Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  Conventional wisdom held that speaking occurred there. The sounds were cut up and divided; words were directed in a hesitant arc at the world of the hearing. In that room Dori confirmed what was already known. Even when you suspect that a continent exists, you release a sigh of relief when it truly comes into view and you can say—America. Only in that room did Georgia confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt (as she shared with all others concerned) that the girl could indeed hear and communicate with words. Miraculously, her speech was not impaired. Someone proclaimed the continent, running and calling out with a choked throat that this was indeed America, and somewhere was a deck full of excited people, holding hands, blessing the scope of the achievement and the expectations confirmed and even exceeded. But all this happened, if it happened at all, far, far away from that room.

  From the perspective of Georgia O’Keeffe (or what she was called outside that room, a rather simple name, which there’s no point in disclosing other than to gratify mere voyeurism), the words that emerged in their entirety from Dori’s mouth were the Archimedean point from which it was possible to raise Dori like a flag waving on a flagpole. Had Dori been aware of this image, which Georgia repeated in a few of her excellent articles, she would have explained that it wasn’t a flag flying on high but an actual girl who was raised on a pole, and only the shortsighted could get something like that wrong, seeing a flag instead of a girl. But even if she didn’t know the exact words Georgia used to describe the size of the achievement, Dori certainly assumed that she credited the breakthrough to the special bond that formed between them. And yes, even Dori had to admit that despite all the lies, at the edge of things there grew a bluish tinge, thin as an eggshell, of truth. Georgia was the one who suggested the announcer’s test. The zoo cafeteria was no longer an option, “lucky for everyone,” Georgia said. She mentioned it almost in passing, not disclosing the fact that in her hand was the winning card under which the entire pile would fall.

  The two of them thought about the juvenile judge and her practical proposals following the zoo incident. This judge, who, free of gavel and robe, was just a regular woman, but a woman who clearly believed in her own persuasive force, saw Dori as someone in need of clearer guidance and encouragement than Georgia’s airy suggestions. And so the judge sweetly proposed to her that she follow a more certain professional path and, more precisely, become a sign language interpreter. As much as she tried to remember this woman, only a short time later, she couldn’t. She remembered only her sweet perfume, which reminded her of something unseemly, at once living and dead. Georgia told Dori that she must meet with her one more time and that would be it, there was no need for more than that. Nevertheless Dori identified on her face, on her hand, suddenly busied with her amber necklace until she caught Dori looking, something that resembled fear.

  “Look,” Dori opened up and said to that gavel-free woman (and she didn’t say “look” and not “listen” from meticulousness, but simply out of habit). “Look, I don’t think so.”

  “It’s very common in complicated families like yours,” the judge pronounced slowly, and waved her hand to emphasize her surprise. The bracelets swayed on her arm and Dori looked at the way they captured the light and just nodded and said “No” as if with her the signs and the words spoke opposite languages.

  But this time it wasn’t merely another suggestion. She, Georgia, had a plan, she knew someone who knew someone, it was paid work, a job with convenient hours that fit Dori like a glass slipper or a leather shoe. She knew Dori couldn’t refuse. So she placed a note in Dori’s hand with arrival instructions and telephone numbers. Dori looked at the telephone numbers with amazement. “What I am supposed to do with this?” she asked in the language, but Georgia understood and answered her quietly, “You can call. You’ll hear them and they you. Talk.” Dori fixed her with that old opaque gaze that she recognized, that of a nine-year-old girl whose legs swung with an odd, stubborn rhythm, while the rest of her body was frozen and rigid. Georgia doubted it was possible; could everything really be forgotten in an instant? Was it in Dori’s power to huddle up once more inside the cochlea and never emerge again? She was unable to capture her gaze and it seemed that a milky film flooded over her eyes. All the hatches were battened and the land that was discovered through so much effort again sank below the water. At that moment, for the sake of despair, even elegance abandoned Georgia. How old she looked when she repeated her name aloud, “Dori, Dori, Dori.” And she called out again: “Dori.” And again. “Dori, Dori, Dori.” Even those in the adjacent rooms could hear her. A spoon striking a plate and doling out a single name: Doridoridori.

  And Dori heard and said, “Yes.”

  WHEN SHE CLOSED THE STUDIO DOOR BEHIND HER

  When she closed the studio door behind her she already knew that she had been accepted. She went down the stairs to the noisy street, sealing off her ears from the tumult and waiting for Georgia’s warmhearted congratulations and, following those, the position itself, which would come to her tied with a bow. And so it happened, more or less, indeed with a bit less formality than she anticipated. Dori looked at the scratched phone monitor that presented her with her new working hours and thought, yes.

  All this happened as it happened not because Dori’s voice was pleasant, although it is possible that it was. The main matter was that Dori’s voice lacked an identifiable tone. This is one of the paradoxes characterizing the speech of extremely late learners. And this is also the paradox located in the silent underside of the announcements that people prefer to hear, announcements appropriate for the street, the weather, the flight schedule. For things of this sort. The best voice is one that conveys threatening words in an impartial tone, as if they are the truth itself. And even if the truth isn’t really what the listener wants, even if what they hear is a lie, the tone of truth is the tone in which they prefer things be brought to their attention. This, at least, was Dori’s conclusion.

  “How wonderful,” he said to her during their meeting in the recording studio, after she sent a shortened version of her résumé. “How wonderful,” said the doll-like man, who identified himself as one of the studio’s owners. He looked for approval from the woman whom Dori judged to be his older sister, and Dori too looked at the legs spread wide, the crossed hands, the square jaw, and the thick glasses with the metal frames. Yes, as if it had already happened before, they marveled at Dori as at a puppy standing on a ball. But since the owners of the studio themselves looked like other participants in this circus—not sword swallowers or lion tamers but two human cannonballs—Dori didn’t mind. If the sister resembled a tough, downtrodden farmer, the brother was seemingly taken from a very old staged photograph, upon which someone had marked up the eyebrows and lips for emphasis. They were an inconceivable combination. She listened to the man politely, looking at his soft hands, which moved unsynchronized with his speaking mouth. The more she considered it, and she definitely considered it at that moment, she was convinced that they were brother and sister. There was an intimacy between them that couldn’t be explained any other way. A realistic portrait of a farmer from the Great Depression holding a wax doll.

  As if to compensate for his sister’s attitude, the brother again clapped his pretty hands. He finished telling about the history of “this special place of ours” and admired Dori’s résumé one more time, shook his head as if he couldn’t believe it, and said, “What can we do, the time has arrived to talk business,” and now he and his wife would allow her to get ready for a moment and begin the test. Dori looked at him inquisitively because she didn’t know how to get ready or for what, and he quickly reassured her that he hadn’t a shadow of a doubt that she was suitable, “but business is business,” especially with them, in show business. Because in this studio they sometimes recorded broadcasts and ads that were carried on the airwaves. And perhaps only when they left the room, one after the other, while he waved to her—like a parent explaining to his child that he won’t go far and that he’ll stil
l exist even after he leaves the room—and then sat down in the leather chairs on the other side of the glass in a room that almost resembled the room in which they sat until now, only then did she understand she was mistaken. Husband and wife, who would believe it. Dori held the book that was given to her and started to read from the spot marked.

  “I’ll come to one place and pray; before I have time to get used to it and love it, I’ll go on. And I’ll keep going until my legs give out, and I lie down and die somewhere, and come finally to that eternal, quiet haven, where there is no sorrow or sighing!…”

  “That’s it, someone who can read from War and Peace can read anything,” the sister who’d turned out to be the wife said into the microphone. When the severe impression of her appearance faded, the woman resembled a shortsighted, well-trained mole, and instantaneously Dori’s array of images sailed like a ship leaning on its side—from a farmer, armed with an agricultural implement and chasing down a mole, to the pet of the farmer’s little daughter that in a moment would lie down on the studio’s polished floor and ask for its fur to be stroked.

  “We don’t accept everyone,” she warned in her warm voice, trying to preserve something of the first, severe impression, but she immediately added, “Ada, my name is Ada.” And from the tone of her voice Dori understood that they would actually accept her.

  The voice of her husband, the male doll, was forgotten immediately after he finished speaking, but Ada spoke with a rich, thick voice, and Dori imagined this was the explanation. That despite everything the husband had told her about “taking advantage of opportunities and understanding market forces and surviving in this tough business of ours,” from the outset, they had Ada’s voice. They could draw a circle in the dirt and set up the studio and the rest around it. Because the moment that Ada stopped speaking, she silently waited to hear her again.

  When Dori shook their hands goodbye, in her mind’s eye, she saw Georgia O’Keeffe closing up the file dedicated to Dori Ackerman with satisfaction. She always had a weakness for stories. “Dori Ackerman has a good ending,” or perhaps, “Girl D finds her voice.” Either way, she could now place her in the drawer of solved cases, in the cabinet painted white that was locked with a key.

  And during one of those meetings, coated in satisfaction like the frosting on a cake, Georgia confirmed for her that it was thanks only to Ada’s exceptional voice (which the cigarettes had somewhat scorched over the years) that her husband was able to establish the recording studio. Ada, so she said, was once a rather well-known professional who read the news, provided the voice-over for state ceremonies, and, as a hobby, read from the masterpieces of world literature at the library for the blind. Dori laughed, because once again the disabled had gathered around her like beggars at the edge of town. And when Dori laughed, Georgia smiled. Only when she left did Dori realize that Ada was the figure who appeared in the photograph in Georgia’s office. That she was the woman laughing with a cigarette in one hand.

  SHE MET ANTON AGAIN

  She met Anton again in Continental Philosophy. In the college’s stuffy air she could forget that only an hour earlier she had been sitting opposite Georgia O’Keeffe, staring as if from habit at the tortoiseshell brooch, the painted nails, the hair gathered around her skull, knowing from experience that even if she really tried such things they wouldn’t suit her and the refined headband would slide off her like water. During classes she also easily forgot the emergency instructions that she had recorded over the course of three days. The college’s charmless building easily erased all that came before and after it, and its visual dullness implied that there, somehow, the main event was happening, even without the benefit of climbing ivy or a peaceful stream.

  On that day the college looked especially colorless, and even the students themselves looked as if their hues had been drained away and they had been forced to trot out these infinitely pale versions of themselves in public. Dori found her place on the left side of the lecture hall, no less pale than the rest of her neighbors in the row. Through the large windows it was possible to see all that the world had to give her at that moment. Which wasn’t much.

  She woke up when the discussion was already at its height and on the whiteboard was written: The present King of France is bald. Against her will she imagined him, the exiled king, bald and red-eyed, even though she had already been told that there was no point in imagining something without a referent. Not to mention a king with no kingdom or name or likeness and whose impossible baldness shines with the colors of sunset. Yes, as if summoned, the royal family pranced about between college classes, eagerly anticipating every example: The king died and then the queen died. It was necessary to add a correction: The king died and then the queen died because of grief. Because what distinguishes an average story from a tightly drawn one is the cause. So it was already determined and explained and passed on. One might correct this and say, what distinguishes them is the grief. And this Dori actually understood. Instead of listening to the material being taught, she pondered whether or not all the kings who hovered over the young bodies bent over their books lived together in the same heavenly castle and descended each day in order to act out roles in paradoxes and examples for tired students. Are the kings too amazed anew each day that the morning star is the evening star, without simply saying: Venus, the star is Venus? In any case, with a certain mulish stubbornness, she went from class to class, grabbing the ideas by their fringes, always grasping on to an image instead of the thing itself. And in each Anton watched her like a shadow.

  Now he approached, with his measured steps, in the old leather shoes that looked heavy and ancient, and she quickly straightened up and in the same motion stiffened her back and smoothed out the flowers that spread across her dress like eczema, remembering her constant tendency to slouch. This too Anton saw, saw and smiled. And instead of being insulted, Dori smiled, even if the joke was at her expense, even if he signaled to her that he saw her at her weakest. As if they had known each other forever and always, she thought, and they stood and smiled smiles that were very different from each other, but Dori mistakenly saw them as a single smile. His eyes were red, he was very skinny, his wrists were white, thinner than hers. She thought that he was wonderful, beaten and winning all at once, defeated in an enchanting, theatrical manner, like a prince who knowingly transforms into a beggar, or better, shatters his own kneecap with his father’s golf club, and she didn’t say a thing because she suspected that this was one of those paradoxes that evaporates when spoken aloud, and anyway it was unlikely that Anton golfed. “The coffee here is terrible,” he finally said, as if continuing a conversation they’d been having for some time. “We’ll go to the medical school. They have enough donors to keep from burning the coffee.” And so for a moment they were the current king and queen of France, bald or adorned with hair.

  When they sat at one of the tables Anton smoked and drank while Dori ate noodles with red sauce. “You really look like that girl on the box of noodles,” he said to her after another long silence. He was handsome at that moment and Dori, who nervously gathered up and tossed her hair, couldn’t believe that Anton was a citizen of a country like this, one with noodles in it.

  She was hot. Maybe because of the noodles. Her skin turned pink and red and she didn’t care. Her fingers grew weightless and the tableware itself became quite heavy. If she had put down the fork it may well have split open the table and fallen forever. When she moved the hair from her face with her hand, it was as if his hands were the ones moving the hair, confidently touching her forehead, temples, and finally gathering the hair from behind in a ponytail whose many strands broke loose from itself.

  He wanted her to speak, this she understood; he acted as if she had something to say and her words had importance. But Dori doubted that he wanted to hear excerpts from War and Peace, because other than the words of Prince Andrei running around in her head, at that moment Dori knew only how to remain silent. Together they missed a class, two classes,
an entire day. Evening had already fallen and they had smoked everything that remained in his pack and afterward he asked for and demanded a cigarette from anyone who was in the cafeteria. Anton looked only at Dori and said, “Philosophy is crippled.” And because he didn’t know if he had gotten all of her attention he said, “Philosophy is blind. Philosophy is deaf.” He declared that the only future was in politics and money, and that the only path to true creativity lay there, and Dori, since she knew of nothing to say or why this was being said to her of all people, just nodded.

  Her throat was burning and they drank coffee from mugs containing the dregs of other people’s coffee. An hour or hours later he leaned back. The cafeteria had already almost emptied out and the foreign worker cleaned the tables with a rag that was neither dry nor wet. Her eyes latched on to his movements as if at each table he cleaned he was doling out the end of the evening or perhaps his own end. Anton coughed badly and immediately afterward spread a broken smile across his lips. He said, “Actually, we know each other.” Dori raised her eyebrows inquisitively and tried to understand what he meant by “know,” and decided finally to mention that failed matter at the zoo and that in fact he was right.