Honestly, he didn’t understand that cricket at all and he wasn’t sure that he ever would. He didn’t even know how the cricket got it into its head to play in such a strange way. What in the world was music like that for? You couldn’t dance to it and it certainly wouldn’t put any babies to sleep.
Nonetheless, he stuck the cricket inside his pocket. The cricket had been with him this long and was the closest thing he had to a past. And, in any case, he wasn’t quite sure that it was a wise decision to go and leave this little cricket playing its mournful, melancholic tunes on windowsills. Someone was bound to take a shoe and clobber it.
It was especially risky for this soldier to return, as he had already been found out and the German soldiers would be looking out for him, but he had insisted on returning to finish his work as a spy. He knew that he was doing a deep good, but he didn’t even know if he was doing it for the right reasons. Everyone admired his bravery. But was he doing it because he wanted to engage in a profoundly moral action, or was he doing it because he hated himself and wanted to put himself in danger in order to feel alive? That feeling of having a gun up to your heart, about to pull the trigger — at least that would make his damn heart beat faster.
They tossed him out of the plane, his parachute burst above him like a single piece of popcorn in the night and down he went onto occupied soil. He didn’t look for the Toymaker, but no one could fault him for that as he was so busy being a hero. He and the other Canadian spies worked hard delivering information and maps to the Resistance fighters, ferreting Allied soldiers out of France and onto boats to England. One night he was hurrying down a road on a bicycle, trying to get to the coast of Brittany. It was the quickest way to get to the coast and he was rather enjoying it, inhaling enormous gulps of air while riding the bicycle over the gravelly ground, when he was stopped by German officers waiting for him at a bend in the path. When they found the radio in his bicycle basket, he knew that he was done for.
The soldier was in a bedroom. The torturers had secured bolts and locks on the door and had hammered planks of wood over the windows. He was wearing his navy blue cable sweater over a shirt, loose-fitting pants, a coat with a fur lining and boots that went to his knees. He was attached to a chain that had been secured to the metal framework of the bed.
Everything valuable had been dragged out of the room. There were no clothes in the dressers, no books on the shelves. He noticed that there was a small teddy bear in the corner, grasping the leg of the armoire and looking at him. Whether it had chosen to stay behind or had been left there, he could not say. It had probably once been a child’s bedroom.
There was no way to escape now. There was nothing he could say or do that would change his fate. He was already a dead man, really.
Since part of his body was mechanical, he was able to withstand pain better than most people, but not that much more. They had broken the fingers of his right hand but those of his left were still working perfectly well. He used them to pull his matchbox out of the breast pocket of his shirt. He opened the matchbox slowly, in order that the cricket might be released. He had given the cricket a leaf to eat a few days before, but he really hadn’t thought about it since then. The cricket climbed out in fine form, scurried up the arm of the tin soldier and perched on his shoulder. The cricket was as close as possible to the soldier’s ear so that he would best be able to hear what it had to say.
It told him his life story, including all the sad things about his terrible childhood in Canada that he had forced himself to forget. Instead of reminiscing about all the very good times that he had had, the soldier let himself remember his own tragedy. He thought about how his dad would come home and beat his mother in the kitchen and how he would hide in the closet. He remembered how his father had kicked him out of the house when he was sixteen years old. He reminisced about how he’d lived on the streets and in boys’ homes for two years before the war happened and how he’d enlisted in order to have a square meal and some new boots. It struck him deeply that nobody had cared when he went off. These were his last moments on earth probably, and he decided that he would allow himself to feel grief. He wanted to feel upset, full of regret and consumed by sorrow. These were the wonderful things in life. These were the emotions that were more like works of art than anything else. That’s why we had music in this world, to make us feel such complicated things.
The soldier wondered who would actually notice that he was gone. Who would accidentally put a plate out for him months and months after his death? The soldier tried to recall each of the girls he had been with while in England. He imagined them in their kitchens, at their kitchen tables, eating their clam chowder, their corned beef, their corn-bread, their Spam, their pickled eggs, their meat loaf, their ratatouille. But he knew that they were probably not really thinking about him.
The only person who was worried about him was the Toymaker. He was probably painting the feathers of a beautiful bird in his workshop. But perhaps he had stopped painting altogether and now lay in bed, sick with worry over what had happened to his dear soldier boy on that walk that he had never come back from. The soldier thought of that Toymaker, who had nobody but a feisty black cat and a bunch of fickle children hanging around. The Toymaker, who had never known the love of a woman and had only ever wanted a boy of his own.
But he could not think of the Toymaker now. He didn’t know the names of his fellow spies or members of the Resistance that he had been working with. They had all been careful about that, so that in the event that one of them got captured, they would have nothing to reveal. Even when he had made love to French girls, he had always warned them not to tell him their names.
He did know the name of the Toymaker, however. The children repeated it about a hundred times a day. He hoped and prayed that he could keep it to himself and not give it to his torturers. It wasn’t as though confessing would set you free. Once you had given up your names, they would shoot you in the woods and leave you there, if you were very lucky. Or they would put you in a concentration camp where you would stand in line for death.
The door burst open and two men came for him, unlocking his chains and dragging him off the bed. He couldn’t help but fight to get away from them, and he squirmed from their grasp onto the ground. One man kicked him in the stomach, which knocked the fight out of him momentarily. The other man pulled him by the scruff of his neck down the narrow hallway.
He grabbed at the wall with his left hand, but all that he managed to snatch was a bit of the wallpaper with blue roses on it that came off like the page of a book. They pulled him into the clean white bathroom, where another man waited.
The white tiles were slippery. They pulled off his coat and his sweater and flung them aside. The bathtub was filled with water and when they plunged him into it, the freezing temperature shocked his body and his back arched and his legs jolted so violently he thought he might break them. It froze him all the way to the bone as they forced him under the water. He grasped wildly, struggling for some way to come up for air, but there was nothing that his limbs could do for him now. His universe had shrunk down to the size of a bathtub and there was no way out of it. They pulled him out for a second and then shoved him back under.
He had never felt so trapped. Every time he went underneath the water he felt sure that he would drown. He had no idea what it would feel like when he couldn’t breathe anymore or how much death would hurt. There was a terror of the unknown all around him. That same feeling was being experienced all over Europe. There was a little boy who had crawled under his kitchen table during an air raid who felt it. It was in the heart of a little girl who had been separated from her parents and was now stuck on a crowded train. There was a boy touching a bullet hole, terrified because he didn’t feel a thing. There were ninety children all feeling it at once on board the SS City of Benares passenger ship, which had just been struck by a torpedo. And they all kissed their dolls and teddy bears and told them not to worry and wished them Godspeed.