And Now a Word from Stalin...Maybe
“Denial is the first impulse of a traitor.”
Akhmed’s response to another character making this metaphor during conversation is an accusatory, “You’re quoting Stalin.” While the quote is attributed to Stalin in a famous political thriller by another writer, the evidence supporting Akhmed’s accusatory tone is ambiguous at best. While Stalin may have said it on a number of occasions and almost certainly believed it, solid attribution is prickly at best. Nevertheless, it is a fine metaphorical composition.
Metaphorical Layers
“This hospital is a madhouse.”
Akhmed himself makes this observation out loud and, in turn, receives an accusatory response from an offended new mother. The term “madhouse” has a certain connotation in regard to hospital settings, as the woman’s scornful look regarding the state of her newborn’s sanity implies. For a long period of time, a “madhouse” was a hospital in name only; treatment of its patients tended to resemble more that of inmates by jailers. Today, of course, the phrase carries the weight of a very famous pop culture reference: Charlton Heston’s astronaut’s outrage at finding himself on a planet where ape evolved from men.
Out of the Mouths of Babes
A little girl gets her first taste of a chocolate-flavored energy bar and is told it’s a cookie. It only takes one bite to confirm that it is not a cookie. So she is told it is flavored to taste like a cookie. To which the little girl replies:
“How can something be flavored like a cookie and not be a cookie?”
Now, That's a Skinny Girl!
The narrator at one point recalls Natasha and Sonja enjoying hide-and-seek as children. Natasha possess an attribute that have given her quite an advantage, but somehow didn’t:
“Natasha was slender enough to hide behind a broomstick, but Sonja always found her.”
But Only Skinny on the Outside
Sonja will much later try to describe the missing Natasha to border guards, camp officials and others, but explicitly bemoans her capacity to transform physical fact into efficient metaphor:
“how could an instrument as blunted as language express one as strange and fleeting as Natasha?”
