Ivory, one of his sisters said, leaning her head in from the hall and then walking into the room. She handed me a parcel. I have a dress to give you, one that no longer fits. I think it will look smart on you. I had shown up in the same one each week, and all I think is, Please let it be practical and dark so that I can wear it to the university underneath the laboratory smock.
I became a research assistant to Professor Tapping and a Professor Ellis, a migratory bird expert who managed to wrest fascinating research from the most interminable fieldtrips that continually tested the limits of human patience. Hours spent watching an empty grey sky for wings. Though he taught me that another way to look for nests was to listen. He was also incredibly adept at Latin binomials. With biology, taxonomy is essential. It gives the chaos of nature a form. Aristotle once grouped animals in a hierarchy by whether or not they had blood, or whether they lived on land or water. Humans, he put on the top. Like Descartes—who once nailed his wife’s live poodle to a board to prove that it did not have feelings—his relationship to animals was immature.
Even early on in my studies, I found myself turning away from empirical science when I saw that it wasn’t able to speak to the kinds of questions I wanted to answer. They are vast, possibly ridiculous questions, too large for the fine-grained grid of specialization. What is communication? What is silence? Can animal vocalizations and their meanings be made into a dictionary? What would it accomplish for extinction? I have listed a litany of questions. How should the listening be translated? As a kind of diary entry? An emotive expression? A reaction? Or is it an act of discovery? My questions filled an entire notebook to get to a single sentence that I voiced in a meeting with Professor Tapping. He answered me in measured tones, attesting that scientific discovery does not always mean accumulation of data or measured consideration of facts. It often requires a leap of imagination. True scientists do not simply conduct prescribed experiments, they develop their own. Sometimes it’s the only way to get to new knowledge.
You start with a fantasy, which you must ultimately prove in reality. An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. You know— He pauses. Scientists do the same thing as artists, they just use the words hypothesis and experiment instead.
I found all the field recordings the university had, seven in total, including braying Antarctic emperor penguins and hornbills from the Carpenter expedition. I wore enormous headphones, sat in a small wooden carrel that smelled like varnish and dead skin, and counted the seconds between the sounds, listening to the static, the dry little scratches of feet on snow, the timbre of trees creaking in wind. They let me sign out a microphone and heavy recording equipment from the university. I lugged it out to the ravine. The silver discs spin and click to a halt after I replay the sound of thrushes. Their voices telling interior things. Night descends. Everything quiets for a moment. Moonsoaked. Treeglitter. The air held on to this distant, vanishing sound of swallows. There were large gaps of silence. It made me think of Satie’s Gymnopédies, which had been playing quietly in the dining room when I first met Lev at Tacita’s apartment. The music was so far from my mood, slow melancholic notes floating in space. I stared down at the recorder, moonlight on my fingers. This blue dusk, the birds’ voices, invitation. A great calm washed over me. I knew what I had to do. And for the first time, it felt like the beginning of a new age, the one after the king has been killed.
BLACK SWAN
Each breath is the dark corner of an echo and contains the energy of wind, like two people whose paths are about to cross and then don’t.
A DARK VERTICAL LINE divides the mist. I recognize his gait and watch his shadow move across the grass. He has such radiance, you forgive him anything.
First he cannot see me. I am white, clothes waving like a flag, hair in black gusts. My breathing is slowed, the taste of his coppery mouth on my tongue. His hands on my fingers. He says, You’re so cold. And puts them inside his shirt.
We climb a monument modelled after an ancient Roman temple. Lev prefers this strange park sculpted from the ruins of one of Napoleon’s gypsum quarries. Despite the careful curation of exotic plants, it cannot shake what lies below. A history of blood and industry. Battles and bodies and murder, though now beautiful flowers grow. The swans are black. Paris from up here looks small. The silver rooftops and the domes of Sacré-Coeur appear over the treetops. And unlike every other park in Paris, here you can sit on the grass.
Lev is part nocturnal animal. He leaves the studio at night and wanders for hours, walking though Place des Vosges, through the cemeteries, behind the Pantheon, exploring the old Paris. Only sometimes can I come.
There are wet-root smells soaking through fog. His eyes whiter. My eyes blacker. The grass cold under his hands, he opens his eyes to the dark sky. A farness that makes him near. His presence all over my body. Hands on my ribs, hipbones. His mouth on my throat. Stars falling on skin. Fingers in fingers. The parts of the moon that glimmer through. Warmth. Violence. Bones licked clean. The thing that happens to us. Its full pleasure beating through me, shaking me awake, head clear, mind stilled. Longing and abandonment skinned off to ripeness, a daze of rapture.
When I first made the lines, he says, hands underneath his head, I was actually thinking about the honesty of trees. I think of the Buddhist monks, being silent, sitting. Who does that better than trees? Our backs on the damp grass as we look up, the sky pierced with sharp black branches.
In Siberia, near the Tunguska River, he says, when I was a boy, I heard about what the villagers thought was the end of the world. Everything shook. There was a cracking sound like lightning, and then a column of blue light brighter than the sun. Windows broke hundreds of kilometres away. All the trees were on fire. Eighty million trees burned to the ground. It was so isolated there that no one came to investigate. He closes his eyes. Twenty years later someone came to look at the hole that was left. Thousands of square kilometres. He laughs. It was a comet. The largest one to ever hit the Earth. Almost no one died because of where it was. If it had exploded four hours later, it would have taken out the whole of Petersburg.
I’m trying to picture the size of that, the terror of the not-knowing. Living in a permanent stoop, waiting for some unnameable violence that might strike again and take you out for good. For twenty years, not knowing, when Lev turns to me.
You will like this, he says. The peasants said they could hear the trees hum long after the explosion.
I am about to say something, but see he is already somewhere else.
Later he will show me all the thick white and pale grey shapes spaced symmetrically. The icy lyricism of his work makes me think that it is impossible to escape our geographies. I also know what it is to feel air so cold it burns. So cold that animals cannot be born. So cold that if you die, no one can bury you. An endless rhythm of cedars. The bleak north wind.
His work is intelligent and beautiful and unsentimental. I see how directly it comes from what he left behind. A realism in what most people call abstraction. Vicious cold, exhausting heat, relentless insects, black dust, everything covered in ice. By way of compensation, they are given an unending sky. Where he comes from has a heartless logic but it is also sublime. It exalts and destroys. As a result the people carry a humility that allows them to think majestically.
The Greeks, he says, knew that there were no perfect circles, straight lines, or equal spaces in nature. They had to create them.
I know he finds it impossible to put down the first mark, and this series of gratifying experiments has altered his mood.
Where did it come from? I say. A prick of jealousy. He has seen me hunched over working and reworking. Changing the way I work makes me anxious; with him it is the opposite. He is emboldened by it.
The error, he says, is thinking that you have a part to play in the process. You need to receive everything. Cling to nothing. His voice drawing a line, There is no halfway.
Our eyes meet for a moment.
You s
ee what’s already inside you, I say.
You could tell me anything, and I would believe it. You have the eyes of a mystic, he says, putting his hands on either side of my face.
Though distant, he has the ability to establish deep communions. Why was he given over to me. Choose him. Do not choose him, I think. Blinking back the emotion.
There is something in these animals, I say, changing the subject. The ones I have been drawing. But I’m finding it hard to know what exactly is real.
We make our way down the hill, past the taverns with their overhead shutters closed, the windowledges of geraniums, pert and anxious in the cold. He stands at the door of Mme. Tissaud’s. I feel his mouth on the back of my neck. The only thing real is feeling, he says. I twist the key in the lock, and when I turn around he is gone.
BAT
Mammal (not bird); uses polarity compass; can sense the direction of the magnetic field vector. Knows which side the arrow is located.
I FIND MY WAY BACK to the car at the foot of the plane tree. I see the bluelit town in my rearview mirror and wonder how it is I am here, by this place I don’t even like. Everyone shuttered in and then tomorrow it all starts again. One might die, another might be born. There might be a boy who thinks he can fly and ends up in the salle des urgences for stitches. There might be a woman who as a girl sprayed her wrists with perfume and wore a flower in her hair when she thought she might see the man who would become her husband. And now they might sit silently with their dinner on their laps, light from the television blinking across their faces. The clock will chime each hour, they will do it all over again. Routine lures you, it makes you feel your own identity. Though I often think the opposite. That in repetition, you can lose sight of yourself. Like women imprisoned in housework. Isn’t the very definition of insanity repeating the same thing over and over again in the same way, expecting a different result?
Out of the black there is a flash of bright. Two low fixed stars. I swerve. A pair of eyes. A dull thud, then the squeal of brakes. My heart pounds. My palms slip on the leather grip. I turn off the engine. My heart racing. I brace one hand on the wheel, the other on the car door, and slowly hoist myself up. My legs unreliable, as when I was small and broke the left one falling off a horse. The X-ray terrified me. A skeleton, no different from all the other skeletons. I had a plaster cast and had to scratch my knee with a pencil. When the cast was sawed off it exposed a strange leg, bony and brushed with blue. It looked dead. Not my own. I realized, after limping around trying to walk the way I had before, that your mind is part of what makes you walk. It also made me realize how easily things could break.
There is a thick dent and a bright star of red with a few coarse brown hairs on the far right of the bumper. Tapetum lucidum. I’ve learned about the membrane behind the deer’s retina that increases their ability to see in the dark. It also makes their eyes shine in headlights. The body went down, I am sure of it, bent at an odd angle. I know that I cannot walk in the tall grasses that join the blacktop. The slivermoon casts little light. In the almost eerie silence I hear the scraping of dry sunflower fronds against one another in the wind. I see nothing but the endless flat fields and a solitary tree. There is no body.
Deer sleep in beds of deep vegetation they press down with their quick bodies, tangled thin legs, in order to hide from predators. They never lie down in the same bed twice, but the imprints can remain for several days. Years ago I followed the whorls of grass. Each time I came upon a deerbed, it felt as if the deer had just departed, leaving a warm impression in the grass. I remember taking a documentary photo of the first bed I saw, the smell of sun still on the lens cap. My hand touched the grass. Before I knew I was doing it, I got down and lay on the imprint. My body curling into the existing form. First aware of their proximity, and then the quiet embodiment of absence. It made me think of my own mortality. I closed my eyes though the light came through my eyelids. Grass prickled my cheek, poked my back where my coat had ridden up. Lying down, I was struck by the hard band of loneliness that encircled me. Everything crystallizes over time. Like deer who begin with soft velvet antlers and then they calcify underneath, eventually turning to bone.
—
After the engine fan cuts out, there is a hot wind and the quiet buzzing of cicadas. I run my hand over the dent and lean against the warm metal of the car. My eyes burn with tiredness. I feel the trace of Valentina’s voice telling me it’s time to stop working. But I want to do it because I want to do it. I am not happy when I am not working. We let some people continue, I think. Painters don’t retire—they die. Though I have read what the critics say. They say in the history of art, late works are catastrophes.
I look out at the silent fields. A bat jags into view. Its webbed wings misshapen and black, like a broken umbrella. Its movements jerky, the only mammal with the ability to fly. And I think, It’s never the grand spectacles, but always the small intimate moments that hold me rapt. I look up and see part of the moon weakly illuminating the grass. Another bat. There must be a cave nearby.
—
When I open my eyes again, I can see Lev’s shoulders. My feet finding depressions. I clamber down slowly over stone rubble, my back lit by the sun. Through a little vestibule and a densely mudded floor. Caves are not to be entered lightly, I hear his voice say.
Why?
The lower world. A doorway between our world and the otherworld.
We lie on our backs and stare up at the smooth, pale rock. I see something glint. Jewel-encrusted. A bat wrapped in itself. The condensation droplets on its wings glittering. The still-warm sun on our shoulders goes cold in the compressed dirt, the dampness of the cave seeping into skin and holding it there. I stay still, listening to the sounds for a long time until it feels as though I am inside a hallucination, not my own. I start to hear something. Who is there?
When there is a spring in a cave, Lev says, it sounds like voices.
—
Ever since, it is his voice I hear when I enter a cave. For a period when I am deep into recording bats, it is often. I never get used to the feeling that I should not be there. I remember in the southwest, moving through with the recording equipment. The cave begins to narrow until I am crawling on my hands and knees. Then flat on my stomach. It gets so tight my arms become pinned in front of me. I cannot move them back to my sides. I try not to panic. There is the familiar acrid ammonia scent. It reminds me of the shock when I first started life drawing at the academy. I had pictured the painters during the Renaissance who worked in palatial ateliers with velvet and sun streaming through the high windows. What I found were dark little packed studios with models, sometimes taken from the street, unwashed and looking entirely out of their element. The rooms were overheated and stifling and the models would perspire heavily under the electric lights, making the air sour with sweat sharpened by the scent of turpentine and tobacco.
If I squirm and wiggle, there has to be a way out. Despite our prejudices bats are essential to the balance of nature. To our foodchain. To whole economies. They are in peril. Hanging by their feet with their gnomic faces and leathery wings and ultrasonic cries, the little licks of echolocation. They might be one of the most reviled groups of animals on earth.
My knees are shredded and I have cuts all down my arms when I finally come to the cave mouth. I put the earphones on and play back the tape. All I hear is the sound of my shallow breathing.
Later, in Paris, I will hand Ondine the earphones. She says she wants to listen to what noise pollution destroying bat populations in southern France sounds like. Little clicks and a low hum like a vacuum cleaner running, it turns out. I look around at the city that after all this time in the field seems full of barricades. Buildings, gutters, pigeon spikes, exhaust fumes, barred windows, sirens, pavement mottled with gum and spit. We sit and drink café crèmes at the Café de Flore where the waiters with their starched white shirts seem to be frozen in time. Though I wish I could walk all the way through the Marais, over the
other side of Canal Saint-Martin, we take a taxi across the river. We pass the Palais Royal, and then a street of beauty parlours with coarse hair extensions inexplicably strewn on the sidewalk like horsetails. I see a man who holds a hamburger grinding out a cigarette with his foot like a chicken scratching at the dirt under a red and white Quick Burger sign. Paris can be both ancient and garishly new, never going through the awkward jerky passage of adolescence, just existing in two different times, one running under the other.
Ondine’s flat is near the oldest hospital in the city. She has sculptures and books and neoclassical French chairs, silk dresses in the closet. She believes in working for people who pay. I scan the photos on the wall, mostly of her and her son, Lucien. Ondine never takes pictures of places, only people. Always get a person in the shot or it will look like a postcard, she has told me. There is a photo of us in Lapland. We are laughing, wrapped in enormous coats, huge hats, snow everywhere. We look happy. Younger. Every photograph has a bit of death in it, Barthes said. But here they seem like life to me. A child in a garden. Ondine standing beside her plane squinting into the sun, Ondine lying in sand with Lucien as a meaty baby in her lap. It occurs to me that I’ve never been surrounded with artifacts. I’ve never had a framed photograph of anything. I’ve always felt that life runs dry in a house, with its traditions and accumulated objects on display. But here I see how they can bring you into existence. She turns on the radio in her kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse is playing. She immediately snaps it off. I can’t listen to that. He was such a dog, she says and then laughs, uncorking a bottle.
Isn’t he just like any other man who thinks he can cheat death by having mistresses? I mean you of all people should understand, I say teasingly.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 14