Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  * * *

  When she sat in Georgia’s office, her hands under her knees, disposable plugs were stuffed into her ears, the yellow kind that come packaged in pairs at the drugstore. Dori had adjusted to the feel of them, less spongy and stringy than the wads of cotton from childhood and also less irritating than the plugs from her elementary school years. Anati had supplied her with them without reserve, even though she had nothing to give in exchange. Suddenly they were friends. “You know that you always could hear,” Georgia told her again with the uncompromising gentleness that Dori already knew well. Delicate white gladioli in a new vase quivered from the breeze of the air conditioner, while Georgia stressed every vowel and consonant, knowing that Dori couldn’t keep from lip reading, all still supplemented with incomplete, mistake-ridden gestures in the language. “There are those who hear and those who don’t. It’s that simple.” This wasn’t the first time that this was said to her, but each time it sounded more baseless than before. “They did you an injustice. They raised you in opposition to your abilities.”

  Sometimes she wanted to be seduced by the smooth, clean explanations that Georgia gave her. The clean and clear explanations about the world and about Dori herself that drew in the air between them a bright, vivid map of the stars. But even she couldn’t convince Dori that she could hear. At least she knew that once, she was their girl, belonging to them completely.

  * * *

  “You turned yourself off,” Georgia O’Keeffe said to her.

  “I’m not an electronic device,” she quickly objected. “Can you imagine that? Nice to meet you, Dori the Toaster.”

  “But all the same,” said Georgia, Dori’s joke passing by her like a paper airplane.

  Dori was silent; what was there for her to say?

  “Hearing isn’t a voluntary sense, but apparently you were a very strong girl. You succeeded in closing it off, sealing it up. You succeeded in telling your brain that you couldn’t hear, that with you the sounds were stopped at the threshold.” As she spoke, Dori recalled those sailors who fell off the edge of the earth because they believed the earth was flat.

  She focused with her gaze on the letter E and discovered seven books on the shelf whose titles included the word End in a variety of configurations. Recently Georgia had changed the internal order of the library and the books were classified according to the name of the book and not the author. Dori read the names aloud and stopped. She knew that Georgia was listening to her. That she had time and wouldn’t rush her. In any case, Georgia’s theory was lacking. Even with her unique key wrench, which had proven itself more than once, she couldn’t turn all the screws. “What you need is a skeleton key,” Dori said aloud, and Georgia asked, “What do you mean?” and Dori shrugged her shoulders and said, “Whatever.” But she knew that only by stealing would it be possible to find a trace of what once was, only by coming with impure intentions and a great, overwhelming will. But she wasn’t sure who she was supposed to steal from.

  And perhaps the truth was only what was recorded in their books, only what happened afterward, in the world of sounds. She knew that they had forced her to accept the voices’ weight inside her. Dori was the first woman and therefore was required to give a name to every noise and rustle in the world. When she tried, she discovered that even this was impossible, because the sounds had names from time immemorial and people and animals and even objects had voices, and things made noises. They raged and clattered and squeaked, even more vulgar than the bodily odors that were masked by perfumes and nevertheless always reached Dori first, tiny particles floating to her to be quickly absorbed.

  Even then, in the first years outside the house, in days that had no floor or ceiling, as much as they asked and speculated (and at that time Dori didn’t know just how interesting she was, from a research perspective, and how many researchers wasted their time on her case), they couldn’t find the key. The therapists hypothesized and Dori sat silent. Closed up like a wall of bricks in a fallow field. A girl in the form of a wall. Because Dori swallowed the key, the entire key ring. At first it rested on her tongue like foreign words and then it was swallowed, plunging inward. Had they asked her, they’d have learned the only way to get it back was to shake her upside down. So many things would had fallen out of her stomach and pockets. Dori herself would have been surprised to see what fell out, but this they didn’t do. Not even Georgia. Therefore they went on missing things big and small. Because she wasn’t a strong girl at all, but very weak. A person without any strength of her own. Lili had more strength than her, that was clear, but look, look, all she’d done was take it and leave.

  * * *

  But Lili wrote her. It didn’t matter where Dori lived, Lili’s letters found their way to her like water and electric bills. They rested in Dori and Anati’s mailbox, on which the name of the German tourist was still written. And like the bills, the very existence of Lili’s letters, most of which remained sealed and silent, indicated a debt. But in fact, that year, simultaneously with her college studies, the recording studio, Anton, Dori did finally open the envelopes. At least some of them (every tenth envelope and sometimes every seventh envelope and once two in a row). When she read, her eyes skipping between the rows, she wondered when Lili became so ridiculous, desperate, so different from the brilliant, objective voice in her head. She wrote as if it was clear to her that Dori would read and read and find Lili’s opinions on the weather and the death of painting interesting. She sent her fragmented sketches from an exhibition that she saw and informed her about the deaths of old female painters. Dori understood. Even if they didn’t exchange a single word, she understood that Lili was writing to her about Georgia. That her sister was referring to her out of everyone. Because she again gave her a big sister’s instructions, imagining that she had power over her: Do you remember? You must remember. Do you forgive me? I forgive you. Actually, she was saying: Go, leave, obey.

  She read only a fraction of those letters, a fraction of a fraction maybe, but alas, the fraction that she did read she knew by heart.

  Yes, the words themselves weren’t worth much. Had she pinned Lili to the wall, her sister would have admitted this herself. Nevertheless she sent letters. Along with them, Lili sent small drawings of the hotel she lived in and diagrams of five ways to make a bed. She drew with quick lines a few of the guests in the hotel and the cooks, most of whom were immigrants from their own dying countries, chopping and frying and resting during cigarette breaks. Later on she drew the dogs she walked, adding their names in tiny writing to the drawing, noting who was aggressive and who was simply amazing, and who was in love with whom and who was jealous. And Dori smiled against her will and sometimes showed these illustrated letters to Dima, who looked at them with a furrowed brow. Again she pointed out the small drawings that adorned the outsides of the envelopes, an impartial tour guide, but she knew that all this was a smoke screen. Once Dori relented and wrote to her something in return, perhaps out of courtesy, perhaps from exhaustion, she mailed to her scenes from plays she borrowed almost at random from Georgia, who preferred Shakespeare, and from Anati, who had recently announced her intention to study acting and had bought all the Greek plays. But mostly she just cut out and pasted the texts she was required to read at the studio. More directions to a destination than Natasha asking, to the amusement of the entire table, what they’d get for dessert; more turn left, plaza up ahead than Ismene pleading before Antigone. But anyway, Lili didn’t respond to either.

  ANTON SAID GOODBYE TO HIS MOTHER

  Anton said goodbye to his mother at the entrance to the house and Dori nodded to her from a distance. She sat on one of the eight carved wooden chairs in the kitchen, dressed in a shirt with spots that didn’t match anything, looking through the broad window at the movement of clouds that drifted past as if by special invitation. The wealth still stunned her and she tried to pretend as if she belonged even though she never would belong with these people, who, for instance, ate oysters. Were Anati ther
e instead of her, she would have immediately felt at home, placing her feet on the counter and still looking incredibly appropriate. As if this sequoia-wood counter was only waiting for that talented-but-disturbed girl to come home. Dori’s feet swayed a few centimeters from the floor and Dori, who refused to feel like a girl, moved to the opposite chair, which actually was identical to the chair she’d sat on a moment before. Around then, the two of them nodded to each other, as if mimicking each other’s movement, but the similarity between them ended there. And the mother said, “Don’t let him drive you crazy. My boy, he drives people crazy.” Dori nodded again, for the second or third time, and reflected on the tone of explicit pride that accompanied these words. Dori wrung her hands and the mother clutched the silk scarf tied around her neck and tightened her grip on the keys in her other hand. Her short, fair curls waved around thanks to the blowing of an unseen breeze dedicated only to her. She looked like a graceful, courageous pilot who was about to cross the ocean. Hard to believe that she gave birth to Anton at the age of thirty. Hard to believe that she gave birth to anyone at all. Dori thought, there’s no need for such camouflage, for sentences made of words that contradict what they seem to mean, because when it came to Anton she and his mother were of one mind. In their eyes, every fault of his looked like evidence of his unique soul. So it happened that Dori suddenly remembered what she’d found written in a book by one poetess, dedicated to a different poet. The dedication said that she and his mother were proud of him and loved him. How strange these things were in her eyes then. It’s almost unnecessary to point out that the mother was the woman from the café. The one whom Anton sat next to silently, the one before whom Dori danced her little scene with the cards. Dori assumed that she didn’t recognize her; usually they didn’t recognize her. But Dori immediately identified the expensive bag and the purple lipstick, purple as a bruise, and the inquisitive eyes.

  After she visited one of their three homes for the first time, Dori concluded that there was indeed a place that was called the mother’s house, and there was the son’s apartment and the additional apartment as well, but in fact the division of the spaces between the mother and her son were rather fluid. They shared the places they owned with impressive generosity, like twenty-year-old roommates in a leaky apartment. There were always too many cartons of milk or none at all and the pantry was incredibly well stocked until suddenly they were missing something and they’d decide it was possible, it was certainly possible, to live without sugar, lemons, or flowers. So they lived together with the same modernist works, with open spaces, covered in glass and metal. The apartments and the house (the “properties,” Anton would correct her) were all listed under Anton’s name for some reason. When she encountered his mother again (indeed less frequently than it seemed likely they would meet, and even this was hasty, like a superficial kiss on a cheek), Dori still couldn’t figure out why she and Anton tended to move through space together and each time settle down together in one place and abandon their other homes. Whether or not this moving, according to which they locked one apartment behind them and moved on to another, happened out of loneliness, whether or not they desired each other’s presence or whether they acted like this out of convenience only—Dori felt for the mother. Because she was able to find a good explanation for each and every motive, even if she herself remained a guest among them for a limited time. There was no one to blame other than herself. She herself doled out the time. She stayed as long as she could give it.

  Only in the old house, which was called the mother’s house, was Anton sometimes alone or alone with Dori. Because the mother couldn’t stand the house in which Anton was raised and complained about the automobile traffic that ran too close, likewise about the color of the walls. Yet only there did Anton’s boredom disappear, like clothing he could roll up, under which Dori saw a boy, just a boy. A passionate boy who wanted exactly the same stories that everyone wants, and when the newness threatened to evaporate he’d close his eyes across from Dori’s moving mouth. Dori couldn’t shake the image of a chain of hearers clinging one to the other, asking one after the other to hear about Lili. Sometimes it seemed to her that she was trying to go forward but forcefully stuck to her back was a funny line of listeners, judges and social workers who held on to one another’s hips, coveting the golden goose that she held in her hands. And now Anton as well. But very quickly he found his place at the head of the chain and the hips he held were hers. Each time he asked her to speak she plucked another feather from Lili’s tail, and if Anton hadn’t been so skinny, it would have been even easier to imagine that he intended to swallow the entire goose—beak, feathers, deafness, and all.

  But no one was twisting her arm to speak. Not even Anton, and no, she really didn’t have to. At certain moments it seemed to her that an arrow long since released had finally struck the target. And even if she wasn’t the one who shot the arrow, the target was nevertheless struck. Because finally she spoke about Lili. When this happened she didn’t feel relief, but the guilt didn’t bother her either. Because what she said and what she didn’t were the same to everyone. What lives is what dies, like the king, like the queen. Wherever they are, they die one after the other, or one following the other. One could go on endlessly enumerating the royal chain of the dead (the king died and then the queen died and the princes died and the guards died and the cook died and the gardeners died and the cat died), and compared with all that, what was Lili? Almost nothing. A random collection of cells, unfocused thought, air particles, memory on top of memory, voice in the head, hole in the head.

  And it’s not nice to say this, but there wasn’t enough in just the two of them together. Because there was no “Dori and Anton”; such a thing didn’t exist except as a phrase with no foothold in the world. The rooms they sat in were quite empty, when she bent toward him, almost leaning into him, it was as if she were leaning into a wall or a closet. When they slept together the body was elsewhere. No one reached out a hand. This was so different from what Dori had hoped for, the suffocation grabbed her from inside, saying to the limbs, move, continue without a heart, without lungs, press on, and Dori, because she had no choice, pressed on. He came to her because she wanted him, because the desire was valid and strong. But from the time he stayed she had to give something, something else besides the desire itself, which was pure and somehow so embarrassing (for example: she’d collapse into his arms and he’d lift up her dress. She no longer wore almost any dresses). Dori tried to be daring and thoughtless. She tried to act like she thought women were acting in other rooms at the exact same time. She did what it seemed to her had to be done, but it always looked stupid. She couldn’t keep from seeing herself from the side and shaking her head in amazement. What exactly are you doing? When she took her shirt off facing him, with a clumsy motion that seemed to her to convey defiance or sophistication, she only put it back on quickly. Even at age ten Anati had taken off shirts better than her.

  Yet when he didn’t come to her she counted the hours. Immediately after midnight she’d set down her book and call him. She always chose the same words. Like a child, like someone whose sleep is very important: “Come to me, I can’t sleep.” Face-to-face this wouldn’t be said; what are you talking about? Face-to-face she said only what he wanted to hear. The first time he said, “I’m coming,” and she thought he’d have a plan, but they only walked for hours. He didn’t believe in public transportation, he threw up in taxis, and his Citroën was up on cinder blocks for an unknown reason. Afterward she would discover he had set routes. She walked with him on a commercial street full of garbage. On a jewelers’ street emptied of its gold at night. Among prostitutes and pimps. In a small club hidden under a restaurant Dori clung to the crimson wall and Anton caressed the face of someone he knew. She didn’t protest, as if such tribulations were necessary. Suddenly they were like one body, for an instant, smoking the same cigarette, sticking a hand under a shirt, the same hand, the same shirt. She didn’t like to be touched, but A
nton had such familiar hands, hands of a prince from ancient legends, a marble statue made of flesh and blood. And when he placed his palm on her stomach the entire world couldn’t touch her.

  THERE WERE OTHER NIGHTS TOO

  There were other nights too. On those nights she spread blue eye shadow under her eyes, unintentionally creating for herself the look of an ill person. She wore clothes taken straight from Anati’s closet, the fineness of its clothing unequaled since its owner was ten. Dresses with sculpted collars that buttoned down her back, patterned stockings without a run. She still wore the same tattered boots that were buckled with a snap of the copper clasp, like gnome’s shoes. The boots stepped on Anton’s leather shoes more than once and each time she apologized and received confirmation of her excessive physicality against the solid wind, the frozen milk that was Anton. On those nights only the stories ruled the roost and she was the one who told them. After some thought Dori painted her nails peach-orange.

  Afterward he apparently loved her more and she hated herself a bit more. “I prefer to be your mistress rather than the emperor’s wife.” She memorized words that she never had the opportunity to use. Anton still caressed other girls’ cheeks. He still loved his mother more than her (What did you think? Lili and Anati, who never met, said to her. What exactly did you think? they sang as a chorus). But what was hers was hers by law. Anton saw in her a coding machine with ten thousand combinations. His hands wandered over her. Grasping, so blind, clumsier than you might guess. But she taught him what he asked to learn, and sometimes what she wanted too, signing the word “breathe” like lungs rising and falling above her chest and each time Anton looked on, spellbound anew.