Anna Winter tore off her patient’s head and lay it on the table. Tugging at the straw-like hair, she turned the head around. One eye stared back at her, blue and unblinking. Fishing some surgical pliers from the pocket of her starched laboratory coat, she pulled the lid of the other eye until it flipped open to reveal an empty crater. She ran her fingers over the pouty baby-face, fractured nose and rosebud mouth. Even though its body was battered and broken, Anna could see how much her patient had been loved. Cradling the cracked porcelain head, she dunked it into a tub of water. The remaining eye looked old, made of hand-blown glass. Luckily, it was still intact. Eyes like these would be difficult to replace.
‘Her name’s Betty.’
The client, her narrow lips pursed, stood on the other side of the table, like a student in the first row of an anatomy dissection. She stared owlishly at her beloved doll as Anna gently cleaned out the eye socket with a cotton swab. The raw-faced woman’s life story began to ooze out.
‘I’ve had her since I was four.’ Her voice turned squeaky. ‘That’s sixty years.’
Anna glanced up.
‘She was a gift from my nanna when Mother died.’ A tear trickled down the woman’s cheek. She explained the family dynamics, her dreadful marriage, her return to part-time work in a bakery after the children left home. As Anna listened to the litany of sorrows, she lay the doll’s head back down and used a felt cloth to dry it carefully.
They all ended up telling her their stories; tragedies and joys spilled out into the chalice of her silence. There was the butcher’s teddy bear, who had been left with him in a basket when he was abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage as a newborn. Its smile had worn away over the years and he wanted it repaired. Or the toy soldier with a broken gun, belonging to a high-ranking bank official who carried it around in his briefcase for good luck. And every Friday morning the widow who lived up the street brought in her melancholy Raggedy Ann. Anna always helped lift the doll’s mood by having a cup of tea and some home-baked biscuits with its owner. Tiny doll-souls absorbed everything, observing without seeing. A world of secrets stayed locked inside those eyes.
She reached for a box of glass orbs that rested beside her, each one cupped in its own small silken nest. They ranged in colour from greyish-green to blue and brown. She needed to get the eyes right. If they were disproportionate or had lids that blinked with an overly mechanical click, it made the doll look insensitive.
Choosing a blue eye for Betty that matched almost identically, Anna inserted it carefully into the socket. The customer, clutching her handbag, hovered closer. As the doll doctor slid the eye into place with a pair of forceps, the woman gasped:
‘Don’t hurt her!’
Anna flinched. The doll’s eye suddenly slipped from her hand, clattering onto the floor, as though a flicker of life was ignited and it was trying to escape. The blue orb rolled away with the force of a marble and smashed against a metal shelf. They both watched in horror as it shattered into tiny shards.
Anna was not used to having someone watch her as she worked.
‘Would you please leave?’ she snapped with startling force, ushering the woman away with her free hand.
Betty’s owner wiped a tear from her cheek and cleared her throat.
Anna feigned a smile and tried to soften her tone. ‘If you would kindly come back later this afternoon, it would give me more time to pay closer attention to Betty. As you can see, it’s a very delicate procedure.’
The woman picked up her handbag, straightened the front pleat of her skirt and scurried out of the shop. The bell tinkled as she closed the door behind her. Anna made a point of never asking how the damage to a doll had occurred. Most of the time clients would volunteer the gruesome details themselves, but Betty’s owner, for all her babbling, had omitted the story of the doll’s demise.
The workshop looked like a small amphitheatre, each wall lined with shelves that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. They held a galaxy of broken toys, some with disfigured faces, others suffering from unstrung limbs or missing teeth. The dolls ranged from expensive antique collector’s items to those that merely looked like a dressed-up sock with limbs crudely moulded out of wax. A ceramic squirrel, missing a paw that once played a mandolin, leaned against a red-haired monkey smoking a broken pipe. A giraffe with a bent neck towered over a toy bishop who wore a torn cassock. Some of the dolls were hideous and beyond repair, black mould lining the edges of their pink mouths. Fixing each one involved a large degree of versatility and inventiveness. But repair always went far beyond the mere tinkering with a physical object. A true doll doctor restored the client’s most treasured childhood memories. Discretion was meant to be paramount in Anna’s profession, but this morning her patience had shattered along with the doll’s eye.
People travelled to her from all over the country. Although there was no sign outside the workshop, those who sought her out seemed to somehow find their way instinctively to her door. Men would stand at the counter shuffling from one foot to the other, their cheeks reddening as they pulled moth-eaten toy dogs out from duffel bags. Old women cradled lifelike baby dolls swaddled inside the folds of crocheted blankets, and trembled as they handed them over. Anna had seen it all. How they whispered their goodbyes, planting secret kisses on treasured plastic cheeks and stiff woollen curls before leaving. Some would stay too long, like this morning’s client, stories spilling out onto the long, oak surgical table that was littered with doll flotsam and body parts. Chubby legs and dimpled porcelain arms, splayed out and distorted, looked like they had dropped off some contortionist suspended mid-air. A shelf at the back of the workshop housed dolls that had simply been abandoned, their unfortunate fate sealed as they transitioned from being treasured companions to spare parts. Others, resurrected from the dead, carefully cobbled together from Anna’s mortuary detritus, were reanimated into little human lookalikes.
Anna knew her customers were searching for their childhood, and like a true alchemist she distilled something from nothing to bring back those hidden moments of memory. The fleeting vision of a mother leaning over the bed, holding her palm against a child’s feverish forehead to chase away the bogeyman of the dark, or a myopic uncle peering over the edge of his spectacles, his fingers gripping a chubby cheek in a pincer hold.
Surgery began again. Placing some glue onto the back of another glass eye that had a greyer, steelier hue, she slotted it inside the gaping socket. She gazed at Betty’s two eyes staring back at her and felt a strange joy in their glassy silence. Anna preferred the company of dolls – they asked no questions. Instead, they just waited patiently inside her workshop – eternal brides adorned with yellowed veils, seated next to ambulance drivers ready to tend to the wounded. The debris of doll accessories – a Wunderkammer of broken prams, miniature houses, wigs made from human hair, leather boots and knitted clothing all piled into trays was everything that could ever be needed for a doll’s comfort.
In the far corner of a top shelf sat a homely doll wearing a faded gingham pinafore, white anklet socks and black party shoes. Her name was Lalka, and she watched Anna’s every move. Lalka was a remnant from her own childhood, an ambassador from the world of things and a memory of the dead – a parting gift from Mutti. To the outside world she had always been known as Lali. Anna cherished her first doll the most, even though those that came after were all poetry and precision by comparison.
Anna set her client’s broken doll aside, waiting for the glue to dry. An earless bunny lay on the operating table, next in line for repair. It smiled blandly. Thankfully, this would be a quick job. An ear could be perfectly replaced, reattached where there is nothing important underneath. Eyes, though, demanded time, as Fraulein Schilling from the Puppetarium had taught her all those years ago. They were the essence of a doll, the all-seeing holders of secrets. And always the hardest part to mend.
She was about to pack up and head upstairs when she heard someone knocking at the door.