“Come, see the documents,” Dima said, almost pulling them by the hands out of eagerness. His small room was extremely neat. There was little furniture in it and many books, which were arranged in straight, attractive rows. There wasn’t a single picture. One could fall asleep on his low bed and dream of nothing. There was a cabinet. And inside the cabinet (Dima showed them when he swung open its doors) there was a chest. Not a treasure chest but rather a rectangular metal chest, closed with a lock. Lili recalled the story about the goose who swallowed a key that opened every door. When after much effort the key was removed and the door was finally opened, behind it there was just another goose, made of gold and precious stone, true, but a goose is a goose. And she tried to remember if she told this story to Dori or Dori to her. Actually, in Dori’s story, she remembered, the hidden goose was made of shiny metal, but for God’s sake how many geese can glide like this back and forth in her memory, beating their feathers, spewing out keys.
Dima opened the chest that was filled with clear binders, and in them were files of accounting pages and bills of ownership, proof of what he was giving to the two of them. They looked silently at the notary’s signature and Alex’s signature, under each of which appeared Dima’s simple signature. “I told you, it’s yours. Everything is computerized. But you,” he added, and signed carefully, with a thin smile, “always loved paper.” Dori looked into the neatly ordered cabinet and saw that Lili’s old notebooks, or notebooks that looked very similar to them, were arranged there in stacks, even though they disappeared some time ago, were destroyed, got wet or were burned, were exposed to winds that blew page after page, word after word, from them, and they knew that neither one of them would read from them again. Dima, who followed Dori’s gaze, stuck a folded-up sheet of lined paper into her hand and she closed her fist around it. “Read this afterward,” he signed. “If you want.” Even with a closed hand Dori understood that it was an ancient note, which had been folded up and straightened out many times. A note in a girl’s handwriting, handwriting more familiar to her than her own. But there’s a time for everything. A time to mourn and a time to dance, and the note was slid into her pocket.
“I kept these for you too,” he added, and Dori saw the missing birds that Anna didn’t have. Dima was like a magician whose tricks were no longer of any use. Once there were many more, a whole flock, but only two remain. Blue and green. The birds that Uncle Noah, who died too, long ago, built for them. Lili takes one of them and stands it on her palm. They still work if you turn the keys or move the small handle. They’re like two clocks that display another, distant time. The mechanical birds sing simple songs that are buried in the bellies, single-toned songs that now sound hoarse, songs that Lili and Dori haven’t heard for years and years. Once, one of them heard and the other didn’t. And now both hear. “I remember them,” the one says, and the other doesn’t deny it. Because sometimes that’s all there is. The facts and only the facts and nothing else besides.
Dear Establishment,
My name is Lili. My sister’s name is Dori. Our father is deaf. I’m deaf too. Our mother is hard of hearing. Dori and I go to school at home. Sometimes we sleep in one bed. People think that Dori is deaf but she’s not. You need to teach her to speak and hear even if she doesn’t want to.
Sincerely,
Lili Ackerman
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Aquarium is a work of fiction and the Ackerman family doesn’t represent the diverse deaf community in any way. That being said, in the course of researching for this book, alongside the professional literature, I received help from people and organizations who generously shared their knowledge with me. I want to offer special thanks to some of them.
First among them is Tamar Halutzi, sign language interpreter, who kindly taught me the nuances and subtleties of Israeli sign language.
I’m also grateful to the Institute for the Advancement of the Deaf in Israel and my sign language teacher, Amit Elbaz, who graciously taught me basic terms in this rich language. Additional thanks to Riki Bitton, director of social services at the Deaf Association, who opened the doors of the association to me and shared her knowledge with me.
It is with great pleasure that I thank my brilliant editor, Oded Wolkstein. I hope that there will be some more strange ships for us to steer. I thank Keter Publishing House, which provided Aquarium its first welcoming home. I’d like to express my gratitude to Todd Hasak-Lowy, who dared to travel to unknown territory and ingeniously echoed words, music, and spaces inhabited by tunes keyboards do not play. I am also grateful to Maayan Eitan for her enchanting attention.
It is an extremely pleasant obligation to thank my agent, Paul Lucas, whose genuine love for books is only comparable to his love for human beings.
My FSG editor, Julia Ringo, is an absolute marvel—I don’t have enough words to thank her for her wisdom and generosity. And finally, I am happily indebted to the whole wonderful team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux—a publishing house I was secretly dreaming about ever since its name loomed on my horizon.
* * *
If errors and mistakes made their way into the book, they are my responsibility alone.
A Note About the Author
Yaara Shehori is an Israeli novelist and poet. She has been an editor of Hebrew literature at Keter Books since 2013. In 2015, Shehori was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Literary Works and the Ministry of Culture’s award for upcoming writers. She holds a PhD in Hebrew literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and a fellowship from the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2017, Aquarium was recognized with the Bernstein Prize for the best original Hebrew-language novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
A Note About the Translator
Todd Hasak-Lowy is an American writer and translator, and a professor of creative writing and literature at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. He is the author of The Task of This Translator, a short-story collection; Captives, a novel; a narrative memoir for young adults, Somewhere There Is Still a Sun, cowritten with the Holocaust survivor Michael Gruenbaum; and three books for younger readers. Hasak-Lowy lives in Evanston, Illinois, with his wife and two daughters.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Lili
Dori
Part Three
Part Four
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author and Translator
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2016 by Yaara Shehori
Translation copyright © 2021 by Todd Hasak-Lowy
All rights reserved
Originally published in Hebrew in 2016 by Keter, Israel, as םוירווקא (Akvaryom)
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2021
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lines from “My Blue Piano,” by Else Lasker-Schüler, from After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, translated and introduced by Eavan Boland, copyright © 2004 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved.
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-72083-4
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Yaara Shehori, Aquarium
Aquarium Page 24
