Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  Uriel Savyon, ladies and gentlemen, didn’t know a thing. He didn’t know who I had become. He didn’t even know that by means of the aids I’d heard more than a few things in the world. Those ugly aids definitely did the job if I didn’t turn them down all the way. Maybe I didn’t hear everything, but when I wore them, if I wore them, I understood that this din that seized my body from within, that this assault was what people called hearing. Perhaps you might expect that this was wonderful; you can hear, and it seems to you that this is a wonderful attribute. You pity the deaf, after all. You’ve seen those videos of the deaf people who begin to hear and joy washes over their faces. I’ve seen too. They spread like viruses. The baby smiles, the grown man cries, the girl covers her face with her hands. But I, when I could think about something other than the pain, understood that Alex, my father, was right. It was terrible.

  When they first put the aids on me I felt as if someone had cut me in two and there was nothing holding me together. I felt ravaged, but I didn’t have the words for this. My friend Jenna told me that when she started to hear it was magical. They played her a Beatles song. It’s always the Beatles. Paul and John sang in harmony and her parents cried. She cried too. From joy, what else.

  She smiled when she said this, like she was aware that the story was in bad taste but nevertheless wasn’t willing to wrinkle her nose at it. After all, we were about to be therapists, to reflect like a silver spoon the feelings of whoever stood before us, to slowly undo the knots. To listen. I held my opinion about this propaganda from her. As if all the deaf were surrounded by a world of pain and silence until technology came along and saved them. But I turned up my nose; yes, that was obviously my role. The wrinkles of the nose, and the sarcasm, and the unnecessary cigarettes and so on and so forth. She told me things that were utterly foreign to what I knew. Her parents spoke to her so that their voices would be the first things she heard, after the Beatles. And she was happy and even if the happiness was temporary and fleeting she held on to it. Because that’s how she told it to me, without her regular giggle, in what was suddenly a little girl’s voice. I believed her when she spoke. I still do believe, like the Italians Marco Polo told about China, bringing with him a noodle as proof. Wonders and miracles, an unbelievable land.

  But if you want to know, I signed “hurts.” I signed “enough” and “stop.” Maybe I shrieked. They turned the aid off. When they turned it on again, apparently no one spoke. Someone played music. Something repulsive. Something I haven’t heard since. Not on purpose. My mother spoke first. I knew that it was her although I hadn’t heard her voice before. My father looked at me. No matter what, Alex spoke only in our language.

  When Uriel Savyon saw me in the eleventh-grade hallway, under the “Young Leadership” poster, he gave me an ignorant, stupid hug. A hug that wasn’t acceptable between boys and girls, contact that was uncommon even between us at home. I stood there and waited for him to stop; I counted the flakes of dandruff that had fallen onto his collar. Students began gathering around us; two of the smaller girls who I couldn’t always tell apart opened their eyes wide as he spoke excitedly about me and about Dori, and how he always wanted to be our friend and how nothing was the same since we left. He spoke loudly and fluently, but from time to time signed in order to emphasize what he was saying. I don’t know if any of them noticed this. I tried to get away from him, but he wouldn’t stop talking about Dori and the whispers were rising all around us so I had no choice and said in a voice lower than usual that he should come over that afternoon. He was the first person I ever invited home. I said to him, “Meet me next to the back gate.” It was a half-hour walk from the main road, I figured, maybe forty minutes with all his hand-waving. It might cool him off a bit.

  He really was waiting next to the gate, smiling. Optimistic and kindhearted like a sheep at pasture. I saw that he was trying hard not to run to me, forcefully sticking his feet in the ground. A pocket had been revealed to the world and it held my entire past, but I wasn’t hurrying to open it. As if Dori herself was liable to fall out of it. When we turned onto the dirt path Uriel again said something about her, how funny she is, even though there was no chance he ever really spoke to her, even though Dori isn’t funny at all. He spoke formally every time: “Dori Ackerman.” After the fifth or five-hundredth time I said to him, “She’s dead.”

  The moments stretched out on the path until his whistle broke the silence. Even in the days to come he didn’t ask about Dori; weeks passed and he didn’t ask how she died, under what circumstances. Had he asked, maybe I would have said. Maybe I would have told him everything. But the first time we walked home together he just whistled. He whistled a kind of intricate melody, not something he could have come up with himself. Months without rain and our shoes kicked up small clouds of dust. He whistled and I listened, and suddenly we were like two people listening to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Two people who became emperors themselves while listening. Of all things to remember, as if the thing lodged itself in my actual childhood memory and wasn’t taken from some educational story for girls. I almost told him about the hero of that story, a girl who tries to pretend that she’s someone else and secretly listens to records until someone, a boy, say, joins her and they listen to Beethoven on an old, scratchy record.

  When I read this story for the first time, I hoped that my ears would cease being just two pieces of flesh stuck to the sides of my head. I had a complete list of things I had only read about and meant to hear. I knew that one day I’d hear everything. Beethoven’s Concerto no. 5, the Emperor, was entry number thirty-four on the list. I planned on listening to it, hugging my knees from all that beauty, like that American girl from the story, who, I imagined, was all elbows and knees.

  And suddenly it was clear to me that this is what he was whistling, that he was walking and whistling the Emperor. I asked him and he said, “What are you talking about, it’s Tchaikovsky,” and then he added, “No, just kidding, it’s a gum ad. I’m crazy about it, you?” I admitted that I was, that I was kind of crazy about it. It really was pretty.

  His hair was already cut short and didn’t cover his ears like the funny haircut he had when he was nine or ten years old. When the dirt path turned into a shiny black road he said to me, “They cut down the tree.”

  “I know,” I said to him. “I’ve known since it happened. It’s like they waited for us to go to get rid of it.” I waited for him to deny it. When I got rides to the old house I saw with my own eyes the notice in the stairwell announcing that parasites had been found in the tree, the fruits had worms, the tree didn’t suit the climate, it wasn’t planted in the intended place. Even then it sounded to me like a bunch of fabrications from the municipal sanitation department. But in those days I couldn’t have put that in words. “That’s right,” Uriel said, “that’s exactly what they did. My mom said so too. She complained to the city, but the tree was the responsibility of the building, not the street, so there wasn’t anything to do. They didn’t plant anything in its place. It just stayed there, a stump.” I told him that I knew that too, though I didn’t.

  When we got close to the house, Lotti, one of the head ducks, welcomed us. She signed to me in our language, “Welcome back.” “Lotti,” I said to her, “I hear with the aids and you’ve heard from birth. Maybe you can tell me what you have to say.” But Lotti, whose eczema had spread from the neck on up by then, just looked at me with the obsequious smile reserved for the leader’s rebellious daughter and stepped aside. “There’s food,” I explained to him without looking back; I knew he was walking behind me. “They cook here all the time, even though my dad doesn’t eat a thing. The refrigerator is full, see for yourself,” I said, and opened up our domestic horn of plenty. In a pan I warmed up two pieces of lasagna though I debated whether or not this was the proper way to heat them. The lasagna was delicious and the two of us focused on eating.

  “I mourned when you left.” There was something strange in the way he pronounced t, but o
ther than that, to my ears his pronunciation sounded almost perfect, in its way. Almost the pronunciation of a hearing person.

  “I went searching for your things like some junkie.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Not too much,” he said, and then I knew that he was lying. I remembered what we left there. “Us too,” I said to him, “we mourned too.” And I didn’t know if it was the truth this time. The facts were no longer identical to the truth and anyway even when they rolled right under my feet like pebbles I didn’t pick them up. Uriel talked about the model airplane club and the amateur theater group and it became clear to me that he had turned into one of the people with hobbies. The dandruff was actually bits of model airplane glue. His enthusiasm for the world stuck to him like a second skin. And after describing the special glue for the airplanes, which he revealed could be made at home, he went on to tell me about the transplant, about the cochlea he got when he was ten years old. About the surgery and the special fit, close to perfect, “even though nothing is perfect,” he said with satisfaction, as if repeating someone else’s words. He wanted to expound upon the exercises they taught him, but this wasn’t the place to talk about that. Our house, even after adding window boxes and a doormat, was an implant-free zone.

  “You’re not normal,” I whispered to him. “How could you let them do that to you? You’re really a robot.” I didn’t care that he looked at me with astonishment, that according to all logic I was the one who should have been astonished. I could see, after all. Had I looked at him I would have seen. “Do you understand the power over you that you gave to them? They can insert whatever they want into you. Implanting fibers in your brain. You have no control at all. You—you’re like an android. It’s not normal.”

  He smiled. That boy of model airplanes and drama, who once walked with a limp, Uriel Savyon the miserable, smiled. “Lili,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said again, and got up from my place. I cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink. The salt shaker too. I turned on the water that sprayed straight onto the clear plates where cracks had formed along the edges. I didn’t want to imagine what Father would say if he knew what I had brought home. The water washed away the mess in every direction. I stood and looked at the waterfall that I made myself, in the sink, with water. Uriel left, I knew he had left, but the water continued flowing. At that moment Alex Ackerman, like a dog with a highly developed sense of smell, entered the kitchen. Unlike normal, he stroked my hair. “Dad,” I said to him, speaking with my lips while my hands remained under the stream. “Dad,” the lips pronounced, unaccustomed to this nickname being uttered aloud. “You must remember Uriel, that poor kid from the old house? You won’t believe it, he got an implant. They gave him an implant, the little traitor.” I finished speaking and turned around to him. I signed to him “hello” and “everything’s fine” and “there’s food in the fridge.” The words I spoke were absorbed only by the walls. No tragedy had occurred. And we met again, of course. At a certain age there’s nothing to be done. The system demands that you meet each morning. Sit and listen to a Bible lesson. Or meet in art class and dunk gauze into plaster. During that time everyone made a cast for everyone, hollow casts hung all over, in classrooms and public places, the art department at school was at its peak then. For most of the creations I served as a model. I would walk down corridors and see five Lilis, skillfully made this way or that, painted according to their owners’ talent, looking back at me with their plastered gaze. Some of them raised a hand in the air. Some had hair added to them and others looked on bald and smiled at nothing. Perhaps it would have been better to fill them with candy and smash them open under the right circumstances, but it seemed that everyone, truly everyone, was impressed. I loved the feel of plaster hardening on the skin, and sitting under the gauze, which was my only contribution to art class, earning me a perfect grade. Outstanding model. Uriel Savyon actually didn’t get caught up in the cast craze, but instead toiled over a statue made of gum. I admit it sounds quite disgusting, but somehow it wasn’t. I meant to be mad at him, but when I saw him again, enthusiastic and full of anticipation, I didn’t have the energy. He moved aside the leaning columns of gum and I cleared away a spot for him next to me. My right hand was full of gauze as well as my neck to my chest. Two industrious girls were now working on a cast for my feet and were making their way up in the direction of my calves. Achilles’ heels covered in white.

  Dori would say, “Look at you, what did they do to you, you look like all your limbs broke at once.” Perhaps she would have signed this to me in hidden writing on my back, over the shirt. But Uriel didn’t say a thing. When the plaster hardened and was detached from my body, and only a grayish dust remained on me that didn’t hint at what had happened there, I rolled down the ends of my pants and put my shirt back on and he asked me to come with him. Of all places, he wanted us to go to his parents’ house. Strange, as if my imagination and his had been restricted to those of good children whose hair is combed to the side and who hurry back home after school.

  I felt as if I was walking in a dream. And, as in a dream, when you know that there’s no significance to anything you do, you can actually do anything without bearing the consequences. Like for example visiting the well-kept Savyon family home in a nearby affluent suburb. The house was large and made of simple forms, without any special decorations. The light fell perfectly there; this is what he told me and I was uncertain if he was being sincere or ironic. But it appeared that Uriel was proud of his parents and their well-kept home, as he already was, for some reason, proud of me. He appeared truly happy when his parents hugged me one after the other. They were a family of huggers and they remembered me. His father hummed in agreement when his mother said how beautiful I was, how beautiful I had grown. She wiped her eyes and blamed the tears on an eye infection. A bright blue stripe stretched out under each eye. And after she put in a few drops from a bottle pulled from a pocket of her blue silk shirt, she wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. In this way she departed from the regular custom of the house, according to which each object had a clear role. Eyes were wiped with a handkerchief, and the towel served only to polish wineglasses. And even Uriel himself, who looked to me as if he were constantly standing on the tips of his toes, trying hard to reach higher, appeared calm and relaxed as well. As if finally his toes and tensed muscles (tensed cheerfully, yes, but still) had quieted down a bit. Because he himself wanted so much, but his parents, I understood quickly, had already stretched out to their full height.

  * * *

  I didn’t plan for us to become friends. It seems I didn’t plan any of what happened. But in those days plans weren’t my top priority. Everything was so sticky anyway, and each morning it seemed that the sun had moved a bit. Our beautiful world tilted over, slightly bent, as if an earthquake no one felt had taken place and all of us continued walking along the earth’s crust, ignoring the valleys and gorges, the new furrows that had been formed.

  In my eyes the world sometimes resembled those leaves that fall spinning from the branch and all that remains of them in autumn is their skeleton. And inside that larger rotation Uriel and I also began to spin, airy and weightless, stuck to each other because of proximity.

  We spent the afternoon hours at his parents’ house. His father tended to work in the adjacent home office. His mother was a judge in the juvenile court and in the evenings would tell us briefly about the cases over which she presided. She spoke about them as if they were archeological findings she dug up in the garden, with the excitement of someone who unexpectedly finds a statue under the petunias. I quickly came to understand that her tears were primarily a result of seasonal allergies. Even when she told us about the kids who burned down a garage, who tied cats’ tails and worse, the tears that flowed were thanks to these allergies. I nodded along to keep from revealing how much I resembled the kids brought before her, even if I still hadn’t committed a crime, no
t a single one you could be tried for. I assumed that this was how it was among women of a certain age, that their tears begin to spill out for some reason. Time after time, Uriel Savyon’s mother talked as if these were comical misfits on trial. Sometimes I felt that they expected me to say something, share my opinion. But it wasn’t my plan to be ground up under the wheels of water or justice, like Max and Moritz in the stories. And they never asked me what it was I didn’t want to say. The Savyon family let me be a clean and reduced version of myself, a feathery version of Lili, fluttering about innocently in a world where the light fell equally and naturally upon every illuminated room.

  After some time he introduced me to Dima. They met in one of the classes for advanced youth or advanced thought, classes that Uriel always quit before long, but before he quit they managed to see each other, and seeing means identifying. Dima believed only in substance, in structures and what one could touch. Uriel believed in everything else. Dima put his faith in the perpetual revolution, and with us the revolutions dwindled in our grasp. One day they’d stand people like us before the wall. This we knew. We were people for whom there was no use. But still we also knew that the one who would save us from the wall was Dima. For now we were a trio. Uriel the hard of hearing, Dima the deaf, and me. They stuck us together with carpenter’s glue, deaf glue. If they gave us nicknames, we didn’t hear them. Our routine was set in place quickly, with nails, until it was easy to forget the days when the two weren’t by my side. Dima would escort me to school on his bike and continue on to the factory. Uriel would sit down next to me in class.