The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  There is a distant thrum of an airplane above. Lev once told me that he was interested in aviators, until he actually met one and then was disappointed to find that this person was just normal. A sportsman. No inward struggle, just a tightly focused mind with little self-consciousness.

  What did you think they would be like?

  Adventurers.

  Well isn’t travelling adventure?

  People who travel for recreation are limited by the part of themselves that’s only interested in elsewhere. Travelling is a substitute for real activity.

  What would you consider real activity?

  Anything you do with your mind.

  Later Lev explains that he stood below waiting for me, and when I didn’t come out, he began to toss the roses through the open window. Without staying any longer, he left.

  But that’s impossible, I say. They were placed there so perfectly. As though they had been arranged.

  BEE

  Solenius vagus (female) skilful borer, behaves differently from the Osmia, (condition of the) sense of smell.

  ONE, THEN TWO. And then Valentina’s voice on the telephone saying hello like a question mark.

  It’s Ivory, I say, annoyed at my thin voice that resembles none of the fury inside.

  What time is it? Valentina says, her voice full of sleep. Clearly I’ve woken her up.

  I don’t know.

  Suddenly she’s pricked alert. Have you seen Skeet? Is he there?

  What? Why would he be here? Isn’t he in Oslo?

  A pause. Relief trickles through.

  Can I telephone you back in the morning? It’s the middle of the night, Ivory.

  Valentina, there is no telephone reception where I live, as you well know. I am in my nightclothes, standing at a payphone that I travelled to by car. You could ring this number in the morning, but I assure you it will not be me who answers.

  What is it that can’t wait until morning?

  You cannot tell me you did not expect that I must be upset, after all the time I have worked with the conservatory. Valentina. I need to know what’s going on. There has been no communication. I sent all the skylark files over six months ago. Some of the most beautifully complex recordings.

  I think of how the slow methodical work put me in a reflective mood. All the power the sounds contain, like precise little jewels read inside the cave walls.

  To think that skylarks die because we eat cereal. They can’t find food through the densely packed winter fields. St. Francis once petitioned the holy Roman emperor to scatter grain across fields on Christmas Day to give the crested larks a feast. The fields in England used to be clustered with them. We can see exactly the effects that moving the spring sowing of the wheat and barley crops to winter has had on the populations, I tell her. All so we can eat more cereal. I’ve—

  I can hear a sigh, the telephone receiver unmuffled, as though she’s reconciled herself to the conversation.

  I don’t know what I’m expecting. Valentina has only ever had a touristic understanding of what I am after with my work. She is the person now who has known me the longest. A biologist-turned-bureaucrat, she clicks down the halls to her small bright office at the university where she tracks projects, allocates funding for the conservatory. Something shifted years ago between us. We now use a brusque more informative style of communicating with each other. She has always been unwilling to accept that my life, for the most part, is not what anyone might call domestic. She hates the clutter of bags of nuts and fruit and vegetables I leave on her counters, one of those modern kitchens that look like a morgue. I don’t believe in refrigeration, I say. She glares. It kills the taste in things.

  I wouldn’t think someone who is used to gritty sandwiches in the field, who drinks nutritional supplements in the lab, would care about taste, she counters.

  She admonishes my utter lack of style, but I’ve also never understood the thrill of feeling enhanced by a garment. She says I have it wrong. Clothes can be profound. They are signposts of the interior. When I would stay at her apartment in Oslo she would offer up her enormous toiletry case. You could do something with your hair, she ventures. Horrified that I would enter a public building barely combed, in an unironed shirt. What about some makeup? You know women use lipstick to tranquilize, I say. She ignores me. Her hair is swept up in an old-fashioned businesslike style. She wears what seems to be the same structured dress in different colours that she used to make from brown paper patterns. It hides all my sins, she says by way of explanation. Her elegance is out of place, against the modern triumph of comfort. She cannot stand all these people now, no difference in droopy attire between the child and the adult. Perhaps our generation, so consciously assembled, wanted to avoid the complacency of comfort. As though we secretly found it necessary, the need for small pain.

  I did apologize for the way the last batch of notes reached you, didn’t I?

  Ivory, it’s got nothing to do with that, though if you’d not smoked so much perhaps your writings would be more legible. Besides, you know data is required to be in digital form now.

  I’ve never wanted to rely solely on technology, Valentina. The resistance is active, not passive. My method has forced me to recognize each voice individually.

  That’s precisely it. You hold too much information in your head. You are probably the only person in the world with these decades of fieldwork, this intimate knowledge of behaviour.

  I think of Mme. Tissaud’s voice saying the death of an elder is like the burning of a library. They are like palimpsests, she once told me. Those very old documents in which the original text has been erased and replaced with new writing. Within them is a record of layers of natural and human events.

  Ivory, she interjects. I don’t want you to take it personally. We’ve all had to undergo a fair bit of restructuring since so much funding has been cut.

  Restructuring, Valentina, I say, wanting to sit down. That’s damned rot. You know I detest these modern euphemisms.

  Well, it’s what’s actually happening. We’ve amassed a sizable library of your recordings, which will remain in the bioacoustics archives. But the linguistics and your cymatic imagery are not where the conservatory is interested in putting resources at this point. It’s a direction things have been going in for some time now. We’ve lost a considerable amount of our funding, Ivory. It’s—

  But, Valentina, you just said I am some sort of singular repository. A pause. Some time? How long, Valentina?

  There is no answer. Oh Ivory, she sighs. Mea bloody culpa. What do you want me to say? Her tone faintly hostile, as if to say, Do you have no idea that you are so old?

  All that beeping and whirring of the extraordinarily expensive technology that’s been brought in. Remember when it was just pencils and recorders? People look things up on a computer now and think they’ve found something out. That they know something. But you need to really observe something, really be with it, to know it. That is learning— Valentina. So?

  So?

  So, it is a quaint project by an old woman who should have retired long ago.

  You wouldn’t have received funding for so long if that is what it was, Ivory. You know that. But it isn’t daft to consider that maybe it’s time to stop work. Relax a little. You could travel, get a pet—

  Become one of those old women with a dozen cats wrapped around their ankles? I stare into the receiver, and attempting composure, say in a lowered tone, Of course, Valentina, you and I well know that for anyone who even remotely considers the idea of animal liberation, eliminating the word pet would probably be the first step.

  Valentina laughs tentatively. See, that sounds like you, she says, loosening up.

  I revere the work.

  She remains quiet. Well?

  Well the French have a saying. If you piss in the violin it doesn’t make much music.

  How—vulgar, Valentina says with a laugh.

  I’m like a bee, Valentina, I must keep moving to stay still.
>
  I am reminded of recording sounds of wild bees nested in lightning-struck trees. Knowing which chemicals were hitting them through the sounds they made. When Valentina proposed that I focus my research solely on bees, all I said to her is that people notice the bees and the monarchs because they are iconic insects. But what do you think is happening to everything else?

  I am now desperate to sit. There is a faint scent of urine in the phone booth. It authenticates my theory that the world is covered in pee. I say to Valentina, Of all the hours I’ve spent on my stomach in the dirt, really listening to the world. In ditches with clouds moving across the sky. The astonishing intensity of it. I wish I could use words that we use when we talk about love, not these drab ones we reserve for work. It has given me a wonderful release from the consciousness of self. I need not speak, just listen, and remain marvellously alert. And then I look down and see my hands. Or the small flashing red light of the recorder. Tears fill my throat. And I’m amazed that I’m alive. Struck by the notion that I myself am here at all, that I am simply here.

  I understand this, Ivory, you know, she says quietly.

  Everyone wants something nice that relates to them. Like we are preserving this rainforest so it will be around for our grandchildren. You know that I think that is the worst reason. We should be preserving it because the plants and animals deserve their rightful habitat. I do it for them, Valentina. They should be allowed to exist.

  Well they are lucky you have saved them.

  They have saved me, don’t you see? It is something of great importance in my life, I say, trying to gain some composure. I am lucky. Not everyone can say that.

  You have fulfillment, is that not enough?

  Fulfillment. That is a dead word, Valentina. In the eighteenth century they would have called it inspiration, which I prefer.

  A car rattles off past the river.

  Anger is already turning into something else. Despite its being the appropriate response for what is being meted out.

  I look down and see that at the bottom of the telephone booth there is a collection of dead flies, like raisins.

  I hear the deep tiredness in Valentina’s voice. There is also a certain nervousness I’ve never felt before. Because I know her so well, amid the warmth there exists a sliver of condescension. My age. The restructuring. Of cutting off any drain. It occurs to me that I am a drain.

  —

  The conferences I used to travel to, often with Valentina, weighed on me. The urbanity, the people, the requisite small talk. Dry scholarly symposia on subjects such as Linnaean taxonomy. We would walk past the dull corridors that smell of desk, past the students huddled in the courtyards in conversation, stubbing out cigarettes underfoot. Valentina always dressed strategically. Tight dress, sharp heels, lipstick. There was a feeling of confinement heading back to our hotels. I can never seem to help that feeling of absence in what others consider a gratifying present. That need for male identification, which I have always associated with young women who have little choice, which she plays in to. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. They ask so few questions of us.

  —

  It’s not possible, Valentina. My work has never been about surrender, I say into the phone.

  Please. Let’s talk about it in the morning, Ivory, okay?

  I hear a metallic hum. The card has run out of time. She has told me nothing.

  Damn it, I say into the dial tone, jerking my hand back as I slam it into the receiver.

  I hear the wind ticking over the plane trees with their pale calico trunks like the flutter of the white queenly moths flickering across the caves at night when I work. My body vibrates. From emotion, or cold, I’m not sure which. I gather my shawl about my shoulders. This isn’t dignified.

  BUCK

  Colourblind mystical eyes; freezes at the unknown.

  Brays, small kingdoms of concrete music with geometry.

  A PAIR OF YELLOWHEADED BLACKBIRDS pick at their feathers and rasp through reeds and fronds as though they are a couple that has grown old together, comfortable in each other’s personal hygiene and itinerant bodily noises. At least, this is what I imagine when the thin paper takes up the walnut ink. There is the lyrebird with the tail feathers of a dandy and a voice that can mimic everything from the circular rhythm of a tin-bladed fan to a barking dog. I have been saved from abject poverty. I am drawing biological illustrations for M. Barbary, a professor at the Sorbonne and an antiquarian book collector Mme. Tissaud knows, who deals in lithographs from early nineteenth-century publications. Butterflies, grassland animals, plants, birds, fish, crustaceans. These tender-faced creatures labelled, ordered, once drawn alive in their native habitats. I am replicating them, in my cold Parisian studio. Overcoat on, fingerless gloves, enough francs to pay for my flat, food, for coal and art supplies, though everything is getting harder to find. My own art waits on the easel. A group of horses in different colours with human eyes, in a dark stormed landscape. Tacita says she likes the way the wild eyes hint at a disturbing unnameable confrontation. Flowers grow from underneath. There are smaller scenes in the underpaint, in the corners.

  The gallerists have taken an arm’s-length interest in Lev, but still treat him as the parvenu. I have been with him when a well-regarded gallery owner approached. She had a foxfur collar, tall shoes, and hair the colour of whisky. She found his poverty attractive. I could feel her appetite for him. She spoke with him in a low provocative tone, her hand on his arm, as though I wasn’t standing right there beside him. She wanted him to come to her gallery, to meet with her there. He remained cold, unreadable. Though she didn’t seem to mind. We weren’t introduced.

  Some of his work is sold for good money. Though I really don’t know how he lives; he never discusses practical matters with me. I know from Tacita that he can spend whole weeks in his studio with no heating, with only tins of herring and alcohol to drink. He works so prolifically that he hangs his art by clothespegs like laundry.

  He tells me nothing, I say to Tacita.

  Well people who are too direct are uninteresting.

  She is silent for a moment. Lev said what most fascinates him about you is your ability to read other people’s thoughts, to see other people’s dreams.

  Other people’s dreams can be tedious, as it turns out, I say to Tacita, who ignores me.

  He told Istvan that you are like one of those animal deities that lead people to the afterlife.

  Really? I say, surprised. I am reminded of how his sensitivity stops me. This is not straightforward. I think of you and Istvan. So simple and quick.

  God, I, you make it sound like a murder.

  Oh, why not the kind artist from the academy who sends me notes and draws tiny still-lifes on sheets of letter-sized paper?

  Yes, everything would be so much better, she says with fake excitement.

  All right, Tas.

  You would never be happy in such a slack union, I. Everything would be well arranged but lifeless. You would be adored but numb, without feeling. Besides, you’d feel guilty about eventually turning against someone who would have done nothing but continue to be himself.

  But I wouldn’t be so troubled. I feel like I never get my fill. And then I worry that I am letting him absorb too much of me, so that he can use it to do what he needs to do. But this I don’t say to Tacita. Once things are said out loud, they can become true.

  My last letter before Paris: Dear Mother, All is well. Am settling in nicely. Thank you for the notecards. Love to all. Though in truth, I am dying inside. And when they receive word of my expulsion, the only thing they are surprised by is how easily duplicity comes to me.

  —

  At convent school, I am an unenthusiastic student. My thoughts readily stray from the classroom to the outdoors. I have filled notebooks with drawings. I barely pass an exam. Every day I stare at Jesus, pretty as a girl, on the giant crucifix in the chapel where we say our morning prayer. All the girls’ eyes on the first naked man
they’ve seen. They say he is handsome. They hold up fingers, blotting out the hipbones and blood. I count one hundred and twenty-seven references to animals in the bible. Forty-one of which are dogs. There are no cats. At one point, when they have us memorize passages of the bible, I refuse. Why? Sister Agatha asks, eyes narrowed. Because it is a book of fairy tales, I say standing against the wall, and not even good ones. Are you not concerned about the side effects of your godlessness? she asks. By side effects do you mean sound mental state? That was the first expulsion. Another came after I decided I wanted to be a saint. Mainly to see if I could levitate, something my brother Edgar and I had read and marvelled at. I was also caught listening to the nuns’ crystal radio. I didn’t have enough time to find a station, but felt life rushing in at the whistles and pops between stations as I turned the silver dial. Later I argue with the doleful Sister who taught science. She had a mouth twisted in a permanent scowl and smelled like an old book. She had us filling out qualitative analyses of the elements in writing, like a police report. The Sister performs experiments in the chemistry lab mechanically, with a sober rigour that borders on humorous. I feel an almost violent enthusiasm and am unable to wait for her droning instructions, managing to create a small explosion with potassium dropped in water. It sounds like a door slamming. I don’t hear the nun-shoes squeaking on tile as they all come running in because, for a moment, I’ve lost my hearing. I am stunned. I feel an excruciating sharp pain, and then liquid leaks out of my left ear. When I look at my fingers, I see that it is blood.