Dolls – Vestoj

Becoming A Lady In the World

Clarissa M. Esguerra — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 01:30:09 +0000

A quinceañera in Huntington Park, California, 2001. Photograph by Lauren Greenfield.

THE YOUNG QUINCEAÑERA IS seemingly always in a ball gown. She is in pink, green, blue or other pastel colour, festooned and bejewelled, and with a large skirt that sways in a way that affirms the hooped crinoline underneath. She is beautiful and brimming with excitement for her impending journey into womanhood. Her mother typically accompanies her, helping her with her dress and fixing her hair just so as the photographer captures the moment in front of a city’s landmarks.

The fiesta de quince años, simply called a quinceañera in the United States, celebrates a girl’s fifteenth birthday, her transition from childhood into adulthood. The significance of this day has roots in both Aztec rite-of-passage ceremonies and Spanish debutante traditions, but the quinceañera is uniquely Latin American. The customs vary from country to country, but all share the common thread of family and community. A regular occurrence throughout the U.S. where Latin American immigrant families live, such a milestone event has slowly evolved into its own.

All activities and objects that surround the quinceañera are symbolic, especially the dress which literally reshapes a girl’s body into a woman’s.

The quinceañera begins at a church with a Catholic Mass, the girl typically accompanied by her parents, her godparents and her court of honour comprised of selected female and male friends, siblings or cousins – her damas and chambelanes. She might wear a crown or tiara, a symbol of her upstanding morality – a princess before the eyes of God – or a necklace with a cross or pendant of the Virgin of Guadalupe, blessed by a priest. Her father might present his daughter with her first pair of high heel shoes. He might give her a doll (usually in a dress similar to the celebrante’s), the last doll she will ever be given.

Afterwards at the reception is food, cake and dancing. Such an event, which can include stretch limousines, professional photographers and event planners, can total many thousands of dollars. However, true to the way of dear family and friends, these costs are commonly shared with individuals sponsoring parts of the celebration or donating time to make the day possible.

The day after, the quinceañera and her family informally continue the celebrations with the recalentado (‘re-warming’). Gathered together at a family member’s home with a brunch of food not eaten from the previous day’s festivities, they reflect on the party, reliving their favourite parts.

The following interviews with three Mexican-American women living in the Los Angeles area speak to the memories they hold of their own quinceañeras. Each woman represents a different generation and brings their unique perspective to this important milestone. Each reflects on her passage into adulthood, family and cultural identity, and what it felt like to finally bare the physical and symbolic weight of her quinceañera as she donned her dress for the first time.

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Julie Regalado, Pico Rivera, California, Age 50

My dress was white – back then it was white – but I didn’t wear heels. We wore either sneakers or flats to church and at the party the dad or godfather changed the shoes from the flats or tennis shoes to a small heel to let people know that the quinceañera was now a young lady. That was before the traditional waltz, when the quinceañera dances with her dad.

The court – mine were cousins, males and females, fourteen of them – surrounded me while I did the special first dance with my dad. Then my father gave me to my godfather who danced with me. And then I danced with the seven boys on the court. The symbol for this was that as a young girl, I was protected by my dad. As the waltz finished and the circle around us started to open, I became a young lady. We rehearsed the dance because it had to be in a certain way. First the dad, then the godfather, then the seven boys.

I lived in East L.A. and my quinceañera was in Mexico. It was in Jalisco in a little town called Cihuatlán. It wasn’t really my decision. My parents are first-generation who came to the United States for a better life. But also they didn’t want to lose the tradition, the culture. Because my mom was poor and had a really small quinceañera with just family, it was way different from what I had, where I had my dress, my shoes, everything was planned, and with really traditional food and mariachi music.

My dress was white and poofy, with tiny blue flowers around the edges and along the bottom of the dress. My mother made it for me. I was not asked, ‘How do you want your dress?’

When my friends and I were having quinceañeras the dresses were all white with a little bit of pink or blue or a favourite colour. But very light, not a whole lot of colour, because white signifies purity. I think for many families that celebrate the quinceañera, it was for the adults. They kind of ran the show. I was just happy I was having one.

The blue flowers were my choice though. The cake also had blue flowers. It had to come together with the boy cousins wearing light blue shirts, and the girl cousins wearing light blue dresses, and the cake with light blue flowers too. I was telling people that these are my friends, my cousins that will accompany me as I make the step from being a little girl to being a young lady.

The first time that I wore the dress, it was in a fitting for my mom. My mom was a seamstress, so she wanted it to look perfect. When I tried it on, I felt like crying. I was the last one of my friends that turned fifteen, so I saw my friends here in the States having their quinceañera and how pretty they looked, how loved, and the family… It felt like a dream come true for me. Yes, finally, I had my own.

During the ceremony, oh my goodness, I felt like a princess. That day was the day I felt the most beautiful in the world. I thought I was in heaven. I felt so loved. I had my dress and the accessories that were bought for me and given with significance. I had a little golden cross so that God will always be with me and protect me. And I had a small crown. It was just a little daisy crown that had a little ribbon and the ribbon hung at the back of me.

The celebration lasted four days. I think at the end of the four days, I felt – with everybody coming together and constantly telling stories about me when I was little, what I used to do, how I acted – at the end of those four days I felt like, OK, I’m an OK lady! It started unfolding, how hard everybody worked to come together to make it happen. It was a family effort. Everybody would just start saying, ‘I have a flower shop so I’ll give her flowers. And I’ll get the goats. And I’ll get the decorations. And I know the priest in the church.’ My godparents bought a pig just for me, just for the quinceañera.

The next day we had leftovers and everyone came together to my grandma’s house. And the topic was the quinceañera. That makes it nice, special, to hear that all these people are a part of your life. I appreciated it more because I knew that my mom and my dad were not rich. They came here for us to have a better life yet wanted us to experience the quinceañera ceremony from the beginning to the end.

I am married – a beautiful ceremony – but it doesn’t compare. I still remember my quinceañera; it is my best memory. It even tops me getting married. I have a nineteen-year-old daughter, she had a quinceañera and I tried to make it the same. But I think as time has passed, quinceañera are a little different. The ceremony part has changed a whole lot.

You know, I love my father to death. He is no longer with me, so when I think of my father, that’s the moment that I remember. It was the only time I walked down the aisle with him. My father had six girls, but with me that day, I really felt I was an only child. No one else existed except me and our bond, the experience we shared. He also did a speech of how he saw me grow up and how I was now fifteen. And having six girls and for him to come out with six different speeches, to me it was, wow. I felt that day like an only child.

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Marvella Muro, East Los Angeles, California, Age 41

I’m an only child, but I also had a babysitter with four daughters who were older than me. I basically mimicked them. I think that I just thought it was part of the process. Qunceañeras are also connected to Catholicism, so although I don’t consider myself a devout Catholic, it was part of the culture and I was excited about it but also hesitant because I’m very shy and I don’t like attention. I didn’t know if I really wanted to go through with it, but I just said, OK, what the hell.

I had a dress and flowers; we also had a car decorated with tissue flowers. A lot of people get low riders, but I didn’t. My quinceañera was on a budget. Usually people have them in a hall with a whole court with fifteen people, but I didn’t have that. I just had two little girls, myself, and my godparents, and then we had the party in our backyard. My mom’s co-worker’s son was the DJ, and there was a pot luck and my friends from high school.

The dress is not supposed to be purely white; there are always different colour accents. Pure white is for a bride, so I added peach. Going back to the four girls that I grew up with, they had a collection of bridal books from the late eighties and early nineties. I would look at those dresses and I liked the simplicity. I think that’s why I liked my colours, the off-white and peach. I think it was satin; nice but inexpensive. The colours today are so bright sometimes – they look really great because they are so out there, but again I don’t like attention.

I had my dress made from those bridal books. We got a family friend that knows how to sew to make the dress. She was the neighbour of my mom’s co-worker, a Cuban lady in her sixties in Alhambra. I showed her the picture and she said OK, this is what you can do, and she told us where to get the material. We went downtown to the Fabric District for the fabric and the flowers too.

I made all the centre table arrangements. I turned over a small styrofoam bowl and put fake baby’s breath on it and a candle in the middle with a ribbon around it. I also made the party favours: a little straw hat with a ribbon that said ‘Marvella Muro’ and then ‘Quinceañera..’ I glued a little magnet at back and I burned myself with the glue gun. I think it took two months because it was after school after homework, an hour or something every day.

The ceremony of wearing flats to heels to transition into becoming a woman, no, I didn’t do it. There was a hesitation of having so much attention on me, so I just did the bare minimum. I did have the waltz, but the waltz was with my godparents and then the men came in and they danced with me, so it wasn’t rehearsed. I participated in other quinceañera where there was a rehearsed waltz, and we would rehearse for a month, every Saturday. And it’s fun, but the limousine and all of that… people will spend thousands of dollars.

I felt excited and embarrassed when I first put on my dress. It was the same feeling when they did my hair and put on my make-up. It was the first time that I was allowed to wear make-up, so it was toned down, not too flashy.

My quinceañera was in a small chapel in East Los Angeles, the Santuario de Guadalupe. I think the majority, if not all Catholic churches, have the Guadalupe because if its prominence in Mexican culture. Fresh flowers were offered to her as a thank you and protection.

After the ceremony, I felt different. It was a combination of two things: you are still the same, your body is the same, but at the same time, I was like, wow, you’re fifteen and you’ve gone through this whole process and, you know, you make up new responsibilities for yourself as a teenager. Like social responsibilities as you go through your teens, through puberty, as your body changes. And now you can wear make-up and what does that mean? What colours are you allowed to wear or should you experiment with? I was actually a late bloomer in regards to feelings to boys. I think in Mexican culture, dads are more strict with the girls than they are with the boys. The boys are out all night – I think that’s in many cultures – while the girls have less liberties. I grew up with a single mom so… it had nothing to do with parental restrictions. I think it was just me.

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Natalie Jimenez, South El Monte, California, Age 17

The whole experience was magical. Everyone is there for you.

My dress was a light pink colour. It was poofy at the bottom with a diamond design on the top, and a heart in the middle. We went shopping downtown and bought it at the first store we walked into. I saw it and was like, ‘Oh my god it’s the one.’

As soon as I put it on I didn’t want to take it off. It was a girly feeling, like I was a princess. I honestly felt like a princess. I had hoped that it was going to feel like that; it was how I always pictured my quinceañera to be.

I had a crown, nothing big or anything. But when I put it on I felt like a grown up because they were crowning me in a new stage in my life. I had high heels too. I was in flats and then my dad put the high heels on me during the event. When I was putting them on it was like, OK… you know, grown ups and teenagers are always wearing high heels, so that was basically another step in your life too.

For my court, I had six guys and that was it. I didn’t have any damas, just chambelanes. They were mainly just my cousins. It was easier to get them to do it and we knew their moms for their tux sizes. There were only two that weren’t cousins, but they were childhood friends.

My ceremony at the church was kind of eye-opening because I was in the middle of the church and everyone is on the sides. I had to take the flowers to the Virgin Mary as a sign of thank you and grace, so that was really nice. I think there were around two hundred people. That was just close family – it wasn’t everyone.

For the dances at the reception, we started rehearsing a month before. My waltz was the song ‘A Thousand Years.’ My surprise dances were ‘Greased Lighting,’ ‘Footloose’ and ‘Come On Eileen.’ A surprise dance is when you go from the waltz, which is more formal, to the surprise dance where you get to really express yourself. For the waltz, I wore my big pink poofy dress, and for the surprise dance I wore the same colour and design but basically in a mini version so I could dance. My mom choreographed the waltz and my dad choreographed the surprise dances. Then the official dance was after that, with a variety of music played throughout the night like cumbia, eighties, pop and rock en español.

My mom didn’t have a quinceañera. One of my close girl cousins had one; she had it in August and I had mine in December. I saw how pretty girls were in their dresses, like my cousin and friends who had quinceañeras. I always wanted one. Seeing pictures of the dresses and the parties, it just always caught my attention.

I feel like everyone should have one. Even if it’s just a small party. It really is a good feeling. You’re with your family, you’re celebrating yourself and it’s not like any other birthday. It’s great. They should have that feeling of going into womanhood. I think because Mom didn’t have one she wanted me to experience what it was to have one. She was dancing all night.

Clarissa M. Esguerra is Associate Curator of the Costume and Textiles department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A Costume Of Herself

Holly Connolly — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 22:41:28 +0000

A Frida Kahlo nail polish, for sale in 2018.

THE HAGIOGRAPHY AROUND FRIDA Kahlo tells us that she means something. She has become a symbol of feminism, of enduring pain, of indigenous identity and of redefining beauty standards. She is also a fridge magnet, a tote bag and a Halloween costume. She has been a beer bottle. There is a cartoon Frida Kahlo cat, ‘Catlo.’ A whitened, bland version of her was controversially a Barbie doll. Kahlo’s image proliferates; when I begin looking I see her everywhere. I go to a dinner and her head is hanging on a string above the mirror in the bathroom, like a talisman. ‘She’s been so overshadowed by her celebrity that her work has become lost,’ said Julie Rodrigues Widholm, curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s 2014 exhibition Unbound: Contemporary Art after Frida Kahlo, the aim of which was to ‘restore [Kahlo’s] artistic legacy.’¹ It’s a common reading, which pits Kahlo’s commercial ubiquity against her avant-garde artistic credibility. But such an interpretation ignores certain facts. Chief among them: Kahlo’s careful choreography of her own image. Like many who transcend into sainthood, she didn’t achieve it in life. When American Vogue interviewed her in 1937 it was as ‘Madame Diego Rivera, wife of the famous Mexican painter,’ and when she died seventeen years later, in 1954, aged forty-seven, she was still, according to The New York Times’ obituary, ‘Frida Kahlo, Artist, Diego Rivera’s Wife.’ Since, her legacy has come to far surpass Rivera’s. Amy Collins, writing in 1995 for Vanity Fair, described Kahlo-devotees as ‘masses of late-twentieth-century idol seekers.’ The cult around Frida Kahlo shows no sign of letting up, and it’s as much around her work – she was a better painter than Rivera, after all – as it is about her; there are exhibitions soley about the kind of life that she lived. In 2015 New York’s Botanical Garden had one on her garden, this year London’s V&A hosts one on her possessions, namely her clothes, jewellery and makeup. ‘Style is character,’ Joan Didion wrote of Georgia O’Keeffe; she was considering how much we can expect that an artist is their work. With Kahlo, context is important; her work collapses the line between life and art. What she looked like is relevant; she made fifty-five self-portraits. She painted her pain: The childhood polio that left her with one withered leg. The freak tram accident when she was eighteen, and an iron handrail pierced through the side of the tram car and impaled her through the uterus.² Her spinal column, collar bone, ribs and pelvis were broken, she sustained eleven fractures in her right leg, and her right foot was crushed. It meant she could never carry children to term, although she conceived three times. She painted her fat, irresistible husband Diego Rivera, who was so much older than her, and who most likely slept with her sister.³ She married him in 1929 and then again in 1940; it was the kind of love where you divorce only to remarry a year later. Her biography is relevant because she made it relevant. Picasso has not yet been honoured with a retrospective on his personal aesthetic, nor has the one-time Comme des Garçons model, Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Brooklyn Museum did though, have one on Georgia O’Keeffe, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern.’ Women’s work is still viewed through a different lens than men’s; their lives are more closely associated with their art, and their art is oft-seen as inherently more personal than their male counterparts. The men who have had recent shows of their belongings, Prince and David Bowie, have been known for their androgynous theatricality, and for explicitly creating a persona through their clothes: they were performers.⁴ Undoubtedly, part of Frida Kahlo’s work was the construction of Frida Kahlo. In her diary she nicknamed herself ‘the Ancient Concealer,’ perhaps in reference to this knack. Her name wasn’t quite Frida Kahlo, originally it was Frieda; she dropped the ‘e’ to sound less German. And she was born on July 6, 1907, not July 7, 1910 – the beginning of the Mexican revolution – as she often said she was. Clothing figured into these efforts: there’s an early family photograph of young Frida dressed as a boy. In the year she divorced Rivera, she painted herself wearing what’s instantly recognisable as one of his suits. Costume informed her everyday dressing, too: the Tehuana dresses, huipils (printed tunics) and rebozos (shawls) that she wore weren’t of their time. Children would stop her in the street to ask where the circus was. There’s a 1946 photo, ‘Frida On The Rooftop,’ taken by her lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray, that emphasises their incongruity. She sits vivid against the Manhattan skyline in an acid yellow and rich pink huipil, and a full powder blue skirt. It’s an outfit that’s simultaneously ahead of, in terms of colour, and behind, in terms of form, its time. These day-to-day clothes, currently on display at the V&A, had an intimate and specific relationship to her body. The full skirts of the Tehuana dresses, which she lengthened with thick strips of horizontal lace, covered her withered leg. When her leg eventually had to be amputated, as a result of gangrene, she used a prosthetic leg with a delicately painted, lace-up red boot, emblazoned with a Chinese dragon. The huipiles sat easily over the corsets that she had to wear in order to support her spine. She painted directly on to these corsets, so that they looked more like armour; her insignia was a womb and the Communist flag (a lifelong Communist, she had an affair with Trotsky in the brief period when he lived in her home while in exile). Its difficult to know whether these clothes were fashioned to normalise her appearance, or to highlight her body, as it existed, through ornamentation. The answer seems to be that she did both; she didn’t use clothes to become a totally different persona, but instead to more fully embody Frida, without the ‘e’, Kahlo. The practice of dressing as Frida Kahlo has, like her paintings, long outlasted the woman: At the V&A’s exhibition, there is a guide dressed as Kahlo. She wears a Tehuana dress, her hair is in plaits on top of her head, and her eyebrow has been shaded in at the middle. (I learn, anecdotally, that this is not normal practice at the museum.) In the gift shop you can buy miniature headless stickers wearing her trademark Tehuana dresses; their purpose is to stick over photographs, so that a figure in a photograph can be dressed as Kahlo. There are also real dresses that you can buy; many Kahloes sashay around a makeshift changing room. At what point does Kahlo-as-costume become problematic, insulting to the vision and legacy of the artist herself? The British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Theresa May apparently crossed the line last fall. When she stepped out in a Frida Kahlo bracelet, critics pounced: why would a lifelong Communist want to be associated with May?⁵ This spring, a Mexican court ordered toy company Mattel to stop selling the Kahlo Barbie doll, originally created as part of its ‘Inspiring Women’ series. Kahlo’s great-niece, Mara de Anda Romeo, contested Mattel’s right to use Kahlo’s image, which they had licensed from the Panama-based Frida Kahlo Corporation. Romeo’s biggest issue was not the creation of the doll, but the fact that Kahlo wasn’t represented faithfully enough; ‘I would have liked the doll to have traits more like Frida’s, not this doll with light-colored eyes,’ as she told AFP News Agency.⁶ Romeo didn’t want money, but for the doll to be redesigned as a more accurate likeness. This didn’t extend, though, to the doll’s body itself; little was said of Kahlo’s disability, by Romeo or Mattel. That the Barbie’s able-bodiedness didn’t figure largely in the Mattel controversy is telling. In the fashioning of Freida the woman into Frida the persona, the artist herself kept and caricatured certain elements; She emphasised her eyebrow with a Revlon pencil, for instance, and was rumoured to comb her moustache. But today, the persona has been flattened. Given that Kahlo’s work, and self-presentation, was so defined by her body, the oddest feature of the Frida Kahlo tchotchke industrial complex is that her specific corporeality is so rarely incorporated or addressed. The most knotty parts of her reality have been smoothed out, and the most essential bits lost. It’s easy to argue that Kahlo’s image is being warped by consumerism, a process to which the artist would have certainly been opposed. She cared very little about conventional beauty – in her self-portraits she almost de-beautified herself; flattening her bone structure and adding worn circles under her eyes. Kahlo created herself so specifically not according to popular standards, but to her own mind’s eye. It’s this that perhaps, more than anything, explains the protection over her image, that it was so specifically hers.

Holly Connolly is a London-based writer. She has written for The Guardian, Garage, iD, and Dazed, among others.

http://www.artnews.com/2014/07/14/saving-frida-kahlo-from-her-own-celebrity/ ↩
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/style/frida-kahlo-is-having-a-moment.html and https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/frida-kahlo-making-her-self-up-va-museum ↩
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/1995/09/frida-kahlo-diego-rivera-art-diary ↩
See: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/music/my-name-is-prince-at-the-o2-it-s-like-prince-is-right-there-in-front-of-us-a3668286.html and https://www.vogue.com/article/david-bowie-is-brooklyn-museum ↩
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/theresa-may-frida-kahlo-bracelet-communist-cough-conservative-conference-a7982931.html ↩
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/03/frida-kahlos-family-is-not-thrilled-with-her-barbie-doll ↩

Silicone Selves

Taylore Scarabelli — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 17:32:07 +0000

“Star Doll,” Mariko Mori, 1998. The Japanese artist based this doll on an earlier work from 1995, a ‘live sculpture’ in which she dressed up as a virtual pop star. Created for Parkett Vol. 54. Courtesy of Parkett Art.

IN NEARLY EVERY EPISODE of the plastic surgery reality TV show Botched, a contestant feigns his or her desire to become doll-like, requesting larger implants, bigger lips or a thinner waist. In Season 2, the doctors meet Katella Dash, a charming buxom woman in a mini zebra-print dress dotted with hot pink and kelly-green flowers that accentuate her cascading blonde hair and glossy pink lips. More eye-catching, however, is the open-mouthed blow-up doll that is propped up against her hip. ‘This is Katella number 2,’ she squeals. ‘This is my idol, this is what I aspire to be.’

From plastic-surgery obsessed reality stars to the growing army of Kylie Jenner lookalikes, silicone aesthetics have become near-ubiquitous beauty ideals. But attraction to the synthetic is nothing new. In The Sex Doll: A History, Anthony Ferguson follows the predecessors of today’s silicone love dolls, from seventeenth-century dames du voyage, masturbatory cotton replicas of the female form brought aboard ships to entertain depraved sailors, to what he refers to as the first modern sex doll – a sculpture inspired by a fifteen-year-old girl in ‘little white socks’ created by German surrealist Hans Bellmer in the 1930s.

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When you order a silicone sex doll online, a giant, coffin-like box arrives. Inside, a headless doll lays naked, skin gleaming and perky breasts pointing upward. Her head is likely to be wrapped up in styrofoam, cushioned gently in between her knees. To the average person she appears corpse-like, an immobile piece of human-like plastic teetering just beyond the uncanny valley. But to iDollators, doll owners with an imagination, she’s a blank canvas for a fantasy world.

Today, sex dolls are seen as both works of art and objects of desire. ‘You can act out any sort of fantasies with them, whether its sexual, or non-sexual,’ synthetiks advocate Davecat tells me over Skype. For Davecat, synthetiks, a catch-all term he coined to describe love dolls and humanoid robots, are beings – artificial people who should be treated the same as their human counterparts. ‘Sidore has always been in the back of my mind,’ he tells me of his purple-haired silicone wife of seventeen years. ‘She’s a representation of the ideal girlfriend/wife that I would one day like to have. She embodies a lot of things I find attractive in women, with visualised ideals.’

Like Katella, modern sex dolls simultaneously evoke the power of limitless creativity as well as the oppressive force of heteronormative beauty standards, and the desire to create a simulacrum of the ‘perfect’ human form. For doll owners, crafting the ideal humanoid involves not only picking out their wigs, makeup and clothing, but also creating an imagined personal history that dictates the dolls’ personality and unique style.

Like Mattel before them, sex doll creators capitalise off this thirst for individuality, offering customisable features, removable body parts, and interchangeable face plates for those who get tired of the same old doll. On the website of RealDoll, a popular American sex doll manufacturer, customers are invited to customise their future companions with a range of skin-tones, wigs, and eyes that come in colours like ‘kush green.’ Other suppliers sell eerie childlike forms or miniature dolls with gigantic breasts. Sinthetics specialises in male dolls¹ and fulfils requests for custom blue-skinned avatars, while Teddy Babes exclusively deals in plush, human-like designs with fuzzy orifices to match.

With ready-to-buy dolls from American companies costing upwards of four thousand dollars, sex dolls, like plastic surgery, appear to be a rich person’s game. But for iDollators like Davecat, who spent a whole year saving up for his fantasy wife, it’s simply an opportunity for creativity. For many doll owners, dress up is more important than sex – and there’s a world of underground synthetik fashion to prove it.

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The first mass-produced sex doll was created in Germany and distributed throughout Hamburg’s red light district in the early 1950s. More of a gag than a functioning object of pleasure, Bild Lilli (meaning ‘good-time girl’), was a 11.5-inch model of her scantily-clad human counterparts. Subsequently, she evoked a seemingly pornographic character, a three dimensional companion for those who could not afford the real thing. Bild Lilli came with a little red dress, arched eyebrows, and an exaggerated feminine form which was, according to Ferguson, an inspiration for Ruth Handler – the creator of Barbie.

It’s not uncommon for modern iDollators to treat their companions like little girls treat their dolls. Playing dress-up enables doll owners to craft an identity for their companion and show them off to their peers online. On Twitter and in doll forums, you can find endless stylised portraits of synthetiks, ranging from simple webcam shots to full-fledged shoots with post-production that render the models almost uncannily human. A web magazine called Coverdoll is dedicated to pin-up style portraits of dolls, featuring a ‘coverdoll of the month’ series, including vitals and questionnaires answered by the dolls themselves.

Noteworthy is one iDollator’s forum called ‘Keira This Week.’ Each post contains a photo of Keira perched on the edge of a four-poster bed – legs dangling off the edge to accentuate a line up of sky-high stilettos positioned on the carpet below. Her outfits range from ‘coral jeans and a fringy little sweater,’ to festival-worthy heart-shaped sunglasses, jeans, and a frilly shirt. ‘She dresses fairly conservative,’ Kiera’s owner tells me. ‘If I had a theme it would be to dress her in kind of timeless, classic looks that I would notice on the street… If I had to pick a ‘go to’ image I guess it would be “early Kate Middleton” (pre-marriage).’

Other iDollators are less inventive and dress their dolls in simple outfits, like short-shorts and cheap lingerie. The disproportionate sizing of some dolls, along with their lack of dexterity, can make it hard for doll owners without the time and strength to dress their companions in more elevated looks. Lifting the dolls’ arms can wear down their silicone skin, so getting a doll into a bandage dress is impossible, Davecat tells me. Nevertheless, doll forums are full of tips and tricks, including how to dress your doll in sheer tights to make it easier to put shoes on and off, and why to avoid dark colours (they can stain the surface of light-skinned dolls).

For Davecat, dressing his dolls is a way to both express their unique identities as well as the influence of his own style. ‘I’ve always had a fascination slash attraction to goth girls, being a somewhat lapsed goth myself,’ he tells me. ‘I focused on a traditional, early-to-mid eighties appearance for Sidore.’

Along with his wife, Sidore, Davecat has two other dolls: Elena, a bisexual Russian woman who, according to an episode of Love + Radio, saw Davecat and Sidore on TV and decided to move to America to be with them,² and Miss Winter, a pale goth with a lip ring and indigo-streaked hair. ‘I conceived [Sidore] as a character in a story I was writing back when I used to have a go at writing fiction,’ Davecat tells me. ‘I kind of view [the girls] as three dimensional characters in a book.’

***

In the 2014 documentary The Secrets of the Living Dolls, the camera follows female maskers, a underground subculture of men who dress up like dolls. Using rubber masks, body suits, and seductive outfits to match, the maskers embrace feminine identities ranging from ‘nasty hag’ to sophisticated housewife. If dressing in drag is an over-the-top performance of femininity, masking is on another planet – one where the ideal fantasy woman is made out of silicone instead of human skin.

I ask Davecat if dressing up love dolls could be seen as an expression of an iDollator’s femininity, or a latent desire to dress in drag. ‘It’s a valid point,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t see myself in a lot of mesh blouses but I’m sure it’s a lot deeper for a lot of iDollators. It’s like yeah, “I could see myself in that skirt or whatever if I didn’t have societal pressure or I wasn’t uncomfortable wearing women’s clothes.” It’s one of the many ways that synthetik are fantastic outlets for people.’

While love dolls can be conduits for companionship and creativity and offer the freedom of expression for folks with repressed identities, they can also act as a tool that promotes more nefarious forms of sexuality. Like Hans Bellmer before them, iDollators can purchase dolls crafted in the image of children. A recent post on ‘The Doll Forum’ (of Coverdoll Magazine), announced that the site would ‘no longer tolerate young-looking dolls in children’s clothing,’ a relatively disturbing insight when you consider the type of content that was allowed before.

‘Within the past two to three years there’s been a whole rising tide of “infidels” and “red pillers,” Davecat tells me, referencing the term many online Men’s Rights activists use to describe themselves. ‘Guys who are just like, “Now that we’ve got these dolls we don’t need real women.” People who are saying, “Sex bots will replace women, and yeah I can’t wait.” That’s contrary to what I believe in, and contrary to what anyone with any sort of conscience should believe in. I’m trying to get people to see artificial [beings] as people and not just sex toys.’

***

In another episode of Botched, a Barbie-like contestant named Alicia tells the doctors that she’s going through a process of ‘bimbofication’ in order to make herself look like the ideal male fantasy. ‘I want to look like a fuck doll,’ she says. ‘But I don’t want to be a fuck doll.’

For ‘red pillers,’ there is no difference between Alicia and the doll that arrives in a box. Both are objects to be played with, manipulated, and tossed away when they no longer serve their purpose. But for Alicia, like Davecat, blurring the line between fantasy and reality doesn’t necessitate exploitation. She isn’t molding herself into a flawless feminine object to be used and discarded. She’s exploring the boundaries of representation, subverting heteronormative standards of beauty by embracing her own distorted representation of them.

In a series of YouTube videos, iDollator Mishka Valentino gives in-depth tutorials on how to apply makeup and make repairs to silicone dolls. In each video, Valentino uses a low-fi computer-generated voice to read out scripts on behalf of his doll, Jasmyne. In one tutorial she dictates Valentino’s actions as he jams a needle through her nipple in order to fill her ‘slightly deflated titties.’³ In another video, her detached doll head sits poised on a metal stand.⁴ ‘I am known as Jasmyne on the doll forum and Mishka is the person applying the makeup,’ she says in a robotic, monotone voice. ‘Here he is eagerly making a tutorial on how he applies makeup to any doll… as you can see he uses a large brush to add the base foundation first…’

For iDollators, the ability to construct individual identities for other, human-like beings is both an exercise in power and an opportunity for exploration. Like Alicia, who pursues body modification as a means to construct a new identity for herself, synthetik enthusiasts find strength in the make-believe fantasy that is cohabitating with a life-size silicone doll. It’s hard to say that the proliferation of non-responsive and impossibly busty silicone sex dolls will lead to a renewed respect for the feminine form, but for iDollators with big hearts and a bigger imagination, all they can do is try.

Taylore Scarabelli is a New York-based writer whose work focuses on fashion, feminism and technology. She has written for Dazed, Flaunt, Real Life, Topical Cream, and Under the Influence, among others.

For more on male sex dolls, see the first episode of the Viceland show Slutever: https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/male-dolls/57f41d3556a0a80f54726060
↩
See: http://loveandradio.org/2016/09/a-girl-of-ivory/ ↩
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCUFC_tvS7M&t=519s ↩
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrr5yzaRCcc&t=359s ↩

ANSCHLUSS

Kay Boyle — Tue, 30 May 2017 08:41:19 +0000

Kay Boyle was an American poet, novelist, journalist and translator. As a young writer she worked for several fashion journalists, an experience which informed this excerpted short story “Anschluss,” originally published in Harper’s in 1939. A contemporary of William Carlos William, Gertrude Stein and Hart Crane, Boyle was a victim of McCarthyism in the 1950s and lost her position as a foreign correspondent for the New Yorker. She went on to participate in many activist movements, including the strike at San Francisco State University in 1968 and that decade’s protests against the Vietnam war.

SHE HAD COME OUT in July to Brenau for two years now, and back twice at Christmas: Merrill, the fashion-editor’s assistant coming from Paris for her vacation in Austria, stepping off the train into this other world of mountains and seeing the dark forests’ shapes lying unaltered in the grass or snow. Fanni was at the station every time to meet her, the strong black silky braids pinned up high round her head and wearing her homemade dirndl and apron.

It might have been Fanni that brought her back: they reached out their arms to each other and kissed each other’s face; but even while the slow, low American voice was saying, ‘Fanni, here I am again. Here I am back, Fanni,’ the travel-weary and fashion-weary eyes were looking for something else besides the scenery and the voice was waiting to say it.

Fanni stood looking at her, the smile fixed on her mouth, seeing again not in desire or envy but with awe the mascara on the lashes, the hats that varied from summer to winter, from Descat to Schiaparelli, marveling at the undying scent of Chanel in the Paris clothes.

‘Is it possible, Fanni, I’m back?’ the voice went on saying, the naive youthfulness and blitheness masking for a little while the satiety and the concern, calling attention wildly for a moment to something fresher than the scars from thirty years of being gallant and bright. ‘Fanni, you’re looking so … ‘ [this or that or the other thing.] Or, ‘I simply love your dress or your shoes or your jacket – it’s quilted, isn’t it? You must tell me which shop it came from. I’ve got to have one to take back to Paris. They’d be crazy about it.’

If the hotel porter didn’t come at once Fanni, being the younger, stooped and without difficulty picked up one of the pigskin bags. They would argue about it, one of them wearing high heels and the other broad hand-stitched sales, because Merrill said it was much too heavy for her; and then when the porter came at last the American woman began laughing her soft, quick, youthful laughter. She couldn’t think of the German words to say any more – only ‘Guten Tag‘ and that was as far as she could remember. Out of the station the three of them went, the hotel porter carrying the bags and laughing, and the two young women holding arms and laughing, out into the unfailing miracle of the wintry starlit world or into the stormy blue summer evening’s light.

Outside in the square, Merrill knew all the horses and she had saved sugar for them from the dining car. Sugar for horses, said the eyes of the porters and eyes of all the drivers on the boxes of the open carriages or sleighs, and even Fanni’s dark, quiet eyes said it. It was a thing they never got used to seeing: just one more of the lavish, unthinking gestures foreigners made over and over, like ordering whisky in the face of poverty. At one season they would be carriage-horses when she came, drowsing there in the sun with their feed-bags on their noses; and the next time they would be wild eager creatures with their breath white on the air before them, shaking their harness bells and pawing at the thick-packed snow.

Only when the two women got to the Gasthaus and sat down at the long, clean, polished table in the public room did Merrill say the words that had been there every instant, what she had come across these countries alone to utter, had waited, mouth shut and eyes worn with despair over cocktail glasses, manicure tables, typewriter keys, programs of couture openings, shorthand notes, to ask month after month, ‘Fanni, how’s Toni? How is he making out?’

She looked away when she said it, taking her gloves off or her cigarettes out, or seeking for her lighter in her bag. Nothing was ever changed in the warm dim room except the season’s changes: one time the tall tiled stove hot to the hand and the next time cool, and hot red wine in the glasses instead of beer. Or else the changes in the waiters’ faces: this one in jail for political agitation and another one moved on to somewhere else because he had worked his three months out of the year there and could go home and collect his dole in leisure for the months ahead. And Merrill, drinking the beer or the wine and chewing at the big tough pretzels, would look at something else and say:

‘How’s Toni, Fanni? I must say he’s the most unsatisfactory letter-writer! What’s he doing now?’

Fanni would take a swallow from her glass and shake her head.

‘Doing?’ she’d say, wondering anew that this useless and uneasy thing must be asked. ‘Oh, nothing. You know the way it is here. There is nothing for anybody to do. He makes things out of wood of course a little, and he plays, you know. He plays the harmonica most of the time.’

That was the sign for them to burst out laughing again, screaming, shrieking, rocking with laughter together, as if Toni were the name for half-wit, for village nut, for the queer white-headed boy; or as if this were a family joke they’d never get over if they lived to be a hundred, a pain in the side, an ache in the face season after season instead of the two syllables describing glory, naming at last the animal and golden-flanked Apollo toward whom their love turned, sistered by his power. Here they sat, summer or winter, laughing fearfully at it: Toni, my brother, said Fanni’s slow, silent, loving tongue, and Merrill strangled in her nervous fingers Toni, Toni, my strange, wild, terrible love – the two women laughing and laughing as if the time would never come to wipe their eyes and speak coherently of him.

This year they had left it like this: whether there was the Anschluss or whether there wasn’t, they would meet in Brenau toward the middle of the summer just the same. You can’t change a people’s ways or their faces overnight, Merrill said for two months to herself in Paris. Her right hand was free of its good glove, and the silver-mounted pencil in her fingers flew at the paper while the mannequins in winter suits, fur wraps, ski ensembles came down the carpeted floor toward the double row of seated women, hesitated, turned lingeringly, and mounted the salon’s length again. ‘Really adorable fur buttons, leather-frogged,’ she jerked down, ‘like your very smartest Hussars.’

Her left fingers took the cigarette from her lips and snuffed it out in the metal engraved dish while her right hand blocked quickly down in the still girlish American script: ‘Upper sleeves built to assist any filly beyond her first carefree youth to shoulder the responsibility of looking sixteen and spirited this winter.’

Outside was the Paris heat, July’s, and Merrill thinking: once this farce of the openings is through I’ll set my lovely profile toward the heights. Everyone, mannequins, sister-journalists, sales ladies to be split into two categories if you caught them unawares: those who went upward out of choice and looked a mountain in the eye and those who took their clothes off at once and went to sleep on beaches. The Nordic and the Mediterranean blood, each manifestation of it going back to its source, like eels up out of the water with a flick of the tail and covering ground, field, thicket, swamp,wood, returning to their own latitude to breed.

‘Hats this winter,’ she wrote, ‘are likely to be taken by your little girl to put on her Dy-dee doll if you don’t watch out.’ All the seas in the world could dry up and the beaches tum to oyster shells and 1 wouldn’t care, she thought, noting that wimples were worth a word or two, as long as they left Austria and the mountains and the people exactly the way they were.

“Für ein Fest gemacht”
(Made for a Party), Hannah Höch, 1936

…

In January, just before she must get back to Paris for the openings, they arrested Toni again and put him into jail. But there was no shame or even wonder to it as there would have been in any other place on earth. It was merely another part of the spectacle to see him at the high barred window, his ski-jacket on because there was no heat inside those walls, and his harmonica playing fast and recklessly. Fanni and Merrill went down the back-street at night and tried throwing a comb up the height of the Rathaus to him, and it struck three times against the bars and fell again before he got it, and each time he missed it he giggled like a girl. That’s what I love, she thought wildly; that’s what I love – that dark faceless shadow leaping like a fool for a comb to do his hair with, laughing like a nut when perhaps they’ll hang him tomorrow, and she turned to Fanni with her voice shaking in her throat.

‘Political agitation,’ she said fiercely, as if she had not said the same thing a hundred times before. ‘But what kind of political agitation? Why can’t he have a lawyer and a room to himself if he’s a political prisoner?’

‘Mein Gott, it’s nothing!’ said Fanni. This softness, this female fury in the strange foreign woman was enough to take even the significance of truth away. She stood, a little shorter than Merrill, in the snow-covered back-street, both of them held and hidden in the shadow of the Rathaus wall. The street lamp was farther along, but even without its light Fanni could see or else remember the beauty of the other woman’s face, fragile, nervous, balked, with the little lip trembling and the eyes painted blue and starry as a child’s, and the child’s hood fastened underneath her chin. There was the actual sight or else the photograph of it fixed indelibly in Fanni’s dark, shrewd, merry eyes. ‘He’ll be out again in three or four days,’ she said, wanting to touch Merrill’s arm perhaps but not knowing how to make the move. ‘It’s happened so often. It happens to them all if they go round lighting the fires. It’s treason – is that the word you said it was? – yes, treason, a small treason, very little, to light the swastika fires on the hills at night.’

‘Peaches!’ Toni’s voice called down to them. ‘Merrill, can you got me peaches?’

‘Get, not got!’ Fanni called up the wall. ‘It’s a joke,’ she said to Merrill. ‘He thinks that is very funny. He saw those pictures with colors on them about peaches in the American magazines you have.’

‘Fanni, I can’t bear it,’ said Merrill in a low, fierce voice. ‘I can’t bear it. I’ll get him diamonds. I’ll buy his way out if they’ll let me.’

All the way back to the middle of town they could hear the harmonica playing, the little grief in it now nursed in the hollow of his hand and asking in warbling nostalgia for a homeland that had perhaps never been or for a hope without a recognizable or possible name to give it. Night after night he played until the evening he came out, and Fanni walked on ahead to let them kiss each other by the wall.

‘Merrill, I like the perfume again,’ he said against the hood’s fur.

‘Toni, Toni,’ she said, holding to him, and she felt the tears running down her face.

‘Toni, we can do something together. You don’t have to stay here. You could go to France with me – you could – ‘

‘I’ve never been into a city,’ he said.In a minute he might begin laughing out loud at the thought of himself wearing city clothes. ‘I have to stay here in my country. I’m too poor a one for you.’

‘I’m old enough to take care of you, much older than you,’ she whispered and he held her hard against him.

‘You are my doll,’ he said, saying it savagely and hotly against the hood’s white fur. ‘You smell good like a doll, and little small teeth like that. If I wanted to do it, I could break you as children do with a doll, pull your arms out and break all your little bones in your skin–’

He bit quickly at her cheek and chin and lip, soft, dry, nibbling bites at powder, scent, and rouge, and she looked up at him with the tears still on her face.

‘Toni, I’ve put red all over your mouth and my mascara’s running,’ she whispered.

‘I’ll keep your red like that,’ he said. ‘I’Il keep it like that on my face. I’ll never wash it away.’

Then in 1938 it happened; it happened in the spring. The German troops went over the border without a word and there was the Anschluss, and maybe he’ll be singing a different tune about it now that he’s got it, thought Merrill. Perhaps he’ll want to get out of the country by hook or by crook now he’s got what he’s been wasting behind bars for. They won’t be able to change his face or the shape of his hands or his mouth singing what words he did; not love ditties on top of a mountain, nor popular airs, nor things of classic pricelessness, but the pure loud clarion call of ‘Austria, Awake, Awake!’ Awake and in your right mind by this time, I should hope, thought Merrill, buying the ticket to go back; united and awake and in her senses she can’t cast the pearls of his teeth before swipe nor squander the fortune of his glance on one direction. His country nor no other can make a law abiding man out of what he is. He’ll go on rebelling, shouting the Nazis down as he shouted the Catholics and the Communists and Schuschnigg out of countenance, revolting now in the same cool, careless way against what he’s been wearing the flesh of his bones to get.

For the first time, stepping off the train at Brenau, she could not fling her arms out to Fanni or kiss her face, nor draw that first deep draught of other air in before she said, ‘Fanni, it’s like falling asleep again and finding the same dream still waiting for you.’ This time she must stand waiting on the platform alone, turning from the far sight of snow on the mountain tops to the shady, summery road leading off under the heavy boughs toward the first hotels where the swastikas on the flagpoles folded and unfolded languidly on the breeze. Fanni did not come running late down the pathway worn along the rails nor call her name out across the picket fence. The sun shone hot in the waning afternoon, thunder clouds were gathering on the rocky horns at the valley’s end, and the horses sneezed in their feed-bags on the square outside. In a moment the hotel porter came through the station door, took off his cap, and said, ‘Heil Hitler’ and shook her hand.

‘Griiss Gott,’ said Merrill brightly, and then she started laughing as usual because she couldn’t think of the German words to say. ‘Und Fräulein Fanni – und –Fräulein Fanni?‘ She said it over several times to him, but he only shook his head and stooped to pick her bags up. All he knew was that the hotel had raised his wages and that the place was full of Germans, full of them, just like the old days again before the frontier was closed, and they’d put a new uniform on him. He made her feel the cloth of the jacket. ‘Oh, gut!’ said Merrill, having forgotten the right word to say. ‘Perfectly lovely. Très gut, Hermann!’

At the Gasthaus the letter was waiting for her, and standing in the room where Fanni had always been she read it once quickly, and then reread it slowly. After she had folded it in the envelope again she took it out and stood reading it over. You will forgive me for not being at the station, Merrill, or words similar to this it said. Now I am district nurse and I cannot choose my own time. Today I must go on my bicycle to Kirchberg to arrange about the vacations for some expecting mothers and I shall then have to report what I have done at the office when I get back. So, please, may I come in this evening and see you? We are all very well organized now. Toni is Sports’ Organizer at the lake, so if you go swimming this afternoon you will see him. He is also Director of the Austrian Youth Local. Of course he is very proud. If you do not see him swimming, he too will come in and visit you with me tonight. So until we meet, my dearest friend.

Even the little bathing cabins, set out in rows on the south side of the lake, were topped by swastika banners, small ones fluttering in dozens against the wide somber mountain waters. This place, where before so few people had come, was now singularly alive: the refreshment tables crowded and bathers lying on the wooden platform that sloped to the edge, swimmers basking on the floats, bathers stretched reading their newspapers and smoking on the summer grass. Enormous, thick-thighed, freckled-shouldered, great-bellied people, not Austrians but invading cohorts come across the border with heads shaved close to baldness, speaking the same tongue and bearing vacation money to a bankrupt land. The air was filled with their voices as they called across the echoing waters, the hullabaloo of monstrous jokers gurgling at the surface, the shower and impact as the great bodies dropped from the diving boards and smote the tranquil currents with their mighty flesh.

Their bathing dress was dark and plain, the women wearing skirted ones with modest backs and necks, and Merrill changed into her pale-blue two-piece suit in the cabin and looked down at the strip of delicately tanned skin between the top and trunks and wondered. I never minded wearing this before, she thought. Why do they make me know I’ll look a queer fish among them: hair curled, mouth painted, thin as a rake, and half-naked? With something almost like shame she stepped out of the cabin door into the cool mountain air. The storm was gathering quickly in the valley and in a little while the sun would be gone.

Once she looked up she no longer saw the people: the heavy sloping shoulders, the shaved narrow pates, the folds of obscene hairy flesh at neck or chest, or cared for whatever insult or censure now stood in their eyes. Toni was on the springboard, ready to take the high dive, the heels lifted, the calves small as fists with muscle, the knees flat, the thighs golden and slightly swollen for the movement not made yet but just about to come. The throat, the lifted chin, the straight brown nose were set with cameo-clarity for an instant against the deepening sky, his arms thrown back and laying bare his breast as if for this once, just now, and this time forever, the shaft of love might pierce directly and the blood might flow at last.

‘Toni,’ she said in silence, ‘Toni, Toni,’ watching his hands part the surface and the body slide perfectly into the water’s place. Once he had risen, visible as light floating upward from the depths, and shaken the drops from his face and hair and thrust the locks back, she was at the edge and kneeled there, waiting. ‘Toni,’ she said out loud, and immediately he turned his head, wiping the water from his mouth and chin, and treading water. He took the five long strokes that brought him to her and reached his fingers to the edge of rotted timber and hung there, the hands tanned yellowish, the square nails clean, his upper lip drawn back upon his teeth, and then he lifted himself out, dripping, and stood on the wood.

‘Mein Gott, Merrill, you look like somebody from the theater,’ he said quickly. For a minute she might not have heard him, sitting there mindless, heedless, watching his wet bare feet stain the boards beneath them with water as if a shadow were spreading imperviously across the weather-rotted and time-rotted wood. She looked at the small, strong, perfectly molded ankle-bones with the skin drawn over them like tight, sheer silk, and suddenly, as if at that instant she heard the quickly uttered words or just at that instant understood, she jerked her eyes up to his face.

‘What time did you get in?’ he said. ‘Fanni showed me the letter you wrote. I thought you said this week some time–’

‘No, today,’ said Merrill. She sat squinting up at him, trying to shade her eyes and face although no sun was shining, feeling in panic her half-nakedness, the thinness almost skeleton-like among these people, the strip of body between breast and navel obscene, infecund. ‘It’s quite gay here, isn’t it?’ she said, making a gesture with her naked pale arm and hand. ‘Quite different, isn’t it?’

‘No, it is not gay,’ he said. He was smoothing his upper arms dry with the palms of his hands. ‘They are not like the English and American people who came here before. They know we are a country, not a playground. They respect us. They do not come to dress up for parts in a musical comedy the way the other people did.’

She sat there at his feet, squinting up at him, watching him turn to pick the bath towel off the springboard’s trellis and start rubbing his shoulders with it.

‘It is very serious here now,’ he said. ‘You see how they dress? Fanni will tell you how things have changed for us.’ And then he said quickly, ‘The nails of your toes, Merrill,’ squatting down on his thighs to come nearer to her and so say it the more violently and brutally. Merrill looked startled the length of the legs curved under her to the ten dull red medallions varnishing their extremities. ‘Wear that in Paris. Wash it off before you come here to us,’ he said. ‘Now we’re busy we haven’t time for people masquerading. We aren’t the tourists’ paradise any more. People can’t come and pay to see us dance and roll over on our backs like bears with rings through the nose–’

‘Toni, you got what you wanted, didn’t you?’ Merrill said in a low, quiet voice, sitting there without movement, even the nervous hands lying still. ‘You got what you were working for, didn’t you, Toni?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes,’ and then he said, leaning again, ‘Merrill, don’t go, but just put a bathrobe round you. Everyone here is looking at you like something out of the Tiergarten. Nobody’s used to suits like that or paint like that on the mouth–’

That was the next to last time she saw him. The last time was when she took the train the day after at the station, and he was there on the platform with half a dozen others, all young, all neatly uniformed in gray and green and smartly belted at the waist. They were there to meet the Innsbruck train which must have been bringing officials on it, and when he saw her on the other side of the glass his face altered and he took a step forward as if he were about to speak, as if it were not too late to say it. But the movement of the car passed like a veil between them and he brought his heels sharply together and lifted his right hand and she saw his lips open as he spoke, either ‘Heil Hitler’ or ‘Aufwiedersehen–‘ and that was all.