The kitchen wasn’t important: an icebox, a filthy stove covered in pots filled with murky water in which everything was boiled, a stockpile of tinned red sauce, tinned duck, veal and pork, spaghetti in plastic packages, condensed milk, bottles of red wine vinegar, an old canvas sack full of yellow bread rolls, and a few mousetraps that hadn’t been cleaned in years. The most important room in her restaurant was the archive, a former pantry filled with drawers and boxes in which she kept her patrons’ paraphernalia. Stained napkins, photographs, broken teeth (she served her yellow bread rolls stale to encourage this), spectacles, hats, bowties, umbrellas, fingernails, earrings and other jewels. She kept a watchful eye, and underneath her dress on a long chain, a tiny pair of scissors she used to cut bits of their hair so slyly they never noticed. She also had a red leather journal for keeping track of who came when, what they ordered, and who they talked to. As she strolled around her restaurant during its busiest hours, kissing cheeks and upsetting plates with her brocaded body, her little hands were busy grabbing, pulling, picking up little treasures. Her prize possession was a mummified finger belonging to a painter who had committed suicide2 and the emerald engagement ring of an opera singer. She sold the odd bit to a Brazilian or Japanese collector to keep herself in comfort, but nurtured the grand ambition of donating her collection to the state, or a museum, and being immortalized as a patron of the arts. Along with her objects, she kept a rotation of serving staff who were all in one way or another, by her own judgement, beautiful, grotesque, or exotic. One month she only employed dwarves and the next, only persons over six feet tall. When the sconce was hung in her restaurant, she only had women with facial disfigurements serving. She paid them horribly and pinched them.
Earwigs and cockroaches lived in the glass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling of her restaurant and mice chewed on the bread rolls before painters and critics did. The sconce did not mind such creatures and so he was happy, and in the restaurant he was reunited with the smell of his beloved rosemary, which was sprinkled in abundance on everything to hide rancidity.
A woman who hated fish came into the restaurant one night, not many weeks after the sconce arrived. She wore a black tuxedo and a hat shaped like a golden snail. She was accompanied by a young slim man with a drawn-on unibrow3 who wore enormous amounts of perfume to try and drown out any sea smells in their vicinity.
The woman hated fish because her father had drowned in a shipwreck on its way to a far-off metropolis. She had nightmares about her father’s body being eaten by fish and had spent a fortune on opiates, therapists, and comforting luxuries to rid herself of it. She was an art critic. No artists had painted the sea, fish, whales, boats, oysters, or even glasses of water since her career had begun. Anastasia followed this rule: there were no signs of marine life, no seafood, no sailors in the restaurant. Talk of sea voyages was strictly forbidden.
When her food came, the critic said, “I did not order fish, I ordered pork chops with red sauce as I always do, and yet I smell fish. Did someone sneak fish into this dish?” She examined her pork chops then got out of her chair and sniffed around under tablecloths, by the tortoise painting, sniffed the other customers, their diseased genitals and legs, their cigarettes, and their meals, sniffed the disfigured faces of the waitresses, the toilets, and the carpets, until her nose landed on the sconce.
She demanded the sconce be taken off the wall.
“It stinks of the ocean, of fish, I feel seasick just looking at it.”
Anastasia hurriedly threw the sconce out and gave everyone a complimentary glass of red wine vinegar to calm their noses.
One of the waitresses took pity on the sconce and took him home along with her leftovers. She was very squat with a blonde bob and large red warts all over her face, which she covered with make-up when not working at Anastasia’s restaurant. She lived above a shoe shop and had pictures all over her walls of a sad woman with a scar on her face and a little baby that looked like a sick old man.
She kissed the pictures of the scarred woman in the morning when she got home from work, and before bedtime. During the daytime, the sconce observed the pictures of the woman with the scarred face, which were covered in greasy lip prints, and enjoyed the scent of new shoes from the shop below.
The sconce could tell when the waitress started a job at a different restaurant: her smell went from red sauce and rats to clams and tobacco. Besides her leftovers, all she ate was cabbage, tea, and little sausages from a fancy looking tin.4
The waitress didn’t see or talk to anyone. She picked at her warts, washed her clothes in a pot on the stove, and listened to the radio. One night, she took the sconce off the wall, put candles in each of his cups, but rather than hanging him up again and lighting the candles, she brought him to bed, kissing his little face. The sconce enjoyed the sensation, and only wished that her mouth tasted like rosemary instead of clams and sausage. She took off her nightie, and tried out each candle, the sconce’s face leaving an imprint on her thigh. The woman was a virgin and the candles were bloody when she pulled them out. She took them out of the sconce’s bowls, and washed them in the bathroom before putting them back again.
The sconce continued to live in her bed. Sometimes mice and cockroaches crawled over him when the waitress wasn’t there. One day, her breath stopped smelling like clams and she stopped leaving the apartment. She held the sconce to her breast. People knocked on her door and she didn’t answer.
She left in the night, leaving all the pictures of the sad woman but one. She tried to fit the sconce into her purse but there wasn’t room for two and she took the picture of the sad woman with scars instead.
Everything left in the apartment was thrown out, including the sconce. I don’t know what will happen to it—it was found by an old man riding slowly around the city past midnight on a giant tricycle.5
1This actually once happened in the city of—, in the year 19—. A boy ate so many tinned sardines, greedily with his hands instead of a fork, that one morning he woke up to discover his fingers had turned into sardines desperately gasping for water. He could feel their tiny hearts throbbing like wounds. He plunged both hands into his nightstand jug of water. He had to keep his sardine-fingers in a bucket of water to keep them alive. A doctor designed two glass mittens for the child but failed to take into account the need not just for water, but for oxygen, and the fish died. Their corpses were removed before they rotted, leaving the boy with fingerless hands. For the rest of his life he kept the fish bones of his fingers in an old cigar box in the bottom of his wardrobe with a note requesting the fish bones be buried with him when he died. As an old man, he would often go into grocery stores, look at sardines in their fancy tins and quietly weep, like a mourner visiting the grave of their beloved.
2In the restaurant, the young painter, who was from Moldova, got into an argument with a bald Russian sculptor who cut off the painter’s forefinger with a butter knife. It was a finger on the painter’s left hand, the hand he painted with, and as it was pocketed by Anastasia before it could be found and sewn back on, he went back to his studio in despair, a hanky wrapped around the stump, and said to himself, “Without the forefinger of my left hand, I might as well be without my—” and castrated himself. He bled to death from the wound. The whereabouts of his — was the obsession of Anastasia. It was rumored to be hidden in an abstract bronze sculpture of a goat made by the Russian sculptor.
3Without make-up, he had barely visible blonde eyebrows but painted unibrows were very fashionable that season, and were called, for some strange reason, “Doll’s Fingers.” They were painted with either black, green, or red make-up. The Doll’s Fingers were, the next season, replaced with “Doll’s Moles,” a painted dot above each eye rather than an eyebrow.
4There once was a woman who opened a tin of the same sausage brand to find a finger with the nail still on it. “It can’t be. It just looks like a finger, my eyes are deceptive, such a distinguished trusted brand would not allow fingers in their t
ins instead of sausages,” she said. She ate the finger as if it were a sausage and choked on the bone and died.
5The old man is missing one of his thumbs. When he was a child, he stuck his hand in the bathtub where his parents were keeping two large carp to eat for Christmas dinner. After getting stitches on the stump of his thumb, the boy’s mother said she wouldn’t cook the carp, they should be killed and buried. The father didn’t want to waste them. When he sliced open their bellies, he removed their guts and the boy’s mother had them buried in the family grave plot as she couldn’t bear to throw chewed up bits of her son into the garbage. They ate the carp for Christmas dinner and the mother wept. The boy, for the rest of his life, could not eat fish without thinking about what those fish had eaten when alive…
EDWARD, DO NOT PAMPER THE DEAD
Bernadette worked in a variety shop, which had been a great appeal to Edward when he first met her. She worked in close proximity to cigarettes, chocolate bars and magazines with color photographs, tinned cakes and green gumballs. Edward worked in an envelope-importing warehouse, as a clerk. Once, for Bernadette, he had stuck a small envelope in a larger envelope, on and on till he had used every kind of envelope he could find—it resembled a parcel. It would take a long time for Bernadette to open them all but he had forgotten to put a message inside the smallest envelope: the cleverness of his idea had excited him too much. When she got to the tiniest envelope, he grabbed it before she could open it, then asked her to move in with him. He had been thinking about it for a while, how comfortable it would be, how she would perhaps bring many goodies home from work.
On the day Bernadette was meant to move into the apartment Edward shared with his parents, Edward did not go home after work, but went to the movies to see Pinocchio, checking that it was accompanied by a piano instead of an organ, an instrument he hated. Original film sounds had gone missing somehow. He and Bernadette had seen Dumbo together. The film had been accompanied by an organ. The organ at the theater was covered in bright paintings of birds, musical notes, and fairy-tale characters, garish like a circus caravan or a chocolate box.
Edward thought the sound an organ made was like thin, wrinkly hands covered in fake, colorful jewels. They shared a box of multi-colored, chalky candies Bernadette paid for, though she could have brought something more tasty from the store where she worked.
Edward’s parents had sold all of their furniture to pay for his education. There were rectangular shadows all across the walls and floors where things used to be. It suited Edward remarkably fine, he hated furniture, and the thought of moving it. He had a recurring dream in which a large chest of drawers chased him down an endless staircase. With all the furniture gone the fear of his parents asking him to move it was gone too. Bernadette said she was bringing all the furniture from her mother’s house, as her mother had recently died.
Bernadette lived in a shop front with her mother. The windows had red and green curtains, and were crowded with swan figurines. In the front garden, plastic flowers were shoved in the soil, they were very dirty and faded. In the center was a painted concrete figurine of a duck wearing a sailor suit. There was a bit of sign left above the windows, it said PARSNIPS, MILK, making it easy for Edward to find his way there. The house next door scared Edward: the windowpanes were painted black and there was a chicken’s foot nailed above the door.
Bernadette had two thin gold rings on her fingers. Edward did not know where they came from, nor did he add to them. Trinket jewels: they seemed a thing women were born with, even poor women.
Bernadette’s mother had been the same shape as Bernadette, with a large bottom and a long neck, as if her body were a heavy pink gown hanging off her neck, or like an important civic building with a tall clock tower. She also had the same hair color: a dark, rich red. She smelled sickly sweet. She would serve them minced crab, ungarnished, on tea saucers. There was only the one room in the house, and a bathroom. The room still had a long countertop and lots of shelves, left over from when it was a store, but the shelves were all empty except for some very thin red books and a tin with winged cupids and the word “Sugar” on it. Bernadette and her mother slept on two pink velvet couches and cooked on a hotplate. How two such voluminous women could sleep comfortably on such hard, small couches and sustain their hunger with one hotplate, Edward did not know. It was better to sleep on no furniture at all, on the floor.
In the bathroom, there was a large box labeled RED ROSE POWDER HAIR DYE, and a block of soap the color of butter. For wiping, there were strips of newspaper, cut evenly as if with scissors instead of ripped, as Edward’s family did. He noticed all the strips were from ladies’ newspapers. That must be what they read then, thought Edward. He cleaned himself with a strip advertising jelly molds after emptying his bowels. The toilet wouldn’t flush everything away, so he left it as it was.
When he arrived home after Pinocchio, Bernadette had moved in. He did not know how the furniture was moved in: he did not ask. His parents and Bernadette sat at the new, flimsy table Bernadette had brought, and ate tea, herrings, and gherkins for dinner. Edward’s parents looked like crumpled balls of newspaper and cloth.
Bernadette’s two couches seemed even smaller and dirtier in his apartment, like two inedible prawns spat out by a disdainful and filthy mouth.
Edward was surprised to find, in the bedroom he now shared with Bernadette, that a large brass bedstead had replaced the pile of wool blankets and newspapers he had formerly slept on. The bed was covered with a bedspread made, he saw, with the green and red curtains from the room Bernadette had shared with her mother. He half expected to find the porcelain swans swimming about between them.
Bernadette wore flannel pajamas to bed. He had imagined her owning long, high-collared nightgowns. Her legs looked like those of an elephant in the flannel trousers. The next day he bought her a long and garish green nightgown with a lacy, bib-type thing on the front, it was half see-through and the material made a sound when a hand was run across it. She wore it obediently. He took the flannel pajamas for himself, tying them across his narrow waist with a bit of string. They were quite warm and comfortable.
When Edward’s parents died, he and Bernadette were able to keep it quiet for five months that they were a couple living in a three-bedroom apartment, before the neighborhood council assigned them two more people to live with.
Horace was twenty-two, but looked much older on account of his thick moustache, stomach, and ill-fitting brown suits, plus the wart on his cheek with a hair growing from it that he never shaved, and a lack of rosy youthfulness in his jowls. There was always some bit of savory sauce on his face, always a bit of his white underpants sticking through his open fly, always a fecal smell about his person. Whatever he did, he made enough money to be able to buy fried mutton, and newspapers.
The Child played piano in the cinema. She didn’t really know how to play the piano; she knew how to play two songs, and couldn’t read music. The songs she knew were “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” and “Animal Crackers in My Soup.” She could get by playing those two songs for hundreds of movies. She wore a black suit to work. Her hair was frizzy blonde. All the Child brought for her room was a rickety ironing board, on which she slept with a scraggly patchwork quilt made of dull colors, and a hand-tinted postcard of Rudolph Valentino, so that he had red lips, very pink skin and a green suit. She stuck it above the ironing board.
Horace brought a poster of a cartoon sardine with very long eyelashes wearing a clam-shell brassiere and a short skirt, lounging by the seaside. He had wanted to put it in the bathroom, but Bernadette did not allow it. He put it up in his room. Across his window, instead of a curtain, he taped a black and white picture of children riding on a carousel, torn badly from a newspaper. He spent most of his money on the newspapers, and bought them all, so that there were stacks and stacks in his room, but he would not let the others use them for toilet wiping, in case he wanted to reread them. Above his bed there were rows of dried boogers stuck
to the wall.
Bernadette bought more things for her and Edward’s room. A picture of an Arthur Rackham fairy on the wall. A small dark wood wardrobe, in which Edward made Bernadette keep her mirror. Also inside were suits for Edward, five dresses belonging to Bernadette, a hat box full of underthings and socks, and an extra pair of shoes—Mary Janes with quite a tall heel.
Behind all the clothes, wrapped in newspaper, was a portrait of Bernadette done in charcoal by an old school friend of Edward’s. Edward couldn’t remember much of that friend, except that he wore a beige suit with a loose blue bowtie, that his hair was long, and that he had taken a train to live somewhere else. He sent them a postcard once. The light blue ink on the back was too damaged and lightened from traveling for them to discern what it said, and the postcard was later lost.
On top of the wardrobe was a cardboard box with hearts on it full of needles, buttons, metal thimbles, a Chinese pin cushion, thread, whatnot, and a wad of cash and coins, Bernadette’s savings. The box was from Bernadette’s work, it had once held red-foil-covered chocolate hearts.
“There were none for us to have, of course,” Edward often said, lifting the box to his nose to smell the remnants of chocolate. Beside the chocolate box was something that disturbed Edward greatly: a sewing machine catalog. Some of the machines were circled in blue ink. Bernadette’s plan was to save up for a sewing machine so she could work from home and have a child. They couldn’t afford a child on Edward’s salary alone. Bernadette said her friend Margaret sewed men’s trousers and had three children now. Edward had never met Margaret, it seemed a surprise that Bernadette should have other acquaintances besides himself, he felt like Margaret was made up.
Slipped inside the catalog was a list of names on a scrap of pink envelope:
The Doll’s Alphabet Page 9