Page 70 - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

natured fatalists one and all, never in a rush, preferring to put off action until

matters had resolved themselves without anyone in the troupe having had to lift
a finger. The leader of the pack was a disheveled sophisticate named Hamlet. It
was Hamlet who became Radha’s chief extracurricular guide, her lecturer,
heckler, cheerleader, and coconspirator. At those times we all forgot whose
voice and hands Hamlet and company were making use of, and the next day
Radha would report mastery of some minor voice control trick to Gustav as if he

hadn’t been there in the room with us. Initially it seemed that this type of
forgetfulness seriously displeased Gustav, but as we grew more comfortable
with him I began to see that when Radha told him something odd or amusing
that Hamlet or one of his other puppets had said or done, what Gustav actually
expressed was restrained interest. He was observing a process we were not yet
privy to.

—

I CAUGHT ON LONG before Radha did. She spoke to Gustav’s troupe in a way that
she would never have spoken to him directly. As this confidence flourished, so
did a sympathy between Radha and Gustav’s puppets, who devoted themselves
to making her laugh and would materialize en masse outside her classroom door
and walk her to the bus stop at the end of the day, crying: “Make way for boss

lady!” Gustav surrounded her with her especial favorites: Hamlet with his
pudding bowl haircut, Chagatai, who was both assassin and merman (he kills
sailors with his sexy falsetto!), Brunhild the shipbuilder, and an astronaut named
Petrushka, who answered any question put to him in exhaustive detail. Also
present was a toddler-sized jumping bean known as Loco Dempsey. Their
master walked behind Radha, arms raised as he worked the controls high above

her head. Under Gustav’s command all the strings stayed separate; Radha
marveled at that and leaned into him so as not to be the body that tangled those
clean lines. He nudged a few of the controls into her hands, lowered his arms so
that he was holding her—not tightly, since there’s only so much you can do with
your elbows. He whistled a brisk polonaise and her gestures led his as she set
Brunhild and Loco to marching. Radha looked so happy that I thought some kind
of admission was forthcoming later, but instead she turned to me and said: “That

can’t be the same gang Myrna told me about.”
—