Mother Doll: A Novel by Katya Apekina

Author:Katya Apekina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

Petrograd was buzzing. I could feel it! It had probably been buzzing for a long time, but I was only then becoming aware of it.

I told my aunt and uncle that school wasn’t for me anymore, and they didn’t protest. My schooling had seemed to them like another one of my mother’s pretensions. What good could it possibly do me? Olga stayed enrolled, pulling things out of the school piece by piece to destroy it from within, but I was happy to be free of it.

Hanna and I would tell my aunt Gittel that we were going down to the hospital to read to the soldiers, which we were allowed to do as long as we promised never to touch their bandages. We would ride the tram to get there and strangers would engage us in conversation because Hanna had a sweet and open face. I’d been so cloistered—to be out in the world without the filter of Fräulein Agata’s irony was an entirely new experience. The suffering and hunger of the people around us was not an abstract idea. We were coming into direct contact with the things my teacher had preached about in vague terms.

At the hospital, we would wander the rows of convalescents. It was boys like my brother who’d been sent off to get mutilated in a pointless war. They would groan and reach for us. Hanna would stop and hold their hands. I’d step back and look down at the book I brought, look away from their bandaged stumps and protruding rib cages. Unlike me, Hanna was never squeamish. The men at the hospital sensed her kindness. They’d call after her like caged bears.

And then, on the way home, we’d inevitably get roped into helping some other unfortunates. We would follow strangers on wild-goose chases. Somebody would hand us a poorly printed pamphlet and we would end up in the basement of a bakery for a meeting, or filling out some illiterate factory worker’s governmental forms in triplicate, or bringing some poor woman and her sick child to a doctor. To say that I wanted to be useful is maybe overstating it. But I was curious. I’d been shoved in a box for so many years, and now I was learning to straighten up, and I surprised myself the taller and taller I got. Of course, what I wanted most of all was to again feel the thrill I’d felt delivering the bullets to the man in prison. Engaging with all these people, with their squalor and their unmet needs, it was something Hanna was better at. I could play the part for a few afternoons, but then it would get tedious. A whole life could be spent that way.

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