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Lili and Dori. A light head next to a dark one. Curls and braids. Red mixed with brown. Four narrow eyes. The older has a girl’s name and her sister a name they give to boys. At home, they called them Big and Little, a stretched-out hand signaling the height of the taller one and then the height of her sister. Always one in relation to the other, even when they were apart. To the world, they weren’t yet Little and Big. They were the disabled girls. They had tanned legs, stung by mosquitoes in the summer. In the winter they wore shorts like boys’, without charm, without that blooming sweetness, without whatever shields the soft bones of children—not the flesh but rather that strange, pleasant innocence. That they never had. Mostly they wore oversized straw hats that seemed too adult for their age, the two of them like two black pits.
Hair fell in their eyes, but what was there for them to see—an oil stain on a shirt, a scrape on a knee? They spoke with words unvoiced, but they definitely spoke. They had many words. There was the language. An apple tree stood in the yard and all its fruit had worms. It grew there just as in a legend, and in opposition to all the rules of climate. They threw the apples. They tossed the leaves at one another as if they were two forest girls marrying each other under a green canopy. Lili was brave and Dori a coward, but they climbed the highest branches. They sat on a budding branch and shouted to the moon and the stars. It wasn’t pleasant to hear. Quite frightening, actually, like a couple of rabid foxes. The neighbors screamed until they gave up, because what was the point? Ackerman’s deaf girls couldn’t hear anyway. The neighbors learned and kept quiet. The girls hurled small, hard apples at the cats in the yard. Never hit one.
In truth, the tree belonged to the entire building, eight apartments, each one with lights on in the evening. But only Lili and Dori climbed it. Other than the screaming, the neighbors barely bothered them. Perhaps they left them alone out of pity. Perhaps out of despair. Perhaps they just gave up the sour apple harvest. Not a single child came near them, and they didn’t know that was odd.
From Lili and Dori’s perspective, the tree in the courtyard was the only thing that made their small apartment bearable. Low ceilings. Warped tiles. A room without a window; the drum rattle of the washing machine and the shaking of the sewing machine that could be felt in the soles of the feet. How cramped they were there. Only on the apple tree were they okay: two daughters of the forest. Two imps. Deaf. Half retarded. Illiterate. Leave them alone.
When their father knocked on the trunk of the tree, they sensed the rising vibrations and hurried home. Sometimes they saw the light in the apartment rhythmically switch on and off, and that was enough. The lighthouse was illuminated. Each of them had worn a key since they were very small, tied to shoelaces around their necks. You need to be responsible, the whole world told them; you’re not sweet, and you can’t get comfortable with relying on someone else to worry about you. At the entrance to the apartment, each checked the other’s appearance. It was hopeless. Lili’s collar was torn in two places; Dori’s socks were falling off and her braid looked like a mouse’s tail. Lili was the big one. When they stood opposite the door, this became clear once again, whether or not they called her that at home. The big one slid a finger wet with spit over the small one’s eyebrows, forcefully cleaned a green-black stain above her cheek. It didn’t help. The two of them tried to smooth out their wrinkled skirts. Whoever heard of such a thing, climbing in skirts? But that is what they wore that day, over their pants, because the two uncles, their father’s brothers, were supposed to arrive for a visit. Their father treated the visit as a necessary evil (and before each visit Dori imagined those words written above the uncles’ heads), but the girls were required to look civilized. At least this time.
They certainly could have opened the door; they had keys, after all, but they waited. Finally their mother stood at the threshold with a blank expression on her face and they went in after her. Their father’s two brothers sat there. Their discomfort splashed in waves all the way to Dori, who saw four hands that couldn’t find a proper task. Uncle Noah interlaced his fingers and then released them. Ari’s hands lay dead on his knees. Noah loved to make small, ingenious devices, though this was in no way his line of business. Once he built a tiny bird for her that jumped out from its cage and spread its beak. She looked in amazement at the colorful feathers that had been glued one by one to its small body. Dori never knew when the bird was liable to leave the cage, even though she tried to guess. But his main hobby was children—he built dozens of tiny plaster children who slept in cigarette cases and matchboxes. For days after each of his visits, they found these boxes throughout the small apartment.
It can be assumed that it was only because of their uncles that Lili and Dori learned to read words, the words formed by their uncles’ fish lips. Dori was faster than Lili, true, but both of them could understand, if there was enough light and they could clearly see the mouths opening and closing, the tongue rising toward the palate and separating, the rows of teeth. How ugly it was! More than once they trembled in disgust and terror at the sight, with a kind of nausea that had pleasure mixed up in it, like sitting in a monster’s mouth without being swallowed. Noah and Ari, for their part, tried hard to absorb something of the language, they kept asking the girls to teach them, but the teaching never went anywhere. Alex asked them firmly, again and again, to let them be; they were girls, after all, not circus animals.
Sometimes it appeared to Dori that while her parents were beautiful and slender and ageless, the uncles themselves were immeasurably old. They were like fish that had been eaten and only their shiny fishbones were left on the plate. After one of these visits, which became more and more rare, they found two blue fish with wings stuck between the M and O volumes of The Complete Encyclopedia for Young Adults. The fish were precisely the size of their palms and made of thin metal. It was possible to scrape off the coating with a fingernail, but one try proved that it wasn’t worth the effort. The fishes’ wings shimmered as if they had been smeared with nail polish.
They were briefly alarmed by the thought that Noah knew the girls called them the fish uncles. “His toys are too sad,” Lili proclaimed as her open hand descended in front of her face, her expression conveying deep sadness, and then, in the blink of an eye, both hands, with fingers clenched, moved frenetically back and forth before her chest. Then she pointed to the uncle. But Dori knew that despite Lili’s conviction, her sister kept the boxes of sleeping children in the back of her bedside table; she even kept the fish (whereas Dori, despite her best efforts, lost hers). That was how they were then, like two open books in which almost the same thing was written.
Copyright © 2016 by Yaara Shehori
Translation copyright © 2021 by Todd Hasak-Lowy
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.
