Mother is horrified when she hears. Though astonishingly, she acquiesces to my pleas to attend the art academy. This is the last one. After this, she says quietly, you are on your own. She agrees to it only because of Queenie. A week before I woke with fierce pain in my chest. All day, I was unable to breathe. Mother called that night. She didn’t have to say it, I already knew. Queenie had died. A heart attack. There was no space in my body for such great agony. I felt vague, rudderless. I wanted her to say something more, but there was just a low buzzing sound on the telephone during a long awkward pause. Well that’s it then, I said. No one said anything back.
—
A bright knock in the cold. He is in my room. Always north of him I see a light. He smells like the sun. From his coat he produces a lark’s nest woven with dark hair that could be mine. He holds it out to me with both hands cupped, like an offering. He also produces a pair of worn leather riding boots. They are for me. I immediately question where he got the money. I know he is hungry. He says he traded a painting. They are completely impractical, reflecting back my childhood with its opulence that makes me almost ashamed. But at the same time I realize how remote it is too. How there is very little of my childhood left that feels real anymore. He says, No. They are verging on a beauty that is in no way material.
I show him my illustration. He studies it for what feels like a long time and then he asks me what I’m doing it for.
So that I can live.
You should paint, if you want to live.
It seems so odd to be talking at all. I have been aching to see him. It has been days. The last time I saw him he held an olive in his teeth, passing it to my mouth, warm and salty and filling me full of desire. My cool fingers on his warm neck. Ravish me. We are surrounded by people in the dark and riotous café. He rips the shoulder of my dress with his teeth. I drink wine with my coat resting on my shoulders for the rest of the night, and listen to a café luminary recite long passages of Dante and Verlaine. After the cafés close, the artists will go to one another’s studios, taking bottles. Behind its shutters, Paris is a late town.
It almost doesn’t seem real that he is here, in this small blue room with little ornamentation. I hate myself for not asking all the things that have been occupying me. Ulyana. His wife. His absences. But instead he returns to silently alter my existence.
How difficult it is to say what you actually feel. Rough hands, blue refracting eyes. I find his presence blinding. I see how rare communication actually is. Real, true communication. So much remains unsayable between people. All the secrets we keep.
His mouth on mine. Brushes drop. Abandon. Pleasure bursting into a thousand pieces.
—
Tell me a story, Ivory.
Imagined or real?
All stories are real.
A long silence.
I look at the familiar corners of the room. My voice has a different sound.
Once there was a raven-haired woman with skin as white as marble who had a daughter, a feral, woodland child. It was difficult for the girl to live as a regular child, as she had been given the extraordinary gift of hearing the voices of living creatures. This did not please the mother. The child would only become herself alone, deep in the woods, which pleased the mother even less. One afternoon, the woman threw a garden party where she had servants put out triangular sandwiches, trays of teacups, cakes piled high on glass plates, everything creamy and opulent. The woodland child was forced into formal attire, a shiny red dress, with a sash that wound tighter as she breathed. She tried to creep across the gleaming wood floors, attempting to slip out unnoticed. The raven-haired mother caught sight of the red swirl out of the corner of her eye, and in a few strides her hands were on the woodland child’s shoulders. You remember Mr. Winter don’t you? the woman asked the girl. A dark eyebrow arched in disapproval as she conducted the girl toward the man with kind, wet, bovine eyes. The girl nodded hello. The man was tall and awkward, with a shyness almost worse than hers. She could see that he was fighting down his embarrassment. Clumps of his hair fell forward and bobbed up and down when he spoke. He did a sort of clipped head bow every time he acknowledged the girl, which she found endearing, though he often knocked heads with maidens who made excuses and scurried off. If he were an animal, the woodland child thought sadly, he would be prey.
I am told you are an accomplished rider, he said to the girl, his eyes like someone carefully not looking at a rat they’ve just seen run out of the host’s kitchen.
I am fond of horses, the girl said, looking at her shoes. The mother hooked a finger under the girl’s chin and directed it up.
Just horses then?
All animals, she said, unused to the interest of an adult human. It’s unfortunate we’ve not figured out how to communicate with them better, she added.
The woodland child’s mother remained tensely polite and was about to speak when she was abruptly led away by a birdlike woman. This was the girl’s cue. She slipped two hard-boiled eggs from their delicate arrangement into the pocket of her dress, and moved with arrowing purpose.
The grass was damp and glossy. The woodland child’s shoes were painted with mud as soon as they left the flagstones. She ran, the sun-striped oaks blurring. It was so quiet she could hear the sound of her own heart beating. She could see the house, a dot in the distance. The windows were like flashes of mirror, giving shape, small fragments of civilization in the brush. The woodland child stopped when she reached the trees. The woods that surrounded the house—unlike the ones she would later know that form tidy colonnades—were clumped, thick, and deep.
The girl was slightly afraid of being caught, though she knew the raven-haired mother would never leave her party to look for her. And so she let herself relax a little. She knelt down on the forest floor, carpeted in bluebells, and loosened her sash. She snapped a twig. And in an empty space on the shiny mud, she wrote. She didn’t use ordinary letters. It was a message for the forest animals, so she wrote the way they do. But as she dragged the stick, the hairs on the woodland child’s neck bristled. She knew she was being watched.
The woodland child jerked her head up. It was a buck. A huge rack of antlers and wide dark eyes. Its body stock-still. Even though it was a calm and gentle creature, she was terrified at being so startled and alone, this deep in the woods. Her heart beat wildly. She could hear its breathing. Its fear. Air released from its nostrils. She looked into his eyes like dead angels. Neither the girl nor the deer moved for a very long time. Their breathing was synchronous.
A faint gasp escaped through the woodland child’s lips. And then the strangest thing happened. The buck made the same sound. She stood paralyzed in this moment. Their eyes locked. The girl understood that if you gazed into someone’s eyes long enough, there was no need to ask any questions. What passes between galvanizes. Children can look into eyes forever. But when you look into a creature’s eyes long enough, everything they’ve ever known passes through you too. The shelterless life. Running until their heart is about to explode. The life that occurs in the open, and in part-darkness.
It was at that moment the woodland child understood that a mystic and a solitary creature were the same thing. Hours deep into the thicket, a darkness grew. The girl became aware of canopies of sound. Her attention was on the deer, but at the same time, on everything around her. A collusion occurred. The woodland child would protect the deer from the bows and bullets, and the deer would teach the woodland child its language.
The raven-haired mother had rays of anger radiating out of her when the woodland child finally returned home. The trays and glasses had all been cleared away. There were only small signs of the party that afternoon. Flowers throughout the house, the smell of lily-of-the-valley perfume mingled with tobacco in an unholy union. The girl knew to remain quiet. There was no use in attempting to defend herself to her mother, it was like burning green wood. But the raven-haired mother was oddly good-humoured, calm even.
That night she sat
on the edge of woodland child’s bed and informed her that she would be sent far away. The forests and the animals were turning her into something unrecognizable. The mother knew, even then, that part of the girl already belonged to them.
SWALLOW
Pair; nested in a fissure halfway up a 400-foot precipitous rocky wall. Vocalizations muffled.
To reach them would require 300 feet of rope. Or wings.
WE’VE REHEARSED THIS BEFORE. Skeet asks, Why a dictionary?
Each time I answer him it is at least ten degrees different.
It started with a professor in Toronto, I tell him. When I discussed my applied linguistics class, and my interest in what happens when a language dies, he said that we cannot measure what we’ve lost. The effects are culturally devastating. Each language is a key that unlocks the knowledge of entire civilizations. It’s everything, he said. It’s medicinal secrets, ecological wisdom, weather patterns, spiritual attitudes, mythological histories.
If what we say marks all that we know, then a dictionary is the most important human document. Is it not?
But wherever there is language, there are borders that limit our existence, he counters. Not to mention nonverbal thinking and feeling. Wittgenstein, he continued, said that if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Language being the place from which compassion grows. But of course this is precisely the self-serving tautology used by people who defend things such as animal testing and slaughterhouses. And then there are the silent languages. Silence is not acoustic. It is a state of mind. Moths and pheromones, the flashing of fireflies, honeybees dancing on hive walls, the leg waving of spiders. Glasswing butterflies. They read clear to us, but to one another they are rainbow coloured. Sound packs the most information the most rapidly, but the interesting thing about nonverbal communication, he says, is that it is harder to lie.
I found a flat on a little avenue by the university, and dragged my trunk upstairs to the tiny room under its angled ceiling. There was just a small stove and a narrow bed. I found a wooden table and chair, and a jug and a washbasin, on the street, it being impossible to throw things away in a city. I noted down the dates of the exams I needed to pass in order to register as an undergraduate and taught myself biology from a book, one I might have illustrated when I lived in Paris. It felt like a return to childhood. Born by a lake, sworn to water. When I crossed the sea, my suitcase had contained white dresses from another life. The brass latches clicked open, the contents emptied overboard into the black, cold underworld. Gusts of white, like live feathers falling on the dark swells. But the little money I had was giving out, and I was so often cold or hungry or both. I had only one practical grey woollen dress. My face was bare. There were no flourishes. Everything was scrubbed away. My gait felt lumbering, not graceful and light as once it was. Clipped wings against a bitten moon. The only way I could mark the changes wrought to my inward self was by altering my appearance. Before I came here, I cut off all my hair, dark ropes on the floor. The only way to bear the loss of Tacita was, in part, to become her. Small ways.
In a desolate moment, I wrote a letter to Mother that came back months later, unopened, the foreign stamps a ruinous luxury. I eventually received word from Arthur back in England, the one brother who survived the war. He wrote only “flat feet” by way of explanation. He wired money without my even telling him how grim my situation was. We exchanged respectful, affectionate notes at long intervals. Neither of us mentioned our other brothers, though their memories darkened over us. A shell exploded. A plane was shot down. A gun was fired. Uniforms rusted with blood. And then vanished. As though they were never here. It becomes another thing to forget. I think of them as boys, and still they were. We are not readied for such violent loss. So we vowed to make new lives. Singular, where everything is precious. I confided to him that I was gloomy but carried a secret about my future, which I promised to reveal later.
The air was different here. The light. The sidewalks even. They were flatter and wider, gutters tinnily gurgling at the edges of cement curbs. The empty shining streets. The air smelled like nothing. A faint scent of trees and brake dust. There was nothing in the sky except billows of grey smoke from the chimney stacks and the hum of factories. There was no war here. They were not used to death. They did not know my past. They did not know that for a time I ceased to be an honourable woman.
Professor Tapping could get so deep into his work that I would often see him cross the campus in his laboratory gown, having forgotten to take it off. I wanted to take a course from the music department, which I was told is strictly forbidden. But what he said with his limpid eyes was, Your studies can all intersect. In one of his lectures, I thought Mother, with her acute desire for tidiness, would have approved of the precise geometry of cells—Latin for small room, oval and orderly. Everything seemed so absorbing, with no weight of memory to it. Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love, Darwin wrote and I underlined.
Everything sounded amplified to me. Songbird migration happens at night. Whales are composers, their songs are clicks that rhyme like words. Animal voices are important because so many animals are difficult to see. My behavourial biology professor pointed out that we were in an age of intellectual revolution. Biologists and evolutionary psychologists were disassembling the consensus. Everything was worthy of re-examination. Don’t ever hold back in pursuing an idea that might seem mad to others. He told us that after Einstein published his theory of relativity, one hundred physicists wrote a paper condemning it. Einstein’s response: if the theory is wrong, why wouldn’t one author suffice?
I wonder if being truly successful at something means that you are simply bad at everything else. Years later, Einstein’s letters to his wife depict certain strict, somewhat cruel domestic arrangements.
You will make sure—that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons.
After a short time, I received an invitation to Professor Tapping’s house in Forest Hill. The dark wood, the antique rugs, the thick velvet curtains, and his punctilious manner comforted me. The housekeeper let me in to the sitting room, with visible hesitation, having been used to admitting only male students. I waited while she told him I had arrived. My eyes moved toward a framed photograph in the hall; in it, Professor Tapping looks very young in his black suit. There is a woman next to him in a hat. He holds her elbow. They wear the same stern expression that everyone did then, even though it is clearly their wedding day. It reminds me how photography can be a form of lying. I never ask about the photo, or the woman in it. He carries a forlornness the way that only men can, men who have been left to go on living alone. His two sisters are clever, unmarried, and most likely would have been scientists too if they had been male. I wondered if they had stories of fiancés lost in the war, or secret lovers met through the university, or maybe, as with me, none of it would even matter now. There are not many versions on offer in this town. Everything seems to favour an inert sort of morality. Couples who don’t seem to love each other very much but get along well enough. They mate for life, rearing their offspring in sturdy houses with large lawns.
Each Sunday, there was bread, cheese, baked fish, cake, and Paganini’s virtuoso violin solos on the record player. I was almost embarrassed by it, making me aware of how the crudeness of my life bordered on the masochistic. It took a moment to adjust to proper food and conversation outside of school. I had become adept at concealing myself, offering up only one of my profiles.
In the laboratory I am made to slash the throat strings of animals with a knife, spending hours dissecting and sectioning, making paraffin slides. Birdcalls I’d not heard since childhood drifting through the open laboratory windows, everything a song for hard sorrow. The classrooms were crammed with men back from war, their long legs sticking out from underneath their desks making them seem like ove
rgrown children. Though the nights were feverish, work shutting out despair, my days were calm, concealing all the determination that I possessed. I received a first degree, and then a second in quick succession. Because I excelled, and because I did not have any money, I spent my summers at the lab.
The warm months, the room broiling. My mind torpid and thick. There was not a surface or object that did not feel hot. In winter, the wind roared in the chimney, banged at the windows. One night it was so cold I wondered if it was safe. I ran my hands along the wall and found that the reproduction Constable that hung here when I moved in, and for some reason I never removed, covered a hole right to the outside, cold air streaming through in a circle where a stovepipe must once have been. I heard the gnawing of squirrels in the walls and felt half-mad in the boreal air. The kind of cold encountered by some of the soldiers I had seen. The kind where corneas freeze, teeth shatter, faces are eaten by frost. Those men marching who looked off, only to see what it was. That they had no eyelids. Their eyelids had been torn away from cold. I piled everything I owned, including my textbooks, on top of me. A thin layer of ice formed on the washbasin.
If it is cold enough, birds in flight can freeze, and then drop from the sky like stones.
I received my first cheque, a small bursary in the mail. I exchanged the cheque for a bicycle. I rode it through the city, and to the ravines. It was spring. The weakest season here, though small leaves sprouted from trees that had pretended to be dead all winter. There were sudden yellow flowers, and cherry trees with warmed branches clotted in pink bloom.
Professor Tapping and I drank bitter English tea that he sugared heavily in a matching cup ringed with gold. I remember him looking up and saying with warmth and determination, You will accomplish a lot. But you must know your own response to your work, Miss Frame. If you don’t, his teacup clattered delicately, you will miss the reward.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 13