The Toymakers(45)
She did. He was walking with his head bowed low but, as she looked, he turned to her and held her gaze. Those eyes, they were glacial blue.
‘Papa Jack, is that … you?’
‘Back then his name was Jekabs Godman. But yes, this is me. If you’re to stay in our Emporium, you must go with him now.’
The figure had lifted a gloved hand. He was beckoning to her, but Cathy held fast. While she was here, one hand still on the crank handle, still feeling the touch of Papa Jack, it was possible to feel safe. Untethered, perhaps she would disappear, be swallowed whole by this toy and whatever magics it was performing.
‘You’ll have to hurry,’ Papa Jack breathed. ‘If he lingers too long, the gang masters will come for him. They are a brutal kind of man. They were once like Jekabs, prisoners every one, but they came back as guards. Please, Cathy. Jekabs is a … decent man. He’ll tell you it all.’
She tried to resist, but the wind flurried behind her, propelling her on. Her fingers slipped from beneath Papa Jack’s, his eyes turned away from her, and soon she was whirling forward, borne by the snowfall itself.
Jekabs Godman was taller than the hunched mountain of a man he would become. He was, if it was possible to admit it, as handsome as his son Kaspar, with hair of jet black (now beaded in frost) and defiant features that over time would shift into peaks and ravines. He welcomed her with a smile. ‘Walk with me,’ he began, ‘and beware of the rest. Don’t speak to another soul.’
His voice was not the feathery voice it would one day become, but he still spoke far too gently for the ravaged landscape around. ‘Where are we going?’ Cathy asked.
‘We are going into the east,’ Jekabs Godman said, ‘and leaving everything we knew. It will be six long years for me. They call this … katorga. It is the most harrowing thing that can be visited on a man. Some of us will die on the way. Some of us will die there. But me? Well, you already know: I will survive. What you don’t know is how. But come. We have walked but twenty-six of our miles. There are still six thousand to go.’
And then, as the column marched around them, Jekabs Godman told her his story.
Ten days ago, Jekabs Godman was a husband, a father, a carpenter of modest income but high renown. Now, he was nothing. Ten years ago, he was an apprentice, dreaming of the things he might one day make with his hands. Now, Jekabs Godman touched the burning indentations in his shoulder, the symbol that demarked his crime, still smelling of seared hair and flesh. The press of bodies against him forced him to look up. In front of them lay the east, frigid and featureless as the end of the world.
Ten days: all it took to destroy a world. Jekabs Godman was arrested on the first day. On the second he protested his innocence. On the fourth he confessed. On the fifth day he discovered the crimes of which he was accused, and on the sixth was found guilty. On the seventh day he was branded with hot iron and ink and, by the eighth, he had accepted his fate. Jekabs Godman: imperial saboteur and operator of an outlawed printing press. He had been using it, in the cellar of a well-acquainted friend for whom he had built cabinets, to run up leaflets for a stall he proposed to erect at Christmas, where he might sell some of the odds and ends he made to while away the hours between jobs: little wooden angels, delicate pine bears. On the front of the leaflets were Russian horses of the kind he dreamed he might one day build – and above hung the words: ‘Are you a child at heart? Then … Welcome to Papa Jekabs’ Emporium …’
‘Oh yes,’ said Jekabs, and he put an arm around Cathy as if to protect her from the imaginary winter wailing around, ‘toys had always been my dream. I had a son, you see, and another on the way. To play with my children with toys that I made, that was almost the only dream I had. And until that knock came at my door, in the dead of the night, that was how life would have been. But they came for us all in those days. If you weren’t a killer or a criminal, you were a sympathiser. As for me, and as for sympathy, well, I’d never thought the world could have enough …’
Night crystallised. On the plain the blackness was never absolute, for the stars whose light was smeared across the heavens were reflected in grain fields and hedgerows dusted in snow. A fox, silver as the moon, darted across Jekabs’ path and in its eyes was the promise of something Jekabs would never feel again: freedom.
They had walked through the vagaries of twilight, prison outriders hemming them in just as assuredly as the dark. Men on horseback thundered up and down the line, keeping tallies in their heads but never breathing a word. When the outriders sounded their horns to announce the day’s march had reached its end, they made camp in the pastures of some farm whose service was rewarded by the gratitude of the Tsar (eternal and enriching, but never made manifest). The farmhouse sat at a fork between two of the ancient cart roads that criss-crossed this corner of the world, and in its reach were cattle barns and the ruins of the farm that had sat here in centuries past. Here the prisoners were corralled. Some were sent out to gather firewood and forage. Others were set to butchering the pig dutifully trolled out by the farmer. Jekabs’ duty was to wait and endure.
In the light of the farmhouse doorway there hung a little girl, watching her father deposit grain for the horses who drew the prison wagons. Kneeling, Jekabs picked up a length of twig. He sat on a stump and, first with his thumb and then with an edge of stone, scored lines and dug grooves. Another twig, a length of briar, a ringlet of leaves and pinecone for a head – and then, when he set it down, a stick soldier stood to attention. The way the wind caught it and whisked it along gave the figure the appearance of marching.