A Wall of Light (13 page)

N
OAH’S DIARY
, J
ANUARY
11, 1986.

In the news: I don’t know.

I
am ten minutes away from a complete and total mental breakdown. These have been the worst three weeks of my life and probably anyone’s life. I came home from school and right away I thought someone was dead, I thought Sonya had died because Dad was sort of crying in the kitchen and Sonya was in the hospital and I swear my heart stopped beating. Dad said right away, “No one’s died.” Then I was relieved for about half a second before he breaks the news to me, Sonya’s deaf and she’s never going to hear again.

And it’s the fault of the fucking damned idiot toilet, fuck it to hell, because now it turns out that Sonya got her kidney problems from not going when she had to go and not drinking enough and she did that because she was afraid of the noise and there was some sort of mistake in the hospital and her kidneys didn’t flush out the drugs and that’s why she went deaf. Once in August I remember I finished all the water when we went biking and she wanted some but I wasn’t in the mood to go back, because I said to myself, who asked her to come along in the first place? But Dad says that it wasn’t one time, he says she’s had bad habits for years. He says it’s no one’s fault except the person who gave her the overdose of the drug. Still, I can tell he’s feeling bad because he never got anyone to fix the toilet but nobody knew she was scared of it. She didn’t say anything until the doctor at the hospital talked to her when she first got there and then it came out.

Meanwhile Sonya is a total mental case. First when she came home she was very calm, waiting for her hearing to come back. Then finally she wrote Dad a note. He was washing lettuce, I was there in the kitchen, he was washing dirt off this big lettuce from the garden and Sonya comes in with this note,
How soon until I can hear again?

So Dad wipes his hands and sits down and he writes:
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.

So she’s still very calm and she says pathetically, shouting a bit, “But there’s noise in my head. I’m not really deaf.”

But Dad right away has to tell her the truth. I would never have had the guts. I would have lied and given her some hope. But he writes,
That’s internal noise. It’s not coming from outside. Your hearing is gone for good. There’s promising work being done on technology to repair hearing through implants, but it’s hard to say when that will be available, or how well it will work.

Sonya went completely crazy. First she ran outside and stood on the road with her arms stretched out, and this poor guy almost ran her over but he swerved and went into a honeysuckle bush instead. Everyone came out, of course, huge commotion. Mom lost her temper completely, shook Sonya and yelled at her, but I came to her rescue. How could Mom be so insensitive? I don’t understand her sometimes. Meanwhile Dad had to give that poor guy first aid. He was shaking and had his hand on his chest and Dad said it was lucky he didn’t have a heart attack.

Then lots of tantrums, breaking dishes, kicking doors, for about three days nonstop. She almost broke her violin but Dad managed to save it just in time. Finally I think she just got exhausted. But instead of going back to normal she gave up. She won’t do a thing, it’s as if she’s two years old. We have to feed her with a spoon and someone has to sleep with her, Gran can’t do it all the time because Sonya thrashes and cries all night and clutches your clothes. So Gran and Mom and I take turns, though mostly it’s me and King Kong because Mom is tired. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in three weeks. I try to imagine what it’s like to go deaf suddenly and I can’t. I tried shutting the sound on the TV to get an idea, and I admit it was scary and I can see why Sonya is scared. She even needs someone to go to the bathroom with her, she’s totally regressed. I go with her, though it’s incredibly embarrassing but I just turn away and she’s so pathetic that who cares. I realized she can’t hear herself going and so it’s as if I can’t hear her either. I’m worried that she’ll stay crazy forever or maybe the pills also damaged her brain?? Maybe she’s autistic now!! I have to ask Dad. If I believed in God I’d pray now. Please at least don’t give her brain damage. But if God is so mean as to make her deaf in the first place, why would He listen to what I wanted or what anyone wanted? I’d do anything to hear her play the violin again—I feel so bad that I complained. Instead she just drools and rocks.

I think soon there will be two crazy people in the house because I am losing my mind slowly but surely. I started crying in class when the teacher read us a sad poem by Dan Pagis and I had to pretend I was sick so I could run out of class. Oren came out after me and found me in the washroom and put his arm around me and he kissed my ear. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. By the way, Ilanit has been coming up to me quite a lot to say how sorry she is and can she help. I wonder whether Guy is starting to get tired of her or whether she just feels sorry for me. I would even say she was hinting she wants us to get back together. Maybe she figured out what a total jerk Guy is, and how he’s just using her. But I can’t think about that now. I dreamed Sonya was dead and I woke up and saw that she really was lying very still so I put my ear on her chest to see if her heart was still beating. But her boobs got in the way. They felt good under her flannel pajamas so I rested my head on them and drifted off. Oh, man, on top of everything else I’m turning into a pervert.

L
ETTER TO
A
NDREI
, M
ARCH
22, 1957

M
y heart and soul, no word yet from you or Heinrich, but I shall go on writing to you under the assumption that there has been some holdup and eventually you will receive all my letters. I can only assume that Heinrich has stayed longer than planned in Moscow and is still with you. It is really too bad that we must wait so long! I know you are as anxious to hear from me as I am from you.

With only one day to opening night, Kostya and I were forced to move! The plumbing system here collapsed and the entire building was flooded. It happened while I was at work and when I came home I had to wade through ankle-high water to get to our room. Luckily I lost nothing, at least nothing that can’t be dried out, like my winter shoes. Kostya’s beloved teddy, the one we hid the money in during our daring escape, is soaked through, but a few days in the sun should fix him. This poor teddy has been through a lot.…

In any case, we have found a much better place, thanks as usual to Carmela. Really, it was about time we left that gloomy neighborhood. I am now in a very nice part of Tel Aviv, downtown, on a street with the lovely name Spinoza! I do like telling people that I live on Spinoza Street—it makes me feel very distinguished. In fact, we are now in Carmela’s building—an old man who was living on the top floor died last week and his son is renting the place. I have mixed feelings about having Carmela as a close neighbor, but Kostya likes her and they can continue with their cooking projects much more easily. In this country it’s the higher apartments that are cheaper instead of the other way around, because people don’t like to climb the stairs to the top.

We still have only one room but it’s much bigger, very cleverly designed, and there is also a much larger balcony, with a lovely garden below and a tall tree that touches the balcony, which makes it cool and pleasant. We are a ten-minute walk from the sea and much closer to Kostya’s school. Best of all, the apartment came with a bed, a table, two chairs, and a gigantic bookcase—one of those old heavy pieces—which Kostya cleverly decided to use as a partition wall so that he has his own private corner now.

Luckily we have very few belongings and with Carmela’s help we were able to carry everything in four trips. People were so kind and helpful on the bus! Everyone gave us a hand. It’s a good thing, because I need all my energy for tomorrow. I am so afraid of not remembering my few lines. I am happy to be playing a comic character, however, for a change!

Guess what? There are no cockroaches in this apartment! That is, there are a few here and there, hiding under the sink or on the stairs—but not the infestation we had in our old place.

I await all your news, dearest.

S
ONYA

O
n the way to Raya’s we stopped at a bakery and bought her a bag of almond cookies. Raya loves to eat; she’s particularly obsessed with Kostya’s lemon meringue pie, and he would always make it for her when she came over. I often told my brother that Raya was half in love with him and entirely in love with his food. She would invite herself for dinner and sit at the table like a child at a birthday party, stuffing herself in polite Arab fashion. She never gained weight, though, because she was so active.

Raya’s apartment on the sixth floor was a cruel joke on hot days. You dragged yourself up the stairs, wondering whether you’d expire before you reached the summit. Clearly, this was another thing that kept Raya slim; my brother and I were both gasping for air by the time we reached the top floor. “I’m out of shape,” my brother said, ringing the bell. “I need to get back to tennis, or jogging, or something.”

“It’s the heat,” I assured him. “It makes it harder to breathe.”

“I miss Noah,” he said. He had played tennis with Noah, a long time ago.

Raya opened the door with an enthusiastic exclamation. She had just stepped out of the shower; she had a towel wrapped around her head, and her silk purple bathrobe clung to her skin in wet patches. She began doing an East Indian dance to match her turban, and singing “Ein Ani,” a song by Fools of Prophecy that borrowed heavily from Indian music. It was from one of her favorite CDs and she had acquired the score for me so I could (in theory) share in her pleasure.
“Ein ani, ein ani, ein ani,”
she sang. There is no I, there is no I. Raya had a number of faults: she was impatient, she drove her several boyfriends crazy with jealousy, and she was easily vexed. A broken coffee machine drove her into a small frenzy; even a pen that didn’t write properly could elicit an impressive supply of swear words—accompanied, if I was with her, by rather imaginative signing. But her capacity for love was astounding to me. I’d never known anyone to love, truly love, so many people. This included me.

Raya was the only person outside my family who had studied Sign for my sake. Even my poor mother had never managed to pick it up; her memory was already on the wane when I lost my hearing, and she had relied on Kostya and Noah, who were both proficient, to translate for her. And Iris was too overworked to learn, though she reproached herself for not finding the time and continually apologized. I think she felt particularly guilty because she always resented me a little. I had been imposed on her, and my appearance on the scene may have prevented her from having another child of her own.

Signing did not come easily to Raya, and she often supplemented signing with writing, but she tried hard. She said it was fun learning a new language that was so poetic and expressive, and not entirely unrelated to belly dancing, her preferred after-hours pastime. Raya had grown up in the suburbs of Cairo, where each house was a walled-in fortress and the favorite adult activity was hosting or attending lawn parties within those walls. Diplomats and artists, businessmen and professionals, married couples and single men accompanied by their beautiful girlfriends would spend the evening talking and eating eggplant caviar near the pool. The children chased fireflies and planned mischievous pranks which they never had the guts to carry out. Raya’s cook was a favorite with her friends because she terrified them all with gruesome, vaguely prurient stories about white slavery.

When Raya was sixteen her father was offered a job in California, but Raya wanted to stay in the Middle East. Her secret dream had always been to live in Jerusalem, heart of the world’s mysteries. Luckily, her mother was Jewish, though she’d converted to Islam when she married Raya’s father; taking advantage of her convenient ancestry, Raya acquired Israeli citizenship and moved to East Jerusalem, where she lived with an adoptive family her parents had found for her. She finished high school at a private seminary and went on to study math at Hebrew University.

Though Raya loved Jerusalem, no one was surprised when she moved to Tel Aviv. Jerusalem was beautiful, she said, but too austere—like a choral mass: fine when you were in an austere sort of mood yourself, but not something you’d want to take on as a lifestyle. Raya wore showy, extravagant clothes; she had a mutinous sense of humor; and at parties she entertained everyone with her belly dancing. But her complicated identity was a continual source of distress to her. She once told me she was living evidence that the concept of the nation-state was unworkable and basically inhuman.

My brother said hello and Raya kissed him provocatively on the lips; she was not his type, however. She kissed me on the mouth, too; the concept of restraint was foreign to Raya. She was the only teacher in our department who got away with hugging and kissing students, or touching their arms and ruffling their hair. This was partly because women were less vulnerable to harassment charges, partly because she was so public about her demonstrative behavior, but mostly because her students loved it and had come to expect it, like cats waiting to be patted. And if she had a particularly untouchable student, someone who was religious, for example, or cold and angry, she kept a respectful distance, though not without teasing them a little.

“So, what’s this translation you need?” she asked. Like Kostya, she spoke as she signed.

“I’ll explain later. It’s complicated.”

Her flat consisted of three rooms: a tiny vestibule into which Raya had managed to squeeze a narrow bed and a television; a kitchenette to the right of the vestibule; and a main room up ahead that served as dining area, study, and bedroom. By downtown Tel Aviv standards it was a desirable flat: air-conditioning, solid plumbing, sunlight pouring in through the windows, and two large balconies with panoramic views of the city. From one balcony it was possible to see a startling patch of sea, naked and ethereal, hovering between two buildings.

We entered the main room. I was not surprised to see that Raya had another visitor: people continually streamed in and out of Raya’s flat, at all times of day and night. This had led to some turbulent situations in which a lapse in visitor coordination had resulted in two lovers crossing paths.

Today a woman with shoulder-length blond hair and a sad mouth was sitting cross-legged on the bed looking at a newspaper spread out in front of her. Her age was difficult to determine: she looked young because she was slight and somewhat delicate, with narrow shoulders and thin wrists, but her blond hair was streaked with gray. There was something self-effacing about her, as if she didn’t want to stand out, but she achieved the opposite effect. Her feet, peeking out from her jeans, were small and almost luminous, like polished stone. Though I was sure I had never met her before, she seemed vaguely familiar. I sifted through my memory and found her in a photograph at someone’s house. Ibrahim’s. A group photo with several other people.

As if to confirm my retrieval, Raya said, “This is Lily, a friend of Ibrahim’s from London. She’s the one who got shot in the leg by those lunatic settlers last year.” The woman looked up and smiled hello.

“How horrible! I remember that story. Are you all right?” I asked her.

“Yes, I was lucky, the bullet just grazed me,” Lily said. Raya translated, but it wasn’t necessary; I had understood.

Raya said, signing only, “She’s staying with Ibrahim. He says it’s platonic.…” She looked doubtful.

I do not approve, really, of secret signing; people sense that you’re talking about them and feel hurt or confused. But Lily didn’t notice. She had returned to her newspaper, which seemed to absorb her completely.

My brother handed Raya the small bag of cookies. With elegant fingers, the fingers of a belly dancer, she fished out the little spiral discs. “Yummy, yummy. Okay, I’m ready for dictation.”

Raya and I sat at the round all-purpose table. My brother approached Lily and asked her for a part of the newspaper. He sat down at the end of the bed and the two of them began to discuss something or other—probably one of the news stories.

I knew my brother found Raya a little overbearing, though of course he would never say anything; he was pleased that I had a close friend. When I was younger he used to drag me to all sorts of events for the deaf: dances, movie nights, discussion groups, courses, signed plays. At one point he even gave cooking classes in Sign, for one of the local organizations. I was his assistant, cracking eggs and bad jokes, and making sure everyone understood his instructions. I was never very enthusiastic about these forays into identity-by-functionality, as I called it. “I’m not deaf, I’m Sonya,” I would announce, rather pompously. I did meet some very nice people, including extraordinarily courageous men who had not only lost their hearing in battle but were also paraplegic or blind or dependent on all sorts of medical devices. But friendship is a mysterious thing; it falls from the sky like the Snow Queen’s shard, except that it warms you instead of freezing you. “Fusspot,” my brother would reprimand me. “No one ever meets your standards.” And I would defend myself: “Just because I’m deaf, I’m supposed to be less particular?” He’d smile, because in fact he was exactly like me. He’d never had more than one or two close friends.

Then Raya was hired at the university, two years after I joined the department. I was on the hiring committee when she was interviewed, and as soon as she walked into the room I knew we’d get along. She wore jeans and a white T-shirt with a drawing of a coffin and the words
COST OF OCCUPATION: DO THE MATH
printed below the coffin, and she brought delicious butter cookies to the interview, which she handed out. “If you don’t hire me, at least I’ll know it wasn’t because you were hungry,” she said. No one minded. The math department is full of eccentrics.

When the semester began I invited her over for dinner. She arrived with tulips, chocolates, and a subtitled video of
Casablanca.
Over the course of the evening—or rather evening and night, for she stayed until three in the morning—she ate nonstop and talked nonstop. My brother translated and she picked up her first few signs that evening. I was surprised at the time to discover that she was twelve years older than me.

“‘Dear Khalid,’” I dictated to Raya, “‘My name is Sonya (Sophia). I’m thirty-two, I teach math at the university. I’ve been deaf since I was twelve. I took an allergy pill this morning and it made me sleepy, that’s why I fell asleep in your cousin’s car. I was in a very strange mood, I don’t know what came over me.”

Raya stopped me.
“What nuance do you want for ‘mood’?”
she wrote on a separate sheet of paper.
“Emotional state? Or spiritual state?”

“Emotional, I guess … ‘I apologize for my behavior. I’ve never done anything like that before. A long time ago I had an unfortunate experience, which is why you thought you weren’t my first partner, but I have never had a boyfriend—’”

Raya stopped writing and looked up at me, her eyes widening.

“‘—and I came here to say I’m sorry. I hope we can be friends because I really like you, but if you don’t want to, that’s okay. I don’t know more than a few words in Arabic, so my best friend Raya is writing this letter for me. With many wishes for your good health and happiness, Sonya, [email protected].’”

Raya grinned at me.
“So you finally did it!”
she wrote in huge letters beneath her question about the word for
mood.

“I’m such a fool,” I said. “I should have explained, talked to him, but I wasn’t thinking. He got scared and ran away.”

“He’s the one who’s a fool, if he was anything less than courteous and grateful.”

“Don’t say that. He was very nice. But he thought I was lying when I told him he was my first lover, and he also didn’t know I was deaf.”

“How could he not know?” she said.

“He wasn’t talkative.”

“How did you meet him?”

“He was driving his cousin’s taxi and he drove me home from the university. I left my briefcase in the car, he ran after me, I invited him in. After sex he panicked and ran away.”

She laughed.
“Probably afraid your brother or husband would come home and kill him.”

“No, he was afraid of me.”

“Well, how was it, darling Sonya?”

“Too short,” I signed emphatically, and we both burst out laughing. There are times when Sign is irreplaceable; words could never have conveyed so perfectly crude carnality, romantic longing and schoolgirl humor all at once.

“Well, too bad it was such an imperfect start, but all first times are like that. You’ve heard my stories …,”
she wrote.

“I think I love him,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said.
“Okay, I’m not saying anything more,”
she wrote.
“This should be interesting.”

“How’s Rami?” Rami was her current favorite lover, a religious married man who wrote a column about impoverished people in the newspaper. Each week he focused on another family or person in dire circumstances: a woman and her baby living in a pigeon coop, an immigrant who had to rely on a blanket for a door, a foreign worker sleeping under a parked truck to escape the rain. At first readers had come forward to offer assistance, but the trend didn’t last: there were too many cases and too few people with the means to help. Almost no one I knew still read Rami’s columns.