months the doctor gave us. My eyes sting and I can’t hold back the tears, not now. “Alya...”
She stops, but holds her arms out, just like she does during the doll walk. When she looks at me the smile is still on her face. “When I am being her, yes. She does not have cancer. I want to be her.”
I stare at her, feeling like my eyeballs might actually pop out of their sockets, and I notice things I didn’t before. The smile on her face never wavers, as if someone painted it there. Her eyes don’t blink. Her arms are still outstretched in front of her, but she shows no signs of tiring, as if she could hold them like this all day. When I touch her face, her skin is cold and... and hard, not quite hard plastic-unyielding but almost. It is slick and smooth and there isn’t much give to it.
“But you’re not a doll. You’re a little girl,” I say and it sounds like I am pleading with her. Perhaps I am, because if she is somehow becoming a doll, a cold mannequin with unblinking eyes, I will not have the six months I was promised with her. I’m a communist, I’m not supposed to believe in God, but who else could’ve answered my little girl’s prayer for no pain? Or maybe it’s even simpler than that, maybe my mind has gone from months of fear and grief.
The painted smile never wavers. “I. Do. Not. Want. To. Hurt. Anymore,” she replies and every word she says sounds measured out by a metronome. Her arms drop and her body folds at the hips--a clockwork doll with its spring unwound. When her knuckles hit the floor, it sounds like hard plastic hitting wood.
My hands shake as I search for a pulse in her neck. I do not expect to find it, but I do--a steady, slow throb against my fingertips. “Alya?” She does not reply, but remains folded in half at the hips, her knuckles touching the floor. I turn to run for the door, to the communal telephone in the corridor that always smells of old potatoes and winter boots that need airing. But what would I tell the ambulance dispatcher? What can they do?
Instead, like a sleepwalker, I shuffle to the tape recorder, find Alya’s piece and queue it. The blizzard rattles the windowpane, splattering snow on the glass. In the downstairs apartment a cat screeches. The music plays, then the key-in-lock sequence comes on.
For what feels like two eternities, nothing happens. Then Alya’s small body jerks, her hands twitch and... she unfolds to her full height. The painted smile, the unblinking blue eyes, the healthy pink color in the cheeks that no longer need rouge. “How do you feel, Alya?”
“I do not hurt anymore,” she says in that measured voice. The key sequence finishes and the Swan Lake piece is now playing. “I am hungry.”
“What would you like?”
“Tea and white bread with sweetened condensed milk on it.”
When the tea is ready, we sit down at the kitchen table across from each other. The bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling drizzles us with butter-yellow light. I have to squint sometimes when I am reading a recipe in the kitchen, because the light is poor. Yet the three onions we put in glasses of water have sprouted healthy green shoots--the only fresh vegetables we will see until summer.
We dip our spoons in the blue-and-white can of sweetened condensed milk and then spread it like honey on thick slices of bread. The smell of black tea drifts on the steam that rises from our metal mugs. Alya eats three slices of bread, each slathered with thick milk. She hasn’t eaten this much food in one sitting in months. I can’t seem to stop staring at her and have to remind myself to swallow past the numbness in my throat. I wonder why Alya seems to be enjoying her early morning snack so much, because to me the milk on my slice of bread tastes only slightly better than the slurry made of toothpowder.
The music stops as Alya reaches for the fourth slice of bread. She freezes in place, her right hand suspended over the table. I get up and rewind the tape. It can’t be this simple, can it? She can’t just come back to life, pick up the slice of bread and spread milk on it simply because I turned her music back on. Yet when the muted cymbals start clashing again, she jerks and takes that fourth slice, her fingers moving with slight stiffness, as if afflicted with premature arthritis.
We talk until grey morning begins to seep into the kitchen through the white curtains like pale smoke. The first bus from the regional capital arrives to the stop across the street. Dishes clank in the apartment next to ours and the smell of eggs fried in lard drifts into our kitchen.
As the last notes of the Swan Lake clang, I guide Alya to my bed where I curl around her rigid little body that feels so plastic-hard and plastic-cold in my arms. I do not know if she tricked the cancer out of her life by becoming a clockwork doll. Nor do I know if I will still have her in six months. But as I drift off to sleep, curled around my only child, I think that being a mother of a doll is better than being the mother of the memory of a little girl that once called me Mama.
Other titles by Larisa Walk:
"A handful of earth" - historical fantasy novel
"Servant to the seasons" - dark fantasy short story
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