The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  Her words fade in and out of my ears. They are just words. Her experience. What she has identified as essential to her. I can’t even articulate what I feel, in part because I don’t know what I feel. Ardent. Vulnerable. Dangerously inhabited. Words everyone else uses. I know it is supposed to join people, this common language, but now I think it only separates us, reducing our experiences to the same words. And really, what has happened? Nothing. Nothing that can be explained other than this sense of feeling altered. Of nerves exposed. He obliterates thoughts of my work, of myself. It changes everything. I possess nothing.

  Ivory, she says, grabbing my hand, which is cold, fingernails flecked with gesso, from across the table.

  Don’t be a mourner. Please. Try not to think of it. It will ruin you.

  I know this. I squeeze her hand, yet I am unable to perform with forced high spirits.

  An obdurate romantic. Merveilleux., she says, placing her hand on my shoulder.

  I finally reach for the wine and tip it straight from the bottle down my throat, in one long, theatrical gulp. My brother Edgar once taught me how to open my throat. We practised on lemonade, which made us choke and burn and sputter to the ground laughing.

  How marvellous. Tacita smiles. How almost persuasive, she says in a way that tells me she’s impressed.

  —

  I have such a vision of Lev that it is as though I’ve willed him here. He is standing in the courtyard of the art academy several days later. He leans against the stone wall. And even though my back is to him, I know he is there. I can tell by the expression on the faces of other women. When I turn to see him, the tangled black hair and flashing whiteblue eyes make him seem almost half-mad. Their portentous purpose startles me. In this moment I can see that something he carries removes him from the world, and from me. He is outside of time and place. Something about this, about him blinds me. He looks at me and I avert my eyes. When you are being looked at, really looked at, it is hard to look back. Standing near him is like being under a low rush of birds.

  We walk through all the arrondissements sequentially until my heels blister and a small hole, the size of a centime, appears on the bottom of my left shoe. I have only one pair of shoes now, and the polish I apply each night to fill in the cracks has washed off on the wet stones, staining the foot portion of my stockings into a shoe trompe l’oeil. I barely remember what we speak of. I am cloaked in a shy opacity and become joltingly self-conscious about my slightly lilted gait, about speaking French without mistakes, about which expression I should wear on my face, how my arms should hang, what I should do with my hands, now turning red in the cold air. I am too busy noticing everything in the presence of him, how he speaks, how he moves, to remember what we discuss. There are long stretches of silence, which he interprets differently. These silences always make me think of my mortality. That there is always so much more to be said.

  I like how he arrows, straight as a sunshaft, through the crooked streets. We sit at the top of Belleville, the buildings silver under the violet sky. He rips at a baguette and offers it to me. His hands are large, rough, long fingered. I shake my head and I watch the swell of his jaw as he eats, thinking that where he comes from they have black rivers, they eat black bread. I suddenly have a memory of Father telling me how the Russians loved Ivan the Terrible. He explained that for them, the word terrible means formidable. He said that Napoleon could not defeat the Russians because when his men arrived the Russians had already set fire to Moscow. They destroyed their own city. Owning a ruined city was better than giving it over.

  His hands rip another shank of bread. I also think, All men are hungry.

  We hear bottles rolling and clinking in the back of an open truck making its delivery to the cave aux vins.

  What do you think of, Ivory? he turns to me and asks. He says my name, Eve-or-aya.

  I wonder if he means in general, or now, and either way there are so many thoughts in this blindingly silent moment between us that I can scarcely pick a single thing. I look at the potted violets on the sill across the street that delineate the space between the shutters and think of how I love old white paint, but this seems silly after such a long silence. I think of songs that take wing. Of how when I wake up, I touch my cheek and part of my forehead to the windowpane in my studio because I like to feel the burn of morning. But I don’t have the nerve to articulate such seemingly constructed responses. I’m not sure if I’m liked enough to say what I think.

  We walk back to Lev’s studio. It is a high white room. We climb up creaking wooden stairs. While my studio is just one painting on an easel, his has the exalted chaos of an archaeological dig. It is shockingly filthy. Something I’ve never witnessed in my childhood, where opulence insisted on staring back at you through crystal, marble, silver. Here there are paint-splattered walls, tins of brushes clotted with paint, photographs, magazines, books, and newspapers all torn in piles. The floor littered with coal, charcoal, matches. It is the opposite of his paintings, clear and simple, stripped to the most essential thing. In his studio, it feels as though his subconscious is leaking out. It touches even my feet. Everything in varying degrees of creation and destruction. It reveals his mind in action without ever relinquishing its mystery. Everything smells of smoke and turpentine. A fire left its black imprint on the shared wall of his studio just a couple of days ago, the room burning, banging into flames, twisting upward. He told me that you should never involve the pompiers. They ruin everything. Instead, he got the fire down with buckets of water. The wall, his chair, and table were blackened, but miraculously, everything else, including his paintings, was untouched.

  There is no pretense. We are barely up the stairs. His rough hands on my shoulders. The dark cloud jacket in my nostrils. Wool and outside cold and smoke. When I taste him, I am tasting outside. The unshaven skin leaving a constellation of small welts on my cheek and neck. Back-seamed stockings, the ones with the pinhole of white thigh, twisting off. My shoulders fibrillating against the windowless wall, marked with black, carbon wings. New fingers, new mouths. He grabs my hair, the pins scatter on my shoulders and down my back and onto the floor, a barely traceable rain. When my hair comes down it falls over and encloses him in a dark wave. He lifts up the white folds of my dress. I am cool against him. The warmth back into the body. Delicate networks of blood. Flashing silver eyes. Sweat shining on bone. My hand on the tendons in his throat. The truth anointed. The kind of truth that can arise only from such a profound wordless moment. The far, unlanguaged precincts where there is only feeling.

  I fall asleep on his bare chest, the bang of his heart against the side of my face. The only thing I think in the folding darkness, Nothing else matters.

  Later he moves across the room and brings back a large canvas, its wooden stretcher striking the floor in front of me. On a thick white ground that could be Siberia, or Lapland, is a pale blue square. Blue is the hottest colour, he says flatly. When all the colours melt away, you get blue. From the date on the back, it was made weeks ago but the tiny word in the right-hand corner is unmistakable. The faint glint of those three small letters in graphite, a shining prophecy. It says, feu.

  NIGHTINGALE

  Luscinia megarhynchos: narcotic effect; voice that signals spring.

  WHAT IS THIS? Skeet asks, reading through the handwriting of voices written out on a faded blue grid.

  Vocalization: 3:45 p.m. west of Albion Hills. A liquid bubbling in descending scale. Sounds like water running out of a bottle.

  Juvenilia. I found it yesterday. An old notebook. Back when I only knew how to anthropomorphize. Before I used equipment. I pause and then say, Before anything had become anything.

  Frame?

  Yes?

  I need to talk to you.

  I’m trying to remember when I last saw you.

  Paris, he says, slightly impatiently.

  Hotel du Nord, was it? Yes. I had missed the presentation of your paper on chorus howls. I remember you walked into the restaurant
telling me that you always know you are in Paris because of the tang of dogshit.

  Frame, I—

  God Skeet, what am I going to do? I close my eyes, still hearing the harmonic high-frequency wolf sounds, the ones associated with agnostic inner states. I understand there are probably no practical suggestions.

  I’ve been trying to work that out the whole way here, Skeet says.

  Skeet? I look around at all the fieldbooks and papers filling the room.

  Yup.

  Sometimes I wonder if it might be too late.

  Horseshit, he says.

  —

  Science began under a sliver of a new moon in Toronto, my chest pounding like the mice hunted by owls from the sound of their sped-up heartbeat alone. I had come from Paris having trouble doing the simplest things, sleeping, eating, talking. I’d walled grief into one of the remote, inaccessible corners. But something pierced a bright hole in my mind, allowing a moment of transparency where I was able to see everything. Like sincere huge-headed woodland creatures in fables that instruct you what to do. Everything seemed clear and possible. I wanted a place that had no history. Here there were once forests of trees so thick the sky was black when you looked up. The settlers cut the trees from the water’s edge and moved north, building the city out of the lumber until most of it burned down and they had to start again. On a short, cold black night in winter, whole city blocks were swallowed up, the glow of the fire seen from distant towns. Mother had once dismissed the entire country as dirty, a place full of lumberjacks, men who lived in grubby cabins and tore at meat with their fingers. When I stepped off the boat, it was late fall. Grey. I looked around at the trees and thought, They haven’t any leaves. The winter light was quick and sharp, though in the summers it stretched long into night, and everything grew and grew.

  I took up the hem on my wool dress so that I could walk freely. Movement was essential to fieldwork. I quickly discovered a route, past the piano factory and the brick quarry to the ravine thick with sumacs and thistles as high as my collarbone. A route that became much easier when I later had a bicycle. There was skeletal milkweed, the heart-shaped leaves of lilacs, and new bitter little smells. According to the man who sold me vegetables, not long ago black bears scooped salmon straight from the river. Crouched on the steep grade that rolls down to the water, the wet cool plants brushed my neck, flecked with dirt. Hair in gusts. I waited and heard the creak of trees in the wind, and then the haunted low tones of a pair of barred owls. Later, when I read over my transcriptions, it looked like You you you.

  Crossing the bright green circle of grass toward the biology building at the university felt like a piece of luck. Recording animal sounds at the art academy was like trying to figure out an answer without knowing the question. In Toronto, all the lectures—evolutionary biology, ecology, organic chemistry—pointed to atoms and cells, charged with electricity. I found the biology courses exhilarating. Practical theories that would lead to magical work. It seemed a sturdier place for the mind. But it didn’t come easily. I struggled with calculations. I sank into despair after accidents and failures due to my inexperience. Nothing was clear to me, just the need to immerse myself in something real. I developed a taste for experimental research right away, though learned to keep most of my ideas to myself. Or when speaking of them, to use dull adjectives and the dry technical language they favoured. I loved the laboratory, its order, its precision. Clean, with rows of glass-covered cabinets containing equipment and stacks of yellowed papers with observations, including eclipses, earthquakes, and meteorological bulletins from the past century. There was a faint, burning wax scent. Afterward, I bent silently over books at the library or at the wooden table in my rented attic room, too fond of quiet to share lodgings. I studied and worked, nothing else counting. I spent any spare time outdoors, wandering through the muddy ravine, scrambling above the river, full of curiosity and daring, with dozens of ideas in my head, while the other students were inside back at the lab, conducting delicate experiments. A return to the wilds. The green leaves and branches and vines that twined with the fallen oaks. That aliveness. The screeches and twitterings and low-rumble calls. I slowly felt a thaw, an edging toward the possibility of happiness. Not the kind that rolls in like a storm, but the ordinary kind, the kind that lasts.

  An Edison phonograph and a box of wax cylinders from the music department in an old cardboard box had been left in the corridor. It was the same model that Koch used to record the owl sounds. The First World War marked his shift from music to wildlife. As a boy, he had met the great Franz Liszt and played in Clara Schumann’s music room, where Brahms was a frequent visitor. The phonograph was an early model that had the ability to both record and play back sound. I carried it home and up to the attic and cleaned all the parts carefully with a cloth. There were cardboard tubes containing dark blue cylinders, coloured, I later found out, because the dye layer reduces the surface noise. I opened the window to the sterling high pitches of two mockingbirds in conversation, the whistling of a train, and played it back, the sounds magically preserved in tinfoil. I marched madly around the flat as if this could not be heard sitting down. Eventually I undressed and lay down in the narrow bed, though unable to sleep. The dark was silent, punctuated by the squeal of a distant engine, low voices in the hall below, eyes open to the ceiling.

  The most important thing, Professor Tapping said, is to keep your eyes open. He first had me observing crows, which I thought perfectly suitable. It seemed folkloric, as when the hero on an adventure is advised to pick the lesser creature out of a stable of nobler ones. The simple, even ugly language asks for nothing. It loses everything except meaning, what the creature wants to say. Fairy tales and nursery lore are crammed with creatures. Coded reminders that we once knew animals to be on the same footing as us.

  I read that in Greek, vulture, cathartes, means cleanser. Something clicked into place.

  A crow will snatch a sandwich from a picnic table, Professor Tapping said. They prosper in cities, in close proximity to us. He doesn’t know I’ve seen crows sold for fifteen francs a piece to mothers who put them in soup and feed it to their angular children.

  We walk to the Necropolis Cemetery in Cabbagetown. Cemeteries are, he says, the best place to observe birds in urban ecologies.

  In the afternoon light a large bird does eventually loop down from the sky, its broad black wings spread like something after a fire. Scrawny feet. Scorched-looking face. Its neurotic pinprick eyes glancing at us as it makes an unnerving sound suspiciously like laughter. Of course, I think, he chooses these birds to observe. Black with torn wings, charred voices, the carriers of death. I remember something about them as takers of the soul, to the other side. But then its head lobs down in garbage and guzzles a dropped breadslice. It is both a cindered heart and just another grubby creature. I notice the dirty feathers. How can it fly with those feathers? I find myself paralyzed by simple questions, the questions of a child.

  This is good, Professor Tapping nods enthusiastically, bits of bread flinging out of his mouth. He has brought cheese sandwiches wrapped in waxed brown paper. Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

  Aristotle?

  Euripides, he says, waving the other sandwich in my direction, suddenly making me aware of how hungry I am. We eat in silence as he pulls out a lined notebook and begins to draw what looks almost like an architectural diagram.

  Was he the one torn apart by dogs? I finally say.

  Who?

  Euripides.

  I haven’t a clue, he says. They often congregate in cemeteries, the crows. They protect themselves in mobs. Unlike pigeons that require buildings to shield them from predators. The crows sit on top of the cold bones as well as the still-warm, the just-dead.

  —

  Corvus, Skeet reads out loud from one of the fieldbooks. Both crows and ravens make loud raspy signature calls, caw and kraa respectively. Why, he asks, all the birds, now?

  It’s what I began
with. They work best with the cymatic imagery. Visual symbols and patterning give us clues that sound alone cannot, I say to Skeet, who is studying the nightingale images. You know, you might be the only person who understands my logic. I hope you can continue the work when I am—gone.

  Frame—

  Skeet. Please. Don’t let them use the dictionary to make ring tones for European mobile phone networks, or for relaxation, like that station, bird radio. Or sit, I plead, like Mme. Curie’s papers, sealed away in boxes lined with lead. It makes me think how fearless she was. But in my experience, I say, searching for my cigarettes, it is the young who are afraid of life. Only the old are afraid of death.

  Except you, Skeet says.

  Well when it’s no longer an abstraction, when it’s actually bearing down on you, it is a significant deadline. It helps you concentrate magnificently.

  He shakes his head. You really are like those aristocratic women who plant goddamn rosebushes in the face of ruin, he says, handing me the small glass filter I’m supposed to use when I smoke this much. He has on a blue jacket like the French workers wear, faded to grey and missing most of the buttons. His skin is brown and the tips of his hair glint gold. The sun has both darkened and bleached him out.

  I’ve come full circle, I say, exhaling. Reduced to my senses alone.

  HARE

  Millions of unaccounted notes, its blood mixed with house paint, drawn on a tarot card.

  TACITA AND I SIT in the second storey at Café de Flore drinking café crèmes and see M. Marant, an instructor who teaches at the art academy, walk by with his wife and their baby. We’ve witnessed them as a family on a number of occasions. She picks him up pushing the black shiny poussette and he routinely invites students to his apartment for seminars. He seems a bit stunned by his own life, I say to Tacita. He and his wife look like siblings, as sometimes married people do. We secretly call the baby the Larva because she is so coddled that her feet never touch the ground, her personality never allowed to emerge. It is as though she is boneless. Tacita, whose perceptions of people are disarming, can divine nothing from the baby. Not even a nascent grain of temperament.