We’re calling them mannequins now, the dolls in the windows of women’s clothing stores in the Altstadt who display the latest wares. Do you ever think about that? Astonishing, really, that it didn’t take master clockwork or a mechanical brain or even the artistry of the waxworks for young women to be replaced by cold, hard plaster. That mannequins are now inanimate, manufactured in great heaps like bullets and combat boots, merely took a Great War. Merely took the unpeopling, the unpersoning of many many men, and therefore, I suppose, women too.

He asked me second. I know, because of the way anyone knows anything around here: people talk. Especially artists. Especially women. He asked me second and what I should have said was, “Why not buy a mannequin?” A sentiment that was all the more tawdry only a year before. A sentiment that only a year before, would have been all the more aligned with Oskar Kokoschka’s, yes that Oskar Kokoschka’s, intentions when, upon returning from the war, he asked me to create a life-sized doll of his ex-lover Alma Mahler, yes that Alma Mahler. Actually by this time, I hesitate to remind you, she was Alma Mahler-Werfel.

 Really, what I should have said was, “no.” That I did not want, what is now surely my destiny, to become a vulgar footnote in the otherwise rarified histories of a Great Artist and an Even Greater Muse. But could I have said no? Would you have—a promising young artist, a member of a burgeoning avant-garde, i.e. a pauper—turned down a large sum, as much as perhaps five hundred marks, and an opportunity to create at such a scale, for such a well connected audience? You might have. He asked me second, and I cannot say whether the artist he asked before me was rich or poor, hungry for fame, or merely a dedicated craftswoman. I can not say whether she didn’t have the time or was disgusted—horrified—by the request. I can only tell you what I know, and I know that instead of what I should have said, I in fact said, “yes.”

Then came the instructions, for I had misunderstood Oskar’s request. A total and complete misunderstanding. A misunderstanding so stupid, so naive that only someone like myself—young, desperate for attention, i.e. an “up-and-coming” artist—could have made. I thought he was attracted to my artistic vision. Thought, having seen my dolls—my first big break—at the Richter Gallery, having heard his beloved Alma sing my praises and seen her stun in a dress of my making, he decided that I should be the one to construct this uncanny instrument of desire. But I was no artist in Kokoschka’s eyes. Indeed, I wasn’t even his first choice. He saw me not as artist, but as mother, maker, Madame. He saw me as only a vessel through which his own artistry, his own putrid Pygmalion delusions, could be borne out.

“Yesterday I sent a life-size drawing of my beloved and I ask you to copy this most carefully and transform it into reality,” he wrote. Reality? I remember thinking, though I did not dare write it in my reply. Who in their right mind would commission an avant-garde like myself in pursuit of naturalism? Of course, Kokoschka wasn’t in his right mind, or so it’s whispered these days amongst even his greatest admirers. “A strange case of shell shock,” they often say. But my brother suffers from shell shock, and my neighbor too, and neither has implored me to create a doll that shall let his “sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to the sinewy covering of skin.”

*

I did what I could to follow his instructions, though not every detail could be permitted. He asked for couch stuffing to fill her breasts and thighs, and “les parties honteuses,” yes, he gave me extra marks to buy an old couch, to disinfect and use its innards. Why he was so concerned for the cleanliness of our little Galatea’s insides, I did my best not to dwell on. Still, I abided—buying a couch from the haggard widow across the way, who upon my asking shrugged and said “there’s no one left who requires a seat in my parlor.” I ripped its seams and steamed its insides, like a good little doll-maker. As for the skin, which Kokoschka insisted should be “of the thinnest fabric available, gossamer silk or the very finest linen,” well, for this he gave me no extra marks, and even with the great bounty I had collected, it seemed out of the question that I should pay for enough gossamer silk to cover a doll which was to be 1.6 meters tall. Besides, I think he forgot, the buffoon, that I had met poor Alma, that I knew her skin wasn’t gossamer thin, but was luscious, thick, animal-like even. And so, instead of silk or linen, I purchased three fresh swan hides, from which I plucked, one by one, each and every of their soft white feathers.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Skin and fat are purely ornamental, as any good anatomist knows. It was no use to bother with the swans or the couch before I had her skeleton. On this subject, Oskar was silent. Perhaps, he considered it beyond his expertise, or else, his interest. I made her skeleton out of papier-mâché, brass paper fasteners, and a metal spring (for the neck). I crafted each bone carefully before joining them, moulding them out of crumpled newspapers and watered down glue, leaving them out in the sun to dry and harden. There are 206 bones in the human body, and each one of these I painstakingly envisioned under Alma’s meat and skin. I assessed carefully, not only the obsessive sketches Oskar sent me, but the images of her in the recesses of my brain. I consulted the measurements I took for the dress I made her. I interrogated my memories of our fittings—the way her collarbone lay in her chest, the length of her forearm, the shape her pelvic bone made against the taught skin of her hips. The skull was the hardest part, though; teaching myself to see beyond the smooth skin, the fatty cheeks, the hair of her brow.

My sister took a photo of us when I was done, me and the bones of the Alma doll. I hung her up on a stand I’d purchased from a retiring physician only a couple months before, one that used to display the bones of a corpse. In the picture, I’m holding her hand, smiling, leaning towards her. You can see my exhaustion in the way my hair falls, stringy and stuck to my forehead, reaching towards my brow like spider legs; in the old ratty sweater, more suitable for sleep than waking hours, that’s clinging to my torso; in the bags under my eyes. There’s something you can see in her as well; something about the way her empty eye sockets seem to gesture towards me, the way her toothless jaw forms a sort of grin; the way she looms over my shoulder like a mentor or long-time colleague, even though I am her mother, maker, Madame.

As I put her together, I received letter after letter from Oskar:

“Dear Fraulein Moos, Can the mouth open? Are there teeth and tongue inside too?”

For the teeth I used a pair of dentures some poor soul sold to the pawn shop in town. When I saw them, in the shop looking at bits and bobs for other projects, I knew immediately they were hers. I stuffed and sutured a tongue, made of the backside of a plush red velvet. I sewed the swan-skin around her jaw, paying careful attention so it would wrinkle only slightly when her mouth drooped open or was pushed shut. There was no money left for glass eyes so I painted them on, her eyebrows too. And so, she was always looking, always slightly surprised or bemused.

“Dear Hermoine, if my drawing is not clear as to the position of a muscle, a tendon, a bone, examine the place on your own body, which you must move with your hand until you have the feeling of it warmly and distinctly. Fingertips see more than eyes.”

And for her calves, I shaped them with muscle—like my own. Not dainty and weak like the calves of a musician, of a career wife. The couch stuffing smooths down into her feet, with toenails I’ve crafted from clay, heels rough from glue-made callus, and a red scab behind her ankle, left from the back of an imagined too-small shoe. Her breasts I did not make of stuffing, of horsehair or feathers or some other fluff. I shaped them from papier-mâché. So they are forever afloat, always right-sided even without a corset or brassiere. I left them hollow, so if you’re rough they’ll make a sound. I left them hard as her bones, so they will be left alone.  

“Hermoine—I beg you once more to use all your sensitiveness for the companion you are preparing for me and to breathe into her such life that in the end, when you have finished, there is no spot which does radiate feeling.” 

And as I worked on her rear—the rest of her nearly done, while she lay on her stomach, her head supported by the strong arms I built her—I noticed something strange. Something without explanation. There were tiny sticks, thin like needles, pushing out of her once smooth skin, creating the look of goose pimples. And as I sewed up the seam of her skin, up her sides with a ladder stitch so it wouldn’t show, I watched one sprout all the way out—a feather. A swan feather. And it was followed by another and then another, bursting through her skin like fuzzy clouds of snow white smoke.

*

By the end of that day, the Alma doll was nearly completely white—her skin, no longer smooth and pink-ish beige, but plush and dense with feathers. In fact, when I ran my hand against her leg, or arm, or cheek, it felt more like the body of a dog or chick than of a lady. I tried to pluck these feathers. What other solution could there be? I sat for hours with a set of tweezers, and then becoming lazy, grabbed at them with my hands, leaving fistfuls on the floor of my little workshop. But it was no use, they shot right back up only moments after I’d pulled them.

I know the way this sounds—implausible, unbelievable, impossible, i.e. completely made up. But I tell you it is true, that this really happened. I could spin a yarn about how sometimes the art tells you how it wants to be made, that we poor clowns—artists—are merely vessels through which some greater power creates, or that I’d left the feathers on in the first place out of some kind of malice, some clever plan to keep Kokoschka from acting on his baser instincts with my creation. It would make for a good story, a nice neat theory for critics to prattle on about in their silly magazines (nice to think that they might write about me at all), but nice as it would be, it wouldn’t be true. She grew the feathers herself, somehow, willed them out of her swan-pores like a cat does with her claws. And once they were sprouted, they would not be undone. I told this much to Kokoschka. I wrote him letter after letter, though whether he received them I’ll never know, since he did not address them in his letters to me. But of course, I had to warn him—had to make my excuses. I’ll remind you that my little Alma was commissioned. That though I’m her creator, she’s considered to this day Kokoschka’s life-sized doll. That in the archives I will only be mother, maker, Madame.

With no word from Kokoschka, or at least no words other than his obsessive ravings over her pinky toenail, over the shape of her nostrils and the tendons in her neck, there was nothing I could do but press on. The last step in my process is always a hair. Hair always gets in the way of things if you put it on too soon—it'll accidentally wind up in the seams of the skin, under the ceramic nails, sewn into the back of the tongue. Kokoschka did not give me an allowance for the hair, he instead had it sent to me. It’s the one part of the doll he exercised this kind of control over. He had a specific color in mind—much lighter, to my eyes, than Alma’s real hair, which was mousy brown. The hair he sent me was a red-ish blonde—a kind of rose gold, long and silky straight.

I sat in a bar stool, Alma seated in a low kitchen chair before me. I held her forehead for leverage and, using a copper knotting hook, I pulled the strands of hair two by two through the netted fabric of Alma’s scalp—the only part of her body, save her eyes and mouth, that was yet featherless—I tied a tiny knot to keep them in place before pulling them all the way through. This I would have to repeat over and over, for row after row, until her head was fully populated. As I moved down the back of her neck my grip shifted from her forehead, to her eyes, to her nose. And just as I was almost finished, after so many hours my wrist ached and my fingers felt as though they’d be forever contorted into the shape by which they held the knotting hook, my grip shifted to her mouth. And though I know—I know—neither you nor Kokoschka believe me, I’ll tell you both all the same: I swear to it that the doll opened her perfect little mouth and bit my hand.

Her teeth came down fast and hard. They drew blood that stained the white feathers on her chin. They left an arch of angry red across my palm and index finger. Worst of all, they hurt like hell—felt as if they were shooting the pain directly into me, rather than causing it by force. And after I’d bandaged myself up, after I’d doused the wound with a stinging burst of vodka, and convinced myself that it must’ve been some freak accident, something to do with the spring in her neck or the paper fastener that joins her jaw, I returned to pluck the stained feathers from her chin and when I touched my finger to the edge of her lips, she moved to bite me once more.

How do you sew together the lips of a doll that is so eager to bite? Carefully, I suppose. It helps if you glue the lips shut first. Helps more if you, as I did, apply the glue with a cotton swap taped on to the end of a long metal stick. Of course, I felt terrible shutting her up—terrible both for the fact of her suppression, and for the masterful work I’d accomplished that would now go forever unknown. I felt less bad when I noticed, only a couple weeks later, that my smart little swan had begun to chew through the dried glue in the right hand corner of her mouth. In fact, I didn’t feel too bad at all anymore, but instead felt rushed.

*

I packed Alma in a box shaped like a coffin, tucked her into the layers of shredded paper and leftover couch stuffing with her arms folded and everything, thinking Kokoschka, himself a showman, would enjoy this display. I wondered idly, as I taped the edges of the box shut, if this was how they shipped mannequins from the factories. But thinking upon it, it made more sense, I believed, that they would ship them chopped up in reassemble-able pieces.

I know what you’re thinking, but I warned him—I swear—sent him even more letters. I wrote about the never-ending feathers and the bite that wouldn’t heal. I wrote about the strange dreams I’d had since the bite: dreams where I sat on a shelf for years and years, perfectly content, looking out into an ever-changing living room; dreams where a surgeon replaced my eyes with enormous glass globes; where a little girl, somehow four times my size, dressed me again and again in pink and purple dresses adorned with many ribbons. I told him about the glue, about sewing her mouth shut and how poorly it made me felt, how I mourned the beautiful mouth I’d given her. I even wrote about the feathers that’d begun to burst through the skin of my palm, in the exact spot where I’d been bitten. All of this, like the rest of my letters, went ignored.

“I was prepared to make allowances to subtract from my fancy in favor of reality; but in too many ways she belies what I demanded of her and expected of you,” he wrote to me. “The outer shell is a polar-bear pelt, suitable for a shaggy imitation bedside rug rather than the soft and pliable skin of a woman.”

As thought I didn’t warn him. As though I hadn’t sent him envelopes with the feathers themselves enclosed.

What happened next I can only surmise from gossip, written and whispered, from public knowledge and police reports. Oskar paraded our doll around for a few happy weeks. He took her to the market. He dressed her (somehow, over all of those feathers) in a custom gown and sat with her in box seats at the premiere of Die Frau ohne Schatten. He threw parties in her honor, and painted portraits upon portraits of her nude, in fanciful robes, of the two at them looking contemplatively out into the distance. If you look at these portraits, you’ll notice a sort of progression, where one by one Alma becomes all the more human, and Kokoschka all the more doll-like.

I cannot say if she bit him, of course. But I do know that not 6 weeks after she’d arrived, Kokoschka’s neighbors called the police to report a decapitated woman in his yard, who upon closer inspection was our little Galatea, beheaded and drenched in red wine. And I can confirm that soon after that date, my feathers turned molten grey and fell to the floor, and those horrible dreams finally ceased.