Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  But alongside the relative restraint with which the institution’s educational staff treated her, the children adopted surer means. These were very accomplished children and they wanted to prove she could hear, who was she kidding? If the whispers and screams didn’t work, the pinches, shoves, and notes buried in her clothes would. In truth this was quite banal but nevertheless, as is the way with these things, effective. It was not for nothing that the educators believed in the healing power of the company of other children, in the power of the flock to awaken the failures, in that power, as of the students of the great sages, to toughen each other up with suffering, to sharpen knives against their thighs or however that saying goes. So without announcing it, by some turning of a blind eye that did the trick, they let the children be. And the children saw her.

  * * *

  Anton looked at her as if she were suddenly transparent and he could see through her to the expensive drawing that was hung up behind her. She saw how his eyes wandered along the thin sketched lines suggesting two pregnant women. She guessed that he had already identified himself with those other children. But Dori herself knew that this couldn’t be. There are things that permit no reason to doubt. The very paleness that spread across his face was evidence that Anton would never have joined them.

  * * *

  And one day a bird sang outside her window:

  Soon little Dori Ackerman

  will finally

  open her mouth.

  It will be a beautiful day

  when Dori Ackerman

  admits it all.

  The bird was right, of course. It was a fact that Dori heard it singing even though the window to her room was sealed shut. Because on that day, which would certainly be a spring day, the flowers would be blooming in the garden of the institution, the birds would be singing, and all the measures that had been taken would retroactively be deemed to have been necessary. Clearly it would have been better if she had given up and surrendered on her own. Clearly that would have been easier, and things would have played out in her favor. Many would even have agreed with the bird’s speech, if only they had managed to hear its voice.

  But Dori Ackerman was a loyal soldier in a different army. Despite everything, she knew the children didn’t and wouldn’t see anything about her. She was Columbus’s egg and they were foolish Spaniards who would never reach America and would never discover a thing.

  * * *

  Sometimes she saw the three of them in the house in the village, without her, but less and less over time. Their house teetered like a nutshell, like a paper cutout in which everyone’s likeness would dwell for eternity. Her mother’s paper doll was a crying figure. The tears ran from her eyes in two long white strips that fell to the earth. Her father stood on a small hill, his hands in his pockets, but the paper clouds of smoke that were cut from his pipe signaled to her that everything was temporary, everything precarious, and that she must remember who they were, she must remember the pinky finger. Whereas Lili, Lili was folded up like a boy in a box of matches. She missed her, Dori did, as she would a hand cut off with a knife.

  PART TWO

  OTHER SISTERS

  I would like more sisters, that the taking out of one, might not leave such stillness.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  LILI

  Alex and Anna left me alone like generals giving up on a lost battle in an ongoing war. Because Father and Mother went back to being who they always were, Alex and Anna Ackerman, without any extra add-ons, getting along better without offspring around. Behind Father went his regular pack: Aharon the deaf, who made wooden sculptures that always looked like broken ships, smiling with his wide lips to show how harmless he was; Lotti, who was fat and dimpled, and looked warm even though she showed no warmth to anyone other than my father; Uri, who wore an ironed blue uniform every day and never did anything; Ogden, who since meeting my father had removed the devices from his two ears and felt twenty years younger; and Salman, who remained as he was. They followed him, a line of motherless ducks. They loyally carried out my mother’s longtime task, quacking yes and yep. My mother, who during that year stopped crying and went on longer and longer trips and returned from them glowing, eyes torn open, as if she had seen an exceptional natural phenomenon. A glacier or a fjord or a sperm whale washed up on the shore. But I already understood that since there were very few natural phenomena where we lived, she was apparently seeing something else.

  We didn’t talk about Dori. Dori was even more hopeless than I was. I was the touch of a finger away, even if no one around us touched anyone. In the beginning they told me the country was small, I could visit her, but we never did. “Didn’t you once have a sister?” they asked me at the regional school. “Weren’t there two of you?” I wagged my tangle of hair, orange as sun-drenched apricots, and pretended I didn’t hear. Perhaps I really didn’t; sometimes deafness is very useful. If my parents had long since accepted my flimsy cooperation, my passive belonging, Father’s pack was in despair over the situation. The hard core (because there also was a softer layer around it, like a cloud of busy electrons) nevertheless tried to convert me. Lotti especially was determined to baptize me into the covenant of the innocents. The ceremonies she thought up always included a water motif and the smashing of hearing aids with a sledgehammer. She was easy to avoid, but her fervor impressed me. I understood that she was trying to like me even though she never succeeded. The five of them tried really hard to win my father’s affection, the kiss that always remained on his lips and that no one earned, like in Peter Pan.

  More than anything, the quackers saw the aids I wore to school as their personal failure. When they saw me they shook their heads and Lotti rocked her whole body for emphasis, how sad, Alex’s daughter of all people. I could have told them that their Alex wasn’t much of a father, but they wouldn’t have listened to me. Turns out that they too discovered the advantage of deafness, probably even before I did.

  And I actually loved our language. No, it was deeper than love. That’s like saying you love your internal organs. They are the words that spell the world, the words with which I said “I” and “sun” and “home” and “Dori.” Like in that Russian song that Mikala insisted on playing for me on repeat when I moved to New York, and that she translated loosely, because being exact is never possible: “I wish there would always be sun, I wish there would always be sky, I wish there would always be mother, there would always be me.” She sang along to the recording in her broken voice, which didn’t fit her at all, and said that roots were important, and I told her that those weren’t my roots. And she insisted on translating it into English and claimed with emotion that mother is the source of the world and I agreed and sang sky and mother and sun.

  But beneath that I said, Dori. I signed onto my hand her name and my name, but only that and only there. Because from the time I decided to stop speaking our language, I preferred to be silent. This began at the regional school, where the more silent I was the more popular I became. I got excellent grades, even though I didn’t make a sound in class. Perhaps it was actually because of that. I was silent as a stone, like a mermaid whose voice has been taken. That’s what Dori would have said; between us she was the one stuck on fairy tales. Silence, I thought then, is the only thing that will save me. When I was left alone I was no longer willing to be mocked. There are things that two can absorb that one cannot.

  And at home as well, it was as if everything had changed. The establishment was watching Alex and Anna through a magnifying glass, this we knew; they were waiting for another mistake on their part, for more neglect and foolishness, but the focused gaze made Alex hold his head up straight, root up weeds, give Lotti and Ogden and all the rest the rules of the current management, the tedious detail work. Even the scenery around us changed. Our empty flowerpots filled up with plants that were supposed to last in all weather, even in the desert; the envelopes from the regional council were opened, the letters read and arranged in a pile; Lotti took on
cleaning duties and Ogden was in charge of upkeep. Uri walked around and around like a guard, dressed in blue and clutching a crooked branch to defend against potential enemies. These were the foundations of Alex’s kingdom, even though I didn’t know it yet. Around then, Salman planted the first apple tree saplings. Perhaps because the apple was Anna’s favorite fruit or maybe Dori’s. I always hated apples. Anyway, I think the saplings were given to Salman as a gift, but this, of all memories, I doubt. The world gave my father’s people nothing but obvious flaws.

  * * *

  In the beginning they came for weekly meetings and afterward they showed up twice a week and quite quickly the empty units once occupied by immigrants were in use. They lived around us like small, hardworking mice, but they still resembled ducks most of all. Alex’s followers were characters organized around a single attribute, flat as a pancake or a parable. And with all their one-dimensional might, they settled among us and announced that they had no intention of leaving.

  Father’s quacking ducks would come up to me with eyes ablaze and hands shaking. They said to me with heavy mouths, in a language that a few of them spoke with an impressive stammer, that there was no man as marvelous as my father. My mother’s few friends, whom she assembled from God only knows where, admired her and despised my father. They said that she was wasted and meant that she was wasted on us, on the husband and the daughter. Her garden won one prize and then another. Her friends took her out to coffee and cake. Perhaps it wasn’t the friends but someone else. I learned to nod like a bobblehead dog by the windshield and then, as in an old trick, I came to resemble the windshield itself. I became transparent. And not even this changed anything. I was a weight around their necks. I was the tree planted in the wrong soil. The branches obstructed their view, they saw through me.

  * * *

  Father and Mother and I, still living at one address. If we had a dog, the picture would have been complete. No one spoke about Dori. Because from the time that everything was decided and agreed upon, with swift legal and social work intervention from the regional council, the die was cast. Due to the charges, which were later dropped, my father was in custody for almost a week. He returned with his beard shaven and his eyes sparkling. He was thin and happy. Someone said that his lawyer slid him out of there like an envelope under the door. “They had no reason to arrest your father,” the lawyer said to me, of all people, when he returned him to our house. “To be disabled is not a crime.” I didn’t tell him that there was no point in addressing me, I didn’t tell him that he should revise the dictionary when addressing Father’s quacking followers. He sat on the edge of the porch and when Father entered he called after him, “Mr. Ackerman!” But Father went right past the lawyer, walked right past me too like I wasn’t there. Father didn’t hear.

  I counted the changes to myself, reluctantly interested in them. He, Alex Ackerman, began smoking again but went from a prisoner’s cheap cigarettes to a pipe that Uri carved for him, engraving in it his initials, “A.A.,” and my mother sat silent for many days. Finally she offered to braid my hair into two braids. I refused, and not only because my loose hair hid the aids I wore. Afterward she didn’t offer me anything again. Had I known that it would be this way, perhaps I would have said yes, okay, you can groom me like a ten-year-old girl. But I doubt it.

  The hearing aids arrived via special delivery. My mother threw out the first shipment. The second accidentally fell under the tires of our pickup, and when the third arrived the deliveryman stood next to me, waiting as I put them on, then adjusted the volume and left. When I wrote about this to Dori I described the deliveryman in a blue uniform carrying the box like a cake tray. I didn’t send the letter.

  This too could be told differently, because the deliveryman, due to his medical training (real or imagined), appeared calm and content. His thoughts flickered across his face like the letters on a neon sign. He’d heard my sad story and was certain that in his hand was the gift of the gods and modern medicine. He expected an outbreak of joy, a reward for the good deed, additional affirmation that science can fix everything. The lame shall walk; the deaf shall hear. The aid was removed from the box. The instruction manual was glued to the top. He put them on, he left, I shrieked. I stuck around to hear.

  When I was sent to the regional school the teachers assumed that I was deaf and dumb. They saw what they saw and heard what they heard and nobody bothered to correct them. I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to whisper the truth in anyone’s ear (ha!) and tell them that deaf-mutes are an invention. This was also an invention of mine, the mistake I took hold of throughout my first months at school; I rode on its back like I would hang on skates behind my dad’s pickup, something Dori and I almost never did except that one time.

  Maybe I wasn’t mute, but I knew how to be quiet. When someone said he knew one way to make me scream and moan, they quickly shushed him. It was like I was stepping down the long and deserted corridors of eternity, touching the sides, and suddenly encountering a stretch of damp wall where paint refused to dry. A piece of eternity. And I touched it.

  Within a year I acquired what my father always wanted, everyday holiness. The art teacher claimed I had an Etruscan smile. The little girls stood in line in order to brush my hair. Even the big boys looked at me with eyes full of emotion. I reminded them of something they had been robbed of without noticing. And I only sat and smiled, gazing out at a nonexistent horizon. No one knew a thing about me and whoever knew preferred to forget. They loved sitting by me, as if I were an oak tree or a goddess from Atlantis; they told one another that they achieved calm next to me, discovered the correct answer, that I had this quality. And perhaps I would have been tempted to believe them had I known the truth. But even the truth wasn’t important. I was what I was. A sea where every wave erased the one before. A beautiful silence.

  * * *

  Strange how sweet that period is to me. A period sewn out of empty hours. A period in which thought receded from me like a cloud dumping its rain in another place. I put down the notebooks. The famous notebooks, the notebooks in which I wrote everything that happened as long as it changed. But that didn’t matter anymore. Because there was no Dori to read while I pretended that I didn’t care and that it didn’t matter to me and that her eyes, running over the lines, weren’t saying anything to me as I sat opposite the notebook with nothing to write. In that place I heard everything. At night I heard even the insects that spread out across the nearby field; I heard gates slamming, illicit love (wife of, husband of, son of, all of them sucking at each other’s flesh with a deep, dark lust). I heard children running away from home and being brought back with a reprimand; I heard the dog barking and the dog that wouldn’t bark again.

  * * *

  In art I made birds full of glue, in literature I memorized tragedies. I liked Ismene more than Antigone. Ismene the appeaser, the persuader, the beautiful, the lukewarm, neither fire nor ice. The sister who stays behind. Whose lines are especially boring. Of all characters, she was the one whose lines I memorized during long, colorless afternoons, when Alex and Anna were Alex and Anna. And there was actually no point to this, because in the end I appeared in the role of Antigone, dressed in a well-stitched sheet with my hair gathered in a braid on my head like a Russian farmer. The drama teacher worked with me on diction. He made me practice breathing in order to produce a voice. My articulation, heavy mouth and jaw, sounded artificial in his ears: “And now, Ismene, you can prove what you are: a true sister, or a traitor to your family.”

  This was a very ambitious school and somehow these aspirations suited me. Like those hand puppets that have the wolf on one side and the grandma on the other. I was Antigone on the outside and deep inside I was a supporting player who doesn’t drive the plot—because I read, and that’s what they write about Ismene, that’s what they always write about her.

  I’ve since lost patience for Greek tragedies. You can find more logic in a phone book, and probably more dysfunctional familie
s as well. With regard to the deep truth of my life, I prefer sticking to clear principles over ancient sins and capricious gods. Yes, even alphabetical order and area codes. Facts are preferable to fiction.

  Alex and Anna looked at me and saw the one who remained. I was the big one without the little one, without a relation or a growth chart. Although I secretly thought otherwise then, I wasn’t the right daughter. Sometimes, when Anna and I suddenly found ourselves in another long, slow afternoon, yellow as a lemon cake we didn’t eat, it seemed to me that she wanted to sign something to me. She’d begin saying something, then the hand would drop down. Sometimes she asked, “Did you eat?” and I’d nod. Sometimes she asked if I’d slept, if I’d done my homework, as though imitating a reasonable family in which a dialogue like this was conceivable. Only once did she ask me, “What happened to your notebooks?” But perhaps it only seemed to me that she asked, perhaps all of this never happened. Because her war against my notebooks succeeded, and since when does a warlord take interest in his slain enemy? Again, Dori interferes with my images.

  Anna didn’t ask if I was writing. If I read. And if she had asked, I wouldn’t have known what to answer. The words hovered midair. The facts drowned in the sea. I was empty and shiny like the shell of an egg that had been emptied with a thin needle.

  * * *

  So this continued until Uriel Savyon arrived from the old neighborhood. Uriel had been stretched upward by time, which had also spread an enthusiastic look across his face. Despite everything he still looked pinkish, freckled, and fresh, like a strange character from an animated movie, like he was only a basic sketch that someone had intended to finish but had set aside, half there and half blurred. But there was enough to point at him and say, “That one.” It was him, the boy who Dori and I pitied from up in the tree and down below, the boy who dragged along a bag that was heavier than he was and limped on one leg.