Playing a Part by Daria Wilke

Author:Daria Wilke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

“IN life, as onstage, if you do nothing, then nothing happens,” Sam likes to say.

“You’re nuts, Grisha.” Sashok doesn’t believe me at first. “Totally nuts,” she repeats, concentrating on tapping the spot between her thumb and pointer finger.

She’s picked up this gesture recently, and it drives me impossibly crazy. “It’s a kind of treatment,” Sashok explains, as if her stupid tapping could cure her heart.

We’re sitting on the iron stairs in the puppet room. Sashok calls the stairs the “roost.” Because they’re narrow, iron, and steep, but on top, like a metal nest, there’s a landing for props.

Right above our heads, on the shelves, are papier-mâché apples, pretzel braids that, if you look closely, are actually wound gauze bandages under the paint, wooden wagon wheels, and enormous spoons.

Below are the partitions hung with puppets and masks. You can make out the tops of the kings’ and queens’ heads, and their glued-on wigs, and the sharp noses with their skillfully chiseled nostrils — as if they’re alive. Lyolik’s puppets always come out totally alive.

Sashok and I like to climb up high and sit there, like the captains of the puppet ship, all alone among them.

“I’m so sick of them! All of them!” Sashok says angrily just as we sit down. She mimics, “Do you have a boyfriend? Who do you like? I feel like saying something nasty, just for spite.”

I nod. It’s true, I’m sick of some grown-ups.

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

As if the sky will fall on my head if I don’t. As if I’ll grow donkey ears if I don’t.

Even at the theater, Aunt Sveta or, say, the actress Vinnik, will come up and say, “Which girls do you like in school?”

Why don’t they ask what I’m reading, for instance?

I try to make myself scarce. I pretend I’m in a big hurry. I hate those stupid conversations.

“What do you tell them?” I ask Sashok. She shrugs.

“ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘you’ll faint; I fell in love with Shakespeare a few days ago.’ Then they laugh. I tell others, the stupider ones, Gabanek. Gabanek, of course, makes a bigger impression. At least he’s a foreigner, they think.”

What would you do without Gabanek, Sashok? I think. What would you do without the fat-cheeked dragon-marionette from the Czech fairy tale? What would you and I do without the theater?

“No, you really are nuts,” Sashok continues after she hears about the puppets. “Break them all?”

To be honest, I think I’m nuts too. I think about it every day, roll it around on my tongue like a caramel Sam has tossed me: “if-all-the-puppets-broke-at-the-same-time.”

After all, then Olezhek would have no choice. He’d have to ask Lyolik to fix them. Only Lyolik knows his puppets well enough to fix them all quickly.

They’ll have no other choice, I think. But then I go to the puppet room and pick up the slender hands of the courtiers and hunters, the dressed-up ladies and ethereal fairies, and the velvety paws of the foxes and mice. I look into their puppet

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