Again and again I remember a lone sentence from Uriel’s mother; she said to me, “Why, you grew up with nature, you were raised in a village.” Even then it was hard for me to believe that she meant my parents’ one-story house, where the rooms were so cramped and crowded together that the refrigerator was kept on the porch. Maybe because she never paid a visit. Maybe because she had no idea that Anna’s most complicated technical achievement was to break the refrigerator’s short legs with hammer blows so that the cats couldn’t jump onto it and swarm into the pantry for an all-you-can-eat-buffet. That’s what nature was like. That’s what the village was like. The longed-for pastoral. Fauna and flora were words that didn’t grasp on to anything. I could spread my hands wide and the fingers would touch only air, and opinions were divided over whether the air was good or bad. Our nature was barrenness from horizon to horizon, electric lines and streets that were paved alongside dirt roads, neighborhoods in the distance and occasional visits from stray cats and mongooses emerging as night fell. There were a few fields that were watered for some governmental reasons and there was the puddle that only Dori could find any beauty in. But that was all.
Of course I never said a thing about this to Uriel’s mother. When she spoke I felt that I had won something, a trickle of stolen water. From her ability to see in me a nature girl who skips after friendly animals in the meadow or rides on the backs of horses, I too, for a few fragile moments, saw myself in that image.
But most days the outdoors terrified me. With all my hatred of Anna and Alex, I preferred not to leave the house. I remained in the house and saw them. They passed quickly from hot to cold, conducting extreme temperatures like metals, and next to them I was as cold as an ax cleaving a glacier. Maybe Anna was scared of me. I felt something of this even without the commentary from Alex, who scolded and explained how bad I’d been, how delicate Anna was and how ill-suited to the half-wild life we led. I saw that she looked at me with the eyes of a hunted animal, big and frightened and made-up, waiting for me to tear apart the main artery in her neck with my teeth. But all this obvious suffering was called upon for a purpose. We were performing for an unseen audience. Not only Anna behaved as if her movements were concealing a secret, a fixed object meant for interpretation and hidden reflections. Both Dori and I behaved like that too.
We specialized in subtle and extreme mimicry, we were quick-handed. All the excitement over her mannerisms was intended for those who see but don’t hear. Who looked at us through the holes in the doors, through ourselves. Someone, somewhere, sat and wouldn’t take his eyes off of us.
Dori practiced fainting and Anna revealed her many injuries, which were as attractive as the wounds of Christ. But no one knew a thing about us. Anna was as determined as a warhorse and even I was never as delicate as a raindrop, a finger, or a rose’s petal. We were no more sensitive than metal forged in fire. And nevertheless we carried on. The crowd needed to understand that I was the villain, that I, with evil looks, with shoulder shrugs, with my ostentatious introversion, I was the source of all evil, the cause of Anna’s injury and all the injuries still to come.
And beneath all this the fear still pecked away at me that no one was looking, that no one saw, that all this could continue until the end of time without anyone noticing, the same stained couch, the same air that was hard to walk in, us. Me.
In light of this one might imagine that I would be an incredible actress, that my career in the theater would last longer than a single high school production. But that’s not how it went. So yes, Ms. Savyon, I’m answering you a bit late, with the assistance of the cleanest vodka I could find in the area, because there are things a lady doesn’t compromise on even though the cup stays full. Do you understand yet, Ms. Uriel’s-Mother Savyon? This is the nature in which I was raised. No connection to the green abundance I’m now immersed in. I live in a house that isn’t mine, in which every piece of furniture and every object appears to be a paragon of its kind. Look at the glass in my hand, the rug under my feet, how they point in the proper direction: restrained good taste. Even the fauna and the flora here are endowed with the owners’ tranquility. It’s easy to be impressed by the velvety green of the trees’ leaves and the silky green of the soft grass. The picture is rich in details, as if a level-headed architect with a slight tendency for the rococo designed it. And amid all this, only the foreignness suits me.
Eventually I did indeed do a few things that piled up one on top of the other; I took a few steps along a path that could hesitantly be called a career. I left school and returned to it. There’s some diploma you can hang on some wall and my name is written on it in Latin letters. My failure is not necessarily obvious. But beneath all this I’m still Lili. Lili who sits on the green couch with Dori’s flowery fabric, the thick fabric that wrinkles whenever limbs stretch out, that resists the possibility of ever being comfortable. These are Dori’s printed flowers that grow unsightly tendrils and climbing branches nonstop. When Dori first spread out the fabric, and with considerable effort at that, I told her it looked like someone had puked a meadow onto our couch. She tried to hide her humiliation. Dori was proud of this extravagant, itchy fabric. I hadn’t suspected that a decade later I’d see that hideous covering each time I so much as closed my eyes. Yes, on that couch, on the printed fabric meant to hide its many imperfections, there still sits some half-transparent Lili, Lili who despises lies and holds up facts, Lili who looks into the emptiness without hearing, leaning on her right elbow, writing and composing. And that same Lili looks at me with a narrowed gaze. She’s surprised, and not pleasantly, by who I’ve become. I know that this is exactly how things are; there’s no need to console me. Sometimes I want to say to her, we’re the same, but each time I turn away.
Even I didn’t believe that I had a chance. Just like them, I knew that the moment I passed beyond their reach I’d disappear altogether. Much like them I didn’t believe that there would be a Lili without them. Bridges of words stretch out between Dori and me. The words cover the sea but it’s impossible to walk along these bridges, the water won’t bear us. There isn’t enough, in stories there isn’t enough. “I sank beneath the water, Dori,” I sign out of habit, facing an open window and not even the squirrels on the tree grant me a look. But my little sister won’t save me. Not her. Look at me and see who I have become.
I’m Lili Ackerman. And you?
DORI
There’s a limit to what you can expect from people, as perhaps Dori especially understood. She sat facing the camera and fixed her collar. Not that it did much good, because the wrinkle was set deep into the fabric and a slight smell of sweat still came from her despite all the hand-washing that she had almost gotten used to. And that wasn’t the only thing she’d been forced to get used to in the non-technological universe where she’d voluntary settled down.
But these were trifles, so everyone said, trifles that are easy to adjust to following a certain effort. Slowly the body recovers, the stiff relaxes, the heavy lightens, the worthless takes on value. Many described the calm that took hold of them from the moment they dedicated themselves to the place, since they disconnected from the oppressive, monotonous buzz of electricity and electrons. Everyone signed the same words, “rest,” “calm,” “relaxation,” and “quiet,” and Dori nodded distractedly, even though it was all the same to them whether she nodded or not.
She turned on the webcam herself. No, technology wasn’t desirable, was contaminating even, but two cameras were the exception. The camera in front of which Dori sat was located in a locked room outside the complex, a nonidentical twin of the other camera, which was hidden in an old mailbox and filmed a field where only weeds grew. Mostly she sat there together with Alex, on two unassuming wooden chairs that folded easily. Lotti spread out an embroidered tablecloth over the school table and set down a vase with flowers; Alex refused any more than this. But the vase was usually empty, and Alex and Dori agreed that neither of them was interested in flowers.
H
e signed to her and she looked at him, and when it was her turn, she would sign or speak according to the sign he had given her, according to the spirit that had moved him. Recently she had taken to calling him Alex and not Father, and ignored the honorary titles that were attached to him in the complex, whereas he called her Dori and this name, which was signed with the first letter, seemed strange on his fingers. The camera showed only her, although there were a few broadcasts that transmitted the tips of Alex’s fingers. They were extremely rare and there were those who said that they had already become a collector’s item. But of course they were exaggerating. In any case, Alex claimed that their broadcast had many fans, all willing to watch the empty field that the additional camera filmed for days on end, waiting for his word. There was even someone who watched them in China, as Alex had discovered a few days earlier, even though Dori was certain that the viewer was a bored diplomat or at best an exiled goods importer who’d gone out to make his fortune and actually meant to visit a lingerie website with a name similar to that of their own. But Alex imagined a Chinese farmer blinking toward the horizon, fleeing from the infinite rice fields to the sight of their very finite field.
Dori’s camera, as they had gotten used to calling it, recorded and broadcasted once or at most twice a week. If Alex was absent for unknown reasons, Dori read the simple messages that he wrote to her on wrinkled lined paper. She mostly preferred to read them aloud, expecting each time that her voice would sound strange and alien in her ears, but each time the voice sounded clean as in the past, as in the studio, where Ada was her mirror. She read without skipping over a single comma. She reported to the empty space on the jewelry and organic fruit featured for sale, on the dedicated girl who salvaged dolls and toys, restored their painted faces, and gave birth to clean, unblemished plastic girls and boys without uniforms or makeup. When she was required to speak aloud, Dori read all this with a blank expression. But mostly she went back to her mother tongue and signed. Sometimes in his messages Alex emphasized the Western world’s dependence on technology and discussed the blessed return to simplicity and silence. Once, in another life, he’d explained to Lili and Dori that the deaf were merely deaf to the vanities of this world, deaf to its numerous flaws. With absolute seriousness he signed that were the world to make a perfect sound of goodness and kindness, they would certainly hear it. As much as she searched between the lines, there wasn’t a trace of those old messages in the new. In their place came new words, shadowless sentences, explanations that struck her as stupid. But she knew that deafness was a great virtue, and the rustles she nevertheless sometimes perceived, the sounds she tried not to hear but that infiltrated her defenses, she mercilessly drowned inside her.
Dori remembered the first time she understood that what she was hearing was music. The chills, the knowledge that her bones could play it. This was one of the uncles’ tiny birds, inside of which, as she understood only when she told Anton about it later, Uncle Noah had hidden a music box’s simple mechanism. She thought that the bird had played something banal, an ice cream man’s song. She tried to repeat it into Anton’s ears but fell silent. She tried to repeat it to her own ears. Dori held it between her two hands in their old room, as if she could crush it accidentally, as if it could fly away, as if it could sing again. She hoped that it would sing again. This bird disappeared quicker than the others even though Dori hid it. Whereas now she no longer knew how to banish the sounds as she once had, they insisted on clinging to her like crabs to a rock.
Again she heard sounds from the outside, children and a dog. On the farm there was no need for plugs, and when a noise sounded she wasn’t ready for it and again, like a novice, she tensed up. The few noises were created by children, who never tired of building improvised vehicles that made dull noises. Most of them were confiscated, since, despite everything, there was someone to hear them, someone whose quiet was very much disturbed. Mostly everything was so quiet, perhaps like in space, as she sometimes thought. The few rustlings that were made were gentle and natural, whereas the sounds that she had gotten used to hopping over like obstacles—cars rattling, the exhalations of buses’ heavy engines, horns and motorcycles, someone braking with a screech, leaf blowers, noises of air conditioners, personal computers, loud televisions, and cell phones making varied sounds and amplifying the human voice searching for a response, planes breaking the speed of sound—all these were utterly absent. As if all the world’s sounds had sunk into the sea, were swimming in a bathtub emptied of its water.
She said to him in the bathtub, “We are eternal,” and he laughed and she knew nevertheless that their love was deep and ancient, like an apple that always recalls the previous apple that was eaten, an infinite chain of apples, even if she didn’t know who was the apple and who the eater in her parable, and she just observed that miracle, how her leg wrapped around his leg beneath the sparse foam and the light hair on his bare legs moved slowly in the water. But instead of continuing to look or to kiss or to be, Dori just spoke about eternity.
In her mind, the two of them were gods who ate anything but apples. But it wasn’t so. In fact, Dori desperately wanted that moment that already had been, that transformed before her eyes from present to past. Already then she felt robbed of him, she knew how it would end, and she listened to the music that was being played from somewhere, coming in through windows that were always opened wider at night, a guitar solo that went on endlessly and lacked any special beauty, but at that moment it was beautiful and they too, despite her efforts to ruin things, were beautiful. Anton, who was also immersed in the music, announced, “It’s impossible to imagine that once, when you didn’t hear it, you truly didn’t hear.” And for a moment that guitar sounded incredibly beautiful, perhaps from the force of his words, and Dori shrugged her shoulders. “Truly.”
“Sit straight, Dori,” Alex signed, and Dori blushed. Again she remembered Anton, who told her to lie on her back and she obeyed. When was that, weeks or months ago? It seemed that years covered over that past, the college, the piles of cards. Despite this she could instantly see her naked body in his eyes, as if each blue eye reflected one of her breasts. Dori undoubtedly reddened and the heat spread even to the shirt’s neckline and along with it the redness. Even if her father missed the chameleon-like change in colors on her body and her face, the camera was likely to capture this too. She tugged again at her shirt and recoiled from herself even though the camera didn’t transmit smells. When she sees the edited broadcast she’ll be convinced that she looks exactly like she always does in these broadcasts, relaxed, serious, and almost sweet. A portrait from another century set in an ornamental pin. The only daughter of Alex Ackerman, known by many as Father. And also the daughter of Anna Ackerman, about whom they no longer speak.
* * *
The children burst into the improvised studio. Someone, that is, Dori, again had forgotten, that is, forgot, to lock the door. And Dori gazed at the two boys and the girl who was a head taller than them and at their beautiful dog, a brushed-out collie who was better groomed than the three of them put together. She looked at them with an affection in which there was also envy. They were as naked and tan as savages except for the underwear with drawings of angry birds. All of them proudly petted the body of the well-groomed collie, which smiled a canine smile at Dori. She knew that these kids had tried previously to raise a guide dog but the loud spoken commands had disturbed many residents of the farm and this came to an end. The children had quickly and with aptitude grasped the signs and the language, as each of them demonstrated, but nevertheless more than once dropped off into speaking and even shouting. Dori asked them if they wanted chocolate and they signed, “Yes.” She opened the drawer of the green table and extended a package to the girl. “Share equally but don’t give to the collie,” she said, and the girl exposed a mouth with especially small teeth and offered a smile that looked like a perfect imitation of the dog’s and ran off laughing almost silently with the others following after her. “You didn�
�t have to do that,” signed Alex, who reprimanded the children for the noise they had made. Dori shrugged her shoulders, but all the same when she looked at him she signed, “Sorry.”
LILI
I still watch them as the dead watch the living, if indeed they can, if they’re desperate to return in whatever body and role, be it as beggars, as thieves, as the world’s fools. I look at them with all the lenses that technology has convened for me, observing how their kingdom is built every day. I want to believe that it’s because of them. That only because of them I’m unable to avert my gaze. But what do you know, it’s my independent behavior. Free will. Enough years now I’ve wandered without them, a satellite drifting in space. Stop blaming the parents, oh Lili Marlene. I look at them the way you look at a school of sharks that was left behind in an abandoned center underwater, only the cameras serving as company. I look at them as I look at my few patients, miserable and scratching and waiting on my word. I can’t help any of them and nevertheless I am what they need, a pair of eyes to look at them without filling up with tears.
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