A Wall of Light (20 page)

S
ONYA

W
hen I first lost my hearing I assumed it was a temporary problem. I thought that as soon as I came home this unpleasant side effect would vanish. I did notice a great deal of distress around me at the hospital, but I was sick and sleepy, and I assumed people were upset about something unrelated to me—a plane crash, for example, or a terrorist act. Someone came to take a photograph of me and in my confusion I thought they were belatedly celebrating my birthday. I had hallucinatory dreams and I wasn’t always sure what I’d dreamed and what had really taken place. In one dream the nurses buried my body under a mountain of sand, the way Noah used to do at the beach, but my brother didn’t understand that we were playing, and he sat with his face in his hands, sobbing. I wanted to tell him that I was fine, that the sand was just there to keep me warm, but the words were too slow and heavy to be intelligible.

Eventually I was well enough to go home. I seemed to have plugs in my ears; all I heard was a lot of rumbling inside my head. On my third day back I handed Kostya a note:
How soon until I can hear again?

He was washing large leaves of lettuce from the garden. I watched the dirt splashing into the sink. He put down the lettuce, turned off the water, dried his hands, sat down at the table and wrote:
You were accidentally given a massive dose of gentamicin at the hospital—no one knows how it happened. The drug damaged the eighth nerve (organ of hearing). The damage is irreversible. We’ve all started learning sign language. We’ll all help you.
Noah was sitting at the table, watching me; he looked like someone being led to the gallows. He reached out to take my hand but I shook him off, pushed him away violently.

A week of tantrums and histrionics followed. I ran out of the house and faced oncoming traffic. The unlucky driver who was speeding toward me nearly had a heart attack as he swerved and hit a honeysuckle hedge instead of my body. There was a huge commotion; everyone in the neighborhood came out to see what had happened. My mother cried, Iris was furious, and my brother apologized to the driver and also treated him for minor injuries. I didn’t repeat the dramatic suicide attempt, but several times Noah had to restrain me physically or I would have broken every dish in the house, and possibly also my violin.

I finally collapsed from exhaustion; one can keep up that sort of thing for only so long. Instead, I panicked. The thought that I would never hear again terrified me and I began to cling to my family like an infant. I refused to leave my bed and someone had to be with me at all times. Noah, my mother and brother, and even Iris took turns. I laid my head on my mother’s breasts and stroked them, I clutched Noah’s shirt. I even needed someone to accompany me to the bathroom. I regressed from day to day and by the end of the week I was sucking my thumb and no longer feeding myself. My family spoonfed me, and when they went too fast I lost my temper and refused to eat altogether.
Slower!
I wrote. The word covered an entire sheet, and the pen ripped through the paper.

The social worker who came to see us disapproved of my family’s collusion in what she saw as manipulative, self-indulgent behavior. Her view was that I should be treated kindly but firmly. She sat near my bed and began signing to me, but I shut my eyes against her and turned the other way. When she touched my shoulder I went limp, as if I were dead. She gave up.

The social worker also told my mother that our beds should be moved apart. My mother and I slept side by side, our single beds pushed together. The bedroom was so small it left us few options, but the arrangement suited us. My mother, leaning back on three fat pillows, her long blond hair braided for the night, liked reading to me or telling me stories at bedtime. And I loved having her nearby, smelling faintly of vodka and cinnamon, and warding off any monsters that might be lurking just outside the window. She spoke about her professor and lover, my brother’s father, who was unable to leave his wife for her, and about her childhood in Russia; the stories were entertaining and also interesting, full of psychological twists and observations. “Listen to how people deceive themselves,” she’d start. Or: “Stingy people think they’re generous because it’s so hard for them to give that when they do give they feel like Jesus, while generous people think they never give enough and see themselves as stingy. I knew a woman …” and she’d tell me an amusing anecdote about a neighbor’s parsimony or an aunt’s sly deceptions. My mother rarely spoke of hardship or oppression, though she must have experienced both to some degree. She learned Hebrew in a basement, by candlelight, at great risk to everyone involved, and it was a miracle that she’d survived her dramatic escape from the Soviet Union while performing in Vienna.

When she wasn’t in a storytelling mood she read to me: Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare. Her favorite play was
Romeo and Juliet
, which reminded her of her moment of glory, as she put it, when she had played Juliet in Moscow. She would hold her glass of orange juice and vodka in one hand and turn the pages of her paperback Shakespeare with the other.
“‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark,”’
she would say softly, intensely.
Romeo and Juliet
was a play about hate, not love, she liked to say. Or rather about irrationality, and Romeo and Juliet were meant to be seen as fools from start to finish. That was Shakespeare’s point, she said, not hate versus love, but the insanity of both. She complained that she could no longer get good parts, for she had difficulty acting in Hebrew. Her biggest role in Israel had been Ruth in Pinter’s
Homecoming
, long ago; she’d played alongside a brilliant actor, Ami Sarig, whom she had adored and who was later killed.

There were also days when she came home late, exhausted from waiting tables, and there were nights when she didn’t come home at all. My mother was determined and resigned, lively and unhappy, charismatic and placid. She had many devoted friends, and I felt lucky that I had a special claim on her.

In the end it was my mother who pulled me out of the despairing panic I’d fallen into. The social worker visited several times, but she was ineffectual; the only thing she left behind her was the sharp smell of Castile soap. But one morning I woke up and found my mother’s arm around my waist, holding me close to her. She was still asleep and I knew she was snoring because I felt the vibrations against my back. I had dreamed I was in a garden in Spain, and there were remarkable blue and yellow butterflies everywhere, but I was the only one who could see them.

I looked at my mother’s hand lying on the sheet: the generous blue veins traveling like a map of rivers from fingers to wrist, the tiny scattered freckles, innocent and helpless, the stubborn shadows cast by her veins, the stubborn generosity of my mother’s hand. I touched her pinkie, and in her sleep she intertwined her fingers with mine. It was true that I had become a lone traveler on a strange planet, but if my deafness was unalterable, so was my family’s love for me. I was important to them, perhaps more than ever, or at least I felt it more than ever. I was like a moored ship, a ship everyone had waited for, laden with rubies and spices. The main thing, I decided, was that I could see and feel: I was sensitive to movement, vibrations, colors, shapes; these things sent out a million messages. I considered pi, the numbers stretching out in a long, solitary row like signposts in a meadow, and I felt an affinity to it. Math also existed in a world of utter silence; we were the same.

Looking at my mother’s hand, I understood her vulnerability for the first time, or at least accepted it for the first time. The other members of my family were resilient, but my mother was treading water; and now even her memory was betraying her. If I continued in this way she would sink with me. “I’m sorry,” I spelled on her hand. Then I slipped away from her, went to the kitchen, and made breakfast. When my brother heard me and came to see whether I was all right, I sliced an orange in two and handed him half.

Now it was Khalid’s arm that held my waist, it was his hand that lay peacefully on the bed. His skin was nearly the same color as mine but his hand was of course much larger. I was moved by the black hairs on his arms—a thin, fuzzy coating designed to protect him from possible harm: wind, for example, or cold. He was asleep; I felt his cool breaths tickling my back. It was a deep sleep and no wonder: he’d spent the morning running around Tel Aviv looking for a rare drug for his mother, he had come home in time to see her off, and on top of all this he’d had to cope with me—not once, but twice. Seventeen months of caring for his dying mother must have also worn him out. I couldn’t imagine what that was like, seeing someone you loved suffer day after day and watching helplessly as she got worse and cried out in pain. At least my mother was not suffering. Some of the other people in the nursing home wept or raged, but my mother was docile and apparently unaffected by her surroundings. It was a blissful forgetting, in her case.

Had Khalid relented out of pity? I had no way of knowing. When I left his house I was afraid he’d come looking for me; I’d have to hide until he gave up his search. I dashed to the back of his building and crouched behind an old gold car that appeared to be undergoing repairs. I was shivering, despite the heat, and I pressed my hands against the sun-baked pebbles in order to absorb their heat and also to distract myself with their hard, sharp edges. I was aware that I had to pee, but I couldn’t remember what that sensation meant, exactly, or what I had to do about it; I seemed to have forgotten all the rules.

I’d either made a sound without realizing it, or else my hiding place was not very efficient. A shadow appeared on the ground, and I looked up: it was Khalid. When I saw him standing there in his black jeans and navy blue T-shirt, looking utterly miserable, I thought my heart would break—not for myself but for him—and I felt very contrite. None of this was his fault: he hadn’t asked me to come into his life—not this morning and not now. I had imposed my desire on him and added to his unhappiness. I would do whatever he wanted, including allowing him to appease his guilt, if that’s what it was. Was it? We had not exchanged a single word since he’d taken my hand and led me back inside.

I had not called my brother. He’d be very worried, but I had no intention of releasing myself from Khalid’s embrace. Whether or not Khalid’s surrender was an act of charity, these were the happiest moments of my life. Even if Khalid didn’t love me and I never saw him again, I would remember this always as a small visit to paradise.

Whatever his feelings, he had enjoyed himself. No one could put on an act like that—for example, the way he’d buried his head between my legs like a thirsty person who’s been wandering for days in the desert and has finally come upon an oasis. I felt sorry for Debbie; her mistake was my good luck. I imagined the American living room in which her parents had talked her out of the marriage: the neat white sofas, the magazine racks. They had destroyed her chance for happiness; they had found a golfer named Eddie to replace Khalid.

I supposed it was a sense of resignation that had enabled Khalid to move so easily from his mother’s death to his own pleasure. He had done everything he could for her, and knowing this freed him. For the first time it occurred to me that my father might be dead, too. Or maybe he was dying, maybe he needed me: there was no way of knowing.

Khalid stirred and I turned toward him. He opened his eyes sleepily and smiled. He spelled on my arm,
“Okay?”

“Yes. I have to call my brother, though. He’s going to be frantic.” I reached into my bag, took out my phone and dialed Kostya’s number.
In Jerusalem, coming home soon
, I entered.

“See you then,”
my brother answered, generous as always.

I signed off and turned back to Khalid. He reached for my notebook. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s so hard to talk to me.”

“I like this system,”
he wrote.
“It makes me think more about what I say. I want to say, I am worried about you. You don’t protect yourself like other people.”

“I don’t have to protect myself from you!” I said.

“Before, you startled me. I didn’t want to kiss you because I didn’t want to hurt you. It wasn’t anything else.”

“You need to get dressed and look after your mother,” I said. “You can’t put it off forever. I feel bad enough as it is, coming at such a time.”

He lifted his jeans from the floor, but only to search the pockets for cigarettes. “Do you mind?” he mimed.

“No, I like the smell.”

He lit a cigarette and stared at me with a slightly amused look as he smoked.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“You don’t seem to notice that you’re not dressed,”
he scrawled in my notebook, the cigarette between his fingers.

“You’re naked, too. Why should it be different for men?” I asked.

“We’re less evolved,”
he wrote.

I said, “Even if I never see you again, I’ll always remember this as the happiest day of my life.”