I HAVE AN IDEA, I say. It is gold, morning.
Tell me.
First, you must pay me a compliment, I joke.
I think he will say something facetious but he stops and then says seriously, You have the rare gift of looking into the hearts of all living things.
I do?
You do, he says, taking my hand and brushing his mouth along my knuckles.
You have slept with one eye open since you can remember, I say. You must become the thing that pursues you so mercilessly in the night. You must confront the wolves. There is a Japanese legend about people who draw their nightmares and then throw them into the sea. But the sea grows unpredictable and it causes great sorrow for these people who fish and live off the ocean’s riches.
And what do they do?
They draw their nightmares and then cut them to pieces and throw them into the wind. That’s how we got kites. This is what you should do, I say.
We sit on the stone steps of the house drinking coffee in the sun. We spend days painting and then sculpting, Lev in the studio out back and me outside. We take breaks and bathe in the river, our fingers slippery as fishes from wet clay. One night while we drink wine, barefoot in the grass, we realize that we have surrounded ourselves in totems. Huge reliefs thrust out of roofs and walls that will occupy this house long after we go.
At night we exchange arms and legs, twined in sleep. Nothing is close enough. But the nightmares continue. I tell him I will watch him when he sleeps. What I do not tell him is that looking on terrifies me. It scares me to encounter him so unprotected. All that movement and terror in every fold of skin, the world growing eyeteeth around him. At night, asleep, is the only time he can be pulled under. In daylight he is untouchable, self-possessed, dangerous. A middle-distance animal that comes close only if it chooses.
Lev draws from nature but you would never know. He sees other things. Not the things I see.
His work is singular and clear and I know that it is good. I am conflicted. I am surrounded by my unfinished drawings, abandoned paintings. The desire for production, but nothing holding.
The bad paintings must be painted too, Ivory.
What if it’s not a painting? I say in frustration. What if the path I’m taking is not right?
There is no such thing as a wrong path.
I think I’m losing faith.
In what?
Humans.
You can take that, he says, to somewhere else. I see what you do. Are already doing. You despise hierarchy and so you are creating a democracy.
His eyes glint.
A world where humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects are of equal value.
Tacita said the same thing. I like that.
Then make it so.
I feel unequipped.
How? he says, though I wonder if he means why.
Birds, for example. Painting feathers seems insufficient when they have such an ancient language. And like other ancient forms of speech it is elliptical. Little is said but much is meant.
Then work on voices, not feathers.
There is a message in the voices. A warning. If only we could learn them. Understand them so they would not retreat. Or appear when they shouldn’t, like the great black birds that come out during air raids.
As if on cue, a blast from the neighbouring farm. The shrieks of cawing crows.
What are they shooting? I ask, horrified.
Farmers protecting their cherry trees from nesting birds, Lev says, tying his boot.
—
When I draw Lev, it is my hand. There is something of me, my projection of him. It is almost impossible to capture him properly. There is always something missing. The blackness. Shimmers, but nothing whole.
While he paints out back, I record the animals in my sound notebook. The trembling of leaves. The laced wind. The vibrating drone of honeybees. The silky flip of the skylark’s wings. It is the first time I sit down and really write. I drink sweet-tasting well water, deep in the pleasure of my work, and conceal my excitement.
I spend an entire afternoon gathering berries for ink. When I meet Lev, it is his sleeve red, my sleeve red. It bleeds through our clothes, and when we take them off the berries have stained our skin. There is sticky juice and dark purple everywhere, Lev licking. Stomach, fingers. We eventually find our way to the river. He grabs both my wrists with one hand and I bite his neck. We emerge from the water gleaming, like royalty. Peacocks, flickers of iridescent blue, hearts beating coming into full light. Laughing and dripping we walk back to the stone house.
The next few weeks are consumed by gathering. Elderberries, cornflowers, roses, walnut hulls. The colours burning the retina from this red earth. There are more parties, and gatherings in the nearby village that is on such a hill that coffee spills off the café tables.
—
When one day I return from the river, the door to the house is wide open. My limbs grow limp. Outside, for almost the first time since we have been here, there are sounds of rain. It falls shyly, and then becomes hard. The kind the farmers want.
Papers are scattered everywhere. Lev’s drawings and paintings are gone. My sound notebook is gone. Lev, too, gone.
Lev. My voice not at all reflecting the desolation within. I stand raw, again, the skin off the wound. Standing for what might be a long time. Stunned. I search through every shelf, every drawer. What am I looking for? I flail around the room but there is nowhere to go to get away from my head. The room is sinking. I sit down at the table to keep from falling. The room grows black as night and I light candles. I pour the eau de vie, like bullets to the throat, burning the hollow of my stomach. Another glass. I want to feel something. Another. Until there is nothing left and the room blurs, candles flickering. I find a bottle of vodka. Everything else is dark and complicated, but the liquor the Russians consume is simple and clear. I pour a large glass as though it is water, the way they do, and am surprised by its severe, astringent taste. And when I pour another, the bottle slips from my shaking hands and crashes on the stone floor. I step on one of the shards trying to pick up the pieces and blood streams from my foot, mixing with vodka. It pools away from the front door, the floor tilted toward the back of the house.
I want to be injured. I want to divert the pain that I feel in my chest. There are tears now I think. I put my hand to my face and it slips across my skin from the wet. With tragedy there is repetition. It is never once, like the beginning of a fairy tale.
Night comes quickly, the blackest clot. I somehow manage sleep in the early hours, like falling into a dark rainsplashed hole. Fear staccatos my breathing. I find rags and clean up the blood that never dried. A pale pink layer of liquid sloshes on top of the stone dip. I inspect the gash. It is wide and red with raised ridges on either side. I bandage it and then sit down and steady myself. My head pounds. My eyes are swollen. My throat thick and dry. Swallowing is difficult. I put my shoes on, wincing, and walk slowly to the village, past the whispering children gathered on the winding dirt road, and begin to ask if anyone saw what happened. Yesterday afternoon.
The adults look at me, heads shaking, Non. Non plus. In their eyes the scorn has been leavened with pity, warmth even.
I try to be neutral, biting my lip to stop the tears. But still, they fall. I swallow rusted metal. A deep rumble of hunger and nausea jab at the same time, knocking the wind out of me.
There is a young girl with long blond plaits flicking over her blue shawl. They reach down her back, touching the top of her gathered skirt. I can see a bit of her legs between the skirt and her boots. They are covered in purple scars, possibly from insect bites. A woman missing some teeth comes forward in a faded housedress, flowers that must’ve been bright once, jaw hingeing from side to side like a goat. I am almost angered that she can eat, as though nothing is wrong.
She says they came in a shiny black car. They were not in there for long. The man was led out, peaceably, almost.
Did he say anything? Did y
ou hear anything? Did you see his face? The—
Ce n’est pas grave, cocotte, she says. But she knows that it is not all right. Despite her attempts at comfort, her eyes say that it is not all right.
When they last took him away there was brutality. I remember seeing—
You remember too much, the old woman says. The best thing you can do is to forget what you’ve seen.
I never forget anything, I say.
She shakes her head out of sympathy, not disapproval.
Les enfants se souviennent, she says. She hands me a pain au raisin. She thinks I’m a child.
My last vision of Lev. We agree to meet for dinner back at the house. He grabs bread in one hand, brushes splayed in his other like a fan. He turns to me, solemnly, closes his eyes. And then, at the last moment, he flashes a beautiful grin and ducks out the door.
There was no force this time. The lack of it, oddly, makes it seem worse.
There was a slapping noise of boots on wet stone. The rev of the engine as it skids away sending dirt and small grey stones into the air.
Now the rain is light, colourless and without hope. I walk along the path, the tall grasses wet and brushing my legs. I can see my limbs, moving along the path, as though they belong to someone else. I fill my pockets, heavy with rocks, and head to the river. Though this isn’t what happens. The weight that sinks isn’t the rocks. What is pulled beneath the water isn’t the body.
I am found, gripping sharp elbows, skinned, nerves exposed. Their timing a stroke of luck. Coming to collect the car for two writers who must get to the port. They get quiet right away, disturb nothing. Swiftly get me out of there. She moves around me, takes me to the house and brings me warmed milk, normally repellent, but it is all that seems to stay down.
Tacita, I am filling, filling, half-deep inside with water.
She hugs me, her body warm against my cold skin, the fields blurring backward as we drive away.
WHALE
Megaptera novaeangliae. Only males sing. Cut out musical lines from a spectrograph, analyze, overlap them over and over again. Identify individual voices in a quartet and write out the score.
MY HANDS GROPE for the switch, but everything is black. I hear the sound of footsteps in the house. I let out a scream, muffled and only part-sure. A man comes toward me and grips my arm.
The room sways and I sink into a chair, half in and half out of the world.
A man’s voice. Heart palpitations. The hideous thump. Out of the chair. Ice cold, and retching as though seasick. I’ve lost my sense of time and space. Remain calm.
Oh, god.
My age swallows even an intruder’s ability to scene steal. It is me who becomes the shocking thing. Narrowed eyes, heaving body, I see in the dark the outline.
It’s me.
How did you find me?
He doesn’t answer.
Do you want to sit down? He helps me onto the sofa and fills one of the American’s plentiful drinking vessels full of tap water and finds an enamel basin and places it on my knees with lapidary precision.
It doesn’t matter. I had to come. There’s something we need to talk about.
I know, I manage to say.
How do you know?
My mind lurches. I am slipping away. I’m going to die. But my instinct is to rat-hole. I can’t breathe. Like the old whales who have to keep one portion of their brains perpetually alert, night and day, to make sure they keep breathing by surfacing regularly. Sometimes when they are very old, they strand themselves on a shallow beach where they can die without drowning. Without having to think about drowning.
This is not how I wanted to see him again. Flickers of sharp reality cant into a deeper, dark space. My mind inaccessible.
I attempt focus through the blur.
How did you escape?
He lights a match, that beautiful striking sound, and brings it to his face.
Lev.
I try to hold still my perception. Hold on. But my control flickers. No. I retch again into the basin. Whirling eyes, hot flashing up my neck and face. I’ve not spoken Lev’s name aloud, I have scissored him from my memory. A victim of my silence. But he reappears, my limbs turned to ash. This meaningless body. Every memory of him an assault.
Time does not heal, it medicates.
I look at this face in the blue light. Untamed. Hair thick and tangled and owling out in parts. Once, in Paris, looking for Lev, a woman described a man to me who wore his hair parted low to one side. But no, I realized, I would be incapable of being with such an exacting man.
Eyes flashing. Long fingers.
Lev? He says it out loud as a question.
Yes.
It’s me.
My mind searches for his name, like a lost word, refusing to form in my mouth. I cannot think. An after-image of his face. A black wing. Cold country. Siberian eyes. His voice. Paris. Notes and sounds and enigmata drifting through.
I do not know who you are, I say, genuinely shocked at this. Knowing, at least, that I should be.
He registers fear.
He takes me by the shoulders. The conservatory. The Yukon. Wolves. Fuck. I mean, Please.
Skeet. The attack has passed, the floor levels. Cognition limps back in.
OfcourseSkeet.
I need to talk to you Frame.
How did you find me?
Jesus Frame. I track animals.
Well yes, I say, you do.
I’m so sorry, he says, looking into my eyes. I had no idea I would scare you like that. Are you all right?
I’m fine.
Did you receive a letter from the conservatory?
I have been waiting but no, it never came. What I received—
So she didn’t mention anything about someone coming to interview you?
No.
He looks down and then directly into my eyes. The person to be dispatched is not from the university.
I don’t understand. A consultant?
No. The outside person is not connected to the conservatory at all. They’ve ordered a psychiatrist from a clinic, dread slows his breath, an assessment. To see if you are not—all here.
I would never let such a person—
I know. She knows. That is why it is under the guise of your work. So he can gain full access to make his assessment.
What? How is it even possible when I am engaged in research for them?
That’s the thing. He hesitates. I tried to explain a while ago, at Hotel du Nord. But I wasn’t sure what was actually going on at the university and the conservatory. They think you—
Please don’t say it, Skeet. For god’s sake. Though I’m certain after what you just witnessed, you have your own doubts.
Jesus, Frame, why do you think I’m here?
Why are you here, Skeet? Shouldn’t you be compiling the data? You have that big conference in Denmark.
There is no more work for me.
I don’t understand.
They’ve cut the funding for your project, a lot of projects, he says, reaching for the basin and taking it away. They even hired a PR firm to smooth everything over. Some company out of Los Angeles that just helped a breakaway nation emerge. An entire country. One of the istans, he says. The pipes creak as he turns on the tap. Apparently one of the women is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. Knows how to spin crap into gold.
Sanity isn’t a question, until you are thought to be mad. This I know. If only there were some form of assurance, like the swing of a crucifix around the necks of European women who lean into their housework. But it’s not like that. This addling. This passing change in perception.
Skeet has told me before about new research into aging. Techniques being engineered, attempting to reverse the wear on bodies by replacing lost cells in bones, in hearts.
But what if those cells are supposed to be lost? What if they contain the parts of our lives meant to disappear?
But who wouldn’t choose the alternative, he says.
; The body grows cold, Skeet. Hard as ice. A worn-out container. When I look out, there are only these eyes not attached to any particular skin, flensed, no particular body but something less than a body. But who cares about the body? By the time you are old you live in it so little, though still, it is all we are. The thing about growing old is its suddenness. One day you look up and find that you no longer recognize anything, not even your own face.
Skeet shifts uncomfortably, pale light coming through, daylight faintly suggested.
Skeet, I say quietly, attempting to remain calm, I would rather drink lighter fluid than go into one of those homes. Those places smell like death. All those people identical, locked away as though they have a communicable disease. Do you know what people become in these places? Their rheumy eyes clouded over like a jar of bacon fat kept under the sink. Women who have lost the use of some part of their body or mind. Mme. Tissaud used to say that the mind is like a mirror, it collects dust. The problem is to remove the dust. Each face confused with all the other faces. Attendant. As though they are awaiting final instructions. You know what it is? It is as though they have already died.
At convent school they forced us to pay visits to these places, which I considered a traumatic activity. I remembered them being decorated with horrid paintings by children with virtually no artistic talent. There was a tiny shrunken woman with white shiny skin thin as bible paper who refused to visit her daughter in the south because she believed her exotic lily was about to bloom. The thing was awful. It smelled like a corpse and looked like a phallus. It’s a very rare plant, you know, the woman protested. I am already an old woman, she said, and if I leave now, I most surely will never see it bloom. And in fact the nurses overwatered it, and when they read up on it, realized that it could be decades before a bloom emerged, if ever. There was also a woman who clutched what looked like a jewellery box. What she carried in the box was her husband. She would thrust it toward me, pointing to what looked like seashells propped up in sand. His shoulder blades, she said in an odd tone that I realized was pride. Most of the people who work there are mannish women with mean little eyes that seem invigorated by the taunting. All that wordless suffering, like helpless creatures. And the thing that is so impossible Skeet, is that those people are us. That is me, and will be you someday, sooner than you can imagine.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 20