The Doll’s Alphabet

by Camilla Grudova

  I dug up a bunch of tubers and made them into pancakes for our trip. There was a small lot behind the building, I grew tubers there, when we first moved in it had been overgrown with sinister ferns. I put the pancakes, a bar of rabbit candy and some jumpers in a bag. I made Nicholas wear the scarf.

  We never made it to the other art supplies store because we discovered a zoo on the way. We stopped in one of the stations along the tracks to eat lunch, there was even a tea machine which served tea in tiny plastic cups. On one of the walls was a map of the neighborhood, and it said ZOO HERE with an arrow. There was no one tending the zoo, the ticket booth was empty, so we just walked in. Nicholas was shaking.

  All the cages were empty, of course. Leaves, puddles, and eroded concrete, but each cage had a sign with an illustration of the animal that had once lived there, and information on what they had liked to eat and where they were from. That’s the rhinoceros then, he said, the elephant, the zebra. He made sketches from the illustrations. As I couldn’t draw, I wrote Zebra in my notebook three times for emphasis, as that was the animal I liked most.

  Nicholas was too tired and excited from the zoo for us to continue on our way to the art supply store.

  We went back to the zoo the next day, Nicholas couldn’t rest until we did. He frantically sketched all sorts of beasts and winged creatures. All the illustrations were in black and white, we didn’t know what colors to paint them, Nicholas decided to paint them pink and brown like humans. The rhinoceros horn obsessed him. Was it like the rat’s skull, or a fingernail?

  He decided to grow one of his fingernails long to know how to paint it, thinking a rhinoceros horn was probably like some sort of thick fingernail. It looked grotesque, and he let it get very dirty. I was relieved when he cut it off. He wanted to add it to his collection on the mantelpiece, but I convinced him that it might disgust or offend the man in the grey top hat, so he put it on the bathroom windowsill.

  I was looking at it from the bathtub, I think it had started to curl from the condensation, when something came out of me, a pink lump. It was flat on the ends, like a tuber with the tips sliced off. It had no mouth, eyes, or hands, but it was alive: it was struggling in the water. I grabbed it and put it on my stomach. When I stood up, it squirmed so much I almost dropped it. It was soft, boneless. I wrapped it in a towel, like I had seen babies wrapped, and held it. There wasn’t any blood.

  Nicholas was painting. I crouched in the dining room holding the thing. I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was still, and strangely hardened. I hadn’t figured out how to feed it or anything. Perhaps I couldn’t.

  The lamp I didn’t like was swinging to and fro.

  I didn’t want Nicholas to paint the thing, or even to see it. I wrapped it in a green scarf I didn’t like to wear and put it in a porcelain jar that said “Mustard” on it and had always been empty. Nicholas was asleep comfortably in bed, a smear of white paint on his face.

  I felt agitated, however, with it sitting in the pantry with all our food. I didn’t want to bury it in the yard in case I later mistook it for a tuber. The next time we were getting ready to go to the zoo, I stuffed it in a small beaded purse I had, it was all withered and darkened. At the zoo, I wandered off as Nicholas was sketching a wolf.

  I unwrapped the thing, and threw it between the bars of the zebra cage. It landed just on the peripheries of a puddle. I wished it were more hidden, but perhaps it would roll away, or leaves would cover it eventually.

  When I returned to Nicholas, he had stopped drawing, and was crouched over, coughing. What if Nicholas expired and dried up like the thing that had come out of me? Then what would I do? I helped him up and we returned home, though he hadn’t finished his drawing. He had only done the wolf’s head, floating in the space of the paper like an abandoned hat.

  THE SAD TALE OF THE SCONCE

  The ship swayed back and forth on the sea like a cross between a cradle and a rowdy tavern. The wooden mermaid on its tip was a welcoming sign: gin and hard work for those with feet, death to those with tails.

  Among the ship’s catch that afternoon were a magnificent orange octopus, silver and green fish, black eels, seaweed, glass bottles, small turtles, and chunks of red coral and jellyfish. The catch was a multitude of colors and textures, like the thigh of an old debauched prince squished into a stocking, the bulbous head of the octopus a blister ripe with pus.

  How delicious it would be roasted, the sailors cried, but the captain stopped them: a zoo in Berlin or Moscow would buy the octopus and they would all be rich. In the zoo, it would wear a bowtie and make love to women pretending to be mermaids, the captain told his crew, redirecting their appetites. They made eel stew for dinner, and put the octopus in a bucket filled with water, with a lid on top.

  The fishes disappeared during the night as the sailors, one by one, stole them away to their bunk beds, intoxicated enough that the small, wet creatures were adequate substitutes for women. By morning, scales covered their sheets, and the octopus was gone. After removing itself from the bucket and sliding across the deck, it quickly copulated with the mermaid figurehead on the tip of the ship before diving back into the sea.

  The seeds of the octopus were very slowly saturated into the wooden mermaid.

  She spent many more years at sea before the ship was taken apart, the wood of its belly turned into houses and bonfires, and the more precious parts, including the mermaid, donated to a museum where she was confined to the darkness of the storage rooms.

  The sconce grew out of his mother very slowly, the way a tree grows roots, branches, and gnarls, and dropped from her tail like a chestnut onto the shelf. As objects are all born with purposes, this one was born to be a sconce. The sconce had a cherub face surrounded by writhing wooden limbs which ended in two little bowls, too small for eggs, but the perfect fit for candles, which the sconce longed for with mysterious anticipation, to rid himself of the feeling of being empty-handed.

  They lived in cool darkness, and sometimes light. His mother, in her silent wooden way, told him about the sea, and fishes, and sailors, and the octopus with orange arms who was his father. Once, they were taken out of the storage rooms for an exhibition on marine culture. The museum staff could find no trace of the sconce in the catalogs, and saw it as an administrative misstep. He was some bit of old ship, a decorative pustule. His mother was very much admired, her paint retouched before she went on view. Everything was so splendid, the sconce almost imagined himself as having been part of the same boat as his mother, an interior adornment illuminating the ship’s intestines.

  Many viewers remarked that they could almost smell the sea, the exhibition was so vivid. The smell became stronger as the sconce aged: it was his inheritance from his father. Museum staff scoured the room looking for dead insects and rodents, and secretly accused each other of using the room for romantic meetings and oily snacks of olives and sardines. For a while there was no one. The lights were never turned on. The sconce nibbled on his memories of the exhibition, and his mother told him again and again in her silent wooden way about ships, octopuses, and oceans. They had almost forgotten about the rest of the museum above and around them when an emaciated member of the staff unlocked the door, sniffed, his nostrils flaring, and grabbed the little sconce. The man licked the sconce’s arms, and rubbed a piece of hard black bread across the sconce’s face, as if it were butter and not wood, before stuffing the bread into his mouth. He was about to put the sconce into a pigskin briefcase he brought with him and—

  Boom boom boom!

  The top of the museum was blown away, destroyed like a cake eaten by hungry children. Dusty light and scraps of oil paintings poured into the storage room and the staff member was buried underneath an iron anchor. A trail of soldiers dressed in grey marched in, looking for food (someone thought they had smelled salt and fish), jewels, anything. One soldier kissed the mermaid, leaving a rancid spot of spittle glistening on her lips. He had a child at home and the little face of the sconce made him sen
timental, so he put it and the mermaid into his rucksack, a little make-believe wife and child to fondle until the war ended. All the soldiers in their makeshift camp admired her—they were starved for women—and a woman made of wood with a fish’s tail would do.

  The soldiers came from a land of equality and sharing, and so the mermaid was passed around. Her wooden breasts were sucked and whittled down by the crude teeth and tongues of various soldiers, until there was nothing left but splinters and flakes of pink paint. They ate her lips, her hair, her shoulders, and, using a knife, gave her the anatomy a mermaid does not have, two rather small green legs, that were meant to be a woman’s but resembled a frog’s. They stuck wet rags between them, and it did fine for some.

  There was one soldier who became fixated on the sconce, still in fine condition compared to his mother. “A nice sweet face, those cheeks, and tiny lips,” he said, removing it from the other soldier’s rucksack one night, and emptying his desires onto the sconce’s face. He wiped the sconce off with a red hanky, and placed him back among the other soldier’s things. He continued to secretly borrow the sconce until the war was over.

  The sconce was brought home from the war and for the first time, he became an actual sconce. The soldier nailed him to the wall, and his wife stuck two dripping candles on his writhing wooden limbs. The candles were more painful than the sconce had imagined them to be, and left black marks on his cheeks.

  There was a child in the house, the child for whom the sconce was a substitute during the war. He was a little cruel thing and would take the candles out of their cups and hold the flame directly against the sconce’s eyes.

  The child complained that the sconce gave him nightmares. In truth, he was jealous, and did not want another child’s face in the house, even a wooden one. His temper grew as his mother’s stomach rose, and the former soldier took the sconce away so that he could have a good night’s sleep.

  He brought the sconce to a small stone house with a high ceiling and a tower. The house belonged to a fat man with a grey beard who wore black dresses. The walls of the house were covered in faces like his own, wooden faces, but also faces of gold, silver, stone, and wax. There were candles everywhere, plants and strange ornate metal bottles that released nice smelling smoke. The sconce’s scent became unnoticeable among the many smells of the stone house, wax, smoke, and rosemary (which the sconce did not know by name but came to love).

  People came in, now and then, to sing unevenly, to kiss each other and to eat little meals—a sip of something, a small piece of bread, an onion. Often, the soldier’s family came, and seemed to be larger each time.

  One day the large man in a black dress died and another large man in a black dress came to live in the same house. The new man had a blonde beard instead of a grey one, and when no one was visiting, slept on the wooden guest chairs and drank by himself. Once, he ate a crinkled burnt fish while he drank, and left the bones on the floor.

  The sconce told the fish bones how his father had come from the sea, and he had heard about fishes, but the fish bones didn’t say anything in return and were carried away by mice. Some of the stone and wooden faces were carried away too, not by mice but by the large man. They didn’t return. The man grew larger and redder and the sconce wondered if he ate them the way he had eaten that fish.

  The time came for the sconce to be taken away. He was put in a sack and taken to a shop filled with old things. The bearded man left with a little bag of coins and the sconce was put on a shelf with a clown, a tin dog, and a vase.

  The shop was teeming with unclean life: moths, spiders, rats, worms, fleas, who gobbled each other and things in the shop which were covered in tasty layers of use: a crumb here, a tea leaf in the bottom of an old kettle, a mutton juice stain on a doll’s dress which still tasted of something when chewed, a chocolate forgotten in a black lacquered box.

  The clown was made of cloth and the sconce saw him nibbled on by rats until there was almost nothing left, save for his porcelain hands which the sconce dreamed of placing in his candle-holes to use as his own.

  The sconce himself was visited by wood-worms, who tunneled deep inside him. He could not move his mouth or his cheeks but in his soul giggled at the sensation. Their consumption of him felt tender.

  The owner of the shop was covered in fleas. He looked like a very small lamb, with glasses. He reminded the sconce of a painting from the museum, with two little babies and a lamb in it, surrounded by stars. One evening, the little lamb man put on a beret and a little red rucksack and left forever. The store had been sold to a new owner, a little fat man who smelled like perfume and liked to eat tinned oysters with a special little golden fork.

  He cleaned the store with a feather duster and mop. He polished all the surfaces. He put traps everywhere for the rodents, and poison for the worms and fleas. After the worms disappeared, the sconce could feel air pass through the hollows where they had lived, and he felt lonely. The store was brightly lit and smelled like lavender and oysters. The fat little man cleaned the sconce with orange oil to hide his scent, which the fat little man rather guiltily blamed on his own oyster breath.

  During a busy holiday season, a man wearing a white suit with a fresh red soup stain on it and a woman wearing a hat covered in glass strawberries came in and bought the sconce along with an enameled copper teapot and an amber brooch with an ugly bug trapped inside. The sconce was put in a trunk with postcards of fancy buildings and seashores, a paper parasol, the teapot, and brooch, and taken first on a train, then a boat, the first boat he had ever been on—but of course he didn’t know that because he was locked in the dark.

  When they arrived at their destination he was hung on a wall covered in striped pink and gold paper in a dark and narrow house he couldn’t picture from the outside. He was given fresh candles every few days and became very well acquainted with a clock across from him who only knew one word, and a painting of a young woman wearing a yellow dress.

  The husband, who no longer wore white suits, but grey ones, often paused in the hall in front of the sconce, flaring his nose and twitching his moustache: “The maid, I shall have to talk to the maid, eating sardines and not cleaning her hands again. I can smell traces of sardines on every surface she touches. Her fingers might as well be sardines.”1

  When his wife passed by, she touched the seat of her skirt and then pressed her fingers to her nose, saying something odd, such as, “It isn’t that time of the month yet,” or, “I thought it had passed.” She would then look fondly at the sconce, which had the face of a little boy.

  He stayed with the husband and wife for many years, and outstayed many maids who were accused of eating too many sardines. When the couple died the sconce was left to one of the maids, who loved it loyally and polished it with caster oil every week until she died. Her own child, a grown man with spider veins covering his nose, sold the sconce to an antique store, as the little face frightened him. He threw the money from the sale into a river. The sconce was displayed on a wall covered in paintings of ladies, oranges, and chickens. There were many dolls in the shop with chubby faces like his, and a model of a ship in a glass bottle which reminded him of his mother. The sconce stayed in the shop for a very long time and was marked down again and again. No one knew how old he was, or where he came from.

  He was eventually sold to a woman who wore a brocade dress every day with a suit jacket on top, and a gigantic plastic yellow rose in her hair.

  She called herself Anastasia, and owned a restaurant. The restaurant was covered in decorative bric-a-brac, and the food was miserable and covered with red sauce, but very popular among bohemian and artistic sorts, including a famous eight-foot-tall painter who carried a small tortoise around in his pocket and had, to the pride of the restaurant owner, given her a painting of the tortoise eating a plum. Anastasia felt she had an obligation to keep the eyes of her patrons stimulated. She continually added new things to her restaurant, searching through antique shops, the sales bins of departm
ent stores, and garbage bins. She carried a large basket with her everywhere, and a little box of tools including a hammer and a large pair of garden shears. She bought, stole, cut, and stripped bits and bobs of the city as if it were her orchard: a forgotten public statue, a cupid on a gravestone rarely visited, a doorknocker shaped like a walrus, curtains in open windows, beautiful plants on windowsills, a bit of arabesque plaster off the façade of a building, the red accordion of a blind street musician, children’s dolls and bears grabbed out of their hands as they napped on the metro, cats and birds which she would have taxidermied by a gentleman who gave her a discount as she brought him more animals than she could use herself.

  In her restaurant there were peacock feathers, plastic lilies, and flaking mannequin arms in vases, tin toys, devil and maiden marionettes that jiggled when the restaurant became busy, a plaster Venus, a large glass sculpture of a bulldog, a bronze Roman athlete, dented trumpets, a broken imitation Baroque harpsichord painted with pastoral scenes in which many rats lived, clocks, paper lanterns, beads, stuffed birds, cats, small dogs, and white mice, parasols, lamps, music boxes and old jars of sausages, beets and pickles that would be lethal if opened. Hanging from the ceiling was a gigantic Harlequin made out of papier-mâché and cloth, and which, if shaken, would sprinkle those below with fleas, centipedes, maggots, and ants. Everything was splattered with layers of red sauce and grease, which gave the fabrics, including the tablecloths and puppet clothes, a translucent quality. Anastasia’s objects dutifully appeared in paintings, drawings, poems, films, and while she gave, she also took from her customers, quietly, like a mouse.