The Clockwork Doll
Page 1
The clockwork doll
Larisa Walk
Copyright 2011 Larisa Walk
Cover photo by Cristallo
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
Like many others, I am here in search of a lie. I need this home-spun show to convince me that the circus is about joy, that some day I will get out of Siberia, that the cancer won’t take my daughter away from me in just six months.
In the twilight of the audience section the air reeks of Red Moscow, the cheap cologne on the elderly woman in the seat next to mine. Its abrasive smell makes me think of the doctor’s voice when he told me the bad news. “You’re not high enough in the Party, Valentina,” he said, his unapologetic eyes bloodshot from celebrating the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution the night before. “We can’t send your daughter to Moscow for treatment.”
I clutch the scuffed armrests of my theater chair and breathe through the mouth. The Red Moscow prickles the tip of my tongue. The reel-to-reel tape recorder wheezes through the last amplified notes of a bootlegged Scorpions’ song.
On the stage with the floorboards in need of polishing, a thirteen-year-old kid named Kiril is finishing his “Equilibrium on Spools” number. His blonde hair looks almost white in the glare of the overhead lighting. He wobbles, airplanes his arms for balance and manages to stay on the rolling spool. The tape recorder squeaks to a halt and Kiril jumps off the spool with outstretched arms. He bows and the audience bursts into applause. In a little mining town like ours, where entertainment consists of getting drunk or going to the movies to this very theater, a show would have to be really bad to not get at least some clapping. And these Circus Studio kids all come from our town. Even if Kiril crashed on his scrawny butt we would have clapped.
My heart bumps against my ribs and I wriggle on the lumpy cushion of my chair. The Circus Studio’s director steps out from behind the dark blue curtain. His shoulder length black hair glints with bluish highlights. The sequins on his green peasant style shirt wink. “Dear comrades,” he bellows into the microphone. “And now ‘The Clockwork Doll’ number by Alevtina Podgorkina.”
The director runs backstage and the tape recorder begins to play a piece from Swan Lake, rock style, with cymbals clashing. I grip the armrests harder. As the audience claps and the cymbals bang out the notes that punch holes in my eardrums, the director carries my daughter to the center of the stage. I pray--something a Soviet citizen is not supposed to do--pray that she gets through her number, that her fatigue won’t make her stumble, that somehow the cancer was misdiagnosed. And I curse myself for letting her talk me into allowing her this one last performance.
She is eight, but looks two years younger. The skirt of her white dress that I over-starched again looks lampshade stiff. Her thin legs protrude from puffy white knickers. The rouge on her cheeks looks like fever spots. The sight of her makes me think of a snowdrop, its fragile petals trembling from the cold breath of suddenly returned winter.
The director sets her down and she drops into a split, pretending to be a doll not too steady on her feet. He makes a comical face at the audience, an exaggerated look of frustration with crossed eyes and eyebrows raised to the hairline. He lifts her up, tries to get her to stand, but she drops into another split. I know this is part of the routine, but worry if maybe this is too much for her and maybe she can’t stand on her feet for real. He lifts her up again and she does stand, but does her face look paler? I tell myself to stop it, just stop it.
Out of the director’s back pocket comes an oversized key, painted in gold color. Accompanied by the recorded sound of a key turning in a lock, he pretends to wind her and then leaves the stage. She looks even smaller, alone on the stage now. Her arms rise in jerky little movements of a wind-up doll. She begins her toe-heel walk to the banging of the cymbals from the tape recorder. This is easy so far, but there are backbends and more splits and body folds yet to come, and I curse myself again for letting her do it.
“This maybe the last time, Mama,” she said to me as she listened to a scratchy copy of her number’s theme music on our tape recorder and studied the moves of her wind-up toy soldier across our kitchen table. “I want to be on stage just one more time.” She lifted her face to me. Her pleading blue eyes with the smudges of illness under them looked too big for her thin face. I said yes. What else could I say?
She finishes her toe-heel walk and now comes the backbend. Inside the fur-lined suede boots my toes clench. She folds her body backwards into something that resembles a little round bridge I once saw in an illustration of a Japanese garden. “Please don’t fall, please don’t fall, please,” I chant under my breath. The cymbals bang. The tired tape recorder squeals. I hold my breath and... she rises from the bend, graceful as a willow branch.
A big smile lights up her face and even from here I can see--what?--a healthy pink glow around the rouge? And her smile gets more radiant. I haven’t seen her smile like that since before the diagnosis.
She looks steady, too, no signs of fatigue. I hold my breath through most of the rest of her performance, not daring to let myself believe in what I see. Words like “misdiagnosed” and “remission” buzz in and out of my thoughts. I tell myself that I will not let them take root, will not let myself embrace false hopes. But hope flutters just at the edges of my awareness, a thin thread of tinsel toyed with by a gale force wind.
I meet her in the lobby after the show is over. “How are you doing, Alya? Tired?”
“No, Mama, just a little stiff,” she replies. Stiffness is something she has complained about since her diagnosis. Yet her face still has that healthy glow around the rouge.
“Go get dressed, Little Doll,” I tell her, because the crowd is filing out of the theater, letting the blizzard carry puffs of snow into the lobby on gusts of freezing air. The snow melts into dirty puddles on the yellowed and cracked linoleum by the wall.
I walk home mostly backwards, shielding her from the worst of the wind chill and the blowing snow. The Party Headquarters, the Meat and Vegetables Store, the bath house seem to float by me on the white tendrils of the wind.
In our kitchen-and-one-room apartment, I help her out of her clothes and into her flannel nightgown with faded pink butterflies. Her face looks pale again. Fatigue painted little yellow shadows by her temples. When I try to tuck her left arm into a sleeve, her joint creaks. I freeze. “Did that hurt?”
She frowns, as if trying to decide how to answer. Her right index finger is tracing the outline of a peach-colored rose on the wallpaper. “Um, a pinch, but mostly it’s just stiff,” she says.
“Do you want your pain pill?”
She shakes her head. “Tired. Need to sleep.” She yawns and I tuck her under an orange comforter that peeks out of the square opening in the center of its white cover. As I kiss her slightly warm forehead, all I can think is, The cancer is spreading to her joints. But I say nothing. No need to frighten her.
Sometime in the middle of the night a noise wakes me, a rhythmic thump-thump of something on the floorboards and then on the rug. Hot water gurgles in the radiator under the window. I blink my eyes open and there, in a puddle of moonlight between our beds, Alya is doing her toe-heel walk, her arms rising and falling in jerky little movements. The round glowing face of the clock on top of our television set reads eighteen minutes past one.
Prickly heat races up the back of my scalp. The last traces of sleep fall from me in little shards with thin, gleaming edges. “Why are you practicing in the middle of the night, Alya?” I try to prop my head on one arm to see her better and have to shift my elbow, because of the lump in the mattress under it.
Alya
says nothing, just continues her toe-heel walk that looks stiffer than it did on the stage earlier. “Alya? You need your rest, Little Doll.” I rise from the bed and turn on the desk lamp. My jaw doesn’t actually drop, but it feels like it should have. The sickly pallor on her face has vanished and so have the yellowish shadows of fatigue by her temples. Instead, there is a rosy glow on her cheeks and she is smiling.
“Alya?”
When she finally answers me, her voice has the slight quality of a monotone. “I feel good. When I am being her.”
“You feel good when you’re doing your wind-up doll routine?” I think, Metastasis in the brain, and a chill snakes its way up my arms. Maybe this is good, at least it’s better than pain. Or maybe I’ll lose her before the six