After they finished she would try out the selection of lipsticks that his mother left in the bathroom, spraying perfumes on herself as if at a department store, smelling like a shopgirl who spent eight or nine hours behind a counter perfumed until it stank. Traces of the perfume were hard to cover up, but the lipstick she always wiped off afterward with the back of her hand, leaving only remnants on the edges of her lips. When they were in one of his homes she wore his mother’s clothes, which were beautiful and expensive, and by chance, as it were, they found themselves in her double bed. “Queen size,” he said, and Dori laughed. There she spoke again and there he listened and there she signed stripes and dots and before his eyes she slowly, so very slowly, demonstrated how to sign “dream” and “house” and “youth” and “desire” and “go fuck yourself.” And sometimes those words that existed in their language only and in no other. At long last she had something to give to someone who seemed the intended customer for those strange stores selling brain teasers, metallic marbles knocking into one another and wooden cubes fitting inside three-dimensional puzzles. Presents for someone who has everything. She told him about the boy in the basement, about Mother’s garden, about looking for metal in the fields. She told him about Lili.
Little by little Anton understood that it wasn’t her father and mother but rather Lili who signed the whole world to her. And she’d taught her well, even though she detested the role of the teacher, one given to her only because she was born before Dori. After all, the two of them knew so little about what happened outside of them, they caught specks of dust and thought, here’s a star, here’s the whole world.
It always came back to Lili. Fairly soon it became clear that Anton and Dori had a need for a third. Who would be with them in the room, to describe what she did and how she did it and sometimes why as well. Who would be like the air surrounding them. A third was required there, even though the third didn’t grow together with them, but instead remained a twelve-year-old girl in green boots. Maybe because Dori knew Lili’s age twelve completely. She remembered the color of the sky and the touch of Lili’s skin on hers. He asked to see pictures, but she didn’t have pictures. They weren’t a family that took pictures. She had her words and this would have to do.
But despite all her stories and all the chains of words that issued from her mouth, holding hands like paper dolls, she felt empty. She was a rattling barrel with only a single coin banging against its insides over and over. Had Dori told her everything, perhaps Georgia would have revealed to Dori that she was in great distress. That she signed “love” and “I love” erroneously and compulsively. That she’d gone and lost herself. But Georgia was only Georgia, and in any case Dori told her even less than she had in the past, because everything she said about him faded away in her mouth. Despite this the words wouldn’t stop and the precise lines evaporated like smoke. She no longer knew how to describe the light or the smell, the fear, what she wanted or didn’t want. Not even the sensation of balancing on one hand the blue fish the uncles made for them.
Maybe only one of the uncles made the fish, and not both of them. And it might be that they weren’t fish but dolphins or even mermaids instead. And maybe she never had any uncles but only her father’s geese who gathered around him, fat and idiotic. Who could say. Ever since she spoke about them, the uncles had faded as if they were never anything but a story. And when they lay breathless between the duvet and mattress, and everything but them was white and pure, Anton asked her again, “And what else.” Her hair cast a shadow on her face and the glow of the nightlight washed over her, making her features coarse and thick. Again they appeared there, just like before, Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, who in this version was even more handsome and tired and weak until he woke up from a fresh shower of blood and words, whereas Pocahontas was clumsy and not attractive at all and completely forgot the name she was born with. She told more, despite the spoiled taste that stood on her tongue, even though when the tongue met the palate and the teeth out of the need for pronunciation and speech she realized the teeth had loosened and had possibly begun to crumble in her mouth. She continued the story in her language, in their language, but she no longer knew who it was she was talking about.
She lay on the bedcovers, spreading out her toes and closing her eyes. She knew that she was mimicking something. Some other presence, some other woman, more mysterious than her, talking sweetly about herself. But she didn’t care at all, even though she knew that the two of them appeared to him as two sisters in a marginal, low-budget tragedy. She still wanted to tell. To say almost everything, to say too much, to say what no one would want to hear.
One night they stayed together. And instead of just heading out, as always, going in and out of places without signs, without her understanding the rules, why there of all places and why are we leaving now, on this night they had an actual address and destination. Anton said the name of one of the clubs of which Anati claimed he was a silent partner and Dori nodded as if she were a regular at the place, as if she knew herself. She put on makeup in the small bathroom and in the mirror saw the same little Dori, only in color, and quickly put on the lipstick that was too dark and turned off the light because there was no point dwelling on it. Even when she switched one dress for another she still couldn’t decide if this was a real date or just an imitation of a date and just to be safe she dragged Anati with her. Anati looked at her as if she was being kind to her, for agreeing to go from dragging to dragged, and with an exaggerated gesture she tossed the Racine play she was reading onto the bed. “God, I don’t have the strength for those French,” she said, and wrapped the balding feather boa around her neck. Dori knew Anati had decided to act superior to everyone that evening and, perhaps under the influence of the “cursed playwright,” as she called Racine, by the time they reached the stairwell she was already speaking with a fake French accent.
And what was always charming became a bit disgusting when the two of them switched roles. Dori tried to tell Anati, enough, maybe she was getting carried away with the drinking, even though it was Dori who drank glass after glass. The floor at the club looked as if dozens of wineglasses had been shattered on it and ground to a glassy dust. Anati took off her heels and danced alone on the open floor, and Dori prepared herself to see one of those moments when Anati was beautiful and unstoppable. But when she danced there, barefoot, her wet hair falling in damp strips onto her back, she looked miserable, ugly even, from trying too hard. Her jaw looked angular and sharp and her skin turned green and Dori thought, what does it matter if she’s pretty, why does it have to matter if she’s pretty, and just a tiny happiness lit up inside her because the seesaw had for a moment tipped in her favor.
The noise was terrible, jarring and repetitive, like a hospital respirator turned up high. “Welcome to the world, they call this music,” Anati had said to her once, long ago, the first time they went to a club. “Get used to it.” And Dori really did get used to it, because you get used to everything. She now saw Anton’s derisive gaze as he looked at Anati and she hated him and hated herself for not doing anything, for not saving her, for continuing to sit next to him as if nothing was happening. Then they kissed. So many other people were kissing there, so many mouths were caught by exposed skin, that even Dori and Anton managed to kiss without adding another single word about Lili, but a moment later she threw up into a tall metal ashtray and Anati threw up too but each was late in grabbing the other’s hair in that moment, which was humiliating. Anton escorted them to their apartment and Anati fell asleep in her clothes in Dori’s bed, as would sometimes happen when they were little.
Anton washed her hair under the faucet of the sink. He used an apple shampoo that was still left from the German tenant. His hands were extremely gentle, as if she were very fragile. Her head was bent over the sink, pulsing with pain, the water rinsed and the sound rang in her ears as she told him about the game that she and Lili had. She spoke as if it was in the water’s power to mask every sound,
as if she spoke only to herself, but when her voice sounded she knew that Anton was listening attentively. “What strange girls we were, honestly,” Dori said like someone unfamiliar, external, because in fact there was nothing strange about it. If anything it was amazing. At those times, when the small house became a black sky and they ran breathless through the rooms, crashing into crates and furniture, all the limitations were forgotten, extraneous forces of gravity were finally eliminated. Like pictures in The Complete Encyclopedia for Young Adults, the two of them were beautiful objects and hovered voiceless in the place you reach after the numbers end and words turn into a floating nothingness.
Anton wrapped her hair in a hand towel and she understood that this was it, now she really had given everything. The joy that whirled around them when they danced like stars dying out and being born, illuminated like planets, this was the last thing to give. Dori realized that the pain was easier to give by far, but she gave it all anyway. This time Dori Ackerman was the one emptied from the outside in, turned inside out like a sock, and nothing remained of her.
At the end of that night, when the light already rose pale in the windows, and the first birds sang, as if checking with the sound of their voice to see if they were still alive, Dori pulled out the shoebox from under the bed. She tossed it in his direction so that the lid fell off and the contents scattered like confetti. Like letters. Because that’s what they were. She said aloud, “Here’s Lili, these are her words.” And for a moment it seemed that her sister was folded up there in the envelopes, eyes closed like a fetus.
Until that moment Anton didn’t know that Lili still wrote to her little sister, still played that old game of writer and reader. Dori saw the boredom pass by and disappear from his face as if in an accelerated motion, leaving in its place an expression of desire and thirst, but not for her, definitely not for her. When she stood up and dried her hair she knew that she’d bought herself more time opposite Anton, but she didn’t know why or what she’d do with all this purchased time. Because Anton truly looked fascinated, ardent even, in those moments, again wearing the expression of the innocent boy, but Dori knew him and understood that when the newness passed, the boredom would return and Anton would close his eyes.
Anton turned on another light in the room, ignoring Anati sleeping in Dori’s bed, and searched through the sealed and opened envelopes with his long fingers. Like a simple voyeur. Like someone there’s no point in approaching, like the weakest finger in the hand. No, not like, but identical to. And her fingers moved on their own, signing the worker, the soldier, the merchant, the king. Signing the artist who chose an idiot, a greedy one, a thief for herself, and she said to herself in a voice that sounded very familiar, “Here’s one that doesn’t even have his own finger.” And that was Anton, Anton who washed her hair with the smell of apples and Anton whom she watched from a distance in college, brilliant and exalted, and Anton who left them with beautiful, measured steps as they faced the gate to the zoo. He was the one she thought that she couldn’t live without, but she could. Dori looked at him and was unable to rekindle any of what she felt, anything of what she knew she’d felt until that very moment. No, it wasn’t a short-term stupor but the end; it gnawed and arrived. The feeling died. It died in an instant.
And as for the letters, it didn’t matter how many of the envelopes Dori never opened and how many lines she skipped over, and if the letters that she already read were quickly stained with grease and ink, becoming illegible, forgotten in every corner, wrinkled and tossed aside. It didn’t even matter that most of the envelopes remained sealed (until Anton opened them) and that in some of them not a thing waited for her. In any case, Lili sent her nothing more than locks of hair, clipped nails, scraps. Not the truth, not the truth and nothing but the truth, and the two of them knew it.
Dori wrote to Lili:
Once there was a calf that walked through the meadow and a small boy walked in front of him. Above them a star twinkled. Once we lived in an apartment littler than little with Dad and Mom. Do you remember that, Lili? Because I actually remember. It was possible to count all of us on the fingers of one hand but there would be something left over, a small, pink little finger for signing “cat” or “dog.” We didn’t have a dog. Sometimes the little finger signed just us, joining the hand that signed a full circle around us, here we are. Once there was a single hand that struck a knee but no one heard the slap of the fingers. Once we learned to speak word after word. Here my hand stretches forward. Look, my hand is mute but the fingers are as pink as dawn. I remember the smell of oranges. Do you remember?
Dori wrote to Lili:
Once upon a time, definitely once, there was a calf that leapt giddy-up giddy-up up and up on Ireland’s green meadows. There was a boy who ran in front of him, not me, I read it in a book. Once there was a boy who taught himself to read from writings on the empty cartons of coffee and laundry detergent. Not me. Someone polished the old kettle until our faces sparkled and smiled when we smiled. The whole world was reflected in our white teeth. We were so happy, weren’t we?
Afterward Lili answered Dori:
Sometimes we were.
Dori sent Lili a letter with letters cut out from the newspaper. The letters spelled a single word repeating.
Afterward Anton read everything he could find.
PART FOUR
THE KINGDOM
I want to write about the good life.
Even if it’s somebody else’s.
—SHIRLEY KAUFMAN
LILI
It’s a wonderful place, I wrote to them. I live in a wonderful place and my job is wonderful. My friends are wonderful; I even adopted a dog. That’s what I wrote, roughly. That is, more or less. Not necessarily in that order. And only after the words were sent, by the good graces of an underwater or underground cable, a signal that was thrown into space and reached the mailbox on which was written ACKERMANALEX, only then did I recall that I’d chosen the word that Alex hated. One of them, anyhow. When I wrote to them I covered myself up in self-pity and immediately laughed at myself. Because with the same wide mouth I cried and then immediately laughed aloud at my wailing.
It’s impossible not to praise modern technology. There’s no need for a singer on an imaginary street corner, singing under a fake set’s lone streetlight. There’s not even any need for the fucking Red Army Choir. When I was the miserable Lili whom no one loved, I played “Lili Marlene” on repeat. I heard the song and sighed with great emotion, until finally it was reduced to a series of actions like this: hearing and sighing.
In a rare moment of candor Anna once told me that she named me after that song. She signed: “That was my inspiration,” and I pretended I didn’t see. Maybe something got in my eye. Maybe the whole world. So pathetic and miserable is Lili. So delicate, like a rose’s petals. And it wasn’t even strange to me, that her favorite song was as beloved by the Nazis as it was by the Allies. I didn’t find anything strange in her naming me after a chorus, a song people hum, a song you need working ears in order to hear. Yes, that’s what our life was like, a hole on top of a hole. In the face of that hole, what was there left to do? One could be a mouse and one could, very belatedly, say: How wonderful. How wonderful the world is. How wonderful my life is, in the present and in the past.
Whenever I recalled another lie that was told to us, a lie we swallowed like poisoned fish tossed to seals, I felt sorry for myself all over again. Sometimes I drank. How ridiculous Lili is. Unconnected, unaffiliated, no kin, no acquaintances, no one who cares. Nor anyone who will call her to come back. Ha! I felt sorry for myself for being raised among them and I felt no less sorry for being far away. Believe me, I had enough pity for both this and that. Overflowing with self-concern. At those moments my hands pretended to be dead and only my feet smacked against each other, like someone trying to swim on dry land.
Because the past didn’t stay in the past. It’s an air pocket that drifts through the blood and all at once bursts open. It’s an anc
ient pain that petrifies the muscle and suddenly in midstride, decades later, the muscle tears and you fall. With all the self-pity (which at least for the most part I kept to myself and didn’t exhaust my surroundings with) and despite the self-rebuke (“Lili, enough already,” I said to myself in all my languages, and my fingers said it quite firmly, like someone unfamiliar and authoritative, someone you can believe), with all this dramatic extravagance (which it turned out I had great talent for), there was something to it. The past advanced. It came. Sometimes you go toward it. What does it mean, leaping like a mindless colt? An idiotic Bambi.
And what did I do all this time? Why, the time passed, accumulated. Something happened to me. It couldn’t be that I continued working at the same prestigious hotel, cleaning rooms and putting on sheets, honoring the standard furniture with a duster. It’s inconceivable that I still walk dogs through the streets of New York, handling them without fear after I acquired the miserable tricks designed to get them to obey. But that’s really not so important. They always want to know, “Where are you from? Your accent’s strange” (“I’m deaf,” I answer them if I want. “I came from the Land of the Deaf”) and “What do you do?” And I feel like saying to them: nothing. I’m not doing a thing. Every day I read Walden at the edge of a calm pond, not in New England, true, but there’s no reason to insist on such technicalities. Perhaps I don’t read Walden either. After all, I’m not from here.
Sometimes I wake up with a burning desire to understand the locals. On those mornings it seems to me there’s a point in researching and understanding what causes them to tick like clocks that never stop, like squirrels that rush to the top of a tree only in order to climb back down again. But usually this effort seems pointless to me. Still, the view here is as lovely as a Disney movie. This I don’t deny and yes, these are my images. I don’t look around and think, hmm, the pond here is like Thoreau’s Walden. The experience of American solitude and the clear soul don’t pass before my eyes. My consciousness is attracted to baby-faced heroes who are meant to be sewn onto blankets and socks, stamped onto glasses and engine covers. Animated characters whose likenesses will appear on banknotes someday. When I studied at the regional high school I watched them in infinite sequences, movie after movie. Before my eyes they would sing and joke, dance and fall in love, learn and teach a lesson. And I, like the last of the gullible geese, found myself extracting moral standards from them. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the entirety of Lili Ackerman’s ethical code. So too is my soul, I say to all who can’t hear me, a superficial, colorful soul. As flexible as a singing crab or a dancing candlestick.
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