Playthings

by Alex Pheby

  Her mouth was pulled up at the cheek on one side; it was somewhat grotesque, he thought. So different from her public mask: her resolute authority about the house, that showed itself clear not only in her face, but in her posture, and her demeanour, and in the particularities of her use of reason.

  To lie there grimacing and shaking?

  It was not like her. To suffer such a disturbance?

  She was not like this.

  She would not let herself become like this. She was a rock. A mighty fortress.

  Never.

  A plaything of the Lower God?

  He sniffed.

  That was of the past. Gone away. A dream.

  But if not, then what was this thing in his arms? If it was not a puppet? If it was a puppet, and not his wife, then where was that woman: calm, even-handed and haughty, dismissive even to him. What was this? This panting thing? Moaning. It was one thing, or the other, this thing cradled in his arms, this grinning mannequin. Its skin was stretched pale and taut over the bones of the skull, taking on the appearance of wax, like a dressmaker’s dummy. It was like a sculpture modelled on his wife’s form, but without her soul. A representation, miracled up and laid on the ground, half in his arms. One of a thousand? Taking on a strange solidity, so that the pulling of the corner of its mouth was no longer what concerned him, nor even the slight movement of the lips, and even less the bubbles of spittle that gathered; it was that his wife, strong, would not have allowed this. So where was she?

  ‘Sabine!’

  Now here was the doctor, barging past Cook like a man who has been separated from his lunch too soon and who is keen to return without delay. He kneeled beside Schreber’s wife—not his wife, the replica—and opened his bag. Schreber was moved by unseen hands to a seat on the red settee. There was buzzing in his head, and his ears, and now, suddenly, in his eyes. The doctor snapped his fingers in front of the replica’s face, in front of the improvised thing, made up from the dirt, and then over each of its ears. He called for a lit candle, which he held in front of it, illuminating briefly the interior contours of its nostrils, and of the sides of its mouth. Then he marched out of the room.

  He returned almost immediately with a passing drayman.

  ‘Sir, your wife has had a seizure. She will require immediate treatment. I have given this gentleman a few marks to take her to my surgery. I will, of course, add his fee to the bill.’

  ‘If I can get the bloody horse moving,’ the short scruffy drayman said, smiling, ‘I’ll take her on the cart. Else it’ll be the young ’un and me. One at the tip, the other at the toe. Alright?’

  The man expected a reply, but no one offered it, and it seemed like hours before the drayman and his boy did what they had been paid to do. They wiped their noses with the backs of their sleeves, picked the thing up, and took it from the room.

  ‘That is not my wife,’ Schreber said to himself.

  The doctor pursed his lips and frowned.

  ‘My apologies, I was told by this girl that the wife of Herr Schreber… she will require treatment in any event. Can I assume you will accept the bill?’

  He turned to leave, putting on his hat and gloves.

  ‘That is not my wife.’

  The doctor turned to the girl and straightened his coat, and he spoke to her, but Schreber did not hear what he said. He marched rather into the hall, and shouted for his wife upstairs.

  ‘Sabchen! Where are you, old girl?’

  Nothing.

  He stamped up the stairs in that peculiar way that Sabine had always found endearing, putting his foot to either side of the carpeted runner so that the heels of his shoes clicked on the wooden steps. Though the sound could be heard throughout the house, the carpet never became worn. If it was a habit inherited from some Schreber familial commandment, then it was one that might be allowed to continue in Sabine’s house, at least for the men, who were heavy and clumsy and therefore more of a strain on the furnishings.

  ‘Sabine!’

  Cook came up behind, calling after him in that plaintive, imploring tone that was exactly what Sabine warned him against succumbing to. The staff must learn to take responsibility for their own actions and not come running to him with every trivial matter. He should not indulge them! They had, after all, her written instructions and were employed on the basis that they might be expected to cope with whatever circumstances the day should bring them. If they could not cope, then no doubt there were a hundred others in Dresden that could and would be glad of the opportunity to prove it. The best thing to do was simply to ignore what they said, and if only he could learn to say no to these people then it would be a great boon to her, because they looked to him as the authority in the house, wrongly. For every helpful suggestion he gave, or ruling on this or that matter, she heard it back tenfold if something was done wrong or forgotten. “The master said that it would be better if I did such and such,” or “Sir told me it wasn’t worth the time and that I should attend to this or that.” Didn’t he realise it was hard enough as it was, running a house? Couldn’t he spend more time at the club, like other women’s husbands?

  From the bottom of the stair the doctor coughed.

  ‘Will you come with me, sir? Or will you make your own way to the surgery?’

  ‘Sabine!’ Schreber shouted.

  The doctor tutted and hissed. After looking up the stairs for a while he gave his address to the skivvy on her promise to pass on the information as soon as was practical.

  Schreber bowled into every room in turn, and Cook followed him like a shadow, like a ball attached with string to his coat tails, yanked behind him, bouncing on the floor.

  ‘Sir, what’ll be done…? Sir, what about the party…? Sir, will she be alright, sir…?’

  Schreber went into his wife’s bedroom and there was her bed—the blankets and quilts tight as a drum skin. Here he stopped and Cook stopped with him, running into his back. She kept talking and talking. Schreber turned his gaze to where his wife might have been lying, and examined the space, knowing that this was the place she should be. His dearest, his Sabchen, little round face, a damp flannel laid across her eyes and her hands together over her belly. But there was nothing to see and, though he wished there would be, no matter how hard he concentrated on the bed there was nothing. There was no sign or message, and the pattern of the blanket came toward him in ever closer magnification the longer he stared. Grids of red and green entwined like the mesh of the ether, intersections picked out in gold thread, and below that motif the brown webbing around which each fibre was woven. Each individual filament was taken up and down, over each other, in and out. If his eyes hadn’t filled with tears—caused not by any emotion, but by his repression of the urge to blink—he would have seen through to the mattress, and then to the bed, and eventually who knows where? Down to the very core of the Earth? But the fluid over his eyes acted like an imperfect lens, bowing and flexing the image before him, disturbing the space on which his wife had lain. The noise in his mind was building so loud and clear now that he could almost hear it speaking of his bad character. It spat parts of words that never quite came together, still obvious in their disgust at his poverty of will. His impotence.

  When his nose touched the blanket he drew back in alarm.

  Cook put her hand on his back.

  ‘What did you say?’ Schreber snapped, turning. She looked down at her shoes.

  ‘I was just asking what it was that I should do about the guests.’

  Of course.

  ‘Will the missus be alright? What was it the doctor said? It’s only that in the fuss I didn’t quite hear it.’

  There was a knock at the door downstairs.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Schreber said, and he pushed the dumpy woman on the shoulder, too roughly, much too roughly, clumsy brute, knocking vases over, was he a child? Was he incapable of looking where he was g
oing, like all men? And they call themselves civilised, traipsing mud through the house. He ran down the stairs, heels clacking loud, with his hand on the banister and each foot kicking out to the side. They threatened to slip on the varnish, to send him falling back, to crack his skull. Clumsy brute. Silly man.

  The skivvy was at the bottom, opening the door. He was sure it would be Sabine, returning from an errand: a small bag with ribbons inside, decorative lace for the table, a new bone napkin ring to replace one yellowed and cracked.

  But it was not her. It was a boy.

  ‘Block of ice, Fräulein? Have I got the right place?’

  The skivvy turned and looked at Schreber. He was standing one stair from the bottom. In his mind there was something like speech: the odd word, muttering, louder and louder.

  ‘Send him away,’ he said, and he took the last step down.

  The girl did as she was told and the boy went back down the path, rubbing his neck and checking a grubby piece of paper. Schreber held out both arms and the skivvy, conditioned by daily repetition, slipped his long, grey winter coat over his shoulders and looped his scarf around his neck. She was nothing: a flimsy ripple in the world.

  He ran out into the street.

  ‘Sabine! Where are you?’

  The day is cold and windy. Schreber finds the world has changed. He drifts away from his home, and is brought back by his adopted daughter, Frido­line.

  II

  As he rounded the corner of Angelikastrasse, the November wind bit. The cold air purged the remnants of the house—the slight persistence of its odour, its lingering warmth on his skin, the fuggy oiliness of an interior—it all disappeared instantly, and now he was left at the end of the street not knowing quite what he was doing. He banged the side of his head with his palm, hoping to jar himself right.

  Where the hell was Sabine?

  He pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders and hesitated, thinking he might turn back and have the girl bring him the calfskin gloves and perhaps even the Russian fur hat, but when he looked back down the street it was not there.

  His house was not there.

  Neither were the trees. No railings. No streetlamps.

  In their place were representations of these things. The objects that he walked past every day after breakfast, lunch and supper—they were changed. Objects that he counted off as he took his constitutional—one, two, three, with his chest out and his head back, cane first, slicing up and down, in front and behind, cutting a straight path through the traffic of the street—they were all wrong.

  The ornate gate of the Burgenthaler house, the iron post where tradesmen tied their carts so that they did not roll off down the hill and into the Elbe, the grid through which rain made its way down under the street—all those things were there, but when Schreber came close and put his cold fingertips to them they were as smooth as pieces of letter paper and just as thin.

  When he craned his neck to see behind them and around them, even though the blasted wind blew up dust from the street and made his eyes water, he could see that they were not real. They were nothing more than stage decorations gaudily painted in primary colours, like those things his father in-law had pressed upon them to store for him in his time of greatest difficulty, as the melodramatic old sot had put it. The garden, so often Schreber’s place of small refuge, where he would sit beneath the trees and read of politics and revisions to the law became overrun with fakes, occupied in one corner by a long black locomotive, and in another by a piece of a wall, draped with vines dripping luscious grapes: all utterly false.

  He crept back toward his own house—the house that he and Sabine had built together—and that too was nothing. A trick. A painted piece of wood three stories high and supported by what? A balsa scaffold, hidden from view? A single layer of bricks with nothing behind it? An egg shell? His home? So fragile?

  ‘Sabine!’

  She was nowhere.

  There were other people on the street. A couple. The man raised his eyebrows as he passed and the wife’s arm looped tighter around his. She watched Schreber all the way down to the corner, clutching her husband in defence.

  At another time, perhaps only a few hours ago, Schreber would have been mortified—on his own street, outside his own house, in Dresden, where he was a man of reputation, respected still, possibly—but now he took no mind of any of them. Because they too were nothing. He might once have nervously glanced down the street, in through the doors of the passing carriages, up at the curtained windows of the other houses—the Burgenthaler house, the Brahe house, the Werninger house—watching for signs that he had been overlooked, but now it was nothing to him, because they were all nothing. Fleeting-improvised-wretched-plaything-human-beings. Puppets, ­soul-less automata, clicking and whirring and chirruping to each other on a flat street of false houses and dust blown by the perishing cold wind. Now, when he shouted for his wife, he paid no heed to anyone’s furrowed brows, or tuttings, or wide berths given.

  If that was Herr Merstenberg’s niece taking flowers to her aunt, then that was also nothing. If she held the flowers in the crook of her arm, and put a handkerchief to her mouth, and lifted up her skirts and trotted away from him? These people were nothing, their lives ended the moment they were out of his sight. Marionettes. Demons. Mechanical birds.

  ‘Sabine!’

  A girl came toward him, an awkward little thin thing in black crinoline, holding a rectangular paper parcel. She was as insubstantial as tissue paper. When the wind blew, she came with it, skipping on tip-toes across the flagstones until she ran smack into him. She wrapped her arms around his waist and her parcel fell to the ground. Through the ripped paper, the luminous, yellow flesh of a pat of fresh butter.

  ‘Papa!’

  Her face was set in a curious expression that Schreber couldn’t recognise. Her black eyes were wide and above them arched two oddly thick slugs of hair. Though she was a girl, her forehead was furrowed. Her mouth hung open at the end of a word, waiting, with the bottom row of teeth flashing wetly with each heave of her chest. She was silent, and now Schreber heard, as if through water, a coarse bellowing roar which, quite unexpectedly, seemed to be coming from his own mouth. He shut it, and the sound stopped too.

  ‘What is wrong?’ the girl wept.

  Schreber felt the urge to reach over and wipe the tears away. He moved his hand, but in the end the tears dropped from her cheek and fell onto her dress without his trying to stop them.

  ‘Papa!’

  An imp. A changeling. A black wood sprite, thin-wristed and sharp-nosed, ready to sneak in at night and do whatever mischief its instincts provoked it to: the rearrangement of important papers, or the addition of a purgative to the milk. Small things. Childish things. Spiteful things.

  Yet she was familiar.

  Her greased back hair was familiar. The ornament she wore on her shawl, too much for her, like an old woman’s keepsake, or a medal. Hadn’t he given something like that to a thing like this? His own mother’s brooch, rusting away in a tin box in a cupboard and now in the world again. On the day of the funeral? One so dead and the other still alive. The cheeky creature! Hadn’t he loved something like that? A scamp. There when he returned from Sonnenstein. Arriving fully formed. Her odd way of arranging her cutlery, as if she were from France, and she wouldn’t be convinced, no matter how much Sabine chastised her. Hadn’t he taken her side? Not her, the thing she represented. Arranging his own cutlery in the same way and calling for potage when he meant soup? Fashioning his moustaches into points? Smoothing his hair into a parting? Marching here and there about the room in the manner of a Napoleon? Sabine’s face falling and Fridoline’s rising, as if in symmetry?

  But this couldn’t be that girl. Could it?

  ‘Papa!’

  She addressed him and expected a reply. Schreber could think of none.

  ‘Sabine!’ he cried,
but the significance of the word was drifting away from him.

  ‘Mother?’ the girl asked.

  ‘I must find her,’ Schreber muttered.

  ‘She will be inside. I left her only a few minutes ago. I went to get butter.’

  The girl looked down. Somehow, in the confusion, she had trodden in it. She jerked her leg back, leaving her foot swinging in the air, hanging from her upraised knee with the print of her shoe on the paper wrapper.

  ‘I’ll be for it now…’

  She looked at him.

  ‘I’ll be for it now, won’t I, Papa?’

  Schreber said nothing.

  ‘Papa, please! What has happened?’

  ‘You are Fridoline?’

  ‘Of course! Please… you are frightening me!’

  ‘You are not mine.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are saying. Come inside, please!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘I’m getting Mother!’

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Where? What about the party?’

  ‘There is nothing. You are nothing. A puppet. A plaything of the Lower God.’

  ‘Please, Papa!’

  She looked up at him, and she was such a frail and odd little thing. It occurred to him that he might push her aside, down onto the pavement, and walk past. He reached out, palm first, and when he touched her shoulder he had every intention of forcing her down. But he did not. He touched the smooth, cold surface of the dress and, through it, the flesh and bones of the shoulder.

  She was not flat, this thing.

  He jerked his hand back as one might from the handle of a kettle left too long on the fire, but his fingers retained the memory of the touch.