“Me?” the girl said, suspicious, on the edge of wrath—you just try and make me the butt of your joke—“Me, a princess? You, at my service?”
“It’s no mistake.” The puppet’s hand moved slowly, reverently; it held its breath despite having no breath to hold, the girl allowed that wooden hand to fondly brush her cheek—watching, you were absolutely sure that no hand of flesh and bone would have been allowed to come that close. “This is the sign by which we recognize you,” the puppet said, “but if you wish you may continue as you are in disguise.”
And your father and his puppet returned to the stage, never turning their backs on the girl, as is the protocol regarding walking away from royalty. The girl’s teacher cried, but the girl herself just looked as if she was thinking. She continued to think through the second act of the puppet play, but by the third act she was clapping and laughing as loudly as the rest of them. I really don’t know why I thought your reaching the end of that story would be a good moment to kiss you; I wasn’t entirely surprised that it didn’t work.
—
“YOUNG LADY, I’m flattered—and tempted—but—how old are you, anyway?” you asked. Then you said I was too young. Too young, not right for you, blah blah blah. Always something.
Joe and Arjun appeared with our coats, and you slid my book out of my coat pocket. “What’s this?”
Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them. Since people like getting around rules, there are various unofficial translations of my great-grandfather’s books floating around online, but all of them just seem to prove his point.
—
“JUST TELL ME the beginning of it, then,” you said, and I opened the book to translate for you. You liked the beginning—a woman opens her front door to find a corpse on her doorstep, but before the body can topple across the threshold of her home she says, “Oh no you don’t,” pushes it back out with a broom, and legs it out of the back door.
“Wait,” you were saying, as I walked away arm in arm with my brother—“Hang on, Radha, I need to know—”
“I’d say she’s at least an eight,” my brother said, surprised. (You have my permission to make him regret marking girls’ physical appearance out of ten.) When I got home the ghost immediately knew something was up. She said she’d been wondering when I’d meet someone.
“If I—I don’t know, if some sort of miracle happens and I have sex with someone, will I stop being able to see you?”
The ghost looked crafty for a moment, then relented and said no, I was stuck with her. And she was pleased for me when you phoned me the next day to ask me to translate the next paragraph of my great-grandfather’s book. You hung up as soon as I gave you the paragraph, but the ghost said you’d come back for more, and you did. You began to talk to me a little after each day’s translation, asking me questions about myself and my day and whatever music happened to be playing in my bedroom whenever you called. “Glad you like it—I don’t know what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here,” I’d say, and you’d laugh, thinking I’d made a joke.
The ghost observed that I was going to come to the end of my translation one day.
“Yeah, but come on. We’re only halfway through the second chapter. And after this book there are fifteen others by the same author.”
The ghost asked if I thought my great-grandfather would be impressed by this use of his hard work.
“Oh, ghost—what have you got against love?”
Nothing, said the ghost, sounding injured. She had nothing whatsoever against love. She was just saying.
The ghost showed that she was on my side when she heard you mention the news that you were one of the two final-year students who got to select a newcomer to mentor. “It’s going to be fun. We get to watch the applicants through hidden panels in a soundproofed room so they don’t hear us booing or cheering them.”
This terrified me, but the ghost breathed on the windowpane and wrote FOR GO IT on the misted glass.
“Who’s the other student?” I asked. “Not green-haired Joe?”
“Haha, no. Though he does put on interesting Punch and Judy shows. Dad says he’s going to be very good one day. The other student’s a boy called Gustav Grimaldi. I don’t like the way he performs; it’s scruffy. And I’d say his puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you’d understand what I meant by that.”
“Nihilistic, eh . . . sounds bad,” I said, pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I googled “nileistic.”
“Sometimes his puppets won’t perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they’d decide to keep their mouths shut forever. There’s no entertainment in it at all, and I don’t understand why he chooses this way to put on a show when he knows so many other ways. He shouldn’t be allowed to choose any new students. If there’s anyone bound to introduce unsavory elements into our group, it’s Grimaldi.”
“Good thing I’m extra wholesome then. Do applicants have to have experience with puppets and all that?” I asked, and when you said that in fact your father liked people to come to the field fresh, I asked if fifteen was too old to start.
“Not if you’re serious. Are you?”
“As serious as I can be. I don’t feel one hundred percent sure that I’m not a puppet myself,” I said.
“No wonder I like you,” you said. The ghost gave me a high five.
“You need a puppet,” you went on. “Competition for places is quite fierce—people do what they can to stand out. Some people make their own puppets. I did, out of paper and pins. The thing fell apart mid-performance, but I built that into the story.”
—
MUM AND DAD wouldn’t be thrilled by my new career ambitions. Don’t forget your Uncle Majhi . . . Majhi the mime . . . and ask yourself, do we really want more people like that in our family? My parents worked a lot—no need to bother them with something that might not work out. The thing to do was gain admission first and talk them round later. I bought a brown-skinned glove puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman. I got him a top hat so I wouldn’t have to think about the cloth hair falling away from the center of his cloth scalp. You gave me a hand with some basics of ventriloquism, even though you definitely weren’t supposed to help—it was then that I began to hope that you’d stop saying I wasn’t right for you—and I taught my puppet to tell jokes with a pained and forlorn air, fully aware of how bad the jokes were. Sometimes you laughed, and then my glove puppet would weep piteously. When you took the glove puppet he alternated between flirtatious and suicidal, hell-bent on flinging himself from great heights and out of windows. I noticed that you didn’t make a voice or a history for the puppet, but you became its voice and history. I’d have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster.
—
WE DECIDED it would be better for my puppet to continue the daily translations—my great-grandfather’s book, line by line, first in Hindi, next in English, as you listened, rapt, and then repeated the line in Russian and French. Thus the book’s bones were broken. I didn’t realize it until about a week before my audition, when I reread the book’s last chapter, which I was yet to transl
ate for you, and the bright words flew through my mind like comets. That feeling was gone from the other chapters; somehow it had seeped out. And I told my glove puppet that it was not to say the final words of the book.
The ghost approved, but she was also quite sure that you wouldn’t choose me if my glove puppet didn’t say the words we’d planned it would say, you and I. The ghost even advised me not to bother turning up. Naturally I disregarded her advice. A couple of days later, the waiting room of your grand old school encased me in marbled fog as I watched other hopefuls practicing with their puppets. Some were more actors than puppeteers, but others handled their marottes and tickle puppets and Bunraku puppets with an ease and affection that didn’t exist between my glove puppet and me. I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls. The girl beside me was very pretty—tousled dreadlocks, dimples, and night-sky skin—you know, with this radiance blended into the darkness. But I considered myself taken, and so I merely asked where her puppet was. “It’s this.” She took a small box out of her jacket pocket, and out of that box she took a porcelain chess piece. A plum-colored queen, her only features her crown and a slight wave that conceded the existence of hips and a bosom.
“Did you make her yourself?”
“No, I found her. I know she doesn’t look like a puppet, but she is one. I know it because when I first picked her up I said something I’d never said before. I put her down and then when I picked her up I said the thing again without meaning to, and again it was something I hadn’t said before, even though the words were the same.”
“What’s her routine?”
“At the moment she only asks this one question, but I’m hoping to learn how to get her to ask another.”
“What’s her question?”
The girl looked uncomfortable. She pointed at her nametag: “This is me, by the way.” Tyche Shaw. My own nametag was lost in my hair, so I shook hands with her and said: “Radha Chaudhry. What’s your puppet’s question?”
Tyche mumbled something, too low for me to hear. I’d just decided not to ask again—maybe she was saving it up for the audition—when she repeated herself: “Is your blood as red as this.”
A chess piece asking a personal question, possibly one of the most personal questions that could be asked. I didn’t know how to answer. At my instruction my glove puppet shook its head, No, surely your blood is redder. Tyche turned the purple queen around on her palm and asked the question again; this time the note of challenge left her voice and the question became droll; the next time the chess piece asked her question she sounded worried, seeking comparison for the sake of measuring normality. Frustration came next (after all, the chess piece wasn’t even red . . . therefore as red as what, compared to what). From what you’d said about Gustav Grimaldi’s puppets I knew you would strongly disapprove of the question Tyche Shaw’s puppet asked; in fact you would hate it. But this tiny queen’s question was large; she spoke and you couldn’t think of anything else but her question, and how to answer it. The sharpest thing I had on me was a brooch—I could prick my finger with my brooch pin, and then we would see.
“You’re good, Tyche,” I said, and I wasn’t the only one who walked out for fresh air. Several other demoralized applicants followed me out and had last-minute conversations with their puppets.
“I’m not going to be able to get this job done for you,” my own glove puppet said to me.
“Shhh, I won’t let you pretend this is your fault,” I told it. “I’m just going to have to find another way to show Myrna.”
—
THERE WAS A FRAMED photograph hung on the wall in front of me, and when I said your name I saw you in the picture. Well, I saw your back, and your long, bright ponytail fluttering. The image is black and white, and you’re running, and you cast a number of shadows that cluster about you like a bouquet. There’s a figure running a little ahead of you and at first that figure seems to be a shadow too, except that it casts a backward glance that establishes an entirely separate personality. The figure’s features are wooden, but mobile—some sort of sprite moves within, not gently, but convulsively. A beauty that rattles you until you’re in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland. You and the puppet—I decided it was a puppet—were leaping through one upright rectangle into another. An open door seen through an open door, and in the corner of that distant room was a cupboard, fallen onto its side. There was a sign on the cupboard door. (I tilted my head: The sign read TOYS.)
It’s a photo in which lines abruptly draw back from each other and ceilings and floors spin off in different directions, but for all that the world that’s pictured doesn’t seem to be ending. You were both running in place, you blurred around the edges, the puppet hardly blurred at all, and the puppet was looking back, not at you, but at me. It felt like the two of you were running for your lives, for fear I’d take them. Or you could’ve been racing each other to that cupboard door, racing each other home. TOYS, the sign reads, but signs aren’t guarantees. Either way I wanted to go too, and wished the puppet would hold out its hand to me, or beckon me, or do something more than return my gaze with that strange tolerance.
—
WHEN MY NAME was called I entered the audition room and my glove puppet made an irresolute attempt to eat a sugar cube from a bowlful that had been left on a table, then gave in to despair and decided to sleep. After a minute there was a crackling sound in the corner of the room and I heard your voice through the speaker, Myrna, trying to give me a chance. “Miss Chaudhry, don’t you have anything prepared? You’ve only got ten more minutes and as you may have seen in the waiting room, we’re observing quite a few applicants today.”
This reminder had no effect on me; I continued as I was until someone knocked on the audition room door and then came in, glancing first at the clock and then through the mirrored wall to the spot where I presumed you were sitting. It was a boy who came in—he had a hand behind his back, and I think I would’ve found that threatening if it weren’t for his deep-set, elephantine eyes, the patience in them.
“I’m Gustav,” he said. “Give me your puppet and you shall have a different one.”
“What will you do with mine?”
“It’s up to him. He can sleep all he wants and have as much sugar as he likes, make new friends, maybe change the position of the parting in his hair if he’s feeling daring. Quickly, take her.”
I handed over my glove puppet and received a brass marionette in exchange. “I got this one out of the store cupboard. She hasn’t been out in a while . . . a lot of people find they can’t work with her; she’s haunted,” Gustav said over his shoulder, as he left the room. Smashing.
—
ORCHESTRATING this new puppet’s movements seemed hopeless; I was holding the wooden bar that controlled all her strings correctly, and none of the strings were tangled, but that had been Gustav’s quick, deft work, not mine. Though we both stood still I felt the marionette advance upon me, and without moving I shrank away.
“Five minutes,” you said through the speaker, not hiding the note of incredulity in your voice. I spoke to the puppet in the looking-glass English that my ghost friend speaks. I asked her if she was haunted or something worse. She answered eagerly, as you do in a foreign country when you need assistance and come upon someone who speaks your language: “Worse thingsome,” was her answer. “Worse thingsome.” And if I help you now, you must help me later.
You won’t ask me to harm anyone? I asked.
Never.
Then I accept.
Good. Simply translate what I say. I will speak; don’t worry about the controls, I will match your posture, it’ll look better.
She spoke the way that my ghost friend spoke—it cannot be that all ghosts speak the same way, I knew that even then—and I translated. It didn’t take long:
I a
m not a haunted puppet, we said, I am living. My name is Gepetta and a long time ago I was an apprentice to two puppeteers whose names are honored in this place. I took care of the puppets in the workshop—I was a kind of nurse to them, tending to their damage, and making sure that they lasted. Their masters grew old and died, and I stayed with the puppets. They were not living, but one step away from living, always one step away. They know when human life is near them, and they need human life to be near them; it keeps them from going . . . wrong.
I began to train others in the care of puppets. In my time it seemed such knowledge was dying out . . . I trained a few boys and girls who wanted to learn, but a plague came. Not a plague that revealed itself in the skin, this one crept through the air. My apprentices died, and I would have too, but my puppet charges forbade it.
Each puppet sacrificed something—a leg, an arm, torso, head, and so on . . . you will replace these things when you are ready, they said.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 8
