The Doll’s Alphabet

by Camilla Grudova

  At the sight of Agata’s sewing machine, my imagination whirred.

  Agata would make me a pair of stockings I wouldn’t be able to take off. A pair that would swallow my legs and expand three-dimensionally with their own horrible breath, like balloons, that followed the direction of her will. She would cut me and sew me back up again like the baby toads she dissected with cold expertise in science class.

  “My mother’s old sewing machine, but that’s not all,” she said.

  I looked closer.

  There was a large mason jar where the spool was supposed to go, perched on top of the sewing machine like a translucent egg being expelled from its body. Inside the jar was a cylindrical light bulb, the sepia color of old photographs. Emerging from the top was a brown wire, attached like a thread to the levers and regulators before vanishing into a short wooden box where the needle was supposed to be. The wire reappeared from a small hole on the side of the box, ending in a black earpiece, culled from a telephone. The box had faded writing on the side. CIGARS, it said.

  Agata pushed over her armchair and sat in front of the sewing machine. She started to pump the treadle. The large balance wheel started to turn, like a cinema reel. The jar started to move.

  “Turn off the lights,” she said. I did, finding the switch near the door. The mason jar glowed. A wobbly bubble of light traveled across the room, then again, but this time there was some sort of shape inside it that was not fully formed, parts of it blacker than shadow, that morphed, flickering, into a Pierrot. He danced across the room. His face, white with black lips and eyebrows, was so beautiful I blushed. I blushed for him to see us, in Agata’s filthy attic, our breath and armpits smelly from a day at school. His outfit was billowing white, with large black buttons, his feet small and pointed. I leaned against Agata’s chair, watching the Pierrot circle us, again and again.

  I knew what a Pierrot was. In my parents’ shop, there was a porcelain Pierrot bust. He had rosy cheeks and the word PIERROT was written across his chest. His shoulders were covered in holes to put lollipops in. The lollipops did not sell very well; children were afraid of the strange, foreign man with his black skullcap. My father had brought the Pierrot at an antique shop and thought it lent an air of elegance to his business. We had no idea what the original lollipops were like, and imagined horrible and exotic flavors—crab, licorice, goat, octopus—rising from the Pierrot’s shoulders, the sugar spun into monstrous shapes.

  Agata didn’t know the word “Pierrot”; I taught it to her, and she was visibly grateful. It suited the handsome, romantic figure in her attic much better than “clown.”

  Agata handed me the earpiece. I didn’t hear anything. It was more like being listened to, as if there was a piece of shivering flesh behind the plastic. I didn’t see the Pierrot again, but this time appeared a man with white wings, wearing a striped sailor’s shirt, and wide sailor’s trousers. His hair was golden, greased back from his face, and his lips were red, very red, like he was wearing lipstick.

  “I have never seen him before. I have only seen the Pierrot. This is why I wanted someone else to try it.” Agata put out her hand for the earpiece, pressed it to her ear, and the Pierrot appeared again. He performed a pirouette and blew us a kiss.

  When she stopped treadling, I looked at the still jar. There were no images pasted onto it like on a lantern, or on the glass slides shown in class. I would have been disappointed if there had been: the winged man felt like something I had illustrated or brought into being.

  Before Agata could start treadling again there was a knock on the door, a quiet, nervous tap. Without getting up from her chair, she gestured for me to open it and to turn on the light.

  Her mother brought us cups of fake coffee made with chicory, and vanilla wafers that dissolved as soon as we put them in our mouths. Agata had a cigarette, then she told me to turn the light off again.

  I didn’t get home till late. My parents were pleased to hear I had been studying with Agata, for her intelligence was known around our whole village. The next morning I hoped, more than anything, that Agata would ask me to come over again. She did. I wasn’t sure if she liked my company, or only wanted to see the “angel” man again, but either way it didn’t matter. I went every day, after school. Agata even borrowed a chair from her family’s apartment for me to sit on. It was a toddler’s chair, with short squat legs, the seat bedecked with colorful illustrations of dogs and flowers. Agata never let me pump the treadle of her machine.

  By the time I went home each night I was starving, and my dinner, left on the table with a cloth on top, was lukewarm.

  I was used to having a snack as soon as I got home from school, and I got into the habit of stealing things from my family’s shop for Agata and me to eat. I brought hazelnut wafers, caramel chews, soft iced-ginger cookies, dry sausages, bottles of raspberry syrup we mixed with water, preserved plums covered in chocolate and, at Agata’s request, an expensive brand of cigarettes with a picture of Romeo and Juliet on the packet, imported from a country in the Caribbean.

  My father noticed I was taking things, and though he was glad I was studying (it was easy to lie to him about that), he couldn’t afford such indulgences, and from then on only allowed me to take food from the overstock room. It was full of large jars of plum jam, dark brown in color, and tinned sardines. Besides the cigarettes, it didn’t make much difference to Agata. We ate the plum jam straight from the jar using spoons. I hated sardines, but Agata ate them, peeling off the silver skin and spitting out the bones.

  My parents and I lived above our shop. We didn’t share any walls with neighbors, and I was fascinated by Agata’s building. It reminded me of the cabinet with dozens of tiny drawers where my parents kept precious seeds and spices. I became obsessed by the fantasy that the angel and Pierrot lived somewhere in the building, that their images had traveled through pipes and oozed through the attic walls like leaking water. When I confessed it to Agata, she called me an idiot, but I couldn’t concentrate on the machine until she’d introduced me to every neighbor. Every door was a disappointing drawer, full of tiny sticky flecks and withered cinnamon sticks. A breath of hope before the next one, then again, nothing. Finally, every room in the building had been emptied of my dreams, except the attic. I also begged her to let me see inside the cigar box. It was nothing to me; a tangle of wires and cogs, no tiny Pierrot and angel trapped inside like beautiful white mice in a cage.

  The moving images came from us, or were connected to us, Agata couldn’t say exactly. She had made the machine in order to project images from her mind’s eye, but the Pierrot wasn’t anything she had seen or imagined before. The angel was just as new to me.

  I remembered once visiting my aunt in the city, when she took me to an arcade where a fortune teller lived in a theatrical box with glass sides. The fortune teller, who wore a colorful turban and many jewels, was made from wax, with a silent wax mouth. If you put a coin in a slot underneath the glass, she released a tiny card with your future written on it. Mine said I would get married and have one child. Agata’s machine must have said something about our futures, for where else could the images come from?

  I created beautiful and ridiculous scenarios in my mind. I was married to the angel, Agata to the Pierrot. The angel and I owned a small, white dog. I spent hours imagining how he would bathe without getting his wings wet, how I would stroke them and keep all the feathers that fell off in a red lacquered box.

  I even dreamed that Agata’s Pierrot was secretly in love with me, that he was in a sense enslaved by her. In fact, he felt somehow originally mine, because of the Pierrot bust in my parents’ shop. I knew the word, and had given it to her.

  I knew Agata had fantasies too, but hers were perhaps filled with more knowledge of the world. Just as she knew how to smoke cigarettes without coughing and read foreign languages, so could she construct an imaginary marriage much more thorough than mine.

  Sometimes she would suddenly say, “Leave now.” The light conti
nued moving after I left—I could see it under the door where I would stand until my legs hurt. I know she wanted to view the images in private. I never complained, I was too afraid of being banned from her machine forever. There was something in the way she said it—“Leave”—that made her seem more grown up than me. Yet we were dependent on each other like a pair of twins, conjoined by a dream rather than a body, for the angel appeared more often when I held the machine to my ear, and the Pierrot when she did. The machine, our secret, bound us together: I could tell her parents or our classmates, while she could tell my parents I wasn’t studying.

  We weren’t friends, exactly. I was bothered by the sound of her breathing and sniffing, she always had a runny nose, and she often screamed at me for sucking my teeth or for noisily passing gas. Our bodies were nuisances to the enjoyment of the machine. I asked my father if I could borrow his record player, which folded up neatly into a suitcase. Music greatly enhanced the whole experience as it made it seem like our dear friends were not silent and unbreathing but, like us, merely drowned out by the music.

  The color of the attic’s walls, the greyish pink wallpaper with its pattern of green ferns curled like little goblins’ ears, gave the angel and Pierrot the appearance of having a skin disease. I didn’t notice this detail in my initial enchantment, but it became noticeable as I demanded more from the machine, like a stomach expanding from eating an ever-increasing amount of food.

  I had the idea of painting the walls white, but Agata didn’t approve—it would mean days away from the machine, she didn’t want paint to get on her books, she didn’t want to pack up her things—so I constructed a white collage along her walls using a white linen tablecloth, a large white blouse of my mother’s, some sheets of typing paper, cloth bags for sugar and flour from the grocery store, endpapers ripped out of books, a piece of wooden board I painted white myself and carried over. Any white scrap I could find. Agata agreed: the angel and Pierrot looked purer, fuller, against white.

  I had a dream that I removed all my teeth and glued them to the walls. I removed Agata’s teeth too, but they were stained and crooked, as in real life. As soon as I extracted them they started to grow until they were the size and length of elephant tusks. They smelled like soiled laundry and were covered in tiny black cavities.

  Once, Large Barbara tried to follow us home, as if she could smell we were up to something important. We ran, Large Barbara’s cane rattling against the stones of the streets behind us. It was a horrible cane, with a doll’s head on the top, soiled and squished by Large Barbara’s sweaty hand. She screamed and screamed, irregular sounds, like the varied contents of a small, traveling menagerie, her cane a large beak or claw hitting the bars. She couldn’t catch up.

  We didn’t mention the incident once we were upstairs, but the attic contained a thought too repellent to voice: what would Large Barbara, who was hopeless, an idiot, see with her ear against the machine? If she were to see, for example, a beautiful prince, wearing turquoise trousers and a yellow sash, it would mean the machine had no base in the future, or reality, and was nothing more than a reflection of our desires.

  I don’t remember the date of the day Mr. Magnolia first appeared. All days had melted into each other, into an amber-colored syrup that slowly hardened under the whirring of Agata’s machine.

  I do remember that Agata was holding the earpiece the first time Mr. Magnolia appeared.

  He was bald, except for a thin rim of hair like scum on a dirty bowl and a plain, unfanciful moustache shaped like the little plastic combs used for lice searches at school. He was old, like a father, and wore a suit, a drab, ill-fitting grey one.

  As he moved across the room he sneered, stuck his tongue out, and grabbed his crotch, his mouth open in a silent laugh.

  We both gasped, but Agata didn’t stop treadling her machine.

  The next round, the Pierrot reappeared, as if nothing had changed; then my angel, then Pierrot and the strange old man again, in an odd, nonsensical sequence.

  Agata kept pumping, horrified and transfixed.

  “Mr. Magnolia,” she whispered, then added, “The name came to me as he appeared. They must come from the same place, they must belong to each other.”

  “I don’t know, I heard that word somewhere, yes, it’s his name.”

  She looked the word up in her seven-volume dictionary. The different volumes were scattered around her attic and it took us a while to find L–M. We were surprised to learn that MAGNOLIA was a flower, a large pink or white one. The dictionary did not contain pictures or any more information, so we could only imagine how horrible the flower must be. We went to a flower shop.

  “Do you have any magnolias?” I stumbled over the word, unsure if we were being obscene.

  “Magnolias grow on trees, I can’t sell a bushel of them. I have beautiful purple asters, poppies, carnations, roses. Silly girls, magnolias grow on trees!” said the shop owner, a broad woman with dyed hair and too much make-up, wearing a wet and stained apron over her dress.

  Agata blushed at the word “silly.” It was the first time I had ever seen her blush.

  “Here, I’ll show you a picture.” The shop owner went into the back of her shop, returning with a large, damp book.

  “It can either be white, or pink. Girls, it grows on trees in foreign places!” she laughed. The flower looked like a dessert.

  “Stupid, worthless dictionary. It should’ve told us that,” Agata mumbled as we left. We walked back to her house in a hurry, both wanting to see Mr. Magnolia again, to compare him with the image of the flower we had just seen. But there was no resemblance between the beautiful, large flower and the ugly plainness of Mr. Magnolia, who grimaced at us and tugged at his trouser legs.

  “Mr. Magnolia, he must come from abroad. That is the connection. Perhaps he has an important message,” said Agata when we were back in her attic.

  We recorded and tried to decode all his poses, gestures, and faces, but it was really a way to kill time between seeing the Pierrot or the angel who struck us dumb. Whatever music was playing when Mr. Magnolia appeared was made ridiculous. We could never play that song again. As Mr. Magnolia continued to appear, more and more songs were ruined. I borrowed more records from my father’s collection—symphonies, ballets, operas, folk songs—and was careless with the ones we no longer wanted, tossing them across the attic. They cracked and were forgotten.

  Sometimes Agata would say, “I am so sick of Mr. Magnolia, thank you very much,” or “Fuck you and your Mr. Magnolia,” her lips curled, her head turned in my direction.

  It was unfair of her to blame me for Mr. Magnolia. He first appeared when the earpiece was held against her head. He slithered out of her mind like a maggot. Was he waiting to prance, like a devil, into both of our futures?

  I lost weight, I smelled like tobacco. I was behind on my schoolwork. My teachers had written my parents a letter, so they knew. Agata wasn’t. She didn’t hand in assignments anymore either, but I think the teachers believed she could do no wrong; they were firm in the belief that her work would be the best in class if she handed it in, so it wasn’t necessary for her to do so. She didn’t speak in class anymore, but sat sullenly, her arms crossed, one foot underneath her desk moving up and down as if pressing an invisible treadle.

  Neither of us had appetites, our stomachs felt tight and curled like unblossomed flowers. We consumed only cigarettes, cups of black tea, and spoonfuls of plum jam, brown and glistening like grease to smooth the cogs of a machine.

  One evening, returning home bleary-eyed, my fingers sticky, my parents forbade me from returning to Agata’s. My mother said it was disgusting for a family to have so many children, and that she had heard they all slept in one big bed, boys and girls mixed. My mother picked me up from school the next day, and the next, and also dropped me off in the morning. The first night away from Agata’s machine, I couldn’t sleep.

  “What happened?” I asked Agata as soon as we were seated in class.

&nb
sp; “Nothing. The same. Mr. Magnolia appeared fifty times, Pierrot twenty times.”

  “And my angel?”

  “Not once. He only appears when you are in the room.”

  The thought gave me relief and hope. Had the angel missed me? Did he not think it worth appearing if I wasn’t there?

  Still, I worried he would appear for Agata alone the next day. Every morning I asked her, and she gave the same reply. After four days, she answered, “Yes. He blew me a kiss.”

  “No. I’m joking,” she snorted, when my face gave away my horror.

  After a week, I stopped asking her, though she still told me. I acted indifferent, and it started to make me feel indifferent.

  I felt calmer, more focused. I could read, do my homework. My appetite returned, my parents indulging whatever edible whims I had.

  The time came, a few weeks later, when I felt assured that I could see Agata’s machine again without the intensity of feeling I had before.

  I was even glad at the thought of seeing Mr. Magnolia, but mostly I was curious to see how my reappearance would affect the expressions of the angel and Pierrot. Of course, my parents wouldn’t let me, so I had to sneak out after dark. I was sure Agata would be running her machine throughout the night, and I was right. The angel and Pierrot didn’t act any differently than before; I was disappointed, I had expected them to jump off the wall and embrace me. All I could do was continue holding the earpiece to my scalp, for Agata to continue pumping. There was a jar of plum jam left over from my last visit, viscid because the cap hadn’t been put back on properly. We ate it from the jar with our fingers, the earpiece increasingly sticky as we passed it between us.

  “Faster! Move it faster!” I screamed, Mr. Magnolia disappearing as quickly as he appeared, his image not fully formed, his head oddly squished and wobbly.