Raindrops.
Dangling car keys and a bam of the door.
Tic- tock.
I’d like to think it was a clock ticking. I wish I was that lucky.
Tick- tick- tick- tock- tick- tick…
The engine roared again. Tired. I heard a low rumble of protest somewhere in the buzz.
Bloody rain.
We got on the road again. It felt familiar, the same. As always. Maybe it even was, who knows if we hadn’t past by it already.
He was driving. Pebbles cracked beneath the tires as he changed gear. It was 20 minutes since our last stop. But the minutes dragged on for too long and I focused on the seconds instead.
1,2,3,4…
“Apchih!”
Nathaniel moaned desperately in the back. His cold was getting worse. And he didn’t have much hope for improvement in this weather. Nor in these circumstances. Not while he was in a box 24/7 anyway.
He hadn’t let us out for a week. It’s been a whole week and we still couldn’t escape from the ghastly weather. We couldn’t outrun the rain.
Tick- tick- tick…
This had gone way past any article or another. Maybe he was just doing it for the sport, who knows. Whatever the reason, though, we couldn’t stay like that forever. We’d need to stop sooner or later. He needed the money. We could get by on very little and no food at all, but he had to eat sometime, he had to shower, sleep. He had to buy gas for the damn car, right.
…57, 58, 59, 60.
One hour.
I felt like cursing. That was a first- it surprised me. I shook my head, but the feeling remained- glowing with awful self-contempt at its irritating persistence.
“Psst!”
There was a tap on the carton wall of my box.
“Jez?”
Pierre was whispering from the other side.
“So, are you enjoying the rain?”
“Enormously. Aren’t you?”
“Not for long, anyway.”
“Pardon?”
“You didn’t hear? Nathaniel was on about it for hours yesterday.”
“Yeah, I must have… switched off. What is it?”
“It’s stopping. It was on the radio- Tom was listening to the weather forecast. It’s good news, right?”
A weak smile that he couldn’t see appeared on my face.
“You know I don’t really mind the rain so much. I’d just like to get out of the car every now and again.”
“You and everybody else. But I think he’s almost ready now.”
I felt too tired to actually follow the conversation, but asked the question just the same.
“”Ready”?”
“Yeah, well he’s got to be planning something to take us that far.”
I blinked, wondering if I heard right.
“How far exactly?”
“You didn’t see the sign? Paris, Jez. He’s taking us to Paris.”
“Wow.”
“indeed.”
“What do you think is it he’s planning?”
“Hah, I can’t even hear his words now-a-days, let alone his thoughts. I guess we’ll know when we get th-…”
“Hey!”
I jumped in my seat. ”
“Quiet back there!!!”
Thomas hit the side of the box with his fist.
“Sorry” we both whispered.
So, I frowned, Paris, huh? We’d never gone to a place so highly populated before. He’d only taken us to small towns and villages.
“Something must have changed” Pierre echoed my thoughts.
“Something- yes, he’s still cranky, though.”
The car went through a bump in the road and I jumped at my seat. I’d stopped counting the seconds. The landscape outside was changing rapidly as if marking time for me. I didn’t have to wait long and sure enough, in the late afternoon, the rain stopped and the sky cleared to bright blue. By then we’d past almost five road signs saying “Paris” with big, cocky letters. We were still probably a day away and there was no way of knowing for sure where he was going, but there was something… something in the way he held the wheel. Something in his weary eyes. Some tangled sense of doomed defiance. Like he knew the course he was about to take, but just didn’t like it.
Little before dusk, we arrived at a small town outside of Paris. It was a rather quiet and unnoticeable village. Even as we passed through it, it felt distant somehow, like hiding behind the thick glass of a snow globe. The tires stumbled slowly and carefully over the dusty roads and raindrops fell like tears from the branches of the trees beside the road, sprawling down on the front window of the car. We took our time circling the streets until finally the engine roared to a halt before the entrance of an old building.
A theatre. The car door closed loudly behind Tom and an old, gray man walked out of the building. After a minute of shaking hands and making introductions, they walked inside together.
I felt sleepy, dizzy somehow- my head was pumping uncomfortably and after they disappeared, I reached out and pushed the handle on the door to roll down my window. I was feeling the need to smell some fresh air. The sun was gradually slipping down from the sky and the clouds were already painted golden with bright pink shadows between them. The air was fresh after the rain and I inhaled it greedily. After staying in the box for so long the light breeze felt reviving. The weird, alien desire to curse disappeared immediately. I inhaled again and it seemed that every single shadow in my thoughts was dispersed by the whiff.
There was a whisper from the back and as I turned around I saw two bright, wide eyes and locks of yellow, sunny hair peeping from the box behind me. ]
“Aunt, Jez, is it true that we’re going to Paris?”
I laughed quietly.
“Maybe.”
The girl pouted with an artistically overdone gesture to show her discontent. Obviously she was hoping for a more specific answer. She was so charming that my smile grew even wider. Pierre chuckled behind his fist next to me.
Stubbornly: “But I want to go!” More pouting.
“Jules! Stop pestering everybody and come back inside!”
The wide, blue eyes flickered at me and Jules gave the desperate sigh of a martyr.
“Aunt, Jez?”
The voice was a bit thinner and was quickly followed by another pair of smart, gray eyes and locks of yellow hair. Jenny appeared next to her sister Jules and they both looked at me expectantly.
“Do you think we’ll like it there?”
“Yeah, do you think it’s nice in Paris?”
“Do you think they’ll like us?”
“Are the people different?”
“Is it a really, really big city?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but was interrupted by the harsh voice of their mother Velma.
“Girls! In! Now!”
They looked at each other with irritated expressions and, casting a momentarily smile towards me, hid their similar heads back in to their mom.
I looked outside again. It was sunset, bright and cheery and I decided not to think about Paris. A whim like that wouldn’t last long anyway. I stretched my hand outside the window and watched as the raindrops dripped from the tree and into my open palm. I watched them splatter over my fingers and let my mind wander in the mean time. The lids closed over my eyes and daydreams took over me in an instant.
Images flickered through my mind, senses mingled inside of me and smells and words all came to form an undistinguishable mess with one single association attached to it. I was remembering, yet again, my birth. Well’ not birth actually, but rather… assembling, or making or whatever you’d like to call it. I wasn’t born by mistake or chance, but made on purpose and my creator had long, gentle fingers and a soft touch. Tom was very careful with all of us I guess, but I only want to remember how he handled me. I still dream, especially lately, of those sleepless nights, when his tired eyes burned through the candle light, right to my very heart, which he had put together from nothing but lonely desire and steel thread.
I smiled- I always became a bit poetic when I thought about that. The memory was as warming as the summer sun and I refused to part with it for another 20 minutes, in which I deliberately lingered on the details. I felt like I was blooming somehow.
“Shut up, already.”
“What, I’m just saying it’s possible.”
I opened my eyes unwillingly. Nathaniel and Velma were arguing behind me in hushed, intense tones.
“Possible. Everything is possible, but this is nonsensical. Why would he do something like that? It’s pointless, Nathaniel.”
“Just think about it, all right. The boxes, the thinking, his distancing himself from the world, the traveling… the fires. What else could it be? Can you explain it?”
“Oh, hush! It could mean millions of things. He could really be going crazy, you know.”
She said it in such a wistful tone it would be comical if it wasn’t so serious.
“Plus, you know what it would mean if it was true, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. Do you think I’m not worried? But it’d be best if we were prepared.”
It didn’t take me long to realize what they were talking about. After all it had crossed my own mind more than once.
He was thinking of creating another rag doll. And that in itself was bad enough. It meant weeks without work until he was finished, it meant neglecting us, it meant no air, no sunshine, no rain, no talking.
And for one of us it was damnation.
Tom was never good in writing. Actually, Tom was never good at anything else than making living dolls. He didn’t talk and even if he tried to it came to no avail. He was antisocial and he had absolutely no charisma whatsoever. He was barely literate, couldn’t spell his name right and wrote in capital letters. In reading he found no pleasure and even though he was able to, I never saw him bother with anything longer than an article. Stupid or ignorant wasn’t exactly right, but let’s just say he was far away from being a misunderstood genius. Taking all of this into account I think it goes without saying that writing a play for us was neither easy, nor pleasant for him, and naturally it was a flop. In our performances we were the true work of art and I’ve had the feeling that more than one person that ever saw us felt like it would have been better if there was mute option to us he could take advantage of. It was very unlikely that he would ever go to the trouble of changing the play for the benefit of any of us.
Neither Velma nor Nathaniel had to say it for we all new it already- if Tom invented another doll, one of us would become… hm, what shall we call him- a burden, useless, inutile… disposable maybe.
-
Well, whatever Tom’s plans for any of us were, they’d have to wait, because we were all due to perform that night. And as if to negate all that I’ve thought and all that we’ve said, he was positive, smiling, attentive and playful all evening long. Even Pierrot was back to his old, radiant self and as we went on stage he winked at me with a luminous smile. Nothing could go wrong and I laughed at myself for worrying. The theatre was full and as the curtains fell over our heads, we bowed under a wave of applause that ought to have made up for every disapproving word anyone had ever said about us. When we got backstage Tom hugged me, whispered quietly in my ear: “That’s my girl” and his soft, velvet, hoarse from the cigars voice embraced me as gently as his arms did. Someone brought flowers for me while we were getting ready and we laughed all the way to the car. The night was warm, the air sliding through the open windows- fresh and fragrant with the smell of wild berries and distant, cold streams. That night we all sang along with the radio, blasting in the small car. Then, we fell asleep under the sound of the light, summer rain.
It seemed like not even a single atom was out of its place in the whole universe. Like I said, nothing to worry about.
-
We drove for two days. On the third, at the break of down, we stopped in front of an old lawn full of weeds and untrimmed bushes. He rented an old bungalow just out side of the nearby village and unpacked all of his luggage in the single room of the archaic building. I couldn’t stop fidgeting while he arranged the table. His face had gone frantic since I last saw him and it surprised me find that he had unpacked even his burin and his nippers. I could also see pulled out on the table all five types of scissors and a whole box full of different needles.
It didn’t take long for me to realize I was wrong. This wasn’t going to pass at all. It only got more visible as the week went by. As if whatever was bothering him was sinking its teeth deeper into his skin, spilling venom through his veins and to his heart. He couldn’t sleep anymore. His days turned into a series of silent trances forming one mad, introverted existence. He would spent days just sitting in his improvised workshop staring at the fire or at his tools. Thinking. Smoking non-stop. The room was always full of smoke. Either from the suffocating heat coming from the mantle-piece or from the end of his burning cigar. At the beginning I tried not to think about it. Yeah, like I could do anything anyway. Like any of us could help. Pierrot tried to talk to him once. Poor, innocent, kind Pierrot. I doubt if Tom even heard him. I doubted he’d ever listen to him or any of us for that matter. So we waited, patient, in our boxes, for his mood to finally change.
Some days he yelled at us for no reason, others- he wouldn’t do so much as mutter a single word with a weak, exhausted voice. And then, there were the days when he went out. He left for hours at a time, always returning with big packages that stood unopened in the corner of the room, as if he was afraid they’d attract too much attention to themselves.
Days stretched and mingled into sleepless nights. What was before a week now seemed like a month and a month to us equaled an eternity. It was as if the sun didn’t want to set in the ground, as if the moon took too long to hide behind the clouds at dawn. Some mornings I wondered if dawn was coming at all. It felt like the night had taken so long that the sun had missed its turn to shine today.
And then, just as we wondered how much longer could he keep on living like this, surviving on cigars, no food, no sleep and the little money we’d made at our last show, while constantly spending more and more on those mysterious boxes and paper-wrapped packages, he muttered between two pulls from his smoke:
“We have a show tomorrow night” and fell silent again as if nothing had happened.
The rag dolls around me started to whisper quietly between themselves. What did this mean? Had he gone back to normal? Would we start traveling again? And most importantly- was he making another rag doll? Some thought not. They were certain it would be useless, that he didn’t need one. They thought whatever troubles we had we could go through them without a new addition. I knew better- he didn’t need reason to be inspired. He didn’t need to have an explanation to go mad.
Early next morning he started getting ready. Our costumes needed to be cleaned, we had to wash our hairs and our faces, clean ourselves from the smell of smoke in the bungalow. Some wanted to practice their lines again. I knew mine by heart already.
I looked at Tom as he walked around all day, working though his mind was obviously still somewhere else. His footsteps were light on the floor, barely audible by then. His face was a pale shade of grey and there were big circles around his eyes. There was no spark left in him, it seemed like he was slowly disappearing into a cloud of despair I couldn’t understand.
Time came that we should get ready to leave.
I looked at my dress with a deep frown on my face as something sharp pinned itself at my heart like the sting of a merciless bee.
A bridal dress. And yet I didn’t feel like a bride. I felt neither happy, nor pretty. He looked at me judgingly from head to toe until finally he focused on my face and forced a tired, unconvincing smile.
“You’re beautiful” he told me. But his eyes were not impressed. The callous bee stung deeper into my heart.
“You’re my favorite” he said. But as much as I wanted to believe him I couldn’t. The more I craved for the relief to flow over my body, the stronger I shivered, the harder it was to blink with the tears in my eyes. The tighter I pressed my lips so that I wouldn’t scream out the panic that built up in my throat.
His touch was cold as he picked me up and took me to the car. I curled in a ball in his hands to fell some warmth, but he was too cool, like lying in a bed of ice-cubes. I tried to remember if he’d been like that before. I tried to think back to when he had last touched me to convince my self that I wasn’t just imagining his softness. I tried to convince myself that there had been indeed some sunny glow in him that was now gone, that I wasn’t mourning an imaginary loss. But remembering only made the contrast stronger, so I just closed my eyes and started reciting my lines as a diversion. It worked and soon enough I was in the box again, the lid- carefully closed over my head, the sound of the engine buzzing in my ears.
The night was dark and silent. We stopped at a narrow street with no public lighting; the loudest sound came from the low vibrating of the wings of a cricket in the distance. Tom took us in one by one. I could hear the door slap behind him every time, the rumbling gravel beneath the heels of his shoes. When my turn came I peeped curiously from under the lid. The street was empty- I hoped that meant that all the people were inside already. On the brick wall, on the right from the entrance gate there was a single, faded poster of all of us, sitting on a dusty stage with mysterious grins stretched over our faces. It was a poor resemblance, but it was all we could afford after Tom had bought the costumes. The copy was old and faded- we only had a few of them and we’d already given our best to the bigger theaters at Nice. Not that that had made any difference there. We never managed to impress the pretentious crowds that always seemed to be a step ahead of us no matter what we did.
I wondered where we were now and weather the audience here would like us.
Just as it looked from the outside, the theatre hall was very small. The stage had obviously seen too little performances in its time… or way too many, depending on the way you would look at it. It was old and half- broken. The walls were lit by about two dozens of candles. I tried to remember the last time we’d been to a theatre where they still used candles. It must have been a decade now. I amused myself for a while by guessing weather they were old- fashioned or just old. Or maybe both. The thought brought a hopeful smile on my face- old people were nicer, less arrogant- they wouldn’t boo or throw bad fruit at us. Maybe this wouldn’t be so catastrophic after all.
Wrong again.
As I shot a quick glance through the curtains I saw that the dark saloon was full. Apparently they really were all of them gathered here. In any other town this would be incredibly good news, but here it just meant they’ d be a lot more critical since we were obviously the only amusement available in a radius of… well, more miles than I could count I’m sure.
I looked at Pierrot. He tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth barely twitched. Beside him sat Nathaniel and fidgeting behind me were the twins Jenny and Jules. They played the ugly sisters, a part I considered extremely unsuitable for them. It’s just that every time I looked at them all I could see was the mischievous spark in their eyes and their childish giggles. I rolled my eyes impatiently as they poked at their ribs and shrieked fascinated by their improvised game behind my back. Their mother, Velma, threw them a stern look and they quieted down with merry smirks on their pale, similar faces.
I turned around. Tom had just appeared from an office room across from me and sat on chair from where he could watch the play, hidden behind the curtains. He gave a short nod to an old man with weary eyes who pulled a rope to unveil us to the audience.
The candlelight was weak- it hardly reached my skin, but it made me feel better somehow, safer. I kept glancing back at Tom every few minutes. He had lit a cigarette despite the warnings of the proprietor and he lifted it to his lips every half a minute or so, as if he didn’t even realize the movement. His gaze was fixed in the ground a few feet away from him. I thought he looked like someone searching for a lost miracle. His somewhat tensed posture hardly changed all through the evening. Towards the end he lifted his eyes and started moving them slowly from face to face around the audience.
Something seemed very wrong and it made me nervous.
I was sweating. Unnatural for me, but it happened. And I forgot my line. I forgot the words- either that or a part of me just didn’t want to say them anymore.
“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”
Do I?
The audience was eager for a confirmation. I could almost see their lips whispering:” ”Say it!” A confirmation at the price of anything. They didn’t care if I meant it as long as I kept to the script and gave them their happy ending.
I turned to Tom again to see if he was looking at me. I needed to know whether making the sacrifice of saying a fake vow for the hundredth time was worth while. That he appreciated it.
He was still glaring at the people. His eyes were moving quickly as if searching for an old friend. Dissecting the audience with an unblinking gaze. All the sudden it felt like all the air sprung out of my lungs and tightened around my throat… He used to look at me like that. As if we had a secret, no one else knew. As if I was a mystery he was trying to uncover. Now, he was looking away. Searching for an inspiration; boredom soaked in his tensed movements and pouring out of his heavy eyelids. The smoke from his cigar choked me from across the room.
It was magic that he hoped to find somewhere in the dark saloon. A new mystery was waiting to be found in one of those unfamiliar faces. I swallowed with difficulty. He was searching for adventure, passion, new secrets to share. Another rag doll.
”Jez.””
A better rag doll.
”Jez.””
A better bride.
”Jez!?””
A new me.
”Jezerel!””
I turned around to Pierrot and closed my eyes so he wouldn’t see the tears. The people were still waiting for their confirmation.
”Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?””
Pierre’s eyes were concerned; his sweet, innocent face- curled up in confusion. A rag doll in a black costume. It was nice of him to care and I forced a smile.
”I do.””
I didn’t mean it, but what did it matter, anyway?
The curtain fell over a wave of applause that crushed me to the ground. I tried to brush my eyes, but my hand was still in his and he wouldn’t let go.
”What happened?””
I looked at him- he reminded me of warm milk and honey with eyes, sparkling like merry Christmas lights. My hesitation lasted only a second.
”He’s going to replace me.””
It took him a second to realize what I meant. Then he just frowned with disbelief and a certain amount of shock. I suppose he wanted to look enraged, but it didn’t look natural on his sweet face and when I focused harder on his features I spotted the well conceived marks of pretending. He had expected this all along, but still clenched his fists, popped his eyeball as far as he could and flared his nostrils in a funny way, all for my benefit.
“”No. Jez!”
My name was barely a whisper from his lips, but in the silence that’d blocked my ears it was all I could hear.
Behind us the proprietor was bombarding Tom with compliments hoping to drag an answer out of him. It wasn’t going to happen any time soon, obviously.
“Great show, Tom. Same thing next week, huh?”
I turned around and saw Tom award him with a lazy nod without even looking up from the ground.
“Tom, are you OK?”
He lifted his gaze slowly and disorientated as if just waking up from a dream. A smile lit his face and he responded with anxiety I’d never before heard in his voice.
“Sure thing, mate. I’ll even have a surprise for you.”
