Toymaker, The Read Free Page A

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 redwith 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’sclothes 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?’
    Mathias knew what that was. Lutsmann wanted to know what Gustav’s secret was. Once, Mathias had surprised Anna-Maria going through Gustav’s bags. She said she had been tidying up – ‘Such a mess.’ But she needn’t have said anything and Mathiasknew that she had been looking for something, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was. They weren’t afraid of Gustav now that he was feeble and dribbled and