She had no pity for her mother at all. When she thought about her, she seemed like an elegant watercolor painted on a silk canvas, fluttering in the distance, a canvas no one would ever wrap himself up in or use to sew anything useful. Neither the efforts of Georgia O’Keeffe nor the inquiries of Anton, whose mother was the steadiest element in his world, changed her mind. Despite her familiar sobbing, the tears that flowed down her face almost constantly, her mother never gave herself over to them completely; parts of her were always kept beyond the reach of Lili’s and Dori’s little hands. Sometimes Dori forgot the color or shape of her eyes or the way she looked at Dori with utter hopelessness. But how could she forget? It was pointless, considering that for more than a third of her life she saw her anguished face morning and night. Lili would say to her, “What do you want, she looks like you.” But their mother, for all her flaws and tears, was beautiful.
Dori still stood in her spot, a few steps away from the blessed entry, even though Lotti again suggested she sit down. Almost nothing remained as it had been, but nevertheless this was the house, in which there were now many places to sit. Their old room had been turned into a room for thinking, which was designated not only for her father, Lotti pointed out, but rather for the entire community that sought to consult with Father. And when Dori stared at her she signed, “Father, your father.” All these years later her sign language was still awful. A young girl with a wise gaze, who later on they explained was Lotti’s niece, stuck a glass of lemonade in her hand. She drank the flavorless juice and didn’t know what to do with the empty glass until the girl returned and took it from her. Her father began dozing off in his chair and Dori recalled the story about the man who had mice living in his beard and thought about telling it to the girl with the serious face. She laughed, a laugh that seemed to die out before it made a sound, because she was the only clear witness to its existence. As she quickly discovered, even the hearing in this place preferred to ignore superfluous sounds.
“We kept your dolls,” Lotti signed to her as if Dori were still a girl, and sent the niece to bring her a cardboard box decorated with faded drawings of mermaids. Dori rummaged among the painted smiles, the plastic and porcelain limbs. Beneath these she saw a few of Uncle Noah’s creations that had remained whole despite the years. She suddenly recognized something dandyish in his design, in the initials “N.A.,” Noah Ackerman, which were also signed on the tiny bottoms of the toys. She removed two children from matchbooks and a pink fish, which were covered in a layer of dust that wasn’t typical of this house, like a kind of projection from the previous house, which one couldn’t even long for. Dori swore that the fish now resting in her palm was once blue. Green, perhaps. “These are all my sister’s,” she said. When she encountered a blank stare she emphasized again, “They’re Lili’s, I lost mine some time ago.” But Lotti pretended not to notice and plumped up a few pillows that required no plumping, while her father was already in a deep sleep. Only the girl looked at her with interest, as if learning for the first time of Lili Ackerman’s existence.
LILI
Almost against my will I’m counting the weeks until you’re born. In the workroom that I insist on not entering, bundles of towels, sheets, cloth diapers, and tiny baby clothes pile up. Jenna and Mikala bring them. Jenna, thanks to whom I live here, even though she still pretends that I’m doing her a favor, mainly brings me gifts of dubious utility, rattles of pure silver, embroidered designer baby socks. Mikala worries about more practical things, insists on going over the birth plan with me again and again. She’s also the one who reminds me that I have a life to get back to, referring to the tiny clinic in which I rented space as if it were a valid career and life option. She reminds me of our shared studies, even though I survived them thanks mainly to her. It was our deafness that connected us, three students in a full hall, even if to the world we seem like we hear or half-hear. But what kept us connected to one another couldn’t be seen or touched.
While they arrange the bundles, compare lists, look at each other with worried faces, I look at the field. Not at the view outside the house, but rather at the empty field the webcam films from their stupid farm. It’s not the field that we sat in during our childhood, trying to respond to Alex’s delusions of grandeur, seeing flames on the horizon, taking an active part in the prophecy. Had they asked me then, I would have said I saw them. Every natural disaster that Alex envisioned, I saw too. But the current camera films a different field. Sometimes people appear in it, not farmers, God forbid, rather those who come in private to sit alone with nature. I don’t recognize most of them, but from time to time Lotti arrives. It’s impossible to mistake her even though she’s heavier than in the past, wearing a printed dress, her hair trimmed close to her scalp, and like a seasoned farmer she sits down among the stubble with an expression of almost embarrassingly intimate relief. She closes her eyes, her face, ruined from a lifetime of injuries, still conveying pleasure. There’s no doubt she’s aware of the camera’s existence, but I doubt if anyone watches the broadcast other than me.
Jenna is busy with the question of whether or not the girl will hear. She’s equipped with statistics attesting to a high probability of the baby having at most partial hearing. After all, both of my parents are deaf from birth. Yes, I answer, even though I’m not at all certain about even that. I’ve been presented more than once with contradictory evidence regarding their mysterious pasts. Nevertheless I mostly preferred to retell only what was told to me. Even if the cellar never existed, I find myself reporting on it like a family memory, like a line engraved on one’s palm. It was there and that’s that. Enough with the stories I know. On the basis of those stories, I’ve moved on. On the basis of those stories, I told my few clients that it’s possible to live with contradictions, with lies. But to Jenna and Mikala I’ve mainly told the truth. And the truth is that I don’t know. There’s not one thing I could say that I know without a doubt about the two people who raised us, the two who had the labels father and mother attached to them. Despite everything, I don’t know either of them.
DORI
Ogden was chopping trees behind the house. The years were visible on him, in the hair that had gone entirely gray but still rested in a kind of emperor haircut around his face, which resembled the face of a mastiff, in the hands full of bulging veins. He wasn’t harmful, Dori knew; he was never harmful. But suddenly the name duck, which came to mind when she saw him for the first time in years, in the tall grass (because after all she thought Here’s a duck well before she thought Here’s Ogden), seemed meaningless to her. The swinging of the ax was strong and rhythmic. These were the motions of a young man, even though Dori remembered him as an older man back then too. Ogden himself didn’t appear surprised by Dori’s presence in the place; the ax continued to strike at the same rhythm, as if a small girl hadn’t left there, accompanied by flashing lights and sirens that perhaps none of them had heard, and now returned. She had already noticed that this was how almost everyone who knew her from the past was treating her. Warmly but without excitement. One might think that Dori had been absent for only an hour or two, that she had returned from a brief visit to a nearby town, that she stopped to buy gum or knee socks. But she was no longer one of them. Only the new ones still looked at her with eyes wide with wonder and amazement, as if in a moment she’d turn water into wine. “This is for the tourists,” he signed to her about the ax, “your father’s idea.” And indeed Dori saw a not-so-young couple in bright clothes on a straw swing nearby. With expressions of intent seriousness, the two of them gently swung, gripping identical mugs of tea and watching Ogden formally. “Welcome,” he signed, and out of habit she translated aloud. It seemed to her that she recognized irony in the expression of his face, but when he finished signing he went back to chopping the wood.
Facing Ogden’s orderly pile of wood, she finally understood the essence of the change that had taken place at home. Everything in the area was meticulously built from natural materials o
r at least covered in them as if due to a categorical local imperative, an emergency regulation that left no trace of any visible metal object in the region. The Iron Age was rejected entirely in favor of a rounder, wooden time, blooming slightly, a perfect setting for Lotti’s awful cakes and even her father’s white beard, if not for he who lived beneath it. To the naked eye it appeared that the farm and all its inhabitants had neglected no cranny in a meticulous weave of naturalness. The house as well as the few structures she could see were built as uniform facades of wood and raffia, products of simple craftsmanship, straw, and homey embroidery. The farm never stopped affirming village life, a simple life that shunned toxins and stood on the threshold of tranquility. It looked like the tourists, at least, understood this, and perhaps it was all really intended for them. Dori doubted it all. Her father hadn’t abandoned metal for their sake, not he, who collected it almost as if on a mission, never mind that he later sold it for a hefty price. Like metal, he knew how to escape and blend into the ordinary alloy just as he always went back to his glittering self, and like every metal expert he knew how to run hot and cold and hide the valuable under a cheap veneer. This entire return to nature couldn’t have been to his liking. At most he must have grudgingly gotten used to it. Because even then it was their mother who insisted on growing her ridiculous garden.
Dori thought sadly about the beautiful metals they left behind, as if the years hadn’t passed and a mountain of iron intended just for her stood a touch away. And now it suddenly vanished and was gone. Her fingers could still sense the cool touch of the steel, caress the brass rods, skip over the dark taste the lead stored, tarry with the impure alloys she actually liked for being complex and composite, with a low market value. Lines stubbornly stuck in her head, as if she had no words of her own at all: “And last of all the ruthless and hard Age of Iron prevailed, from which malignant vein great evil sprung; and modest and faith and truth took flight,” she mumbled, a bit proud in spite of herself that she’d remembered the lines even if she couldn’t remember when and how she read them. What was more, this time she didn’t have Georgia O’Keeffe’s eyes to defy with words, words, words.
Because the words were Dori’s and as such there was no one to doubt her. Not in a place where words didn’t change a thing. Signed words, words spoken aloud, words read in a book or on a bill with a bottom line. They were attributed to her out of habit or proximity or error, like a feature of her features, and it didn’t matter to anyone if Dori’s pages were entirely blank. Perhaps she wrote words only because no one wanted them other than her, and in Lotti’s book everyone must do something, even write. She had forgotten that Dori knew how to be Alex’s voice and hands, that Dori knew many things (at least she herself believed this) and not just one. But by virtue of that same mistake Dori was rechristened as “Alex’s daughter who writes.” It was only natural that she was introduced like that to Idit, who was herself given the description “dear friend.”
If Lotti hadn’t been Lotti and Dori hadn’t been Dori, the latter would have been liable to be confused and think that Lotti was proud of her, that she was making this introduction to Dori out of some impression of her character. But everything was utterly clear to Dori. When Lotti introduced Idit to her, in the courtyard of her and Alex’s house, in the place that was once a vegetable garden, she interlaced her arm with Idit’s sturdy arm and hopped back a step. All her movements, which Dori recognized and knew to be authentic, communicated that this was a splendid honor. The neck of her dear friend was adorned in stiff brown and golden necklaces, her body was wrapped in muslin fabrics like a giant diaper, and on her feet were crude wooden clogs. From her hand hung a large basket full of binders. Her entire appearance rang of poetry. Idit, as it turned out, oversaw the farm for the local council, but with time had become Lotti’s confidante and a dear friend of the whole farm.
All this became clear to her. At first Dori didn’t know if Idit was very naive like Lotti, or very evil and very fervent like Lotti, and only afterward did she understand that this woman was an egg sitting on a stone wall, singing her songs and never falling down. Because in addition to the lines of poetry she recited for ears that were deaf due to volition, effort, or necessity, it seemed there were a few official budgets mixed up in the matter.
Idit looked at Dori with a secretive smile. “So you’re the sinful daughter!” she announced in a raised voice that sounded like the ringing of a school bell, decisive and cheerful and violent. Weeks had passed since Dori heard a voice speak other than her own, when she translated Alex’s speech into enunciated words, such that she almost didn’t pay attention to the content of the words. “Sinful!” the dear friend Idit repeated, scattering exclamation marks around, and Dori thought about Hester Prynne and the fiery letter that she sewed onto her dress. She had always been dramatic, and here was someone even more dramatic than her.
“The sin of writing!” she declared again with overt bliss when she understood that Dori had missed the point, and her necklaces accompanied her with a rattling sound.
“I mainly read,” Dori said after some time, even though she didn’t know if this was true.
Idit looked at her the way one looks at a strange animal, say, a three-legged cat. “I myself am beyond reading,” she explained calmly. “I read and I read and I read until that was it. Enough for me. I discovered that there were too many books in the world.” Her Roman nose fluttered aggressively but her hands were crossed under her chest, as though she intended to sing an aria. Pleasure shone from her, full and round. Her skin went pink like the skin of a well-pampered baby. “And in general,” she added, “if I read, I prefer not to understand. Isn’t it more pleasant not to understand?” Lotti nodded vigorously as if hearing words of extreme wisdom, forgetting for a moment the pact of the deaf, and Dori wondered how Lotti’s loyalties were divided between Alex and the philosopher facing her. No way can Alex stand her, she thought. No way.
“I prefer to understand,” Dori said. With a smooth motion, as if her hand had extended greatly and became a swaying, eel-like arm, Idit grabbed the book Dori was holding, a book that Dori had grown used to carrying around like an umbrella, even though it didn’t rain. Idit opened it at random, reached out a finger, and came to rest on a line of text. She read with emphasis, breathing between the words, “The French have already come and gone.” Then she closed the book with a kiss and gazed victoriously at Dori. Her watery eyes sparkled, the makeup shining below them.
“Why, that’s wonderful,” she said. “That’s absolutely enough. I could wander around that line for many days.”
No, thought Dori, no and no, but her thoughts were unreadable on her face. Not when she thought, you cow, and not when she thought, idiot. And in her rage she wondered why Idit of all people had aroused her anger. Suddenly it was clear to her that it was actually this heavy woman, with the wooden and amber jewelry and the authority that flowed from her, authority that had no basis at all, she was the woman whom Alex needed. She was the woman he was supposed to marry. But instead of embracing her and calling her Mom, she thought what a shame that Anton wasn’t there to laugh with her about this, and what a shame Lili wasn’t. And what a shame about all those who were gone and what a shame that no ammunition was given to her against that carefree expression, which called on her to let go of meaning, of the flimsy rope connecting form to content. Only the buzzing of the flies could be heard clearly and it competed with the distant whisper of generators.
Now Idit walked proudly in the apple orchard, her wooden clogs almost sinking in the muddy earth. Dori saw her upright figure hidden and disappearing among the trunks and Lotti panting a step behind her. Ogden rose above the ax and looked at the two of them and then shrugged his shoulders. Sweat gathered on the nape of his reddened neck. Instead of wiping it off he turned to Dori. “Your mother’s house,” he signed, “it’s in a development area, on the other side.”
“Is it far?” she asked, and he signed the distance.
“And
is she there?” Dori took her time when asking a trick question.
“She’s there,” he confirmed. “I brought her apples this morning.”
Her parents lived separately. That’s how they were, not Alex and Anna Ackerman, not a single, monolithic unit. She had understood this even before she stood across from her father’s white beard and Lotti’s sovereign gaze.
Dori had made sure not to know a thing about them, nothing following the moment she was removed from them, as if a period was marked at the end of a sentence, after the word end. Because what happened afterward, to Dori and definitely to them, occurred in another life in which it was possible to divorce and marry, to die and to give birth. In that order, actually. There was no past, rich and fertile like a plant that never stopped climbing and winding around the walls of an abandoned heart. She knew what she knew, this couldn’t be uprooted from her. But it was healthier to remain separate from what happened afterward. Not every pain must be scraped with a shard.
During the first years Dori thought about them as pillars of sand. Her parents were frozen in time like Lot’s wife, since they couldn’t help but look toward her with longing. But Lili would never turn into a statue, this she knew. She began picturing them as two, a father made of salt, a mother of sparkling crystal. Afterward Lili wrote to her and the address on the envelope indicated another place, not the village, not the house. The address indicated that Lili had gone away and left her behind. And maybe Dori would have completely forgotten that image, which floated before her eyes just then, no longer a home cut from paper but instead a father and a mother who were frozen face-to-face, if she hadn’t now made her way to what was called the development zone. A silent yellow tractor, a technological wonder seemingly landed from another planet, signaled the place with its presence. She touched the hood of the engine that was cold and motionless. The driver had definitely fled for his life so that the locals, lovers of tranquility and pine paneling, didn’t pelt him with stones.
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