The Dictionary of Animal Languages

by Heidi Sopinka

  The truth is, no matter how close you get to another person, it will never be close enough.

  We need the spaces in between, Lev says. The not-knowing. In between, the world is real.

  But the most important thing is the thing we will never know.

  I look around the large room. How an open door and upturned papers can contain violence. I oscillate between numbness and a wretchedness that comes in waves, the kind that can pull you under. I am vile and old. Cracked, dull, lined, hollowed. Though when I flash in the mirror as I move by the front door, dark as a crow, this is not what is reflected back. I am a rain-ruined figure, but it is only my eyes that look off. It is only the old who look older in tragedy.

  I wanted to see Lev go. That he has vanished makes no sense. I understand now why people want to see the dead. The open casket, the body dressed in finery for the angel of death. Glasses on unseeing eyes, jewellery, a bloodless decoration outlasting skin. Hair combed—untidy is diabolical. We so obviously want to witness the goodbye. As though our observances will lessen the fact that people can just vanish. But where do they go? The child’s question and the adult’s question are the same.

  Lev’s cries in his sleep, warning calls. The one sound the recorder of sounds refuses to recognize. In rapture there is no room for anything else. Not even like a storm where there is calm in the eye. Rapture is a place where beauty rests entire. But I am reminded that everything is temporary. Nothing lasts. I try to picture his hands. I can see them perfectly. I know how he’s boned. The things that cannot be led away without witness. Still, the rain falls.

  —

  What are you thinking about? Skeet asks.

  Weather, I tell him.

  We don’t have a lot of time, he says. At the same moment we both realize how absurd this is. Like wrongly timed laughter that comes when moving furniture. Or at a funeral. Skeet’s laugh is low and infectious and makes me laugh.

  I’ve lost my sense of time.

  Maybe that’s a good thing.

  I remember strange things, I say.

  Like what?

  I don’t know. Ridiculous things, like houseflies buzz in the key of F. Crustaceans are instrumentalists. Or during social moments in unusual surroundings, seahorses turn bright colours. Then I think of my father, for instance. I never had much time with him as a child, but sometimes we would say the same thing at the exact same moment. Something uncommon like, Through the din.

  There is a sound above. Hold that thought, he says.

  EXTRACT OF INTERVIEW WITH LEV ALEKSANDR VOLKOV, PARIS, FRANCE, 1974

  Q.

  A. It’s finding another shape or another myth, something that tells us more.

  Q.

  A. Epiphanic chaos.

  Q.

  A. I think artists have a large capacity for uncontrolled emotion.

  Q.

  A. No, it is deeply ordered. Though there are accidental things.

  Q.

  A. I always try to take the work further, to move closer to what I want.

  Q.

  A. The risk is that as you move nearer it is possible to lose the image completely.

  Q.

  A. I don’t discuss my dreams.

  Q.

  A. I do not answer categorical questions.

  Q.

  A. Wrong question. Next question.

  Q.

  A. What is it that you want to know?

  Q.

  A. Not my wife, or my children.

  Q.

  A. Facts are just pinpricks. They are like the little dark holes that show where rain has hit.

  Q.

  A. There are no more facts when someone dies. There are things more vital.

  Q.

  A. Death made me grow up.

  Q.

  A. I have experienced extreme violence at close range. But I have also seen beauty.

  Q.

  A. Beauty. Does it have to be qualified?

  Q.

  A. Not beauty but unexpected outcomes.

  Q.

  A. Gypsum.

  Q.

  A. Tied to the end of a long stick.

  Q.

  A. Gravity.

  Q.

  A. Nature? No. I think it crass to merely copy what you see.

  Q.

  A. There comes a point when talking about a painting is beside the point.

  Q.

  A. The point being?

  Q.

  A. If I’d wanted to express through words I would be a writer.

  Q.

  A. No.

  Q.

  A. For the viewer? It is the residue of the activity. That fleeting moment and how they themselves interpret that moment.

  Q.

  A. Free it from the dead weight of the world.

  Q.

  A. Valéry said to give sensation without the boredom of its conveyance.

  Q.

  A. I’ve no idea. It is an act of impulse. Impulse that alters itself as I stand behind it.

  Q.

  A. The lure of pure feeling. Nothing more.

  SEAHORSE

  They greet each other with a dance every morning to make sure the other is still alive, and then, for the rest of the day, they float alone.

  TIME IS MEASURED IN CENTIMETRES. One week, one centimetre. It makes me realize how unfair we are to children. Popping buttons, wrists sticking out below shirtsleeves. Pinched and accommodating in last year’s shoes. Warmed and fed and nurtured while we pretend that they are not experiencing something as disturbing as changing size. The sheer panic of taking away what you know.

  That anything could grow in these times is a miracle.

  At first I could barely look at Tacita. A breach of contract. That I should be in this state, the one we agreed would not be ours. Elle est tombée enceinte. She fell. This is the part I hear. How soon it doesn’t matter. Tacita remains the same. We conspire. We make a pact that despite everything, this will be a creative time.

  It has given me new status among the artists. A small rebellion against the bourgeoisie whose eyes flit straight to the bare finger. Wanton. Pauvre cocotte. But general scorn is nothing compared to the anguish from within.

  I do what they say. I drink milk and sleep, deep lumbering sleeps where I am tugged under to blackness. There is nothing left to do but sleep. I am corpulent and raw and all desires are unmediated, like a child’s, and I know that in this puerile state, with this calm body unwieldy and dense, is the promise of coming violence.

  I return to the cocoon that is Mme. Tissaud’s. Her ample arms around me, having swept my studio, a dustpan full of flaked paint, flung the window wide open to let in the autumn air. I tried staying with Tacita and Istvan but their apartment, with all its love and beauty, was weighted. I have unpacked my valise, the shiny lining funereal. Inside I find one of my dresses from the south, crumpled, forgotten. I hang it on the back of the door and iron out its wrinkles with the edge of my hand. The dress is white with small eyelets at the sleeve and hem. I notice a purple stain. Then the deadening sound of a plane overhead. All the planes. French or enemy. No one seems to know.

  I sit still in my chair, waiting for inspiration to arrive. It comes, it doesn’t come. The only thing I am able to do with consistency is record in my sound notebook. The comfort of its cool white pages. Mme. Tissaud gave me an alum-tawed book, one of the books meant for Angel’s library, but she’d stitched the white cover with a faint red linen thread, and it seemed not right for him. She produced it, and I told her of the theft of mine, in that order. Everything with her is in that order.

  Though the smell of solvents makes my stomach lurch, I start to paint again. I worry that parts of me are drifting away. My head feels stuffed thick with cotton. Painting holds me here the way I need it to. The work begins as a glimmer, a sense of something imagined. It slowly becomes something I can see. Then it becomes something I can do. It is a self-portrait. There is something about it that feels final. There are wooden floo
rboards and two walls that form an off-centre corner as though I am putting my subconscious on a quiet, anticipatory stage. I am seated on a chair, also off-centre, and am encircled by animals. A wolf, a white horse, a red fox, a deer, a raven, and other birds at my feet. I have a frontal gaze, eyes locked, unsmiling mouth, hair let loose and moving in an unsettling way. My clothing is earthy and male, with the exception of fine lace-up boots. Bright red slashes of paint alongside my arm show the chair beneath me. It would appear that I am holding court, communing with animals. Though this would be wrong. The index fingers of my right hand are extended in the sign that I have seen in Italian paintings. Extending or repelling evil. Bound in a pact. I spend too much time on the fingers, as they are the hardest to draw. I give everything delineated shadows. The one window is not painted perspectivally. There is a sense, as I paint, of suspended time, not controlled by a clock, where anything might happen. The stark contrast of inside and out. When I stand back, I see how wild I am. The animal in me stares back.

  I sleep on the side my heart is on. I have listened to the heartbeat through a stethoscope. It sounds like horses at full gallop. Sometimes I am up for whole evenings. Tacita tells me that legend says when you cannot sleep you are awake in someone else’s dream. There are days of working and eating bread and cheese and fruit. And then days of cigarettes and wine out with Tacita and the artists. I am reckless, I am chaste, I am dangerous, I am arch. I am sunk.

  You know this is good, Tacita says. Other selves are good. It’s nearly impossible to always be the same person.

  I didn’t want this. But I did nothing. I drifted, went blank. And then it was too late. Tricked by my own body. But the body alone achieves nothing. It pulled me in. Climbed inside my mind, and silenced it. What began as dread became softer, sweeter, sickening in its need. It washed over me with such force, filling every crack. And I find myself startled to not only want it, but to be protective of it. That someone who doesn’t yet exist could have the power to alter my way of being so profoundly is chilling. I lose my grip. But in it, there are flashes of clarity, when for a moment I remember who I am. A current rips through me. I am no longer an inanimate object as all other adults are. The mind floats, but the body is sure as metal.

  It is a public act, this. Everyone has an opinion, all the monologues that are regularly restrained now take on hard, tangible sound. A stranger on the street places his hand on my stomach, uninvited, and says he named his daughters after female saints, and I wonder if the very young woman beside him is one of the saints or his mistress. A woman says my arms are too thin. Another says that God sees everything. She repeats this holding her second and third fingers in a V below her eyes to accentuate, in case I might need a visual aid for His eyeballs boring into my corrupted flesh—reminding me of how much I dislike religion in people. The uniformed men snicker. With their thin cold lips they comment in their language, though it requires no translation.

  The museums have closed. Their collections crated, masterpieces wrapped in horse blankets and sent to the provinces. The rarest animals in the zoos have been evacuated. Each week another one gone. Tacita and I continue our project. We document the disappearing animals. In a small notebook I record their voices while she paints their portraits like royalty. Classically styled, regal, catching their expressions through the bars. It is a departure for both of us. We ask the zookeeper where they go. He tells us nothing.

  Everything about this state is elaborate and held in place, not dramatic like dying. So when I climb the stairs with food procured from tickets and other machinations (I think of Lev’s country, standing in line for onions and apples and matches), a sudden flood of water shocks me. It is warm and streams down my legs, making the wooden stairs slippery. A torrent. River water the faintest pink.

  Like death, birth is too rapid. We wait and wait, but still it is a shock every time.

  I walk slowly, full of purpose, a trail of water, leaking, forming streams, pooling, creating a visible trace of every movement. I place the bag of food on the wooden table. Even in terror, there is protocol. I feel the first stab of pain. I panic, and make an animal sound rapidly becoming a choking, terrified cry.

  I don’t want to do this alone.

  I make my way down the stairs. Mme. Tissaud is out. I walk out zagging onto the sunlit street like a lunatic. In public, I think, nothing bad can happen. This is how unreliable my mind is.

  What I remember flickers. A stranger’s kind face. A dark car. The blur of arches and stone. And then white. I find myself with a stiff sheet over my legs, bright silver lights in my face creating a mosaic of tiny metallic glimmers like the eye of a fly. There is something wrong. Already everything is canted toward danger. I am a different, volatile version of myself. Combative. My limbs flashing and twisting. Fighting everything. What the nurses say when they can’t find any veins. When they wrestle me into an ill-fitting gown and rubber pants like an incontinent child. Tell her, they command one of the doctors. Tell her she will slip and hurt herself in her own waters. Tell her she needs to listen to us.

  I can hear my heart pounding in my ears. Black waves. I see for a moment, then black again. Pain comes with such force it threatens to rip in two and then it moves cleanly away without a mark, leaving stretches of nothingness. Unthreateningly pleasant, like cold water in a glass. In these moments I could paint, smoke a cigarette, kiss. But with the beginning of the stab is the memory of it right there, just below the surface. And when it comes, it comes so hard that it is impossible to do anything else, even breathe. It goes deeper each time. Primordial. Slicing through skin and nerves to underlying bone. Deeper than bone. A body ripping open for life is the closest you can get to your own death.

  Something changes. I try to tell them that I can’t breathe. Everything blurring and flashing, but nothing comes out. I cannot speak. It is like a bad dream where everything is wrong. The loss of voice and the movement of limbs. They are mistaken. I hear them say something. Blood pressure has bottomed out. There is a surgeon. Nurses grab my arms as I flail, and tie them down on either side, spread out like Christ. They say it’s because the instinct is to grab out, to reach down for the baby.

  This isn’t how it is supposed to be. It doesn’t match any of the prior slowness. The indolent growth. The scrimmed mind. The thick long days.

  With other creatures, birth seems other, poetic even. Like seahorses, swimming in pairs linked by prehensile tails. I’ve read of complicated courtships that include full moons under which they make musical sounds. When the males give birth a few weeks later, out of a cloud, like magic, hundreds of fully formed seahorses appear.

  —

  I wake up in the dark. The air is stale. Used up. I am in a room and there are women in beds with iron bars coated with white paint. Bassinets on metal casters beside them. Small catlike cries of tiny pink-faced creatures that barely yet contain sound. I take a deep breath and exhale and realize that there is no knifing pain in my ribs. No sharp twisted muscles. No thick ropy feeling in my stomach. No pressing of hard head on bladder. No pinch and shift of internal organs. I feel open and bare and stretched, like an abandoned carcass. Big pieces of sky between each rib, stripped clean and gleaming. I touch my stomach and it is nothing but soft loose skin, not round and hard. My breathing comes rapid and shallow. All the months it took to get used to the steady growth and in one quick moment, everything gone. The mind does not work this way. This fast. The baby grows and slowly displaces you from your own body, and then tosses it back to you in an instant.

  Beside my bed there is no bassinet. I feel husked. I panic, try to get up. A jolting pain in my stomach. I slide off the bed, attached to an IV, its heavy metal shackles. It isn’t as light and smooth-rolling as I expected.

  I wander through the hall, bare feet cool on the tiled floors, gown falling off my shoulder blade, bumps of vertebrae exposed, raining blows on all the doors. The astringent scent of floor cleaner presses through the halls. Madwoman, I can see this reflected in the nurses’
little eyes like pins that fix a butterfly’s wings.

  There is a note on the door to the nursery. It is a schedule. Fermé. Ouvert à huit heures, it says.

  I bang on the door. A nurse with undertaker makeup comes out and reprimands me. I should not be up. Allez au lit! she says harshly, as though I am a child.

  Ou est mon enfant? I say, at first a quiet rumble and then louder, raging.

  Revenir le matin, she says in a clipped, authoritative voice, pointing to the sign.

  Revenir. Revenir le matin, I repeat catatonically. Tell me what happened. My words come out sounding like shavings on bone. I need to talk to someone. Where is the baby.

  Sit down or you will rip your stitches moving like that.

  Tell me, I scream. Tell me.

  She directs me to my bed and snaps off the light.

  Almost more painful than birth is when the milk comes in. The body gives a couple of days’ respite and then suddenly there is filling, filling, chest hardened swollen, stretched raw, blue veins to the surface. Only there is no baby to alleviate this. Instead they come in, without consent, and in the night bind my chest so the milk will dry up, an act so painful I can scarcely breathe.

  I am told that normally unwed mothers are segregated, but because of shortages we are all in the same ward. It is hard to believe we are anything but in the same ward, sanded down to sameness. At any given moment there are women in other rooms, pacing and groaning and bellowing like animals in a cage.

  C’est à cause de la pleine lune, one of the nurses says. Elle rend les gens fous—she pauses, a sudden hard laugh slams out of her—ou les accouchent.