When the director came from the Volkov Museum, Skeet says, I heard Valentina say she would track you down, as though she hadn’t just received sound files from you. In those deadly goddamn conservancy progress meetings, she began to imply that the dictionary was over, and that your single-mindedness around it was a sign that you really had gone crackers. When the painting sat in her office and she made no move to notify you, I began to wonder if it wasn’t she who was crazy.
Skeet says he radiated with anger. He will confront Valentina. No, he will call the police. No. He will do neither. He once told me that everything he knows he stole. Only he didn’t realize what he was getting into. And still, he couldn’t stop. Not all of life is accumulation. Sometimes a single moment of a single day can determine a life.
He observed when Valentina took her coffee each morning in the small glassed-in eating area with smooth birch tables and a view of the treetops. She would sip from her mug with her notebook and files in her lap and read for a quarter of an hour, sun on her shoulders. He picked a bright cold morning, moved quietly, clicked the door shut. He knew he had only minutes. His heart beat wildly but he was oddly focused. He took the pin from between his teeth. It slipped in his damp fingers as he twisted it into the lock of the drawer underneath her desk. After an excruciating minute of frantic precise movements, it opened. He pulled out the letters and put them in his bag that also contained a hard drive of every single file from the dictionary he wiped clean from the sound lab. The documents and the painting were not where he remembered them in Valentina’s office. He panicked. His eyes scanned the room, tidy and sharp. He opened the filing cabinet. There were steps at the door; he held his breath. His head chases the image of his mother painting her toenails on the metal steps of the fire escape with the glass bottle he had pocketed for her for the first time. He felt so odd because it had both made her happy and violated something. He was probably only six or seven. She saw him looking down at her. Why so glum chum? No harm, she paused. Done. The steps continued along the hall, and he let out air silently. He found the file folder containing faded records from a hospital in Paris, from Spain. There is a report from an internment camp, a pale blue telegram, adoption papers, a letter from an art appraiser. He takes the entire folder and puts it in his bag. His eye catches the edge of a padded grey envelope. He pulls it delicately, slips it under his shirt. The sharp corners prick his chest as he walks out the door and shuts it behind him. He slides his hand along the cool wall, perhaps to steady himself, or to remind himself of where he is, or both. He moves through the hall in long strides, his shoes are silent. He takes the stairs, and then holds his plastic security card underneath the thin red line of the scanner. Hurry, he thinks. No, stay still. Nothing happens. Finally, there is a beep. The turnstile opens and he walks through the doors. The sun flickers onto his face, his back to the building. After all the years spent there, all the hours with Ivory in the sound lab, he understands that he will never see it again. He doesn’t turn around.
—
Do you want some water Frame?
Thank you. No. Skeet. There is some sherry on the kitchen shelf.
I’ll get it. He stands up, his legs carrying him toward the house.
I sit huddled in this cave, little animal that I am. I had never thought ahead to what would happen once the baby was born. Lev was unreachable. There was, eventually, no post. No news, good or bad. He knew nothing of me. He was dead in the eyes of everyone.
Skeet comes back in what seems like an instant. Youth. The distinct thud of his gait, sun-swung into the cave carrying a bottle and glasses. He pours the sherry into a cheap tumbler and passes it to me, putting the bottle down on my desk. He hesitates—it is morning still, or perhaps because it is a woman’s liquor—and then pours a glass for himself.
We sit, joined in thinned silence.
How, I finally say, did she die, Skeet?
He braces himself, sitting up higher on his elbows. It said—He chooses the word carefully, letting all the other ones fall away. Fire.
But Frame, she too had— He shifts so quickly on the desk edge that he spills his glass.
Jeanne had a daughter, he announces slowly. Lou. He pauses. Feeling the need to add something, says, She lives in New York.
Loup? I say in disbelief.
Lou. No “p.”
History shifts underfoot. Unreliable ground. I’ve no idea where to take refuge. Everything built around love ruptured, a child who died. This information trips up my plodding rhythm. Like the composers who insert a scherzo two-thirds into a piece. A joke. But here it comes out dark and heavy, savage almost.
There is a roar of an engine swinging into the drive. I am filling with pain and exhaustion. The physical miseries setting in as they reliably do. I can tell by the urgency and economy of Skeet’s movements that he thinks it is to do with the conservatory.
We hear the crunching of gravel up above. Skeet and I sit huddled in pitch-black silence. He folds his hands behind his skull, his frame long against the rounded walls. With his arcane knowledge and renegade bloodline, it strikes me that he makes the perfect criminal. He told me once that when he was small, he had seen his mother take a bottle from the shelf at the liquor store and put it under her coat. She told him it isn’t stealing if you really don’t have the money to pay. He said he realized in that moment that thieves are never made later in life. It only comes easy when you have always done it. He won scholarships that were never quite enough to live on. He told me when we first met that he was so broke at university he’d sold his blood for a doughnut. And now here he is with me. And I think, As with animals, association with anything weaker foreshadows doom. Lawlessness demands synchronous agility of mind and body. Like that French-Algerian writer and her lover who broke the same bone in their foot escaping from different prisons.
The gravity of the situation just now flickers through. I’ve had grief and joy in my life but nothing like this.
I don’t know who I am, I say.
I’ve said it out loud. Everything dislocated in my mind. What a person does is who they are. The work accesses the deepest part of me. Which is not a part.
Skeet, I say slowly, it’s just— I’ve survived such a long time. It can’t end with a witless falling-off.
Then don’t let it.
Dread fills the space.
You’ve never spoken about Lev. About your past.
You might be the only one who knew not to ask.
It is there. It is always there. Offered up on these delicate documents thin as cigarette paper. Documents with signatures and stamps that have crossed vast spaces. It is all recorded. It is not a mystery. Things don’t just slip away.
He hands me the file, but I have no need for these coloured papers, pale and small, covered in elegant script and silver type, beautiful and inaccurate. Written out in languages I do and do not speak. How could something so neat and thin possibly tell of life, so huge and hard and wild.
Prénoms: Jeanne Albertine. Sexe: Feminin. Née à l’Hôpital Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, le 10 février 1941. Mère naturelle: Ivory Frame. Père naturel: Inconnu.
Parents adoptifs: Gilles et Marie Archimbault du Souillac, France.
Nombre: Ivory Frame. Género: Femenino. Años: Aproximadamente veinte. Cabello: Marrón. Ojos: Marrón. Altura: 170 centímetros. Peso: 43 kilogramos. Nacionalidad: Británica. Observaciones: Rechazó el examen físico. No responde a castigos por parte de las enfermeras. Es incapaz de caminar en línea recta. Es incapaz de subir escaleras. No come. No puede dormir por la noche. Su sentido moral es cuestionable. Solitaria. Delirios: 1. Cree que la institución es ‘Un Inframundo’.
2. Asegura que puede comunicarse con animales. Diagnosis: posible psicosis, delirios, reacciones de ansiedad. Lev Aleksander Volkov. Feind ukrainischer Herkunft. Camp des Milles. Entkommen, April 1940. Nähere Umstände unbekannt. Verhaftet und inhaftiert, August 1941. Ausweispapiere: nicht vorhanden. Einweisung in Drancy 11. Juni. 1942. Morgenappell bei Gewitter: Häftl
ing abwesend. Flucht des Häftling bestätigt, 14 Uhr. Nähere Umstände unbekannt.
When Lev escaped to Paris, no one was there. It seemed the city had been boarded up, emptied out. Their flags snapped overhead. The streets quiet, dark, and foul-smelling as though there had been an epidemic. He didn’t know of anything. He didn’t know that Istvan had moved to work out of the south. That Tacita was gone. That I had gone. That somewhere along the way to the coast, I broke. Was given drugs, injected into my spine, that created such terror the doctors thought they could shake me sane.
In the clinic, I had gone to hell. At least that is what I felt. Food administered through a tube in my arm. The door in my room has bars. I feel like a wild animal caught. I don’t know where I am or why I am here. There is a mattress scarcely covering the slats on my cot like a whale skeleton. Starched-collared nurses with their clanging keys and coloured pills, thin lips telling me I am here for a rest, their voices moving at terrifying speeds, never looking at me, instead picking up the chart at the end of the cot. Reduced to a white rectangle. I am given one dirty sheet and a pencil. There is the smack of the little explosion of the gas lamps turning on. The milky light. The smell of blood and urine and ammonia coming from the black and white diamond tiles. Long empty days full of terror for simply being somewhere where no one else is.
At night, I twist in my sheet. I examine the details of my captivity: the cheap varnished wardrobe, the objects they eventually give back to me—a jar of face cream, centimes, a small mirror. I hold them carefully. In my hands, they bristle with meaning. I arrange them as though they might contain the answer to escape but when I wake up each morning nothing is coming off them. They have lost their significance. One day, through a window in the hall, I hear the click of horse hooves on the stones, followed by the low call of a pigeon on the grubby windowpane. Glimmers of sound that make me desperate for the outside world. I catch my mind looking for Lev’s face and feel such sharp pain I erase the memory of him. My mind is not right. I am not yet well. There is a doctor who offers to help, occasionally putting his cigarette in my mouth, but when he slides his hand up my thigh, I understand what kind of help.
Eventually they give me books but I have no interest in them, no desire to read. The head nurse is often followed by a black dog. Medium-sized, soft-hearted, with wiry hair and large wet eyes. I feel desperate to read his inner resources. I can hear vibrations of beings and feel no need to communicate in the normal way. Spanish words bullet off the walls, needing no translation. My body is always burning hot. I wipe it with the nightdress worn all day, all night, and far too large. There is no monthly bleeding because I am neither woman nor person, just eyes and skin and organs. But when asleep in the windowless room, I am in my body. I dream I am pregnant. When I wake there is no stomach, no baby. Foolishly alone. I sink into a deep panic. Lying on my narrow mattress, I become the child. I stretch my arms or move my fingers, and, for a moment, I feel I am the baby. The one robbed of childhood, never to experience its sorrow or its magic. I wonder if dying is harder than being dead. I can’t seem to walk properly. My mind tries desperately to unite with my body, but everything is jammed.
After a stretch of silent weeks, I see parts of myself flicker in, all my senses quickened. A moth flutters into my room, its wings jerk and catch the light from the exposed bulb and flash bright and precise as paper. There is an inch of hope. The wings say: tragedy will be burned, nothing more can die.
I discover that I am not in a mysterious place. It is a madhouse. I draw maps of escape and then one day, miraculously, I do. My parents want me further away so as not to bring further disgrace. It puts an end to speculation as to how I got here. The institution isn’t what they object to. It’s the other things I have done. They send their housekeeper to take me to a new clinic. We drive along the highway beside a lorry crammed with sheep. Their braying is fierce. But my mind feels clear and sharp in the outside air, enlivened at leaving behind the dirty, sordid world of the institution. The feeling of moving toward a precise, mathematical existence. In town, we stop to eat at a restaurant. The housekeeper eyes me nervously. I realize that she is hesitating to give me a knife, which suddenly strikes me as uncontrollably funny though I don’t dare laugh. I excuse myself, go to the washroom, and am thankful I have calculated correctly. I crawl out the window and eventually make my way to the port. I wait and wait for passage.
Months later, on the street in Lisbon, I see a figure in the distance. A man walks toward me. The man is Lev.
MOURNING DOVE
Fast flight, bullet-straight vector.
Wings make sharp whistling noise.
One of the most hunted species.
WE BOTH HAVE TICKETS in our pockets. My ship, his plane. We don’t know how to greet each other. Nothing is as I had imagined. I am frailer, wilder. He is toughened. We are fallen. But when we move closer to each other it is the same. Parched hearts, earth-struck, everything gold. He takes my hand and kisses the ends of my fingers. A welter of heat in my insides. I have been so numb, it makes me aware of how much my body suffered, separate from him. I am reminded how remarkable his movements are. His mesmerizing eyes, their mad quick glitter. How they knife into you. I am immediately brought back to the agony of him. The touch of him is all. It slices my past from me. It is hopeless to try to recover my sense of what is happening, the surface of my mind slips. This moment will never play out slow enough. His presence so sharp I feel it in my teeth. His cool skin. He smells like the forest. This history of skin. Every organ in slow articulation. A list of hungers. The pull and click, the honesty of shameless coarse desire. My obedience to it. Shoulder, mouth, wrist, neck. How quickly he alters me. My mind burns. When someone is killed. When a baby dies. When someone returns from the dead. When death is woven into every single thing. It seems ridiculous to give up anything, however imperfect. To not simply dwell in the miracle of the body—it is stronger than anyone thinks. He touches my face, my hair, blown and knotted as though I am at sea. I wonder if he sees that I have lost my youth. He would never say it, but it would be true. Of all the death. Of everyone vanished. All this weight that came suddenly, the burden of it. And then, he stands here in full tide. Alive. It is so surprising, that we insisted, it seems, on living. We hold each other with sounds of gears shifting, shoes on cobblestones, and voices speaking in a different languages all around us. He kisses me, gravely, sensually. Everything goes silent for the length of a single breath. My heart deepens its beat. That familiar feeling of being both hollowed out and then completely filled, with what I am never sure. My mind filled with a thousand things I cannot tell. He says he thought he would never find me. I say I thought he was dead. He looked for me in Paris, but I had left. Taking nothing. He hadn’t, at first, accepted this as an explanation. I notice he has new clothes, but this isn’t what creates difference. I see that something else has changed. He carries himself differently. His world caught. His movements unfamiliar. A buoyancy lost. But then I understand it is not he who has changed but me. That he has always had the knowledge that life evades. That we grasp it only for a moment. It is what makes him untouchable, yet oddly more alive.
I am engaged.
His voice like the centre of a flame.
My heart snaps in two.
I see the dark beginning to unwhorl. I try to think of when I last was looking at him. Time is so different, I think, when we are in pain, when we suffer.
An American, he says. She will get me to New York.
My body grows so cold it feels like burning.
She helped with my papers.
My hands tremble. A jolting pain like a nick to the arteries.
She is wealthy.
My eyes rip the pavement below his feet. Trying to comprehend what he says though I am still taking him in, I am still with him, the image of him. Stunned that he can announce he is leaving, as though he is an ordinary man with an ordinary fiancée.
He is held back by torment. Ivory. His eyes search my eyes. They con
tain all we cannot alter. He says, The only person I have ever loved is you.
And I think, That is a lie that tells the truth.
The only way I know how to express myself is to offer him my body. From the top of my skull downward a scalding pain. He knows what I think. That too much has passed between us. Too many things, and how would you begin to tell? But we are forced to go on as people do.
I can’t find my pitch. I’m gone. Everything in me that was you is gone. Lev. Can’t you see? But this is not what I say. Instead I walk back with him to my rented room like an animal dragging a trap. It is bright with the last available light. The tree out the window, with its good practical leaves like a memorized poem. Each of us with so much to say, but acutely aware that words so often say nothing. They strike the wrong spot. They force you to give up. Maybe this is why we use the same two dozen words for everything. And the truth is, you could search your entire life and you would never find a phrase that would even remotely fit this moment. I know Lev doesn’t feel this way. He says words can be as precise as an arrow.
He tells me he hasn’t painted in so long it feels like injury.
I gave away all my art supplies, I say. Everything.
It is possible to begin again.
His words are pressed, lasting. He is right. This notion of what must be moved toward is inside me like a separate person. I know, I say. What I want is to tell him everything, but there is no translation. And what good would it be, if we were able to tell all there is to tell?
Ivory. Where are you? You seem. Separate.
We are silent.
I learned it from you.
Nothing can keep me from you.
You, the one who has never needed anyone.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 25