s good to you, but let me tell you, he was a shit father. A really shit father. And what’s more, he’s done some terrible things. Unforgivable things. You’re too young to understand, but one day you will.’ John had died not long after that, and although they must have spoken again, that was the last thing Adam could remember him saying. It had shocked him to the core, and even now, decades later, he had never forgotten it. How was it, he thought, that his grand­father could be such a selfless and noble man, and his father so rotten? Since the day his dad died, he had tried to be more like Arkady and less like John, whom he still blamed for shirking his duty to Mitty & Sarah.

  John Kulakov had rejected the family business, considered himself to be above toy-making. Adam, for his part, thought there could be no greater responsibility than to take charge of the company when the time came, to protect and build on every­thing Arkady had created. He had a destiny, a fact that had weighed heavily on him over the years. Sometimes he would think about what his life would have been like if he’d chosen another path, but he was consoled by the thought that what he did gave so many people reasons to get up in the morning, which, when you thought about it, was a better use of a lifetime than any other.

  Now, tonight, with his grandfather ailing and maybe not long for the world, Adam wondered if it was more than family commitment that had driven him to take the role. He didn’t believe in God, necessarily, but there had been certain times in life when he could feel some invisible force at his back, guiding him this way and that. He’d felt it the first time he’d called a company meeting to outline his vision. The feeling had been there the night he’d met Tess, as well as the night they’d married, and the day Kade was born, and a half a dozen other perfect moments through his life.

  The first time he’d known for sure that something was watching over him was at nineteen, when he’d been driving his first car, a boxy, unwieldy Saab convertible, down Toorak Road late on a stormy night, not exactly drunk, but too tipsy to be driving on P plates, or to notice the tram tracks which caught the edge of his rear tyre and spun the car out. It had rotated completely around, and then halfway round again before the rear end smashed sideways into a Corolla parked on the side of the road. He’d sat shocked for a minute, deafened by the rain on the roof of the cab and blinded by the deluge outside, as a thousand horror stories of young drink-drivers going to prison ran through his head. He’d scrambled out to find that, while the other car had been totalled, his Saab was unscathed, the chassis intact, the paintwork unscratched. He’d driven off without leaving a note, filled with a great surge of relief and faith that this was definitive proof that the world had a greater purpose for him.

  Tonight he felt it again. He would have never admitted to his staff, to his wife, even to himself, that he was uncertain about his stewardship of the company, but deep down, the doubt had gnawed at him. Tonight, as the hours ran out and his glass emptied, his mind was changing.

  Tonight, he could feel it, almost hear it – great invisible gears turning behind the scenes, tectonic plates shifting beneath him, daring him to lose his balance. He would not, though; he knew that very clearly. The universe was testing him; his grandfather’s illness was as clear a sign as any that it was time for him, at long last, to man up.

  It was a tragedy, sure, but so was the war that had forged his grandfather into the man he had been. Now, as the company struggled in a tanking economy, he would stand firm and rise to the challenge. He would rebuild the company from the ground up. He would be faithful and true to his wife. He would set a role model for his son worthy of Arkady’s legacy. Just earlier tonight, he had stood up to the bully Tariq in the car park, handled it like a man, shrugged it off. There was no greater bully than fate, and Adam would meet his head-on.

  The joint was finished now so he took a last draw and flicked the butt out into the night, where it arced lazily until it landed, hissing, in the pool. Adam thought about retrieving it before Tess could find it, but that would involve grabbing the pool net from the shed, and the cleaners were coming in the morning anyway, so he left it.

  Dawn had nearly broken and, too excited to sleep, Adam got dressed and drove to the office, taking the road by the beach for as long as he could to watch the water change colour with the rising sun.

  He gunned the SUV down the motorway and swerved to take the ramp that led to his office. When the speed bumps in the road signalled the gate into the car park he tapped the accelerator and hit them at speed, so he could enjoy the gasp and recoil of the state-of-the-art shock absorbers in the guts of his German-engineered machine. After he parked, he took a moment to savour the stillness of the new day before going in, luxuriating in the sight of the chrome and glass office, the gargantuan warehouse next to it. Yes, things were changing; this would be a new era, a new start. In his euphoria, he failed to notice his was not the only car in the car park, that the beat-up Ford Falcon that had been following him around all night had pulled in quietly after him and stopped, turned off its engine, going quite still, as if taking a moment to think.

  __________

  Dieter watched the experiments through the one-way mirrored windows installed so that doctors could observe their subjects in privacy. He didn’t want Arkady to know that he’d ordered his death. It was one thing to die; it was another to die without any friends. Better that Arkady perish thinking that Dieter was not responsible for what happened to him. There was no oversight of how the prisoners were used by the SS, and they were subject to random executions and punishments, a fact that Arkady knew very well. He should go to his death with the hope that Dieter would come to his rescue.

  They froze him first, in tubs designed to test thermal endurance. He was stripped naked and directed at gunpoint to climb into a basin of iced water, where a prisoner, a huge red-headed Soviet soldier captured on the Front, was already freezing. Dieter had overseen this experiment before, and knew the water would be just above freezing point, and Arkady would stay submerged while it sapped the body temperature. As the subject became hypothermic, they would stop shivering as their homeostatic thermoregulation shut down, then they would stop responding to stimulus. At 32 degrees they would lose consciousness. Death would occur at 25.

  Dr Pfeiffer waited, and waited. The 32-degree point usually occurred in less than an hour. Now, hour after hour, the two men sat, hunched into balls in the water, still shivering. Dieter left to have his dinner, and when he returned the men were still conscious.

  The other man, long past stoicism, was growing furious. He swore loudly in Russian, turned to Arkady. ‘Do you speak German?’ he asked in Russian. ‘Ask them to kill us. Please ask them to kill us.’

  ‘They wil
l kill us,’ Arkady said grimly. ‘But not soon. Don’t expect mercy. These are bitch-whores, these Germans.’

  ‘And stupid.’ The other man laughed, unexpectedly. ‘What kind of fucking idiot tries to freeze a Russian to death?’

  Arkady snorted, and the two men laughed until they wheezed. ‘Goodbye, comrade,’ the Soviet said to Arkady. They shook hands.

  Watching from the other room, Dieter ended the experiment. ‘Take them out. Take their temperatures, and shoot the one with the red hair. Warm the other one up, and if he lives move him to the altitude program.’

  Then Dieter watched through the double-thick glass of the pressurised chamber where they tested the effect of high altitude on the brain and heart. This was, like the freezing baths, a research initiative from the Luftwaffe, as they wanted data on how long a human being would survive if a pilot ditched in sub-zero temperatures, or what ejecting from a plane at high altitude would do to the body.

  Once locked in the chamber, Arkady was given a free-flowing oxygen mask, and Dieter’s colleagues lowered the pressure until it matched that of an altitude of a cruising warplane. Then, to simulate a pilot ejecting without a mask, the oxygen was turned off and the altitude dropped. Dieter went to the observation port and saw that Arkady was already twitching with convulsions. As the dial plunged, his legs and his arms stretched forward at a right angle from his body like a rabid dog. At 20 000 feet of pressure he was whimpering, and at 10 000 screaming. At zero feet, the chamber was depressurised and Dieter went in to inspect.

  Arkady’s eyes were rolling back in his head and he was gibbering, strange bits of words that tripped through gritted teeth. He had bitten his tongue and the blood oozed down his jaw. Dr Pfeiffer checked his reflexes by shining a torch in his eye, found no response.