This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (20 page)

I slept most of the next morning. It was nearly noon when Aunt Zahava woke me. I ate a quick breakfast and then rode the bus to Jaffa Road, to the secondhand English bookstore. Then, at twenty to four, I returned to Aunt Itta’s and walked up the hill and down again.

From afar, I saw Nachum waiting, peering closely at his digital watch. His legs shifted impatiently as he stood by the railing in front of the building. Then he looked up and saw me. He smiled, as if dazzled by my existence. He thrust his head forward, then the rest of his body followed, and he hurried up the slope to meet me.

I hugged him, touching him lightly. It was ten minutes past four. Nachum looked again at his watch.

“Ah, ah, ah—” he said. “So…so you came at four…and ten minutes.” He waved his hand dismissively. “
Lo norah.
Never mind. Never mind. Ih-ih-ih-it’s almost—it’s almost still four…four o’clock.”

Upstairs in the apartment, he offered me a drink.

“So, so, so, you want—you want
pih-petel?
Or jih—juice? Orange juice?”

I wanted
petel.
He filled my cup right up to the brim. I sipped from it quickly, so it wouldn’t spill over. Then we went to the corner grocery. Aunt Itta needed eggs and milk.

In the small corner store, I watched him pick up the items, placing them carefully on the small conveyor belt. I watched him meticulously count out the change: four shekels for the milk, five for the eggs, and two and a half from his allowance for a bag of chips.

On the way home, I asked Nachum for some chips. He looked at me eagerly. “Ha, ha, ha—how many?” he asked.

I thought for a moment.

“One?” I suggested, unsure.

Nachum reached into the bag. He carefully took out one chip and gave it to me.

We walked half a block. Again, I asked for chips, but this time for a few.

“Kih-kih-kih—kamah at rotzah?”
he asked. “Ha, ha, how many do you want?”

“Just a few,” I answered, and thought I was being very clear.

Nachum looked at me, bewildered. He stared down at the bag as if it had turned into a mystery. His eyebrows furrowed. His mouth opened, then shut, then opened again.

I changed my mind.

“Two chips,” I said. “Two.”

Nachum reached into the bag, his brows unfurrowed, relief on his face. He counted out two chips and carefully placed them in the palm of my hand.

“Thank you,” I said.

He nodded vigorously, cheeks filled with potato chips. But at the steps of the building, with the bag nearly empty, I asked for three more.

I watched his hand searching in the bag, his fingers struggling to take out exactly three chips. This was tricky, because with his left hand he held the bag, and with his right hand he pulled out the chips—one, then two, then three. The third one cracked between his fingers.

So he started again. This time, he pulled some out randomly, but what came out was a handful of four. He frowned. He dropped the chips back in the bag.

His hand now rustled inside the bag in agitation. I could see the order of things becoming confused in his head. His hand and his entire mind were buried in the chaos of chips as he pulled out the first, the second, and the impossible third, which snapped again like a dry twig in his fingers.

My hand reached out slowly.

“Nachum,” I said. “Nachum…I will try.” Immediately, he pulled his fingers out of the bag and thrust it toward me as if handing over an impossible mission.

I pulled out a handful of chips, laying them out over my open palm. Then I counted out three with the other hand. The rest I dropped back in the bag, which I returned to my brother.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have three chips.”

My brother nodded once emphatically, reassuring himself that things were all right.

“You, you, you…you are welcome,” he said.

Back upstairs, Aunt Itta gave us meringues. We stood by the window, sugar and egg whites melting in our mouths. The curtains rustled in the afternoon breeze as we looked out over the hills of Jerusalem.

“Autism spectrum disorder,” said the tall and important book, “is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder manifested across multiple contexts and characterized by severe deficit in social-emotional reciprocity, communication impairment, and repetitive patterns of idiosyncratic…” Blah, blah, blah.

I shut the book. It was impossible to understand, its pages filled with large words running busily across small, crowded lines.

I asked my cousin Batya how they had done it. How did Nachum change? She shrugged and smiled. She asked if I wanted more cake.

“Yes,” I said. “More cake, please. But tell me, how did it happen?”

Batya bent over the stencil on the table, marking out a circle of dots for her kindergarten class.

“Prayers and miracles,” she said. “And faith.”

I shifted the couch pillow behind my back. Yes, yes, of course, prayers and miracles and lots of faith, but also something to do with the chart on the wall in Nachum’s room, and the permanent scar on Ayalah’s knee, engraved into her skin by my brother from the time when he did not have words. One did not just walk into a closed labyrinth where fearful children stood armed at the gates of their minds. Bad things happened to people who came looking.

I pushed the book away and sighed, bored, leaning against the armrest of the couch. I watched Batya fill in apples on her tree. There was still an hour until Nachum came home. Then we’d eat dinner and go to the Western Wall.

I asked Batya why Nachum still spoke funny. After all, if his mind had connected and his brain had somehow healed, why couldn’t he talk the way I did? Why did he still stumble over sounds?

Batya put down the red marker she was holding, switching it for a green one. “Because it’s hard for him to speak,” she said.

“But why?” I asked.

“Because he’s still autistic,” she said.

“He’s a cured autistic.”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, he’s not crazy anymore.”

“Okay.”

“So?”

“He’s still autistic.”

“How?”

“His mind operates differently.”

The marker brushed against the stencil in smooth, green strokes.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How does his mind operate differently?”

Batya did not answer.

“And why does he still speak funny?”

She nodded her head, as if she’d heard, her eyes focused on the tree trunk.

“And why does he still pace when he gets very excited or nervous? Do you remember how he used to rock? Like a crazy boy? Why did he do that?” I curled my ponytail around my thumb, smoothing down the frizzy hair. “What does ‘autistic’ mean?”

The marker stopped. Batya looked up from her apple tree, its top now round and fully green. “Do you know why babies like being rocked?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Because they’re babies.”

“But why do they like it?”

“Because rocking is soothing.”

“Yes. How?”

“The swaying. The back-and-forth moving.”

Batya looked at me, as if waiting for more. “So?”

“What do you mean, ‘So?’”

“What’s the connection? Why do babies want to be rocked?”

I looked at her, exasperated. “Because they’re
babies!
”

I flipped the pillow across the couch. Good Lord of the heavens and earth, what a question! Because that’s how God made babies: for rocking.

But Batya said that rocking had nothing to do with size. It had to do with fear. It had to do with the balance between the senses that keep the world aligned.

“When a baby is born,” she said, her voice filled with patience, “their vision is not focused. Everything is gray and blurry.”

I rolled my eyes. I knew that.

“It’s like suddenly all of space is filled with shades and shadows. There are strange, unpredictable sounds. Suddenly it’s cold, then hot. There’s this sharp light that stings the eye, and shapes loom in and out. Everything shifts and moves unexpectedly.”

I knew that. Sort of.

Batya continued. “Rocking soothes a baby because it stops the jumble of movement and sounds. Now there is just one motion. Rocking is a simple, predictable rhythm that makes the body feel safe. It lets the mind shut out a world that the brain can’t yet process. Rocking provides balance that the senses don’t have.”

She stopped to see if I understood. I nodded. I had definitely not known that. Nor did I know what it had to do with my brother. Because Nachum had rocked way past his baby years, way past the age when it was normal or remotely cute.

“But in babies,” Batya went on, “vision slowly comes into focus. Over time, their minds adapt to the sounds around them. The ears, eyes, and fingers of a baby are like windows to the outside world opened just enough to take in the right amount of touch, light, and sound, so that the brain can process them. The child no longer needs the rocking, because the senses, now aligned, provide balance from inside. The baby feels secure. The world is a comfortable place that he can now explore.”

Batya left the table and her tree drawing and sat down beside me on the couch. She picked up the flipped-over pillow and settled it on her lap.

“But not for your brother,” she said. “For autistic children there is no balance. The senses never align. The mind is never safe—it can’t ever settle down. It’s not that they see too little; it’s that they see too much. Their windows are open wide, much more than the average person—there is nothing to stop the heat and cold and rain from flooding inside. Touch, light, and sound rush in through their ears, eyes, and skin, but it’s too much for their senses to process. Such a mind is a frenzied place, the brain battered and overwhelmed. Inside their heads there is always a terrible storm.”

Batya stopped, allowing me to absorb her words.

“Do you realize what the world looks like to such a child?” she asked. “For your brother, the world was never a safe space to explore. It was a terrifying and dangerous place that he needed to fight off, endlessly.”

I remembered Nachum’s flailing hands, his frenzied eyes, and wondered for the first time what he’d seen when he looked at me. What kind of strange creature had I been? I remembered him holding up his hands, protecting his face as if he were being attacked by a swarm of bees, and I wondered: What had my hands felt like on his raw, bare skin? My poking finger, like the sharp point of a spear? What had my voice sounded like when I screamed?

A boy like that needed balance, and that’s why he rocked. A mind like that needed silence, needed for the merciless earth to stop. It was like running through a corridor filled with looming, blurry faces, and frightening echoes that bounced off the walls. It was like opening door after door in long, endless hallways, and following a maze with no way out. The only thing to do was curl up in a corner, and rock.

Back. Forth.

Back. Forth.

Back. Forth.

Back. Until his brain had disconnected from his ears, until his eyes had stopped seeing the colors and light, until his body had ceased to absorb the world’s signals, until he’d shut down every last switch of his mind. And inside it was dark and still.

Batya said it was called sensory deprivation. It said so in the tall book. She said it was the way autistic children survived. It was also the reason, she explained, that Nachum did not speak back then.

“When the brain shuts down, it does so completely. It cuts everything out—all the lights, all the sounds, both the music and the noise, the prodding hands and the gentle hugs. In such cacophony, the only relief is utter silence.”

But still, I could not understand. Because I remembered the paintings my mother brought home a few months after Nachum left. She had hung them up proudly in our kitchen and entrance hall. There was a still life of wildflowers and apples, and canvases filled with rich shades of purple and red, petals unfurling toward the sun, specks of dancing sunlight mingling gracefully with the shadows—images no child his age should have been able to draw. Several of my brother’s artworks had hung on the walls of the prime minister’s official residence in Jerusalem, exhibited by ALUT, the Israeli Society for Autistic Children. When the exhibit was over, the painting came home to us in Brooklyn.

Nachum had always made impossible things: complicated Lego structures, delicate strokes of pastel color on drawing paper, like bright flashes of genius in a dark room. But I had never liked the pictures on the wall. They had stared down at me, a disturbing reminder of something gone terribly wrong. How could a boy who saw flowers and apples like that be so blind?

I asked Batya how it was possible. If all Nachum wanted to do was make himself unsee, how had he created the paintings on the wall? If he could turn himself deaf, how had he heard the bird chirping way up on the top of the tree in our backyard, listening to it one morning for what had seemed like an hour, as if under a spell?

Batya told me to imagine a mind that worked like a microscope. The same eyes that could be overwhelmed by an avalanche of signals could tune in to the smaller things that a normal mind could never perceive. A leaf, a flame, music, numbers, particular patterns and details—his senses latched onto such things because he could see them with crystal clarity.

But that had not ever been a good thing.

“Nachum would sit with his eyes glued to the picture on the Lego box,” I told Batya. “Maybe he was seeing something clearly, but if I tried to touch him or if my father tried to help him with his Lego, he’d scream like he was being skinned alive.”

Batya leaned forward, trying to make me see.

“Nachum’s mind was in constant chaos, Menuchah. So when he finally found a thing that brought order to his senses, he held on to it like a drowning person to a branch. In a flame, in a running stream, in the pieces of his Lego—there was balance. His mind could process it, and it was like a tiny island of peace.”

“But those things didn’t even calm him down,” I exclaimed. “They just tensed him up in a different way.”

“Because like that,” Batya said, snapping her fingers, “the balance could disappear. If he moved one wrong inch this way or that, the chaos would come tumbling in again.”

I began to understand his paintings. In the drawings he had made, the way no child his age should have been able to, lay the excruciating details that Nachum perceived, like a map to his wide-open senses. Where I saw an apple on a tray, he saw varied shades of green, how the light flickered off the skin. Where I saw a fruit, he saw a pattern, a precise order of detail and shadow that became a single point of clarity in a world of utter chaos. It was this vision that had made him blind. Perhaps a drawing for Nachum had never been a work of art, but a distraction, an escape, a cry for help, a means of explaining the way he saw and why he could not speak. Strangely enough, Nachum stopped drawing as soon as he began to talk.

Later that evening, as my gentle cousin and I walked up and down hills and along narrow, twisting streets toward the open-air market on Machaneh Yehuda Street, Batya told me a story.

“In your brother’s room,” she said, “there hung a little red wig on the hook in the corner.”

I shook my head, not understanding why she was telling me this. She continued.

“The first time your mother left Nachum in Israel, he would not let her go. We had to peel his fingers off her ankles so she could leave the house.”

On the day my mother was to leave for the airport, my brother had held on to her, his fingers clasped around her wrists. He had thrown himself on the floor, his hands locked around her ankle in an ironlike grip as he screamed. Shaking and trembling, he had cried and begged,
“Ima! Ima! Ima! Ima!,”
because he did not want to be left behind.

My mother promised that she’d be back, but Nachum never heard her. She stroked his face and soothed his tears, swearing that she was not abandoning him, that in a few weeks she would return. But a boy like that could not understand; to him, words were meaningless sounds. He could not understand that in Israel there were resources that did not yet exist in New York; a family with older children and a place and their hearts to give him; and the Hebrew language through which he had once, if rarely, communicated.

Nachum had only his eyes with which he watched my mother leave, walk out the door, and drive away in the back of a cab on her way home to New York.

In the end, she had left him on the floor. Ayalah had held tightly to his right hand, my Aunt Itta to his left, while his kicking feet landed in Batya’s bruising lap. This is how it was for a boy who had no words.

It was Dr. Cory Shulman who knew how to make him understand. The next time my mother arrived in Israel, Dr. Shulman explained how one makes a promise to a child with no words. She told my mother to make a pact with him. On the day she left, she and Nachum would exchange an item. My mother sat on his bed in his room, and my brother sat next to her. He gave her a knitted wallet he’d made, and she gave him an old red wig that she’d worn every day for as long as he could remember.

And my brother let her go. He watched calmly as she explained that she was leaving. He let her kiss him good-bye. He watched her walk out the door and down the stairs, and from the window he saw her sit in the back of the cab. Then he watched the cab drive up the hill and away, disappearing around the curve in the road. Afterward, he sat in his room and played with his Lego.

Because in my brother’s mind, my mother was still there, in the piece of herself she’d left behind just for him. To him, the wig had never been something separate or apart; a person’s hat or watch or the clothing they wore was part of their makeup the way their hands and legs were. The red wig worn by my mother was a piece of my mother, there, still in his room. Now she was not gone; it was only that most of her was somewhere else. This meant that she’d return, that she would always come back to him.

The red wig stayed in my brother’s room for more than two years. It hung on the hook as a binding pact, a sacred promise, until he found a way to make one in words.