Night of Cake & Puppets

3 Treatments for Female Baldness

I text Karou: Tonight’s the night.

Her reply comes at once, which makes me feel like she’s in town, just at her flat or at Poison or something, which she so isn’t. She writes: You will conquer. You are Napoleon. (Pre-Waterloo of course. And cuter.)

Hmm. I text back: So you’re saying I should…attack him?

Karou: Yes. Stun him with your amazingness. He will look back at his life up till now as the pale dream before the goddess. His real life starts TONIGHT.

A little over the top, maybe, but I appreciate the vote of confidence. Where are you, madwoman?

—South Africa. Trying to track down this poacher. Don’t think he wants to be found.

—That sounds…safe?

—And fun! Someone stole my hairbrush out of my hotel room, and left a dead snake hanging from the doorknob. By its mouth.

—WHAT?

—Just another day in Africa. Better see a witch doctor for some all-purpose curse removal. Hope I don’t have to drink blood this time.

—Blood? What kind of…Never mind. Don’t tell me. DON’T.

—Human. Duh.

—I SAID.

—Just kidding. No blood-drinking. I better go. YOU. Have a spectacular time falling in love tonight. Want to switch lives?

This gives me pause for a second, because it’s the closest Karou has come to complaining since the night we stood in front of that doorway in Josefov and watched blue fire burn it to nothing. She was in shock, and in grief, and in fury, but never a hint of self-pity. After she spent just one day of reeling, hugging herself, and staring, we buried Kishmish in Letná Park, and then she kind of slapped the slackness out of her face and forced her eyes into focus and came up with a plan. Which in turn inspired me to come up with one, too, but yeah, mine’s more kissing and less blood-drinking. So there’s that.

I text back: If I say ‘no’ am I a bad friend?

—Never. Just remember every detail. I need fairy tales right now. Rabid ones.

I love her. I write back: I promise. Please be safe. And that’s the end of it, because she doesn’t reply. I picture her disengaging a stretched snake mouth from a doorknob in order to get into a lonely hotel room somewhere in Africa and I feel this mix of disbelief and belief, protectiveness and vicarious sadness, lostness. Guilt. Part of me thinks I should be with her on this crazy chase she’s on, but I know I’m not fit for it. I can’t fight, or speak Zulu or Urdu or whatever, and she’d have to worry about protecting me, and anyway, I did offer. She said no. She said I’m her anchor: I have to connect her to ‘real life,’ stay in school, keep her updated on Wiktor the living mummy, and Professor Anton’s nose hair, and whether Kaz dares show his face at Poison Kitchen.

And Mik. I have to talk to Mik. She was pretty insistent about that.

If all goes well tonight, there will be talking. At some point. One assumes. I’m just not starting with it. I’m starting with a drawing. I’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, redoing it over and over, and it’s finally good enough: a drawing worthy of launching a love affair.

Love affair. Doesn’t that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair. Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it’s a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one. I’m not looking for fate. I’m seventeen. I’m looking for kissing, and to move forward a few paces on the game board. You know, do some Living.

(With my lips.)

The drawing’s in my bag with my other…props. A few things have already been set up around town. It all had to be ready before I go to work, and I go to work…now.

Hello, Marionette Theater of Prague. Just another Saturday. Just walking up the steps with my bag of tricks, no scheming here…

Oh my god, there he is.

Knit cap, brown leather jacket, violin backpack. Sweet, cold-pinked cheeks. What a lovely display of personhood. He’s like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I’m fun but smart. You won’t be able to put me down. There’s a little bounce in his walk. It’s music. He’s got headphones on – the fat, serious kind, not the weenie earbud kind. I wonder what he’s listening to. Probably Dvořák or something. He’s wearing a pink tie. Why don’t I hate it? I hate pink. Except on Mik’s cheeks.

Hello, Mik’s cheeks. Soon we shall know each other better.

Aah! Eye contact. Look away!

(Did he just…blush?)

Feet, help me out here. We’re on a collision course. Unless we take immediate evasive action, we’re going to meet him right at the door.

Panic!

Hey, look at this fascinating notice on the wall! I must pause here and tear off one of these little phone-number tabs so that I can call and inquire about the life-changing effects of…

Treatments for female baldness?

Awesome.

‘It’s not for me,’ I blurt, but the danger is past. While I was staring in rapt fascination at the female-baldness flyer, Mik slipped into the building.

Close call. We almost – in Karou parlance – ‘entered each other’s magnetic fields for the first time.’ He would have had to hold the door for me. I would have had to acknowledge it with a nod, a smile, a thank you, and then walk in front of him down the entire length of the hallway, wondering whether he was looking at me. I know how that would go. I’d suddenly become conscious of the many muscle groups involved in the art of walking, and try to consciously control each of them like a puppeteer, and end up looking like I’m in a loaner body I haven’t mastered yet.

This way, I can walk down the hallway looking at him.

Hello, back of Mik.

On his violin backpack is a bumper sticker that reads:

EVERYTHING IS A MIRACLE. IT IS A MIRACLE THAT ONE DOES NOT MELT IN ONE’S BATH.

—PICASSO

Which totally does not make me imagine Mik in the bath. Because that would be wrong.

Good-bye, back of Mik.

He goes through his doorway, and I go through mine, and thus is perpetuated for another night one of the world’s great injustices: the segregation of musicians and puppeteers.

They have their backstage lounge, we have ours. You’d think someone’s afraid we might rumble. There’s a cellist on our turf – get him! Or, more likely but less interesting, it’s a simple matter of space. Neither lounge is very big; they’re just windowless rooms with lockers and a couple of sad couches. The musician couches are slightly sadder than ours, one clue to the hierarchy here. Puppeteers rule the roost, but it’s not a very posh roost. In general, musicians respect their status (i.e., easily replaceable), but the singers, not so much.

The reason I hate it when we perform operas – like now, we’re doing Gounod’s Faust – isn’t because I don’t like opera. I am not a philistine. I just don’t like opera singers. Especially sultry Italian sopranos in heavy eyeliner who go out for drinks with the strings section after the show. Ahem, Cinzia ‘fake beauty mark’ Polombo.

Anyway. It’s the puppeteers who matter around here. There are ten, six of whom are in the lounge ahead of me, pretty well filling it.

‘Zuzana,’ Prochazka says the second he sees me. ‘Mephistopheles is drunk again. Would you mind?’

Drunken devil. All in a day’s work. To be clear, I am not a puppeteer. I am a puppet-maker, a different animal altogether. Some puppeteers do both: build and perform. But my family has always stuck to fabrication, with the idea that you can be decent at two high art forms, or you can excel at one. We excel. Excellently. Still, it behooves a puppet-maker to understand puppeteering. My professor at the Lyceum – Prochazka, who also happens to be lead puppeteer here – requires practical theatrical experience, so here I am. I scurry and fetch for the puppeteers, restring marionettes, retouch paint, mend costumes, and lend a spare pair of hands for easy things like fluttering birds or clip-clopping the horse hooves.

In this case, Mephistopheles has a loose string, making him list drunkenly to one side. It’s an easy fix. ‘Sure,’ I say, and put my stuff in my locker, more mindful than usual of the contents of my bag. Once the lounges clear out – puppeteers to the stage and musicians to the orchestra pit – I have some sneaking to do. The thought of it kicks my heartbeat sideways.

I have to break into Mik’s violin case.

I grab my tool kit. First I have a devil to sober up.