Anna was required to carry her travel permit with her at all times. Dated 3 NOV 1943, the national security card screamed at her accusingly – GERMAN. Enemy Alien.
Permit: From date of issue until cancelled or reviewed.
Purpose: to travel to her place of employment at L. J. Retter & Co., Carlton, and to move freely for business and recreational purposes within 15 miles of the G.P.O. Melbourne. And to report once a month to the Police.
Signed by the Aliens Registration Officer.
Their radio had been confiscated, so she had to rely on what she overheard or saw on the front page of Leo’s newspaper. The day’s headlines shouted: BOMBERS SWOOP ON RETREATING GERMANS. Over 150,000 Allied troops had stormed the beaches of Normandy overnight, attacking Nazi Germany. The newspaper reported it as one of the greatest military operations in history, with thousands dying during the attack. She felt like a moth who had managed to escape a giant spider’s web. The grandfather clock cried out the time. It was a massive mahogany antique given to Leo by a customer who had died a lonely death. Oppressive in its precision, on the hour it hammered out a bittersweet reminder of time passing. It had just sounded five o’clock when she heard Leo climbing the stairs from the workshop. Anna was sitting at the kitchen table, eyes half-closed.
Leo had been so kind to her, making sure she always had enough to eat, bringing her bowls of soup and schnitzels with mashed potatoes for lunch. Together they were learning the tricks of the doll trade. The L. J. Retter doll factory was Anna’s centre of gravity now, keeping her tethered to life. Leo had been issued with a permit from the Department of War Organisation of Industry to order machinery for the mass production of his dolls. Now he had found a prototype, he could go ahead and place the order.
Leo sat opposite, lifting the newspaper from the table.
‘Have you seen the headlines? It looks like the war may be over soon. There’s finally some hope.’
Anna nodded distractedly.
‘I’ve changed my mind.’ Anna said.
He peered over the top of the page. ‘About what?’
‘About what we’re doing to Lalka.’
He folded the newspaper and placed it on the chair beside him.
She cradled her face in her palms and suddenly started sobbing uncontrollably.
‘Anna, what’s wrong?’
‘We’re ruining her,’ she bawled.
‘Oh, no, darling. I didn’t mean to upset you. I only wanted to honour you and Lalka, and the memory of your dear mutti.’ He got up and made his way over to her, gently placing his hands on her shoulders.
‘I know that, but Lalka has been my rock since I was a young girl.’ Anna calmed down a little as Leo wiped her tears with his handkerchief. ‘You might be able to copy her face,’ she said, ‘but I don’t want you to use her name.’
‘Okay, that isn’t a problem at all. Let’s call our new doll Lorraine instead, with Lalka as our inspiration. Believe me, every doll in Australia will be jealous of her, and all the little girls will be lucky enough to have their very own Lalka – or Lorraine – to love. She has been such a wonderful friend to you. Every girl deserves to have such a loyal companion.’
Within a few weeks dozens of Lorraines were lined up in the workshop, each one wearing an identical bride’s dress with silver trimming on the sleeves. Lorraine would be every little girl’s dream, manifest as a doll. She could act out the imagined union over and over as she waited for her groom to arrive.
Anna preferred to work alone. For one thing, there were no clients hovering over her. Leo sat in his cramped office at the back of the warehouse, surrounded by files and doll samples. They had an unspoken understanding – he was available if she had any questions, but would never dream of intruding on her workspace without asking. Except on Fridays. That was the day he spent dusting and cleaning, not trusting anyone else with their precious dolls. When they first started the company Leo had given Anna a pair of gloves, which she promptly set aside. She wasn’t sure if he had meant the gift to protect the dolls from getting dirty, or to save Anna’s hands, all red and peeling. But she never wore them; gloves formed a barrier between her and the doll.
Carefully opening a box that held a new doll, Anna felt as though she were a small child again, unscathed and hopeful. But as an adult her eye was keener, and she saw her own demons reflected in the doll’s eyes. Dolls could bend in any direction, their pliable, impossible bodies performing skilled acrobatics like circus performers. Designed to mimic all the distortions of anatomy and the false promise of eternal life, they made a mockery of the delicate tightrope of vulnerability human beings balanced upon.
The intricacy of artificial eyelashes, matched by the coiffure of repurposed human hair, the careful carving of wooden teeth outlined with pink rosebud lips that never uttered a word – the workshop was a panoply of lifelike dolls who lived in the bardo of human creation and assembly. They existed in gelatinous time, a glimpse into the past, and the legacy of childhood. Late at night, inside an opera of silence, Anna often felt Lalka was simply masquerading as a doll, alive among them all. The oozing of glue trailing along the joins between her limbs and torso turned to blood in the uncertain boundary of dreams.
‘You know something?’ Leo asked, stopping in front of Anna as she sat tinkering with a tiny broken shoe. ‘I’m angry too.’
He stood facing her, this garden gnome of a man, a permanent smile imprinted on his rotund face. He scrunched a rag up into a ball, torn from one of his old shirts. Nothing went to waste at L. J. Retter & Co. He had spent the past hour carefully dusting the shelves in the workshop.
‘The world doesn’t owe us anything, Anna.’
She looked at the back of his hands, dotted with tiny brown islands, blue veins bulging under wrinkled skin. She watched him moving along the rows of dolls, taking his time as he polished the face of each one. He opened the cabinet where those he had built himself were kept. Some were perfect, others only models, the rough prototypes for what was to become a line of dolls loved by children around Australia. Yvonne, Janette and Lorraine, his brides, had long veils stitched onto their curly hair. Each of them wore a uniquely designed lace frock and clutched a tiny bouquet of flowers in one hand. The other hand reached out, inviting an invisible groom to lead them to the altar.
‘Is part of you still in love with him?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘You know who I am talking about.’
‘No, Leo. Of course not. Why would you even think that after everything I have told you? How could I ever love someone who accused me of being a Nazi sympathiser?’
True. Alter had been cruel to treat her the way he had, jumping to the very worst of conclusions and not even trying to piece together the mystery behind the notes inside the dolls.
‘Sometimes people just toss dolls into the rubbish, but doll-makers like us know they can be repaired,’ Leo said. ‘It’s the marriages of parts that are more difficult to fix, those dolls brought in stitched together with ill-fitted heads and unmatched limbs hidden under elaborate costumes. Strange compositions tucked away under a veneer of gentility.’
He moved towards the workbench and stood beside her. She looked up.
‘Aren’t we all a bit like that, Anna?’ He stroked her cheek. ‘Patchwork people, thrown together in a jumble of ancestry. Who knows what our true origins are? For all you know, your mother might have been Jewish – perhaps that’s what your papa was trying to hide in order to protect you? And maybe way back, someone in my own family was a Jew-hater. What does it matter now, as long as we don’t carry the sediment of hatred in our blood? Surely there is enough of that in this world?’ He blushed and cleared his throat. ‘Well, I’d better leave you alone now.’
‘Thank you, my dearest.’ Anna said as he headed towards the door. ‘For all you have done.’
Some of the dolls had sagged into themselves over time, almost toppling over. Anna saw them all as if for the first time, the lonely years they marked off, their owners who had once cradled them with loving arms now grown or gone. She picked up an Yvonne doll and felt a sudden urge to throw her across the room, smashing her papier-mâché skull, enraged by the eternal waiting for Mr Right. Then she would turn on Janette and Lorraine, smashing each one against the back of her chair before hurling them over to where Yvonne lay. On top of this carnage of brides Anna would pile beach girls in frilly bathing suits and angelic babies wearing pretty organdie outfits with pink trim. She imagined herself standing amid the wreckage, surrounded by a sea of shattered dolls.
Her heart racing, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out a book of Spinoza’s poetry that Alter had given her. He had been translating it into Yiddish at the time they met. She opened its pages and a photo fell out – the moment of their first meeting captured in a faded image. She never wanted to look at it again, Alter’s face filled with adventure and promise. She had lied to Leo just now. The Yiddish poet was still there in everything she did; in the air around her, even as she rushed past the kosher butcher on Lygon Street, remembering how he would dry-retch at the sight or smell of meat. She tore up the photo and threw the pieces in the bin. Some dried-out native flowers he had once picked for her in Birdum fell out of another page, crumbling into dust.
Alter had said he loved her. Cried that he longed for them to be together forever, could never have written the kind of poetry he had until she came along. And even though the dream had been poisoned, yes, somewhere inside she still stupidly loved him. The words that had roared past his lips when he showed her the notes he had found in her dolls haunted her: I would never have picked you for a Nazi. Even when she had heard them, she had still somehow believed he would stay with her. He was a man who would be prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of his art, and she had been his most powerful muse.
Anna stared at the row of perfect Lorraine brides, who would spend both winter and summer hibernating, year after year, waiting to know the body of a man, benign smiles pressed on their faces like prophecies of what was to come. But behind their uniform visage, she saw her very own Lalka. In her mind Anna slowly began to sweep up the carnage of dolls she had just pretended to destroy. The Lorraines watched her as she stared back at them indignantly. Lalka, stripped of her uniqueness, her history forgotten, was now moulded into a model Australian girl.