Soldier Doll

by Jennifer Gold

  Dr. McLeod opens the door. She is a tall woman, one of the tallest people Elizabeth has ever met. Her hair is short, a fiery auburn color, and she wears it tucked haphazardly behind her ears. Unusually dressed, she is wearing a long, green lace skirt paired with a men’s gray suit jacket. On her feet are tan construction boots; hanging from her ears are what look like bright blue parrot feathers. Elizabeth likes her immediately.

  “John.” Her voice is warm. She ushers them into her office. “Good to see you. So you’re living in Toronto now, I guess. Settling in okay?”

  “Getting there,” he says. He smiles and shakes her hand in greeting. “I’m doing some contract work with the air force, Trenton base.”

  “Isn’t that quite far?” Dr. McLeod frowns. “It’s about two hours away, no?”

  “It is,” he agrees. “But Amanda got a great job at one of the hospitals here, so we decided on Toronto.”

  “Long commute,” she observes.

  “I’m shipping out in October,” he explains. “To Afghanistan. They need engineers over there.”

  “Afghanistan!” Dr. McLeod looks surprised. Her father quickly looks over at Elizabeth, who stares back at him, impassive.

  “How long will you be out there?”

  “A year. But I get a couple weeks’ leave at Christmas and then again next summer.” He looks around. “Great space you have here.”

  The office is large but has a cozy feel. Elizabeth looks at the faded rug, patterned with small blue-and-white squares. An odd assortment of pictures crowds the walls. It feels more like their old living room back in Vancouver than a workplace. The walls are a soft yellow, and an impressive collection of books rests in oak bookcases that decorate the perimeter. Tucked away at the back is a comfortable-looking pair of worn blue armchairs with a paisley pattern; in the center is a round wooden table with mismatched chairs. The desk is in a corner, pushed to one side, covered in books and papers. Elizabeth wonders, briefly, how it doesn’t collapse beneath the weight of so many books. She stares at the room, impressed that an adult has succeeded in making such a spectacular mess.

  “It does the job.” Dr. McLeod smiles, her parrot earrings swinging. “You must be Elizabeth. Having a good summer vacation?”

  “Not bad, thanks.” Elizabeth suddenly feels shy and small. She fingers the long rope of faux pink pearls she rescued from a box her mother had marked for donation before the move. “I like your earrings.”

  “Thanks!”

  Dr. McLeod claps her hands together. “So!” she says. She motions them over to the meeting table, urging them to sit. Like the desk, it’s a disaster. Elizabeth stares at the clutter of scientific journals, folders, and different-colored pens. Dr. McLeod apologizes and clears some space so they can all see each other. “What brings you both here? A big find, I hope.” She grins, dropping a stack of magazines to the floor. They all turn and watch as the stack topples.

  “Well,” says Elizabeth’s dad. He looks over at her. “It’s actually Elizabeth’s find, really. She was the one who spotted it. At a yard sale,” he adds.

  Elizabeth blushes. She reaches into her bag and brings out the soft pink bundle. Carefully, she unwraps the blanket and lays the doll on the table. She looks up at Dr. McLeod. “It’s a soldier doll,” she says.

  “A soldier doll,” repeats Dr. McLeod. Her eyebrows narrow and she frowns, looking puzzled. Then, her eyes widen as her confusion transforms, becomes comprehension. “Not the soldier doll? From the Margaret Merriweather poem?” She gives them a sharp glance and leans in to get a closer look at the little figure.

  “Actually,” says Elizabeth’s father, “that’s what we’d like to find out.”

  Elizabeth and her dad both gaze at her, looking hopeful.

  “Well,” she says. She shakes her head. She picks up the doll and stares at it. “Well,” she repeats.

  Dr. McLeod studies the doll. Elizabeth watches as she turns it over and over in her hands, taking note of its features. She does this for some time. After a while, she looks up at them and gingerly places it back on the table.

  “Okay,” she says. She trades the doll for a purple pen, clicking it on and off repeatedly. “I need to run some tests. And do some research. But I can tell you that this doll appears to have been made some time very early in the twentieth century.” She reaches for a notepad and jots something down.

  “So it could be the soldier doll? The real one?” Elizabeth leans toward her eagerly.

  “It could be. But it’s too early to say for sure.” Dr. McLeod makes detailed notes on the doll now. She turns the figure to the left, then the right. She scribbles again in her notebook.

  “It’s not another Titanic dish, though.” Elizabeth looks over at her dad, who is looking at the professor with some concern.

  “What? Oh! That.” Dr. McLeod laughs. “That was funny, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too early to say. This could very well be the real thing. I need to run more tests, though.” She turns the doll back over, gives it a penetrating stare.

  “There’s something, though, something odd—” She frowns, thinking. Her voice trails off. She gets up and goes over to one of the bookcases and pulls an older-looking volume from the shelf. Reading, she frowns again.

  “Uh-oh. Bad news?” Elizabeth’s voice is light, but she’s concerned.

  “Not bad, necessarily. Just strange.” Dr. McLeod points at the book. “The uniform. It’s the wrong color for a British soldier. Merriweather was English, and she wrote the poem some time during World War I. The doll should be wearing a British uniform.” She turns the textbook out so they can see the illustration she’s referring to. The soldiers in the photograph are wearing thick woolen tunics dyed khaki.

  They all look over at the doll; it stares back at them blankly.

  “It actually looks more like the German uniform from the First World War.” Dr. McLeod opens the book to another page, showing them the gray-clad soldiers. Elizabeth peers at the photograph, realizing the professor is right.

  “What does that mean?” Elizabeth asks curiously.

  “It means we need to do more investigating. I need to run some tests. Send it to the lab.” She picks up the doll and touches its coat. “Odd,” she says again.

  Elizabeth thinks of her dad in their old family pictures, waving at the camera in full military regalia. Of course different countries would have different uniforms. She’d never given it much thought before, but it makes sense, like in sports: you need know who’s on your team. She thinks of Afghanistan and of camouflage and rifles and the desert, wondering if her father’s uniform will protect him. From dust. From the sun. From bullets and shrapnel. Her stomach tightens.

  Dr. McLeod stands again. “Come back in a week. I’ll send it off to the lab. I should have some results for you by next Thursday.” She leads them to the door. “And don’t worry. We’ll take good care of the little guy.”

  She shakes hands with both Elizabeth and her father. “The soldier doll! Imagine.” Dr. McLeod has a faraway look on her face now, as if she has traveled into the silent figure’s past and somehow found herself stuck there. “It’s too bad he can’t talk,” she says, half to herself. “He must have so many stories to tell. I wonder where he’s been.”

  Chapter 5

  Berlin, Germany

  1939

  “Papa?” Hanna Roth peered around the storeroom door of her father’s Auguststrasse antique shop. “What’s this?” Carefully, she presented her father with the small wooden doll she’d found wrapped in an old blanket and tucked in a dark corner of the back cupboard. Now that she was forbidden from attending school, she often helped her father out with tasks around the shop. Cleaning the back cupboard was a job she’d taken on without being asked—her father was an excellent businessman, but a hopeless housekeeper.

  Franz Roth blinked twice as he look
ed up from his bookkeeping to stare at the wooden figure before him. It had been years since he’d seen or even thought of the little thing, or the strange circumstances under which he had acquired it. He took off his glasses and placed them on his desk to take a better look.

  “Ah,” he said. He took the figurine from his daughter and sat back in his chair.

  “It’s strange, is it not, Papa?” Hanna peered over his shoulder. “I’ve never seen such a toy.”

  “No.” Franz nodded. His voice sounded far away. “It is very unusual, indeed.” He set the doll down on his desk and stared at it hard, remembering. He was silent for a few moments.

  “Papa?” said Hanna, questioning. “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course, Liebchen.” Franz straightened. “I was just thinking about the doll. About how I came to have it.”

  Hanna’s curiosity was piqued. “Is it not just an ordinary toy, then?” She searched her father’s expression. “There is something special about it?”

  “You could say that, yes.” Franz put his glasses back on and sat back in his chair once again. “Sit down, Hanna. I will tell you the story of the little soldier doll.”

  . . .

  It was at Ypres. “What kind of name is Ypres?” he remembers joking with his friend Max. “Never trust a town that starts with a Y.” He and Max had found this enormously funny at the time. He had met Max Reinholz his first day of training, when they were both seventeen, and despite their very different backgrounds—Max was the son of a prominent Christian lawyer; he, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper—they had quickly become inseparable. “There go the Troublesome Twins,” people would joke when they went by. “Troublesome” they earned because they were always engaged in some sort of prank. If a soldier came back to his camp to find his undergarments waving bravely from a pole, he could be sure the Troublesome Twins were behind it. Their commanding officer threatened them daily with everything from disgraceful discharge to a public whipping, but in reality he enjoyed their hijinks as a welcome distraction from the monotony of trench warfare and the hours spent in cold rain in muddy little holes, picking at lice and bargaining with God not to be annihilated by the latest round of shelling.

  It wasn’t raining when he found the doll. He remembers because it was one of the only moments of reprieve from rain in his entire two years of service. It never seemed to stop pouring in those cursed fields, the endless pounding of icy water that permeated even the warmest of undershirts and the toughest of boots. It was also nighttime, he recalls, rendering the memories somewhat fuzzy—full of shadows and shrouded in darkness. He and Max were huddled deep in their waterlogged trench looking at a picture of Max’s girlfriend, Leni, waiting for an opportunity to enter, undetected, into no-man’s-land: that desolate area in between German and British lines that contained the ruined bodies of friends. It was their job to bring these comrades—and any of their severed arms and legs, or worse—back to the camp so they could be dignified with a proper burial. Also identified, if possible, so their mothers could be informed of their deaths in the form letters lauding their sons’ bravery and sacrifices to the Fatherland.

  “She’s schön, eh, Franz?” Max asked for the hundredth time, whispering and waving the photograph of Leni.

  Franz grinned. He finished his cigarette, dropping the singed remains into a puddle at his feet. It disappeared quickly in the murky water. Franz felt the wetness against his feet and shivered as it seeped through invisible, tiny cracks in his boots and then again through the woolen socks his mother sent regularly from Berlin. He peered out. It looked clear, for once.

  “Let’s go,” he said quietly to Max. “We’ll move out on my count.”

  “I’m not finished my cigarette,” Max grumbled, dropping it into the pool at his feet. He took a last look at Leni before stuffing the photograph back into his pocket. “The things I do for you.”

  “For me? This is for the Fatherland, Herr Reinholz. If it were up to me, we’d be on leave at a warm inn somewhere with a bottle of wine.”

  “Or beer. And hot food. Sausages, maybe.”

  “And a soft bed.”

  The two men crouched low as they moved, clutching their rifles close to their chests. They moved as quickly as they could, but it was difficult; the mud was thick and viscous as blackstrap molasses, trapping their feet with suctioning noises that reminded Franz of breathing through a gas mask. His thoughts strayed to the mustard gas and the screams of the men who had been exposed to it. A memory of an English boy screeching and tearing at his eyes came to him, and he pushed it away, walking faster, lulling his mind into submission by staring at the unchanging terrain at his feet.

  Suddenly, there was an explosion, and the ground beneath them shook. Startled, Franz dropped his rifle, swearing loudly. “Scheisse!”

  “What the devil?” shouted Max over the noise. “The major said there wasn’t going to be any fighting until dawn, that Dummkopf.”

  “I think someone set off a mine,” said Franz, shaken. “Our British counterparts, I suppose.” There was always a chance of encountering enemy soldiers on a similar mission at night. He cursed their bad luck. Frantically, he searched the mud for his rifle. In the distance, now, was the distinct sound of gunfire.

  “My rifle.” Franz’s voice was desperate. “Max, do you see it?”

  “Oh God.” Max looked at his friend in horror, realizing he had no weapon. “Where did you drop it?”

  Franz gestured helplessly at the expanse of mud and stagnant water. “Somewhere here,” he said.

  Max poked furiously at the mud with his own gun, kicking at puddles with his feet. “I think I see it,” he said suddenly, as he bent down to retrieve the lost weapon, tearing at the mud with his hands.

  Franz turned to his friend in relief. “Thank God, I—”

  His voice died as he caught sight of a British soldier with a rifle pointed in the general direction of Max’s back. The Englischer was still a ways off, but close enough to kill if he wanted to, and Franz didn’t doubt his motive.

  “No!” he cried, lunging on top of Max. With force, he pulled Max into a tiny shell hole at their feet, just in time. Max was safe, but the bullet had pierced Franz’s right shoulder, the pain hitting him like an explosion. He felt a roaring in his ears as he rolled over, retching.

  Max stared at him. “You saved my life,” he said. He was shaking as he watched Franz’s blood mingle with the Flemish mud across his coat. “You saved my life,” he repeated. He sounded stunned.

  Franz groaned in pain. “I shouldn’t have,” he said, trying to grin in spite of himself. “Look where it got me! I’ll never play the violin again.”

  Max snorted; Franz was tone deaf. “Tell you what, mein freund,” he said, bending over Franz to examine the gaping wound. “When we get home, I will personally pay for some violin lessons.” He tore a strip off his uniform and tied it tightly around Franz’s upper arm. Franz gave a small howl of pain as Max pulled the makeshift bandage even tighter.

  “You won’t have to waste your money,” gasped Franz. He looked at the bandage, which was covered in a mix of soil and blood. He felt faint. “I’m going to die.”

  “I won’t let you.” Max gave him a hard look. “Anyway, what are you complaining about? It’s not like you were shot in the heart. You’re acting like a girl, Franz.”

  Suddenly, Max shushed Franz. “I hear an Englischer,” he hissed. Cautiously, he lifted his head out of their hiding place, only to come face-to-face with a mud-encrusted pair of enemy boots.

  “You’re still alive.” The boy, younger even than himself by the telltale hairless chin, stared at him blankly. Franz looked up at him from the shell hole.

  “You don’t say, old boy.” Max’s voice was sarcastic. He had been to the best schools and spoke English well. “Bad shot. Give my best to the king.”

  Flushe
d, the boy reached again for his rifle, but Max beat him to it. “This is for Franz,” he said. He shot him once, quickly. The bullet grazed the soldier’s knee. With a cry of pain, the British soldier collapsed to the ground, his body skidding a bit in the mud.

  “Max, don’t.” Franz winced as the boy writhed on his back in the muck like a farm animal, like a pig. He thought of his younger brother, David, who had started his service a month ago—he was a boy, barely out of short pants. “He’s about twelve years old. Look at his uniform: it’s hanging off of him. They couldn’t even find one small enough.”

  “He tried to kill you!”

  “Just take him prisoner. Please.”

  Max shrugged. Hoisting himself out of the hole, he reached over and grabbed the soldier by the jacket collar and hauled him toward the tiny trench. The soldier flailed wildly, shrieking with pain. It was raining again now. It had started abruptly, the way it always did, and was coming down in sheets. Water and mud splashed in every direction as the boy kicked his legs.

  “Charles?” a new voice, distressed, came from behind a barbed-wire fence. Another Englischer. Franz craned his neck to try to see what was going on above. “Charles? Where are you?”

  “Ned!” The boy waved, frantic, from the ground. “Ned, save me! I’ve been shot! They’re trying to kill me, Ned!”

  Franz watched, wincing as he tried to shift his arm to a more comfortable position, and Max threw up his hands and looked at the sky that was still vomiting water.

  “Gott in Himmel, would you listen to this Dummkopf?” Max muttered. He turned his back on the boy to check on Franz’s shoulder. He tightened the bandage.

  Franz was about to reply when he caught sight of the other Englischer, the one called Ned, swiftly making his way over to where Charles was lying on the ground. Ned fumbled for some bandaging cloth in his left breast pocket as Max shifted quickly and pointed his rifle at the second soldier.