Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  * * *

  Dori didn’t know whose idea it was to send the teddy bear airborne, to give him a cross-country flight. Maybe Anton, whom Anati’d met someplace and who joined them that day at the zoo’s entrance. Dori looked at Anton and Anati. Their heads were turned upward, like those of hopeful youths on a banner intended to promote something or other. The two of them wore their youth like medals, as if it would never be taken from them and melted down in the free market. So Dori thought, because she still narrated the world to herself with such images, which elevated everything.

  In the end, with arms crossed and hands in pockets, the three of them stood and looked at the giant bear, tied blue and smiling to the entrance gate. The slogan “Fifty Years of Zoo” was spread across his stomach in thick letters, as if someone had scribbled on him while he slept. The blue bear popped up as part of the zoo’s fiftieth anniversary, which had been celebrated two and a half years earlier, and in addition to him there were smaller decorations scattered in town, a new fountain and flowering snapdragons, blooming and immediately withering on the roadsides. This wasn’t the first time that a breath of fresh air could be felt there, that a Technicolor rainbow rose over them in the sky. “It doesn’t work if there isn’t a sack of dollars at the end of the rainbow,” Anton said to them, wise and experienced, and Dori thought how she’d never seen anyone like him. This was the second time that she heard him speak. Sometimes she saw him at one of the clubs that Anati dragged her to, which were dark and thick, loud as a garage. But it looked like Anton didn’t recognize her, and maybe didn’t see her at all.

  She shifted her weight from leg to leg, feeling the hardness of the pavement as if she were stepping on it barefoot. Sometimes Dori and Anati ran along these paving stones at night as they returned from another deafening club, their heels striking loudly. “Don’t step on the cats’ heads,” one called to the other, re-creating the old game that they’d played for the first time when, at age eleven, they first heard this term for the stone tiles in the ghetto. But to them each tile was an actual cat head that yawned and sighed.

  The bear continued to look at the three of them with round blue eyes. Dori imagined that he had drifted to them from a different city with a different language and different hopes. They definitely made him in China, she decided, and in her mind’s eye she saw the battery of Chinese workers who together made a giant blue bear that would be inflated with foreign, distant air, quite distant from their homeland. Each one laid a sleeping child on her knees and reached out with busy hands. The bear can go to hell, she thought, just when its pronounced lack of charm touched her heart. Enough things have already been sent to hell. Let the bear go too.

  Anati drew a simple diagram of the points at which the bear was connected to the gate, and which they had to disconnect one after the other. “There are those who tie a district cop to a brown bear and float them in a lake and there are those who hurl a bear balloon off of scaffolding,” someone said, maybe Anton, maybe Anati, but apparently it was Dori herself who spoke, and her voice sounded deep. Anton looked at them with obvious exhaustion and said that he was leaving. It was clear that he was pulling out of the whole business and Dori steadied herself so she wouldn’t follow him.

  At three in the morning the two of them returned to the gate. It was cold, and they had pliers in their handbags, and, just in case, they were also totally drunk. In the darkness that was diminished by the random streetlight, the giant bear seemed more feeble but somehow solemn as well. Prometheus Bound or something, thought Dori. “What about the guard?” she asked in a whisper, and Anati smiled her glowing rubber smile. “The guard is definitely some toothless poet. Only lousy poets guard construction sites these days.”

  “Maybe they don’t even get paid,” Dori said, encouraged. “They need this for their biography, for the day to come when they’ll get published and show everyone.”

  In contrast to their predictions, the bear didn’t fly skyward but slumped down, first the stomach, afterward the head, like someone falling into a pool without water. And that was how he remained, in the corner of that ugly street, under the zoo’s gate. They heard the roars of the guard and while they ran Dori wondered if that was how a poet would scream or if that was one more bit of Anati’s nonsense. Her legs ran to the rhythm of an old march song, skipping over all the cat heads, and the maybe-poet ran after them, but apparently he was asthmatic and short-legged and drunk himself from too many weak lines of poetry. Their breathing was young and easy and he had no chance against them as they ran cheering and waving their bent pliers like rifle butts, like an underground squad of African girls firing Israeli weapons at the neighboring village.

  Dori and Anati laughed with cinematic pleasure, and their hair got tangled in their mouths as they ran, and their clothes were crumpled in the night wind and for a moment they were freed from themselves. “Blue bear anarchists,” Anton had mocked before he left, as if he had momentarily swelled to the size of a big brother, but they couldn’t hear him anymore and in that moment they, the two of them, had won.

  Lili wrote to Dori:

  Each morning I roll up the blinds and each morning the very same city wakes up below. Same street, same green plant store, and same pharmacy that offers its shopper perfumes and body oils and light and hard drugs. Sometimes I drag myself out of bed just to see the women walking to the pharmacy in heels. Imagine I was opening the window and you were peeking out from the window of the building next door. We would definitely wave to each other in English. Afterward we would recognize each other in the courtyard and we would play until darkness fell.

  Dori, why do you make me sentimental? Suddenly all my words are coated in powdered sugar. I know that you can’t stand this, but what will I do, what?

  Do you remember the sugar? We were willing to lick the floor for it. No, you’re right, you don’t have to say a word. We aren’t children. No one here is a little girl anymore. I calculate your age according to my age and vice versa and admit the facts. Maybe you still count rings in that tree that died long ago. Maybe you count stars. But just picture us meeting and suddenly you are my baby. I would put you down to sleep in a baby stroller. Covered in a blue jacket. Falling asleep next to you. Move a bit, Dori, make some room.

  Lili wrote to Dori:

  Tell me, Dori, when a letter arrives from me do you read it immediately or set it aside? Where do you put things in general? On what side? Do you have a side? What things do you have? I’m trying but your mouth is filled with water, Dori. Perhaps you ripped my words into tiny pieces. Perhaps you fed birds with them.

  But I don’t think so.

  I know this couldn’t be.

  I’m now practicing what we never did.

  Pay attention, Dori,

  I’m kissing you goodbye.

  Lili.

  Lili wrote to Dori:

  If I remember you remember too. The house was always damp and the plaster crumbled under our beds. Hiding in the tall weeds outside the house there were small bugs that stung us on the legs. We feared snakes more than we hated the bugs. The bulletin board at the entrance to the grocery store smelled of rotting wood even in summer. Opposite that board we divided up the plunder—the announcements for me and the tacks for you. You had an insane collection of tacks that you kept under the bed. Where did those tacks wind up? I bet they disappeared in one of those operations, “Clean the house and put on a nice face for the social workers,” the ones who arrived after you left. Perhaps thanks to your collection a tack factory in East Germany flourished and then all at once went bankrupt.

  I’m writing to you and Uriel is next to me, working on another outrageous animated movie. It’s really magnificently bad. I’ll suggest that he switch all the characters for tacks. Maybe you’ll see the movie one day and read the subtitle “Special thanks to Lili and Dori,” because that’s what I’ll insist on. You understand: without you I’d never think about tacks.

  Lili wrote to Dori:

  This is my two-hundre
dth letter to you. Obviously I’m counting. I could have baked a cake for the occasion, spread vanilla frosting on top and hurled it into the wall. But instead, imagine me not baking anything.

  I still picture your life. If I really concentrate I can also see the idiotic friend that you found for yourself, the colors you have in your hair, the closed-up expression that you stuck to your face. I see you grown up but you’re always Dori, the exact same Dori. If you’re asking, know that I still haven’t received any letters from you. Perhaps all your letters drifted away and were lost at sea. Perhaps you’re sick of thinking about the past. So I’ll tell you about the present. Here’s the present: I’m taking Porgy and Bess on a walk; you won’t believe it but those are the names of the dogs I walk, a more lucrative and established business than I ever could have imagined. And here is the future: in the very near future, that is, tomorrow or two days from now at most, I will take a break from my very prestigious studies. Which is a nice way of saying that I’m tossing my future into the garbage. But don’t worry. I’ll walk dogs full-time. Three times a day I’ll take Gilbert and Sullivan out for a walk as well as Porgy and Bess, the stupidest pair of terriers in the world.

  I love you, Porgy.

  Lili wrote to Dori:

  Know that I forgive you for being silent. Yes, obviously, you’re allowed to be silent. It’s your right.

  We always said that there are too many words in the world.

  But maybe you’d want to write me nevertheless.

  Maybe, for example, you’d write: Shut up already, Lili.

  Dori wrote to Lili:

  Shut up already, Lili.

  PART THREE

  THE SAFE PLACE

  The safest place to be

  is under the branches.

  —SHIRLEY KAUFMAN

  YEARS PASSED

  Years passed and Dori was still little. Time doesn’t grow everything, not every beanstalk sprouts and climbs to the clouds. Anyone looking at her from a certain distance might think that she was a girl. Her nails were still clipped along a crooked line. Her bangs were held with thin barrettes; her pockets were turned inside out. And nevertheless, Dori. She looked from the side at that which she wanted to regard straight on. The way one looks at the sun to keep tears from flooding one’s eyes. She heard what there was to hear, for instance, the rustle his coat made when it rubbed up against the glass case. In the meantime this was all that she did, allowed the senses to go in her place. As in a children’s book, Dori Ackerman looked and listened.

  Anton, in a stylish raincoat, stood in front of the bulletin board that was closed off behind safety glass and a reinforced lock, as if there was a need to protect the schedule from students’ greedy hands and not actually from the lecturers, who used to fritter away its hours, leaving buzzing fluorescent lights on in empty classrooms. It seemed that this was a communal hobby of all the lecturers, the progressive and the conservative, those who stagnated and those yet to bloom: everyone preferred to travel to conferences or be sick with diseases that require bed rest. Often they disappeared without advance notice, like secondary performers in a mystery play. In fact, it was only because of this that she intended to peek over Anton’s head and verify which of the morning classes had flown away through the faculty’s filthy windows. But Anton was half leaning on the holy board and she couldn’t read over his shoulders. In fact, he looked like someone who could lean on air particles and they’d hold him up. The material world, even in a school that extolled the human spirit, was beneath his dignity.

  Anton looked at the passersby in the Humanities corridor, his sleepy gaze making their haste even more foolish, their acceleration lacking any value, interest, or purpose. He gazed at them but looked like someone who was meant to be gazed at himself, and Dori actually looked and saw the contempt that enshrouded him like a high-collared coat (though the raincoat he wore had wide lapels and a wrap-around collar). And in fact, when he is portrayed in her memory he will appear mainly like this, wearing an old jacket, grayish-blue in color, which looks like it was once very expensive but is now threadbare. In her eyes he seems like a spoiled housecat that pretends to be an alley cat or perhaps vice versa, like the barefooted man who pretends he owns a shoe factory. She wasn’t used to either manner and so had many theories about him, error-riddled all.

  She will remember with a certain bitter amusement that no matter how much she investigated in those days, she couldn’t tell if he was very poor or very rich. Because amusement is the reward for she who finally has the facts in hand and can knead a story from them. She remembers how they met, how he left them with a light step, even before it turned out that the blue bear’s final flight would have fewer actual consequences than they had hoped, other than those very much expected, because in the end they did fire Dori from the cafeteria. Brief coverage in the local news was all they got. In the end, the fall of the zoo’s symbol didn’t move anyone and, try as they might, they were unable to understand the failure. It seemed that the world they knew spoke only in symbols, but they’d chosen to topple the wrong symbol. Stupid bear, Dori thought once again. Fewer and fewer words passed between her and Anati, and perhaps in the gap that was created a place was made. Because, in fact, a short time later they met Dima, who emerged as the only spectator of their failed bear performance, and in their presence he claimed that it was a beautiful act, a beautiful act indeed. And maybe she wouldn’t have recalled any of this at all if not for Anton, because what was the point in remembering gloryless failures like the bear? Dori still looked at Anton and waited for him to recognize her, to say “Hey, it’s you, the pretty one from the zoo,” even though no one ever said a sentence like that to her and Anton couldn’t have said it, because she hadn’t worked there long enough and also because at best he would have said “the little one,” because Anati, not she, was the pretty one, as everybody knew. He didn’t say a word about the night with the bear. And she waited until she couldn’t wait anymore and then decided to continue looking, because she knew how to look.

  No, he wasn’t gorgeous, she concluded. Actually, in those moments he looked to her like the skinniest person she could imagine. His bad qualities jumped out at her, the vanity, the childishness, the coddling that was evident in his heightened, swollen upper lip. Someone who loves himself wholeheartedly, she thought. She meant to hate him, but nevertheless noticed that the skin was white and the eyes brown and adorned with dark lashes, that the hair pointed from the temples toward the crown of his head in a strange haircut that she actually found striking. Fine, she concluded to herself derisively, he’s good-looking, in his way. Dori saw his exposed gums because he had an insane, charming smile, and when the gums were exposed the white tips of his fangs suddenly protruded and the smile cut across his face like a declaration of joy that everyone could share, like a joke intended for all, and God, God almighty, and all his armies and all the kingdoms that rose and fell beneath him, that was enough.

  If they’d asked her, she’d put it like this: her heart fell from its spot, jiggled in the rib cage, moved. Her heart throbbed and throbbed, filled up and emptied out, didn’t know what to do with itself. All of her delighted in the way his smiling lips twisted back into a kind of pout (“Childish,” Lili would have said. “Feminine,” she would have added, after thinking, and Anati for her part would have announced that there was no point in her wasting time on him, whereas Dori would have shrugged her shoulders, neither looking nor listening). She saw the outlines of his hands shoved behind his head as he leaned on the holy bulletin board. The lapels of his jacket opened like the holy ark, she thought with the same wild hyperbole that characterized her exaggerating heart, and she saw that he was wearing a suit under the jacket. He walks in beauty, like the night, she thought, even though he just stood there without moving, even though it was early in the morning, even though she remembered just the opening line of the poorly translated poem.

  Anton had returned from a student exchange program in a cold land, a land where many of the
students tended to go, but only he came back wearing a suit and a big jacket, dressed in a northern European manner that he made look even better, ignoring the local weather and the fact that the semester was about to end. He’d returned early, she realized later, and she wasn’t alone in noticing that he had suddenly appeared and was everywhere. And Dori, you must understand, Dori nearly lost her mind.

  Unusually, she was late for the afternoon class in the big lecture hall. The class dealt with problems in the philosophy of language, and that day they were discussing that whereof they could not speak and thereof must remain silent. Since she was late, she sat near the top of the hall. It seemed that the lecturer, who had already started the flow of words that would be interrupted at intervals by regularly scheduled coughs, raised her eyebrows a bit due to the tardiness and the new place where Dori sat down. She thought to apologize, to explain that this was the first place she found and therefore she was sitting by the stairs and not as always in the far-right chair in the third row, because that seat was already taken. But the lecturer had already moved on, and it wasn’t as if anyone really expected Dori to open her mouth.

  Sitting there felt like getting off at the wrong floor in your own apartment building, and in her head she quoted a French writer who’d said something similar, perhaps related, and she repeated the French phrase for the benefit of that voice in her head, which for its part nodded imperceptibly and said “good” even though it knew that Dori had never read that book to the end, definitely not in French. The seat back was scratched up and she passed her fingers over the scratches’ paths as if it were possible to read a secret code there intended just for her.