The Doll’s Alphabet

by Camilla Grudova

  I barely focused on my angel when he appeared, so keen to see him a second time. “C’mon, again!” I screamed as he was pulled back into the lantern. I kicked away my little chair, sat on Agata’s lap and put my foot over hers, adding pressure. My foot was much smaller, it didn’t make her go any faster, but she put her free arm around my waist and held me there, and the earpiece passed seamlessly between us. The angel and Pierrot became stronger, more flamboyant in their actions. The angel imitated the obscene crotch-grabbing of Mr. Magnolia, and I was so thrilled that at first I did not hear my father shouting in the hall. I did not hear him until he had grabbed me, and was carrying me away, and only then I noticed that my legs and arms and nightdress were covered in jam, so dark it could have been blood. Perhaps my father imagined it was.

  At home, my mother bathed me, calling me disgusting over and over again, while I moaned, a strange, deep sound I had never made before. I did not go to school the next day; I did not go to that school ever again. I suffered from horrible visions: Agata’s lips, Mr. Magnolia’s crotch, jars of jam with bits and pieces of sewing machines hidden inside that I choked on, they tasted like metal and licorice. I kicked and screamed and threw up, and was kept in my room for months.

  When I could get out of bed, I was sent to stay with my aunt in the city. My parents sold the shop and joined me a few months later. By then I was so integrated into my aunt’s exciting city life that our village, and my entire childhood, was a blur I was embarrassed to remember.

  My aunt took me to restaurants, bookshops, department stores, markets, and the cinema. She was a professor, and though she lived alone, she had many male friends. I became fond of one, Leopold. He was much older than me. He had a raspberry-colored birthmark on his cheek and wore very tiny, round spectacles. I kept in touch with him throughout my schooling, and married him when I started university. Our son inherited his father’s gigantic nose, which depressed Leopold sometimes, as his nose was full of cruel, bitter memories like an old heart, but I liked it. They both made me think of crows with their feathers painted pink.

  I found work as an archivist and often looked for Agata’s name in catalogs and newspapers, but I found no trace of her. I assumed she’d gone abroad, perhaps taken on a different name to fit in better. It was hard to return to our country, and I felt bad for her parents, who had put so much effort into supporting her, most likely getting nothing in return.

  I still suffered, a little. I couldn’t stand any sort of apparatus. Leopold once gave me a music box shaped like a theater with a dancing paper Pierrot inside. It made me so nervous I had to run to the bathroom and vomit. I couldn’t even hang a mobile above our son’s crib because of the shadows it would project across his nursery walls.

  I hated the microfilm readers at work, I avoided them as much as possible, and typewriters, which I used sparingly, always biting my tongue. I preferred to make handwritten labels and lists, and made sure my handwriting was neat and clear so my co-workers wouldn’t complain. My favorite things to work with were old manuscripts, so old I had to wear white gloves while handling them, manuscripts written on skin.

  I couldn’t think about the way clothes were made, with those awful, black contraptions. I was drawn to expensive things described as “hand woven,” “hand knitted”; I loved the word “hand,” its warm and soft connotations. I always imagined a chubby, pink child’s hand like my son’s, completely opaque—no wiry veins showing underneath.

  I hated anything that whirled, flickered, buzzed, clicked, clattered. Sometimes I had nightmares, beasts with scissor mouths, metal fan wings, a telephone receiver for eyes, metal pincers and cog wheels longing to touch me.

  There aren’t any flattering photos of me. Cameras make me blink and shudder.

  I still took great pleasure in food, with the exception of fish and jam. Fish did not seem natural, but mechanical somehow, perhaps because of their silver skins. I often had a dream in which Agata scooped out my flesh with a long spoon and stuffed it into fish skins made from silver satin and sewed the seams onto her machine. I was left as nothing but a pile of fake sardines, the satin damp from my flesh hidden inside, and a skeleton wearing my own hair as a wig.

  For my birthday, Leopold always gave me cured ham legs, pickled tongues, and other gourmet meats, ones that resembled what they were, meat that hadn’t been minced, ground, pulverized.

  When I was in my forties, I went back to our old village to visit a sick aunt who was too weak to travel to the city. I had the idea that I would also visit Agata’s mother, remembering the cruel way I used to laugh at her bald patches, her skinny limbs. I also suspected my parents had given her harsh words. I wanted to show her that she was forgiven, that really it wasn’t her fault. I would bring her flowers.

  I looked for the old flower shop, but it was gone. There was a floral section in a large, new grocery store. I bought her a cheery orange bouquet.

  The curtains in the first floor windows of their building were faded from the sun, and full of equally faded trinkets, like deteriorating daguerreotypes that took the interior life of the building with them as they crinkled and vanished, leaving nothing but a blank stone wall, an uninhabited ruin.

  I was surprised to find anyone there. Agata’s mother answered their door.

  She wore a turban made of ragged grey and black fabric, from which I surmised that she must be entirely bald underneath. She was even thinner than I remembered, and bent, like a rib bone. The apartment was free of children; they were all grown up by now. Instead there was an old man, huddled in a chair by the stove, giving off the same sopping smell as a toddler. I wondered how many of their children had left the town, how many had left our country, to which they could never return.

  “Come upstairs,” her mother said in a whisper, placing the flowers on the table. Agata’s father flared his nostrils, seeking the origin of the floral smell, and I realized that he was blind.

  “From the glass. His eyes were ruined by the glass,” Agata’s mother said, shuffling out. I followed her up the stairs. There was a distinctive mixture of aromas—cabbages, shoe polish, mice, tobacco, old kitchen pipes, walnuts, smoked ham—as if the stairwell was an accordion, and each step a key that released not a note, but a heavy spray of fragrance. It was the thought of being trapped in that wheezing, terrible contraption that made me hesitate, but Agata’s poor mother kept walking up, and so I followed. Strongest was a warm, waxy smell. It drowned out all the others in great, deep waves, and I had the sensation I was ascending towards a room full of thousands of burning tallow candles.

  By the time I glimpsed the buttery light under the door, I knew what to expect, and my ears took in the flickering sound.

  She sat in the same armchair. She was so fat that her eyes, which used to protrude, were sunk deep into the flesh of her face, as if they were drowning in the bluish purple bags below them. She was lumpy and frayed, like a cloth doll stuffed with too much wool. Unclean fleece, I thought, torn from an animal. Her brown hair was cut short, and was oily. I could see layers of dandruff flakes stuck to her hairline, glistening in the light of her lantern, like shards of broken glass among the wooden ruins of a building. In the center was a bald spot; an unclean skylight, cracked like a boiled egg tapped with a spoon, but still solid.

  “The angel hasn’t come back since you left. He is waiting for you,” she said, only half-looking at me and her mother, who whispered, “I’ll bring you girls some coffee in a few hours,” and left.

  My white collage on the wall had turned yellow. Scraps of fresh paper, mostly toilet roll, ribbons, and a fridge door had been added. It resembled a frilled and bedraggled wedding dress, ill-preserved by its bride, worn over and over again, the sweat and sweetness of the wedding day covered in grey reproductions of itself, the stains of a day relived over and over. I imagined the attic as one of the arched hollows under the bride’s arm, the place where the body leaves its imprint on fabric most intensely, those pathetic, damp, and silent mouths of the heart.
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br />   My old chair was very small, it hurt my back, the earpiece was greasy, but I felt behind it that strange piece of flesh, that mysterious ear listening to me. Once more my winged man appeared, wearing the same appealing wide-wool trousers, the same lipstick, and I thought, he’s feigning cheery indifference, he is yellowed and worn by my absence.

  RHINOCEROS

  Across from the apartment building where Nicholas and I lived was a train station. There weren’t any trains, but a café whose small metal chairs were spread out across the vast space, and a kiosk. The kiosk sold navy blue gloves, packages of powder you put in water to make colorful sweet drinks, syrup that did the same thing, pads of grey paper and sea monkey kits, nylon stockings that smelled like chemicals and broke into holes as soon as you put them on, small jars of salt, and bars of pink candy that were very waxy in consistency and came in a package with a goofy, yellow animal with long ears represented on it. Everyone knew what a rabbit was, even if they had never seen one, because of that candy. I thought, if Nicholas were an animal he’d be a rabbit like that. He was small, and almost albino.

  Nicholas and I went to the station often, because it had speakers which played music, very faintly, and there were old, interesting posters on the walls: a large poster for the film Peculiar Jane, one for a dark imported beer—the beer bottle was surrounded by crows—and another poster of a winged insect made out of metal or something. That one was for a jewelry shop that was no longer open. We had written down the address and visited, but there was no sign of it ever being a jewelry shop: in its place was a closed-down bakery filled with empty bread shelves. Nicholas had sketched and painted the posters many times. The station was very drafty, lukewarm teas from the café didn’t help much, but we were used to being cold. The very old brick fireplace in our living room had been filled in with an electric one that didn’t work. It had strange white bars covered in fuzzy-looking red wires behind a metal bar grate. It looked like a very bad drawing of a real fire. The hearth was covered in beautiful tiles with green flowers on them. Once, when desperate, we tore one of the tiles off and sold it. It didn’t get us more than two cups of tea however, and we became so nervous about the landlord discovering the missing tile that Nicholas painted a replica on hard paper and glued it in the empty space. One could hardly tell the difference, as long as they didn’t step on it.

  Above, on the mantelpiece, Nicholas kept his sea monkeys in a plastic, castle-shaped aquarium. They were tiny grey things, they resembled aquatic bed bugs, really. The water was murky. I had bought them for Nicholas’s birthday. The package had pink creatures with chimpanzee-like faces and clear roles—mother, father, son, daughter, wearing fancy outfits. In his childish way, Nicholas was disappointed that the creatures didn’t resemble the image at all but he still painted them, using a magnifying glass.

  Beside the aquarium was a mantel clock that looked like a shrunken train station, a small, long skull—the person we bought it from said it was a rat’s—and two winking-face tea cups Nicholas had inherited from his grandmother. We didn’t use them because Nicholas thought they would scream if we poured hot liquid into their heads.

  Directly across from the fireplace was a red couch with some sort of botanical design on it. It was inside the couch that I found the beef can, after removing the cushions and cleaning underneath because the couch sometimes gave off an odd smell. The can had a white animal on it, called a beef. Nicholas became terribly excited. He opened the can with a knife, thinking there would be a tiny beef inside that looked like the one on the cover. It was just horrid, blackish mush inside—it smelled wicked. I said, Nicholas we ought to throw it out, it might be dangerous, and he threw the stuff out but kept the lid, washed it off, and painted it many times. I had encountered the word “beef” in novels before. It was something English people often ate, but I didn’t know what it looked like till now, and the novels were now half ruined by the image of the characters eating that black, smelly substance.

  Every five months, a man in a grey top hat visited to pick up Nicholas’s paintings and drawings. He loved the one of the beef, saying it was very noble, and asked where we had found the image. Nicholas showed him the tin lid.

  We found it on the street, Nicholas said. The man replied he’d like to have it too if we didn’t mind, and put the lid in his pocket, saying, I haven’t seen one of those since I was a boy. We weren’t sure if he meant the animal or the tin.

  Don’t worry, Nicholas said, after the man left, I kept a sketch of the beef just for us, it’s in the suitcase under the bed.

  That suitcase also contained some drawings of me, kept hidden because we were under obligation to give all of Nicholas’s artworks to the man in the top hat, though I don’t think the man would’ve liked them. He never acknowledged or expressed interest in me, only in Nicholas and his paintings of sea monkeys, pots, insects, and whatever else he could find.

  He gave us money, and sometimes food, in exchange for the artworks. The food was never consistent, for example, he brought us two bags full of greenish-brown grapes. We ate as much as we could. Some of them were moldy and shriveled, which gave Nicholas the idea we could make raisins out of them. The air of the apartment turned out to be too damp for them to turn into raisins, though we did hold them over the stove for some time.

  Another time, he brought us a large sack of flour. I didn’t know what to do with it, I made a dreadful white soup out of it that gave us both stomach aches, but fortunately we were able to sell the rest of the sack at a market we went to every week to look for treasures. Nicholas was always looking for bits of animal, but someone sold him a jagged piece of broken porcelain saying it was a bone, he didn’t have a good eye for such things. I found the rat’s skull, and traded a nice blue dress I had for it. My only other clothes were a brown skirt with white spots on it, a black skirt with pink and green flowers, and some shirts and jumpers Nicholas and I shared, mainly inherited from his grandmother. Whenever the man in the grey top hat visited, Nicholas made me put on a pink jumper—the only one without paint stains on it, though it did have a large moth hole on the chest covered with a badge that used to say VOTE MAXIMILLIAN on it. We thought this phrase might be dangerous so we blacked it out with paint. It just looked like a large black button.

  We showed Nicholas’s paintings in the living room, the light there was good. We also had a studio room for Nicholas, a bedroom, a bathroom with a large green tub, and a dining room we didn’t use as we didn’t have a table, and there was a foreboding-looking light fixture dangling from the ceiling.

  Sometimes the market had picture books wrapped in plastic, but we couldn’t afford them so we tried to memorize the images on the cover, a hairy animal wearing a straw hat, a pink one in overalls, a large grey house. Nicholas quickly drew them all after we left, but the results were frightening, too frightening to paint, we thought. The animals just looked like misshapen people.

  It took us almost two hours to walk to the art supplies store. We walked arm in arm.

  One old man lived above us, the only other person in the whole building, he owned a bicycle. I tried to be friendly to him, bringing him some tubers and tea, but he never offered to lend us the bicycle though Nicholas and I always looked so tired when we returned home. The old man didn’t use the bicycle often, only once a week or so to buy bread or a bottle of spirits, which he put under his arms while cycling but never dropped.

  I pictured Nicholas and me on the bicycle often, me pedalling, him sitting on the back with his arms around my waist.

  I always packed us a lunch for our trip to the art store: a thermos of tea and some boiled tubers wrapped in foil. We stopped somewhere nice, a statue, a fountain with no water in it, to eat. We also had to stop for Nicholas to cough more often than I liked, but Nicholas wouldn’t let me go alone. He insisted we go together though it exhausted him. I think he was also afraid of me choosing the wrong things.

  Whenever we went out Nicholas brought his net, just in case he saw an insect or some
thing. There were three cockroaches taped to the wall of his studio room which he had found in the halls of our building, and a bed bug kept in a velvet box. When we ate at home he was deliberately messy, hoping to attract something living.

  On one of our walks to the art supply shop we discovered a cavernous grocery store. We could hear our feet echoing as we walked through it. Not all the lights were turned on, so we just went into the aisles that were lit up.

  There were shelves and shelves of tea, all the boxes were quite faded and old-looking, and the tins rusty. That was about all, I think the shop also had some cotton kitchen cloths, dusty bottles of syrup, and some dried white things—we didn’t know what they were.

  Does tea go off? I asked Nicholas. He said he didn’t think so, so we bought a few of the cheapest boxes, I was afraid of the rust on the tins. As we felt so abundant in tea, Nicholas used some of it to do paintings of his cockroaches on paper. They looked like light brown watercolor pictures, very lovely, but the next time we went by the grocery store it was closed, shuttered up.

  The art supply shop was squished between two vegetable shops. There were mildewy curtains drawn across the windows that had become stuck to and stained by a handful of dead, brown plants, giving the unpleasant impression of a healing wound and bandages. It was half empty. There were small plaster busts of men with beards and lots of boxes of chalk.

  Sometimes it took the owner a long time to find the paints Nicholas wanted. Nicholas always became nervous that there wouldn’t be any more, that he’d have to start drawing with chalk, which gave him a funny, unpleasant feeling to touch, and which you could just wipe away.

  The store had lots of nice paper. Sometimes Nicholas tried to buy me some, but I said no, the grey paper pads from the train station kiosk were fine enough for me.

  The last time we were there, the owner had hardly any paint left and wasn’t sure if he could get more, but told us there was another art supply store if you walked along the train tracks until you were at a station with a green roof, walked through it, or around it if the doors were locked, and then on a few streets from there. He drew us a map, but couldn’t say how long it would take, though it was sure to have more supplies as it was so out-of-the-way. Nicholas was enthusiastic about making the journey, but I was worried about his health. It could take hours, or days even, and what if they had nothing but white chalk?