The four of us formed a gang, developing a kind of friendship, even if the vast majority of our time together was spent discussing the practical aspects of our toys’ dying process. There were two boys and one girl in the group besides me. The fact that our mothers wanted their boys to set aside their plush toys at a certain age was more or less understandable, but I have the impression that parents are less strict with girls in this respect. A girl can play with these toys for a longer period of time – my therapist agrees with me on this – it is socially acceptable for a girl to keep them even into adulthood. Still, the girl’s plush toy, Ferkó, got infected with the sickness all the same.

Vili more or less stagnated the first two weeks; only the rupture in his armpit had apparently been growing bigger, and the thread had started to loosen in other areas as well – at his foot, at the edge of his hand where he had black claws made of cotton. By the end of the second weekend his fur started to fade. During this period Vili’s voice in my head was calming. He kept my spirits up, as if I were the sick one, not him. I often fell asleep listening to his voice.

Unfortunately during this time I sometimes wet the bed. My therapist says that’s normal, it’s called regression, an emotional reaction which entails going back to a former stage of development. After a while, I stopped sleeping with Vili because I didn’t want to stain his fur. My mother was not very happy with the bedwetting, and I was well aware that it was a sign of weakness. My mother would shake her head impatiently and sigh heavily to express her discontent, and I would stand in the middle of my room in shame, shaking in the coldness of dawn, but Vili’s voice gave me comfort even then.

Then things took a turn for the worse.

One day I came home from school and found Vili on the floor, the stitching on his side split open and the white stuffing pouring out of him. My heart sank. I thought Vili had died while I was at school. But I could hear his voice, very quiet, weary with pain, but still clear. Vili was alive. I picked him up carefully in my shaking hands, which only caused him to lose more stuffing; my throat went dry from panic, I could hardly breathe. I laid Vili on my bed and tried to hold his wound together. I couldn’t sew, and I despised myself for that. In the end, I applied super glue to the edges of the wound and held the material together while I whispered to Vili that everything was going to be all right, although I knew that nothing was ever going to be all right again.