Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

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.