Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  The two of them learned that day about Columbus’s egg, and Dori tried to concentrate on the arrogant Spaniards who thought they could do what Columbus did. She wondered if it didn’t make sense to break the top of the egg so that it would stand up straight. She knew that if her father sat around the table with Columbus when he returned from his travels, he would find his own way to stand an egg on its head. She knew that this foundation, which their father called healthy logic, drew near and evaded her again. She continued to read until Arad came and sat down beside her and asked her about the village and her dolls and Dori didn’t know how to answer. He suggested that she write the answers down. “Like some sort of Pocahontas,” Lili would say later on. But Dori knew that was wrong. That she was Columbus and Arad was the Spaniard who needed to be shown how to stand an egg on its head. Dori smiled at Arad and wrote in his notebook almost everything he wanted to know.

  * * *

  What did you tell him? Anton asked her.

  I told you. What he wanted to know.

  It seemed to her that Anton was jealous of her first listener, even though she didn’t utter a single word into Arad’s ears, just wrote and wrote. And as if to console Anton, she finally told him that Arad was interested in her only because he was writing a thesis that focused on “The Advantages of Homeschooling in Difficult Cases.”

  Afterward he published it as a book, and I was the difficult case. One of them, anyway. The girl D., the deaf girl with Columbus’s egg. For years the book was quite popular, she said, like someone with a stake in the matter. She didn’t look at him as she spoke. I read his thesis a few years ago, she added, and meant the research itself, and not the book, which was much less detailed and drifted into other stories, and she resisted telling him about the day she spent in the library reading the description of her, which was made up of lies and a strange truth and gave her hot and cold stabbing sensations. And later on, when they found out? Anton asked, leaning, interested, on his elbows. Ah, it was already too late then. And probably for him too, Dori answered, as if she didn’t really know what happened to him.

  * * *

  Their mother was the one who told them, while she was still battling the spiderwebs that had set up shop in every corner during the long years in which the house had been abandoned. And they said—not their mother, someone else—they said that the man who lived there before had shot himself after his lover went back to her husband. That was why the house was so cheap. Or maybe it was actually the deserted lover who took her life. But Anna Ackerman refused to elaborate; the two of them had their doubts whether she knew anything at all. But they knew.

  Girls know things. Even the deaf ones. Vibrations pass through the earth. Winds blow. The winds blowing through the village undoubtedly whispered into their deaf ears, those evil winds that tore away laundry, laundered and stretched out again, dirtied by the village’s holy soil, adorned with marks that said it all. But their mother couldn’t hear anything or read any marks. Definitely not then. As if she were blind in addition to everything else. Approaching a certain holy status. The two of them pondered between themselves how long it would take for blood to pool on the cement floor. And who had found the dead lover (they decided that it was actually she who died, and not the man with the rifle; that way it was more romantic) and if her eyes were open or closed. Dori imagined that she was very beautiful, with folded hands and a long, beautiful name, but as much as she tried she couldn’t link letter to letter or picture her right before her eyes, perhaps only her palms, which were definitely white as snow or sugar, loaded with rings given to her by the living or dead lover. No one had an inkling of what they knew about the case. There were more urgent items on the agenda.

  The Ackerman family, understand, had plenty of its own to deal with and had no need for village fables, as Anna Ackerman would announce at every opportunity: “We have more than enough on our plate.” Once, she admitted that this was what her mother, the grandmother whom Lili and Dori never met, used to say. Lili argued that at least that stupid saying of their mother’s pointed to Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Maybe their grandmother was the queen of England. They had no other evidence.

  Another week passed. “Put out your hand,” their father instructed them. The smell of whitewash no longer wafted from the main room, the only room that was ever whitewashed, but its walls were still very white, like sugar or snow. Seven boxes still stood there, one on top of another, and it didn’t seem that anyone would ever tear the packing tape and remove from their innards the kitchen utensils, or the winter clothes and boots and toys that could be used by much smaller children. Dori thought that perhaps they would keep on living like this forever, and in the end no one would remember what was in the boxes, and only in a thousand years would researchers come and, thanks to the boxes, come to understand something about their ancient culture. Instead the boxes were eventually opened and everything more or less found its place and children’s toys kept rolling around the house, as if the two of them had any interest in a smiley phone on four wheels. Their father smiled and each girl obediently raised her right hand, which in a single moment transformed from a simple speaking appendage into an actual hand. “The thumb is the king,” he explained. “Or the queen,” Lili added, and he agreed, with a smile. “The whole royal family, in Buckingham Palace. But as a shortcut, the king. Next to him, the pointer, she’s the merchant whose task it is to finance the king’s wars.” “And the palace too,” Lili added, and their father said, “Yes.”

  “And the middle finger, she’s the soldier who will fight for him in the wars. And next to her is the worker whose labor they steal.” By this stage they no longer understood a thing, but they smiled the rest of the way through. This was no longer a story about a king and a queen, as they’d hoped, but the two of them noticed that only the pinky hadn’t been given a role. When Lili finally mentioned this, their father didn’t get mad. His eyes lit up, and they understood that they had gotten to the point. “The pinky is us—the artist. The beggar. The fool. The deaf. That’s us. We’ll begin as fools and beggars and in the end we will become their saints. This way, with our finger, we can overpower the entire hand. Thus kingdoms fall. Thus they rise. Remember.”

  * * *

  In the village, the Ackerman family flourished like couch grass, which flowers beautifully when left untended. Suddenly it seemed that the unwelcome weed was a sumptuous bloom. So, in fact, when the village’s welcoming committee arrived, they didn’t know that they were at the door and didn’t let them in. The braided challah and the small container of salt were left in the doorway, and only two days later did Dori bring them inside. No one ate them. Their mother went out for air again and again, to turn over the beds, to battle the pests with teeth bared. To the nearby houses, one after the other, came their father’s followers—“les misérables,” they called them, “the beggars.” Dori and Lili laughed so hard they had to hold their stomachs. With a discerning eye, Lili looked at Salman and Gita and declared them “ducks,” and so they were: quacking away, unable to fly. This especially suited Gita, whose speech always reminded them of wings flapping, and, in fact, when Gita caught Dori in the shade of the house, she explained that when she was a “little-little girl, littler than Dori,” they didn’t let her sign their language, and tied her hands behind her back, here, like this: she demonstrated a rope’s imaginary grip on her wrists, and Dori noticed that her arms couldn’t meet behind her back. But now no one could tell her to be quiet, and they’d show them what was what. “She made it up,” Lili ruled when Dori told her, “it’s a fairy tale.” But about this, of all things, Dori wasn’t so sure.

  In the plot of land behind the house, Lili and Dori used a kitchen knife to cut a perfect circle in the soil, with just the two of them inside, much less odd than whoever might come to join them. A circle drawn with dirty bare feet, the perfect diameter of which signaled to all who came near: we are not like you.

  Because in the beginning these were the original simpletons: Gita
and Lotti, Salman, Ezra, Uri, Hundar, and that other one, you know. Their innocence was a label affixed to the lining of their clothes if they got lost. But despite everything, they never got lost. They looked at Alex with admiration, as if they were seeing the moon in all its fullness. Salman would often squeeze his hands, really shaking them. Lotti would giggle and her round eyes would open wide with pleasure every time she saw him. “I think she’s bowing down,” Dori said to Lili, but her sister didn’t believe her until she herself saw the slight bending motion that Lotti adopted and that spread among the rest of the simpletons. Yet it appeared that Alex didn’t notice; he adjusted easily to the people who took to following him, waiting for the slight flick of his hands that would direct them to their task.

  It was a long summer, and the two of them learned that in the village there are a lot of dead hours. One tree more or less didn’t matter to anyone. The trees grew on their own, and were it not for the parasites, thought Dori, the trees would rise up and take over the village, twisting through the windows, splitting the roofs. But in the meantime the trees presented no real danger, even though most of them grew and flourished and, when the time came, produced fruit and flowers. The trees in the village had a clearer purpose than the apple tree in the old house, making it hard to believe that it was once their entire world.

  Village life, which they were only beginning to adjust to, caused a new busyness to sprout in all of them. Anna hoed the earth and fashioned beds, which blossomed. Everything she planted grew. Lone seedlings and afterward plump plants. Their mother really did have green thumbs. Amazingly enough, she could make anything grow; when the tears weren’t falling, that was what she did. Dori recalled the old story about the cabbage and was happy that, all things considered, she hadn’t chosen to plant cabbage. And while their mother tended to a vegetable garden, with beautiful tomatoes and other vegetables for which she needed to invent new names, Lili sat on the best-maintained stretch of the green couch and wrote down in her notebooks everything that happened. She had already taken control of their father’s notebook, which had stood neglected since they moved to the village, and she filled another notebook and a half with dense handwriting. Their father, in addition to the metal collecting, which was, after all, their main livelihood, submerged himself in the business of being holy. Which, he said, would work “in any kind of situation, and even better when the winds rage and the flesh of the land is torn.” And there were those who gathered around to listen to him. “Unbelievable,” Lili said to Dori. “He really had a plan.”

  * * *

  And as for their tree, a few days after the Ackermans left, the city quickly chopped it down. An unequivocal hazard, a danger to the public, the entire trunk was rotten, mortal danger; who would plant an apple tree here? Lili knew exactly what they said even if she didn’t hear a word. In its place the municipality planted something useful, something suitable for the local climate, not just for stories. Telling all of this to Dori, Lili knew that such was the fate of the world under the moon, a history composed only by its end, signaled by a period, after which, only empty space. But she didn’t write so much as a word about this. What could be the point of writing that there was a world there, with forks and scratched plates and glasses with the lenses fallen out? The ones who chopped the tree down were definitely glad to be rid of the whole business. Maybe they let their little girls play with the tableware, the abandoned glasses, but probably not. Probably they didn’t want to touch anything that remained.

  Dori knew that she was supposed to save it. She’d had one tree to save and she had failed. She didn’t discuss this with Lili, even in silhouettes at night. Because in truth she wasn’t an exemplary little girl, a girl with hair tied up in a ribbon and tears of determination in her eyes, a girl everyone praises for her strength of spirit and who, when the crucial hour comes, hugs the trunk and doesn’t let them chop it down. Nope, Dori was exactly what they said she was: difficult. A biter. A demon. A nuisance. An Ackerman. She knew all this and she didn’t care one bit.

  * * *

  Anton wasn’t interested in the tree, but the tree was there. He asked for the entire story and this was what she had to offer. She spoke as if everything would have been very different if, for instance, the tree produced different fruit, apricots or pears, instead of those hard apples. Even though she saw that Anton’s eyelids were lowering, that his patience was waning and that her advantage was dwindling too, and she guessed that in a bit he would stand up, shake off the imagined dust that never touched him, and be lost to her—nevertheless, her mouth never grew weary of speaking. When she spoke about the tree it was the truth: it grew leaves and shade all at once. But when she spoke about who they had been, about Lili and Dori from back then, the two of them only became less real. Two girls from an old story. And she wanted to tell him, Wait, it’ll get better soon. Soon something will happen. But in the meantime she didn’t have a thing to tell him.

  4

  Inside the world a clock ticked. Dori heard it even though she wasn’t supposed to hear at all. But that’s how it is; there are people hard of hearing who hear background noises, just as there are deaf people who hear sounds that aren’t there at all, that exist mainly inside their heads, and who knows if it’s heard like a sound at all. Maybe it’s like those sounds that only dogs hear. Maybe it’s like underwater sounds. Those deaf from birth have nothing to compare their sounds to—and it’s not that they don’t try. Quite a few deaf people have a piano at home for this very reason. And that’s a fact, said Lili, who had looked into it. Fact.

  But Dori heard a clock, not a piano. This occurred in the second month of their life in the village. The uncles came for a visit and Lili received the clock and notebooks, while Dori received a doll with long eyelashes and a bag of candy. She lost the doll within a day. At the age of nine, Dori was clearly too mature for dolls, not that her uncles knew this. She thought that perhaps the dead lover, the one who died in their house, had taken the doll for herself and now the two of them were winking at each other with their long eyelashes—but no, of course not. She waited for Noah’s strange presents, which were always the real treasures. Only months later did she discover the gift bearing a tiny tag on which “Dori” was written: a gold cage with a bell inside. She placed it on the windowsill until it disappeared like her things always did.

  * * *

  So in the end, or perhaps from the beginning, Dori had nothing and Lili had notebooks and a clock. Nevertheless, Dori was the one who actually heard the ticking. Dori smelled and tasted time like Captain Hook, who heard the clock everywhere, reminding him that time was running out. But not exactly, because time is infinite, after all. The days had no boundaries at all and they blended into each other until they couldn’t remember when they got up and when they went to sleep, and again there was geography class, with a globe from which half of Africa had been erased and which had gin bottles hidden inside. Only Lili and Dori drank from them sometimes, and laughed at their mother, who had no idea that the globe she’d been given for teaching lessons to two ignorant girls was, in fact, a home for such bottles.

  And so while Lili wrote and wrote and their mother brought shoots to the garden, Dori had an abundance of time that passed in waves of nothingness, time in which nothing occurred except for a second continental drift. It ticked even in her dreams, which were all set in the same place. She walked on a bridge that stretched in a circle above a blue land, crowned with trees and homes of many stories that stretched out in curved lines, a world that was an oval dome. The air was thin but she recognized every bit of it. The clock hung in the sky, a large object that looked about to drop like an apple, though she knew it never would.

  In her sleep she could see it too, a red wristwatch with images of clowns. Lili kept it safe and already closed it using two different holes in the rubber strap. White stripes signaled that Lili’s hand was growing, all the while writing and writing. They were already ten and twelve years old. Because time moved, despite everythin
g, and someone bothered to count the days, to give a sign, in a world of nothing but a surprised lizard in the cracks of the house, a single fish, and piles of metal that accumulated around the house, confronting strangers with impenetrable islands.

  Old plaster fell bit by bit. Again they painted their room sunset-colored and again they soon came to hate the color. The fish swam in a round aquarium and Dori looked at it. They had received it as a pet, a present in honor of the new home. They fed it on and off and didn’t give it a name. “Why would a guard dog help?” their father asked them when they begged for a dog. “What good is a barking dog if no one hears him? For us, a fish is better.” This was supposed to be a joke, and Dori smiled and Lili didn’t. But that was how it was. They didn’t tell him that they didn’t want a dog tied to a chain but a dog that would sleep in bed with them, one night in Lili’s bed and then one night in Dori’s. Lili wrote it down. Back then, at least, she wrote down almost everything. Not what could happen and not what she wanted to happen (because Lili was used to wanting only in the negative—not to leave the house, not to chop down the tree, not to move to the village. Even wanting a dog wasn’t her want but Dori’s, and it didn’t do much for her). Lili Ackerman wrote down only what did happen.

  And perhaps, here, the rift finally opened between the two. Because until then, the space between them was very narrow, like, say, the space between two front teeth. Even if someone, it doesn’t matter who, already broke her front teeth. Maybe as a result of running into a pole after which the two teeth fell into the palm of her hand. Luckily they were baby teeth and sit nicely Dori and don’t move and new ones will grow in.