Karmann

Doll
###The soldier jeered at the old woman, “he's dead Baba. There's nothing left, get in line.” She'd stood watching as they'd stripped her husband of everything, his life, his clothes, his teeth, and his medals, his precious precious medals he'd won for playing the piano so beautifully. She had nothing left of him, not even a photograph. Too tired to be scared any more, too close to dead already to fear it, she spoke back in a wasted cracking voice, “Please, can I keep something? A medal?”### “A medal! Baba you're crazy,” he laughed, “move on.” She started toward the line, her swollen feet moving in a painful shuffle, head down when he suddenly changed his mind. “Baba,” he called, “take your medal,” and he threw the bright striped ribbon from which a shiny gold medal embossed with a piano used to swing. It floated through the air and landed a few feet in front of her. Painfully she bent down and picked it up before making her way to the line, clutching the ribbon to her chest.
###It was early afternoon but the gloom lay thick in the bunkhouse when she'd finally made her way to her new home. She stood inside the door letting her eyes adjust before trying to make her way in the dark. If I die here she thought as she looked around I will already know what hell looks like.
### “There's an empty bed over here,” the soft voice of a child called to her. It seemed to be coming from the back of the bunkhouse and she made her way toward it. Her feet kicked up the dirt floor as she scuffed along and the dust in her nose smelled of death. Finally she reached the place where the voice had come from and amazingly there was life in the form of a young boy. He was huddled on a mattress in the corner beneath a window, his long arms and legs so thin he looked more like spider than a child. The skin on his face was stretched tight and when he smiled, trying to be welcoming she could see the teeth all the way to the back of his mouth and the effect was that of a grinning skull. She took this all in without shock. Too many times she'd seen children like this. Tightly clutched to his ribcage was a small white doll and the sight of this ugly doll fashioned from scraps finally brought the tears to her eyes that had not come to her once yet in this ordeal. It was too much that their beautiful joyful children were reduced to this - skeletons playing with scraps.
###“May I see your doll?” she asked, tears sliding into the crevices around her eyes.
###“Sure. He's a soldier and he's planning to save us all and take us home,” he pronounced proudly as he handed her the doll. She took the doll and examined it admiringly. Its eyes were stitched on to a misshapen head with brown thread probably plucked from another prisoner's sleeve, it's mouth a bright red slash and from its head sprouted four or five threads pretending to be hair.
### “He's very handsome. Has he already won many battles?”
### “Oh, yes, he's a decorated general.”
### “Well then he needs to wear his ribbons,” she said and she reached into her pocket where she'd stowed the ribbon from her husband's medal and carefully crisscrossed the doll's chest with the bright fabric. “There,” she said as she handed back the newly decorated general, “now everyone can see just how brave he is.”