[FICTION]

[01/09/26]

Radish

by Yurii Tokar

Eleven-year-old Alyonka came to the Yevpatoria children’s health center, Zhemchuzhinka, in the summer of 2011 from a small Ukrainian city where there were several factories. Her parents were poor, but they managed to buy Alyonka an expensive ticket so that she could leave her microdistrict, melting in the factory’s coke-chemical smoke, and have a three-week vacation in Crimea.

I worked with a group of children there as an educator. The girl was in this group. Alyonka did not cry or feel sad about being away from home and her parents, whom she left for twenty-one days, as many other schoolchildren do in the first days of vacation in health resorts. She did not isolate herself from her peers. On the contrary, she quickly made friends with the girls, her roommates, and then with the boys of her own age, despite the fact that the group included children not only from different cities but also from different countries—Russia, Ukraine, Belarus.

At times, it seemed to me that the sixth-grader lived in some kind of invented world of her own, even though she was still present in our world. In some incomprehensible way, these worlds united in the girl’s mind. But don’t adults live in a world of their own making? What can we say about a child then?

Alyonka had a toy—a small, light pink, plush dog, which the girl called Radish. When I first noticed this toy in the child’s hands, I made the mistake of asking, “What is the name of your teddy bear?”

“It’s a dog, Radish,” the girl answered seriously, not offended by my lack of insight.

“Ah... ah, well, yes, of course, a dog. Sorry, I was wrong,” I conceded, taking the toy creature in my hands and examining it carefully. “That’s right, a dog, now I see. And why does she have such a name?”

Alyonka could not explain the origin of the mysterious creature’s name and therefore just shrugged her shoulders.

The sixth-grader almost never parted with Radish, but the girls in her room often laughed at the way Alyonka treated the toy as her best friend and even fell asleep in bed with it in her arms. Several times, while she slept, her friends hid Radish behind one of the beds, in a closet, or somewhere else, and then laughed as Alyonka looked for her favorite toy and  called out:

“Radish, where are you? Where are you? I have to find you, Radish!”

After spending a few minutes, Alyonka always found her imaginary friend. At the same time, the girls treated Alyonka kindly and they didn’t hide the toy in order to make fun of her. They just didn’t realize that they were hurting the girl.

One day, Alyonka came up to me with tears in her eyes. When I saw the girl, I was sure that she would start complaining about her neighbors, who had probably hidden her dog again. But Alyonka did not complain about anyone, instead, holding the dog in her hands with difficulty, as if forcing herself, she asked, “Can I leave Radish with you and pick her up on the day I leave for home? I think the dog will be safer in your room, but I will come once a day to look at her. Can I?”

“Yes, of course, you can,” I answered, somewhat dumbfounded.

Alyonka indeed came to visit Radish every morning and whispered something in her ear while I walked around the rooms, waking the children up for exercise. On the day of departure, the girl happily took her dog.

YURII TOKAR was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union. He graduated from Dnipropetrovsk State University in 1988 and began teaching mathematics and physics in the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster. His stories, essays, and poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in several countries, including Ukraine, Germany, and the United States.