Aquarium

by Yaara Shehori

  Anton continued, “You’re that little one who passes out cards in cafés. You’re famous among us, only the whole time we thought you were deaf as a rock. Seems to me you already owe me more than a little money for all that impersonating.” The smile again divided his face in two. She knew that she had never placed a card before him, that a coin or a bill had never passed between them, that she hadn’t spread out her hand before him. But he looked at her like someone who catches a small fish and lets it go because there’s no reason to bother keeping it on the hook.

  Dori continued sitting across from him. Because that’s how it is in life. Girl D doesn’t always find her voice. Sometimes the cat steals her tongue. She sat in the chair and felt how much the narrow backrest hurt, how much it hurt her for hours or days. She was small and ugly, she understood, miserable and beyond repair. Yes, and she also understood that there was nothing to fix, not her and not what was happening in that moment. The current king of France is a liar and there’s no queen. And if philosophy is blind and deaf, what is she. What-is-Dori. In a smooth motion she emptied the contents of her bag onto the table. Alongside the wallet, the book, the plugs, and the toothpaste, the cards that sat in bundles at the bottom of the bag dropped out. She lifted up one of them and placed it before him. “Don’t hand out, sell,” she said. “You want it? Buy it.”

  She lost more and more shifts at the studio, and Ada left her polite messages asking Dori to get back to her soon please, and her husband’s messages were more irate, his voice failing to cover up his anger. Lili’s letters arrived one after the other as if she felt something, as if all the envelopes always contained the same bunch of words: “I told you so!” But Dori knew that she hadn’t told her. And even if Lili felt something, Dori herself didn’t feel a thing. She was like the shards in the display cabinets in the department, the ones with the notes meant to remind visitors where it was taken from or the function of the jar or plate from which it was broken, but that no one paused to read, or if they did pause they only shrugged their shoulders and continued on their way. If Anati knew about Dori’s broken shard example, she would have laughed at the drama of it. But since the reason for Dori’s sadness, her criminal inaction, was a guy, just a guy, she actually left her alone.

  Every morning and evening, Dori made up her eyes in black, which Anati had once said was pretty and suited her. In meetings with Georgia, she reviewed, eyes closed, the titles of the books according to their customary order on the shelves five years earlier, as over the years she’d memorized them more than once and this useless knowledge made periodic sudden appearances. Her days were filled with words that her mind struggled to absorb. The world didn’t lag behind; it too became pointless, like a remote archeological exhibition. For hours she lay and stared at the flaking roses that she cut out and stuck to the wall, and she only went out to cafés. Alone and with Dima, and in fact with increased frequency, such that occasionally she went out on shifts two to three times a day, traveling to areas she hadn’t visited before. Dori no longer accepted avoidance or averted gazes. She smiled a broken smile and they paid. The fraternity of the deaf and stupid named after Dori and Lili Ackerman flourished like never before.

  At a café on the Upholsterers’ Street, she saw him again. Dori noticed him sitting with his legs crossed and all his bad qualities prancing around him. The place sparkled with cleanliness and the white tablecloths were stretched out under the silverware, but Dori didn’t retreat, and didn’t even sign to Dima that he should go in this time, that her head hurt or simply that the sickly man at the round table would recognize her. Instead, with a courage that she didn’t know she had, she approached the table. Anton sat next to an impressive woman, not young. The woman’s lipstick was as purple as a struck blood vessel but she still looked wealthy and confident. The scarf around her neck, the leather bag, the amused expression, all these looked valuable, and the woman placed the bag on a chair of its own, like a third diner, and she rummaged through it in search of a sucking candy or some change. Dori looked at the red liquid that the two of them drank. The more sickly and flushed Anton appeared, the healthier the woman looked, and Dori too suddenly felt strong and vital. She refused to try to guess the relationship between them. Under this was the thought: a bachelor is an unmarried man. She thought: a rose is a rose is a rose and Anton is Anton. Because despite everything, she’d learned something in college. It turned out that she knew herself how to calculate the sum of zero. The woman looked at her with slight curiosity and Dori returned her gaze, even though she was definitely the kind of woman whose door swings open to reveal an exemplary apartment when she goes out for the day. Erect as a primrose, Dori placed the cards in the center of the white tablecloth, making sure to straighten the corners. When she left the café followed by Dima, her hands were empty. She left the cards and the tower of coins next to them, untouched.

  A week passed, and one evening Anton appeared with them in the stairwell. She didn’t know how he found the address, because the only name on the mailbox was that of a German tourist who had left the country a decade before. But he stood there, with a jacket, even, looking at a poster of The Bride Wore Black that they’d hung on the door on their first day in the apartment. In his hand he was carrying a circular cardboard container decorated with bearded faces. He said that he had brought her soup. “Couldn’t find any flowers?” whispered Anati, who was looking at him as if she didn’t recognize him, as if they had never met before, but Dori hushed her.

  “You made soup?” she asked.

  He hadn’t made it. But Dori invited him inside all the same, so whatever she later told herself about that evening, she knew that it was she who had let him enter.

  Anton sat on the only chair in the room, seeming to her ailing and fragile, like someone suffering from a severe illness. He glowed with a refined light. If Georgia had been aware of Anton’s existence, Dori would have described this to her, as if people really could glow with that sort of internal light, which perhaps in a different century characterized those suffering from tuberculosis or arsenic swallowers a moment before death. She didn’t intend to resist; she didn’t want to be in opposition. He was beautiful like an ornamented altar on which money is burned for the gods. The beauty of someone who hides away while the earthly world slams against all his windows. Purple hollows appeared around his eyes. She saw on him the signs of her insult as if they had been drawn out in a blue line along his skin. Poor Anton, she saw. A child. An emperor who has a mother. She knew that she’d agree to anything. Whatever he’d ask and whatever he’d want and whatever he’d say or not say.

  She stood with the pail of soup in which small carrots floated while he rose and wandered in the narrow space that was hers, his hands browsing the postcards tacked to the corkboard, the diagram of a missile that Dima sketched for them as a housewarming gift, the edges of which had already started to bend. His hands rested on the back of the sofa bed and finally on the pile of cards that formed miniature skyscrapers, casting shadows. Anton looked at her and smiled as if he was conspiring. “So what, you’re deaf on even days and mute on odd ones?”

  This time he took the cards in his hands, shuffling them as in an old, simple magic trick. She saw no sleight of hand before her, but rather heartbreaking clumsiness. It was almost possible to believe that he was really seeing the cards for the first time, that Dori hadn’t dropped one in front of him only a week before. Dori finally left the soup in its container; until that moment she had still been holding it and couldn’t find anywhere to put it, like a guest rather than a host. “I’ll make tea,” she said, happy to have something to do. When she left the room she was suddenly sorry she didn’t have a cake to slice and serve, and this thought, odd and unnecessary, came and called as if Anna Ackerman herself had sat down in her ear canal and explained in a spirited, jovial soprano that “in moments like this everything must be perfect, from the cake to the blinds, and it’s just a pity that Dori doesn’t take care of herself.” She ignored Anton’s quest
ions, Anna’s erroneous advice, and Anati, who was waiting for her in the hallway, determined to clarify what Anton was doing there, especially after that one time. She especially ignored Lili, who knocked inside her head, “Really, you’re letting this vampire into the house?” Even if the words didn’t seem to suit her, Dori knew it was her voice, whistling like the wind.

  All at once she was surrounded inside and out, and she knew that what she really needed was to breathe and breathe until only two remained, she and Anton (and in the face of the breathing, Lili held on last, whispering to her aloud in a disembodied voice, a voice that Dori knew had to be hers, even though she had never spoken about vampires before: “So that’s all you need? For them to smile at you?” And Dori thought back to her: “Maybe. Maybe that’s all I need, would you believe it?”). She poured the tea into two cracked cups with thick rims that the previous tenant, the German, had left behind.

  Anton asked again and Dori answered. Of course she answered. He opened the small window and hung from the peeling sill facing outside, drawing out an acute angle with the chimney visible from the window. As he smoked opposite the chimney, she thought that it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. The new streetlights that had been installed as part of an effort at community improvement and development, successful on neither front, came on with surprising strength. In the play of light and shadow the chimney looked almost beautiful, or at least impressive. “It toughens us up in the event of a nuclear storm,” she said. “Fixed servings of air pollution.” Anton went on smoking and she could tell that he’d laughed. And even though she didn’t hear what he said in return, she laughed too. When he came back inside, the top half of his body looked refreshed from the smog, and he sweetened his tea with heaping spoonfuls of sugar and this caused her to stop and waver and finally not sweeten hers at all. Before he could ask again, she said that the cards were work; he’d seen for himself. “But you’re not deaf,” he insisted, his gaze calling her an imposter, and only then, with burning pinkies, she removed the plugs from her ears, heard the sprinklers in the garden that was planted at the foot of the chimney, Anton’s hand rubbing against the jeans she wore under the dress, she heard all that breathing and said, “I was once.”

  YOU’RE FAKING IT

  “You’re faking it,” the girl who slept in the bed nearby whispered to her every night, getting out of her bed in the dark to stand barefoot next to Dori. Almost touching her but no, never quite. Dori could feel the cold of the tiles climbing up the girl’s legs but there was no way of knowing if she was cold. The darkness wasn’t absolute, but rather brightly dappled by the rusty light that illuminated the main corridor. But it was dark enough to draw close to what one held at a distance in the daytime. They showered in the same shower (one after the other) and hung and folded their clothes in the same closet and despite this the girl gave off a scent of peaches and acetone and Dori didn’t. They were ten years old. They were even born in the same month. But this was all they had in common. The girl had wonderful dresses she didn’t wear and Dori saw them hanging up in the wall closet like headless dolls. At night too. “You can hear me now, right? Can you hear? And now? And now?” the girl asked with her mouth very close to the ear canal, almost resting on it. So it went night after night, her face hovering above like an airborne search squad. Dori never knew if before she had been sleeping and had suddenly woken up or perhaps she was never asleep. She suspected that now it would always be like this, until the end of days; she would lie down and this girl would float above her in a perpetual examination. Dori’s gaze was turned to the low ceiling and she lay stiff with limbs tensed, eyes always opened, cottonballs stuffed into her ears, trying to understand how at first she’d thought the girl looked like Lili.

  The smells of urine and bleach and the faint, peachy scent that the girl gave off carried from their room. They unrolled the checkered bed covering each night and spread it out each morning. The girl disappeared each morning and returned unexpectedly, in a noisy panic, swaying strangely. They didn’t speak, as if Dori was nothing more than another bookshelf added to the room. But Dori didn’t speak with anyone then.

  Dori left the shared room only when they forced her, and then she would walk along the edges of the vegetable garden, measuring with her legs the artificial lawn, a gift from generous donors who waged a war against the local weather. Only at nights were the two of them peas in a pod, close and alike, until the girl would unroll her blanket and stand by her head. “Can you hear me?” she’d ask again as if verifying a fact. “Can you? Can you?” Dori didn’t know if she enjoyed this, or if she had to do it, maybe she too had simply gotten used to spending nights this way. But she only thought all this afterward, because during those nights she lay with tensed limbs like a doll built out of wood with joints screwed together, the dread climbed over her and curled up in her belly and tallied up her vertebrae. They were supposed to become friends. That was how they were introduced to each other, with an emphatic promise, a promise laced with an implicit threat: Anat and Dori would be the best of friends, they had so much in common, and Dori looked at her toes in the blue sandals she had recently been given and that didn’t suit her and she knew that this was a lie, and Anat ignored the counselors’ words and insisted on adding the i to her name, saying, “My name is Anati, not Anat.” And even Dori knew that this didn’t make her name or the girl herself cute.

  Despite all this, Dori preferred the night. During the days, paper bags filled with air exploded behind her back. They imitated her language with hand movements that didn’t mean a thing; they imitated in a heavy, mocking voice what their ears heard as the speech of the deaf. After one of them succeeded with an imitation, the others burst out with laughter that sounded as if it had been hanging around for a long time, waiting for its chance.

  When her novelty dissipated, the bullying weakened, grew more sporadic. She learned it was best to give in a little and keep the fear inside. Give a finger and not the whole hand, so they didn’t know which finger she’d given and what she’d kept. But in the institution, which Dori got used to calling a boarding school like everyone else, there was no place for secrets. Children always broke into your secrets and shook them around until everything came out, clattering and worthless. Everyone knew who didn’t have a mother, who wet the bed, who was beaten, who was beaten worse, who was removed from their home with a court order and why. The children kept pictures and letters under the thin mattresses even though strange hands pulled them out and fondled them. They read one another’s diaries and left comments and sometimes cut out entire pages. But Dori didn’t keep a diary. She didn’t write a single word. In their language too she kept silent for days and weeks. Only at night did she call for Lili. Underneath the blanket her fingers signed for her to come. She knew by heart how Lili’s body felt next to her and out of habit she drew close to the wall, making space for her. An entire world had been taken from her and what was given in its place screeched like chalk on a blackboard.

  And it was actually that girl, Anati, who opened and closed doors, who rattled and rustled and blew her nose in ways that Dori hadn’t ever considered possible, it was actually she who gave her the first earplugs. On that day she got dressed next to her, while the door to their room was ajar. She threw on the wide purple shirt with the collar cut off, and wore a bathing suit without a drop of embarrassment. Dori sat on the bed and stared at her. Without wanting to, she heard the electricity moving in the walls on its way to light up the many rooms, just how many she didn’t know, the water moving in the pipe with its uneven flow, the window banging in its frame in the dining hall without a person stopping to close its latch. The world was always too noisy.

  With incredible dexterity, the girl they called Anati tied a shrunken turquoise and blue and gold bikini behind her back and with another smooth motion inserted into her ears two lumps of gray material. “I have water in my ears,” she said, almost apologetically. “They make me.” After a moment, she stopped, opened up the d
resser drawer, and threw a small bag at Dori. “I have spare plugs in the drawer, try them yourself, you can’t hear almost anything.”

  Dori inserted the two strange lumps of material into the auricles of her ears. In her hands the plugs were repulsive; they looked like something bodily, like something alien, like a part left over from someone or something. But inside the auricle it wasn’t unpleasant. The material quickly sealed her up, like sealing cracks in a broken jar. Because for those moments the plugs caused the creaks of the window to sound as if they were coming from the adjacent room and not inside of her, the buzzing whisper of the electricity to fall silent, Anati’s steady rustling to quiet. Dori hunched and froze under the summer blanket in her stained shirt, and Anati looked at her with renewed interest. “You can’t even pity that girl,” as one teacher said to another and Dori, unfortunately, overheard. But Dori lifted up her eyes and looked into Anati’s as if she were looking into a mirror. To the few pieces of furniture in the room (two metal beds, a closet, a carpet with a homey weave) the proper shadow was finally added, the purple edges that things had in the past returned to their places. The world stopped for a moment and was reset with the proper color and texture, and it seemed to Dori that the always, the familiar always, which had left her behind, had suddenly returned. And Anat-Anati looked at her as if she was going to scream “can you hear me” into her ears, but that question finally had no meaning then, and instead she said, with eyebrows raised in amazement, “Yeah, I knew it! You’re crazy, I knew it!” This Dori heard, and she nodded as if to agree.