The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  You will hate yourself, I overheard Father cautioning Mother, if her behaviour allows her to win. Though I wonder, when a mother disowns a daughter, who it is exactly that wins.

  HYENA

  Hyena; points of stars, cackle.

  BRASSERIE LIPP IS BOISTEROUS. There is a gathering, a corralling of performances. This group has such a hunger for radical expression that almost any ludic gesture could gin up a constituency. Hugo with his hallucinogenic speaking style conducts spontaneous writing, passing a blank book for collective contribution. He writes, Broken. Tacita wonders when that word could ever be positive. When you’re talking about a horse, I say. Or an engagement to a lecherous man, she says. A large roll of thick cream paper is unfurled, the ends taped to the long row of tables. Everyone is a prisoner and must draw a map of their own escape. A scene is performed for a play in which a black swan lays an orphic egg. Tacita gathers the contents of each person’s pockets and recreates their dreams out of paperclips, matches, a Jew’s harp, centimes encrusted with grime. Yuri, who once slept on Lev’s floor, juggles lit candles that surprisingly do not extinguish on the downdraft. He was once a clown in the Russian circus but was kicked out because of his drinking. They told him he was murdering himself with liquor. When he came back sober, he wasn’t able to catch anything. His body had compensated for the offtime of alcohol. When I hug him there is the familiar slightly musty animal scent, but the smell of brandy is staggering.

  Tonight, I am invincible. I kick off my shoes and dance on the tables, my ankles brushing the heat of the candles, while Lev deadpans poetry made from Victorian department-store catalogue clippings. When he snaps the book shut, I walk off the table and into his arms. He kisses me slowly, deeply. He stands so close I can feel the heat of his body. We look at each other. We barely speak for the rest of the night, but our bodies glint awareness. He is amused by the group’s antics and has a genuine affection for them, but his artistic affiliation is elsewhere. He is tolerant to a point. When one of the artists does something like dye a toy bear pink and build shelves in its stomach, he just shakes his head. Though mostly he is alone, he seems to like something he gets from the group. Istvan says it is like interbreeding, given the polarities between his art and that of the group’s. Like a donkey and a horse.

  And who exactly is the ass in this scenario? Lev says.

  This morning we dyed our hair blue. Only both being dark, it is a halo of cerulean, faintly suggested.

  Grind the blew cornflowers gathered in the morning before the sun riseth, with faire water very well upon a stone. Then put them in a horne or shell, and pour water theron, stir them well together, then let them stand half a day, then pour out the water, and take the gaule of a great fish, and grind it with gum and the white of eggs, and use it when you thinke good.

  It is night. We fall into the cold sheets, our hair leaving watery blue bled into Lev’s pillowcase. Blue is benign. Despite what they say, it is a happy colour. A whole universe from red.

  There is one star over Jardin du Luxembourg that can be seen through the window from the bed. I appear to be asleep but am not. In truth, I find it impossible to sleep when I am near Lev. I am also kept awake by a little dry grinding sound that is him, in typical lucubration. His paintings happen at any time, but he draws only at night, when the shapes from dreams emerge. I see that he does not want to be interrupted. This is clear.

  Punishing silence, the stretch of days between. I paint when I first wake up and then late into the evenings, adjusting to the light. Through my small window, a view of the tree branches. I am conscious of the smells of oils and turpentine that fill the slanted space. Occasionally there is a voice on the street, birdsong, a reminder of another reality. With the apartness, I cannot help the feeling of abandonment. There is a violence in absence. These rhythms of closeness with Lev that upend once he leaves. A stiff formality returns when we first see each other after days apart. We act like wildlife, tentative, despite our bodies bristling with intent.

  I have a board on my easel, gessoed and ready, staring at me, but I keep working in my sketchbook instead. The closing facing pages experiments as well as animal voices. This is what I am drawn to, but at the academy they continually dismiss my interests, reminding me to remain on course. They impose the ideals of classical art: order, proportion, symmetry, equilibrium, harmony. I see the other students adopt these intellectual concepts and determinedly incorporate them in their work, but feel as though something vital is being repressed. Instinct. And though I want to hold on to something solid, I am starting to have the sinking feeling that the academy is the wrong thing. What they want is for us to meet requirements. What I want is to ignore them.

  I have no way of contacting him. When I say goodbye, I don’t know if I will see him an hour later or a week later. I have no rights, no hold on him. There is no plain dignity in the waiting. Waiting has become a habit. He barely exists in this world where we overlap. I know with absolute certainty that any dialogue around it would make him recede for good. And though I have become used to being silent with him, I am still struck by how many things I can’t say.

  Over a week later, when he arrives at Tacita and Istvan’s he takes the small flower from his buttonhole and puts it behind my ear. An electric shock. This happens every time.

  I say, Only you.

  His lips on my ear. You have been in my mind, between my fingers.

  My face and neck flash red. Truth makes heat.

  I watch how he puts his hands on Istvan’s shoulders and looks into his deep eyes and greets him with such assurance. Though within the possible conduct of every human being, he alone is magnetic. I feign a great calm.

  Tacita and I drink tea out of chipped blue-and-white china cups.

  The problem, she says, is that I am in love with everything. All of these things. These broken, dirty, miscast things are imbued with such significance I can barely walk down a street. Istvan is wondering if the boxes of things that pile high will take over and we will become diminished souls. I spend so much time collecting, but haven’t been able to work on anything.

  But this is the work, I say, lining up the cup directly in the saucer’s circle. The art is in the choosing. Assemblage is restoration.

  Extraordinary.

  What?

  Your ability to see so clearly.

  Everything is easier to see when it is about someone else.

  I think, though he deeply understands, Istvan feels weighted by objects.

  So. The worst version of collecting would be that you are held ransom by the objects. That they hold you, that they block your mind. You need an uncluttered mind.

  She fishes in the tin for a cube of sugar.

  And I guess the question you would have to ask is what it is exactly that you’re holding on to.

  Life, she says as she drops in the sugar. Her spoon clicks against the side of the teacup. I, sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.

  Does anybody fully? I like what the objects are to you, each with its energy from where they have been before. Each with its own democracy.

  It’s similar to your paintings, I. You show an alternative world, where humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects are on an equal footing. Where do they come from?

  Dreams.

  Tacita slaps me on the back as though we are sportsmen and I have just scored a point. She walks across the room and uncorks eau de vie and pours it into our teacups.

  I think of this place. Full of its imagery. The poetics. The corners of antiquity. The disquiet. As though the city was invented for Tacita. And here I am looking for things elsewhere, like the crows that fly over it. It’s ridiculous. Like saying yellow is the colour of that red painting. Tacita says we need relatively. How else can we measure? It is not new, the idea of the thing farthest away being the most desired. With longing there is velocity.

  I think of Lev. How I trick myself into believing that I don’t need to know the things he is unable to tell me. We have never d
iscussed his wife. I don’t think I’ll ever know him, but there exists a part of him that is mine. My understanding of him is more physical than intellectual, but it is that too. Though it is also what he senses from me that, in part, attracts.

  The prophet with Siberian eyes. Tacita and I secretly name him Rasputin. We laugh, though it doesn’t have the effect I want. To render him harmless.

  I measure the time differently, with all of my body. But I refuse to simply wait for a man. If nothing else, it destroys all notions of the present. And still I can’t help imagining him. Getting up. Moving toward his easel. Mixing paint. Layering paint. And going out to the cafés where women smile and come to his table and he talks and moves as though I do not exist. I think, How ridiculous. Somewhere he sits in a café and I find this an assault. Although sometimes I feel I’m the luckier one. To have this obsession. To be so alive from it. Yet when I conjure up his face, the tendons in his wrists, the way he walks, I am aware that there is little difference between this and a hallucination.

  I continue to make regular visits to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, with and without Tacita. As a result, all the pages in the notebook of animal sounds have completely filled and I’ve begun a new one. I have no idea what I will do with it, but I feel excited by simply seeing the tilted violet script sitting on pale blue lines. Vibration of bones. Sounds not made louder by adding but by taking away. Small kingdoms of concrete music but with geometry, interstitial, ringing, humming, speaking fragments, unforeseen. I have befriended the mid-sized mammals guard with the lopsided grin who at the beginning would make me produce my acceptance letter from the academy each time to qualify for the less expensive ticket. There is a spotted hyena there that I have been thinking about. The larger animals often seem sad and filthy, and I find it hard to connect to the fish, but when I saw the hyena, something was set in motion.

  At the Sainte-Geneviève Library I consult various texts, learning that spotted hyenas live in large matriarchal clans and have a startling social intelligence. Though they are capable hunters that kill most of their food, it is also true that they will eat garbage, which I find a virtue, not a character flaw. I notice that when she is fed she makes an almost giggling grunting sound of laughter that exposes her jagged, yellow-brown teeth, so dirty and crooked they feel like something private. And then I discover her small golden eyes, ringed with black halos, and her sharp pointed face. Every few minutes she pricks up stiffly and looks around.

  Medieval bestiary says that hyenas are immortal. That they are highly sexualized and can change their gender. She looks at me with those yellow truthful eyes and I feel helpless merely being a witness, while her nobility remains intact. I am slightly afraid of her. There is a stone in the hyena’s eye, the old scholars say, that can, when placed under a person’s tongue, predict the future. I like to think I am not projecting any of my uneasiness—about her capture, her environs, her general station—onto her consciousness. The gold eyes continue to stare back. And in truth, she appears a bit despondent, spending altogether too much time lying on the floor of her cage.

  —

  What do you want, Ivory? Tacita asks.

  What do you mean? I say, leaning in. You mean from Lev? From life?

  Yes.

  Yes what?

  From life.

  I don’t know, Tas. I feel like one of those people of old who are told to enter the sacred groves or the remote areas within an Egyptian pyramid. You know, the ones who must pass the harrowing tests of fire, air, water, and earth in order to learn the universal secrets.

  Which are?

  If I knew I wouldn’t be undergoing the tests, I say. But even with Tacita I hold back. My mind always reaching forward, thinking of how little security there is from the past. And now even less from the present. I was sent to convent school when I was little, no more than ten. I never dreamed that small acts of rebellion would lead to exile. Once Mother had her mind made up, there was nothing to say. She was appalled at my behaviour. I was to be hidden, locked in the attic like Rochester’s lunatic wife in Jane Eyre. When I left, Arthur handed me his copy of Greek Myths, which I knew was his favourite book, and my eyes filled with tears. We had read countless myths and fairy tales and stories rich with escape and adventure, but in this one, there was only me. When I read on the train about Persephone being dragged to the underworld by Hades, over and over again my stomach churned as I looked out at the colourless sky, the trees blurring farther away.

  —

  Days pass. Tacita has an idea. Do you promise to say yes even though you don’t know what it is?

  What choice do you give me?

  A few days later we walk down a stone lane, arms entwined. It is dark. I don’t know why but I am afraid. I can feel it in the stiffness of my spine. My quick steps.

  Tacita tells me that the woman is the eldest of seven sisters. She bought this apartment from a famous theatre actress, only when they signed the papers, she met the actress and was disappointed with her appearance. She had an uneven gait. Her husband was distant. There was a big white baby with navy blue eyes on her lap. There was an issue with the door, and its not closing shut. She had the feeling of history repeating itself. She moved into the apartment anyway. She found out that the owner had five wives. All of them, except the last, the actress, had died in childbirth. There was something strange about the children. This woman has always known her predisposition. She does readings with big candles. Her first reading, Tacita says, was of her own death. She stops to look at me. You know, we don’t see death the way people in other centuries saw it.

  Which is how?

  All the time.

  I haven’t heard what Tacita says. I realize I am shaking. I don’t tell Tacita. Instead I ask if she is one of those women dressed in black. Lips and fingernails painted blood-red. Fantastical name.

  Her name is Dot.

  Dot?

  I think she’s English.

  That is a name devoid of all magic.

  That might be the point.

  Tacita has told me about the time her mother took her to a village reader when she was young. The woman had an almost priestly energy. Flowers mysteriously fell from the ceiling. Tacita was told she would die young, in her childbearing years. From blood. I’ve asked her if this is why she has vowed to never have children, but she says no. It was her mother’s death that made that choice. Still, she is attracted to ritual, the idea of constructing a religious system of her own. The mystical life.

  Aren’t you afraid that what she said might be true?

  I think what is meant to happen works itself out many times, in many guises.

  There is some mystery there that I honour. I think some people really do have a gift of seeing. And if they truly do, then most likely whatever they do will be transformative. But Tacita, you know that you already do what they do. The contemplation of the surfaces of things that stimulate visions.

  —

  Dot’s apartment is through a hidden courtyard off a dead-end street. An interesting choice for a channeller, Tacita says. We climb the spiral stairs and slip past a thick door to a wide and dark apartment on the third storey. The apartment is depressing. Dark and ugly and very cold. The front windows have been blacked out by swaths of black velvet. There are sheets piled in a glass cabinet so white against the dimness they hurt the eyes. There is a silver tea service, of the kind Mother had, displayed on a burnished wood credenza. Candles burn on a large oval table covered with a red-embroidered cloth from another country. Astral bells. It seems a cliché and completely singular at once.

  Please. Sit down, Mme. Szalasi. Mlle. Frame. Her voice is flat and lifeless, like an artificial lake. The apartment has a strong, nauseating perfume, one that is clearly concealing something else.

  She speaks, unnaturally, with her back to us.

  I look for something barefaced and fraudulent. But there is nothing overtly damning. A thin uncertain noise hums in the room. There is an obvious construction of dramatic elem
ents I refuse to be unnerved by. But still I feel as though I’m being dragged through deep reeds toward a river. I remind myself that it is of my own invention. Captive to a mood, a state of mind that she has worked at manufacturing.

  I have taken part in the group’s séances. But they separate themselves from this experience. The air prickles and is electric, but everything feels slightly funny. The holding of hands, flickering night-moth eyes, the droning speak. I am always on the verge of laughing. I stop myself because I understand what they’re trying to do. To gain direct access to the unconscious. There is always a presence of animals. I like how they emerge, marvellous and sacred, conveying messages through their appearance in dreams and trance.

  It is in this moment that I realize that I don’t believe our future is meant to be known.

  The air is sliced in two by an unfamiliar voice.

  Dot changes her accent, her entire voice, altering its pitch completely. It is thick and lilting and full of heavy consonants. Russian. The hair pricks up on the back of my neck. I stand still. She recites in the low hushed tones reserved for children after dark.

  Baby baby rock a bye