This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (21 page)

At the Western Wall, I watched my brother pray. Through the narrow opening between the stones and the gate separating men from women, I could see my brother’s profile, his forehead merging with the wall, his lips shaping the words of the prayer.

Around me, the whispers of a thousand voices rolled over the plaza like the murmur of the sea. In the crevices between stones the size of boulders, I could see the folded-up notes, pushed inside the gaps, each plea buried deep, awaiting the attention of the divine.

To my right, a young woman wept. Her face was buried in her prayer book, and her fist banged emphatically against the stones, as if she would not leave this place until God had changed His mind. Behind me, a group of marriage-age girls swayed fervently. When they finished, they brought their hands up to their lips and, reaching past me, touched the tear-stained slabs of rock. Then slowly they walked backward, still facing what remained of the ancient temple. One did not turn one’s back on this wall.

I asked God to forgive me. I told Him that I knew now that He had never lied about the miracle. He’d kept His side of the bargain; it was I who had not. Because after those forty days, with my brother still as crazy as a bat, I’d been furious with God. I’d accused the heavens of taking my best prayers and giving nothing in return.

I asked God to forgive me. I’d been only eight, I whispered, and the miracles I knew of from the stories of the saints always happened within the hour—at most, after one month and seven days. So when my fast was over and nothing had changed, I turned away, and even as the miracle unfolded around me in the five years that followed, I had refused to look.

Some miracles take a long time. Some need more than forty days and nights; they take perhaps years of work and dedication. Some miracles unfold over time in stunning acts of transformation—a rock sculpted by wind and water, a seed turned into an oak, a mountain range pushed up, a canyon carved out. They’re formed over years and centuries in stretched-out, slow-motion magic. Maybe you can’t see it happening, but it is still a miracle.

I’d been an idiot, I told God from within the murmuring crowd. Because five years on, I finally realized that He had never said no. He had only said “Wait.”

There was no one particular incident that brought Nachum to words. It had been a gradual thing, occurring in the weeks and months of his second year at the school for autistic children. It was there that my brother began to speak.

Maybe it was the structure, the silent space, only possible without five demanding siblings around. Maybe it was the love and mind-bending devotion, the cocoon created within my aunt and uncle’s home. Maybe it was the trained therapists who could see the storm in his head, or the experts who could translate the sounds of his silence and his screams. Or maybe it was prayers, pious deeds, and an abundance of faith.

Later on, a teacher would show me the cards they had used to break down the compendium of noise we call language and expression into small, comprehendible bits. She called it a manual for understanding sounds. She said that for my brother, words were not an instinct but a system to be taught and practiced, the way one learns how to swim or multiply numbers. So the flash card with the smiling face must be held up and defined clearly as “happy,” the card with the frowning face as “sad,” and a face with tears on its cheek as “cry.”

Cry, cry, cry. Sad, sad, sad. Scared, excited, mad. These are the word-sounds for emotions, the way Nachum began decoding the shifting movements on other people’s faces.

The teacher would stand with him in front of a mirror when he was confused, holding up the card with a confused face near his own, and repeat “confused” until Nachum had made the connection between the word-sound “confused”—the thing he felt inside himself—and the expression on his own face, or on other people’s faces. When people grimaced a certain way, they were confused.

Until then, he could not know.

The flash cards were just one of several kinds of visual aids the school used to break down the chaos of the world into pieces that Nachum could process, and then build the pieces back up into patterns that he could understand. This was how the jumble of lights and noises was slowly untangled, separated into details he could fathom—every person, place, and thing a lesson of its own; every expression, emotion, and object put in meticulous order. The bewildering sensations that had once seemed to be trespassing on the territory of his life were now organized, defined, and labeled, word-sounds arranged in a mental toolbox. Until finally, there came a time when Nachum looked up and turned on the switches of his mind.

“You can’t reorder the senses of an autistic person,” Batya said. “But you can teach him to define what his ears and eyes bring into his head. You can teach him to better understand the messages, the difference between loud sounds that are threats and ones that are just running bathwater, between a looming object that means danger and a hand reaching out to help. You can make the earth a safer place for him to explore, and slowly his brain can settle and begin to absorb.”

Nachum began to hear words, and perhaps it was then that he learned to fend off the outside without completely shutting it out. My brother learned fast, first tens, then hundreds, then thousands of words in less than a year. It was as if once his mind had begun to grasp the connection between sounds and meanings, he wanted to absorb them all.

Words were like a secret he’d unearthed, revealing the instructions for living on this mysterious planet. Words were a code that, when finally deciphered, directed him in the ways and manners of a foreign planet. Words made every experience less frightening, more predictable, and the ceaseless background noise finally quieted down.

“But why does he still talk funny?” I asked.

“Well,” retorted Batya, “have you tried learning French?”

“No,” I said. “But if I would, I’d talk like the French.”

“You barely talk Hebrew like the Hebrew.”

“I most certainly do.”

“No, dear cousin, you don’t.”

“I definitely talk Hebrew like the Hebrew.”

Batya shrugged, her eyes teasing.

“My Hebrew isn’t funny,” I said, annoyed.

“It isn’t
very
funny,” she agreed.

“It isn’t funny at all.”

“It’s a
little
funny. With a bit of New York wrapped inside Israel.”

“I speak a perfect Hebrew Hebrew.”

“You do?”

“Mostly, I do.”

Batya’s eyebrow curved up. She laughed.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I have a tiny accent.”

“Yes, maybe.”

I sniffed.

“Anyway, what does this have to do with Nachum’s Hebrew?” I demanded, arms folded over my chest. “He’s been living here for years, and he still speaks funny.”

Batya laughed out loud.

“It’s not his English or his Hebrew. It’s language—it’s words.”

“Huh?”

“It’s words,” she repeated. “Words are foreign to your brother. Communication itself is like a second language. The work you’d need to put in to learn French, he needed to put in to learn human.”

I shook my head, but Batya was not done yet.

“Nachum did not become magically unautistic. He is not ‘cured.’ He never will be. He became fluent in the human language by rote memorization and practice, but it’s still a second language. So he’ll always have an accent.”

I stood up and walked to the windows overlooking the hills. Outside, little cabs with yellow lights drove by, their fenders disappearing around the bends of the twisting roads. On the sidewalk, boys in
kippas
ran screaming, chasing after balls that bounced down the slope. Near the steps, ponytailed girls in long skirts and button-down shirts giggled and jumped, chanting the words of an old Hebrew rhyme. I watched a white van pull up to the entrance of our building. The doors folded inward like an accordion and my brother Nachum came out.

I sighed. I knew that Batya was right—about Nachum, not about my accent. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t known any of this at all. I’d heard these things before, vaguely. My mother had said them at some point, but I had never listened. I’d never read
My Special Brother,
the book she had bought me, or watched the movie
Rain Man,
about an autistic brother. I’d never read Nachum’s painstaking first letter home to us, and I hadn’t remembered the name of the school he had attended.

It was as though I had been living on a tiny island with only two mountains and a chasm in between. On one side stood my determined mother, and on the other everyone else. I stood with everyone else. The people on my side of the chasm saw what my brother had as a frightful disease. They feared it, and I absorbed the fear. They loathed it, and so did I. They called it a curse because they did not have the words to explain it, and where there are no words, there is always fear.

Nachum and I met a girl on the way to Aunt Itta’s house. It was a week after I’d arrived in Israel, and my brother had picked me up from Aunt Zahava’s apartment after school. I saw the tall, thin girl with an easy smile from afar, as we walked past Tnuva’s dairy factory.

“Nachum,” she said, surprised. “How are you? Is this your sister?”

Nachum’s eyes flashed. He stammered with excitement.

“I, I, I…I am fine. Vih-very much. Thank God…And, and, and, and…thi-this, this,
this
is my sister, Meh-nuchah. She, she…
she
is my sister.” At the word “sister,” a smile spread wide across his dimpled face.

“Ahh,” said the girl, “so this is your sister.” She turned to me and gave me a welcoming hug. She said it was so nice to meet me. Nachum had been telling her for weeks that soon, soon I’d come.

I nodded politely. “Ahh,
ken, nechmad.
How nice. I was really excited to come.”

“Who
is
that girl?” I asked as we walked away.

“Thi-that, thi-that is Matty. She takes me to the park. Every week…to play.”

In the fifteen minutes that it took to walk down the hill to his street, my brother introduced me to four different strangers.

“Thi-this, this, this…
this
is my sister, Meh-nuchah…She, she, she is my sister. My sister.”

I should have been embarrassed. After all, it wasn’t as though Nachum was normal. But strangely, I didn’t care. Instead, I found myself observing him curiously, wanting to know every detail of his world. Suddenly, I didn’t think in terms of the levels of crazy. My brother had emerged unexpectedly from a distant legend. Overnight, he had stopped being a character and become my brother. I had crossed the sea that separated his life from mine, and now I found that his story was mine too. I was his sister, to the man selling papers on the corner, to the girl who took him to the park, to myself.

I watched him in awe.

“And who was that?” I asked Nachum of the third person we had stopped to talk to who now knew that I was his sister Meh-nuchah.

“He, he, he—he is a man who is a seller of fih-lowers. Seller of fih-lowers. Uncle Zev buys fih-lowers there, fih-lowers every Shabbat.”

“And that man who is waving?”

“He…he, he. Is a man. Just. A man. I do, do not know. He is fih-riendly…for no good reason at all.”

We crossed the road. Instinctively, I took his hand. Nachum studied our linked hands.

“You, you, you…you are holding my hand.”

“I am.” I explained, “I am being careful about the cars. Because you are my brother.”

“Yih-yes. Yih-yes, yes,” he quickly agreed. “I am—I am your brother. When we cross, you will put your hand in mine.” The dimpled smile appeared as though he agreed that indeed, this was a good idea.

I thought about what I’d done. I realized that my brother crossed the streets of Jerusalem by himself every day, all the time. He really did not need me to hold his hand. And maybe this occurred to him too. Because suddenly he chuckled, as though it was funny, as though he remembered something.

“Be, be, because I am your brother…your cih-razy brother.”

I cringed. “What? Wha-what? No. You are not.”

He giggled gleefully, as if teasing me. “Yes, yes, yes, yes. I…I…I am your brother. Your cih-razy,
crazy
brother.”

He laughed out loud. He shook my hand hard, as if that would explain his words. I looked at him, taken aback. Then I giggled, just a little. It was hard not to, seeing his expression. He was so utterly pleased with what he had said.

“I am
cih-razy,
your cu-cuckoo, tru-la-lu-lah—bih-rother.”

I laughed now along with him, because it was funny, what I had called him back at home—and he had known.

“We are all a little crazy,” I said.

He chuckled, liking this, striding yards ahead of me before realizing he had dropped my hand and I was no longer next to him. Then he turned around and marched back up to me.

“We all are, we all are,” he repeated. “Cih-razy. Also Ayalah, and also Aunt Itta, and also Batya. But only I…I…I—only I am your cih-razy brother. Your cih-razy brother.”

I agreed. “Only you are my crazy brother. My favorite, crazy one.”

He guffawed, his head lurching forward as he strode down the hill, far ahead of me.

My grandmother Savtah Miriam fumbled with the watch on her swollen wrist. She sat down heavily in the armchair by her bed.

“She was standing on the threshold of her apartment,” she told me. “‘Enough with the tears,’ she had said. ‘The rebbe has given his blessing.’”

Savtah Miriam’s hands quivered as she recalled standing outside her mother-in-law Bubba Miril’s home on Sanhedrin Street, some twenty years before.

“Come inside,” Bubba Miril had said. “Sit down, Miriam. Let’s talk.”

But my grandmother shook her head, no. “Not until you promise that the rebbe will take back his blessing.”

Savtah Miriam reached out for the clear glass teacup in my hand. She was nearly seventy years old and struggling with the onset of Parkinson’s. She leaned forward stiffly. I bent closer, waiting for the spasms to stop long enough for her fingers to grasp the cup. Slowly, she lifted the tea to her mouth. Her lips twitched and trembled but her dark, still-lovely eyes gazed at me calmly.

“Your mother was a beauty,” she said, watching the sugar settle in the cup. “All my daughters were.”

I sat on my grandmother’s bed while she sipped the warm liquid, a rivulet of tea seeping from the corner of her mouth. Even with the windows wide open, the apartment smelled like a hospital room. Pharmacy bottles and pill containers were scattered everywhere among scented lotions and brand-name perfumes. Behind the jar of Vaseline lay a string of South Sea pearls. It dangled off the edge of the bedside table like an old, forgotten toy.

The phone rang shrilly on Savtah Miriam’s lap. Gripping the receiver, she poked at the talk button with her jumping pointer finger. Then, as if urging her limb to lift itself, she yanked her arm upward, tilted her head, and leaned her ear into the phone.

It was Dr. Shachor, her gerontologist, the one she’d called four times since the morning. This would be a long conversation. I left my grandmother on the phone and went off to the adjacent room, the former master bedroom, where she no longer slept. I searched through the leftovers of her past. It was my third visit to her home since I’d come to Israel, but I was still nowhere near done exploring.

Inside closets guarded by iron keyholes and old skeleton keys, glamorous dresses hung in dry-cleaning wrappers, some still with receipts that had been stapled on a decade before. From the musty drawers of a dresser last polished before I was born, I pulled out antique watches with leather bands, gold brooches that I tried pinning on my cotton shirt, and silky scarves that I twirled around my still-chubby neck. All around me were my grandmother’s things, the clothes and shoes of her younger years: four-inch heels tottering in the corner, a mound of skirts thrown over a chair, cashmere cardigans folded neatly in hopeful piles, waiting to be worn again. There were belts and shawls sorted and wrapped in plastic bags, perhaps waiting to be given to the poor, while four musty wigs on Styrofoam heads observed it all from their pedestals on the windowsill.

In this room, years before, my grandfather and grandmother had slept, and their master bedroom furniture was untouched among the piles of folded-up memories. In the corner by the window, packed carefully into boxes, lay porcelain cups and hand-painted dishes, brought from America as gifts by my grandfather at least two decades before.

I could hear my grandmother bid the doctor good day and end the call. Then the shrill ringtone pierced the air again. It was one of my aunts, or maybe a friend of Savtah Miriam’s. I stuffed the silk scarves back in a drawer and closed the door behind me, moving into the living room.

During my second visit to my grandmother’s apartment, I had found albums and containers filled with photos in the buffet cabinet against the wall, beneath the elegant glass cups and silverware. I had opened the albums and begun to look, but then Batya had come to pick me up—it had been almost four—so I’d left, reluctantly.

Sitting on the floor now, I pulled out three albums—one with a red cover, one beige, and one an ugly green—from the shelf. I waited quietly by the threshold. Then, as my grandmother continued to complain on the phone about her aches and pains, I quickly crossed her open doorway and stepped into the kitchen. I was afraid that if she saw me with the albums, she’d tell me to put them back.

In the cabinet near the fridge were shopping bags that my grandmother always kept bursting with cookies and sweets. I broke off two rows of a chocolate bar and grabbed a handful of licorice and two hazelnut cream wafers. Then I sat on the wooden chair at the tiny kitchen table, teeth drowning in sugar, and opened the first of the three wedding albums.

Suddenly I noticed the silence. From my grandmother’s room came the sounds of birds chirping on the window ledge and slippered feet scuffing the floor in boredom. My grandmother had hung up the phone.

“Menuchah!” she called from across the hall. “Bring the albums here.”

I jumped up and walked to her room, the albums cradled in my arms like a cache of ill-gotten goods.

“Bring them here,” Savtah Miriam said eagerly, her hand fluttering in the air. “Sit down next to me. I haven’t seen these in years.”

So I laid out the albums on her bed: red, beige, and ugly green. She pointed to the green.

“That’s your mother’s,” she said.

I opened the album on her lap. She touched it gently with a trembling hand. The muscles in her neck balked and strained as if in deliberate resistance. Her face flinched, the tendons in her cheeks shuddering, as she forced herself forward. Finally, her body eased, as if agreeing only reluctantly to let my grandmother back into her past.

Savtah Miriam smiled when she saw herself, porcelain skin and designer clothes, once queen of the neighborhood. She turned the page, her eyes wide open as if it was pitch-dark. Aunt Tziporah looked up at us from a photo, the accordion folds of her pink silk dress covering her expectant stomach. In another photo stood a group of friends wearing their hair piled high like beehives, old-fashioned pumps, and dresses with loud, colorful patterns. And there was my great-aunt Frieda, her arm around my patient mother’s waist, her other hand clutching a shimmering rhinestone purse. Nearby, a circle of women danced as my grandmother, in her rippling silver and mint-green gown, looked on.

I pointed to a photo of all three sisters: Chana, Zahava, and my mother.

“Who made Chana’s
shidduch?
” I asked.

My grandmother searched the picture, her voice foundering but certain. “God in Heaven,” she said. “Who else?”

She paused and then added, “Also Yankiv, the shadchan, and Wiessmandel, the rebbe’s assistant, who knew the boy.”

“Who made Zahava’s
shidduch?
” I asked.

Savtah Miriam shook her head, as though I was asking all the wrong questions. “God in Heaven,” she repeated. “Who else?”

“And who made my mother’s
shidduch?
” I asked, my finger resting on my mother’s tiara in the photo.

“Your mother’s
shidduch?
”

“My mother’s
shidduch.
”

Savtah Miriam’s head swayed. “Your mother,” she said. “Your aunt. Also your father.”

My finger stayed on my mother’s tiara. Savtah Miriam looked down, waiting for it to move. When it did not, she looked up at me, her eyes lingering.

“God in Heaven, of course,” she said, as though her earlier words had been a careless mistake. “Don’t bite your lips like that. It makes you less pretty.”

We looked through the rest of the album, which contained most of the same photos we had back home. I pointed to one of my favorites, of my grandfather between my mother and father, all their faces aglow.

“They look happy,” I said.

Savtah Miriam leaned closer. “They are happy,” she said. “They were very close.”

“Who?” I asked.

She waved a shaky finger over the picture. “They. It was the happiest day of Sabah’s life when he married off your mother, his youngest daughter.” My mother looked out from beneath the protective plastic, her hand touching her chin, on her finger the diamond ring. I chuckled as I looked at the picture, and Savtah Miriam wanted to know why, but I said that it was nothing—just a joke I’d remembered. Because it was hard to explain to my grandmother the things I’d been told as a child.

“Your father bought the most expensive jewelry,” Savtah was saying, smiling at the memories. “Nobody had jewelry like Esther. You know that he worked for a year in New York, sending her gifts back here in Israel?”

Peering at another photo of my parents, she cleared her throat and then said, as if in approval, “Your father was a handsome man.”

I chuckled again, agreeing. I had always known that. Even as a child, I had understood that if among the characters in fairy tales were Chassidim, and if among those Chassidim two were allowed to fall in love, then the princess bride and soldier groom chosen for the picture on the cover would look like my beautiful mother and my father, tall and slender, with high cheekbones and merry eyes, always laughing as if at a secret joke.

Savtah Miriam gazed at the album as if she’d forgotten I was there, as if she were still standing under the canopy beside my mother, with her husband and my father to their left, everyone’s eyes closed in prayer.

“Oh, how he loved him,” she said. “He always said that he was like a son. He was his favorite one…”

Then she came back out of the picture, and saw me again. She took a piece of licorice from my hand and chewed it slowly, savoring the sweetness, her eyes moving from me to the album and back, as if deciding whether to worry about what I had heard her say. Then she shrugged, or maybe it was the Parkinson’s tossing her shoulder about.

“Such things you don’t say out loud,” she said, and repeated it once more. “You don’t say out loud.”

We turned the page. There was the Holy Rebbe and, to his right, his brother, the one who’d be rebbe after him. There was my other great-great-uncle and, at his side, my grandfather, shaking a well-wisher’s hand. In between them sat my father, with his trimmed beard and tall, fur hat, a soldier in a Chassid’s land.

“So the rebbe gave a blessing?” I asked.

Savtah Miriam did not answer.

“So did the rebbe give a blessing?” I asked.

She paused, as if absorbing my question. Then she answered, “Of course he gave a blessing.”

“But why,” I asked, “if my father wasn’t yet a Chassid?”

“Of course he was a Chassid,” she said, her eyes squinting and then widening so that I could not tell her meaning.

“Always?” I asked.

“Always,” she answered. “In the soul. For marriage, he added only the hat.”

I looked down at the picture, at the first night my father, now a married man, had worn the fur
shtreimel,
and I heard my grandmother laugh, the tremors in her voice making it ripple and echo.

“What doesn’t one do for love?”

I laughed along with her, but it wasn’t because of the love. I laughed at the fear I’d been carrying around since third grade, since the day Blimi had said that awful thing about love.

It had been hard not to believe that over my family there hovered a dark curse. It had been just as hard to accept, though, that between my parents, who liked each other in all the right ways, there was some kind of wrong love. So after Nachum left home, I had stopped thinking about it entirely. Afraid to ask my parents or aunts if it was true, I never discussed it again. As I grew, I mostly forgot, a large enough part of my mind assuming that it was nonsense. The other part of my mind, smaller and much farther back, I ignored. Because there, gathering dust in the corner, the curse still loomed. What if it was real?

It was as though Savtah Miriam assumed that I already knew the first half of the story. Her voice quavered, dipping and sloping, words stopping just short of her tongue as she dropped memories of that time like a trail of crumbs for me to follow.

“Your great-grandmother, Bubba Miril, met your father first. She trusted your mother, and after a while, she agreed to speak with him. Your mother was no longer a girl of eighteen. She was already twenty-three.

“Bubba Miril agreed to speak with him, and when that happened, I knew it was over. Your great-grandmother was a smart, smart woman. Did you know that? The rebbe was her brother and he trusted her the way his Chassidim trusted him. They talked every single day. She was the real rebbe in the family.

“She told the uncles to meet your father. She said it was good, so of course they approved. The rebbe gave his final blessing. For your grandfather it was enough—his mother’s approval. But not for me.

“She was a wise woman. Did you know that? Don’t bite your lips like that. It makes you less pretty.”

So in the end, it was Bubba Miril who made it happen. She had stood at the threshold of her apartment on Sanhedrin Street.

“Enough with the tears,” she said to her daughter-in-law. “Your uncle, the rebbe, has given his blessing. Come inside. Sit down, Miriam. Let’s talk.”

But Miriam shook her head, no. “Not until you promise that the rebbe will take back his blessing.”

“So what happened then, Savtah? What happened then?”

“Your great-grandmother was a very wise woman.”

“But what happened then?”

“She got angry.”

“Really? Bubba Miril?”

“She got very angry.”

“Did she scream?”

“Bubba Miril never screamed. She did not speak much. She only said what there was to say.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said what she said. She spoke in Yiddish. You know Yiddish? Of course you know Yiddish.
‘Bashert iz nish vus macht dich frietig. Es iz nisht vus macht dehm sh’chainim freitig. Es iz nur vus macht deh himmel frietig.’ At mevinah,
Menuchah? You understand?”

I understood. The words meant, “
Bashert
is not what pleases you. It is not what pleases the neighbors. It is only what pleases Heaven.”

The other thing Bubba Miril said, also in Yiddish, was, “It is not for you to cry, Miriam. Sometimes the Almighty makes things happen, because the matchmakers won’t. The rebbe will officiate at the wedding.”