The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  I find a park bench illuminated and slowly walk there. My legs ache. I conduct what I might say on the telephone, the stillness creeping. Though the village is quiet, there is the odd low rumble of a truck, a distant voice. I sit in silence for long enough that I drift off. I wake to a young woman in a white nightgown and complicated sandals, with straps around the ankle like a slave girl’s. Mostly they seem to wear cheap, ill-fitting garments with exposed midsections. For all its practical improvements, feminism has not yet freed women from a sense that their value resides in how they are seen by men. The woman has a tattoo above her ankle that I can’t make out, most likely something banal. It used to be just sailors and criminals. Not much interests me about fashion. During the war it froze for six years. Now there is clothing manufactured to look like what was once worn by the bone-poor, and somewhere somebody profits from this. I picture how many times I mended my one pair of stockings in Paris. How unshined shoes were tantamount to the end of civilization. The modern expression of rebellion seems sadly commodified. When out with the artists, I always felt a nervous sort of energy. As though anything could happen. Because the revolt came from within, and how can anyone ever predict what might come from the mind? Change life, Rimbaud said. There were naked bodies, objects on fire, magnetic fields, clouds eaten by the moon.

  The young woman and I are like churchgoers, an extended polite silence between us. But soon her sobs punctuate the night air with a violence that almost gives me a coronary.

  Mademoiselle? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?

  She turns her pale oval face and looks at me suspiciously with blue-socketed eyes, as though she has just now been alerted to the fact that she is not alone. She must think me mad, this old woman in striped pyjamas piled with sweaters on the other end of the bench in the middle of the night.

  She tells me that she can’t sleep. That she’s so exhausted she cannot even sleep. A small baby. No husband. The baby sleeps twenty metres away but inside it is a dark and shrunken world, one she feels she’ll never get out of. She needs air. She needs to feel part of something bigger than her apartment, with its hushed tones and sour-milk smell. She says no one ever told her about the loneliness. I am the first adult she has spoken with all day. The days are without end. Nights are the worst. They are as deep as black water. It is only me, up with the drug addicts, the mentally ill, and the old people— She stops, embarrassed.

  Ça va, I say. It is the first time I’ve heard my own voice in days. Old people actually aren’t usually up at this hour.

  She lets out a small laugh. She wipes back the wetness with her hand. She says that when she pushed out the baby, a whole new magical life came with it. People stared, saying a baby this new still has angels around it. She felt enchanted, altered. Her own sister didn’t even recognize her voice on the telephone. But then you don’t sleep for months and you are stuck in this gruelling toil and everything slides to a brink. It makes this bunched, plain life it came crashing down into all the more desolate. If the baby is screaming and I am half-starved, do I still make a sandwich for myself while he cries? While he sleeps inside, is it illegal for me to be sitting here, on this bench? I feel unhinged, she says. Like I am capable of doing something crazy.

  I think all women carry something of a rebellion inside them that often goes unexpressed. Because we think we are not in the race—or game, or whatever the sporting analogy is—we have a sense of anarchy that I think is an advantage. In times like these it threatens to erupt. It is not such a bad thing.

  I can’t shake the darkness that rips through me, she says. It’s so strong I could harm myself, or the baby. She pauses. I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately, she says, blowing her nose.

  Well all the thinking you do, I doubt you’ll figure out much.

  I’m so tired, she says. Sleep like a baby, she mimics. Why does no one talk about the fact that babies are insomniacs? I’m so exhausted but I’m just sitting around doing nothing. I sit inside all day. Laundry piles up, the refrigerator empties. Nothing is ever finished. I never realized how hard it is to do nothing. To do nothing and be okay with it. To not become impatient doing nothing. I can’t rely on anything. Each day I think I learn something about him, about my situation, but then it changes. She slumps against the back of the bench and mutters what sounds like, He seems somewhere between human and animal, though more animal than human. And what does that make me? Someone told me to keep a journal because you forget everything. And you know that in ten weeks, I’ve only written one thing. One word. She laughs. Milk. I feel like a farm animal. Like the goats on my aunt’s farm that I helped milk when I was little. We would get them on the milking stand with the lure of grain, then we would keep them in by their necks with a long piece of wood that had a hook and eye at the top. I always liked the sound that streams of milk made hitting the pail. It sounded so rustic, so comforting. Now I don’t feel that way at all.

  Mammals are so dependent on milk, I think but don’t say. It’s why we will never be as free as the birds. Because I have nothing subjective to contribute, I tell her about sleep. Dolphins don’t sleep for a month after giving birth, I say. It’s how their offspring avoid being prey.

  C’est moi. Exactement, she laughs, wiping her eyes.

  Well there are better stories.

  How do you know that?

  There just are.

  No, I mean, how do you know about dolphins?

  Oh. I study animals.

  What do you study about them?

  I work a few kilometres from Fontevraud in the white caves near the house there. I am transcribing animal languages that have been recorded.

  I didn’t know there was such a thing.

  It’s been over a hundred years. The first recordings were birds on an Edison phonograph. But those birds were captured. Which isn’t the same.

  Oh.

  The first wild bird recordings in North America were made in 1929 on a movie soundtrack because no one had invented a tape recorder yet.

  She looks at me with the look that people get when they are determining how old you really are, patronizingly, as if I am a small child. And what I want to say to her is, Don’t do that.

  Maybe you can tell me, she says. I think I saw a jackal by the river late at night.

  Egyptians used to read the Book of the Dead on how to navigate the underworld. The god of the dead had a jackal’s head. He determined who could enter by weighing the heart. If it was lighter than an ostrich feather, the soul would be allowed to ascend into heaven.

  She shifts on the bench.

  Jackals are opportunists. They often steal what others kill. I think what you might have seen was a wolf.

  You know a lot about animals.

  I’ve observed them my whole life. We are quiet for a while, both staring ahead.

  Is the work lonely? she finally asks. I think of sitting for hours silently on the ground.

  It’s like being in love, I say, feeling oddly candid at this hour with this stranger. Your interest in everything else is lost.

  I wouldn’t know, she says, the baby’s father left. We aren’t—close.

  I am relieved she doesn’t use one of those tinselled words like soulmate. People should leave each other’s souls alone. Untapped parts of a person used to be called charisma. Now they are cause for therapy. What’s inside you is a precious, essential thing that must be left inviolate otherwise you risk ruining it. The radiance at the centre of your very own life. The thing that makes it worth living. Without it, no one is truly independent.

  To be understood is the worst disaster, I finally say out loud.

  What?

  Valéry.

  Who?

  —

  I tell her that I am writing a dictionary of animal languages, of species on the brink of extinction. By listening to wildlife, we gain understanding of animal communication, and the health of wildlife populations. I am looking at the patterns that have emerged from the sounds. They allow us to see what we normal
ly could not. There are innumerable little extinctions occurring all the time. We are living in an age of slaughter. But modern society seems to operate with no sense of the past and even less regard for the future. I have no idea why extinction isn’t more a source of horror, I say. I once ended a lecture this way, and surprisingly a student’s hand shot up. And do you know what he said? He said, Stalin said one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. I was so angered by a rhetorical question being answered with a fascist’s justification of mass murder that I was actually shaking. After I calmed down, I thought about it a lot, and realized that I had to admit he had a point.

  And what brings you here, she inquires politely, at this hour?

  I’ve come to speak to the person from the gallery. The one who sent the letter in my pocket, knife-sharp. I thought I was coming here to confront Valentina about the complete silence around my work. S’affronter. Already it sounds like a dustup. But it is the letter that occupies me.

  Work, I finally tell her, and quickly feel ridiculous.

  You know, I say, switching the subject. You will open up into motherhood, you just must remember to do it without losing yourself. Let the laundry accumulate. There is more danger in getting too good at being practical. Women who do this are never fulfilled. My tone is of a calm parent, though this is not my intention.

  You must have children.

  A grandchild, I say. The word hangs in the air like a bird testing its voice.

  She looks at me oddly. Both of us are calculating how this is possible, or maybe only I am. She is distracted, looking at her hands.

  I am trying to not think of the letter. As though it has not precipitated a new and exquisite pain. Why is there no mention of a child? What kind of terrific odds could produce such a preposterous outcome? My entire life I have been persecuted for living, in essence, like a man. And now this absurd claim like a thousand forces doing their best to pluck things from me, designating my own inadequacy, my own insignificance. Only for a moment did I let thoughts of motherhood take shape, but even then, especially then, it was set to fail. The choice was made. And once a choice is made, it cannot be unmade. I tried to not think of it. Looking too closely at things changes what you feel. And now it doesn’t matter how much or little I thought of it. Why repeat sad things?

  Ask for help, I tell her. Sleep. You will find that you will get through it. The night is difficult, but the night can also bring solutions. She looks up. You need to sleep long enough to dream.

  She slides over and collapses in my lap holding on to my waist, and then starts shaking with tears.

  I’ve not been held like this for years. It is uncomfortable, verging on painful, but I do not move.

  I wish I could help.

  You already did, she says, wiping her eyes with the tips of her fingers. Though everything she says sounds open-ended.

  She gets up, holding her small body with grace, and then glints white through the cool grass and across the park. A pale shape moving, through the navy blue light. I think because of my age and opinion, she mistakes me for wise and maternal. The truth is I’m neither of these things.

  SNAKE

  Sun jerks in its eyes as it slicks through grassblades, blood heating.

  HAVING SEEN THE DANCER means I can’t go to him tonight. I make these interior arrangements. I need to see friends, laugh it off. Stunned that I am capable of violence. I know that hurt, I am dangerous to meet.

  Tas, all I can think, that woman is so overtly sensual.

  Tacita lights a cigarette and hands me one.

  Okay, I, but that woman is not Lev’s wife. She’s a dancer. Her name is Ulyana.

  Great. So now there are at least two.

  I asked Istvan about the dancer. I think she’s from Leningrad. Istvan says that Lev found her beauty gratifying.

  Is this supposed to make me feel better?

  Her self-involvement is legendary. Istvan says before parties she makes herself cry because it makes her eyes bluer. He said her birthday is on Christmas Day.

  God Tas, what does that matter?

  She is used to ruining festivities. That relentless need for an audience. You know, if she were religious, she’d want to be Jesus.

  I laugh and Tacita says, Finally.

  Istvan also says she’s the sort of woman who can change the mood in a room with a single remark. He calls her a cage in search of a bird. She kills everything, including conversations by saying things like, I dance like no one.

  What else do you know of her?

  She once told Lev that when she has a blister on her foot before a performance, she shaves off a thin slice of raw meat, usually veal, and places it on top of the wound. After she dances, at the end of the night, the meat is cooked. It’s the only thing that works. She says all the dancers do it. Tacita winces. I think this image has possibly ruined ballet for me. She pauses and then says, She might be half crazed with hunger. Her only food is vodka and cigarettes.

  Vodka and cigarettes are not food, they are an addiction.

  I, let’s not talk about her.

  After a moment, I force myself to ask, Do you know anything of Aglaya?

  No. Istvan says that Lev never discusses her. Istvan doesn’t even know where she lives. She sucks in her breath. He wonders when Lev has long absences if he has gone to her.

  An inward shudder.

  I wonder if they have children.

  There is only silence around everything with Lev. He does not want to talk about it. I, let’s not talk of it either. All of this. I wonder if it even seems like you.

  Tacita—

  She squeezes my hand. It was the dancer who went outside of courtesy, she says.

  I reach for Tacita’s coat and my own, a cream wool coat, stitched by Mme. Tissaud, who prefers creating clothes of her own style rather than the fashionable thing. She has drawers of ribbons and fabrics and underclothes from bygone eras though everything she makes is unfussy. A wise man, she says, wears simple clothing and carries a jewel in his heart.

  We walk to Le Dôme hand in hand. The cold air is sobering. For a moment I can see these unsettling things. The three-inch newspaper type. The sparse grocery stores. Museum collections slowly trickling from the city to the provinces. As I feared, each week another rare animal vanishes from the zoo. Monkeys. The python. The hyena is still there but the guard informs me, after much pleading, that she is soon to go. There is a danger of not taking danger seriously enough. And yet still my world exists only within my desires, and two arrondissements. We walk to a group who seeks mappable routes to the unconscious. The underworld preferable to the sliver of land we precariously stand on.

  Istvan comes toward us and kisses us both warmly. My eyes flicker across the room. Lev is not here, though many of the women who look for him are. Unlike everyone else, he does not recount amorous episodes from the past. I hear about them from other people. I think of what Tacita said. That maybe he and Aglaya are together. I have offered myself up to my beloved. I am acutely aware of the geometry of desire. Of the fact that somewhere he too could be doing the same.

  I excuse myself. In the toilettes women jut out their lower lips applying red lipstick, their mouths o’s while their eyelashes coat with black. Hair in waves. They wear complicated constructed dresses and garter belts and silk-seamed stockings. They are ravishing. They smell of perfume and cigarettes. I am overcome with love for them, for bothering. Of course beauty also destroys beauty. Like the iridescent peacocks now gone from the zoo. Tacita and I observe that they prefer to eat chrysanthemums and roses rather than the granules and grit consumed by the dust-coloured birds that nobody notices. I see myself glint across the mirror. Dark-circled eyes, angular lines, messy hair braided and pinned up around my head. A white dress with pleats that fall to the ground. I look wrong. Out of time. I have a certain ignorance in complex barters of social currency. With women, appearance is most definitely one. I know that solitaries look odd. It is mostly when I am in a room with people who
have a common goal that I feel remote. I have grown used to being separate, but wonder what it would be like, just for a moment, to be them. Women who wash their hair in dead champagne to make it gold. Women who sleep with pins and strips of rags tied around their hair to wake up to curls. Women who wear the newest thing. Would I know which dress was the right one? Where to find a small mother-of-pearl mirror that clicks shut? Queenie had one, Mother, an army. I wonder if because I had only brothers I have never really understood why people choose to determine women by their outsides, and not by their brains or hearts. I don’t want to be admired like Ulyana. I want to be given space so that I can paint and record and unfold into what I’m making. Without that, I see that there are parts of my life that run thin. I see how the best things are made in solitude. These women who seem to live in front of the mirror, this flash of beauty, fleeting, like glitter at a party. But, I remind myself, I am not a solitary anymore. I have Tacita. I have Lev. And with him, I am alarmed that my words are stunted and rusted from being so deep inside of me I have no idea if they are even really there.

  I emerge back into the noisy room, gather my coat and gloves, and kiss Tacita.

  Oh Ivory, don’t go. We’re just beginning.

  You must tell me what transpires.

  We will re-evaluate in the light of day.

  The walk back to Mme. Tissaud’s is rainsoaked and the lights get mooned in the dark rivers of streets.

  I take my key and unlock my door, the damp cold is startling. In the dark, I see a thin film of water from the rain. I left the window open. But also sharp frilled edges of roses.

  How? A locked room and only I have the key.

  I can’t stop thinking about Ulyana. I can’t shake her image. Acting as though nothing has happened is like having to speak to a stranger in the morning, when there still exists the remoteness of an intense dream. I wish I could live without this interior drama. I think of Tacita and Istvan and the way they move together, without question, or conflict. Though I know living by comparison is living in shadows. I wonder if she experiences this. The feeling that if I hear from Lev, if he is in my room, or we meet in the street, it is a marvel. That he is even there. I cannot imagine a world that he inhabits sturdily, enduringly, without fail. I cannot imagine living together. A shared key, food, space. Instead we move like animals, cautious of coming in close. What is it that is feared? Capture?