“So what,” Dori said with her old stubbornness, which popped up all at once, like it used to, before she started trying to please everyone and signed “excuse me” and “please” even to the furniture she bumped into. Because Dori was sure that their mother, well before she was their mother, stood and sang with a rounded mouth. Lili turned off the light. Neither of them fell asleep, at least not right away.
Indeed Mother had two albums that were no longer taken down from the high shelf, because enough was enough, really, but their father had no photos from before they knew him, from before he met Anna. What there was, they knew by heart. One photograph of Alex and Anna from their wedding, standing under the chuppah, young, their father’s hair cut short down to the skull, their hands not touching, and behind them a view of tall buildings. The next pictures were of a tiny Lili in hospital pajamas in their mother’s arms, with wild red hair, and afterward pictures of Lili and Dori together, as if they were twins even though they weren’t, not at all. Their father had a memory like an elephant, so he didn’t need pictures. Absolutely not. And Alex Ackerman’s No List extended almost without end: No father and no mother. No history. No past. History started, they always knew, with him. True, there were the uncles, yes, his two younger brothers, but the two of them evaded any questions they were asked. Regardless, what was there to say, there was nothing to say, not about what was, at least. And if you dug with a teaspoon you’d hit a wall. There was no address where their father and brothers were raised, no door to knock on and find out. Nothing. He was what was. Other than him, what had been, all that was, had died.
“There was a miserable boy.” This was him, who else—Alex Ackerman. The two of them were already old enough to hear. This happened a short time after their mother’s albums disappeared. Almost as if they were receiving something in exchange, which wasn’t logical, because such bartering never interested them. They got the story about the boy. The others brought him, the boy, down to the cellar. They had strong hands, they had a grip you couldn’t escape. They carried him with the kind of ease with which they would carry a wet kitten. They didn’t even have to win his trust like Dori and Lili did when they tried to catch small animals they could raise in a box. He trusted them from the beginning. “Who would he trust, if not them? They were his parents.” Their mother told them the details. Their father confirmed them. Dori and Lili sat close together, like girls, on two mismatched chairs, as if they were really girls and not two complicated mechanisms of black thoughts inside girls’ skin. They saw how the old covenant between their parents tightened again. Alex and Anna were like two hands: one speaks and the other sings (no, no); one tells what was and the other tightens into a fist. Their mother narrated as if she herself had been there, and maybe she had been. Anger bubbled up in them, and after it, astonishment. He had parents. This meant they had a grandfather and a grandmother. But they couldn’t delve into it. Because whoever delved died. Truly died.
They tried hard to think about that cellar. Perhaps they always suspected its existence. Perhaps it was always waiting for them out of the corner of their eyes. They tried hard until they felt four black walls rising up around them and a low black ceiling. Dori felt her tailbone, the spot from which she would sprout a tail if she were, for example, a monkey, grow warm. And in the room it was suddenly hot, very hot. Burning. The chair burned. The bone was forcing her to get up and walk around the room, but Dori remained seated and so did Lili. Their father was the boy from the cellar. This was the period at the end of the sentence, the stain that darkened every view they saw. Once they realized that, it became the one and only true measure for all that had happened.
* * *
And that time their father returned and his face was green and he lay on the couch in his work clothes (by this stage not much remained of the dark rose fabric, the stained and torn cloth; who remembered that once, unnaturally large flowers had bloomed on it?). He puked into a pot without handles that Lili brought him and the two of them squatted around him and attended to him with concern. His vomit was foamy. Blood pooled in the corners of his eyes. Lili grabbed Dori’s hand and signed to her, “Don’t worry, it’s from the metal.” This was one of the side effects of the secure livelihood, their wise livelihood, and the time had arrived for Dori too to know about it, because the last time this happened Dori was just a baby.
It was heavy metal poisoning, the kind that’s life-threatening, even if that life is as unusual as their father’s, their father who seemed in that moment to transform into an antique oil painting of a deathly ill person in the corner of the room, the shadows falling on him and Dori and Lili standing above him dressed in white, holding oil lamps. The pot was filled with thick vomit that gave off a smell of death and it was clear that a doctor wouldn’t be summoned. But Salman was once a medic, one of them recalled. And perhaps he, the father, had called on them from within the painting, whatever it showed. A father lying horizontally and two daughters squatting, wringing their hands and pulling out their hair with worry.
Dori ran to Salman and knocked on his door even though there was clearly no point, but still she wasted almost no time waiting and burst inside, waking him from sleep even though it was only seven in the evening. But when he understood he rose, and without changing his clothes, which were as full of holes as if he had intentionally burned them himself with a cigarette, he began walking, and Dori wanted to remind him that he was wearing oversized white pajamas filled with holes, but she didn’t know how. He walked in front of her with long steps, like a giant woken from his slumber, a mountain that suddenly decided to reveal its legs. He opened the windows in the house and instructed their father to drink milk and luckily there was milk there, almost half a carton, and he cooked a few weeds in a different pot, and their father drank and Salman checked his pulse and they waited.
Alex Ackerman, it turned out, would go on living. No need for an ambulance or to fall into the hands of the butchers of the establishment. Dori knew then that it was the cellar drawing him back to itself like a poisoned mushroom, that the cellar wanted its boy, had sent him poisoned metals from the earth. She told Lili, who shrugged her shoulders because “metal poisoning is metal poisoning, not witchcraft and not mushrooms and not underground arms that reach out from below the earth and grab you.” And the time had come for Dori to know the difference. She preached to her as if she were many years older, as if she were tired of Dori straggling after her like a rag doll after a real girl. Suddenly Lili very much resembled their mother. And this did not please Dori. Lili would have hated it too if she only knew what Dori was thinking.
Lili sat down and opened one of her notebooks and Dori guessed that she would write about the metal poisoning. Lili didn’t show her what she wrote, even though she asked her to. “You’ll read it later,” she explained, because there was no point in hiding it. The two of them knew this. Dori always knew where Lili kept her notebooks. There was no chance she’d do something that Dori didn’t know about. Even when Lili disappeared for entire days, Dori knew that if she only tried very hard, she’d be able to find out where she was. Because that was their way, like conjoined twins who share a single pair of ears.
Lili explained, as she always did, that she couldn’t read it now, that she should come back later, when the ink could no longer be smeared. And once Dori had flipped through the notebook she asked, “Where did you write about the cellar?” and Lili said that she hadn’t. “But why not?” Dori really didn’t understand and her sister winked, and who even knew that Lili knew how to wink? But it turned out she did. It’s possible that Dori also knew how to wink, only she never tried. She squinted the corner of her eye, and Lili said, “I only write chronicles, you know that. You can read whatever you want but I only write the truth,” she signed. “Nothing but the truth.”
* * *
This family is a lone tree falling in the woods, Dori concluded for Anton. And he didn’t even notice that she said “this family” and not “my family.” Because Anton him
self would never touch the walls of a cellar and think: these are the roots, this is the trunk.
8
Picture for yourselves a world made entirely of crystal. Golden and amber. You are the fly trapped inside it. Suddenly you too are beautiful and arouse admiration, like the resin you are trapped in, which over the years grew so valuable, or at least respected. If you don’t arouse admiration, then your six legs, your netlike eyes, your body forever fixed, it will at least get people choked up. That’s how it was then. All at once Dori was the fly. The only problem was that when she learned she was the fly, the amber started shifting around her in golden ripples, the firm became liquid, and suddenly she heard every whisper. Every word. Commas, periods. And she had no way back. It was no longer worth it to be the fly.
Because the official letter finally arrived and the injunction arrived and the establishment arrived. The real establishment, not friendly meetings with Arad when she wrote deformed, plotless fairy tales for him and sometimes also reminded him of their role as the village fools, because she sensed that this would interest him and that stories like this would cause him to come back. But they didn’t see Arad again. Arad who would write the book, who would build up his career on its success, and who’d drown like a man who up to that moment was sure he could walk on water. The establishment itself, square and gray and windowless, replaced him. When it arrives, nothing can stop it. Not even Alex Ackerman, who, perhaps for the first time in his life, didn’t think to escape in time.
* * *
I don’t understand, Anton said. Was the boarding school because of that? And Dori confirmed, it was truly impossible to understand.
* * *
“Dori Ackerrrmmman,” the teacher said in a scolding voice. She called out a name whose syllables spread out and moved through the room like electric shocks, Dooo-rrriiii, again and again roused her from her reverie as if this was the proof, as if answering aloud—Yes, present, the answer is, the moon is a rock floating in space, the formula for water is H20 and on this side of the zero there is a row of negative numbers—was the point. She had to pronounce everything aloud. If she wanted to stay, that is, because there were much worse places and she was lucky that she wound up there out of everywhere. She at least had to say her name. To say, Me. To open her mouth wide. Do-ri.
Strange that they were strict with her like that, scolded her, spoke about last chances. Dori looked at them in astonishment; did they really not know that she had no choice? There was an injunction from the court. It was in the best interests of the child, the girl, her own best interests. There was the old mermaid, with the soft eyes, who accompanied her since the days when she was taken to the white room, a room with a soft rug and not one picture; there was the researcher sent on behalf of the Ministry of Welfare, who continued coming for regular visits; there was a man in a suit who wore glasses. All of them extended cool hands and along this bridge of hands she walked until she arrived here, at the wooden chair facing the green writing desk, on which Dori didn’t leave a single mark even after months had passed. The writing desk was spotless. She didn’t intend to be seen. She didn’t intend to speak, nor, if possible, to hear. She preferred not to.
The house was somewhere. The entire world, the world she was taken from, was somewhere. She was the victim of a kidnapping even if no one treated her like one. Dori was planted with her head in the ground and her feet up on a strange, distant planet with odd customs, where the air was thin and no one needed to carry the globe on one’s shoulder or back, where there was no way of knowing which side to tap the egg on, how to hold a fork or a knife, how to fall asleep at night. Everyone she saw, down to the last person, made shapes with their mouth, insisting aggressively on the click of the tongue, the friction of the palate, the grinding of teeth. Each and every one of them insisted on Dori waking up and admitting the facts.
They waited. They demonstrated patience. They waited for her to begin speaking. Because hearing, they decided, this girl had always been able to do. Years of calculated pretending (so it was said), of hysterical contagion (as the minority opinion put it), finally had to reach their end. After all, deaf doesn’t mean mute and moreover this girl—the girl named D in the semiofficial documents, which flowed in their roundabout way to the curious—this girl could hear. A simple examination was enough to verify this, and the fact that it had taken so long to carry out such a simple and necessary step testified to nothing but negligence.
In some ways she’s really like a baby, they said, her development so delayed that this was a case of late, almost endless infancy. They invalidated the reports by Arad the social worker, who had concluded that the girl was very intelligent, and who had been fooled for so long. The assessment was that this was a case of a family that had deceived the system, and that the girl, who sat facing them on a low chair and didn’t respond to a word, had been but its plaything.
Dori knew little of this at the time. Not the assumptions or the facts or even the stories that they composed between the former and the latter. The words negligence and abandonment were stretched out in arches over her head and she absorbed whatever she absorbed. Dust and shards. The only story that fit together in her head was that she would not be returning home. Rooms were painted in shadowy hues as if colors were gone from the world. They called her name so many times it became stranger than ever, the spoken letters and syllables falling like metal plates onto the floor. More than anything she would remember the smell. The thick smell of the whitewashed room, the smell of mopped floors, the smell of the heavy cologne and perfume that surrounded the men and women who sat across from her, with one leg over the other or planted apart and hands folded between them. The brighter smell of the mermaid, the sharp smell of the man in the suit and glasses, the smell of sweat in the room where she slept, beneath the smell of the liquid disinfectant used on faucets, railings, and plates, a slight smell of urine that was preserved in the dolls they put in her lap so she’d play with them and that perhaps arose from her own self.
Dori’s hair was combed daily and they assisted her in dressing and undressing, in placing the folded clothes on a chair, in brushing the top and bottom teeth. Sometimes it appeared that she couldn’t learn a thing. Each and every day she required the same help she had needed the day before. And their patience definitely could have run out here—all that, just for Dori to spend the day slumped on a chair with crusty eyes and no expression on her face. Only patience was needed, someone opined, so that one syllable might cling to another and you’d have a word, a sentence, an entire conversation. The mermaid sat and smiled and cut her meat for her. Another week passed and she herself separated the rice from the meatballs. The carrots from the rice. The food tasted like sand. She chewed and swallowed.
No, the others said. She’s not like a baby. They identified the rebelliousness in the averted gaze and later in the eyes that just stared off into space or directly at them, empty and glazed over. This girl, they argued, she’s seriously stubborn. “What’s your name?” they asked as if they didn’t know, as if they really wanted to know. “Say your name.” Facing her low wooden chair, they sat on the edge of a metal chair and said Do-ri. Dori. They were many, but afterward Dori remembered one man with an unformed face, a suit, and glasses. What did he demand of her? Very, very little. She only had to repeat after him, to let her voice climb up and out. Sometimes she nearly loved him when he left, he had such white hands.
Time passed (how much? Who knew. Not her. She only knew that time covered her, heavy as a blanket), and the man who wore a suit and glasses continued to come. She barely saw the old mermaid anymore. In one of the meetings she signed her name. The hand formed a sign in the air, open and horizontal; she signed “little one” because that’s what they called her. And then the hand started spelling out the four-letter “D. O. R. I.” She wasn’t stubborn. Understand that, at least, she always wanted to please. She wanted to be a good example; she wanted the man to love her. But she knew that he didn’t see and wouldn’t se
e and the hand fell slack and went back to sleep.
They agreed on one matter only. They’d truly saved her at the last moment; a moment later and it would have been too late. She was a girl raised by wolves, and the wolves were driven out at the right time. At the last moment Dori Ackerman was removed from the wolf’s jaws, if not from its stomach. The mermaid stuck to her explanation that Dori was still holding on to a single strand from her parents’ straw broom and that she must be allowed to let go of it on her own accord (wolves and witches, yes, many images buzzed about among the people who dealt with her case. Each one grasped whatever he grasped and wrote whatever he wrote).
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