SWALLOW

Pair; nested in a fissure halfway up a 400-foot
precipitous rocky wall. Vocalizations muffled.
To reach them would require 300 feet of rope. Or wings.

WE’VE REHEARSED THIS BEFORE. Skeet asks, Why a dictionary?

Each time I answer him it is at least ten degrees different.

It started with a professor in Toronto, I tell him. When I discussed my applied linguistics class, and my interest in what happens when a language dies, he said that we cannot measure what we’ve lost. The effects are culturally devastating. Each language is a key that unlocks the knowledge of entire civilizations. It’s everything, he said. It’s medicinal secrets, ecological wisdom, weather patterns, spiritual attitudes, mythological histories.

If what we say marks all that we know, then a dictionary is the most important human document. Is it not?

But wherever there is language, there are borders that limit our existence, he counters. Not to mention nonverbal thinking and feeling. Wittgenstein, he continued, said that if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Language being the place from which compassion grows. But of course this is precisely the self-serving tautology used by people who defend things such as animal testing and slaughterhouses. And then there are the silent languages. Silence is not acoustic. It is a state of mind. Moths and pheromones, the flashing of fireflies, honeybees dancing on hive walls, the leg waving of spiders. Glasswing butterflies. They read clear to us, but to one another they are rainbow coloured. Sound packs the most information the most rapidly, but the interesting thing about nonverbal communication, he says, is that it is harder to lie.

I found a flat on a little avenue by the university, and dragged my trunk upstairs to the tiny room under its angled ceiling. There was just a small stove and a narrow bed. I found a wooden table and chair, and a jug and a washbasin, on the street, it being impossible to throw things away in a city. I noted down the dates of the exams I needed to pass in order to register as an undergraduate and taught myself biology from a book, one I might have illustrated when I lived in Paris. It felt like a return to childhood. Born by a lake, sworn to water. When I crossed the sea, my suitcase had contained white dresses from another life. The brass latches clicked open, the contents emptied overboard into the black, cold underworld. Gusts of white, like live feathers falling on the dark swells. But the little money I had was giving out, and I was so often cold or hungry or both. I had only one practical grey woollen dress. My face was bare. There were no flourishes. Everything was scrubbed away. My gait felt lumbering, not graceful and light as once it was. Clipped wings against a bitten moon. The only way I could mark the changes wrought to my inward self was by altering my appearance. Before I came here, I cut off all my hair, dark ropes on the floor. The only way to bear the loss of Tacita was, in part, to become her. Small ways.

In a desolate moment, I wrote a letter to Mother that came back months later, unopened, the foreign stamps a ruinous luxury. I eventually received word from Arthur back in England, the one brother who survived the war. He wrote only “flat feet” by way of explanation. He wired money without my even telling him how grim my situation was. We exchanged respectful, affectionate notes at long intervals. Neither of us mentioned our other brothers, though their memories darkened over us. A shell exploded. A plane was shot down. A gun was fired. Uniforms rusted with blood. And then vanished. As though they were never here. It becomes another thing to forget. I think of them as boys, and still they were. We are not readied for such violent loss. So we vowed to make new lives. Singular, where everything is precious. I confided to him that I was gloomy but carried a secret about my future, which I promised to reveal later.

The air was different here. The light. The sidewalks even. They were flatter and wider, gutters tinnily gurgling at the edges of cement curbs. The empty shining streets. The air smelled like nothing. A faint scent of trees and brake dust. There was nothing in the sky except billows of grey smoke from the chimney stacks and the hum of factories. There was no war here. They were not used to death. They did not know my past. They did not know that for a time I ceased to be an honourable woman.

Professor Tapping could get so deep into his work that I would often see him cross the campus in his laboratory gown, having forgotten to take it off. I wanted to take a course from the music department, which I was told is strictly forbidden. But what he said with his limpid eyes was, Your studies can all intersect. In one of his lectures, I thought Mother, with her acute desire for tidiness, would have approved of the precise geometry of cells—Latin for small room, oval and orderly. Everything seemed so absorbing, with no weight of memory to it. Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love, Darwin wrote and I underlined.

Everything sounded amplified to me. Songbird migration happens at night. Whales are composers, their songs are clicks that rhyme like words. Animal voices are important because so many animals are difficult to see. My behavourial biology professor pointed out that we were in an age of intellectual revolution. Biologists and evolutionary psychologists were disassembling the consensus. Everything was worthy of re-examination. Don’t ever hold back in pursuing an idea that might seem mad to others. He told us that after Einstein published his theory of relativity, one hundred physicists wrote a paper condemning it. Einstein’s response: if the theory is wrong, why wouldn’t one author suffice?

I wonder if being truly successful at something means that you are simply bad at everything else. Years later, Einstein’s letters to his wife depict certain strict, somewhat cruel domestic arrangements.

You will make sure—that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons.

After a short time, I received an invitation to Professor Tapping’s house in Forest Hill. The dark wood, the antique rugs, the thick velvet curtains, and his punctilious manner comforted me. The housekeeper let me in to the sitting room, with visible hesitation, having been used to admitting only male students. I waited while she told him I had arrived. My eyes moved toward a framed photograph in the hall; in it, Professor Tapping looks very young in his black suit. There is a woman next to him in a hat. He holds her elbow. They wear the same stern expression that everyone did then, even though it is clearly their wedding day. It reminds me how photography can be a form of lying. I never ask about the photo, or the woman in it. He carries a forlornness the way that only men can, men who have been left to go on living alone. His two sisters are clever, unmarried, and most likely would have been scientists too if they had been male. I wondered if they had stories of fiancés lost in the war, or secret lovers met through the university, or maybe, as with me, none of it would even matter now. There are not many versions on offer in this town. Everything seems to favour an inert sort of morality. Couples who don’t seem to love each other very much but get along well enough. They mate for life, rearing their offspring in sturdy houses with large lawns.

Each Sunday, there was bread, cheese, baked fish, cake, and Paganini’s virtuoso violin solos on the record player. I was almost embarrassed by it, making me aware of how the crudeness of my life bordered on the masochistic. It took a moment to adjust to proper food and conversation outside of school. I had become adept at concealing myself, offering up only one of my profiles.

In the laboratory I am made to slash the throat strings of animals with a knife, spending hours dissecting and sectioning, making paraffin slides. Birdcalls I’d not heard since childhood drifting through the open laboratory windows, everything a song for hard sorrow. The classrooms were crammed with men back from war, their long legs sticking out from underneath their desks making them seem like overgrown children. Though the nights were feverish, work shutting out despair, my days were calm, concealing all the determination that I possessed. I received a first degree, and then a second in quick succession. Because I excelled, and because I did not have any money, I spent my summers at the lab.

The warm months, the room broiling. My mind torpid and thick. There was not a surface or object that did not feel hot. In winter, the wind roared in the chimney, banged at the windows. One night it was so cold I wondered if it was safe. I ran my hands along the wall and found that the reproduction Constable that hung here when I moved in, and for some reason I never removed, covered a hole right to the outside, cold air streaming through in a circle where a stovepipe must once have been. I heard the gnawing of squirrels in the walls and felt half-mad in the boreal air. The kind of cold encountered by some of the soldiers I had seen. The kind where corneas freeze, teeth shatter, faces are eaten by frost. Those men marching who looked off, only to see what it was. That they had no eyelids. Their eyelids had been torn away from cold. I piled everything I owned, including my textbooks, on top of me. A thin layer of ice formed on the washbasin.

If it is cold enough, birds in flight can freeze, and then drop from the sky like stones.

I received my first cheque, a small bursary in the mail. I exchanged the cheque for a bicycle. I rode it through the city, and to the ravines. It was spring. The weakest season here, though small leaves sprouted from trees that had pretended to be dead all winter. There were sudden yellow flowers, and cherry trees with warmed branches clotted in pink bloom.

Professor Tapping and I drank bitter English tea that he sugared heavily in a matching cup ringed with gold. I remember him looking up and saying with warmth and determination, You will accomplish a lot. But you must know your own response to your work, Miss Frame. If you don’t, his teacup clattered delicately, you will miss the reward.

Ivory, one of his sisters said, leaning her head in from the hall and then walking into the room. She handed me a parcel. I have a dress to give you, one that no longer fits. I think it will look smart on you. I had shown up in the same one each week, and all I think is, Please let it be practical and dark so that I can wear it to the university underneath the laboratory smock.

I became a research assistant to Professor Tapping and a Professor Ellis, a migratory bird expert who managed to wrest fascinating research from the most interminable fieldtrips that continually tested the limits of human patience. Hours spent watching an empty grey sky for wings. Though he taught me that another way to look for nests was to listen. He was also incredibly adept at Latin binomials. With biology, taxonomy is essential. It gives the chaos of nature a form. Aristotle once grouped animals in a hierarchy by whether or not they had blood, or whether they lived on land or water. Humans, he put on the top. Like Descartes—who once nailed his wife’s live poodle to a board to prove that it did not have feelings—his relationship to animals was immature.

Even early on in my studies, I found myself turning away from empirical science when I saw that it wasn’t able to speak to the kinds of questions I wanted to answer. They are vast, possibly ridiculous questions, too large for the fine-grained grid of specialization. What is communication? What is silence? Can animal vocalizations and their meanings be made into a dictionary? What would it accomplish for extinction? I have listed a litany of questions. How should the listening be translated? As a kind of diary entry? An emotive expression? A reaction? Or is it an act of discovery? My questions filled an entire notebook to get to a single sentence that I voiced in a meeting with Professor Tapping. He answered me in measured tones, attesting that scientific discovery does not always mean accumulation of data or measured consideration of facts. It often requires a leap of imagination. True scientists do not simply conduct prescribed experiments, they develop their own. Sometimes it’s the only way to get to new knowledge.

You start with a fantasy, which you must ultimately prove in reality. An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. You know— He pauses. Scientists do the same thing as artists, they just use the words hypothesis and experiment instead.

I found all the field recordings the university had, seven in total, including braying Antarctic emperor penguins and hornbills from the Carpenter expedition. I wore enormous headphones, sat in a small wooden carrel that smelled like varnish and dead skin, and counted the seconds between the sounds, listening to the static, the dry little scratches of feet on snow, the timbre of trees creaking in wind. They let me sign out a microphone and heavy recording equipment from the university. I lugged it out to the ravine. The silver discs spin and click to a halt after I replay the sound of thrushes. Their voices telling interior things. Night descends. Everything quiets for a moment. Moonsoaked. Treeglitter. The air held on to this distant, vanishing sound of swallows. There were large gaps of silence. It made me think of Satie’s Gymnopédies, which had been playing quietly in the dining room when I first met Lev at Tacita’s apartment. The music was so far from my mood, slow melancholic notes floating in space. I stared down at the recorder, moonlight on my fingers. This blue dusk, the birds’ voices, invitation. A great calm washed over me. I knew what I had to do. And for the first time, it felt like the beginning of a new age, the one after the king has been killed.