​I think baba is in my matryoshka doll

By ​Luscha Makortoff

My Russian nesting doll starts speaking to me with my baba’s voice two days after she dies. When the doll first talks, I’m on the cold floor of baba’s cellar, a B.C science 9 textbook balanced on my lap and shelves of canned vegetables dating back to the ‘70s rising high above me.
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“You’re ignoring everyone,” the doll says in her low, lightly accented voice.

I turn to where I placed it beside me. It’s a pretty thing, made of smooth, wooden curves and chipped red paint. On its head, a circle of flowers surrounds a woman’s rosy face. If I squint, it has baba’s eyes. If I squint harder, its eyes blink at me.

I grab the doll and pull it into its two halves to reveal the four smaller dolls inside. They smell like wood and are painted with red flowers and smiling faces—one is missing its head; another has teeth marks on it. None of the pieces have tongues or mouths to talk with and I put them back together. The doll is warm in my hands.

I’ve never heard this doll speak before. For most of my childhood, it stayed in baba’s living room, sat on a glass shelf in a glass case lined with dust and other dolls. She had all sorts of nesting dolls, or “Matryoshkas,” she’d always remind me with a pinch on my cheek. Kitschy ones with Disney characters on them, ones swirling with imitations of famous paintings, and ones like mine—women encased in coffins decorated with folk art. She gave one to all her grandchildren before she died. My parents told me yesterday that our family is going to sell her house. What will happen to the matryoshkas? I’d thought but hadn’t asked because it sounded silly.

“Go upstairs,” the matryoshka says. “The cellar is for pickles, not girls.”

Laughter drifts down through the cellar’s hatch. I don’t want to be around laughing people right now. I place the doll back on the ground facing away from me.

“Turning me around won’t make me go away.” I push it farther across the floor with my shoe. The doll grumbles and I look back at my textbook without processing any of the words on the page until the doll says,

“You should eat something. I smell my fruit tarts. I didn’t make them, so they’ll not be so good, but they’re there.”

All I smell is damp and mould and something I think is death that has sunk into the half rotten bones of this house. I don’t say anything, and the doll goes quiet. The skeleton diagram in my textbook shakes its head at me. I tear the page out and stuff it beside a jar of tomatoes marked 1991.

​I leave the doll on the ground when I leave the cellar. 

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That night, I sleep on the shag carpet in one of the guest bedrooms while my parents snore from the bed. I drag my fingers through the carpet where the threads are stiff from a wine stain made before I was born. My uncle told me the story a few years ago, laughing as baba held her face in her hands. She’d gotten drunk at a wedding and after coming home, went into the wrong room, spilled her drink, and fell asleep on the floor. When we sell her house, its new owners will surely replace the carpet and wonder what clumsy person made the stain.

I get up from the floor and shuffle out of the bedroom, down the hallway, through the kitchen and living room. The house is heavy with baba—pictures on the fridge, psalms pinned to every wall, angel figurines everywhere I look. I slip out the backdoor, where even in the dormant, October garden, baba is in the rosebushes running along the house and the chicken wire spread high around the vegetable patch and the crab apples rotting under the trees. I find dill pushing through the chicken wire and rub it between my hands until they smell like hers.

A wind chime hanging on the back door jingles in the breeze. The sound reminds me of summer days when she would scold my cousins and I for jumping through her sprinklers. I never really absorbed what she said during such scoldings, I just remember the low thrum of her voice. The doll in the cellar has the same one. The doll in the cellar doesn’t have strong hands that smell like dill. I bet the doll in the cellar has her laugh.

I snap the sprig of dill from the plant and walk back into the house and down into the cellar until I stand over the doll. I pick it up, turning it in my hands so that its eyes look up at me.

“About time,” the matryoshka says. “It’s freezing in here.”

When I bring the matryoshka into the guest bedroom and place it beside the wine stain, it barks out a laugh. It’s baba’s laugh.

“Oh, so you saved me from the cold just to taunt me with my mistake?”
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I snatch the matryoshka from the carpet and tuck it against my chest. I bring the sprig of dill to my nose to inhale its earthy scent. The doll chuckles and says goodnight and for a moment, baba is beside me in the dark.

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The matryoshka keeps speaking to me over the next few days, telling me to study more, to brush my hair, to do the dishes before any of my cousins volunteer to. Around us, my family plans the funeral and begins to pack up baba’s belongings. A new angel figurine has been packed away each time I enter the living room. My aunt took her stack of recipe books from their designated corner on the kitchen counter. Someone stripped the baby pink wallpaper from her bedroom and found mould underneath. The doll doesn’t tell me to offer to help pack baba’s life away and I’m glad.

No one else hears the matryoshka’s chatter. It only talks to me, except for once when my uncle serves lunch, and the doll loudly critiques the loaf of bread he places on the table. My face heats up and the matryoshka laughs while my family looks at me, confused. I put the doll in my room for the rest of the day. Before I go to sleep, it tells me, “Why would you leave me on the floor? You know it’s too hard for me. It makes my arthritis flare up.”

I snort out a laugh before I can stop myself.

“I got you there, huh?”

I just tuck the doll against my chest.

Two days later when I get ready for baba’s funeral, the matryoshka asks from the bathroom counter, “Can I come with you?” I started carrying it around the house with me when my dad packed up baba’s glass cabinet of matryoshkas and put them in a box in the garage because I worried it would be misplaced.

“Why?” It’s the first time I’ve responded to the doll.

“So, your tongue didn’t fall out, huh?”

I hold up my hair straightener like a sword. “I could burn it off if that’s what you want.”

“You’re so funny,” it deadpans. “I just want to see it.”

“Your own funeral? That’s morbid.”

“The dead usually are.”

I bring the matryoshka to the funeral with me. My family got used to me carrying it around and they don’t say anything when they spot it tucked into the front of my skirt. I’m prepared to play the dead grandma card if anyone objects.

The funeral is held in a large hall. The casket sits at the front. Family members sitting on either side of it are split by gender and facing the rest of the attendees. There are prayers and later singing in Russian. The choir produces a heavy wave of sound, constant like bagpipes, which has tears leaking from my eyes even though I don’t know what’s being sung. The doll listens quietly.

I look at the scuffs on my shoes throughout the ceremony, so my eyes don’t stray to the open casket and roses looming at the front of the room. I don’t look up, even when my family passes by to say our final goodbyes, not until the matryoshka says, “Look child.” I look. “See? I’m not so scary when I’m not chasing you with a wooden spoon.” She only did that once. I laughed the entire time she chased me and let her catch me even though I knew she would blow raspberries onto my cheek.

The body in the coffin is ashen and sunk in around its cheekbones and eyes. The body isn’t scary because it’s not her. The thing before me couldn’t have possibly chased me around a garden. It bares more resemblance to that husk of a woman I said goodbye to in a hospital who couldn’t say goodbye back. Still, I can’t tear my eyes away from it until they shut the casket. Later, when they finally lower the casket in the grave and I begin to cry again, the doll (baba?) sings back one of the hymns we just heard.

“I wish I understood what you’re singing,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I never learned.”

“I wish I didn’t die before I could teach you.”

We throw dirt into the grave, and I almost throw the matryoshka in as well, but it feels too much like saying goodbye.

That afternoon as I look at her grave, baba (the doll?) asks, “What did you think?”

“Of what? Your funeral? The singing was nice.”

“No. The borscht they served at the hall after.”

“It wasn’t as good as yours.”

​She laughs, so bright and clear and alive that I smile for the first time since she died. It’s the last time she speaks to me.

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After she stops talking to me, the silence that swept over my life from when she got sick to those two days after she died, crashes in again. I keep talking to her, hoping that she will respond and worrying that it was something I did that made her go silent. I tell her about my classes, I learn hymns to sing to her, I recite borscht recipes that aren’t hers. She doesn’t respond to any of it.

On the day my family goes back to her house to clean out all the boxes of her belongings from the garage, I bring the matryoshka with me. I parade the matryoshka around in my pocket to see the bare walls and empty rooms. The garden is no longer a garden, even half-dead as it looked a week ago; it’s now just a yard with no chicken wire fence or windchime over the back door or someone to care for the rosebushes. The doll stays silent.

My dad brings the box of matryoshka dolls—the dull ones not snatched up by family members—to a thrift store and on the ride there, I pick up each doll. I whisper hello baba are you there to each of them and avoid my dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror. When I bring the box into the thrift store, I almost put my matryoshka in as well, but it feels too much like saying goodbye. And I have one last idea.

I take the matryoshka to baba’s grave the next day because that was where she last spoke to me. I leave school in the afternoon and walk an hour to the cemetery, clutching her in my hand the whole way. The cemetery is dense with fog, and it takes me awhile to find the fresh mound of her grave and sit by the dying flowers. I hold the matryoshka in my lap. In the gray gloom, I cannot see baba’s eyes peering back at me.

“Why didn’t you say goodbye?” I ask.

​She is quiet. I shake the matryoshka with a force that grits my teeth and rattles the dolls inside. It says nothing. Tendrils of fog creep up my body. The doll is cold in my hands.

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Luscha Makortoff is a joint English-History major finishing her last year at Simon Fraser University. She has experience in technical and marketing writing, but her true passions are reading too many books at once, sharing historical facts with anyone who will listen, and writing sad, fantastical stories.