Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  During her final years at the school, the pillars of salt ceded their place in her thoughts to a decorated porcelain plate that hung in the office of the boarding school’s principal, a souvenir from a trip to Holland. On the plate a father and mother were painted with a paintbrush. Every time she arrived at the office she complimented the principal on the plate and asked to study the details. When she left the boarding school she thought that she’d give it to her as a parting gift. But that didn’t happen. Maybe the principal forgot that she promised it to her; maybe it was unpleasant for Dori to ask. Anyway, her blue parents, painted against a country backdrop made in Delft, were left hanging on the wall until the principal was replaced and a bright circle was left in the spot where the plate had once hung.

  But anyone looking closely at the plate, as Dori had done more than once or twice, would see that the face of the mother was turned to the ornamented edges, not to the father. She pulled on the straps of her hat and a strange wind stirred. Yes, even with a quick glance at the illustration, one might guess that at the moment he let her, Anna herself would undo the knots and the straps and fly off like a groundsel. She was always willing, like a nomad, like a prostitute, to be taken in by another land. Dori just hadn’t supposed that she’d land so close.

  “Ackerman” was written on the door. At least there’s that, she thought, and felt an inexplicable satisfaction that her mother hadn’t gone back to her maiden name. But if the eight letters hadn’t appeared there, gold on green, she could have guessed by the garden that the house with the green door was hers. Before she entered the courtyard she set down on the fence the book she was still carrying in her hands.

  LILI

  These days are empty and thus good for thinking. Nevertheless they slip away from me one after another. All that is spread out before me is the past, and in an indulgent gesture I read it like tea leaves. Look there, in the upper left corner of the mug—a pentagon shape, a star shape. It’s natural that we’d remember we were two dancing stars. It’s natural that this is how you remember the game of the disturbed girls that echoed in that house, which had more corners than windows. Look closely at your mug. It’s not a star.

  We weren’t comets, we were satellites, a cluster of metal in space. Look and you’ll see clumsy, man-made celestial bodies. True, in the beginning we were the big bang and the little bang, and afterward a black hole and a white dwarf. Sometimes we were glaciers like the icy centaurs orbiting the sun, the first of which was discovered exactly in the year I was born. We didn’t have clear rules for the game, but we never got it wrong. You remember, Dori, there was just running around, there were hands and feet hurled at one another, vast amounts of air that swept around as if a gust of wind had come through the window and threatened to carry the house away. You would say that we were the wind, that we were the running, sisters storm and whirlwind. I’ll tell you we were hurt during that running and days later it was possible to see yellow, purple, and black marks on our hands and feet. It really was, but no one looked.

  Perhaps I’m lying. That’s how we are, fortune-tellers, give me whatever you’ll give me and I’ll read it, lines and dots, stars and stripes, dry blows and motherships, letters and the absence of mothers. And as for the actual mother, our dear Anna, beautiful, sad Anna, it would only be natural for me to reflect on her now. But I don’t think about her at all.

  DORI

  In the small garden no vegetables or herbs grew that would be of any use. The vertiginous height of the flowers that reached past Dori’s waist indicated that this was the residence of the mother with the green thumb. The small garden was filled with birds of paradise and in its middle an upright, fleshy cactus grew. “That’s the queen of the night. You’re lucky, it’s about to bloom one of these nights.” Dori heard the voice that had to be that voice. Because Dori could indeed tell herself stories that would last one thousand and one nights; she could dissolve the pillar of salt, decorate and break piles of ornamental plates, bring to life and kill a thousand mermaids with gills and lungs in her imagination, stupid amphibians with an algae’s brain, she could do all this; at least, once she could; at least, who she once was could, but her mother’s voice she recognized.

  They hugged. They hugged as is acceptable after years, when one comes from the cold and the other from the heat, when the east, for instance, meets the west. Even though there was no warmth in the hug. As if two trees were trying to hug—and this is less exciting or pleasant than one might imagine, it’s mainly rigid. The quiet tree will move its top without a sound. Mainly it was impossible.

  Her mother wore a pink kimono and her hair was gathered up over her head in a high bun. Her eyelids were covered in the blue eye shadow she always liked. Dori didn’t know if she woke up just now or was on her way to bed. Either way she was even more beautiful than in the past, although a fine network of capillaries covered her face. The queen of the night in person. She just barely resembled that weeping willow who raised her. “You smoke?” she asked in a hoarse voice and added, “Don’t smoke, it ruins your vocal cords.” From an oblong pack she removed a cigarette of the brand that teenagers smoke, and nevertheless offered one of them to Dori, who took it and didn’t smoke. She knew that they were supposed to talk about Lili, who seemed to be sitting there next to them on the old sofa that the two of them were sure not to sit on, stretching forward her blue boots. Dori didn’t sit on the old sofa, which was like a final monument to that old house. She skipped over the questions of what had changed and if her mother was surprised to see her and if she had been searching for her all these years. Someone else might have asked, but not Dori. When she saw her there, thin and ornamental like a candlestick, she understood that her mother really was imprisoned inside a porcelain plate. And perhaps her soul resided in one of Uncle Noah’s complex mechanical toys, which to her surprise claimed an entire, glass-encased cabinet there. Because those toys, which were made with the hands of an artist, actually weren’t meant for children at all, and perhaps were never meant for her and Lili.

  “He continued to visit me,” Anna said, “for years. Always bringing his offerings. Do you remember how you used to break them?”

  “Two left hands,” Dori said, and Anna Ackerman confirmed, “Yes, exactly.” She looked at Dori’s hands, which had nevertheless lengthened since and no longer knocked everything over. The toys themselves were spectacular and it appeared that Noah had improved over the years. Dori got up from her seat, placed the cigarette wherever she placed it, and stood facing the display case. There were mermaids with beautiful tails next to two children playing with a ball, the ball moving between them on a metal rail the moment you turned the key on the side of the blue child, and there was a goose. Dori couldn’t control herself; she opened the glass cabinet and picked it up with her left hands. When she caressed the tail feathers, the toy stirred in her hand. The goose dropped a golden ball, an egg. “The gold didn’t come out like he wanted,” Anna noted, “but he was proud of it.”

  Between two fingers she held the tiny golden egg, on which the teeth of time could be seen. Despite everything, it was perfect. Dori wouldn’t have been surprised had an even tinier gosling hatched from it. But there was no gosling.

  Then she searched for the birds, the well-known birds that he always made for her and Lili, the last of which was sent to her when she graduated college, the one that revealed the voice buried inside it. But there was no bird. On the top shelf stood a tiny choir with mouths open and Anna was pleased that Dori gave it her attention. All the girls had black braided hair and bright, thin faces. “That’s me,” Anna said, “all of them are me.” But she didn’t need to say so, because Dori knew immediately that this was her mother, duplicated as in a hall of mirrors. She remembered the photograph she wasn’t supposed to see. Her mother who once heard and sang, who now had an amazingly elegant white device connected to her left ear like a piece of futuristic jewelry. Without touching the choir, she left it in its place, and her eyes met a small bed with a ch
ecked blanket, a masterpiece of weaving. This was perhaps the most beautiful of the creations in Anna’s cabinet. Even more beautiful than the goose, but she didn’t want to touch it. Two girls lay in the bed. Similar and not similar, because one had red hair and the other brown, and the two of them had narrow eyes, almost slits. They looked as if they were scared of the dark, of the wolf, of Little Red Riding Hood. “Are those Lili and me?” she asked.

  Anna shrugged her shoulders. “I always thought that they resembled you a bit. But who knows, you aren’t the only sisters in the world.”

  “No,” Dori said, still getting used to speaking with her mother aloud, “we definitely aren’t.”

  “Don’t break anything,” she said again, and Dori wanted to bring the entire cabinet down to the floor, with all the terrible inventions inside it. “He was strange, Noah, I know, such a character. Always coughing. Well, you knew him. He had bad eyes from all the magnifying glasses he looked through for his hobby. Yes,” she said theatrically, and Dori noticed how much her mother enjoyed speaking aloud, how her pronunciation was rich and didn’t resemble her own at all, “but he was a gentleman.” Her pupils looked as if they were floating from all that pleasure.

  “He didn’t reach your father’s ankles,” she stated casually. “Your father is a great man, that bastard. We did very great things together. Look, you have nothing to complain about, you didn’t come out so bad,” and she studied Dori slowly, the shorts, the short hair, the short stature, and her gaze said very different things than did her lips. It’s likely that without this gaze the conversation wouldn’t have lasted as long as it lasted. It’s likely that Dori would have said goodbye to her mother for another ten or twenty years, exiting the green door as she had entered, the same Dori, the same river. But that gaze, there was enough in it nevertheless for Dori to speak, as if Georgia sat on one shoulder and Anati on the other, as if the two of them said: C’mon, now, speak now. As if Anton stood on the side and watched the two of them like an amusing spectacle, a drama of ignorant villagers. And in front of him, out of all of them, she couldn’t humiliate herself. “Mother,” she said, as if inside the address itself the rest was folded as well. “Mother, why did you do it? Why didn’t you let me hear?”

  The aging spots that climbed over her mother’s hand created a complicated pattern, as if she had drawn them herself. Her mother opened her mouth wide for a moment and inhaled through it and Dori realized that she wasn’t missing a single tooth. When she closed her mouth she no longer looked like someone who was about to cry, and only then did Dori wonder where the flood of tears had gone to. She didn’t look frightened or angry either. As a matter of fact, it seemed that she had waited quite some time for this question, and the answer calmly rolled off her tongue as well.

  “It was you who chose to be like us,” she said. “It was your choice. You chose freely.” Her mother looked at her defiantly and Dori knew that she saw the army behind her, maybe not Anati and Georgia and Ada, maybe not Dima or Anton who watched all this from the side, but she certainly saw the dozens of policemen and social workers, the investigators who stood up to her to eliminate her, who doubted her maternal sense of duty and threatened her with prison, who mocked her parenting skills and cautioned her with sticks and stones when it came to her ongoing possession of Lili.

  They’d had an excellent lawyer, Anna and Alex Ackerman had, a lawyer who specialized in minority rights and was enlisted in their cause. The seasoned lawyer showed that every story can be unraveled in another way, a story is more holes than woven fabric, and as such can surprise he who holds a needle or a pen. Yet even when the honorable attorney positioned himself next to her, with his fluttering jacket and mane of hair and dizzying intelligence, a collection of features that Anna Ackerman very much admired, nevertheless that army was a humiliation that her raised chin struggled to bear.

  Did Dori know this? She knew some of it. She read the press about her, deciphering microfilm in an old machine, opening volumes that bound old newspapers together, her hand sliding over the page until the place where the shocking story of the girl D was written, the family under close inspection, the consequences not yet known. She read the professional articles and the chapter in Georgia’s book. She even read the novel that Arad wrote, at the center of which is a brilliant and handsome social worker who saves a deaf and mute girl. His book, which was put out by an independent publisher with a shiny cover, was Anati’s favorite reading material (other than her plays) and she never tired of reading to Dori the treasure trove of erotic allusions. “You were nine years old!” Anati would shout at her each time with feigned shock. “The man’s a pervert!” And Dori would gather up the book that Anati threw at her and remind her that she was ten or eleven whereas Isadora, the beautiful deaf girl in the book, had just reached the age of consent. But despite all that, Arad the idiot actually remembered a few things that Dori had forgotten.

  So she did know something about all that, even if she preferred to forget. But Anna Ackerman’s advantage was that she understood what Dori had come for, with much greater clarity than Dori herself. Indeed she had prepared herself for this visit over many long years. She’d come not for a plate of cookies or a basket of wormy apples for maximum health or tea in tall glasses, and not in order to finally piece together what was broken. She knew Dori had come to hurl accusations, just as she knew that Dori was soon to discover she was standing opposite a mirror and looking only at herself. Anna Ackerman was a Zen artist of blamelessness.

  “Everything changes, everything is suffering,” she said, “other than what isn’t. Why does your generation think that only it mustn’t suffer? You don’t always have to be happy. Free yourself, Dori, you didn’t eat from the bread of affliction.” When she spoke this way, Dori didn’t know how deep was the source of this mockery that accompanied her calm words. Mockery for a daughter who came like all satiated children to complain about an ancient hunger, about an empty plate. “All in all, the two of you ate what I made for you,” that woman said. And at that moment the words sounded pure and innocent, as if she was really talking about three plates of rice.

  LILI

  A goose floats along the water of a lake. I recognize her child’s face only when it’s reflected in the black water. On those other nights extinct whales float on their belly from continent to continent. The blue whales sing a long and complicated song, but I don’t hear a thing. The goose floats in circles. Every night I wake up from my shrieking, because I hear only that.

  DORI

  If he wanted complete accuracy, he could have done it himself. For instance, combing his beard in front of the camera, and signing fluently, or choosing a more obedient parrot for himself. Clearly she didn’t say this to him, not explicitly, but her look gave it away—you didn’t have to choose me of all people. A moment later she had already lowered her eyes back to the written text, which on that day had no use. When Dori signed in front of the camera her face was full of expression and her movements were soft and round but it’s hard to say that she was precise, and here her father, or one of his minions, is again clarifying that this audacity, presuming to be the master of the words, was out of place. It was forbidden for her to belittle in this way the responsibility that was given to her. Dori was an additional pair of hands for her father. The only pair of hands that remained from the inner circle that had abandoned him. She was the only one other than him who knew how to be a pinky, even if they pretended they were a full hand or ingratiated themselves with the other fingers. But only outwardly. As her time passed on the farm, Dori became convinced that Alex Ackerman had built only a facade, elaborate indeed, which concealed many tunnels that had been dug right under the feet of the bourgeoisie. Because she knew her father through and through. And if that wasn’t the case, then why would Dima have up and joined him?

  Her father again signed the content, making sure to choose the same signs, using them at intervals like the time before, and Dori watched and this time signed as she was instruct
ed, being precise with each and every sign. Her motions were absolutely clear, like the hands of a talking clock. As he did every week, Alex Ackerman described the pastoral life of the farm like a scenic postcard. And she, like a miniaturized and adorable mirror of her father, signed in front of the camera. At times she spoke aloud, although less and less. Thus she described the flourishing of the apple orchard that overcame the cold and yielded a perfect crop. And when she spoke about the German researchers who were conducting pathbreaking research on the farm, research that would make great contributions to the community as well, she didn’t mention that they were long-legged and clumsy as young giraffes, and she didn’t even contort her face when she described the healthy cake competition that was held two days earlier. She did only what was asked of her and Alex watched her with approval.

  She could be even less precise; she actually could sign what she felt like, children’s songs or masterpieces, she could translate into sign language book excerpts like Lili and she once would, when the boredom got the best of them, because few deaf people watched the broadcast, if any. She was certain that the absolute majority of their viewers—wherever her father gathered them, Abu Dhabi or upstate New York—could hear, and watched them as an exotic phenomenon, like amateur birdwatchers who catch with their binoculars a rare bird that’s also liable to carry contagious diseases. For them the content was more or less extraneous. They were impressed by Dori as if she didn’t speak a real language but instead only executed a type of regimented dance, beautiful but meaningless. In their eyes her hands performed a strange, expressive act, which gave rise in them to all sorts of subtle aesthetic feelings. In this matter Dori and her father were of one mind: those who could hear preferred not to understand. At first the use of the language surely astonished them; they were angry to be left outside, in the cold, the rain, the silence, where who knew if they were talking about bats or crumbs, or perhaps they were showing them complete gibberish, but in the end they’d end up pleased. Sometimes they identified a lone sign that they could understand, a very intuitive sign, connected to eating or drinking, for instance, and then they’d sit back with the feeling that they’d acquired real knowledge.