The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  He stares at me. He is too young for this to register. It probably isn’t the time.

  I have come here because— He stops. There are things you should know.

  The post-vertigo has produced a hollow pit, a terrible hunger. Skeet, may we be civilized about this?

  He is already moving in the kitchen, half complicit.

  Any eggs in the coop, Frame?

  Yes, I tell him. But he’s not heard. Coffee, I say. I still get a prick of pleasure to think of the first cup. It remains one of the cheapest enjoyments in life.

  Bread, fruit, cigarettes too, I say brightly, grateful to be holding on to this thin calm. The eggs are from the farmer’s wife, the only ones I dare eat. Those hens are magnificently cared for. Though the activists would probably disown me if they knew I consumed animal byproducts. Skeet puts his hands over his ears. I feel a flood of affection for him, for his long limbs, his rustic charm, his clean way of moving through things. Maybe that is the ability of the young, obstacles are merely chimeric, whereas in age they are made of stone.

  There is a great unfairness, Skeet.

  In the conservatory?

  In life. I hear the whump of the gas igniting.

  We wait and wait, but by the time we are fledged we are already on the descent.

  The eggs skitter and pop on the stovetop.

  It makes me think of how my obsessive listening to the rawest most private noise has allowed me to hear rapture in everything. In recordings. Ravel. Arvo. Satie. In Sappho’s rhythms. Eros has shaken my wits, like a wind from the mountain falling on oaks. This read in Toronto, everything licked clean. All the sound dreams when I first arrived. In one, I am huddled in burgundy ditches of dogwood surrounded by owls making their low rasping noises, scratchy and ethereal like the fragile 78 in Lev’s studio. When I tried to transcribe it, everything fell silent and it was just a needle rhythmically hitting the centre of a record like a heartbeat. In another, I am startled by a fox who creeps up to me and begins speaking. There is no actual voice but I hear the words, We did not reveal this to you so that you would do nothing. The other animals sit watching, like a jury. I wake up panicked, remembering that Freud said that every dream is either a wish or a counter-wish.

  Breton had asked in his manifesto, Why is it that we attach more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams?

  SKYLARK

  Alauda arvensis;

  June 10 – Rose, sheet 9 a.m.

  June 11 – Violet, forked and very grand, about 10:50 p.m.

  June 12 – Blue and yellow, various, much sheet, about 11 p.m.

  June 13 – Red, pale yellow and blue, sheet, distant storm, 11:30 p.m.

  June 14 – Pink, sheet, 7:20 p.m., blue, sheet, at midnight.

  June 16 – Yellowish, but on nearer approach, rose; most vivid flash 7:26 p.m., violet.

  June 17 – Pale yellow, forked, but not severe.

  June 18 – Beautiful rose with a tinge of violet.

  Thunderstorm about 4 p.m.

  June 19 – 3:34 p.m. vivid bright yellow, 3:36, yellow, 3:37 pale yellow, 3:41 vivid pink, 3:51 vivid pink, 3:54 vivid pink, 3:55 vivid pink – the most beautiful pink – so rich a colour I have never seen.

  SKEET POURS THE COFFEE. The breeze is now warmed by the slow sun, this mystical light on clouded windows reminding me of such disparate things. At convent school, walking to the dining hall for breakfast, the elastic of my stockings loose, wool itching my legs. I could see my reflection in the glass, walking in, to what? What exactly had I done or said to the other girls? I have almost forgotten entirely, though I remember silence and the sparkling world cast by the sun alone. The same quality of light in Lev’s studio. All the amorous mornings, profane acts in daylight that altered me, these memories now turned into something else. I am struck by how everything, the pain, the joy, the essence of it faded, leaving only traces of images, sounds, how the light fell. How so many memories lose their substance, what lies at the heart of them. Sometimes I wonder if I have forgotten Lev’s face. I cannot determine whether this is an act of cruelty or kindness on the part of time. Whatever they say about time not being a straight line, life assuredly moves in one direction.

  Frame?

  Okay, I say, tell me.

  He takes a sip of coffee and then searches through his large bag.

  You know you should be in the company of some extravagantly sexy girl, I say, uninvited. An awkward silence.

  Shit, his eyes say. She knows.

  Okay, he says, completely ignoring me. Frame—he begins to empty out the contents of his bag—I’m on the run. Which means, well, it means that we are on the run.

  Are you joking?

  Negative.

  Is it the university? The conservatory?

  Sort of. Their board.

  God. That sickly collection of men.

  It seems they’re concerned with, among other things. How should I put this—

  Just say it Skeet, there is little that can shock me at this point.

  They don’t know what to do with your things.

  That is absolutely not what I was expecting you to say. I need a cigarette.

  He takes a pack of matches out of his pocket and strikes one on the stone wall.

  Things? Meaning my work? My files? What?

  They have a very valuable item of yours and they are not sure where it should go. Well. Okay. I think they want to sell it. It’s huge for the conservatory given how strapped they are.

  Skeet, there is something I’m not getting here. Shouldn’t the valuable item of mine go to—I look him squarely in the eyes—me?

  They think it’s time you go to a facility. They think you are not—

  I laugh. Of sound mind. It just occurs to me now, the pun.

  And because they thought you had no survivors, they have hired a lawyer and are looking into power of attorney.

  I drain my coffee cup and wipe my mouth with a napkin in an attempt at composure. Skeet?

  Yes.

  Why did you say thought I had no survivors?

  I take the letter from my pocket and hand it to him. He opens it. Scans it. Runs his hand through his hair. Sits down. Something flickers across his face but he says something else. He knows. The museum contacted Valentina about where to find me. He already knows of the granddaughter.

  The item. What is the item?

  It is a painting, he says in a low tone I’ve never heard before.

  A sudden flood of fear beats blood into my ears. I wonder whether he is speaking to me about things that have never happened. I only catch—bourgeois woman renovating her chateau in the south. She instructs her mason to repoint the stones, but no, at the last minute she decides she must replace them. He removes them carefully, holding the smaller ones in his palm, hingeing his arm up and down at his elbow as though attempting to determine a weight by feel. A corner of colour juts up from the stone. It is caught in the few centimetres of space between the wall and the fireplace. It must have fallen down. He carefully slides it up and out, and sees that it is dated. It is old. It is by that famous Russian artist. He is dead. Is he dead? That odd thing that happens with famous people from another era, you would be just as surprised to hear they were alive as to hear they were not.

  Exit wound.

  It was sent to Oslo by the woman because it was addressed to you, Skeet says. She looked you up and found you through the conservatory. They had it authenticated. Because a lot of his paintings from that time were destroyed, they say it’s worth—a lot.

  Why was I not notified?

  It’s all been—he clears his throat—recent.

  The word recent doesn’t actually mean anything. Did you know that?

  I’m sorry Frame, he says.

  It’s monstrous. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I feel like a child. Powerless. A quiver of anger. All this time spent protecting the present from the past. From what? Gravity. A space between two objects that was not supposed to let in a third. The sam
e gaps that allow others to make decisions about my own life.

  Skeet?

  Yup.

  Tell me what the painting is.

  He looks at me and then to his bag and grins. You can see for yourself.

  —

  I appreciate a patient person. Professor Tapping was also like this. He would sit quietly for hours marking papers, discussing, at length, small ridiculous questions posed by his students.

  At first I did not ask questions. I read, went to lectures, copied notes. The city looking presentable but dead, like a postcard. I lived between the university and the small room I’d rented, a few blocks between, lined with thin brick houses. There were no sidewalk cafés. Everything happened indoors. Another top floor of a house. An attic. Freezing in winter, broiling in summer, little else in between. I opened the windows, cleaned the room. It was Lev who taught me that you have to tell your story and then you must forget it. Each morning, below my window, a boy would toss the news and miss. I heard the sssss when it would hit the bushes. Before I arrived, before I was well, I was not. There are so many things, I’m unsure what was the worst. The loss of Tacita upon Lev felt like skin removed. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think of him. Carrying his name everywhere. Unable to remove his presence. Everything having been gulped, flesh and bone, his utter calmness within it. Memory going back at every chance. And Tacita, who would tell me there was no choice, everything unfolded the way it must. We would draw and write and laugh, and sorrow would not control my days. That was the way my mind worked.

  Tacita was the one who told me that friendships are acts of accumulation. And then what? It is almost too much to think of her now. I will never be able to listen to a Paris ambulance, its minor key, without a sickening feeling. Its dissonant tone, a bird in the house, every time it delivers the news that she is inside, covered in a white sheet.

  When the gendarmes came to the door all Istvan could say was, She is dead? He is in utter shock though he remains perfectly still. Absolutely dead?

  I remember feeling hardly more than a diagram of anatomy, skinless, strings of red and blue veins.

  Il faut refaire ton vie, they said to Istvan. What they meant was, You can find another wife.

  On her way home, rain had started again. She walked down a narrow street just off Rue du Bac not far from Deyrolle. She stopped to inspect something shining on the road. She was crouched when she was hit. The driver braked too late. It was the back right wheel that crushed Tacita’s skull. Her brain seeped out on the wet cobblestones.

  A single white rose dropped out of nowhere on the wet sidewalk in front of me just before I heard. My last unfinished painting dim against the noise of inadequacy of this act, the absurdity of it in the face of death. I feel no interest in what I have depicted, it seems superficial, ridiculous even. You can lie with other things, but you can’t lie with drawing. Everything grows cold, as when the seasons change and the sun gives no heat. I will out of existence this tendency. Extinguish it. I lay my brushes carefully in a box, and give them all away. I give away all my paint and canvas rolls to young artists who are as I was when I first came here. Tacita had so many boxes, the stacks had grown bigger and bigger. And when I left, they sat there, like a flight cancelled. Istvan, alone and so distraught, offered himself up to his cause. With a small group of volunteers helped hide people in the south until they could be smuggled out. He managed to secure travel visas, arrange escorts for the more vulnerable, organize new crossing routes. It is the kind of behaviour that can get someone killed. Only in his case, it saved. It allowed movement where there wasn’t any. Despite blocked borders. Despite passports infested with swastikas. But still he’s left with Tacita’s things, meaningless without her linking everything, fitting the world, all the little pieces, into one continuous dream.

  I had agreed to leave only because Istvan told me to. I wanted to stay and help him. He said, Do it for her. It’s what she’d wanted for you. And when I arrive on the coast, I have to speak a language I am not acquainted with. I find these words, these short foreign sentences useless. What is a language? I am. You are. Just sounds we make.

  Everything smells of wet velvet. Life feels cheap, uncertain. My mind plays tricks. Tugging me under. There are days at the beginning, waiting for papers, when I don’t wash. My stockings laddered. Dangling limbs. Body aching in a fever. Stomach turning, provoking unwanted appetites. Longing for Lev. A toothsome woman along the docks talks to me. She may be a prostitute but it is hard to tell. Most women here have dirty hair, worm-eaten coats, painted eyes looking for escape. She tells me I should take lovers. Sleep with men to see if I can feel anything. I am so empty I want to be filled. Their fingers, their mouths, everything thrusting until I feel I might break. With arousal, there is shame, hips moving under them. Sometimes I am dead. Lifeless. Sometimes it is rough and violent and I want this. Mostly I feel nothing. And all along there isn’t a single part of my mind that is not horrified by my actions. The body separate from the self.

  No one discusses her time at the clinic.

  A biologist in a sweater-vest who rolled his own cigarettes asked me to dinner months after I arrived in Toronto, and I was stunned. You can’t tell, I think, how far I am from you. I am amazed you don’t see that parts of me are missing.

  Sometimes I could see Tacita’s shining eyes, her fingers, her intentions so blinding that I think she is more alive than I am. I begin to wonder if maybe it was me who died, not her.

  I soberly start to suspect that my work at the university might embody more than I’d hoped. There is a shift. It is possible to work when there is no joy, and this is what can lead you out. Symbols become equations that begin to write themselves overtop of my life. Prophecies that demand truths. At the university I was considered intelligent, austere, unsentimental, like a man. I remake my grey dress, I let my hair grow. I laugh. I have dinner every Sunday with Professor Tapping and his two sisters. There is only work now. My devotion to it singular. Gratifying. Whole. It is how I will begin to forget.

  —

  Skeet?

  Yes?

  What is the painting?

  I had to take it wrapped. No one’s seen it except Valentina, the appraiser, the board, I think.

  Aren’t you curious? What were you waiting for?

  He clears his throat. You.

  My heart beats into my ears, though I feel light and separate.

  From the contents of his bag, he extracts a package. He tears into tape and cuts the plastic bubble wrap wound tightly with his fingers to reveal a single white canvas, no larger than a leaf of letter paper. He unfurls it delicately. It is brittle and thick with paint, now fissured like a cracked desert floor.

  Silence.

  He knows how to say nothing.

  Oh my god. Skeet. I begin to laugh, looking at the canvas. I start to shake.

  I was so entwined with him, we exchanged fingers, arms, parts of our mind. But that painting? I never saw that painting.

  When I urge him to paint his nightmares I know there is nothing I can say to make him do anything he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t believe in advice or influence. His only obedience being to his own mind. I look at the painting in disbelief. It is not the thick white and pale grey geometry of familiar abstraction. He has abandoned his beloved non-objective world. The painting is covered in dense trees. There is sky and grass and jewelled light. It depicts a forest of wolves. Grey wolves encircling one wolf. The lone wolf looks upward to a branch where there is a single skylark, as though overseeing a ritual. On the bottom right corner, it is Lev’s script. Requiem for Continued Existence. And then underneath: For Ivory, composing. I feel joy and sorrow at once. Thinking for the first time how a work of art contains the unknown thoughts of the artist, and how everyone looking at this work will never know what was in him when this was made. Even me.

  In the south, Lev painted in a small stone building off the main house. There was one window to the north with the right kind of light, evenhanded.
He often kept the door open and tied his shirt around his waist, because there was no breeze. Though it was cool and dark at night, lit with oil lamps. I rarely went out there. We worked separately. We knew how to keep our distances. He didn’t like to talk about what he was painting and I never asked. Some days I would abandon the sound notebooks and find the sun on the side of the house by afternoon. Leonor would drop in when she was passing by. Once she came over with a new camera and was taking pictures while I lay back against the stone windowsill wearing Lev’s shirt, opened to let the light of the sun warm my skin. Lev startled me, coming from behind. He kissed my neck and put his hands on my breasts. She said to him, What an idiot. Why have you not painted her? Ta femme.

  And sell it to those men in Montmartre for pocket change? he joked. Never.

  She gave me the photographs later. She said there is always a moment of truth in the darkroom, the image appears as your own face ripples back at you in the pan of water. There were shots of the arched stone walls covered in vines, the animal totems. And then the picture with Lev’s hands on me, the edges of his shirt barely visible, the sun on my knees, his shirtsleeves rolled up, head resting on my head, eyes closed. I am struck by the expressions—his look of tenderness, mine of defiance. The man who had such little respect for most things gave such a pure kind of love, full of delicacy. I remember talking and laughing in the bright sun. What were we saying? I have no memory of the words. But I can see the kitchen, the table where I worked, the tilted floor. Getting up and walking to shake the numbness from my legs after hours of sitting. Or peeling potatoes by the sink, outside sounds fluttering in. The feeling I would get when he would come through the door. He would say, Don’t move. I need to see everything that is essential about you. And I was helpless. I have remembered this moment so many times that the memory has become compressed into one sound—the abrupt metallic click of a doorhandle being turned.