Playthings Read online

  She was not simply false.

  When he looked her in the face there was, in her eyes and in the quality of her gaze, something. It was plain and innocent and hopeful. Something of a child. Love? Faith? Adoration? He swallowed and coughed and drew a breath. He blinked his eyes, and when they opened, after that infinitesimal break with the continuity of his vision, the world was almost solid again. He banged the side of his head with his palm, hoping to jar himself right. The girl was solid. Fridoline. The girl Sabine had adopted to keep her company while he was away. His daughter.

  ‘Frida?’

  ‘What is it, Papa?’

  Her voice. It pained him to hear it, and now, as he did nothing, simply blankly returned her gaze, there was a growing anxiety on her face: a pinching of the muscles at the sides of her nose. Doubt. Then, as he watched, fear—something like fear—creeping into the unconscious movement of the muscles beneath her skin. Then a returning wateriness in her eye.

  He looked away from her.

  The street was just that: the street.

  There was the gate of the Burgenthaler house—an eagle in twisted metal. It was ostentatious, just like Frau Burgenthaler. Despite the mumbled protestations of her mouse of a husband—a clerk in a bank—it was a vulgar display, sniggered at from behind the hands of their neighbours. Their wealth was inherited from her uncle; her every frustrated whim was suddenly released.

  There was the iron post, dented and notched where this or that deliveryman would wait, and smoke, and meet one’s gaze with impudent assurance. Lashing down his cart. Spitting at his feet. Passing fingers through his greasy hair, and laughing to himself.

  The drain. It was all there.

  ‘Papa? Let’s go inside.’

  He turned to look where she was looking, down the path through the trees and shrubs, up to the door. Part of the music from Siegfried was carved into the lintel. Sabine’s idea. A wonderful touch, commented on by everyone. Pointed to. Sabine would sing it for them, only a few notes, but instantly recognisable. If her voice was not what it once was, it was still pretty—very pretty. When her friends came it was not uncommon to hear them still whistling those few notes as they were shown through into the drawing room. Schreber coughed, and sniffed, and turned to look at his daughter. The loose shutter on the pantry window clattered in the wind, and Schreber drew his coat closed at the neck.

  ‘Where is your scarf?’ he said.

  She began to say something, but he cut her off.

  ‘No excuses, girl! You have been told about this. Your mother is very firm on the matter. You don’t have the constitution for wandering the streets half dressed.’

  He took off his own scarf and put it on her, winding it around her thin, white throat, and laying the ends across her chest. One side of the scarf was longer than the other. He adjusted it so that the ends were even. The girl reached out her hand, timidly, as if offering food to a garden bird. Schreber took it.

  ‘It has been a most unusual morning,’ he said. ‘I am not sure quite what is happening.’

  The girl nodded and said nothing, drawing him away from the street and back to the house. For a while, he came easily, up the path and through the trees, toward the safety of his study, towards his bed. He would take a light meal and then, perhaps, a sleeping draught. Cook was in the doorway, waiting for his coat.

  But, just as it appeared he might cross the threshold, he stopped and became immovable as a block of granite.

  He raised his face to see the sun, risen above the trees, cold and painfully bright.

  ‘Papa! Please come inside. It’s only a little further.’

  She took him by the wrists and pulled him.

  ‘Sir? Won’t you listen to the young miss? You look as pale as a sheet and, besides that, what about the missus? And the party? Come inside, sir, I beg you!’

  The sun was so bright that he could barely see. The girl had him by the wrists and she was still talking. She pulled at his wrists, directing his arms, making him move.

  Schreber turned abruptly on his heels, and Fridoline had no choice but to release her grip. The moment her fingertips were no longer felt, he was gone, racing down the street, the tails of his coat flapping and gaping.

  ‘Come back! Papa!’

  Schreber turns his back on his home, and, by virtue of familiarity, takes the route he formerly took to work. The world disappears, and Schreber is accosted by a tinker and his son.

  III

  Schreber could still hear the thing shouting after him, the little one, her high voice carrying an astounding distance: Papa! Papa! Come back! As he left her further and further behind, all that remained was the pitch of her cry, as chill and stinging as the wind blowing in across the river, all the colder now since his neighbourhood was left behind and the windbreak of the houses was gone.

  His heels clicked as he ran, and soon the clicking was all he could hear above the sound of the blood hissing in his ears.

  When he reached the brewery he stopped and leant heavily on the brown stone wall. The sickly sweet smell of the place caught the back of his throat, but he had no choice but to take it in with every breath, his chest refusing to be calmed by his earnest attempts to fill it. When he was able to take a brief swallow and wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, he looked down the way he had come, the very same way he came every weekday morning, though more often by carriage. The little thing was gone.

  As he waited, his breathing slowly returned. He stood straight and adjusted his clothes. He banged the side of his head with his palm, hoping to jar himself right.

  What was the problem?

  A man passed him, walking a tall, thin dog. Schreber gave him a smart bow and the man bowed in return, sparing him little more than a glance. The dog turned its head to watch Schreber, a long tongue pinkly steaming out from the corner of its mouth. The dog swallowed and turned away, the tongue returning almost immediately, but on the other side this time.

  Schreber looked up and down the street.

  Things were much as they usually were.

  So what was the problem?

  Schiller Strasse was quiet at this time of day, the only persons with any business there being the employees of the brewery, deliverymen, and those who wished to pick up the tram into the city. When he chose, on ordinary days, to make his way to the courts—and that was more often than not and sometimes more often than he wished, deferring as he did to Sabine’s understanding of how much a man’s presence could be tolerated around the house—he would take this road, but today…

  What was the problem?

  He looked back the way he had come. Shouldn’t he return home? Right away?

  From the sun there was a voice.

  The feeling is lacking.

  With it came a bright light that made Schreber blink and saturated the world, turned his entire neighbourhood, road, houses, people—all of it—bleached and white.

  Sabine.

  Without thinking to check the traffic, he walked over the road, hands stretched out in front of him as if he was being led. He turned and turned, trying to put the sun behind him, but it was always in his eyes.

  Sabine!

  A huge, low steamship slid down the river toward him, black smoke buffeted by the wind, the sulphurous tang overtaking even the stench of brewing beer. He blinked again and again, but, though he could hear the ship and smell it and even, he imagined, feel its warmth as it passed no more than fifty feet from his outstretched hands, the world was too bright to see. Even the Elbe herself.

  He grit his teeth and walked into the brightness. It could only be a little way home. He had walked it hundreds of times, alighting a tram stop short of the terminus, preferring on dry days to take the air and cut at the timothy grass that sprouted alongside the towpath with his cane. A few minutes at a bracing pace. When he shut his eyes he could see it all—straight b
ack to the house. To Fridoline. To Sabine. He screwed his eyes shut and despite the fact that his cane was left in the stand by the door he made to swing it, here and there, scattering sticky arrowheads and dandelion fluff wherever he walked.

  Just as he always did.

  Just another day.

  The leading idea is missing.

  He screwed his eyes shut. No distance at all, for a man in his prime, freed from the burdens of too much work, and at last able to take the proper time to attend to his health: a regime of exercise and abstinence and early nights. Hadn’t they paid off? These brisk strolls in the fresh air had done him the world of good, nodding cheerfully to whomever he might pass, tradesman or clerk, sergeant or barrister.

  But then for how much longer… (will your defence against the power of the rays still be successful)?

  He screwed up his eyes until his cheeks ached. He was a new man! Wasn’t he? Trimming the rind and the glossy white fat from his chops. Putting his hand firmly on top of his wine glass when Cook came with the decanter. No more long meals in his chambers with men who would drive themselves to lassitude with their cigars and liqueurs and butter sauces. Rather, he would take the tram halfway and walk the rest, while they rode a carriage to the club and wasted their time with billiards and talk of matters that could scarcely concern them any less. He would sit with Sabine, and watch her at her preparations, an occasional game of patience and an early night, the sun barely having set and the curtains carefully arranged so that the light did not creep into the room. Sabine sometimes choosing to remain in the drawing room while he got his much-needed rest. It had done wonders for him. He would be home in no time. He coughed, and sniffed, and screwed his eyes up tight, and swished the cane from side to side.

  Home.

  What are you thinking of now?

  Just another day like any other.

  His foot slipped out from beneath him as he stretched to sever the head of a phantom thistle, sending him pitching forward, so that he had to open his eyes and put out his hands to break his fall. He hit the ground with a thud: elbow and shoulder, and then his head. For a fraction of a second the road returned to him. From where he lay on the flagstones he could follow it all the way back to the corner of Angelikastrasse. It was no distance at all, barely enough to stretch one’s legs, as his father would say. Stop your whining, boy! he would say. It’s barely enough to stretch one’s legs. And he was right. A few hundred steps. Schreber fixed his gaze at the lamppost on the corner of the street, but when he heaved himself up he caught sight of the sun and it was all gone again. First the brewery—burned to its outline, each of the hundred windows picked out faintly in charcoal, but then erased. Briefly the old barracks was visible behind, but then that went too. What of the men inside? The trees—the light desiccated them, making thin black twigs of healthy limbs—they crumbled to dust. All the real things of the world, solid and stable, that marked his journeys through the city, they all blanched away, and lastly the furniture of the street: the lamps, the tramlines, and the smooth stones that made up the floor beneath him.

  Home. He must find home! Just walk!

  There was something blocking his path, invisible, but substantial. He pushed against it and it went away, but in the corner of his eye there was a thing that adjusted its shirt and thumbed its teeth. Schreber knocked the side of his head with the palm of his hand and there appeared a short, bowlegged tinker with his cap in one hand. The other was holding the hand of a child. It was impossible to tell if it was male or female, it was so ragged.

  The tinker came forward, pulling his grubby little tyke with him. He chewed all the time and was muttering something. Brown teeth and stained fingers. The child pulling away.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ the tinker said.

  ‘I…’

  ‘You want to watch where you’re going, that’s what you want to do.’

  Schreber nodded, and tipped his hat, and made to walk away, but the tinker grabbed his arm.

  ‘Reckon yourself do you, sir? Reckon you’ve the right to push a working man out of the way as you pass? Not this working man, sir. Not I. I’ll have an apology, if you’ve one to give.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Schreber licked his lips and bowed deeply. ‘I couldn’t see…’

  ‘I may be filth to you, sir, but I’ve the politeness to keep out of people’s road as I walk the street.’

  Schreber stepped back, releasing the man’s grip, but when he turned away from the tinker there was nothing again. He moved his attention in every direction but there was nothing to see. He blinked and looked back to where he was sure he could hear the dirty little man telling his child, ‘That’s how you’re not to grow up!’ but it was too bright.

  ‘Mind that… person… him there. He’s the wrong sort! Understand me?’

  Schreber shut his eyes and there were the man and child.

  ‘Why’s he making that face?’

  ‘Come away, son!’

  ‘Why? It’s just an old man.’

  The boy’s mouth moved in the manner of a puppet’s—carved from a piece of wood and strung.

  ‘What’s he doing?’

  The boy’s father pulled him away by the arm. It twisted at an impossible angle, the ligaments stretching like the cat gut that articulates a marionette, the wooden arm dislocating without causing pain. The boy’s eyes were painted open in disgust and glee.

  They were flat and dead.

  Schreber wanders as far as the Karola Brücke, which is in the opposite direction to his home. The world returns, but with it come insulting voices. Schreber is too distracted to assure his own safety.

  IV

  He screwed his eyes tighter. He banged the side of his head with his palm, hoping to jar himself right, and now when he opened his eyes again, slowly, he was standing on the Karola Brücke.

  The river rushed below, bloated brown with floodwater. The afternoon traffic was as it always was: carts loaded with wood and coal, and on the back of them were men in shorts and braces, perched with their shirts open down to the waist, exposing their flat and smudged breasts to the cold wind. Men and women of more or less substance marched briskly to escape the waft up from the water.

  Schreber blinked once or twice, cautiously, expecting the whiteness to return, but it did not. He cleared his throat and sniffed.

  So what was the problem?

  Just a day, like any other?

  Just a day.

  To the courts, then? To work? To Pillnitzer Strasse? And lunch with Sabine? So she could show him all the things she had bought?

  He crossed the bridge with his chest high and out and his head back so that his moustaches bristled in the wind, and he hummed and muttered:

  ‘A mighty fortress is our God,

  a bulwark never failing;

  our helper he amid the flood

  of mortal ills prevailing.’

  He walked past the elegant new terrace and down the wide paved boulevard. Deep breaths. Tipping the hat. A mighty fortress. Stick to those things a man knows, those things proper to him, and the world will fall into order. Inevitable. Down onto the Moritz-Allee.

  Schreber bit his lip and silently, without moving his arms—perhaps only a little—saluted his father as he always did when he set foot on this road. Moritz Schreber, so long passed and mourned every day!

  There was one time, on a noisy flickering night, when the whole family marshalled in the hallway. Torch-light came in from the street and men shouted impatiently.

  ‘There are things that must be done and ills of the world that must be fought,’ his father had said, turning at the end of almost every word as if the outside was pulling him toward it. ‘We should not take pleasure in it, or pride, but we must apply ourselves with all the more vigour because of that!’

  With which he left them at a run. His heels clicked like hooves on the polished ti
les, avoiding the good rug.

  They rushed to the window and, below, their father mounted his horse and was away down the street, his whip-hand raised high and his boot buckles glittering.

  The wind came and Schreber pulled his coat close and he could see Moritz now, high on horseback, coming down the Moritz-Allee, driving Catholics before him, beating down on their backs, setting them to panic while all the time he remained stern and impassive, determined and controlled, routing his enemy. Schreber swished with his free hand as if it was he and not his father who had the whip. He wondered for a second where he had left his cane. In the hallway no doubt. That girl! Something would have to be done. Sabine would have to have words.

  Sabine.

  Just a day.

  Pillnitzer Strasse jutted off Moritz-Allee before it had barely begun and Schreber followed his route to work automatically, without thought, his legs doing the thinking and the phantom cane, the phantom whip, doing its work on the heads of phantom thistles and long-gone Catholics.

  He walked into the carriageway without missing a beat, gingerly stepping over the metal rails and threading his way through the traffic.

  The Prince of Hell is responsible for the loss of rays.

  He stopped.

  He should (think) about the Order of the World.

  Just a day.

  Luder!

  Like any other.

  A deep breath. A cough, and a sniff, and the blowing of the wind ruffling the soft down on the back of his neck that the damned barber never properly attended to. Growing like marram grass, wherever it wished.

  Excite yourself!

  Nonsense. A sniff, and a cough. He banged the side of his head, hoping to jar himself right, and now the thinking-about-nothing-thought—a progression of notes mapped onto the keys of his piano. Their echoing in the corridor. Ein’ feste Burg.

  The ringing of bells.