This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (19 page)

“Hineh ha’mamtakim,”
I said. “Here are the sweets, Nachum. From America. Everything you like.”

He took the bag from my hand without ever moving his eyes from me.

We sat on the couch for a long time. I did not say much, only smiled and agreed that it was true what he said. Today, I was his sister. I was his sister, older by thirteen months. Today, I was his sister, Meh-nuchah. And he, my brother, Nachum.

In Nachum’s room there was a closet filled with sweaters, folded neatly into piles and stuffed onto the shelves. Nachum stood by the closet and its half-open door, his eyes carefully following mine. I looked around.

It was a simple room, a high riser bed beneath a curtained window, a birchwood wardrobe set against the opposite wall, a narrow desk tucked into the small space in the corner. Between the desk and the bed frame stood an uneven tower of boxes, some still wrapped up in gift paper.

Through the walls of Nachum’s bedroom I could hear my cousins talking in the living room. Aunt Itta had suggested that Nachum show me the apartment, to remind me what their home looked like. My brother had sat up abruptly at the thought, a flash of wonder filling his face, as if he’d just been chosen to lead an important expedition. I dutifully followed him through the doorway to the small central hall, the eyes of our family watching us go.

Nachum showed me the kitchen, the porch, the bedrooms belonging to my aunt and uncle, and my cousins, and finally his own. I sat on his bed and looked up at the circular, fluorescent light fixture on the ceiling. Then I looked at him, watching him struggle for words.

My brother opened his mouth. He closed it. Then he opened it, and closed it again. I could see his mind reaching to gather the words, building a sentence the way he built Lego, searching for the right color and size, his mouth on hold until the sounds formed a pattern, until the shapes were lined up in correct sequence and order. Then the words came out, breathlessly.

“This—this—this—
this
is my room. This—this—
this
is my bed. And—and—and. This is my. This is my room. This is where I sleep.”

He observed me sitting on his bed, my hand stroking his linen-covered pillow. He leaned forward but then halted, straightening up. He hesitated, as if still trying to find his way around new terrain: someone touching his pillow. I moved my hand off the bed.

He said again, “This—this—this is my room. You…you…you…but you could sit on my bed. My…my…my pih—pillow. I—I—I don’t mind. Meh-Menuchah.”

I nodded, half standing, and then quickly sat back down.

“Thank you,” I said. I looked around. I could feel the silence. I pointed to the wall behind him, where a multicolored laminated chart hung, each square illustrated with the picture of a different task or chore.

“What’s that?” I asked. “What is that sign? Did you get it from school?”

Nachum turned, as if the chart had appeared right then. His eyes absorbed the words, the lines, and the small figures. Then he said yes—yes—yih-yes, it was a chart from his teacher at school. For the mornings. To remember things to be done. Like washing hands. Like brushing teeth. Like saying the morning blessing, and tying his shih—shih—shih—shoes. At the end of the week, there was a reward. Something he liked. Chips, or ice cream.

I nodded. Nachum looked at me, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. His eyes searched the room, as if seeking the elusive thing that would tell him what came now, what it was he must do. I waited, watching his eyes bore into the floor.

Finally, he looked up, his shoulders easing. He walked to the wardrobe along the wall. He sat down in front of it, folded his legs comfortably, and pulled out a bottom drawer. I watched my brother, his back hunched and hands rummaging eagerly through electronic gadgets my mother had sent. He looked up, waving a camera.

“Yih—yih—y-you. You want to see my cam-ihra? My…cam-ihra?”

“Yes,” I said. I most certainly wanted to see his camera.

I got off the bed and sat down next to him, beneath a knitted sleeve dangling off an upper shelf. The sleeve swung limply above our heads, swaying in the afternoon breeze.

I remembered the knitted pullover and its sky-blue sleeves; I remembered the shirts and vests my mother had purchased in the children’s section of Macy’s. I had tagged along behind her, whining and complaining, watching her skip over sale racks and sift instead through the new arrivals—pants, turtlenecks, expensive sweaters—without a second thought.

I had chosen a dress for myself, one that had three silk roses and a white leather belt, but my mother said no. There had been a petticoat beneath the skirt, and pink flowers along the hem, but my mother had taken the dress from my hand and firmly placed it back on the rack. Oh, she’d buy me a dress for the holiday, she said, but I should look only at the sale rack.

Because for me, hand-me-downs were good enough—the well-worn, faded clothes from my fat older sister. More than once, I’d been forced to throw an ugly old dress of Rivky’s clear across a room before my mother agreed that, though it was unnecessary, she’d buy me something new.

And it wasn’t just me who suffered. My mother bought clothes on sale for all five of us, three girls and my two other brothers. But she shopped for Nachum, the faraway child, separately. For him she bought cashmere for winter and fine knits for summer. For him she bought shirts made in Italy and France. She’d pack them neatly in her suitcase—price tags ripped off and discarded. This was no cast-off boy.

Sometimes I helped carry the bags from the bedroom to the dining room table; they held boxes of sweets, gifts tied up in ribbons, piles of games and colorful toys. These would be tucked into the corners of suitcases already filled with new sweaters and shoes. The Mary Poppins bag, I called it, bottomless and endless, filled to the brim with sweets and nice things—tokens for my brother of my mother’s love.

“Meh-nuchah? Meh-nuchah—look.”

Nachum held up a camera. He pointed to a small button, showing me how it worked. Then he pulled out a packet of pictures he’d taken of birds in a park. He held out a disc player my mother had bought him for music, and another one, a sleeker kind, that she’d sent just a few months before.

The drawer was bursting with the things that had been sent from across the ocean: two cameras, three watches—one with a hidden audio recorder, another glow-in-the-dark. There was the waterproof camera that Nachum rarely used, and professional-grade binoculars—“
Kih-kih-kih—k’moh ba-tzavah.
Lih-lih-lih-like in the army. Th-th-th—
that
shows things cih-learly. Very cih-learly. Even. Even in the dark.”

So this was where the gifts and the clothes settled down, the closet and room where they were unpacked. Here was the home of the boy who had been hovering in the background, just around the corner of our lives.

Uncle Zev called out from the entrance hall, his voice beckoning my brother. “Nachum,
boh,
” he said. “Nachum, come. In only five minutes, it’s mincha.”

Quickly, my brother stood up. I looked at him curiously. “Do you go to afternoon prayers every day?” I asked.

“Yih-yih-yes,” he said. “Ev-ihry day I go. To pray.”

He stared at me intently, as if decoding the words my eyes said.

“M-maybe, ah…and maybe—I could walk you to Aunt Z’ava. After prayers.”

“Maybe,” I said, “if Aunt Itta agrees, you will walk me back.”

I followed Nachum to the foyer, where Uncle Zev stood, pulling on his suit jacket and hat. He smiled, watching us approach, pride spreading out like gentle ripples from the corners of his eyes and over his face.

From the kitchen, Aunt Itta gestured at me to come. Nachum went to find his sweater as I asked my aunt about waiting for Nachum to walk me back after prayers.

She smiled but shook her head.

“Tell Nachum that you need to leave now,” she said in a hush. Ayalah and Batya nodded in agreement.

“It’s too much for him at once,” Ayalah explained. “He needs to process this slowly, one day at a time. He’s seeing you for the first time in years.”

Batya patted me on the back. “There’s a whole summer ahead,” she whispered. “In a week or two, you can spend all your days together. For now, tell him that you must go, but that you’ll be back tomorrow at four, when he comes home from school.”

They looked at me, waiting for my confirmation, as if I fully understood why things must be this way. I nodded, understanding nothing. Then I went to the hall and told my brother that I needed to leave now after all.

“But tomorrow, at four, I will be here again,” I said. “I will come back when you come off the school van…Nachum?”

My brother was pacing the floor anxiously. His eyes blinked rapidly as he looked up at me, then away, then up at me, and again away. Halting sounds began and stopped in his throat, his voice tangled in knots.

“Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah—so…so…so tomorrow…tomorrow—you will
come?
You will
come?
”

“Yes, Nachum. Tomorrow I will come.”

“Ah, ah, ah, at—at four…at four o’clock exactly?”

“At exactly four o’clock, Nachum.”

“All, all—all right
then.
Tomorrow—tomorrow I will see you, Meh-nuchah. At four. At four o’clock exactly.”

“At four o’clock.”

“You will come. You will cih-cih—you will come then.”

“I will come then. I promise.”

“Tomorrow,” he repeated, as if reassuring himself. “To—tomorrow…At four exactly. O’clock.”

At the door, he said good-bye.

“You should. You should. You should have…a good night. A vih…a vih-very good night. I will, I will, I will see you…tomorrow. When you come back. My sister.”

And he put his arms around me as if to hug me, touching me lightly, then letting go. He picked up my hand, and I wrapped it firmly around his fingers. He looked at me, still unsure, as if I were still only a wishful thought, a new and delicate thing, and if he touched too hard, or talked too loud, I would break, and he wouldn’t have a sister anymore.

When Nachum first entered the Jerusalem school for autistic children, my Aunt Itta asked the principal a question: What percentage of children graduate from the school?

The principal looked amused. “Zero,” she said. “No one graduates from this school. They leave at age twenty, when the program ends.”

Three years passed. In June 1992, eleven-year-old Nachum graduated from the school, the first student ever to do so. From there he went to a modern Orthodox junior high school with a resource room. He’d stay on there for the rest of high school, making a network of friends, and with tutors and therapists helping with his special needs.

I remember hearing about all this back home in Brooklyn, hearing my mother describing the miracle that had become of the curse. I remember smiling, nodding along without ever feeling a thing. I had looked at the tears of joy in her eyes, at her pride at my brother’s accomplishment, and inside I had shrugged, wondering which role I had gotten in the upcoming school play. The memories came back to me that night, as I sat up, shaken, in my Aunt Zahava’s living room. It was silent in the apartment, only the whirling blades of electric fans whispering from every room. My hands cold and clammy, I stared up at the ceiling, at the shadows on the walls.

I had barely escaped the nightmare before it swallowed me alive. In my jet-lagged sleep, I had stood in a small, empty room, waiting for Nachum to come. When he did not, I opened the door and found that I was in a long corridor with many doors on either side. Somehow I knew that I had lost Nachum, that he was in one of the rooms behind those doors, and now I must go and find him.

In the corridor there were people milling about, their faces round blurs. They were faces I knew but could not remember or name. I asked the people if they’d seen my brother Nachum, and they pointed to a nearby door. But when I opened it and stepped inside the room, it was empty. There was only silence.

I turned to leave, but then I saw a boy. He was curled up in the corner, on his knees. A bolt of fear ran through me. This was the wrong boy, rocking, rocking softly. I did not want him to turn around; I desperately did not want him to see me, because I was looking for my other, real brother, not this soundless child.

I quickly left the room and tried another door. I ran through a narrow, winding hallway. “Nachum! Nachum!” I called. Maybe if he heard me, he’d come back, and we could leave this endless place. I turned right, then left, screaming my brother’s name. Then I stopped and stumbled backward.

I had nearly tripped on the boy. It was the soundless child, curled in a corner the same way as before, but now he faced right instead of left, rocking harder, his movements more agitated.

I turned and ran again, pushing door after door, searching for Nachum. But it was as if I was trapped inside a maze, and no matter how many doorknobs I turned and rooms I entered, I could not find my brother, only the silent, faceless child. I could hear my voice bouncing off the walls in frightful echoes, growing louder as I ran.

Too late, I noticed that I’d reached the last room in the corridor, and that the rocking boy was now angry. I saw the soundless child fling himself up and back, his body arced in the air like an arrow. Then he lunged forward like a battering ram, his head slamming hard into the wall.

The wall caved in and a dark hole opened up, widening like a gaping mouth. “Nachum! Nachum! Nachum!” I screamed as I ran away, not daring to turn around, but I could feel myself falling, falling. Beneath my feet, the ground gave way to the gaping, angry mouth, and it was swallowing me up. I dropped, screaming, clawing at the vacuum. I knew that I’d lost my brother in the one place I could never find him again.

I woke up. My eyes opened wide, and I heard myself gasp. My jawbone unclenched painfully. I sat up and looked fearfully around. Above me, the moonlit reflections of the crystal chandelier danced across the ceiling.

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. I was covered in a layer of cold sweat. I threw the sheets off the couch, stumbled to the open window on the other side of the room, and stood there, gulping air.

It was dark outside, the moon dangling from the clouds like an old man’s lantern. It was just a dream, just a scary dream that had come because I’d forgotten my nightly prayers. I said this to myself again and again, to my trembling hands and chest, but as I looked up at the stars through the iron window bars, I cried.

On the dresser in my aunt’s bedroom that day, I’d seen the fax machine and heard the throb and stir as it awoke. Finally a message glided out, curling over on a roll of silky paper. I could see the words sweeping gracefully across the page, the familiar Hebrew scrawl. It was a letter from my mother in New York.

Near the fax lay a pile of letters curled up and yellowed at the edges like a mound of ancient scrolls. Older letters, I supposed, sent from home in the days and weeks before. And I wondered about the rest of them, the hundreds my mother had written, night after night, year after year, sitting at the kitchen table while the rest of the house was silent and dark. In the background of a thousand dreams, I’d heard the whirring and humming of the machine directing letter after letter overseas.

It was a silklike paper curling out from our own fax in Brooklyn that had told me how much my brother cost. It glided up over the tray one afternoon just as I was searching the desk for a marker. I pulled it out. It was a bill written out in Hebrew for five thousand dollars. Mystified, I’d handed it to my father.

“How much does Nachum cost to fix?” I had asked. “More than regular children?”

My father had laughed. I could not tell whether he thought it was funny, or was just surprised. “Nachum costs ex’ectly like regih’lar children, but six from ’dem toge’der,” he said, his tone playful, as if he was telling a joke. “Nachum cuhst like vun whole regih’lar fe’mily.”

Horrified, I asked my mother if it was true, my father’s maybe-joke about the cost of my brother. Distracted by my sister’s strawberry yogurt, just spilled on the floor, and by the balls of gefilte fish she was rolling, my mother answered, as if talking to herself.

“At least as much as a family,” she said. The fish balls plunked with a small splash into the bubbling pot. “Sometimes more.”

Then she looked up and realized what she’d let slip, the delicate points of a matter never discussed with children. Her eyes flashed with irritation as she looked down at my wide-open mouth and ordered me to close it before my tongue fell right out. She said it was really none of my business how much Nachum, or anyone else, cost. I should never ask again.

For weeks afterward, whenever I remembered what she’d said, a feeling of rage came over me at the enormous sums of money Nachum was taking from our family. If not for him, I knew, we would have already been millionaires.

So one day, when I could no longer restrain myself, I burst out to my father, “But why? Why do you pay so much for an unfixable boy?”

He looked down at me as if I’d just asked an odd question.

“Because he is my boy,” he said. And that was that.

It was that mysterious love thing that I thought only my mother carried. But my father had deceived me—he had it too. I suddenly realized that all along it had never really mattered whether he could find Nachum or not; he still wanted my mother to look for him. The boy might drag them round and round in crazy circles, split open the walls, turn everything inside out and upside down, but my father still followed where my mother led. He’d pay forever for my brother because Nachum was his boy.

I shivered in the cool Jerusalem night as I leaned out the open window. There were shadows in the street, like the ones in our yard that evening in third grade, just a few weeks after my mother had brought Nachum home. It had been nearly dark outside when I had peered out the tiny bathroom window, watching my brother in a frenzy of fear hurl himself away from my father. On his hands and knees on the asphalt, my brother spun around like cornered prey trapped between two hunters. My mother reached out, bringing her hands down gently over Nachum’s head. She held out her arms, but he pulled away. He crawled frantically from her and into my father’s legs.

My mother leaned over Nachum. He stood up, his hands groping at the space around her, and under the night sky, their shadows looked like two great sea creatures writhing and battling.

Then Nachum turned and ran through the yard and out the front gate. My mother ran after him. She caught him and held him as he struggled, his head nearly crashing into the ground. I saw my mother’s shadow pulling back, but my brother’s shadow was stronger. It pulled on my mother until you could not see what was him and what was her, until it swallowed her whole.

Voices speaking in Hebrew came through the window: my mother crying because my father would not come, my father angry because she would not let go, and Nachum screaming, pulling, pulling, pulling.

But then my father’s shadow stirred. He strode toward the gate, his dark form stopping behind my mother’s.

“Esther, let him go,” he said.

“Let him go?” my mother cried. “Are you crazy?”

“The harder you hold on to him, the more he’ll try to run!”

“So what should I do? Throw him to the cars?”

“He won’t stop struggling until you let go.”

The shadows churned under the half-moon glow.

“I won’t let my son run into the dark! No child of mine—”

My father’s voice sliced through the yard. “But the boy is not afraid of the dark! He is afraid of us!”

And my mother let him go.

She watched Nachum run into the distance. She watched my father striding after him, following him down and around the block. Then she turned and came back inside.

I don’t know how far my father walked that night. I don’t remember how much time passed after I let go of the windowsill, but when the front door finally opened and my father stepped inside, Nachum followed quietly behind him.