Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  As the lecturer spoke she heard that voice, which had no need for a body of its own. It seemed to her that the voice hovered over her swimmers’ shoulders, on behalf of which she used to lie for years and say that she was a swimmer or a dancer, even though she did neither, and then it dove down inside and found the self that was a half self at most, and said in a tone rather higher than expected, “Look, Dori, there’s a cause, and there’s the cause of all causes, and you will yet be able to tie all those questions flying in the air before you into a bow. And all that you don’t understand will find its place.” Dori relaxed in her new seat, ignoring the obvious—that this was all nonsense.

  When she sat down, she knew without looking that Anton was sitting a row behind her. When she stretched a bit she could detect from the corner of her eye his thin fingers, fingers of a left hand, sprouting from a too-long suit sleeve. Thus she also saw the thread that remained in the place where a cuff button had fallen off. He was the only one among the students who regularly wore a suit but still didn’t look ridiculous. She sat up taller than ever and her back straightened out in the manner of those who are the object of a gaze, those upon whom words land from every direction, and Dori looked at the dry-erase board on which sentences written in blue steadily accumulated, which said the rain falls or it doesn’t fall, and sentences more complex than these, with foreign letters standing in the place of actual words. Her posture in these moments was almost fair.

  The shaved-headed lecturer cleared her throat for a long time and Dori felt Anton’s womanish mouth come close to her neck and pronounce, “There’s no world that isn’t in language. Only language creates everything.” His lips blew the air onto her skin, and a moment later, the shaved-headed lecturer with the dignified face said those very same words.

  Dori froze. Right into her ear, Anton had mocked one of the department’s most coveted courses, one with few vacant spaces and not only because the lecturer was never replaced by a note announcing a temporary leave of absence. The students, departing the class for the library, their dorms, their temporary jobs, left her lessons excited, and treated the question of language and being as if it were crucial, and when they weren’t laboring over their books, or at least over the parts highlighted by whoever studied them before, they asked why the present eludes words, why language doesn’t really manage to capture this, and a few of them emphasized the “this,” the specific, others the concept itself, whereas others stubbornly interrogated, of all things, the “really.” Dori, who didn’t contribute one word, felt that the conversation inside her was like a noisy bird looking at its reflection in the mirror, looking and chattering, clattering nonstop, but that one day the bird would say something sensible.

  The words that Anton voiced into her neck will yet be accompanied by others. Anton will still say to her that these are just chewed up, recycled ideas, that in northern Europe all this is already a thing of the past and that there’s a point in learning from the philosophers and not from teachers of philosophy, because this present of theirs is over and done with, that she should take a look at her lecturers, who insist on flying away from here at every opportunity, and judge for herself. But she nevertheless knew that the present was stretching out around her like a membrane that would sprout limbs.

  At the end of the class she hurried to meet Dima. As she went down the narrow stairs she spotted him, not yet aware of her, standing in the entrance to the cafeteria, moving his weight from leg to leg and then peeking at an imaginary watch on his wrist. Students thin and quick as rats squeezed inside through the glass doors blurred from too many passing fingerprints, absentmindedly rubbing up against him, as if his body were nothing but an element of the architecture. The same army jacket with missing buttons decomposed on his clumsy body, the scarf she bound him with one needle was wrapped around a soft, thick neck with an undapper carelessness. He looked like someone even a hopeless guerrilla army wouldn’t enlist, but for her, okay, for Dori he was part of the core, exactly like Anati and perhaps even more so. Anati, as they’d always known would happen, had remained at the zoo after the bear incident and was transferred to the department of waterfowl. Despite the change in scenery, no discernible change had occurred in Anati’s terms of employment; now, with unconcealed resentment, she sold small bags of birdfeed to the visitors. When Dori visited, Anati bent forward on high heels over bird droppings, all the while sending Dori a glowing smile and perfectly signing in the language the sentence that she’d asked Dori to teach her long ago: “I-want-to-die-they’re-all-whores.” Her work hours didn’t overlap with Dori’s almost at all and they barely saw each other. Anati spent her free time with the little brat she babysat who had grown by now and shared Anati’s love for short skirts and the theater. Between them they rehearsed scenes from plays and fainted dramatically and Dori found ways not to hear them, as if the two of them were from a silent movie, one smashing glass and the other repairing it, and Dori was looking at them through a window without knowing if it was whole or broken. They grew apart from each other even though they lived in adjacent rooms, but they still shared Dima.

  Dima and Dori emptied cups of espresso loaded with sugar in the college cafeteria. In the absence of most of the students, who had already risen with much noise for the next class, tattered ads for student resorts were revealed in all their glory, and Dori wondered for the hundredth time what she would do in a resort town in Turkey and wasn’t able to come up with a thing. Dima touched her shoulder, she detached herself from a poster on which the hotel’s silhouette was painted in pastel shades, and the two of them hurried to get up. Dori felt the weight of the cards in the bag that swung from one shoulder.

  The cards were rectangular and cut out with scissors. Dori had composed the short sentences without much care, but Dima and Anati agreed that they were her best work. Other than the lines printed in a tiny font, which more than once forced a card’s recipient to put on glasses, the cards also included sentences spelled out in sign language, sketched out in quick and sloppy hand illustrations. The sloppiness made the words look heartfelt; at least, that was how she explained it to Dima, laughing, and he caressed her hair like a trained bear who caresses a doll or a ball, as if the caress itself was a kind of meaningless accessory, something they stuck in his paw.

  As always, they scheduled three hours of café visits in the semi-established area of the city. They never bothered with the really rich, who, as everyone knows, believe in the free market and equal opportunity and thus never give a thing. People had gotten accustomed to their visits as an amusing disturbance in the regular cafés, and there they were allowed to distribute the cards and to gather in their haul with a slight bow. In contrast to some of their competitors (“colleagues,” Dori insisted, even though Anati and Dima stuck to calling the other card carriers “competitors” and that was it, and some of them were even very shrewd and organized in ways that are better left unmentioned), they were never kicked out. Perhaps because Dori identified every complaint in time to order their quick retreat. They were a winning team, if it was at all possible to declare victory in this game, which had no end. They were the brother and the sister, so they were called, and that stuck to them and they didn’t deny it. After all their hair was somewhat similar, and maybe something in their walk was the same, and maybe all deaf people resemble each other in your eyes, such that you have no reason to be too precise. In fact, of all things, the conspicuous difference between them (she so small and he so big and heavy) proved whatever needed proving, because a connection like theirs could only have been forged through the terms of hand-bending known only among families. Dori wasn’t dying to change the impression and Dima expressed no interest in what they thought or didn’t think about him. On the contrary—let them be the deaf Hansel and Gretel.

  In the first café, which was adorned with a decorative cornice in an imitation of some Roman ruin, and where most of the tables were out in the street, Dima hit the fingers of his right hand on his left arm, signing the rank of
an undercover cop, because an inspector in civilian clothes stood next to the bar and was speaking with the owners. Dori signed that she understood. They sat down and drank coffee like two customers. Dima gave her a tiny smile, careful not to let his fingers accidentally touch her; he knew how much Dori recoiled from touch, and Dori looked at the damaged teeth she knew by heart and allowed the doubts that sprang up in her to disappear.

  Those cards, written this way or that, didn’t allow her to forget what the world saw in her. When she collected a card from a competitor (or colleague), setting down two coins in exchange, she would reexamine it on both sides, as if verifying that the stars were spinning on their paths and that, at least in regard to the cards, nothing had changed. Actually, when she spread out the different cards next to one another, the eye paused on a certain variety in the register and on a slight difference in the features of the three illustrated monkeys on hers (a deaf monkey, a blind monkey, and their friend, whose hands covered his mouth; he was the mute). One of the other cards, which Dori held on to and later stuck to her bulletin board next to her schedule and a lone movie ticket, featured red hearts sprouting ears that were divided in half. Because regardless of the drawings, all of the cards signed in the language “thank you” and “hello” or “please please.” All of them said, in this way or that, “We are the deaf.”

  Here they are, pitiable, miserable, in possession of inferior social skills and perhaps even suspect personal hygiene, who knows, who would dare come close to check? Dima’s clothes gave off a slight scent of wood chips and Dori herself smelled like an apple, or at least that’s what she preferred to assume, considering the only perfume she had in her possession. Either way, Dori and Dima knew what whispers came from the mouths that opened and closed like fish behind aquarium glass, just as they knew that it was only with resentment that the money was given to them, those coins that landed on the table without making any sound. They knew that everyone sitting in the café redeemed their lives with a small payment. Dori and Dima were beggars at the entrance to a church, insurance salesmen of eternity, a guarantee of the spenders’ good fortune or at least their fine condition.

  The café patrons, all of them as one, considered themselves certain in their world. Without a doubt, compared with the deaf brother and sister who placed the cards on their table and expected recompense, fate had been kind to them. “No, not fate,” nine of ten dentists would definitely say, as they considered making a toothpick out of the card before them and passing it between the crevices in their jaws. And not just them; the businessmen too, the free professionals, and even the good friends relaxing opposite a slice of pound cake that they’d be sure to share and never quite finish—all of them would agree that it wasn’t at all a matter of fate but rather, how to say it, of “hard work, responsibility, a matter of moral strength.” Without a doubt, the deaf siblings were lacking these qualities from the jump. No doubt they were lacking. “And why, in fact,” one among them would always rise and declare as if this insight had struck him like lightning, “why don’t those two kindly help themselves and go do some normal work? They’re young people, after all.”

  The word parasites filtered through the teeth hidden behind the napkins stained with bright lipstick. And truly look at them, everyone agreed—look and see the utter excess, the millstone around the neck of productive society. Each one of the patrons had at least one hearing-impaired cousin who overcame difficulty with hard work and heroic efforts and became a building engineer, a private investigator, a dentist. During the story about the integrated cousin Dori would quickly gather up the cards. She wouldn’t waste a moment on a closed door. But there was always one who threw a coin to them at the last moment, definitive proof of his superiority. And this coin too they would gather up.

  When the inspector was about to leave the café, gesturing with his hands his desire to pay and receiving a clear sign of negation from the shift manager (at the owner’s command), they decided to cross the street, as if they had better avoid the puddle of turbid light the inspector left behind. They shuffled into the café owned by a man proud of his organic, fair-trade coffee, and who pinned to the walls pictures of smiling farmers in their fields. Beneath the farmers sat poets who linked one long line to another, glued together by the word I. Sometimes they raised their heads and offered Dori a child’s smile, more defiant than apologetic, a smile to say that they and only they, the wordsmiths, the wretched of spirit, could be the poorest of all.

  It was a weak day, the two of them concluded with a show of indifference, comparing the piles of cards with the pile of coins, and Dori again thought that perhaps Georgia was right and the time had come to retire. It was Dori who had urged Dima to join her in this business, which from the beginning looked dubious and miserable to him. But actually because of this, as a patron of lost causes, he suddenly agreed, presenting himself beside her in his military tunic, heavyset and clumsy. And once he made up his mind, he distributed the cards aggressively, placing them on the table and looking deep into the eyes of the person seated there, and only Dori knew that the meaning of that clear, forceful look was pure contempt. Perhaps the decadence and not only the wretchedness enchanted him, so at least Dori concluded, and he agreed to serve all that he hated for the sake of a goal greater than moneymaking. Because what were they doing but driving another nail into the coffin of the society that he loathed? She knew what Lili would say, if she only knew that Dori was humiliating herself like this with strangers. And for money, no less. She could anticipate her horror. Because this was worse than anything that she and Lili ever did and anything that Lili was liable to do individually. But this time, Lili, who continued speaking in her head with a strange, nasal English accent, didn’t get it. Because it wasn’t only Dima who tossed the coins and bills into some drawer and forgot about them. Dori didn’t do it for the money either, and she didn’t resist the humiliation bound up in it. In fact, the humiliation was part of the appeal. To wear the pleated skirt each time, to put on an impenetrable expression, to be that little one who presents her limitations to the masses, who exposes the scale that is never held straight between the deaf and the hearing. So not everyone got it, so what? And anyway, even though only a few knew it, Dori made her living somewhere else.

  WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN

  When she was seventeen, Georgia O’Keeffe presented to her the file upon which was written “Dora (Dori) Ackerman,” as if to say, “We have nothing to hide.” Her calm cat eyes looked directly at Dori, who held the file in her hands. For a moment, as she grasped the rubber band that held together the two cardboard folders, Dori seemed to consent. But the moment passed and she returned the file without reading it. From Dori’s side, things looked like this: she felt Georgia’s admiration for her actions like something alive, something sensual, with soft, glistening fur. When her hands stretched out and placed the file on the small table between them, she already understood that in this tiny act, in her avoidance of reading about herself, she had earned a limitless line of maturity credit.

  And yet, if from Georgia’s perspective she had excelled in this test, for Dori it was no challenge at all. She already understood then that at best she’d read a story about someone else, a girl from a troubled home, a girl who grew up in conditions that the establishment abhorred, until it decided to remove her from this home, from these conditions. She knew that what she’d read would miss everything. “And if I’m going to”—she’d say to Anton, lifting her chin—“if I’m going to read about abusive childhoods, I prefer literature and not the formulations of welfare officials.”

  In the years after, Dori wondered what would have happened had she leafed through the personal file, learned a bit more about her life’s circumstances. But from the beginning Georgia had been kind to her for the wrong reasons, even though it wasn’t always easy to be kind to her. Dori was a tough case, one that didn’t quickly produce results. Were she a plant that was transferred from silty soil to a rich flowerpot (let’s suppose), a plan
t that was finally cared for by a sure hand, she would have already budded and strangely bloomed. But that wasn’t how it went. Dori herself knew this and in general had reservations about gardening imagery, but that moment, when she was seventeen and Georgia O’Keeffe’s age was some multiple of that number, that moment, when Georgia O’Keeffe’s eyes rested on her with obvious admiration and Dori was like a moon upon which the light of a great sun was finally cast: that moment the two of them would remember, as if they’d believed for a moment that the moon had shed a light of its own.

  * * *

  The very fact of sitting opposite G.O. at fixed times, when almost nothing changed in the room—not even Georgia’s features, other than the deepening wrinkles on the sides of her mouth—was the presence of the absolute in Dori’s life. And not just because of the décor or the time of day. In fact, the things that Georgia refused to understand, and what Dori didn’t consider telling her, these actually preserved this relationship and sustained it anew each time she knocked on the door and went inside. The frequency of the meetings lessened over the years, but by that point she was already used to sitting in the pleasant room, like she had gotten used to brushing her teeth or reading with a foot resting on the wall and her head on the pillow. It never occurred to her to miss a meeting.

  Dori was unable to find a real difference between the room she visited when she was eleven and the room she visited five or ten years later. An unthreatening brightness always prevailed there, like an overexposed photograph in which the objects nevertheless don’t disappear but exist in a state of pure softness (these were Dori’s words, this is exactly how she thought about it). There were large pictures of feminine flowers, devouring and devoured, and Georgia O’Keeffe sat cross-legged like Buddha under the Bodhi Tree. On the writing desk, always at the same angle, stood a tiny reproduction of a flattened rabbit and a copper pot. Next to it sat a picture of a young woman with a square jaw, smoking and laughing. The picture of the rabbit, which remained a bit blurry even when the light filtered in through the blinds, created the darkest point in the bright room, like filth congealing on snow, and if Dori had to choose, it was her favorite. Even the shelves loaded with books didn’t weigh down the place and instead supported the sense that it was always noon, that outside there sprawled green gardens on which the two of them might rest their eyes for a moment before the air grew too hot.