Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  Uriel was quite brilliant and they bumped him up a grade. In class he spoke nonstop, but to my surprise he didn’t earn constant ridicule, the usual lot of the enthusiastic at an age when no one wants to be enthused. The others left him alone and I told myself it was because of me. Dima was stormy and irate, like the first page of a wintry novel. At the steel factory he had already advanced to line manager and to the best of our knowledge performed this job with the diligence and anger that characterized him. In the evening he guarded building sites and read books on physics and Marxism. I did the math and found that the two of them together were like three-fourths of a Dori at most. We were simple shards that didn’t exactly combine to make a whole.

  The constant sound of the aids was soft and unremitting even when no one spoke, when Dima didn’t scrape his shoes and Uriel didn’t cough. When no car honked. When Dima caught me gargling water, my head bent back, I explained to him that this was something I’d started doing since the aids. Sometimes the water overwhelmed the brain; my throat filled up with water and the world was forgotten. Dima told me to empty my mouth and dried my face. He explained to me that gargling was a well-known method, a method that was once considered an effective means for teaching the deaf to speak. He told me, slowly and seriously, that during the brief time he wore aids it seemed to him as if he were diving underwater. This was one of the reasons he decided to get rid of them; actually, the most important reason. And in truth, this was how the sounds reached me, slow and submerged, rising to the water’s surface. He said to me, signing the words in his characteristic wooden manner, “You so badly want to be like the hearing that you gargle. But that’s not what they hear.”

  I shrugged my shoulders again. Maybe he was right. “Nevertheless,” he said to me, “nevertheless there were worse methods to teach us to speak their language. If one is allowed to choose torture devices, gargling water is at least preferable to the tongue they used to install in deaf children’s mouths. You understand, this was how they hoped to develop our sensitivity for manufacturing sounds.” This was one of the longer conversations we had. Dima looked at me as if this had happened yesterday morning, as if they had forced Dima himself to grow a new tongue in his mouth. Only when I had the time to read for myself did I discover that he was telling me about good intentions that had led to all kinds of hell, about terrible acts that took place hundreds of years ago.

  A bit after this, the three of us went to the beach. None of us had a bathing suit, but this didn’t make any difference. It was as if my ear grew all at once and took in the entire sea. As if the aid absorbed and finally broadcasted the sound of the world. The two of them looked at me happily, knowing they had done a good deed. That they’d succeeded. I remembered Dori’s tales about mermaids and I wondered if those fish girls lived in fresh or salt water. I knew that somewhere they still sang to her their horrible songs, which I could never hear.

  I smoked my first cigarettes with Uriel and Dima. Perhaps this is the main thing that remains with me of them, the intensity of these habits—the morning cigarettes, the sea, the gargling. Dima predicted a revolution. He had a very clear estimate of when it would happen. The superpowers would collapse, the tectonic plates would quake, and even in our small corner we’d see tanks in the street. He said the time had come for the deaf to establish territory for themselves, that no one would voluntarily give us a thing. At these moments he reminded me of Alex, even though they were so different; Alex was rotten and Dima was fresh and therefore I couldn’t hate him. I couldn’t tell him that I wouldn’t find a place in this republic of his. With an almost identical fervor, Uriel believed in the theater and nanotechnology. He planned to establish a theater company. He believed that this was the purest of all arts.

  Each of them despised the other’s dream. Uriel and Dima were such characters, so concentrated, like mercury or heavy water, that sometimes it seemed to me that I invented them. Perhaps I invented them because I didn’t have a dream of my own, at least not an all-embracing dream like theirs. I just was and it seemed that this was enough. No one knew that I wrote once, that again and again I chose facts over stories, because the difference between the two already appeared to me slimmer than slim. Sometimes I let them caress my hair, but not more than this. If someone had asked I would have explained that they were my brothers. But no one asked.

  So it continued until Uriel came to the two of us and said he had visited Dori. It was a Saturday morning. Dima and I were eating pancakes with sugar in the Savyon family’s back garden. I knew his parents weren’t crazy about Dima, but they accepted our presence there. We were their son’s first friends and they had no intention to object to this aloud. This wasn’t the first time we were there without Uriel. We had also gotten used to coming there when Uriel stayed late at theater club or working on one of his model aircraft carriers. In contrast to the two of us, who always woke up at the same time, as if the bed had pushed us out, Uriel prolonged his mornings to their very end. Just before eleven he joined us, his hair disheveled as always, his front teeth seeming to stick out more, the crust still covering his eyes. I restrained myself from sending him to wash his face. He looked as if he was about to explode; he never knew how to keep news or secrets to himself. “I visited Dori,” he said.

  He said that she didn’t look at him or ask him anything. That her hair was short. That her buttons skipped a hole. As if he had stood in front of the mirror for an hour and was describing only himself. He said that she didn’t answer a single question but didn’t tell him to leave either, and when she talked it was only about outer space. About planets and dying stars. About Saturn, which is the Jews’ sun. I cut the pancake into thin triangles, into crosshatches. Everything he said sounded like secondhand impressions. Dima looked at me. He never knew about Dori, not from me anyway. I tried to read something from Dima’s expression but I read nothing there. Uriel still stood in front of us, leaning a bit on the glass table. We were still sitting. Perhaps we could have been frozen like this forever, on the edge of an explanation, though I knew it wouldn’t end there. I waited for him to produce all the doves from his top hat already. “She made a drawing of stars,” he added. “At least I think they’re stars. So I asked her if I could take it. I brought it for you, you want to see?”

  For the first time in ages my sister and I resembled each other again; at least we shared a single silence. I didn’t intend to answer him, just as I didn’t intend to look at the sketch that Dori drew instead of listening to him. I drank from the glass of milk that was in front of me. It had a fatty taste. I thought of all the good girls who drink milk, of all the little sisters whose hair is pinned back. I forgot all of them. Their names were erased and after this the lines of their faces as well. Glasses of milk were emptied into unseen mouths. There’s no way she’s interested in stars, I thought, no way. But maybe she really did start to draw.

  Uriel too gave the power of silence a try. But after a few minutes, after his face reddened and paled, he returned to words. “You know, Lili, I just wanted to help.”

  Now I spoke. “Help? Help with what? Did I ask for your help?”

  “But you didn’t know where she was. You thought she died. And now I found her. And it wasn’t easy, you should know, I had to check on my mom’s computer, to connect to court records, to her files. After I found out, I went to her on Friday evening and said I was her brother. They bought it really easily. They were happy that someone from her family finally came to her, you get it? Look, I can take you to her. Maybe we’ll take her out for the weekend.” Everything had already come together for him in his head, the facts and the stories, the long trip in the car his parents bought him, too bad it didn’t have a sun roof, Dori becoming part of our gang, her face glowing with joy. I’m sure he had already selected a soundtrack for the journey. Maybe he would also want to replant the tree.

  “I just wanted to show you that she’s still alive,” he said again, a bit defeated. “But she wasn’t at all who I thought she’d be. She w
asn’t like what I remembered either. And you two, you’re not alike at all.” Dima was still silent. The two of us knew it was my turn to speak. I ate the rest of the pancake. It had no taste.

  “There’s a reason for that,” I said to him. “The reason is that Dori died and you’ll never understand anything.”

  But I forgave him; his mother intervened with her judicial temperament, she mentioned how rash her son is sometimes, quick to be impressed, quick to act. She explained and I forgave him. His mother was also the one who said, “Lili will be a psychologist someday,” and signed me up for evening classes at the open university. I didn’t know where this confidence, which quickly became certitude, came from. Perhaps from my habit of being quiet, of nodding when she spoke. Like everyone, she too fancied Lili the silent. It looked as if I held on to every word spoken to me. If only she knew that as she spoke to me I was counting backward. Sometimes from one hundred. Sometimes from a thousand. Maybe that’s what all psychologists do. Maybe that’s the essence of attention.

  His father didn’t actually believe much in psychology, but he too considered it a promising career path. Though his office was attached to the house, he was seldom seen, since decisions could be made and finalized in invisible ink without him. I liked him, I really liked him. I knew that he had once been excitable and enthusiastic, just like his son, until his wife centered him. They hoped that I would do this for Uriel, be the compass point, the leg that stands firm while the other spins around in hasty circles. I suspect that this was supposed to be flattering. She insisted on seeing potential in me, and I let her praise fall on my shoulders like snowflakes that would melt in a moment. When she talked about me, it was as if she was referring to a different person.

  When Uriel and I traveled, he to study theater in New York and me to the different courses his mother signed me up for, my most important goodbye was with Dima. He was about to volunteer for the army, alone among the three of us. I hadn’t supposed that this would happen, but in fact it did. I could imagine him as a soldier, inciting the battalion, mining entire streets and attacking the capital. Teaching them our language. My parents actually accepted my leaving with indifference. My mother even looked pleased, and just then my father was occupied with his own inner journey alongside his pack of quacking fools.

  His mother thought that I was interesting, that I was talented, that there was promise buried inside me. She clearly thought that I had more imagination and ability than her son, whose lack of hearing was the main thing that made him unique. I said to her again, “You don’t see him.” I should have added “love him,” but there was no point. What I had nevertheless dared to say she attributed to my natural generosity, which actually wasn’t that generous. “Yes,” she said, “he really tries hard to be special, our boy. But there are things one must accept as they are.” She paid for both of our studies and ignited the flame on my tail like a guided missile. I didn’t ask her the obvious: Who would want a deaf psychologist? Maybe because I was no longer deaf, not entirely, but instead living in the eternal in-between position of someone who went through a modification to please you, the hearing. Maybe because it turned out I have no interest in psychology. I should have expected this in advance, but the psychology courses were two out of the only three that could fit around the capricious schedule of my job at a hotel. Actually, I would have preferred to take Gardens in Japan, but she never said, “Someday Lili will be a Japanese gardener.”

  I know what caught your attention, like a butterfly is caught in a net. Like dewdrops that will never fall. The world shimmers, but those are spiderwebs. And I’m the spider. Correct: I can hear. I’ve been hearing for some time. That is, as they say here, old news—an oxymoron, I’d say, for it is the nature of news to renew itself, but I prefer to clean the corners of the room, to straighten a sheet, to impose order on the mess you left. I know enough about you after cleaning, quite enough. I have no need to hear your idle talk, if you speak at all with your companion, with your wife. Ears are superfluous here. All the same, I know what you did on the bedcover and where you put the peels and the nail clippings. You’re on vacation now and you demand that the vacation match all your dreams, all the ornate ribbons you tied and paid for in advance. But you’ll go back in a few more days and I’ll clean up after you then as well. I’ll place a chocolate heart on the pillow. I’ll clean the phone’s handset with a cloth. I’ll gather up the few coins you left as a tip and set them down by the beggar at the entrance. We traveled for one purpose but I was detained by another.

  I heard the world’s faint tones, the whisper of eggs cooking on the gas, a cat sharpening its nails on an armchair, the rustle of the wind in the Savyon family’s garden and wintry gusts in the windy corridors of the city that Uriel and I moved to. I heard voices from the outside, even though I sometimes struggled to decide if the conversation I heard with half an ear took place on television or in the next room. In my ears even the ticktock of clocks sounded uniform and resolute, threatening to overpower the rest of the voices with its monotony. This was the kind of thing that Dori talked about. By the time I heard the clock, it became clear to me how strange it was for so much to hinge on its ticking. I thought about searching for my old watch that Dori loved so much and I never agreed to loan her. I don’t know where it wound up, if anywhere. She heard the watch, almost unconsciously, and now it was my turn. But as close as I tried to listen, for me it remained just a stupid ticking that caused things to move and come back. Maybe that’s not so strange; Dori and I never liked the same things, except when we had no choice.

  I really had the surgery. That’s the missing detail. I was operated on even before we left, Uriel and I. Small children are better candidates for the implant, but I convinced them with signs and wonders until they agreed and acquiesced. I received a full subsidization and three days of hospitalization in a room with a standard curtain that gave off a smell of industrial cleaners. I was implanted. I crossed the line. From the hospital I returned to the home of the Savyon family and, five weeks later, when the implant was already working and I had gone through the first training, I showed up at our place. Uriel wanted to come with me. I said to him, no. Even he understood.

  I expected the house to look smaller, like a memory from another time, but it was exactly its size. Alex’s fencing of crooked metal surrounded the house, as always, sparkling in the sun, impersonating something beautiful. Everything was quiet, the hum of the electric wires almost couldn’t be heard, the Ackerman family was a large magnet of silence, and it seemed that the sound of everything in its vicinity had been erased. Suddenly, in opposition to all that my old and new senses were telling me, I wanted to go home. It was a lofty and childish desire, and it threatened to lie down on the floor and not get up until I surrendered before it. I wanted to go to our old room, lie down in bed, sleep, and wake up as a girl again. I wanted to find that watch and wrap it around my wrist. I thought about asking them for it, but when we met, the three of us standing as if the world had forgotten to provide a chair for us, I understood that no watch could be on the agenda. The two of them went together, in lockstep, and stood in the edge of the thick shade cast by the house. I stood opposite them, the light of the sun striking back. The scrap metal I passed on my way to them was the accumulated junk of some factory. I tried to picture the man who sat in the factory, who each day made nuts and bolts. A man replaced by a machine, whose daily production became a pile of junk. I tried to see him but I didn’t see a thing. I lifted my caressed mane of red hair, my tiger’s tail. It was a coquettish gesture, but I had planned it in advance. I lifted up my hair with both hands; I let them see.

  The same trace of pain appeared on Alex’s and Anna’s faces, as if the world had interfered and forced them to hear.

  Alex Ackerman’s palms looked very dark. I thought about this. How much they had darkened, as if they had been dipped in coffee. His fingernails had been trimmed close to the flesh, into square shapes; perhaps he clipped them with metal-cutting pliers
. His age was evident there, on his palms, on the knuckles that seemed in constant effort even when they were still. I looked and memorized these details. I already understood then that I’d get no closer to his hands than this. Anna Ackerman looked eastward even though there was nothing worth seeing there. My desire was still lying on the floor, urging me to pass through the opening of their forgiveness even if it was as narrow as the eye of a needle. I again smelled the old neglected scent that blended with the smell of the vanilla candles that Lotti lit in every corner. I could have stood in front of them for another hundred years, but I left.

  An additional fact is that I lied before. Because these are the facts: I was the one who betrayed them and not the other way around. Even if they left me nine times for the benefit of the poor and oppressed, for plants that did and didn’t flower, the tenth time, it was me leaving. I abandoned everything. I kicked over buckets of milk. I didn’t cry. That’s how it was.

  I didn’t see Dima dressed in uniform. During his infrequent leaves he met with other people, not us. He finally understood that the deaf republic would need brothers in the cause, not us, not me. He didn’t visit me in the hospital and didn’t say goodbye to us at the airport. I knew that from his perspective the surgery had actually made me disabled, a toy with a broken mechanism that you throw to the side of the room. He was very reticent in his first letter. I quickly wrote him back. I didn’t say I was sorry. He wrote little, just facts, like someone who was infected by the old Lili. Despite this I understood everything. Between the lines I read the pity beneath his anger, the sorrow accompanied by faint contempt. Something of the old talent remained with me, even if it was only an invention, intended to amuse Dori. To anger Dori. To widen the gap between us that ran deeper than I could have imagined.