What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(26)

Each puppet sacrificed something—a leg, an arm, torso, head, and so on . . . you will replace these things when you are ready, they said.

They assembled a body, but didn’t join up the parts.

Look at your new body. You will go in, they said.

I said I would not, but it happened hour by hour; I would drowse a little and when I woke another part of me had been replaced. It began with my left hand and ended with my right foot. Think of it: looking down at your human foot out of a pair of brass eyes. And then I grew smaller, and all of a piece, as I am today. My name is Gepetta; long have I wanted to say this, but nobody would help me to say it . . .

—

SO THAT WAS how I met my friend Gepetta. And as you know, Myrna Semyonova, three days later I was called back to your school, our school, and I found Tyche Shaw waiting for me. And you were there, and so was Gustav Grimaldi. Then I knew I’d been chosen, and I went to you. You smiled and said, “Well done,” but it was Gustav who took my hand and said: “Welcome, Radha. We’ll do such things together!”

My ghost friend was right: I disobeyed you and so you didn’t choose me. But what were your reasons for choosing Tyche? I saw even then that you would try your best to break what she carries.

Why are you telling me all this again, you say impatiently, but a person doesn’t easily recover from the sadness of finding that it’s not always affinity that draws us together (not always, not only), that you can be called to undo the deeds of another. You make a lot of work for me—my blood runs cold to think of it all—but you see I take strength from remembering that you began with intentions that were pure.

II.

(YES)

RADHA AND GUSTAV had a shaky start. She brought me along to their first meeting and the three of us walked around Berkeley Square. “Hi, Gepetta,” Gustav said to me. He always says hello to me, even though I never reply. His good manners are his own affair. Radha threw breadcrumbs to pigeons. Gustav kept his sunglasses on the entire time and talked at length about the work of several mid-twentieth-century filmmakers Radha had never heard of. I could see Radha making up her mind that if she was going to learn anything from Gustav it would be by accident, and I saw her changing her mind when he introduced her to his puppets—“You’ve brought yours,” he said to Radha, nodding in my direction, “and I’ve brought mine.” Four of them had accompanied him to this meeting; two peeping out from each of his coat pockets. They were good-natured fatalists one and all, never in a rush, preferring to put off action until matters had resolved themselves without anyone in the troupe having had to lift a finger. The leader of the pack was a disheveled sophisticate named Hamlet. It was Hamlet who became Radha’s chief extracurricular guide, her lecturer, heckler, cheerleader, and coconspirator. At those times we all forgot whose voice and hands Hamlet and company were making use of, and the next day Radha would report mastery of some minor voice control trick to Gustav as if he hadn’t been there in the room with us. Initially it seemed that this type of forgetfulness seriously displeased Gustav, but as we grew more comfortable with him I began to see that when Radha told him something odd or amusing that Hamlet or one of his other puppets had said or done, what Gustav actually expressed was restrained interest. He was observing a process we were not yet privy to.

—

I CAUGHT ON LONG before Radha did. She spoke to Gustav’s troupe in a way that she would never have spoken to him directly. As this confidence flourished, so did a sympathy between Radha and Gustav’s puppets, who devoted themselves to making her laugh and would materialize en masse outside her classroom door and walk her to the bus stop at the end of the day, crying: “Make way for boss lady!” Gustav surrounded her with her especial favorites: Hamlet with his pudding bowl haircut, Chagatai, who was both assassin and merman (he kills sailors with his sexy falsetto!), Brunhild the shipbuilder, and an astronaut named Petrushka, who answered any question put to him in exhaustive detail. Also present was a toddler-sized jumping bean known as Loco Dempsey. Their master walked behind Radha, arms raised as he worked the controls high above her head. Under Gustav’s command all the strings stayed separate; Radha marveled at that and leaned into him so as not to be the body that tangled those clean lines. He nudged a few of the controls into her hands, lowered his arms so that he was holding her—not tightly, since there’s only so much you can do with your elbows. He whistled a brisk polonaise and her gestures led his as she set Brunhild and Loco to marching. Radha looked so happy that I thought some kind of admission was forthcoming later, but instead she turned to me and said: “That can’t be the same gang Myrna told me about.”

—

THE NIGHT a fortuneteller outside KFC seized Radha by both hands and told her that little by little she was falling for an invisible man, she was confounded and kept me awake until dawn asking who on earth it could possibly be . . .

I couldn’t decide whether the Grimaldi boy was to be pitied, congratulated, or scolded. Granted, this was one way to have a secret love affair, but there was no telling what his own feelings were, or whether this was just a routine seduction for him. Put yourself in his place: You’re descended from generations of people who speak and have spoken primarily through puppets . . . as such you’re a kind of champion at psychological limbo. And you happen to like girls with brilliant eyes that see hidden things and dark hair from which they occasionally retrieve forgotten notes to themselves. Then you meet a new one. Wouldn’t you try and see how close you could get without her noticing?