Toymaker, The (2 page)

As circuses go, it was not very large. It hardly warranted the name at all. ‘Travelling show’ was more like it. There were only two carts. The wood of their sides was rotten – no amount of bright paint could hide that – and there were only four horses to pull them both, two to each cart. They were old horses, bone thin. How they managed to pull those heavy carts through the winter mud I don’t know, but horses do that. They keep on going while there is breath in their body. They have big hearts, horses. Did you know you can ride a horse to death? You really can. It won’t complain. It will keep going and keep going until it drops dead of exhaustion beneath you. Then you have to walk. So if you have any sense, you don’t do that. You rest the horse when it needs it, and you have to decide when that is
because the horse can’t tell you. It will just carry on and on until it drops dead. Imagine that.

There had once been two more horses than there were now. They would walk behind the second cart on a long rope and be changed over when the others needed a rest. But these were wild times and there were no safe roads. The thick woods hid things – wolves as well as men. It was the wolves that got them. Just before dark they came out of the woods without a sound – silent and hungry and big. They had the two following horses down before anyone could do a thing: the horses were screaming and plunging at their ropes but the wolves just sank their teeth in and wouldn’t let go even though the halters were still tied and the cart was dragging the wolves and the kicking horses along the ground. So the circus men cut the ropes and the two carts went on as fast as they could, leaving those two horses to the wolves. There was a small lamp in each cart and by its light the people could just see the fear on each other’s faces as the wolves killed the screaming horses, and then everything was quiet except for their own scared breathing and the creaking of the carts as they continued on their way.

The first cart carried everything that was needed:
the food, the faded costumes, the props. With that cart went the owner, Lutsmann, and his painted wife, Anna-Maria. He said that this arrangement allowed him to check that everything was always to hand when it was needed, but everyone knew that it was because Lutsmann thought they would steal things if he put them in the second cart. That’s the kind of man he was. He thought that people would steal from him because he never missed a chance to steal from them. He stole from them in the thin food he gave them; he stole from them in the wages he never paid and in the promises he never kept. But they had nowhere else to go. They were people who had once wanted nothing more from life than to juggle and dance, breathe great gouts of fire, turn somersaults and lift enormous weights, but they had never been quite good enough at their art to find a place in a proper show. When they were taken on by Lutsmann, they thought that it was at least something – a start. Only then did they realize that this was all they would ever have, and that all their dreams and their hopes had gone. They had nothing left but Lutsmann’s Travelling Circus. It is a terrible thing to have no dreams, no hopes. So, in many ways, as well as owning the carts, Lutsmann
owned them too.

His wife, Anna-Maria, was a vicious woman. She considered herself a great beauty. Maybe she had been once. She painted her face thick with make-up. Rouged her cheeks, blacked her eyelashes, reddened her lips – dark as blood. She carried herself with a haughty highness and had a riding crop with which she laid about her when her temper was raised. Lutsmann called her crooningly ‘my dove’, ‘my apple’. She called him simply ‘Lutsmann’, and he jumped when she spoke.

But what of the performers? You might expect that if they weren’t looked after by Lutsmann, then at least they looked after each other. But you’d be wrong. They were petty and vindictive. Maybe that is really why they found themselves where they were. They were that sort of person: Lutsmann’s show was just the lowest sink into which they had all fallen. Perhaps they would have been the same anywhere. Or maybe they could have been better if the world had been better to them. That is a very hard question. It’s not one that I know the answer to. There was a strongman, a fire-eater, a tightrope-walker, a juggler and dancer, a lady who could bend her body in quite impossible ways, a conjuror and a boy. And
the boy was the only good thing there, in the back of the cart creaking along the road, while the wolves killed the screaming horses.

Let me tell you about that boy, then you can make up your own mind about him. His name was Mathias.

Lutsmann’s Travelling Circus was the only world he could remember. It was not the only one he’d ever known, but it was the only one he could remember. Eleven or twelve years before, there had been another world in which first his mother and then his father had died. And in that world too there had been an uncle – his father’s brother – and an aunt – the uncle’s wife – who both died as well. And then, though this was a part he’d never really understood, there had been his grandfather. He was the reason why Mathias came to be in the creaking cart. His name was Gustav. He was the conjuror. There is something about him which I’ll tell you in a moment. When Mathias was younger, Gustav had kept him close by on a rope tied to his wrist. If he thought that Mathias had been bad, he would hurt him. Sometimes he hurt him very much. But Mathias couldn’t run away from him because of the rope. Those days were very confused in Mathias’s
mind. He couldn’t remember them easily – not that he really wanted to. He had to make do with things as they were, because he had no other choice.

Now, there were two important things that he knew: the first was that Gustav was his grandfather; the second, well, that was something that he almost knew. It was a great secret that Gustav was going to tell him one day. Once, when Gustav had been drunk – often he was very drunk – he had told Mathias that he knew a secret. A secret that would make Gustav rich beyond all dreams. A secret so big that there were men who would kill him rather than have it told. When Gustav was sober again, Mathias asked him what the secret was and Gustav’s eyes had narrowed because he knew he’d said too much to the boy. ‘You must never tell,’ he told Mathias. ‘If you are a good boy and do all that I say, one day I will tell you what it is, the secret that only I know.’ And he had put his finger to Mathias’s lips and then to his own. ‘One day, if you are always a good boy.’

The secret was why – and this is the strange thing that I was going to tell you – Gustav had painted his face quite white. He never took the paint off. Ever. What better disguise than a face as white as a corpse? What better place to hide than a travelling circus,
what better companion than his grandson? How could such a person know anything?

When Gustav joined Lutsmann’s circus, he had actually been a very good conjuror. If people do not understand how a thing is done, they are prepared to believe that it might, just might, be magic. If I were to open my hand and, where a moment before there had been nothing there was now a bird, you might not understand how I had done it but you would guess that somehow I had put it there. But if I were to ask you to turn
your
hand over, peel back your fingers and in your palm was a bird – now how could that have got there? That is what Gustav could do. That and many more things too. He could make a tight scarf appear around a man’s throat if he had called out from the crowd and made him angry. ‘Take care,’ he would say, ‘or next time I will make it a rope.’

It was not magic, but how could it have been done?

He was a finer conjuror than Lutsmann could ever have expected to find, and Lutsmann snapped him up having seen only part of what Gustav could do. He took him, child and all, and no questions were ever asked. But Lutsmann knew a man with a past
when he saw one. What did it matter to him? He had a conjuror and Gustav had somewhere to hide – what more did either want?

Well, I’ll tell you what Lutsmann wanted – what Anna-Maria wanted. They wanted to know what it was that Gustav had to hide. Why else would a man like him have come to them? Why else would he never show his real face?

This was the life that Mathias led in the circus. Preparing the things the performers would need. Helping them dress and undress, and never any thanks given. Estella, the lady contortionist, was the worst. Mathias would avoid her when he could. Sometimes he couldn’t. She would call him ‘my pretty boy’ and put her hand beneath his chin as though to pet him, but instead she would dig her finger hard into the top of his throat so that he hung there upon her nail as if upon a single spike. ‘My pretty boy,’ she would say, and then her voice was like a cat snagging silk with its claws. He fetched their water, he cleaned and mended, and did all the things that a child shouldn’t have to do. But he had no choice. There was no one else to look after him.

When they came to a place that was large enough for a show, Lutsmann would stop the brightly
painted carts. The side of the second cart would be lowered so as to make a stage, and there Lutsmann would stand in his fine clothes, black boots and red coat, shouting until he had a crowd. Beside him stood the man who ate fire. He would thrust a lighted torch into his mouth and blow out a jet of flame that lit a twist of straw Lutsmann held in his hand. He could swallow swords too. He could put five of them down his throat at once, one after the other. While this was happening Gustav would be on the stage too, whirling cards out of his hands in ribbons and drawing them back in, spreading them like fans, making them loop the loop. Estella would fold her body around and sit on her own head, and all the time Lutsmann would be shouting and beating a drum while Anna-Maria went amongst the crowd and sold tickets for the show. For this wasn’t the show itself; this was just enough to make people want to come. The real show would only happen when the light faded and the burning torches were lit. Then everything was in shadow, and in the flickering light people didn’t see the cheaply painted carts; they saw what they wanted to believe.

In the light of the flaming torches, Lutsmann would introduce each act before it came on. The
strongman would come first. Like most circus shows, not all was what it seemed. While he was showing his muscles to the crowd, it was Mathias’s job to crawl into a secret space beneath the cart and, at the right moment, hook to an iron bar beneath the floor the huge weights the strongman was to lift, so that when Lutsmann called the young men up to try their luck, they couldn’t move them an inch. He knew when to unhook them too, so that the strongman, face red
with pretended effort, could sail them above his head to the gasps of the crowd.

Then Estella’s turn would come. There was nothing fake about her. She would bend and twist her thin body, and the village men would stare at her, wide-eyed and greedy, until their wives made them look away. Then came the fire-eater, the juggler and the tightrope walker, and then, last of all, Gustav. Mathias would watch the faces in the crowd as they stared open-mouthed as Gustav pulled flags from the air and sent glowing balls floating just out of reach over their heads. What Mathias never saw though was how, from behind his white face, Gustav carefully searched the faces in the crowd for one that he knew.

It puzzled Mathias that Gustav never showed the crowd what he could really do. It was much more than they ever saw. Sometimes Gustav could be kind, though it was strange when he was – he would show Mathias a trick to stop his tears. ‘Look,’ he would say, and then he would do something remarkable – like finding the bird in Mathias’s hand, or making cold blue flames burn on the tip of each of his fingers. When he did those tricks, the air would fill with a scent, like honey and resin. It clung to Gustav’s
clothes afterwards, but Mathias never knew what it was, and Gustav would never tell him.

And that is how it was.

But then things got worse. Mathias saw that his grandfather was becoming absent-minded. He was vague on the stage. He mistimed his tricks now and then, even dropped things, which was unheard of. At night Gustav would twitch and turn in his bed, and if Mathias got up – there was no toilet in the cart – Gustav would catch hold of him as though he were a thief and stare at him for minutes on end in the darkness, wanting to know, over and over, if the daylight was coming. Sometimes he didn’t know who Mathias was or why he was there, and then he got angry, accusing him of trying to steal his secret. For as long as Mathias could remember, Gustav had slept with a pistol beneath his pillow. But one night, when he was raving like that, Gustav put it to the side of Mathias’s head and held it there in trembling silence. It was the longest moment Mathias had ever known.

In the morning, when Gustav was himself again and weeping floods of self-pitying tears, Mathias threw the pistol into the long grass and Gustav never noticed it had gone, or if he did, he said nothing.

There was no medicine that made any difference. Gustav tried several – little red bottles that he would tip down his throat in one swallow, or mix in a small tumbler with wine. It got so that he couldn’t do his act any more. He started to tremble and his words were hard to understand. He forgot things halfway through, and the crowd would hiss and laugh at him as the tricks dropped from his hands. But for all that had happened, Mathias still felt tears of rage behind his eyes when they laughed at the feeble man with the white face, because when all was said and done, he was his grandfather. But that became the act. Lutsmann saw to it. The others didn’t want Gustav any more – he was just an extra mouth to feed – but Lutsmann did. ‘I am doing you a favour,’ he would say in his fat, greasy voice, putting his arm around Mathias. ‘Let the people laugh at him and we will still feed you.’ Then he would thumb his large nose. ‘Maybe one day you will be able to do something to repay us?’