Haunted Doll

Antiques roadshows are not all they’re cracked up to be. It isn’t always a man in a nice suit telling you that a shattered watch you found in your late grandfather’s attic is actually worth $10,000. My experience was mostly standing awkwardly in a crowded convention center trying to find someone who would talk to me. I even bought a classy black dress for the occasion, hoping that it would somehow help my chances of leaving with a nice pay day. My arms were wrapped around a small cardboard box, holding what I hoped to be my jackpot. 

            I pushed my way through the crowd and in the far corner of the room I spotted an open booth. In it was a tweed suited man sitting contently at his desk. He spotted me coming towards him and stood up to greet me. He was tall but held himself like a short man. His receding hairline was parted down the middle, which didn’t do him any favors, and his hand was clammy as it slipped into mine for a shake. 

            “Archie Rivers,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

            “Joanna Teeg,” I replied. 

            “So what do we have here?” He inquired, gesturing to the cardboard box in my arms.

            I handed over the box and took a seat in the uncomfortable, plastic chair across from his desk. Archie daintily opened up the flaps of the box like they were the pages of an old, worn book. I studied his reaction to what he found inside. He squinted and pressed his lips into a flat line of apprehension. I held my breath as he gingerly removed a small porcelain doll from the box. He lifted the doll with only the tips of his fingers, as if he thought the pads of his hands might contaminate it. 

            The doll was tiny, maybe three inches tall. It was meant to be a young girl, but time had since faded any of its feminine features. It was designed almost like a snowman with three rounded parts for the head, torso, and feet. There were ghosts of pink, blue, and black on it that once made up the doll’s painted dress. Its face was almost completely gone except for a single curved engraving where the mouth should’ve been. The only other mark was under its foot, where there was an H-like symbol carved into the porcelain. It had looked like that since I was a kid and just the sight of it brought back memories.  

            I remembered how my great-grandmother used to scold me whenever I stole the doll off her banister. I always wanted to make it the “ugly” friend among my Barbies. The only time anyone ever struck me as a child was because of that doll. The old woman swatted my hand with a ruler when she caught me reaching for it. My mother refused to speak to her for months after that and she died not long after. 

            At that point, my grandmother had already passed leaving my mom as the only inheritor to all my great-grandma’s junk. While we were packing up her house, I hid the doll in my jacket. I assumed that no one would miss it. That night, I threw a sheet over my head and stared at the doll in the yellow brightness of a flashlight. It may have just been the effect of the nighttime and the quiet and the dark, but that was when the horror of the doll became clear to me. Now that it was mine and not someone else’s, it had changed. Like the doll came with a debt that hadn’t been paid. I hid it under my bed, hoping I’d forget about it by the morning. 

            A few weeks later, my mom found the doll. She yelled at me for hiding it from her, but it seemed like she wanted nothing to do with it either. It was placed in a box in our basement and left to rot. 

            When I was a little older, I was brave enough to ask her about it. She told me that my great-grandmother grew up in Poland. There she fell in love with a soldier. They had a daughter together and the soldier gave her the doll before he went to battle. He never returned. My great-grandmother eventually married the man I grew up thinking was my great-grandfather. My mom said that the doll was always a reminder of that loss which is why it was important to keep but not to show off. I couldn’t have been older than ten when we had that conversation, but even then, I could tell she was keeping something from me. My mom died a few months before I took the doll to the antique roadshow. As a final act of grieving, I decided to rid our family of the doll that seemed to drag everyone down. 

            I blinked out of my flashback and noticed that Archie had pulled out a magnifying glass to examine the doll. His face was flushed red as if he’d been holding his breath. He had turned the figurine ninety degrees so that the bottom of its feet was facing him. I could tell he was studying the mysterious H symbol. 

            “No one in my family has ever been able to figure out what that means,” I added. “Our best guess is that the shop owner may have put it on there for some reason.”

            Archie carefully set the doll back into the bubble wrapped safety of the box. He cupped his hands over his mouth and closed his eyes. For a second, I thought he was praying. 

            “Is everything ok?” I asked. 

            Archie opened his eyes and nodded. 

            “Yes…yes,” he said. “I’m just thinking of where to begin.”

            He paused again, nervously biting the inside of his cheek. I wanted to yell at him to spit it out but thought that might scare him away. I decided to be patient. He leaned forward on the desk and beckoned me to join him. 

            “Do you know where you got it from?” He asked.

            “It was my great-grandmother’s. My great grandpa gave it to my grandma before he died in battle.”

            Archie nodded again and my patience with him was already beginning to thin. 

            “Which war did your great grandfather die in?”

            “Um…World War 2, I think? They lived in Poland so that would make sense.”

            “That would make sense,” Archie mumbled

            “Ok, man. I’m done with the cryptic stuff. Is the doll worth anything or not?”

            Archie hesitated again and leaned back in his chair. I rolled my eyes and plucked the box off the desk, ready to abandon this venture and just go to a pawn shop when Archie grabbed my wrist.

            “That doll is more valuable to you in a landfill than anywhere else,” he whispered.

            I turned back to him, confused. I settled back into my seat and put the box in my lap.

            “What do you mean?”

            “That carving on the bottom, it isn’t from the shop owner,” he explained. “It’s the symbol of the SS.” 

            “What?” I said, probably too loud.

            Within a second, the magnifying glass was in my hand pointed at the bottom of the doll’s feet. Due to years of erosion, the carving looked like a slanted H to the naked eye. Under the glass, however, I could make out two separate carvings: a pair of sharp, thunderbolt-like S’s. The more I stared at them, the more sweat built up on my brow.

            “Are you saying my great-grandfather got this from a Nazi?” I asked.

            Archie stared back at me for a second. It looked as if this interaction had aged his face. He didn’t know how to say what he was about to say.

            “You said your great-grandfather was a soldier,” he said. “Did anyone ever tell you what side he was fighting for?”

            “No…no. That’s not possible.”

            “The SS routinely stole from those they oppressed in Eastern Europe. Sometimes they marked what they stole and some of that stuff made it back to the rightful owners…after the war. But if you’re great grandma met him when you said she did…”

            “No, no, no.”

            “She almost certainly got the doll from a—” 

            “Don’t say it!”

            Archie shut up and looked away. I was still holding the doll in my hands. A wave of disgust washed over me, and I dropped it into the box with no care for its fragility. Gusts of comprehension struck me. The reason my great-grandmother was so protective of it and why my mother wanted nothing to do with it, all suddenly made sense. What I couldn’t get a grasp on was why my mother had kept it at all. 

            There was something she told me once that hit me in that moment. She said it after I asked why she forgave my great grandma for hitting me. “Family is like a broken picture frame hung on the wall,” she said. She never explained what it meant, but I finally understood it. And I thought it was bullshit.

            When I finally came out of my trance of self-pity, Archie was still sitting there waiting for me to explode on him. I put the box back on the desk and slid it to his side.

            “Could you find who this originally belonged to?” I asked.

            “Maybe,” he replied. “But we don’t even know if they survived the Holocaust, let alone if they’d remember one doll.” 

            “But it’s possible, right?” 

            “Technically. And we can always donate it to the National Holocaust Museum if all else fails.”

            That backup plan made me feel a lot better, but I still felt helpless. What was I supposed to do against the monumental force of history? How could I make that better? I would learn not long after that all I could do was live my life as if I was the janitor cleaning up the mess of everyone who had come before. 

            “Can I pay you to look into that for me? Like finding the family or donating it?” I asked Archie.

            “You don’t have to—”

            “No. I want to. I need to.”

            Archie smiled for the first time since I’d met him. Even with the box on the other end of the desk, I could still see the doll. Part of me wanted to close it and tape it shut forever, but that wouldn’t fix anything. I needed to look at it, I needed to face it, and, eventually, I needed to accept it. That’s all we can do in the face of our history. Accept it and move forward.