In Anima Fatua, Anna Lidia Vega Serova draws on her own experiences of growing up in the late Soviet Union to craft a deeply unsettling coming-of-age novel. In the wake of her parents’ divorce, Alia, the novel’s beguiling protagonist, is forced to negotiate her linguistic, racial, and sexual otherness amid the maelstrom of perestroika. Despite the many horrors to which she is exposed, largely at the hands of the novel’s grim menagerie of male characters, Alia exerts her own agency at every turn. More antihero than tragic victim, Alia responds in kind to the cruelty around her. She confounds and enthrals as she leads us on a harrowing journey through a country on the brink.
Alia struggles to open her eyes, then immediately closes them again; the light awakens her pain, which spreads in waves through her whole body, her body is pain and everything inside is pain too. The sounds she can hear tell her she is not alone, but she can’t work out where she is. Little by little, she remembers worried faces around her, syringes, sirens, long white corridors. She wonders if she might be dreaming and she forces herself to open her eyes again.
A dim, greenish light gently bathes the large room. There are four rows of beds, two in each row. The women in the beds are all wearing identical blue gowns. Alia realises that she is wearing a blue gown too. ‘Where am I?’ She asks herself the obvious question, but she can’t concentrate through the pain; she closes her heavy eyelids—each one seems to weigh a ton—and sinks back into a doughy sleep.
A woman wakes her up with a squeeze of her shoulder. Unlike the other women, this one is wearing a dark green gown. She helps Alia to her feet and leads her down a corridor to a small room, where another woman in a white gown is sat behind a desk. The first woman sits Alia in a chair beside the desk and leaves the room, closing the door behind her. ‘So…’ The woman in white writes something down in a notebook as she talks. ‘What have we got here? Another young woman who’s decided she can solve all her problems by killing herself?’ Her tone shifts as she looks up from her notebook to Alia. ‘How are you feeling?’
She waits a few moments, takes off her spectacles, wipes the lenses on the bottom of her gown and puts them back on.
Her nose is red and fleshy, full of tiny little holes and blood vessels and black dots, a truly ugly nose.
‘It’s okay.’ She smiles and her nostrils flare. ‘You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but it’s a shame. It’s a shame for the both of us. For me, because it makes it harder to help you, and for you, because it’ll mean you have to stay here with us for longer.’
Alia gives no indication that she’s listened to what the woman said. She carries on sitting very upright in the hard metal chair, staring over the woman’s shoulder at a random point on the wall. The woman writes more of her apparently endless notes.
On the way back along the corridor, Alia manages to see into some of the other rooms, all full of women in identical blue gowns. The nurse leaves her in front of her empty bed and goes and sits in a chair out in the corridor.
‘Don’t sleep there,’ says a woman in a blue gown. ‘Everyone who sleeps in that bed dies the next morning.’
Alia tries to tuck the sheet in. It’s hard work because the sheet is too small and it keeps coming out from under the mattress.
‘Don’t sleep there,’ says the woman in the blue gown again, ‘unless you want to wake up dead.’
Alia finally manages to tuck in the sheet, and she lies down in the bed facing the wall.
‘Suit yourself,’ says the woman in the blue gown. ‘Just wait and see, you’ll be dead in the morning. That’s what you’ll get for not listening to me.’
‘Don’t worry,’ says another voice behind her, ‘you can sleep soundly. That one’s got a screw loose.’
‘You’re the maddest of the lot,’ the first woman protests.
Alia closes her eyes to shut out the argument.
There were voices all through the night. Alia tried to ignore them, but all night she was intensely aware of all those women around her in all those identical blue gowns. It wasn’t so much the voices that bothered her as the light. It stopped her from seeing things properly, no matter how tightly she squeezed her eyelids shut. She only opened her eyes when another voice, different to the rest, shouted right in her ear that it was time to get up. She sat up right away, with a slight, sticky shudder. For some inexplicable reason, all the women in the blue gowns had disappeared. The woman in front of her was wearing a dark green gown, but it wasn’t the woman she had seen before. She reminded Alia a little of her mother; perhaps it was the way she spoke, a monologue delivered almost like a howl, or her habit of moving her chin up and down with every pause. Her pauses were brief, and her words merged together into a piercing, incomprehensible wail, like the sound of an alarm. Alia stuck her fingers in her ears and shouted out to stave off her fear. Everything fell silent, then the howl of the green gown began again, then it was joined by another voice, and she felt a short sharp pain in her shoulder. Then little by little, all the identical women came back.
For the first time in a long while, Alia dreamt of her friend Malena back in Cuba. In the dream, Malena was older and she had very long hair. She was wearing black gloves that reached to her elbows. She was laughing the whole time, but at some point she pointed to a red door and said, ‘Open it, they’re knocking.’
Alia hadn’t heard anyone knock and she didn’t want to open the door. Then they were suddenly somewhere else, in a sort of park. Malena ran her black-gloved hands very gently over Alia’s head. Slowly, she began to wake up. She could still feel Malena stroking her hair. She opened her eyes and saw that it was one of the blue-gowned women. This woman had a shaved head, she was smiling, and she was missing a tooth in her upper jaw. When she realised she’d been caught in the act, she burst out laughing and climbed back into the neighbouring bed.
Alia lay awake the rest of the night. She stared at the wall and saw images in the marks and stains. Mostly she imagined they were eyes. Someone had scratched the word PUMA into the paint, almost at the level of her mattress. She read the word over and over until it was stuck in her head.
There were eight beds in the room and the walls were a greyish-green colour. One of them, the wall opposite the corridor, had a small, high window with a bar across it. Behind the bar was a small patch of grey-blue, blue-grey or black sky, depending on the time of day. The women in the beds slept, laughed, chatted among or to themselves, and sometimes shouted. When the shouting got too much, whichever green-gowned woman was on shift would come and jab them in the shoulder with a syringe. If the woman in the blue gown tried to stop the woman in the green gown from jabbing the syringe in her shoulder, another green-gowned woman would come along and restrain her, or between the two of them they would tie her hands and feet to the bed with long towels.
Alia gradually got used to the way things worked there and to her own routine. She swallowed her pills at the scheduled time, ate her meals when they came, slept and went to the toilet, and—on the instructions of the white-gowned woman with the misshapen nose—she drew pictures of men, women, trees and houses. The only thing she didn’t do was speak. No matter how often they asked, demanded, exhorted, she couldn’t get a single word out. Her gaze floated peaceably and innocently over objects and people without pause or fright, a gaze of pure alienation, as though she had lost all connection to reality, all stimulus.
Some of the women in the blue gowns attempted to communicate with her; they gave her cigarettes, the ones they smoked secretly in the bathroom, and they gave her the sweets and chocolates their visitors brought with them, they lavished her with affection and stroked her hair. The woman with the shaved head in the bed next to hers would smile at Alia with her missing tooth and say a blessing for her every night.
‘Puma,’ read Alia as she stared at the wall, ‘puma-puma-puma-puma-puma-puma…’
***
‘You’ve got a visitor,’ announces the nurse in the green gown.
I follow her down the corridor, we turn a corner and there’s another corridor, and at the end, by the window, a painfully familiar figure. I feel my whole body begin to shake, my skin, my bones, my insides.
‘I hate you,’ says the woman by the window and she slaps me on both cheeks.
My back slides slowly down the wall, my legs crumple beneath me and I collapse like a doll without its stuffing.
‘Nurse!’ I hear my mother shout as she tries to get me to my feet. ‘Help!’
Back in my bed, I feel something burst inside my chest; it’s the bag where I’ve been storing up all my pain, and I cry uncontrollably, I cry, cry, cry. Someone holds me, lulls me like a little child, another person pulls me violently away from those soothing hands, they give me the toxic injection in my shoulder, they tie me down, immobilise me. I can still feel the pitying eyes of the woman in the next bed, her hand tracing a cross in the air again and again, her mouth murmuring words of comfort, then I lose myself without trace in an empty, frozen labyrinth.
***
Vera smiles and offers me an orange. She is the most beautiful person I know, even though she’s missing a tooth and all her hair. I take a deep sniff of the orange, closing my eyes and inhaling the scent of my childhood; I bite into the peel and an intense bitterness fills my mouth. I’m in Cuba again, I can taste its soil.
‘That’s enough tears,’ says Vera, and she brushes my cheek with her fingers; I know she wants to give me a hug, but it’s against the hospital rules.
To take my mind off things, she tells me stories about the mad women of the hospital, tales of sad women and their absurd fates. While I chew on my orange peel and cry, Vera tells me her theory of madness, life and death. She didn’t invent it; it was revealed to her by the voices.
Vera’s doctrine
This world and everything in it were conceived by a harmonious and intangible intellect that we usually refer to as God, though it could take any other name. The elements carry its imprint; they are everlasting and exist in harmony, and they are bound eternally to the mind of the creator. Over the course of our existence, humans have gradually lost our ability to perceive this bond, though we are always searching for it in one way or another. Nevertheless, there are among us certain creatures whose individual will is weak, and who, as a consequence, have a heightened sensitivity which allows them to perceive more intensely the bonds linking them to the supreme force. Some of these people achieve such an intimate connection that they are elevated irrevocably to a higher plane, and others label this difference either enlightenment, sainthood or madness. The majority of so-called ‘lunatics’ are nothing more than beings who have achieved proximity to the divine. Many of them hear its voice and others have powers that we call miracles, though in fact they are gifts within all our grasp, even if few of us ever manage to attain them. We are not mortal, although in this projection we have a limited duration, and we have absolute freedom to determine our actions and our destinies. Our movements form a perpetually mutating image, akin to a vast, exquisite kaleidoscope.
Vera speaks slowly and it does me good to listen to her voice. However, I don’t believe a word of what she says. It all sounds very nice, but where is all the suffering that most of the women brought here experience? The world is unjust and arbitrary, full of random cruelty, sorrows, cataclysms and incongruences. My friendship with Vera is proof of that: today we are having a conversation, today she has given me an orange, and tomorrow we will be separated, tomorrow I have to leave. My mother has come to take me home.
