Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  * * *

  This house is strange to me. In this house I’m forever a guest praising the décor. Sentenced to good manners even though I’m here alone. Between two and four I arrange tours of the big house for myself, a guide gesturing with her hands at a host of lovely spots, practicing foreign accents as if I were again a seventeen-year-old with fleeting aspirations of becoming an actress; here’s the rustic kitchen, the family room, the guest wing, I behave again as I did in those days when I believed what they said about me. Sometimes Jenna arrives and rolls around from laughter and the two of us pretend that she doesn’t own the house, or is actually the owner’s beloved niece who put this house at my disposal. She no longer asks me when I’ll return to the city, no longer pretends that my miserable therapist career is worth a thing, just brings sweet desserts, loaded with berries I can’t bear to eat. We speak English. Lili talks about herself in third person, immigrated to the world of the hearing.

  Only in Alex and Anna’s house did I know every lump of plaster. Every cracked tile in our room, every stain that would never be removed from the doorpost, but would instead be joined by additional stains. My disappearances, as Dori called them, began by chance. It started the time I was locked out of the house. The hours passed. Who knows where everyone was. I never asked. Once I got sick of waiting in the doorway, driving out the cats that gathered by the refrigerator, I got up and left. When I reached the old cultural center I was as surprised as someone who discovers a palace in a fairy tale: grandeur in the heart of the wilderness, a mostly demolished palace, plastered in gray, true, but even then it was without a doubt the most beautiful structure I’d seen in my life. The damage caused by time only emphasized its natural splendor, the elongated windows, the carved lion’s head set on the roof. The lion’s eyes were painted in an opaque, phosphorescent, sloppy orange. The lion saw nothing and the structure itself was scribbled with writings and drawings that, I understood, were meant to be vulgar, but even then I saw in them something exciting and even touching. That the quickly drawn anatomical sketches just wanted to be applauded, to be worthy of eternity like that peculiar blinded lion. The letters that joined into words in a language I didn’t know enchanted me. Yes, my first impulse was to bring Dori there. We shared everything, whether or not we wanted to. But that evening, and maybe it was pure coincidence, I didn’t tell her a thing about it. That’s how it was and that’s how it remained.

  I wasn’t the only one who encountered that structure. Plans were made for it, hidden plans; there were other interested parties beyond me. I discovered that some of Alex’s ducks had a habit of going there, but when we ran into each other we acted like strangers, satellites momentarily separated from the fathership. They informed me that the structure existed on borrowed time, that the climbing plants and raspberry bushes would grow there for a limited time only. That the moment the money passed from one pocket to another all this would likely disappear altogether. I assume that since then the land has been flattened and sold, that something was probably erected on it. But at that time it was a kind of demilitarized zone that no one claimed ownership of other than us, and couples momentarily looking for a place far from everything; kids with cap guns; wanderers; a few emaciated homeless people who came and went. Once I even saw a herd of goats grazing there. Maybe I went there only so I’d have somewhere to go. But both there and on the way there I was never without an awareness that caught me by the back of the neck like a mother cat grasping kittens. I always knew: Here I am. I’m Lili Ackerman. I’m here. Now I’m walking, now I’m sitting down on the rounded cement steps, now I’m breathing, now time isn’t moving. Now.

  After the land rest, I went there almost every day. Such that after I met Uriel I called him to come there with me. To this day I can’t say why him, because truthfully it would have been better to ask Dima to come with me, without acting as if I was lighthearted and as full of mischief as the spring wind. That day I wore a long skirt and the thistles got stuck on it. With the back of my hand I wiped away Anna’s clear lip gloss that I’d found. My gesture was more than he was ready to accept. It would have been better to let things go, to let him woo and myself be wooed, but I said to him: come.

  The air was blazing and embers stood in it, proclaiming a future fire that would spread through the great many thistles. Uriel complained about an annoying pain in his leg; I laughed when he imagined bloodsucking parasites and ticks among the thorns. Very quickly he grew impatient, and even when he tried to joke around I saw that he was dying to leave, that this rickety structure I’d presented to him seemed to him out of a nightmare. I ignored his discomfort. I drew away the spiderwebs and pointed at the view. One after another I presented to him the old notices, full of exclamation marks, that remained from the time when bands still performed there, the illustrated coulisses I found stored in one of the rooms with the rot climbing over them. The more he looked at it with scorn the more I insisted, sure, they hadn’t been drawn with great skill, but with considerable investment. Love, even.

  Finally I said to him, “Look up,” and showed him the lion’s head, the stone mane and the mouth open in a mute roar. Almost against his will a whistle escaped; he loved to whistle, but then he said, “That’s fake, you know.” I spread my hands out to the sides, the fingers grasped air and closed, my arms joined each other, hugging just me. Uriel kicked at the cigarette butts left on the ground and a bag full of rotting oranges. With the third kick the bag ripped open and a foul juice covered his white gym shoes. He looked at me as if I had put the bag there. When he said, “I’m going,” I walked a step behind him. I didn’t look back at the lion with the eyes pecked out. I had hoped he would see what I saw, that he would suggest we put on a production there, a play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or A Winter’s Tale, but he didn’t and so neither did I.

  Uriel, of course, started investigations and inquiries. Two days later he arrived smiling and explained to me that it was a drug den and if I didn’t want to fall into the hands of a local gang or a druggie going through withdrawal then it was best to take myself elsewhere. It was clear he was proud of the terms he tossed out into the air with a showy nonchalance that didn’t suit him. I knew the druggies he was talking about. I heard their words enunciated slowly, trudging along, mangled from the first syllable. But I was certain that at the least they didn’t constantly think: Now I’m getting up, now I’m scratching my right cheek, flinging my hair and gathering it back up, now my neck is stiff and wooden. Now I’m imagining that I’m somewhere else, living a different life, now I’m still here here here.

  After the conversation with Uriel I didn’t return there. The taste faded and ever since I’ve barely thought about the place. Uriel, for his part, told me about Europe, about the beauty of the Old World, about cities where carved lions can be seen all over, where fountains spray water onto Poseidon’s barefoot sons, standing among sculpted coral and fish, and on every gable you can see angels peeking over the back of a tired, naked boy made of stone. We’ll travel there together, he said. But those stone lads and maidens remained misty, dust-clad, all of them bearing Uriel’s smiling visage.

  When I watch the broadcasts from the farm, which is nothing but the old house bloated and renamed, officially and in complete earnestness, “Tranquility,” I discover that the broadcasts themselves take place in that old cultural center. I recognize the color of the walls, the straight angles, and something else that the camera somehow manages to capture. After hours of viewing it becomes clear to me that what was for me a secret never really was one. Even this was revealed and exposed to everyone’s eyes. She’s frozen in her stiff clothing, collar buttoned, hair skewed to the side, extended over the right ear, and when she reads aloud or signs, her eyes look almost transparent. “Can you hear, Little One?” I turn up the voice of Dori suddenly erupting through the computer speakers. “Can you hear?” Her ears are already developed enough by the twentieth week and I know that she can also hear the world that exists beyond the beating of my hea
rt. “Can you hear that voice? That’s your aunt.”

  DORI

  It all started accidentally. Dori didn’t plan on returning home, certainly not like heroes return, their bodies adorned with battle scars. It’s actually the first scar carved into their flesh that enables identification; the years have passed and the countenance stiffened, but someone will nevertheless recognize them with surprise. Dori bore no scars and her skin didn’t say a thing about her. She didn’t even return as girls or women return in their bad years, wretched and familiar with suffering, their backs bent, their hair gathered in a flimsy ponytail. Women forced to pay the price. She still looked, at least from a certain distance, like a child. In fact, she almost looked like she always had.

  * * *

  When they reached the farm at noon, Anati, who until then had driven in silence, began to sing. In a jovial voice she sang that song from The Sound of Music when the children say goodbye to the guests in song and with sweet mannerisms. Dori laughed at the imitation of the Von Trapp family and said to her, as if she didn’t know, “I always hated that movie too.” Over her shoulder she slung the nylon bag, which contained mostly sweaters and books, and said goodbye with a kiss on Anati’s cheek, to her friend’s amazement and pleasure. When she started walking she knew without looking back that Anati still stood there proudly, supported by her new crutches next to the shiny car that she’d bought with the settlement money from the zoo. Anati shouted to her heartily, “Dori, you lunatic,” and launched a kiss into the air, and Dori, with cramped shoulders, nevertheless turned around and sent a kiss as well.

  But only when she was walking on the paved path that once was firm sand and gravel did she realize that she was still wearing the phosphorescent purple exercise shoes that belonged to Anati, who hadn’t commented on this even once. The pairs of eyes followed her until she stood on the doorstep of the house, which thanks only to its location was she able to identify as the house of then. It seemed no one had a doubt about who she was. If any of them wondered and asked with a quick sign, who’s this, they learned without delay that it was the daughter.

  Dori ignored the crowd that escorted her along with more friendliness than expected and stood there like a student before an important test, waiting for some clear feeling to direct her, an inner compass pointing to nausea or dizziness, or a dread rising up in her throat because she was once again in this place, in the house that was almost only the stuff of proverbs. She stood at the edge of the black hole that was always present in conversations and silences with Georgia O’Keeffe, in the stories she told Anton. Georgia certainly would see in these latest events the consequences of her recklessness. To be again, without any defense, in this place, which wasn’t proverbial at all. She was as irresponsible as someone handing a girl a box of matches. And to continue with this simile, Dori was, without a doubt, less the responsible adult than she was, still, the girl.

  No fire was lit there. The uprightness she’d adopted switched within moments to her permanently lowered stature. But even so, her wandering eyes met the rhymed blessing that Lotti, or some creature resembling Lotti, had embroidered and hung on a nail. When they were still four and she was the littlest among them, they undoubtedly would have mocked such domestic idolatry. But Dori stood and read the lines embroidered in red stitching. THROUGH THIS DOOR, SORROW NO MORE; IN THIS HOME, SICKNESS WON’T ROAM. The writing was decorated with angels wearing loincloths, which were nothing more than tied-up diaper fabric that would definitely fall off during the first flight, if their chubby bodies could lift off at all. THROUGH THIS DOORWAY SHALL COME NO DISMAY. And out of the most ancient of habits she wanted to raise her eyebrows, as if searching for a partner for her feelings. Almost involuntarily she looked for Anton, who at that moment must have been far away, in some cathedral of money or knowledge, buried in a computer screen. But the one who raised his eyebrow in front of her was actually her father. Not even his thick beard could cover up the playful expression that flashed across his face, and in that tiny moment, Dori understood that her brief visit would be extended. She was back home.

  Afterward, when she detailed her experiences, skipping over the period of the institution, focusing on academia of all things, asking for his approval after everything, she was surprised to realize just how little her father knew of what she had done. Only then did she realize that she had always suspected that someone was reporting to him about her life, that her father was indeed far away from her for legal and political reasons, but his disguised emissaries were informing him about everything she did, writing letters to him that he would eagerly read.

  Dori looked at him in confusion as he patiently asked her a few questions that had nothing to do with anything. He asked her about the old bank branch, if she knew how to write a check. Dori signed yes but stuck to the facts. The facts and only the facts and nothing but them: she had been lost to them for years. She knew this clearly. And she pushed their grief away, deflected it from herself, and the very act of pushing away proved that there was something concrete that she had to prevent from getting in. She knew that the two of them had inflicted heavy damage on her and therefore she continuously pushed away pictures of her mother weeping and her father standing over her, helpless. But this diligent labor, “years of work,” as Georgia called it, crumbled easily. Fact: Dori saw her father for the first time in more than a decade and a half, and without him speaking about it she knew that the exhaustion and age that had creeped up on him were nothing but a different dress for sorrow, another name for the sadness that enveloped him because she’d disappeared as she had. Because she hadn’t returned when she could have. And he mourned that she remained beyond the field of his supervision until the mourning transformed into a better day and a blessed time and the new life he established on the farm.

  The indifference that would characterize her father in the coming days would also be but an expression of the confidence that always nested inside him. He always knew his daughter would return to him just as Dori now had, in borrowed shoes, without a clear future and trained in a dubious profession that was nothing but the human version of a mimicking parrot. A stupid parrot on a ship of fools. Dori pictured what was about to happen, how for her too the world beyond the farm would gradually lose its shine and she’d remember that everything around her was all that really mattered. She waited patiently for her father to sign things resembling her thoughts. How with a few decisive sentences he’d separate the wheat from the chaff, the pinky from the rest of the feeble fingers. She already started to nod, intending like the others to raise her open palms and move them in mute applause. But her father patted his thigh with his heavy hand and with the other signed, “Good, good.” The conversation quickly returned to the house, which was called, according to rules that Dori was unable to get to the bottom of, at times “The Farm,” and at times “Tranquility.” Either way, it became clear to her, the place had blossomed. They enjoyed not insignificant successes. An organic farm. Volunteers and advanced instruction in the language. They were a refuge for those upon whom the noise of the world took an unimaginable toll. “We went through the front door,” he signed proudly, and pointed at the framed newspaper clipping about the farm and the community achievement award. The photograph that claimed most of the article’s allotted columns showed her father shaking hands with a heavily bearded man. The two of them appeared quite pleased.

  “Where’s Mom,” she asked suddenly, without a question mark. As if only at that moment had she noticed her absence. Her father clapped his hands and replied, “Here, there, she’s without a doubt somewhere,” and to reinforce matters he pointed in opposite directions. How old he looked at that moment, old, frail, and kindhearted, an old man harming no one, a friend of the flies, bees, and ants, not the man who raised her to work her way in by taking advantage of the stupidity of the masses.

  Lotti glanced gloomily at him, wringing her hands together before signing again. Only now did Dori notice how much she had swelled up. She had always been
chubby, but now she bore her weight as a kind of honor. Her hair had been trimmed and gone gray, bracelets covered her wrists, and her dress offered surplus fabric to any who might ask. You could clothe an entire family in that dress with a sail to spare, she thought, not knowing why she hated her so, her round face, her crude hands, and her thick ankles. She remembered her tendency, which had something heartbreaking about it, to concern herself with life’s trifles, with cleaning faucets and folding napkins, as well as with her father’s health. And indeed, her black eyes narrowed in their holes and her freckled, heavily wrinkled face now expressed admonishing concern. She signed that there was a problem with her father’s blood pressure, so why annoy him for nothing? She’d had enough of Dori’s unnecessary questions; there was chicken in the oven. Dori knew that she’d be unable to eat a thing served to her there and smiled with great effort. At least someone fulfilled their desire to the end, she thought, and imagined Lotti cracking young chicken bones in her teeth that were, as far as she could tell, as strong as ever. Lotti had finally found her longed-for place beside her father, like a cat beside the hearth.

  Days later she would try to understand if her father’s raised eyebrow was an expression of deep insight or a moment of conspiring between old allies. The father and the daughter, a fearless duo. She told herself that this was exactly what it was, a flicker of clarity among all the embroidered pillows and organic squashes piled up on all sides. Perhaps Dori forgot those times, the precious ones, that they’d spent together in perfect harmony. Indeed, she was the first one he told about his childhood in the cellar. Indeed, there were the Wednesday trips in the metal truck when her father decreed that Dori had a sense of smell for finding metal, and Dori carried this praise close to her heart like an old decoration that shone brightly again when given the slightest rub.