Mothers & Daughters: Christening Of The Doll

THE CHRISTENING OF THE DOLL

Winter, 1840.

Baba Lena and Dede Andrushka spared nothing to amuse the children, and they always had a lot of toys and dolls. They constantly took them for rides and walks and gave them picture books. Lelya and Vera also met a lot of girls, and some of them even studied with them. One of the girls, Claudia Grechinskaya, became Vera’s close friend. She had many sisters who always gave Vera a ton of dolls made from rags. Vera loved the rag dolls much more than the ones bought in doll shops because she could dress and undress them herself, in their several different dresses.

Rag Doll.[1]

The big house with high stairs and long corridors was the setting for a story about such dolls. Dede Andrushka lived on the lower floor where his office was located. On the very top, there were two bedrooms, one belonging to Aunt Nadya and Aunt Katya, and the other belonging to Baba Lena. Almost no one slept on the middle floor, for that was where all reception rooms were located (a hall, a living room, a sofa room, a piano room, etc.) At night all the rooms on the middle floor were completely dark and empty.

One night Vera returned from Claudia’s quite late and brought with her a tiny doll in a small rocking cradle, swaddled in sheets and covered with a red satin blanket. Near the cradle, in the glass box in which it was placed, were the doll’s linen and dress. The new doll made Vera terribly happy, and she showed it to everyone.

“What’s your doll’s name?” asked Baba Lena.

Vera thought a lot and finally answered. “I don’t know.”

“How did you forget to christen her?” Baba Lena continued, smiling. “You can’t do it without a name. We need to christen her tomorrow. Call me to be your godmother.”

“Good!” Vera replied. “But we need a baptismal font.”

“No, you don’t need a font. You know that it is not good to douse yourself with water. Without a font, we will christen her Cunégonde.”

“Ugh! Cunégonde is a nasty name! Better Lyudmila or Rosa.”

“As you wish,” Baba Lena replied. “Now get some sleep.”

Vera went upstairs to lie down, taking the doll with her, but it took her a long time to fall asleep, as she was still thinking about future christenings without water, and what name to choose? She eventually drifted off to sleep, but suddenly, in the middle of the night, she awoke. Everything was quiet. Lelya was lying next to her, breathing regularly in her sleep, so, too, was Nanny Nastya at the other end of their long and low nursery. She was a wonderful old lady who had nursed the Fadeev children. Out of old memory, she acted as the nurse of the Hahn girls, too. Vera sat up on the bed and looked around. The long, gray fabrics all over the floor and walls seemed to be mysteriously trembling and moving. The night light, placed on the floor, was very hot, and its flame oscillated from side to side. Shadows moved, pulsating in size, growing and shrinking. Vera was just about to lie down again when suddenly remembered the doll.

“How quiet,” she thought. “It would be nice to baptize her now! No one will interfere. Otherwise, during the day they won’t even give you water. Shouldn’t we stand in the corner, near the night light, and celebrate the christening?”

She quietly lowered her legs from the bed.

“No! You can’t do it here. Nanny or Lelya will wake up…and besides, there’s no water! But there is a decanter full of water downstairs in the living room. They gave it to Butterfly when I said goodnight. Should we go downstairs? They would not hear us. It is sort of scary! Well, I am awake now, and I can’t play in these big rooms alone.”

Vera jumped quietly onto the cold floor, put on her shoes, threw on her blouse and scarf, and took the doll.

“And the darkness?” she suddenly remembered. “How can I play in the dark? There’s no light anywhere down there now.”

She looked around and saw a candle stub on the table. She tiptoed over to it and gently picked it up. Silently stepping across the room, she carefully bent down with a sinking heart to light the wick on the flame of the night light. Her heart was beating fast as she glanced sideways at her sleeping nanny. She shuddered, seriously frightened, when the black cap of soot, touched by her cinder, fell from the wick into the night light and crackled. She forced herself to relax and gathered enough strength to move from her stationary position, but she paused many times when making her escape convinced that someone was calling her name. With every creaking step on the stairs, she dared not go further. She heard a strange noise. It was the sound of her blood beating in her ears. She stopped in horror at the percussion of her racing heart, believing it to be something else knocking. She finally reached the last stair and found herself in a long, dark corridor.

“No one will hear me here!” she thought, with emboldened resolve.

She quickly went to the door of the hall and took hold of the heavy copper handle.
The doors slowly opened, and she found herself in a huge, black hall. She felt a cold shiver run down her spine. The light from her candle danced in her trembling hand. Its illumination somehow made the room seem larger and darker as she tried to pass as quickly as possible to the wide-open doors of the living room.

“Ah! What is this?”

She nearly passed out from fright at the threshold of the living room. A small, pale, girl exactly like herself was walking towards her with a trembling candle in her hands. The girl’s eyes widened in horror as she got closer, dropping her candle at the same exact moment as Vera.

“Lord, how stupid I am!”

It was just a reflection in the large mirror opposite the doors of the hall.

As soon as she came to her senses, she picked up her little candle.

“It’s good that it fell on its side,” she thought, “for it surely would have gone out.”

She soon found her prize, the decanter full of water.

“Now just choose a place where you can play until dawn,” she thought.

She settled down in the corner, between the sofa and the stove, under a large chair, between the legs of which was her baptismal hall. She put a cradle and a glass of water there and then took out the doll. Having undressed it, she prepared to soak it in the font. She had once seen the christening of a real child and remembered that the baby’s godmother carried him around the font three times. So she took the doll and sang like a priest and began to move it around the glass with two fingers. “Lord have mercy!” she chanted. Suddenly she thought she heard some movement behind the wall, and then:—

“Hrrrr!”

Someone was snoring in the hallway—or inside the parlor—she could not make it out.

She shrank and hid, forgetting about the christening and singing, and tightly clenched the unfortunate doll in her fist.

“So this is the beast,” she thought. “The same terrible beast that wanted to eat the beauty in the forest, and then married her!” Her heart began to pound again. “What…what if he wants to marry me? Nonsense!” She immediately stopped herself. “After all, I am little. You can’t marry me!” She smiled at her logic. “Oh! But what if they are robbers?”

“Hrrrr!”

The sound from behind the doors was louder than ever. At this point, Vera stopped thinking. Delirious from fear, she threw herself on the floor, crawled under the sofa, and hid her face against the wall. “Lord! Someone is coming!”

The floor creaked.

“Ah! Someone is breathing! Robbers! No…A black beast! How dreadful!”

“The Black Beast.”[2]

Her ears rang with horror, and her eyes became dark, but she still watched all the movements of the black beast with one eye. It came up to the glass into which she threw her poor doll.

“Oh no! He is going to eat her! Wait—no! He just sniffed the glass, sniffed and snorted—and blew out my cinder!” She remained under the sofa, neither alive nor dead, huddled in the darkness and half-expecting the terrible black beast to devour her. She wanted to scream but couldn’t out of fear.

“Who will hear me anyway? Everyone is asleep upstairs, far away.”

She lamented her own stupidity and repented her errors, as the black beast approached her. She felt the heat of its strong breath on her face.

“Ah!” she suddenly screamed. “Please don’t eat me, dear black beast! I will give you everything—anything you want—just please don’t eat me!”

But the beast, not listening to her requests, licked Vera’s face with a long, hot tongue. She leaned helplessly against the wall, preparing herself for her horrible fate, but, instead of biting her and tearing her apart, the black beast sniffed her and licked her cheek. It then yawned and curled up next to her on the floor.

“What kind of animal is this?” she thought, coming to her senses. “Hey! Wait a minute—is that you Zhuchka? Oh, Zhuchka! It is you!”

She felt a wave of relief and a little bit of guilt.

“Zhuchka,” she whispered, standing up.

The dog obediently raised its head, and crawled up to her and licked her hand.

“Zhuchka!” she shouted, terribly happy. “You nearly frightened me to death, you silly wretch!”

She began to hug and kiss Zhuchka right on the face out of sheer joy! The sun was now beginning to rise. Vera crawled out from under the sofa, casually grabbing her soaked doll from the glass (which still remained unbaptized, and without a name) and, without looking back, ran from the living room into the hall. From there she darted into the corridor, onto the stairs, and caught her breath only in her bed. She then covered her head with a blanket because she was shaking all over. She pulled her poor, almost drowned, doll closer to her to try and warm her up. She then fell soundly asleep, as she promised herself to never get up at night again—and not do other such stupid things. In the morning she was very ashamed to get up. Gendarme Ignatius, whose blue uniform she admired on the first evening of their arrival, heard a noise in the living room at dawn and came out of the hallway where he was sleeping with Zhuchka, He saw Vera running along the corridor and told the grownups about this. They told Nanny Nastya, who in turn found a cradle and a box with her doll’s dresses soaked in an overturned glass of water in the living room. Picking them up, along with the stearin cinder, she brought them to Helena Andreevna, and Antonia and told them everything. Helena Andreevna was very scared and angry. Vera would have been disciplined harshly had it not been for Baba Lena, who stood up for her. From that point on, Vera would sleep in Baba Lena’s room. Meanwhile, everyone had learned of Vera’s nightly adventure and laughed at her for a long time. Vera blushed when they called her the “night owl.”[3]

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SOURCES:

[1] Zhelihovskaya, Vera Petrovna. How I Was Little. A. F. Devrien. St. Petersburg, Russia. (1898): 12.

[2] Ibid, 21.

[3] Ibid, 12-24, 41.