Daydreams of Angels

BARTÓK FOR CHILDREN

Once upon a time there was a young Quebec soldier in occupied France. The Germans couldn’t differentiate between a Québécois and a Parisian accent, and so French-Canadian soldiers made perfect spies. This unfortunate Canadian soldier, however, had been turned in by an angry Parisian girlfriend and was shot fifteen times in the chest by a German soldier. He lay on the ground in the woods, looking up at the sky, waiting to die.

The branches of the trees were all laughing at him. It was winter and the snowflakes were falling from the sky slowly. They were enormous, as though old women had crocheted them for a church sale. Looking at them, the soldier didn’t think that death would be so bad after all. All he had to do was close his eyes for good this time, but he kept opening them to get one more peek at the world around him and because he wanted to be human for one more second.

His life wasn’t flashing before his eyes at all. In fact, he couldn’t really recall anything about who he was. Or perhaps he couldn’t be bothered to remember anything. He just wanted to have these last moments to himself. He felt as if he was on the verge of figuring something out, as if some greater meaning was about to be revealed to him, but then it wasn’t.

Two faces appeared above him. They were the round faces of two little girls. They had on black peacoats and red mittens. One had a pale face with blond curls tumbling onto it. The other had short black hair and thin bow lips.

“Bonjour, bonjour,” they said.

Their words turned into small puffs of smoke in front of their faces. They took him by the shoulders and shook him. Their dogs were hopping all over his legs and licking his cheeks. He felt them lifting his body onto a little cart. They were scolding their dogs and calling them all manner of beasts.

The soldier closed his eyes. It was all over for him. The bumpy road turned into the soft waves of the sea. He was sailing away, away, away to some place.

As the girls drew up to the doctor’s house, one of them opened the lapels of the soldier’s jacket and put her ear against his chest. When she raised her head, her ear and cheek were covered in his blood, but she hadn’t heard any heartbeat. They brought him to the doctor, who quickly pronounced the man dead. He told them to bring the man to the mortician’s, as he himself was in the middle of a meal. The girls decided to bring him to the Toymaker’s house instead. He could fix any toy and bring all sorts of broken things back to life. Their cheeks were the loveliest pink known to humanity due to the effort that they had taken in pulling the soldier all the way to the Toymaker’s house, which was all the way out of town.

The Toymaker had always been shy. He had thought that he would overcome it as he grew older, but this had not been the case. He walked through the village with his head down, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. He felt wretched when he was anywhere but his toy shop.

His workshop was where all his friends were. He was busy all the time, bringing things to life. He made dolls with porcelain faces that would speak if you pulled the little chain on their backs.

The dolls had red, glistening lips. They looked as if they were dying to say something but had been warned not to say another word by their teachers. Their eyes were so shiny that at times it seemed as if they were welling up with tears. Their cheeks were rosy, as if they had come in from skating moments before. And their hair was so curly that it always seemed to be shaking, as if they had just taken the pins out and now it was tumbling down and they were laughing.

The Toymaker looked in the mirror and couldn’t help but notice the contrast between himself and the dolls. He was so old that great bags had formed under his eyes and his nose was bulbous and covered in spider veins, but inside he had always felt like a boy. The voice that spoke to him in his head was that of a boy. He dressed the same way that he had when he was ten years old, always wearing a vest with red buttons. He made toys that were exactly to his liking, which turned out to be the same tastes of the children who came into his shop. His refusal to grow up was what made him so good at his craft.

The Toymaker was also able to make little clockwork figures. He made monkeys in tailcoats and white bow ties — like waiters at fancy restaurants — that would bang their cymbals together. What a strange occupation for a ten-inch monkey. He would laugh and laugh while looking at them. There was a bear that waddled back and forth with a suitcase in each hand as if he were on his way to catch a train. There was a goose that held a trumpet to its mouth and played a lovely tune.

As much as people found his toys wonderful, no one loved them quite as much as the Toymaker did. He thought they were all so, so enchanting. They broke his heart. But what he could not do was get a doll to love him. Every time he created something that was beautiful, he was struck by a feeling of terrible loneliness.

Before the war, the Toymaker charged top price for his dolls. It was only the very richest of children that were able to afford them. His dolls were renowned and were shipped to rich families in other cities throughout Europe. The children would pull off the huge ribbon from the box and then they would gasp at what was inside. Now there were no orders for expensive dolls from the families in Paris or any other big city.

But he had a soft spot for all children. The children from the village would knock on his back door. They would be weeping and holding up their dolls that needed emergency treatment. They brought him teddy bears that looked like they had dropsy. They looked like little piles of cold porridge. Some had lost their ears, having been viciously mauled by cats. They were anemic and hungry. There were dolls whose eyes had fallen out and others whose fingers had broken right off.

He had an illegal doll hospital. The Toymaker would pull out the rows of tiny screwdrivers and tweezers. They were so small that he might as well be operating on insects, giving a beetle bypass surgery. He would put on special glasses with magnifying lenses. The children would cry out in surprise when they saw his enormous eyes. He would take his tray of ceramic hands out of the oven, and his bottles of glass eyes that looked out at him from the cabinets, and make all the dolls come back to life. He would lay the dolls on the operating table and he would mend their broken crowns.

One little boy arrived once with a notebook and asked the Toymaker if he would do his math problems with him. His father used to help him, but now he had gone off to fight and was in a prison somewhere. They sat together under the table lamp — the golden glow of the dim bulb — doing his homework together.

But the children always went home at the end of the day. They didn’t really belong to him. That’s why children wanted and loved dolls. They wanted to have something to keep with them always. They wanted to give something a name. The Toymaker wanted that too.

The Toymaker had a black cat named Cleo that hopped around the house. Its slick fur looked as though it were made out of the same material as a magician’s top hat. But that wasn’t the same!

The Toymaker yelled at the girls to bring the soldier in. He couldn’t believe it. If he fixed this young man, maybe he could keep him. This might be his chance to have a real boy!

He worked through the night, sewing all the soldier’s wounds with invisible thread. He mended his broken leg with tiny screws and plaster. He ran wires through his arms and his legs and then put an electrical box at the bottom of his head. He bestowed on him a clockwork heart. Ever so carefully, he placed a small speaker behind his vocal chords. Finally, he filled the soldier with oil. Then he took a step back and hoped the soldier would come to life, but he didn’t.

The children came by every day to see if the soldier was up and about and might want to come and play with them. The little girls yelled into his ears, but the soldier heard nothing. They propped up his head and poured chocolate milk into his lips, but he never swallowed. They held flowers up to his nose to try and get him to inhale. They shoved Cleo’s kittens up to his face because they thought no one, not even the dead, could resist a kitten. But the soldier did.

One of the little girls was in charge of brushing his hair with a little brush made from the ivory of a dead elephant’s tusk that she had inherited from a grandmother. She swore solemnly that she did not have lice. She brushed his hair for hours and hours. What a lovely pouf of hair the soldier had when she was done. His hair was never going to get out of place ever again and all the girls were going to go bananas about it.

They brought in a little boy who was in the Children’s Orchestra to perform for the poor Canadian soldier. He played a Bartók tune that he had learned in school. Even though they knew that they were supposed to be sombre, all the little girls began tapping their feet to the tune. One little girl put her index fingers in the air and started waving them back and forth. The tune was so delightful and bouncy that the soldier’s heart could not resist beating along to it. And when the soldier opened his eyes, all the little girls applauded. There were tears in the Toymaker’s eyes.

The soldier had no memory of anything that had happened to him before he was shot and left for dead in the forest. He asked all the questions that everyone had been intending to ask him when he awoke. The Toymaker detected his accent right away and was determined to keep him hidden away from the Germans for the length of this interminable war, at least!

Because he was convalescing and couldn’t remember a thing, the soldier found that he was often very, very sad. When the Toymaker told him that yes, they were still at war, the soldier was horrified, and he asked him what in the world was the point of any of it. Why should he get out of bed?

“We just have to try and be good,” the Toymaker said. “We can’t make ourselves happy. That is a foolhardy enterprise. The only thing we can do is make other people happy.”

For some reason the Toymaker’s words ruffled the soldier. They sounded like advice of some sort. He had an inkling that he had been lectured to before and he hadn’t much liked it. He had never liked being anybody’s son, he surmised. Why did you have to come into this world beholden to anyone? He didn’t actually owe the Toymaker anything, did he? He hadn’t asked to be operated on.

The Toymaker handed him a little matchbox. The soldier opened it to find a cricket inside that started to play a sorrowful tune, using its wee legs like a fiddle. It made him feel so deeply all of a sudden that he was almost sick to his stomach. He was worried for a second that the Toymaker had actually put him together incorrectly and that there was something coming loose in his chest. He closed the matchbox quickly.

When he was able to get out of bed and stand, the Toymaker bundled the soldier up, wrapping a huge scarf around his neck. The soldier argued that he didn’t need that many layers of clothes, but the Toymaker insisted. He helped the soldier to walk again for the first time in the garden. His legs were weak from having been in bed for so long. He stepped on the brambles of frozen rose bushes, and the ground crunched under his feet as he walked across it, as though he were walking on and breaking bones.

The Toymaker put out his arms and yelled, “Come to me. Come to me.”

The Toymaker had sewn together a colourful ball. They tossed it back and forth so that the soldier could get his reflexes back. Whenever the soldier would reach out to catch the ball, he could feel his insides moving mechanically, and he could sense oil being released from his clockwork heart and into his veins. At first it was alarming and he would drop the ball with a shudder. But he soon began to get used to the feeling of tiny cogs and bolts and springs moving around, in the same way that one ignores one’s heartbeat.

German officers had been going around to all the houses in the village, looking for a spy who had been wounded but whose body hadn’t been recovered. The children went home every evening and they told their parents nothing whatsoever about the spy they had found in the woods. In that day and age it wasn’t at all the custom to ask children what they were thinking. So they were able to sit, unassuming, at the other side of the table, with all the wonders of the world locked away in their brains. They didn’t want the soldier to be put in prison or hanged. He could stay with the Toymaker in the woods forever.

The soldier grew restless in the little house very soon. He grew tired of all the little girls reading him stories out of their fat books. He had had enough of them telling him the long and drawn-out histories of teddy bears and handing him tiny cups that they said were filled with coffee but had nothing at all inside of them. There were things that he needed to talk about — that he couldn’t talk about with little girls or with an old man who claimed to be his father.

The soldier began to feel the urge to be alone for at least a few moments. Everywhere he looked there always seemed to be little girls. They would cuddle up into his armpit while he was taking a nap. They were underneath the kitchen table and he couldn’t move his legs without kicking one. While he was on the toilet, they would come into the bathroom and try to sit on his lap. They would be stomping around the house in his boots and his jacket. There would be three or four of them sitting in the bathtub, pouring cups of water onto one another’s head, whenever he wanted to bathe himself.

Although the soldier wanted to be treated like an adult, he seemed so young to the Toymaker. The soldier still had such rosy cheeks and seemed so incredibly foolish. The Toymaker wanted to be a father to the soldier and tried everything to bond with him.

The Toymaker had been working on manufacturing a toy clown that blew up a rubber balloon. He sat across the table from the soldier and set it in front of him.

“Look at this. It will make you laugh so hard! I’m going to write on the box that if this toy doesn’t make you laugh, you can get a full refund.”

The tiny clown blew and blew until the red balloon was full and round. The soldier only stared at it, unimpressed.

“Oh!” the Toymaker said. “It didn’t make you laugh.”

“You might want to take off that guarantee, buddy. Especially now we’re in the middle of a war. There’s not a lot of laughing going on.”

“I want you to feel at home here,” the Toymaker said, wanting to get to the point. “I think of you as my own flesh and blood. Really. You’re the boy that I always imagined having. You’re so handsome and so smart. You dress yourself so well.”

“Geez,” said the soldier. “Do you get like this with everyone?”

The soldier had no intention of spending the rest of his days there. The thought of it made him crazy. But he didn’t think there was any point in hurting the old man’s feelings, so he didn’t bother to tell him so.

“Do you have anything to read?” the soldier asked.

“Yes,” said the Toymaker, happy to be useful. He hurried into his living room and brought back a big book of fairy tales.

“Do you prefer to read by yourself, or do you prefer to be read to?” the Toymaker asked. “There’s a story in here that my own mother used to read to me when I was little. It is about a goose that always has to protect her goslings from a very fancy wolf who has developed a taste for such birds.”

“Are you mad? A tale about a goose? What kind of insight can a goose have? Do you have any of that existentialism that’s supposed to be all the rage in Paris?”

The next day, the Toymaker left the house. He knocked on the door of a lawyer who lived in town. The lawyer was surprised to see the Toymaker at his door, and was even more surprised when he asked if he could borrow some books from his library.

When the soldier went to bed that night, there was a copy of a book by Albert Camus on his nightstand, next to a glass of milk and a small plate of cookies.

The soldier felt that on some level he should be touched. He knew that the Toymaker was doing everything to make things special, but he didn’t want to feel indebted. The soldier wanted to pay his own way in this world so that he could act exactly as he wanted. He resented that the Toymaker was expecting things from him.

He had a compulsion to open the matchbox as he sometimes did when he was reflecting on things. He could never bear more than a minute or two though, as the music of the cricket always made him feel kind of sad, even though there was nothing for him to be upset about. And this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He actually quite liked it. It made him think that there was some part of him that he knew nothing about and that was going to very much surprise him one day. Nobody really wants to know themselves completely, especially not when they are young. What’s the fun in that? He didn’t mention the book at all when the Toymaker peeked in later that night. This time too he closed the matchbox soon after opening it.

The Toymaker sat by himself on a little chair in the kitchen. He had to admit that he was disappointed because he’d thought that he and the boy would do all sorts of things together. He had pictured them looking for mushrooms together in the forest. He had imagined them on a beach, looking for pretty seashells. But he also had to admit that he wasn’t as lonely anymore. It was as if any company was better than no company.

The boys in the village kept begging to try on the soldier’s topcoat. They wanted to play with his radio. The soldier found two of them in his room one afternoon, pretending to electrocute another little boy seated on a chair, demanding he give up the names of Resistance fighters. The soldier yelled at the boys to get lost and chased them right out the door. He sat on the bed, wondering about his aborted mission in France and where he was actually supposed to be.

“You can be a role model to those boys,” the Toymaker said. “They look up to you. Why don’t you go out and play some football with them? I bet you could take on all of them by yourself.”

The soldier didn’t say anything, but he slammed his bedroom door shut in the Toymaker’s face. All the paintings in the house fell off the walls. The Toymaker thought that this was what being a real parent was like. It was not all wine and roses. You had to try to make your child feel loved and wanted and worthy over and over again, no matter what they did. If he kept at it, he could teach the soldier to be loving and kind.

“They know your face,” whispered the Toymaker on the other side of the door. “Your days as a spy are over. You can’t go out there, but you can be happy here.”

But as much as he tried to be a parent, the soldier refused to be a son to him.

One of the neighbouring farmers delivered food to the Toymaker’s house every week. The soldier always found the culinary selections unsatisfying.

“Don’t you have any way to get wine and meat, for God’s sake?” the soldier asked.

“You have to go into the Big Town to get them. It’s too far a walk for me.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so? I’ll go for you.”

The soldier got dressed in a long grey coat and a beret and scowled with feigned disgust. He stood in the living room for the Toymaker and the children to admire his new look as an indignant Frenchman. Although he couldn’t remember anything about his past, he had a feeling that his having been shot had had something to do with a woman and not his subterfuge skills.

“You will be found and killed,” the Toymaker exclaimed.

“Oh come on, no German in the world can tell that I’m not from France. I just have to scoff at the trees and the rocks and existence as I walk — that’s the hard part. I’m going into town now. I’m going to be somebody’s Cousin Loïc, okay? If I get shot, it’s not the biggest deal in the world is it? A passing mechanic’ll surely be kind enough to put me back together. I’ll have exhaust fumes coming out of my ass when I run. Or maybe an electrician will find me, and when I wake up in the morning my head will glow like a light bulb.”

All the children laughed uncontrollably at this joke, holding their bellies, which were getting cramps from being doubled over, and crossing their legs so that they didn’t pee themselves. But the Toymaker didn’t even smile. On the contrary, he was very serious and worried. He interpreted the soldier’s lack of sensitivity as being due to immaturity. He was no more than a silly little boy — and silly little boys lost their way in the woods.

But the soldier managed to get to the Big Town after a two-hour walk without incident. On the black market he bought a bottle of wine, a long row of sausages, some bread and a bag of coffee. He walked through the woods, whistling a Bartók tune, looking forward to eating some proper food.

On his way back, he spotted a striking young woman coming toward him. There also happened to be a big tomcat following her down the path. She was tall and had red hair that was coming out from beneath a white fur hat. She wore a black fitted coat that went down almost to her ankles. What a fox! the soldier thought.

“That’s a pretty coat,” the soldier said.

“I found it in an abandoned house. I knew that no one was going to come back for it. It’s so warm. Do you want to buy it?”

“No thanks. That’s a giant cat you have there. It looks as if the two of you have had some really good times together.”

“He’s the only one I can trust in this world. You can’t trust people anymore. It’s the people that are the animals.”

The soldier paused, not knowing what to say for a moment. This girl had an odd way of making small talk.

“Do you want some food?”

“Please,” she said, her voice cracking.

She ate a piece of sausage ravenously. She went through all his food, shoving chunks of bread into her mouth. When he was about to object and say that there were others who wanted the food, she hurriedly put three sausages in one of her pockets and the bag of coffee into the other. Then she put her hands up to his face.

“Kiss me. I so want to be kissed right now. I don’t care if it’s good or proper. I just want to feel alive. I need to be reminded that I’m alive and that I’m not in the grave.”

The soldier forgot about anything else that was happening in the world. The girl’s cheeks tasted like tears, but oh my lord, how she kissed. It was a bit of a disappointment when she took off her coat. She looked so skinny, her ribs were poking out and her arms were covered in bruises. But the woman had eyes that looked at him in a way that none of the little girls ever could. She was having dirty thoughts. That’s what he had felt was missing in him in the quaint little house in the woods. The Toymaker and the little girls knew nothing about getting naked and the secret things that adults liked to do when they couldn’t sleep. Nobody had read to him from The Complete Marquis de Sade to try and revive him.

“Let’s find a place to drink this, shall we?” she said, taking his bottle of wine and waving it.

He looked down at the cat. Maybe he was imagining it, but the cat seemed to have a smirk on its face. The smell of coffee whiffed around him. Oh Lord, how long it had been since he had had a cup of coffee. How long it had been since he had had a naked girl sitting on his face. He suddenly remembered who he was. He was a man. He slid his hand inside the woman’s dress and onto her right breast and grabbed it hard. And the woman moaned.

Everything inside his clockwork body began pumping away madly. He didn’t even care if his heart exploded and burst into a million little screws and bolts. That was what it felt like it was going to do any moment, and if it did, it would be worth it. She put her mouth on his dick and he turned his head up toward the sky and laughed and laughed. He felt alive.

He knew that he had to get out of that house in the woods — after he had taken her from behind and she had cried out so loudly that it had startled birds in the neighbouring village.

As soon as the soldier was spent, the girl quickly put her clothes back on. The girl picked up the cat and held it tightly, as if it was all that was valuable in the world and she was suddenly terrified of losing it. She barely even said goodbye as she hurried away. The soldier found himself aching when he saw her go. He loved the sensation of it. For the first time since the Toymaker had brought him back to life, he felt fulfilled by an emotion. He wanted to ache like that again and again. He was impressed that the girl had made love to him and then got up and just left. While he watched her disappear into the woods, he decided that he was going to walk away from the Toymaker. It was what adults did.

He felt in his pocket to make sure the matchbox was still there. He couldn’t leave the cricket behind as it was a present. The Toymaker had gone through so much trouble to fix up all his parts and build him a new metallic heart. The least he could do would be to accept the gift that he had given him. He was undoubtedly an asshole, but when he felt the matchbox in his pocket, he thought for a brief second that he might have a conscience after all.

Although he was taking the cricket with him, he didn’t dare take it out of its matchbox and let it play its bittersweet violin as he walked down the road. The wee violin tune might fill his head with all sorts of emotions that he didn’t want to have. Those were the sorts of emotions that ended up keeping you in one place. They would make you feel guilt and a sense of responsibility. Those emotions were like cages.

The soldier made it out of France. A pretty peasant woman showed him a way out after he made love to her in a haystack. He found his way to the secret rendezvous spot set up by the Canadians to escort Resistance fighters and prisoners back to England. He was whisked across the water in the dead of night. Upon his return, nobody could believe that he was still alive. A doctor looked at the stitches on his torso and whistled at the handiwork. He put a stethoscope against the soldier’s chest and said he’d never heard such a regular heartbeat in all his life. He gave the soldier a clean bill of health.

As a reward for his daring spy ventures, he was given a desk job in England for the remainder of the war. He went out dancing every night with the other soldiers, trying to meet local girls. He was happy there. He found that the girls in London sounded like they had lollipops in their mouths when they spoke. They had adorable little beer bellies from being out drinking all night. The girls in England found everything funny. The commanding officer had to tell the soldiers not to tell the English girls so many jokes, because one of them laughed so hard that she had an asthma attack and died.

When he would get back to base every night, he always had the craziest stories about making love to women. He really outdid all the other soldiers.

He made love to a girl under the bandstand. When the drums were banging, it made all his nerves tremble. He made love to a girl a minute after New Year’s and there was still confetti in her hair. He made love to a girl in a bathroom while she held both their beer mugs, trying not to let them spill.

He made love to a girl who was six months pregnant and said that the father of the child was missing in action. He put his head against her belly and felt the baby kick. He liked anything new. He liked anything unusual. He went to pick up a girl who wasn’t there and he ended up having her mother on the kitchen table. When they were done, she lectured him about keeping her daughter out too late.

Some of the girls would make love to him for a pair of nylon stockings. Some of them, he didn’t even know why on earth they were making love to him. They clearly didn’t like it. There was something about him that made him irresistible. Maybe it was because he didn’t have a soul. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t have a conscience. Women go crazy for a man with no conscience.

He never came close to falling in love with anybody. Instead, he went around having trysts, looking for encounters that would make all the cogs and wheels in his heart begin to spin wildly. He could feel all sorts of little bolts sliding into different compartments and prongs going into different levers. And tiny little pistons started going up and down, and oil would be released over all of his hinges and he felt he moved so smooth and well.

One night he was in an alleyway with a short girl with blond corkscrew curls falling down her round face. She was getting on his nerves because she wouldn’t put out. He naturally sometimes liked the hard-to-get types, but he had just had enough of them for one week. And she bore an uncanny resemblance to the dolls in the Toymaker’s shop, which he found disconcerting.

“Where do you see us ten years from now?” she asked.

“How in the world would I know something like that? What do you take me for? A fortune teller? Am I carrying around a crystal ball?”

What sort of lie did this silly girl want to hear? the soldier wondered. What idiotic fable would she take her clothes off for? She wanted to hear about having a family, of course. If there was anything more ridiculous to the soldier than romantic love, it was undoubtedly this idea that you were supposed to have a family. He felt like lying to her if only to mock her values.

“Well, come to think of it, I see myself living in a really big house.”

When he said this, she undid her top button and jutted her chest out toward him. The girl’s bust was really large and the dress had to, undoubtedly, be pulled together to be buttoned up. The idea of all those buttons coming undone encouraged the soldier to continue his fantastical lie.

“I see myself reading a newspaper in the mornings. And I want to be a father, because I want to know what that feels like. Because I had such a special relationship with my own dad, you know?”

The girl released another button from its tiny hole.

“That’s the most important thing to me: having a close-knit family. I only ever wanted to have one girlfriend, because I know that the task of keeping one girl happy is a big enough job for a fellow like me.”

Every time a lie caused a button to jump free, his dick grew more erect. He didn’t think that he had ever had such a hard-on as the one he had for this curly-haired girl. He pushed her up against the wall and she let him have his way with her as she closed her eyes and fantasized about laughing children climbing into their bed in the mornings.

Later that night in his room, the soldier felt empty. Each affair left him with more assured proof that he didn’t have anything like a soul inside of him, and as though life were insignificant and meaningless. But that night, pretending for a moment that he did care about the idea of a full life had left him with such a sense of the grand futility of everything that he felt as though he were about to be swallowed up by nothingness. That night he decided that he had to go back to France and work as a spy again. He still couldn’t remember his former life, but he wondered if this sort of feeling wasn’t what had sent him over to France as a spy the first time.

A few days later, as he was packing a small bag with only necessary items, he noticed the matchbox with the cricket in it. He opened it and the cricket started playing the most depressing and creepy Bartók tune. It gave him an unholy feeling and made the hair stand up on his neck. He closed the box quickly.

Honestly, he didn’t understand that cricket at all and he wasn’t sure that he ever would. He didn’t even know how the cricket got it into its head to play in such a strange way. What in the world was music like that for? You couldn’t dance to it and it certainly wouldn’t put any babies to sleep.

Nonetheless, he stuck the cricket inside his pocket. The cricket had been with him this long and was the closest thing he had to a past. And, in any case, he wasn’t quite sure that it was a wise decision to go and leave this little cricket playing its mournful, melancholic tunes on windowsills. Someone was bound to take a shoe and clobber it.

It was especially risky for this soldier to return, as he had already been found out and the German soldiers would be looking out for him, but he had insisted on returning to finish his work as a spy. He knew that he was doing a deep good, but he didn’t even know if he was doing it for the right reasons. Everyone admired his bravery. But was he doing it because he wanted to engage in a profoundly moral action, or was he doing it because he hated himself and wanted to put himself in danger in order to feel alive? That feeling of having a gun up to your heart, about to pull the trigger — at least that would make his damn heart beat faster.

They tossed him out of the plane, his parachute burst above him like a single piece of popcorn in the night and down he went onto occupied soil. He didn’t look for the Toymaker, but no one could fault him for that as he was so busy being a hero. He and the other Canadian spies worked hard delivering information and maps to the Resistance fighters, ferreting Allied soldiers out of France and onto boats to England. One night he was hurrying down a road on a bicycle, trying to get to the coast of Brittany. It was the quickest way to get to the coast and he was rather enjoying it, inhaling enormous gulps of air while riding the bicycle over the gravelly ground, when he was stopped by German officers waiting for him at a bend in the path. When they found the radio in his bicycle basket, he knew that he was done for.

The soldier was in a bedroom. The torturers had secured bolts and locks on the door and had hammered planks of wood over the windows. He was wearing his navy blue cable sweater over a shirt, loose-fitting pants, a coat with a fur lining and boots that went to his knees. He was attached to a chain that had been secured to the metal framework of the bed.

Everything valuable had been dragged out of the room. There were no clothes in the dressers, no books on the shelves. He noticed that there was a small teddy bear in the corner, grasping the leg of the armoire and looking at him. Whether it had chosen to stay behind or had been left there, he could not say. It had probably once been a child’s bedroom.

There was no way to escape now. There was nothing he could say or do that would change his fate. He was already a dead man, really.

Since part of his body was mechanical, he was able to withstand pain better than most people, but not that much more. They had broken the fingers of his right hand but those of his left were still working perfectly well. He used them to pull his matchbox out of the breast pocket of his shirt. He opened the matchbox slowly, in order that the cricket might be released. He had given the cricket a leaf to eat a few days before, but he really hadn’t thought about it since then. The cricket climbed out in fine form, scurried up the arm of the tin soldier and perched on his shoulder. The cricket was as close as possible to the soldier’s ear so that he would best be able to hear what it had to say.

It told him his life story, including all the sad things about his terrible childhood in Canada that he had forced himself to forget. Instead of reminiscing about all the very good times that he had had, the soldier let himself remember his own tragedy. He thought about how his dad would come home and beat his mother in the kitchen and how he would hide in the closet. He remembered how his father had kicked him out of the house when he was sixteen years old. He reminisced about how he’d lived on the streets and in boys’ homes for two years before the war happened and how he’d enlisted in order to have a square meal and some new boots. It struck him deeply that nobody had cared when he went off. These were his last moments on earth probably, and he decided that he would allow himself to feel grief. He wanted to feel upset, full of regret and consumed by sorrow. These were the wonderful things in life. These were the emotions that were more like works of art than anything else. That’s why we had music in this world, to make us feel such complicated things.

The soldier wondered who would actually notice that he was gone. Who would accidentally put a plate out for him months and months after his death? The soldier tried to recall each of the girls he had been with while in England. He imagined them in their kitchens, at their kitchen tables, eating their clam chowder, their corned beef, their corn-bread, their Spam, their pickled eggs, their meat loaf, their ratatouille. But he knew that they were probably not really thinking about him.

The only person who was worried about him was the Toymaker. He was probably painting the feathers of a beautiful bird in his workshop. But perhaps he had stopped painting altogether and now lay in bed, sick with worry over what had happened to his dear soldier boy on that walk that he had never come back from. The soldier thought of that Toymaker, who had nobody but a feisty black cat and a bunch of fickle children hanging around. The Toymaker, who had never known the love of a woman and had only ever wanted a boy of his own.

But he could not think of the Toymaker now. He didn’t know the names of his fellow spies or members of the Resistance that he had been working with. They had all been careful about that, so that in the event that one of them got captured, they would have nothing to reveal. Even when he had made love to French girls, he had always warned them not to tell him their names.

He did know the name of the Toymaker, however. The children repeated it about a hundred times a day. He hoped and prayed that he could keep it to himself and not give it to his torturers. It wasn’t as though confessing would set you free. Once you had given up your names, they would shoot you in the woods and leave you there, if you were very lucky. Or they would put you in a concentration camp where you would stand in line for death.

The door burst open and two men came for him, unlocking his chains and dragging him off the bed. He couldn’t help but fight to get away from them, and he squirmed from their grasp onto the ground. One man kicked him in the stomach, which knocked the fight out of him momentarily. The other man pulled him by the scruff of his neck down the narrow hallway.

He grabbed at the wall with his left hand, but all that he managed to snatch was a bit of the wallpaper with blue roses on it that came off like the page of a book. They pulled him into the clean white bathroom, where another man waited.

The white tiles were slippery. They pulled off his coat and his sweater and flung them aside. The bathtub was filled with water and when they plunged him into it, the freezing temperature shocked his body and his back arched and his legs jolted so violently he thought he might break them. It froze him all the way to the bone as they forced him under the water. He grasped wildly, struggling for some way to come up for air, but there was nothing that his limbs could do for him now. His universe had shrunk down to the size of a bathtub and there was no way out of it. They pulled him out for a second and then shoved him back under.

He had never felt so trapped. Every time he went underneath the water he felt sure that he would drown. He had no idea what it would feel like when he couldn’t breathe anymore or how much death would hurt. There was a terror of the unknown all around him. That same feeling was being experienced all over Europe. There was a little boy who had crawled under his kitchen table during an air raid who felt it. It was in the heart of a little girl who had been separated from her parents and was now stuck on a crowded train. There was a boy touching a bullet hole, terrified because he didn’t feel a thing. There were ninety children all feeling it at once on board the SS City of Benares passenger ship, which had just been struck by a torpedo. And they all kissed their dolls and teddy bears and told them not to worry and wished them Godspeed.

The soldier inhaled and the water finally came in, burning his lungs. They pulled him out and flung him onto the floor, where he lay, coughing and vomiting water. He was shaking so hard from the cold that he couldn’t speak. No part of his body was still and his teeth were chattering against each other. The intricate wires in his brain began short-circuiting, the sparks taking the form of a thousand neurotic thoughts all at once and causing an unbearable pressure in his head. His stomach flooded with motor oil, making him nauseous. And his heart was beating so fast that all the bolts and springs began to explode out of their proper spots, like tiny mortar shells being flung about his insides. He wanted everything to work properly in his body, he never wanted excitement again, he wanted this to end.

It was just a matter of time before he gave them what they wanted, wasn’t it? Resisting torture is a myth: everyone confesses in the end. There is no way not to. We are humans and we are built to be capable of betraying everyone in the end. Our pain makes us vulnerable. We can all be got to. We can all be turned upside down like a purse and have all our contents shaken right out of us.

The soldier reminded himself again that he was different. He wasn’t quite a real boy. He was callous and insensitive and his heart was hard. Those qualities would come to his aid now. If his heart was mechanical — if his parts were all replaceable — then he should be capable of withstanding torture. Let myself break, he thought, I can be put back together.

He went back under three times. On the third time, he came out, sputtering for air and vacillating as the spark plugs in his spine began to blow one by one. And he spoke the Toymaker’s name aloud. Or it was more like the Toymaker’s name escaped out of him. The secret was afraid of drowning and so it came out of his mouth in order to belong to someone else.

When he heard the Toymaker’s name come from his lips, the soldier knew, to his own surprise, that he was a human being. Nothing remarkable could be expected from him.

This time when they pushed him back under the water, he inhaled and there was suddenly a strange calm that entered his lungs and flooded through his body. He felt the hands of the torturer let go their grip on him. It was as though they were strings that had just been cut. He felt himself sinking down to the bottom of the bathtub, free of all restraint. The bathtub seemed to have depths that he was hitherto completely unaware of. He had kept his eyes squeezed shut until that moment. Now he opened them to discover that there was water all around him. It wasn’t the cold clear water of the bathtub, but the messy, strange green-blue of the ocean. It was filled with all sorts of life.

The fish went by like leaves being blown off trees. There were large sea turtles that looked like pyjamas hanging off a laundry line and waving in the wind. A school of shimmering fish passed by, as if someone had tossed a whole handful of change into the water.

He could not say how long he had been under the water, as time seemed to be irrelevant now somehow. His shirt had been torn open while he was being tortured. For some reason he thought to button it up and as he did, the soldier noticed that all the scars and seams that the Toymaker had made while operating on his chest had completely disappeared. You would never know that he had been operated on, or that he had been built and repaired in any way.

He felt the presence beneath him. It was a cold feeling, although it didn’t involve a drop in temperature. It was more like the sensation of darkness. He felt the dark shadow growing beneath him. It was so silent and he wondered how anything so enormous could also be so quiet. He thought that he should get to the surface again, so that he could escape whatever was beneath him.

As soon as he broke through the surface of the water, the jaws of the whale also exploded open around him. They then closed around the soldier, swallowing him and bringing him back down into the depths. Deeper and deeper and deeper.

There he was in the great belly of the whale. He thought that it would all be darkness, but to his surprise, there was a light that was glowing. He didn’t know what to make of it. He followed it as he climbed over the half-digested creatures. The thin bones of fishes crunched under his feet as the frozen rose brambles had once, as though he was learning to walk again.

There, in the centre of the stomach, was a small table with a candle burning on it. There was a tiny pot that was filled with krill that were jumping up and down in it. The Toymaker was seated at the table, holding a fork and looking into the wide pot. It seemed as though the Toymaker was going to eat the fish while they were still alive.

“Papa,” said the soldier.

The Toymaker looked up and cried out, as if his deepest wish had just been answered.