Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  Their father wasn’t present whatsoever. If they told her that he flew through the window with the wild geese and went off on hair-raising adventures, Dori would almost believe it. Of course Lili wouldn’t, but that’s already another story. They knew that he lived a tempestuous life, separate from theirs, that his dream was coming true all around him. But Lili also remembered what happened before this, their previous, ancient life, with greater clarity than her sister. And when he returned with a dead goose in his hands, the two of them looked at him. Their father was covered in a thick layer of mud but the dead goose was very beautiful. “Whoever flies with them doesn’t kill them,” Lili explained to Dori. “This goose, there’s no chance that he hunted it. One of his lackeys definitely brought it to him.” The goose had a gentle face like a prince from a book of fairy tales. Their mother rinsed away the blood, cooked it, stuffed the feathers into a pillow. They ate goose soup and goose pie and goose omelets. They threw up after every meal. Lili already barely ate meat by then; she bit hard and chewed hard and said enough. In fact she already barely ate anything, and if someone had paid attention to this they would have thought that she was feeding on the air or the plaster in the walls. Only Dori stuffed more and more into herself.

  And she learned to cook. Because, as her mother announced, all that wandering to the puddle and daydreaming wouldn’t get a person to the grocery store, as if Anna Ackerman ever went to the grocery herself and wasn’t satisfied with the monthly supplies their father brought in burlap sacks. And since Dori hadn’t yet found her talent, because sighing over the beauty of drowsy princesses from fairy tales is a generic attribute, not a talent, it was best to do something with herself. So Dori began cooking (not geese. The next goose that their father brought home they buried in the yard) and their mother grew them vegetables and Lili ate almost nothing. That’s how they were and if their father’s followers and lackeys, the miserable ones, hadn’t brought them more food, they would have continued living on the burlap sacks and expired crates of food and Dori’s attempts at cooking.

  When their father returned home in the evening, always bent over a bit in the doorway and standing up straight once inside, he looked like a giant in Dori’s eyes. His beard again grew wild and his beautiful eyes glanced around happily. And then, as if according to some agreed-upon sign, the world fell into order. Mother and Lili stopped arguing; Dori took off the black swamp boots and kept herself in rather clean socks. Somehow food was brought to the table, one of Dori’s inventions, stuffed eggs for instance, and it didn’t matter to their father anyhow. His only need was to have his fill. He always chopped the same big salad, upon which was poured the same pink dressing that they loved only because it was their father’s specialty, a dressing that required shaking and waiting and pouring from above. Sometimes the thought occurred to Dori that in fact they were presenting to their father the same performance that they had given the reference staff in the previous house. Nevertheless she believed that he was happy because of them and smiled because of them, pleased that they were flourishing like Mother’s plump beets (because it was impossible to deny that she was mainly getting fatter while Lili was mainly growing more beautiful), and she didn’t want to upset him by saying that their days were stuck together like eyelids, that they slept hour after hour and weren’t learning a thing. Dori understood without being told: if you don’t have anything nice to say, just lie.

  6

  “Today bring me the envelopes.”

  “What envelopes?” Dori tried to get out of it, as if she didn’t know. That day, like almost all days, Lili smelled of milk and soap. She lacked patience.

  “C’mon already, the envelopes from the mailbox.” Lili hated leaving the house. She preferred to remain in her room as much as possible, with the notebooks or God knew what. But there were still things that Lili needed from the outside, such as envelopes.

  This started with the announcements on the central bulletin board. Announcements for the transportation times into the city, the movie club, the knitting club, the swimming club. They passed by there with their mother, who in a moment of resolve instructed them to come with her to the hairdresser. Until that day Alex had always cut their hair at home with his black metal scissors, if they had their hair cut at all. Dori loved long hair even if hers looked like mouse tails, even if their father wanted her to cut it so it would grow back stronger, as everything does after it’s cut. Lili had long, knotted red hair that she gathered close to her head. But this time their mother decided to go to the hairdresser’s, which was located in a low house on the other side of the village. They didn’t even know there was a hairdresser there. Dori looked at Lili and said, “Maybe she wanted us to go to the library?” and Lili burst out in her doglike laugh, a glimpse of how Lili used to be.

  The door was open and they entered one after the other and only then discovered that the place was empty. The hairdresser was standing outside and smoking and looking at them. Their mother gave her a note that she’d written in advance. The hairdresser had fiery red hair, a bit like Lili’s but not exactly. Her eyebrows were red as well. She caught Dori looking. “You’ll see when you grow up, today everyone gets it from a tube. Except maybe your sister, who probably got it from some redheaded uncle,” she said, and winked. Dori didn’t wink back. Their mother sat down in a chair and the hairdresser walked behind dragging wooden clogs. “Maybe we rinse the gray out of your hair?” she suggested, and Anna Ackerman’s lips narrowed with resentment.

  The hairdresser’s fingers stirred through her hair and undid the braid. “You actually have a beautiful face,” she said with emphasis and surprise. Lili and Dori were angry, as if it weren’t known to all that their mother was pretty, that even when she was ugly she was pretty. Their mother paid no attention and removed a few sheets of paper from her pocketbook. Dori couldn’t see what was written there and the hairdresser raised her hands, wrapped an apron around their mother’s neck, and began cutting. “So, what’s new with you?” she asked as her hands were busy with their mother’s hair, hinting at the coming motion of the scissors. She added, “Young women need to be well put together.” Dori deliberated over whether or not she was being serious. The hairdresser’s face was reflected in the mirror, almost floating over the hairdresser’s robe she was wearing, and her mouth brought to mind a dead fish. It expressed horrible things, and across their mother’s beautiful face spread silent agreement. If they could hear maybe it would have been possible to listen to how the hairdresser cut the empty space, a moment before the black scissors swooped down and cut the hair for real. But they didn’t hear.

  When they left there, their mother with her hair cut and the girls as before, the hairdresser removed her robe and swept up all the hair clippings into the garbage. She swept up the notes as well, those that Anna Ackerman wrote: “I would like to have my hair cut.” “I can pay.” And the note on which was written in French the word bob. “Such poor souls,” the hairdresser whispered to the scissors and the brushes, to the nearly professional blow-dryer, because in truth no one was there to hear.

  Dori made a request that normally wouldn’t have much of a chance, but maybe the French bob had raised their mother’s spirits and she agreed to stop by the store, which had no sign above it. They waited for her outside, Dori swaying to and fro. They saw her clogs through the crack in the door, standing last in line to buy them phosphorescent candies as if they were six years old. Lili was the first. The first to notice the announcements. And Dori looked as well and saw that the tacks pinning them to the cork bulletin board were all different. Their rounded heads were engraved with a club, a flower, a droplet, a star. The two of them looked. The tacks were different shades of gold. They glowed. Lili quickly removed the four tacks from the notice and gave them to Dori. She took the flyer “Swim Club Starting” from the board and folded it up. Dori put the tacks in her pocket; they poked her as she walked. She thought that Lili would get angry but her sister nodded. It’s good to destroy evidence. As they wa
lked to the house behind their mother, phosphorescent candies illuminating the darkness of their mouths, Dori asked Lili under their mother’s line of sight: “Are you crazy? You want to learn to swim? They’ll never ever let you.” Lili answered, “Who cares about swimming? Didn’t you see what was weird about that flyer?” Dori took the flyer from her hand and tried to understand, like a riddle. She guessed, “The club’s at six in the morning? Probably no one will go.”

  “No, look at the letters. You saw the flyers for crochet and the movie club; only this one was handwritten.”

  “Who wrote it?” Dori asked, and Lili closed her eyes and elaborated: “Someone whose stomach hurts. Someone who misses their son. Someone who chews gum.”

  “Three people?”

  “No, the same one.”

  In their room, Lili asked Dori to help her remove her boots. They were small on her, but Lili said she didn’t feel it because her toes froze after a while. She didn’t ask where the boots were from—they were blue, beautiful, made from soft leather, not appropriate for the village—just as she didn’t show her that she placed the four tacks in Uncle Noah’s miniature child’s bed with the rectangular headboard.

  The next day she said that she needed envelopes. There was a reason for all this, because a talent you don’t cultivate is worth nothing, and Lili had found her talent. More than the chronicles, even, she needed to practice analyzing handwriting, understanding the writer deeply, what troubled him, what he loved. Because it turned out she had a sense for this—a talent, that is. She told Dori that she could learn everything about the writer from their writing. This information too was a kind of fact. A fact out there in the world just waiting to be found. In a few more years she’d be a detective and solve murders using only handwriting. So Dori wandered around the village looking for handwriting for her to practice with, and returned to the bulletin board, but there really wasn’t much there other than a note about lost keys, which she took; then she passed by the post office and took two envelopes sticking out of mailboxes.

  Lili was pleased, even though Dori said that she’d never in her life do that again. Lili actually kissed her on the forehead in thanks and opened up the first letter. It was in English. Lili read and explained, “This woman is in terrible mourning, I see that she lost everything she had.” “Let me read,” demanded Dori, who was certain that this was written there. She looked at the page of thin lines but didn’t understand a thing. All the letters were connected one to the other in loops of ink and the only words she managed to decipher concerned a vacation and the seashore. “You’re just making it up,” she said, and returned the letter to Lili. “You know I’m not making it up,” Lili said, and glued the letter to her notebook as evidence. “When I read someone’s handwriting I know everything about him. Where he’s been and where he’s going, what he likes to eat and what makes him sick.”

  “Well, even if you know everything about him,” said their mother, who had forced her way into the conversation, “then you’ll still have no idea about what he sounds like.” She smiled a wide smile, and Dori could have sworn that she was pleased by Lili’s shock, because she had made fun of her in a way that mothers are never supposed to make fun of their daughters.

  * * *

  You never told me this, Anton said with obvious appreciation. So I’m telling you now, Dori said. And could she really do that, your sister? I’m just telling the story, she said, and slipped away from him. Because she knew that this was a test, that there was no way he believed the fabrications of a thirteen-year-old girl. Even she didn’t exactly believe them, and in those days she would believe three impossible things well before breakfast.

  * * *

  This lasted as long as it lasted. Until the day their father returned home, his hands rust-stained, ignoring their mother as he had since she’d gotten her hair done, and went straight up to the two of them where they sat staring into space on the green couch that had already started to rip. “So Lotti needs to come and tell me that you’re thieves?”

  “We didn’t steal anything,” Lili said.

  “From mailboxes! No less! What’s my genius daughters’ next move? Robbing a store?”

  The anger darkened his face until it seemed to Dori that in a moment his fury was liable to turn into laughter, because it wasn’t possible that this black fury was real. In a parallel world, he would praise them for their subversiveness. He would say that they were starting to fulfill their role, the role assigned to them; finally they were the fifth finger. But none of this was said. The hands fell silent and Lili was all white. White as milk.

  “We were only fishing,” Dori explained. That’s what they called it, fishing for envelopes.

  “Your sister is a little girl.” He faced Lili and ignored Dori, as if Dori wasn’t there at all, not in the room and not in the world. “But you had to know. Running around the village like two criminals. They saw you, you understand? You want them to take you away? To an institution? Do you understand what you’ve ruined?”

  Nothing could be said. Maybe they were the fastest signers in the west, maybe their hands spoke quick and precise, but their father’s hands swallowed up all time and place. They left a desert behind.

  “Return all the letters you stole and write a letter of apology for the bulletin board. As for your punishments, we will have to see.” He said “we” and meant “I.” They had already started to learn something about the punishments that rained down on him in his childhood, and he, unlike them, had never stolen.

  “We don’t have the letters, and Dori’s not to blame. I did it.”

  “I had no doubt. So tell me, where are the letters?”

  “I burned them.”

  She was ready for the slap Lili would receive, for the cheek that would burn with her too. But she didn’t know that it would actually be her mother who would land it on the two of them, one for Lili and one for Dori. There was a deep, infinite justice in this. Because it didn’t matter what they would say, what Lili would say, what their hands would sing, Dori knew: the two of them were guilty.

  7

  While they were together, she thought he didn’t resemble anyone she knew. Anton was a memento from a separate world, a beautiful, stubborn thing she didn’t quite understand. A wormhole leading to a world where they eat caviar and discuss Goethe and bonds. Surprisingly, the world in her imagination resembled an old movie house, like the one that she and Lili, all washed and bundled up, were once taken to from the village: “Because even if you don’t hear, you’ll at least enjoy what’s happening on the screen.” As if they were two orphans, their cheeks blue from the cold, taken in by philanthropists in a carriage. She still remembers how marvelous the velvet seats and velvet curtain were, and the darkness that fell on all the children who sat there, even the two girls sitting up straight in the fifth row. And when the movie started it shocked her body; she thought, This is what electricity feels like when it passes through you, and she had to leave, quickly. She tugged Lili’s hand, but Lili stayed.

  * * *

  Their mother had two leather-bound albums with her old name, “Anna Cohen,” imprinted in the center of their binding. When their hands were clean they were allowed to browse through them. Lately, though, only Dori looked at the pictures and sighed over their beauty. A freckled girl with a pug nose and a thick black braid appeared in most of the pictures. When she wasn’t holding a parasol at Purim or leaning on a hollow wooden horse decorated in festive colors, she sat at a long Passover table, her hands crossed, her back straightened, her face glowing with a smile. There were pictures that showed her playing sports, lithe and flexible, qualities that neither of her daughters inherited. She, or someone who very much resembled her anyway, jumped over a hurdle, hung from rings, grasped a pole. They didn’t know what most of these activities were called. And didn’t remember if the leather cylinder with legs that she jumped over was called a horse or a donkey. They had no one to ask; their mother wouldn’t agree to look at the albums. I have
no time for that, she declared, but the two of them remembered that once she would sit next to them and explain every little thing.

  On the last page of the album were two glue marks without photos. “What happened to the pictures?” Dori asked the last time she looked at the album; it was a mellow afternoon, the light filtered in and rested on the couch with the flower cloth that Dori had found and placed there to make it pretty. In that mellow light you almost didn’t notice that the cloth did no such thing, that the room remained as it was, just with a covering of roses. Specks of dust stood flickering in the air, living their tiny, strange lives. Their mother boiled like a kettle with a black bottom. She hurled the pan with the signs of soot and the burnt oil into the sink, frightening Dori. “Nothing happened. There were never any pictures.” At night she and Lili spoke opposite the glow that the night-light gave off (because sometimes Lili didn’t just turn over to the other side and pretend she was sleeping, sometimes she gave in and they spoke almost like before). Lili said there were definitely pictures of the boyfriend she had before Father. “But she didn’t have a boyfriend before Father,” Dori protested in surprise. Nonetheless Lili was certain about what was in those pictures once glued to the pages. A tall, handsome man with a square jaw and hair the color of apricots. A man who rode horses and motorcycles and shot moving targets. Dori didn’t believe her. Actually, she remembered that there used to be something else there, a group of girls with arched eyebrows and round mouths. “You mean the class picture,” Lili declared. “She has a ton of those.” “No,” insisted Dori, who had already seen their mother’s other class pictures, with the X that always marked Anna Cohen’s spot, even though there was no need for it. They always knew it was her. She tried hard to remember, and very slowly, details of the pictures or at least one of the pictures appeared. She recalled that her mother stood in the center, hands folded, her round mouth smeared with pink lipstick, her braid to the right. “I think they were singing,” she said suddenly. Lili sat up in her bed and with her right hand pointed the light away from Dori’s finger and toward her own face. “What are you talking about, singing? She’s deaf, our mother’s deaf,” she explained slowly, as if Dori had suddenly gotten mixed up. “She was always deaf. How would she sing?”