Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  If you looked at them from the outside, it would have been easy and simple, and best, in fact, to see them as a single unit. The deaf sisters: nocturnal demons, mythological creatures who were doomed to make a little noise and then sink to watery depths. It was tempting to throw a rock at the two of them, although most didn’t bother, because Lili would pick it up and throw it right back.

  The Building Association brought them in for a conversation. They sat there. They joined hands. They didn’t hear. After some time, the two were declared a lost cause. As it was with the girls, so must it be with the parents; as everyone knows, it always starts at home. They couldn’t be reached. They were inaccessible. Severe retardation, whispered whoever whispered it, and the rumor spread all the way to deaf ears.

  Maybe they laughed in the committee members’ faces. It depends on who is telling the story. Maybe their laughter was insane, impetuous, the laughter of one who cannot hear herself. Because time is a thread one can tie in a knot and suddenly what was and what will be are nearly the same. But that evening, they continued sitting in the tree, hanging from it with surprisingly strong legs, hair dangling down, Lili’s red mixed with Dori’s brown, a screen through which they saw all there was. Which wasn’t much.

  They enjoyed scaring everyone; what can you do? Casting their terror down on the residents of the building, who gave the tree a wide berth. They would conquer and rule. Queens without a crown. They could have gone up to the city on elephants and torched it all if they weren’t scared of fire. A few months had passed since Uncle Noah built them a platform of equal-sized beams fastened with long nails to the forking branches. Their hold on the tree was complete. This is the world under the moon, Lili declared, and Dori agreed, even though only on rare occasions did they remain among the branches until it was late enough to see a pale moon reflecting down on them. From their perch they stuck out their tongues at whoever dared to draw near. And perhaps spat on them as well. One way or another, they were the stuff of the neighborhood’s nightmares. And they knew what was said about them.

  Children know. Girls know, even if they’re deaf as a rock. If someone objected to the spectacle of two girls up in a tree and many children taunting them from down below, these with stones and those sticking out their tongues, someone would be found to appease him; someone would be quick to pull out the triumphant, circular argument: “Children will be children.” And someone would add, “This is nothing compared with what’s coming for them. They won’t always be treated so nice.” In any case, the girls didn’t hear a thing. The silence surrounded them like insulation, like that button on the television that mutes the world.

  It was good and easy to float on the surface of this lie, as if on an inflatable mattress in a pool of turquoise water. And whoever drowned, drowned.

  Because, yes, they were very bad. But deep in their hearts they were Exemplary Little Girls, just like in the book. They repeated the words to themselves: “They were completely happy, the nice little girls, and their mother loved them fiercely; and all the people who knew them also loved them and sought to bring them pleasure.” That is, girls like that did exist. Not them—others, Nicole and Claudette, Mirabelle and Bat-El, that kind. With a mother who loved them completely, with all love’s strength. Right behind the girls who hurled apples, near the girls with the dirty legs and the barbaric habits and the birth defect—because that’s what was said about them, they knew—there resided two girls with fine habits and table manners. Girls on whom the world waited to serve delights on a silver platter and who would say in the language of humans, pinkish tongues rising up and brushing the palate, merci merci and ooh la la. They hailed from somewhere in France, with noble titles and lace napkins, with servants and coachmen and tales of tragedy in which the poor were the only ones to die. Like Cosette from Les Misérables, who actually, Dori recalled, ended up alive and well. Perhaps only Dori saw them this way, and Lili had given up on the old game some time ago, but Dori never forgot: the two of them were exemplary little girls. And therefore maybe they were happy too. But no happiness was to be seen in them, unfortunately. “I beg of you,” Dori practiced, trying to form the actual words with the aid of her lips, as the hearing do. “Oh, please, good sir. If you could please forgive me.” She knew how to bow, to let a handkerchief drop, to look out with a courageous gaze toward the horizon that was nothing but the hallway leading to the den, without the need of smelling salts. One day, she believed, her knowledge would be put to use.

  Because in her heart (the heart swelling with blood, the heart working nonstop, emptying and filling, as hearts must), she could choose to ignore their two sticky faces, which they always forgot to wash; the hair they didn’t comb, with knot after knot instead of smooth, silky tresses; the books they left bloated with water in the bath. In her heart, the resolutely stuck-out tongues melted away, and so did the eyes that rolled up in their sockets at the sight of them. They could abandon the faces they wore, like empty masks, frightening the world before it could frighten them. She could set aside the lousy game of hopscotch they played by themselves, inventing rules until darkness fell and they had to go back. Kittens wouldn’t go dying on them because it was impossible to bring them home and they shook inside the cardboard box in the backyard until they didn’t. In her heart, all was very refined. The cats were well cared for and groomed and blue ribbons were tied around their necks, and the two of them were Dora and Lilith, clean and puffy-cheeked, round-eyed like the dolls they didn’t play with, with perfect manners and foreign names that finally suited them. Who would have believed that inside those two disturbed girls, the ones all the parents warned their children about (as they knew, they always knew), there waited two good, polite, likable girls, drinking tea from delicate cups? Even if people thought that they were crazy and defective, they knew their own true natures. And this, of course, is the most precious knowledge of all.

  There were other children on their street. What kind of street doesn’t have children? A sad street, and their street definitely wasn’t sad. They were the sadness in it, yes, that was true. A negligible statistical deviation on a street with children who were otherwise bright-eyed and exceptionally skilled at sports. Nourished entirely by cream and fruit. Children who played games that involved chalk drawings on the street, sticks, and rocks. Clean and dirty children, disturbed and good children. Children who gathered under a tree until apples and rocks were thrown down at them. Children who were shown with the movement of two fingers how easy it was to cut off wings, ears—everything, actually. Clipping and cutting. Dividing and conquering. And that bit above, that no one bothered the girls? That was a nice little lie. Yes, most preferred not to get mixed up with them, but that doesn’t mean that no one did. It doesn’t mean a thing.

  No one remembers childhood as it was, bad and hard and strewn with teeth poking up out of the ground. You forget that childhood is a time with more monsters than heroes. It really seems to you that it was pleasant: the colors were strong, the smells sweet. Adventures waited around every corner, and oh, how many corners there were! You saw frogs and toads, hedgehogs and cats, and all this even if you grew up in the city, in an apartment block near a puddle that dried up in summer and teemed with life in winter. And the grass and the apples gave off such a good smell and the earth had a good smell and Mother too, and in those years it seemed that this would be enough. You played detective; you caught a thief; you acted honestly and courageously. You earned your just rewards, and this seemed fair enough to you. Because even if you didn’t dare venture to the puddle when the others were there, and even if the breeze carried stories about children who drowned in the puddle, you didn’t drown. Allow me to bless you—how lucky you were!

  After you fall, it seems very easy to get back up. So you fall and get up and forget that you fell, or at least you shake off the dirt and the teeny stones from your knee and know, because they taught you, that it’s nonsense, there’s nothing to be done about it, everyone falls. I fell, and here I am today. A
nd they did too, because this is their story, after all, not yours. Dori and Lili fell and got back up so often it appeared to be their regular mode of walking. They say that deaf people have balance problems, but that’s not true. If they throw stones at you, you fall, until you get used to falling. But not from the tree. Never from the tree.

  In Dori’s eyes, the other children were a cluster, like a bunch of grapes. Everyone grew on the same stalk, close together and quite similar, waiting to ripen and explode from too much juicy sweetness. Usually she didn’t think about them—too bad, because if you don’t think, how will you learn? Perhaps Lili thought on her behalf and reached her own conclusions. They didn’t need anyone but themselves. They would make progress. They had books and finger puppets and notebooks and the language. So Dori didn’t think about the others. She feared only wolves, and Lili told her they were just kids; they’d never be wolves. And Lili opened her mouth wide to show her younger sister that her teeth were actually pretty sharp, even though half of them were still baby teeth. “If there’s a wolf here, it’s me,” she announced.

  But Dori didn’t believe Lili any more than Lili believed herself. Dori knew that her sister was a bird, at most, definitely not a wolf, and that her teeth weren’t as sharp as she hoped. Because the marks that Lili left in the world were quite faint. A long time ago, when Dori was still small, like a peanut with hands, like a baby kangaroo that must climb into its mother’s pouch or die, Lili came home with a split lip and a torn collar. A whole lock of hair was missing from the middle of her head, leaving a smooth, round patch like a coin. And there were unexplained scratches on her arms. And there was also a doll, its eyes suddenly gouged out, and then abandoned; there was the repeated bed-wetting at night that dragged with it scoldings about immaturity, a rubber sheet stretched tight. There were signs, if not from Lili’s hands. But she would write all this down one day, and Dori would read it.

  When they asked her, and of course they asked, she said something about a dog with stripes. A dog that wanted a cake. But Dori’s blood inside her body told her that it was the hearing kids. If anyone ate cake, it was them, and not some stray dog. Because Lili was never scared of dogs, not even after all that. Ever since, their parents had stopped making her go outside to make friends, to breathe the fresh air. There was enough air up in the tree, “perfect for photosynthesis,” as their father admitted. In any case, their parents didn’t understand the desperate human need for company. The girls invented new ways to speak; they hung upside down like bats, like pendulums in old clocks, as two who went forth to learn what fear was. They both feared the women they would turn into when they got older, women without a voice, without a single unique quality. Like the little mermaid who lost both her tail and her voice, whose best option was to turn into a statue.

  Sadly, neither of them resembled Anna, who was beautiful. They always knew they didn’t resemble their parents at all, neither Anna nor Alex. They didn’t inherit anything important from them, not the impressive lines of their father’s face, not their mother’s freckles or profile or turbulent tears. When Dori stood in profile, Lili examined her and pronounced that, yes, Dori resembled Noah a bit. But even if the two of them were born from a cabbage or found in a box of matches or in a bottle of baby shampoo, they couldn’t imagine not having been, or no longer being, Ackerman’s deaf girls. And to a large extent they always would be.

  * * *

  Anton looked at Dori, who was again startled by how handsome he was. Handsome and lazy. She saw the wealth that ran in his blood, the obvious pedigree. It was like being handed a doll that was too beautiful and fearing it would be taken away, even hurrying to lose it on her own, breaking an arm or nose as if to ward off bad luck. As he always did at this time, he asked her about her childhood, his hands resting behind his back, quite perfect. His nose was perfect. He looked as if there was no more comfortable and relaxing position in the world, and Dori was amazed again at how he did this. It was a talent, she decided. Dori had learned that he felt comfortable anywhere, even if he chose to display open disgust.

  He wasn’t the first who’d asked to hear about her and Lili (though he called her Lilith, with an almost-whistling th at the end of her name, and Dori didn’t really correct him). Dori knew that he too was searching for a hidden truth, one attached not to biography but to something deeper, to the bones. A vein of gold. When he expressed interest in her, her advantage stood like a sword drawn from stone. All at once she had something that he wanted from her other than her body (beneath the formless clothes, exceeding the low expectations he bothered to display, her body impressed him time after time).

  Dori was small, very small. From a distance one might think that she was still a girl. She dressed like a child who had stumbled into an unfamiliar wardrobe and wrapped herself up in an abundance of colorful outfits, geometrical patterns, clashing colors; it was always a mishmash. Spotted stockings enveloped thin legs inside high boots the color of spilled wine. Not to mention the chewed nails, painted like springtime beetles. She cut her bangs herself and spread a black line above each eyelid. The impression she made was extravagant but not jovial. She was tiny but not sweet. From the age of nine, she knew her face wouldn’t allow it.

  * * *

  And in the meantime they learned to be careful and to look. As in the ancient maps, their tree was the center of the world. Sometimes they still referred to the city they built in its branches as the world under the moon. Sometimes they forgot about it, the way one forgets a doll from early childhood: almost entirely. Forgetting on purpose. And if the moon was up above, white and indifferent like a third uncle, illuminated in borrowed light, to the south of them was the Sea of Mockery that spilled onto the faces watching them. They knew. To the west was home. To the north they saw the lands of Adi and Adi, bright-haired girls, fast-moving and tanned from all those hours in the sun. Of course they knew what people called them; how couldn’t they know? One can understand the world even without the help of ears. In any case, they knew that Adi and Adi, pug-nosed and straight-haired, hated them with a burning hatred, just as they knew that on the eastern side of the map, at the end of the street, there lived Uriel Savyon. He was a year younger than Lili and a year older than Dori. Uriel Savyon: he’d been sent to blend in. They put hearing aids on him. His arms moved mechanically as if they were made from metal, and their father nodded at him: “The boy is a lost cause. They made him a robot.” They looked at him from the tree as he walked to the side of the street, his nose running and his ears covered in earmuffs that somehow only accentuated the hearing aids. Each and every day, Uriel Savyon dragged his feet to the school that the two of them saw from the inside only once. Dori recalled the old illustration that showed every man, woman, child, and cat carrying bundles and bundles of air on their backs, an unseen weight pulling them earthward. That was gravitational pull. Or maybe just gravity. Either way, with Uriel Savyon it was clear as day. Clear as night. “He suffers under the burden of the worst expectations one could imagine.” Dori repeated the things their father had said, and each nodded to the other like a person whose fate is looking up, like someone whose hands are empty and free, ready only to sign.

  In those years, Dori knew for certain what Lili wanted and what she didn’t. What this meant was that she could reach her hand into Lili’s throat and retrieve the desire, like a surgeon who removes an internal organ and then puts it back in place, all polished. The desire was primarily something she didn’t want: not to be like Uriel Savyon; not to be like the other girls; not to be like Mother. In the future it would be simpler. Lili would want to write, and Dori to read, and maybe the opposite. But then the desires would still make their own demands. They were two greedy girls who sucked the sugar from everything, who saved candy wrappers, who would lick tree bark if they thought it was sweet. And even if they had been raised differently, even if they straightened their backs on a board at night and refrained from luxuries, the two of them would have wanted and wanted and wanted. And Dori, as m
uch as she wanted, instinctively knew that the world was only what it could be. And in this world, moving a toothpick required the strength of a thousand horses and a hundred elephants. Better to suck on another candy. But no, they didn’t have to move a toothpick from here to there—they had a role, a mission that was given to them like heads on a golden platter. Only, by chance, the heads were theirs.

  And for a long time, longer than you might suppose, they were left alone. The Ackerman family existed like weeds by the main road. They lived off the good hands and the good eyes of Alex Ackerman, off the residual savings of their mother, Anna Ackerman. After all, they didn’t need much. Their father collected metal throughout the city and knew how to sell it to the right man. He had a talent for finding half-precious metal sparkling in the sun, glittering inside a pile of nothing. But he had nothing against simple metal either. So he dragged the rusty skeleton of a bed from the edge of a field and Dori and Lili ran after him, moving their hands too much while running, like eager cats after the butcher for scraps. They always hoped they’d encounter one of the golden metals, the names of which they recalled from legends and lands beyond the sea. Their father never got rich—after all, he was just an Ackerman, not a Rothschild—but he didn’t collect junk, like they’d say afterward. Only metal. The letters on the back of his van spelled two words, without a telephone number: THE DEAF. Better that they know in advance, he explained, and they understood. The two of them believed that their father really saw pieces of metal hiding in the ground, just as he could tell with one look if the man facing him was a lecher, a coward, an exploiter feeding off the weakness of others, or just an idiot. For years, Dori kept an old catalog of metals her father gave her; the edges of the pages were already starting to bend back then. She never was good at protecting the things that were dear to her heart.