The Toymakers(69)
I am making toys, Cathy. Toys for the ones who go to sleep at night and will not wake in the morning. Toys for those men I hear crying for their mamas. And might I confess? Cathy, they are the most beautiful toys I have ever built.
Daily the wounded men came through, and daily they were sent away – back to the line in boots or far from it in boxes.
The man beside me died last night. I was holding his hand as he faded – and I think I know, now, what I did not know before. A secret has been revealed, and finally I understand the true meaning of toys, something my papa learnt long before me. When you are young, what you want out of toys is to feel grown-up. You play with toys and cast yourself an adult, and imagine life the way it’s going to be. Yet, when you are grown, that changes; now, what you want out of toys is to feel young again. You want to be back there, in a place that did not harm nor hurt you, in a pocket of time built out of memory and love. You want things in miniature, where they can better be understood: battles, and houses, picnic baskets and sailing boats too. Boyhood and adulthood – any toymaker worth his craft has to find a place to sit, somewhere between the two. It’s only in those borderlands that the very best toys are made. So let me tell you, Cathy, about a new toy I have made …
There is a moment, before the end, when a man knows he cannot be saved. I have watched some go to it in a state of quiet awe, but that is not the story of most. Most men feel the encroaching dark and rage against it – but a man can no more fight that battle than light can battle shade. In these hospital beds they hold themselves until they can hold themselves no longer; after that, they are men no more. They are like boys with a fever, wanting only to curl up beside Mama, with old blankets on their laps, and be sung to and told stories. What better way for a man to go out than the way he came in? With the milk of mother’s love.
It was my papa who taught me how a toy must speak to a grown man, how it must fill him with the simplicity, again, of being a child. Children come to the Emporium for adventure, but adults to be reminded that adventure was once possible, that once the world was as filled with magic as the imagination will allow. Emporium toys have always taken us back in time. And, as I have lain here in Arras, watching my fellows die around me, I have wondered: could a toy comfort a man in his final hours? What if he was not here, rotting in a bed in which another man will rot tomorrow – but twenty years ago instead, curled happily in the crook of his mama’s arm, knowing that all is good and right in the world? What kind of a toy could be so perfect as to take him back there, the magic so adept that, for brief snatches of time, he might even forget the reality of his life? What if, in his final moments, those memories were manifest around him? Wouldn’t that be the Perfect Toy?
She was not sure why the letter made her uneasy, perhaps only for the idea that Kaspar and Death made such common bedfellows – and were it not for the fact that his next missive was so joyous (for first frost had come early to Arras, and Kaspar’s senses were enlivened by the thought of an Emporium in full swing), she might have known it sooner. As Christmas grew close, Kaspar’s letters showed him, if not his old self – gleeful and fizzling and bursting with ideas – then at least renewed. After he returned to the line, and found Douglas Flood, John Horwood and the rest, his humours returned; he wrote no more about his Perfect Toy, turning instead to questions of Cathy and Martha and professions of how he missed the shopfloor. It was, it seemed, a restorative to be among Emporium friends once again. But Cathy noticed, in the way his letters still quivered across the page, in the way the words disintegrated as each sentence moved on, until sometimes they were illegible even after many hours of trying, that all was not right with her husband. The lies had started again: the lies of omission, the lies of keep your head up and soldier on, forgivable only because, this time, Kaspar was lying to himself as much as he was his wife.
Kaspar’s body had survived the gas, but something else, some other part of him, lay bedraggled and maimed, gasping for air.
And still Cathy kept writing, for it was the only thing she could do.
Emil Godman and Nina Dean were married on the morning after the snowdrops flowered, bringing the next Emporium winter to its end. Such a sight it was, to see Emil in his morning suit and Nina in her bridal gown. They spoke their words and made it formal before a city registrar, but Papa Jack raised a chapel on the shopfloor, and into it streamed every shop hand who still survived (along with the ghosts of those who had perished on the way). Emil spoke his vows with a tremble in his voice, Nina with the sharp authority that was her everyday tone. Martha scattered paper flowers in their wake while satin butterflies, released from the insectarium, cavorted overhead.
Emil had no best man (Cathy wrote), for it would have been you, Kaspar, to stand at his side and settle his stomach in those few hours before the service, when he knew not how to button a shirt, nor how to fasten a tie, nor even how to put one foot in front of another. You would have laughed to have seen him, but you would have put an arm around him too. Instead it was me who dusted his morning suit down (he had spent the morning in his workshop, dressed in all his finery, whittling more soldiers for the sweet release it brings him), me who told him not to put cuff links into sleeves that were not French cut. Me who told him you would have been proud.
She told him it all, about how Nina’s family had gaped to see the patchwork pegasi soaring in the Emporium dome; about how the toast Papa Jack made harked back to his own wedding day and the wife who was lost while he slaved in the frozen East; how Nina (cold, hard Nina) had shed a tear as Emil told the congregation how he had never envisaged a future as perfect as the future he envisaged now. She did not tell him about the fleeting glance Emil gave her when his speech reached its zenith, for it spoke of indecision, of an instant’s hesitation, of an actor at odds with his part; it spoke, she thought, of a stowaway summer long ago, and things that were better left unsaid. She filled pages instead with details of the many-tiered cake Mrs Hornung had prepared, the trinkets Martha had already made in anticipation of the cousins to come. She told him all of these things, and sat up through the night waiting for the letter she was certain would come in response – but that was the first time in all of their writing that Kaspar never wrote back at all.