“An acrobat?” Masha smiled. “That will serve you well, pet, when it comes to the next puppet show. The Deux Mains adores a nimble doll. But your husband, tut. How careless of him to misplace you, to let you wander this way. Never enter a toy shop after midnight.”
Kay thought of how she had entered this space, remembering being outside the toy shop looking in. The sensation of being followed. The lights on for the first time ever and at such a late hour. A twinge in her hand reminded her of turning the doorknob and stepping into the store in her bare feet. Where were her shoes? She must have taken them off to fool her pursuer, to erase her tracks. At last, she had come so close to the man beneath the glass. Darkness arrived completely as she’d lifted the bell jar. She’d shut her eyes and then awoke to find her life in pieces. Memory, what a strange thing, not bound to any time but to a place. This box of a room, alone with these weird creatures. The Russians were smiling at her. She wondered if the Quatre Mains and the Deux Mains were nearby, in another room in the building, perhaps asleep in a bedroom in the upper story. Or tinkering below in the cellar. Or not there at all.
“Tell me about the others,” Kay said at last, shaking off the dust of her own spell.
“The old-timers,” Masha said. “Some have been here so long that they no longer have a name. Take the judges.” She gestured toward two large puppets arguing together over a chessboard. From the few pieces left on the board, it was impossible to tell who was playing black and who was playing white. “They are simply the Black Judge and the White Judge, but I can no longer tell who is whom. Do you know, Irina?”
“They were in some farce together, ages ago, and I am not sure if either knows his proper title. What does it matter? They are made for disputations.” Catching her fingers in her strand of pearls, she pointed at another pair. On the bottom shelf, an elaborately decorated rod puppet with ram’s horns and a horrid black goatee, his crimson body filigreed with swirls of gold leaf inlaid in the finest teak, played at hide-and-seek with what looked like a bunch of sticks in a gossamer shirt to which had been affixed a pair of wire and lace wings. “The Devil seeks his due,” she said. “He is a foreigner, an Indonesian wayang, a minor deity of some lascivious intent, but we just call him the Devil.”
Masha called out to the girl hiding behind a spool of twine. “Hey, girl, what do we call you these days? Is it Peaseblossom? Or Cobweb? Asphodel? Or perhaps we should just call you Twiggy.”
“Get on out of that,” the girl said, angry that they had given her away. Her voice emerged from a bundle of sticks woven together in the shape of a face, and her eyes flashed like lit embers. “I am the Good Fairy, as you well know.” The Devil laughed and sprang to her at once, and she giggled in mock terror, sticks scraping on the wooden floor.
When the Devil passed by, the Dog barked, the sudden motion startling an old woman rocking on the edge of the counter, her short legs dangling in the air. At her side was the girl who had been so curious about Kay’s hair, a mere waif in a rag dress, a thatch of brittle yellow straw standing up on her head, staring back at them. “The gramma is the Old Hag,” said Olya. “Don’t worry about hurting her feelings by calling her so. Deaf as a block of wood.” She dropped her voice to a whisper and hunkered in close to Kay. “And the little one is No?. Be careful, dahlink, for she is med as a hetter. I will tell you a secret. No? has tried to make her escape many, many times, and that is why old Firkin posts himself at the door. We cannot have such madness let loose into the world.”
“And why does she want to leave?” Kay asked.
The Sisters tensed and lifted themselves from their recumbent positions, sitting up like respectable ladies. Each gave the others a knowing look, signaling a tacit agreement to let the truth alone. Masha spoke: “Who knows why anyone goes crazy? The mind invents its own miseries. I myself prefer to be the very model of happiness. And I advise you to do the same.”
Kay could not stop watching the straw-haired girl. At first she seemed merely still and self-possessed, but in time her inner enchantments began to leak out. No? twisted her fingers together and pulled them apart. Through her thin shirt her clockwork heart beat like a dove’s. In a lull in the symphony of conversation in the room, she could be heard humming to herself, not unlike the mockingbird singing in the predawn world outside.