Violet's Fingers Ch. 01

Foreword

This, first chapter is narrated by the doll, Klavdiya.

I would be glad, if you read, to hear your comments, this has been long in the writing, but fun.

Fialochka's Fingers is the faithful record of Suda's time in the presence of Violet. The manuscript was completed by the spring of 1884 in the village of Volovyy Mist, in a fine, clear hand by her son, Parnassius. Pim for short, Suda named him after the butterfly, grey with splashes of vivid orange; it reminded her of Violet blowing to revive the lingering coals in the ashes of their fire.

Parnassius was brought up by his mother, alone in a remote hanging valley with little contact from the outside world. A lover of words from the beginning, Suda taught him all she could of French, Russian and Latin. But it was nothing compared to the education his secret friend gave him. She had held Goya's palette for him as he covered the walls of the Quinta del Sordo, shared a bunk with Baudelaire on the ship that Aupick had set him upon for Calcutta, soaking in his twisty tricks of wordplay. At least that's what she said; she would also recite the poems Lensky wrote for Tatiana by the stream in summer.

'You were Miss Larena?' Pim had asked.

'No. Lensky; but the real one. I survived the duel,' she explained, pressing his fingers over the scar on her shoulder to feel the bullet trapped under.

Whoever taught him, imaginary or not, Pim was brilliant. He wrote with a poetic flair, as though he was experiencing the illicit pleasures of a first love. But he needed my help untangling and elucidating his mother's story, for it was at the same time a nightmare, almost breaking our dear boy by taking him places neither of us could have guessed.

Despite Parnassius having not met a soul other than his mother, he knew she was without comparison. He did explore other boyish interests; Nietzsche's Überfrau and Maistre's réversibilité, his particular obsession was trying to capture in words the way his mother moved. But how much was it tainted by how he felt watching her move? The boy was enthralled by everything she did, from her spins and flying leaps across the stream below their stone hut to the tiny gestures of her hands as she explained how to skin a goat. But behind her delicate lightness, he perceived a physical power and precision that frightened him.

The goats were unconcerned. With Amalthea, Capella Segunda and the others safely in their enclosure, Pim would lean back against his writing rock above their hut. Paper and pen were ready in hand, but he found himself unable to take his eyes off her as she danced effortlessly through the summer sumerki until the first stars appeared. Pim would tilt his head in anticipation of glimpsing through her cracks, the ball of fire he knew was barely contained.

I knew well the depth of shadowy tales laced through our Suda, a tangling together of the parts she played on stage with the masked horrors of her reality. Of this Pim knew nothing, until at the age of nine our inquisitive boy found the drawings and journals Suda was unable to hide in their tiny hut. They transfixed him, like peeking into her dreams. In furtive moments when his mother was out, he would feast his eyes over the fragments of text, the drawings, beautiful and terrifying. They were her works, pieces of the puzzle of her past, the clues leading to the world outside their valley. He ached with questions she would not answer, until finally, at thirteen, he could no longer resist and set out on his own to follow the trail of his mother's story.

The beginning of the trail was simple, it led directly to the town of Volovyy Mist, where he was warmly welcomed by his uncle, Greco Miran. He was made comfortable, told nothing about his mother, only that everything he needed to know could be found. Uncle Greco then left for sabbatical in Berlin, allowing Pim the use of his rooms while he was away.

Eager to begin, all Pim had was his mother's name, Dilli Novikova. Expecting a difficult search, he was surprised to find almost everyone he asked knew of her. She had been a ballerina, adored by thousands. But then, thinking about how she danced, it should not have been a surprise.

Pim allowed himself to bask in the pride of his mother's fame, but he also sensed there had been a fall from grace. People spoke of her in whispers and looked away in shame. A shiver passed through our boy; something unspeakable had happened.

It was a newfound friend, Sýla, who revealed that his mother had been incarcerated in an asylum for the criminally insane. Sensing Pim's shock, she could not resist adding that the ballerina had escaped a death sentence only by her fame. Sýla had to reach out and press her finger up under his chin to shut his gaping mouth.

Pim then asked her the question burning in his mind and Sýla, a tease, would only tell him that the details of her crime had been excised from the court documents so as not to damage public morality. Pim surprised Sýla by bursting into tears. He pushed her away when she tried to wipe his cheeks with her handkerchief.

He adored his mother. Back in his rooms, he took a swig of his uncle's vodka, unable to accept she could do anything so terrible. Then Parnassius set himself to the task of writing Dilli Novikova's story and so redeeming her. He did not consider the possibility that they were entirely different things.

At this early stage in Pim's search, I worried about how he would cope when he found out what she had done. Would he consider her beyond redemption and abandon her, or create a fiction to mask the truth?

Luckily for us, dear reader, his love for Suda was strong. And lucky I have been here, guiding Parnassius' writing of his mother's memoir, for without me, this entire creation would have been, in Suda's words, not a fantasme érotique, but an erreur fantastique.

Who am I? I am Klavdiya, Sudarynya's companion and occasional narrator. For clarity, I have placed my name over the pieces I have added, while Pim's much larger part is under his mother's name. He wrote in her voice.

Overseeing this story's gestation, I leaned against the window looking out over the town park. I proudly eased this beautiful birth, bringing forth what Suda had kept hidden, a difficult but fitting editorial task for this old friend, soaked in her carnage.

Pim, a flâner, left me behind to go down to the old bookbinders and take a round of the park before meeting Sýla. Yes, after he had turned back to let her dry his tears the silly boy had asked her name and if he might see her again.

My omniscience followed into the world outside the windowpane. Skimming over the oaks, I clipped the slate rooftops, passing teasingly close to the worn stone horns of our pair of horhulʹyi, (gargoyles) before coming to rest against the shutters of our study window.

Below, a bead necklace hung over the edge. Dropped by careless fingers, the night's snow had melted away from its path across the ledge. Its presence weighed heavily; I am sensitive to incongruities. Look closer. What seem shiny black beads warming the snow are actually the telsons of a species of scorpion from beyond the Caucuses. I remember Suda watching the seductress threading the stingers onto the only fibre she had - woven strands of her hair. Twisting a delicate knot in her fingers, she lifted it over her head, pulling her hair through and laying the lure over her pale collarbones. Her blood ran with venom, her nerves stripped bare. We dolls don't need such intoxicants; our madness is innate.

The fingers and hair belonged to Violet. Suda was obsessed with this woman who spouted fanciful fictions of her past, a chameleon of accents and languages. Violet was Fialka, Fialochka to her lovers. Her real name was unknown.

Inside those shutters, back against the glass, my porcelain legs mirrored the necklace dangling over the ledge outside, my loose joints held not with her dark hair, but rusty wire.

Returning to his pool of lamplight, Pim was still quivering with the touch of Sýla's fingers in his hand. He dipped his mother's scratchy steel nib and crossed out the line at the beginning of the manuscript: 'My mother has few principles', a placeholder from the first line of Onegin: 'My uncle has most honest principles.'

His left hand held a sketch by Sudarynya in her thin ink, a cascade of Cyrillic twisting out of control down a tree trunk. Drawn from below, a foreshortened torso hangs by her arms. Bare to the waist, her shoulder muscles stood out, her armpits sunk deep as she strained to lift herself. Pim imagined the pen in his mother's fingers, the lines quick and loose to show movement, wondering whether his thoughts were mirroring hers when she was making the drawing. He copied the text into the right margin, dipped his pen, considered how to treat the verse, then wrote the translation on the left, leaving the rhymes only partial:

"Vinka dangles from her branch above me

stretched to tease in the dappled sunlight.

She releases to drop beside me,

Smouldering, muscled shoulders smooth

Mnemosyne still shrouding from my sight

the scars from the lashing she took for me."

'Vinka' was the informal diminutive Suda used when she was grumpy with Violet. The verse Pim placed here, at the beginning of the story; it framed the event that defined their relationship, even though he did not yet understand how.

Of course, Suda's writings made up only part of Pim's puzzle. Although they often shared the same sheets of paper, her drawings inhabited an entirely different space. Firing his thrill of discovery, they held the illuminating clues, from quick, loose sketches layered to fill every corner of the tattered pages, to the hours of detail drawn into a pale lace iris and a curl of hair. Then there were the insane phantasies...

I awakened from my daydream to find him crouched over the worn carpet below me, searching for an explanation as to why a journal entry failed to agree with a sketch of the same event. He had her drawings spread over his writing desk and across the floor, rearranging their taxonomies in the hope a hidden clue would be revealed.

Pim held a sketch of Violet up to the light. It was clearly not drawn from life, but neither could he accept it was from his mother's imagination. Silly boy! Girls have wild imaginations. I have watched them for over a century. But Pim was not comfortable with his mother's intimacies. To calm himself, he looked across to me, just a familiar old doll, far removed from the phantasies of the flesh.

I laughed to myself; if only he knew what lay behind these green glass eyes, the part I played in the writing of this tale. I may be a doll, but do not imagine me a marionette for the manipulation of others. I am the ringmaster in this circus, part biographer, memoirist; I made sure Pim not only uncovered all the scenes in their play but tilted them such that their colours caught the light, revealing for the reader the beauty woven through every fibre of their story.

Enough from your kintsugi doll. Here, I present Parnassius' rendering of his mother's voice into the present; this is the story of Dilli Novikova's time with Violet, her 'Überfrau.'