The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

She often describes her body as having a buzzing almost mystic energy (she describes feelings as mystic) which she said a doctor tried to dismiss as a symptom from a parasite she picked up from contaminated water once.

  She moves like a teenager through steep inclines of forest, I am breathing heavily, always behind her. Born in 1917. Sixty-six? (Check.)

  Describes the jarring sound of a tropical bird (binomial Latin name, look up) as the sound of a child cutting a tooth.

  The intensity of her gaze is almost impossible to withstand (where to put? beginning?).

  Uses the word dazzle—as in, I have been drinking rosemary tea, hot water and herb, to dazzling effect.

  Things she says that I’d like to use in a story: “uncommon energy,” “its beauty hurt me.”

  She shows me her logs of recordings with field book marginalia. Ex: Lonesome elephant walking into a storm. Recording picks up wind rippling its ears like sails.

  Times she withdrew from social contact altogether. She’s sane though. Her mind moves faster than mine, finding it hard to keep up. She said she went mad. She said it exactly like that, and then nothing more. Must find record of this. Is there a record?

  She plainly prefers the company of animals to people.

  She has the self-sufficiency of an animal. She has no need for society, the same as Volkov. What is the quote? “People who choose to be alone are either an animal or a god.” (Kafka? Aristotle?)

  When I showed her a photograph of a black Soulages outrenoir painting, she said cryptically, “It was clearly executed by someone who understands winter light.” (Find quote of when he was drawing black lines of ink as a boy. Sister: What are you making? Pierre: Snow.)

  Called artists aggressive competitive loners, but in the next sentence said how much she— (I can’t read this next line.)

  Awkward coldness, nervous silence around anything personal. She has developed a kind of carapace of detachment.

  Possessed.

  Used to working without electricity. (Good with a cookstove.) There is something around the dictionary of animal languages that she can neither explain nor control; it’s as though we are in the room with a live bird. She becomes rapt (displacement/cessation/trance—the state of being outside of oneself).

  Her reverence for nature and animals borders on mystical.

  When I ask her what her favourite animal recording is, she says, I don’t answer those kinds of questions. (She later acknowledges that in a woman, this kind of remark comes off as rude.)

  Sometimes her responses are confounding: e.g., Me: Can you talk about this duty to archive?

  Her: Somebody once said that every atom of our bodies was once inside a star. Maybe that is why I am collecting these sounds. Like starlight they give light, despite the black.

  Bangs at the sink washing dishes as I transcribe. I’ve said the wrong thing. Cold fury at the mention of Volkov—after all this time. I don’t tell her about my interview with him in Paris. I mistakenly thought I would. She is careful. Her life is concealed. Even to her.

  She is like a piece of lightning. Or an old saint. Wounded and then healed.

  CROW

  Undersong rambling, improvised, coarse.

  Nose-diving, full glitter, into the blanks between clouds.

  IN THE DARK I see his wild eyes, though he wears them like a secret. After all this time I think I have bits of his body wrong only it is not my mind but his body that has changed. Thinner, harder, like a knife. He won’t talk about what happened. He won’t say. His spirit is untouched, unaltered as it has always been.

  Without clothes, his ribs sharply outlined. A cage that surrounds his heart. I take him in, so stunned I cannot move or talk. Understanding that for now, in this moment, he is here.

  He kisses my mouth, the skin by my ear, my throat. His hand on my chest holding me against the wall, and then pressing me into his arms.

  I think of how I would have been at this hour, alone in my room. How I might gaze out at the cold streets or paint or fall into a state of lassitude. How when I switch on a desklight I move through the room as though he watches me. I write these unanswered letters full of their parched little questions and longing. All the feeling that I try to contain within two pages of white paper disguised by neutral tones, strictly practical language. The word love is never written. Though it’s not a word he would ever use. People love cake, he says coldly. And for me, it is only that words never seem to match what I feel. They read them, I’m told. But there needs to be something, two points in time that connect us. To know that suffering has witness. I take it as a form of punishment. Letters being proof of separate geographies.

  He sees all I have done, the work inhabiting the space, the smell of turpentine, notebook bloated with scribbled pages. An output that twins his own. This long arduous distance, the not-knowing. Separate, we have conducted ourselves in exactly the same way, but I wonder if he sees that alone, I have the strength and spirit to give myself to my work in a way that cannot happen in his presence.

  He shows me a dark circle on a background, thick and white and illuminated, like a moon or sun, his images like something anticipating photography. His cramped, French handwriting below.

  Little by little the sky is clearing. It alone.

  His eyes focus on the canvas set on my easel.

  That is the bird in this painting, I say. Though in my book of sound I wrote out the voices, in different parts, like a symphony. The notes like mysterious symbols on the stiff white sheets, some of them only half-filled, the little black rounds sitting on the thin lines like tiny crows on telegraph wires.

  Against the silver sky, I saw from my studio window a crow catch itself on wires, then fall to the ground, electrocuted. They can only be electrocuted if they spread their wings to touch two wires, the current passing through a vital part of their body. The bird lay in the alley where a large group of crows gathered around it, all at the same time. They dotted the trees, assembled on the pavement, feathered the cars, and began to caw, a deafening, cacophonous noise, and then fell completely silent. This repeated every day, with the numbers of the group slowly dwindling. The body eventually disappeared, and the gathered cawing crows fell to a single crow. This solitary bird returned at the same time every day for months to the spot where the crow had fallen dead.

  You are right, he says, looking at the painting. I wait for what he might say about the work. But after a lengthy silence he says, Crows have funerals.

  I pour wine into chipped goblets I found on the street and pass him one. It is small in his hand. It fills me with a sudden dread. That he can just disappear and reappear, and I can stare at his hands, sometimes real, sometimes imagined.

  I hear the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, audible within the quiet walls. This small triumph. I see ink up the inside of his forearms, hieroglyphs on skin. Bouts of suffering, for him, have always been a source from which he draws. Suffering being a choice, whereas pain is not. The idea of creation that gets him through. And for the first time, I realize that it is possible that the same is true for me.

  When we first met, Lev said that he always sensed he was doomed, predicting a short but intense life. And I said no, my fingers on his jawbone. There is no death in this face. Though now we would never say such things.

  —

  It is moonless and cold when I hear Lev’s voice in the night.

  Ivory, I want to tell you about my wife.

  I say nothing. The word deadly, like air in a vein.

  Aglaya. I have read that in Greek, this means beautiful. I do not want to know if the Russians ascribe the same definition. I try to remember what Mme. Tissaud says. That jealousy is the sharpest emotion because it is love and hate at the same time.

  Aglaya is not from Vislok, the village in Ukraine where I am from, he says. She grew up in Moscow, though spent much time at her family dacha where she eventually stayed after her father died. In school she was forced to recite what would become Party-approved lines of Pushkin
and Turgenev from memory.

  My father was Russian, my mother Ukrainian, but we lived in a village claimed by the Habsburg Empire. So when I was nineteen, my brother Metro and I were forced into the Austrian army. For six months they taught us the arts of war. They transferred us to Peremyshl on the border of Ukraine and Poland, and then sent us to the Russian front. We were stationed in the Voluska province that had formerly been part of Ukraine. It was a bitter experience. The winter was severe. We stayed on a flat windswept plain and had to dig a trench two metres deep and two kilometres long to the kitchen. The cook rode a flea-bitten mare to deliver our food, along the sunken highway that became slick with mud from all the snow. Each soldier was given one chunk of cold meat, served raw in the middle of the night to avoid detection by the Russians. We were there for seven months until we marched on foot to Chernivtsi, a small town near Romania. When the Cossacks attacked the army we retreated again across field, forests, and streams until we came to a province in southern Ukraine near the River Prut. The Russians broke through the lines and surrounded us at such close range that I was struck from behind with a rifle. When I turned around, all I could see were Russian troops. I dropped my gun. My brother did the same. We were immediately taken prisoner. We were indebted to the soldier for sparing our lives. He could have shot us on the spot. It would have been easier for him. Even though we were part Russian, even though we spoke their language, we became their prisoners.

  We were taken to the Russian province of Peskovsko where large land-owning barons began selecting us in groups of ten for service on their estates. At that time we had an old woman as the cook, who for every single meal made a fish soup. The soup contained not only the body of the fish but the head, eyes and all. We could hardly bear to look at it. At last, one day, we refused to eat the soup. The foreman called our baron, who summoned his wife. She came out to the fields brandishing a wooden spoon, in a great rage, and scolded us. You Ukrainians don’t even have corn bread to eat and yet you refuse to eat our soup! But they did, after that, stop serving the soup at every meal.

  Metro befriended one of them and traded his beloved pocket watch for paper and charcoal for me. I had always needed to draw, and once hoped to study art in Petersburg. Still, I never stopped drawing even where there was nothing. I had read of Japanese calligraphists keeping a diary in water on stone. Everything evaporates, they say, but if you drink with your eyes, you remain full.

  We never even met our baron. Instead it was his foreman, who made us call him sire and every day would wake us up at three in the morning by kicking our straw mattresses on the floor, yelling, Get up, you miserable living corpses!

  It was a bleak winter. Because everything was done by hand, wheat was cut in stages, and went well into winter. We would haul the sheaves from the fields in a sleigh and pile them in the second floor of a granary. Upstairs was very hot by a stove that a worker kept burning all night. This was the way they dried the grain. We would then toss sheaves down from the second floor. The millwheels smelled like wet wheat husk. It was so hot on the upper floor that when we finished late at night we were soaked with perspiration. On the walk back in the dark, our clothes would freeze to our bodies.

  After some time, the neighbouring farmer invited us to a village dance. We were reluctant to accept the invitation because we were dressed in the shabby clothes of prisoners of war. When we told the wife of the oldest brother why we weren’t going, she proceeded to lend us suits that belonged to the youngest brother, who was at the German front.

  Dressed in these suits we eventually went to one of the dances. Women wore embroidered dresses and fur-collared coats. In stark contrast to the life we were living. Eventually a young woman came up to me. She stood for a long time in front of me and then I saw something well up in her. Her face graven. Then full of fury. Her mouth breaking up the words into sharp syllables. She was, I discovered, the fiancée of the man whose suit I was wearing.

  It was there we first met Aglaya. She had pale gold hair down to her waist. She was small but strong. Though she now lived in a cottage, she had once known a different Russia. As a girl she had heard of parties where swans of ice had been encrusted with caviar. Cut glass dripped from the ceilings. All the gleaming, opulent things that can make a person mad with greed.

  After her father died she moved to the dacha with her aunt, who then caught pneumonia that severe winter and died, leaving her orphaned. The house had wooden soffits and shutters carved in intricate patterns of animals and flowers, like something from a fairy tale. There were birch groves and high yellow flowers in summer. She felt safer at the dacha, though alone, away from the political turmoil of Moscow. She knew the name of every plant that grew near her. After the winter thawed into spring, there was always a scent of bruised herbs she’d picked from the tangle of wild plants around her house. When food became scarce, she would confect large meals foraged from the woods and crack on top of each dish a stolen egg. Salads and stews made of thick weeds. After what we’d been starved of and then fed as prisoners of war, their simple elegance was almost sacred.

  Aglaya stood at the doorway to the dance. Striking in her heavy dark velvet coat, with snow-dusted hair. It wasn’t just beauty. It was inward and outward. When she left the snow filled in her footsteps, making me question if she’d ever even been there.

  After a meeting of the kulaks, the well-off farmers, they determined we were to cut wood in the forests that belonged to the nobility. The woods were thick with small-leafed trees bold enough to grow in the cold. Then, Metro and I went to cut wood in the lord’s forest. For three solid weeks, we cut wood and piled them into cords.

  Because they weren’t feeding us, Aglaya prepared meals and brought them to us, carrying with her a hoe so that if caught, she could say she was going to dig potatoes, then still being pulled from the cold earth. Because we feared for her safety, we told her not to come.

  When we returned in our sleighs to carry the wood, the lord appeared with his shotgun. You have no right to this wood! he yelled. He proceeded to tell us that a large German army had invaded Russia and decided that all civilians were to be restored their former rights. And so we returned home with empty sleighs. The German authorities announced that all prisoners of war had to report to German army headquarters for return by train to Ukraine.

  Metro and I were immediately conscripted as machine gunners and then sent out to the Italian front. Though the war had ended, our commanding officer neglected to inform us. For some reason, he thought it would save our weapons and equipment by having us eventually return them to Austria via Italy. But when the Italian army caught up with us at Trieste we were disarmed, because our commander ordered us not to fire on the Italians. They marched us back into Italy as prisoners of war.

  We were punished by our captors. They did not feed us, and kept us marching for eight straight days. We were made to sleep in fields without any cover, through rain, sleet, and snow. Many of our soldiers became very ill.

  I remember those eight days walking. They made us go through the same villages and towns that Austrian armies had ravaged during the war. They threw things at us. Rotten food, metal scraps, scalding hot water as we passed under bridges. One of the nights, sleeping in a field in the sleet, Metro said he had something to tell me.

  Aglaya and I were secretly married, he told me. We wanted to avoid harm or suspicion, so we told no one, not even you. Then he said, She is to have our child.

  On the eighth day of a forced march, one starved soldier crossed into a field to pick some hard corn right off the stalk and was immediately shot. When Metro attempted to come to his aid, on the spot, he too was shot. Lev pauses.

  I couldn’t even go to him, lying on the ground. He died where he fell. I felt blood in my throat.

  They buried him right there in a field with a few sticks on which they hung his hat to mark his grave.

  Lev recounts this in such a controlled manner. He is numb, unwavering.

  When she received news of
my brother’s death, Aglaya became perfectly still. The loss of him made her think and move with the gravest economy. She then took her father’s shotgun kept by the side door of the house they would never live in together, and tested the metal on her mouth. She counted in her heart the minutes between losing him and returning to him again. She remembers hearing mosquitoes coming through the open window. The offbeat tick of the clock. The distant bark of a dog belonging to the peaceable brothers two fields over. She then turned slowly and purposefully, and shot a hole right through the clock. She shot the time right out of it. She wanted to remind herself of the precise moment when her life, as she’d known it, ended.

  And then she felt a flutter. The baby moved. It brought her back to the world. It made her understand that even in the most desolate moment, she was part of it still.

  I don’t remember being loaded into a boxcar to a prisoners’ camp at Caserta Casino in northern Italy. But I woke up there, lying on a cot. Like many of the Ukrainian prisoners, I contracted typhus. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I wondered if I too had died. My heart felt like a stone on top of my chest. My lungs were dry as leather. I had the feeling that the cot I was on was cursed, that too many people had died on it, but nothing came out of my mouth when I tried to speak. I remember the elderly Italian doctor entering the barracks with his nose and ears stuffed with cotton batting in order to keep out the stench. He would enter the room carrying a long cane that he used to point out the sick who were to receive the daily fare of an egg and a glass of milk. The food was severely rationed. A cup of soup and a piece of bread was usually all we could expect for the whole day.

  All the prisoners from all parts of the Austrian Empire were repatriated, except the seven hundred Ukrainians who had no country to repatriate to. The national boundaries were redrawn and the western part of Ukraine where I was from no longer existed. For two years they held me prisoner in Italy because they had no idea what country to return me to. A Russian father, a Ukrainian mother. Nothing mattered except the ground you were standing on. It was the only thing that determined who you fought for. I ended up finding my way back to Peskovsko, to Aglaya. If I had returned to Vislok I would have been conscripted into the Polish army, which was then fighting the Russians. I’d had enough of the army, of the fighting. The borders and enemies changing, half the Ukrainians Russians, the other half Austro-Hungarians, fighting each other. The fields split in half. The town I grew up in was not on a map. I was from nowhere. I did not exist. I felt a great remoteness.