Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  On Sunday at three P.M. he tried to visit his father, but he was barred by the worker at the front desk, who informed him that because of doctors’ rounds he could not visit at that time. My father explained that he wished to be present during doctors’ rounds to serve as an interpreter during the examination. The worker replied that the hospital had an interpreter program for the deaf and that my father’s services were not needed. She refused to let him in. Later my father learned that no interpreter had been available; the Cabrini interpreter did not work on weekends.

  That night my father called the CCU to inquire about Sam’s condition. The nurse on duty said the doctor was not there. My father asked for the doctor please to return his call on Sunday night at home. No one returned the call.

  On Monday morning at nine, my father called the CCU again and was told that Sam had improved, that a heart attack had been ruled out, and that he had been moved from the CCU to the fifteenth floor. My father called Fannie on the TTY to give her the good news.

  Fannie arrived at Cabrini at 11:15 A.M. to visit her husband. Requesting a visitor’s pass, she was told that Mr. Cohen was not a patient. After she insisted that he was, the person at the desk made some phone calls and then directed her to the fifteenth floor. No one tried to call for an interpreter. On the fifteenth floor she was directed to a waiting room. Because the nurse could not communicate with her, Fannie did not understand what she was waiting for. Finally a resident who spoke with an Indian accent, which was extremely difficult to lip-read, came and described in technical terms that Mr. Cohen had not survived the second of two cardiac arrests that had occurred at about eight that morning. Fannie did not know what “cardiac arrest” meant, nor could she understand the resident’s speech very well. But when he shook his head, she understood.

  In a state of shock and confusion, she was sent to the hospital lobby. The doctor called my father at work. Dazed, frozen, behind a tightly stretched skin of silence, Fannie waited for him. But it was Max who arrived first. When she saw him striding jauntily up the passage toward her, unaware of his father’s death, the blond ends of his mustache curved in greeting, Fannie dissolved, her sobs breaking against the lobby walls.

  In the days afterward, there were many questions. Why had no interpreter been present to help Sam understand why he was being moved from the CCU on Sunday night? Why had no interpreter been present during the crises on Monday morning, to give Sam the doctors’ instructions or tell the doctors what he might have been trying to communicate? Why had no interpreter been present at any of the examinations, after my father had offered this necessary service and been told that Cabrini would provide it? What possible explanation could the hospital have for preventing my father from serving as an interpreter during the doctors’ rounds on Sunday afternoon? And why had no interpreter been present to deliver the news to Fannie of her husband’s death?

  My father wrote to the medical center administrators requesting answers to these questions. Months passed; it was November before he got a response. It acknowledged no fault but concluded placatingly, “You can be assured that we have reinforced our staff training programs in our continuing effort to communicate with our hearing impaired patients. . . . I want you to know that your persistence in pursuing this matter will impact favorably on other hearing impaired patients treated at the Cabrini Medical Center.”

  As a child, I was only partially conscious that something had gone awry, that something wrong and bad had happened beyond the fact of death itself. Years later, I asked my father to tell me the story. He obliged, reliving its chronology, and I finally witnessed the crack for which I had searched in vain a decade earlier. The craggy planes of his face darkened and shifted; something staggered painfully in his throat. For a moment I saw him fold softly into grief. I saw him miss my grandfather.

  And I wondered at his vision of Sam, so clearly one of indomitable strength. When I go looking for Sam, it seems I come up only with papers, sheaves of dry correspondence about him and for him but never by him. If he was a rock, he has long since gone to dust, and any fossils left behind were left by others, just as the ink on the pages has been left by others, by Oscar his father and Oscar his son. Sam’s own motions—the words of his hands, the path of his body as it worked the court—are traceless; once realized and finished, they left no mark.

  6

  A Recovery

  First there is the snow, a thin white film of it blotting out the city, and for a moment Sofia imagines she is back in Leningrad, waking up in her old school dormitory. But in the bed next to hers, beneath that forbidding lump of pink blanket, lies not a schoolmate but her sister Irina. And in the icy dark outside her curtainless window, the yellow eyes of early morning traffic are sliding warily along Woodhaven Boulevard. Perhaps more than anything else it is the poster of the New Kids on the Block watching over Irina like ersatz guardian angels while she sleeps that roots Sofia firmly in Rego Park. She rises and stands for a moment in the narrow space between the two beds, watching flakes cling to the bars of the fire escape, fall past the branches of sycamore trees, and coat the frozen courtyard.

  Then she goes to the bathroom and sees the blood, and that is when the trouble begins.

  “Mama.” She creeps into her parents’ room, feels her way around the bed, and in an agitated stream of Russian tells her mother. She has gotten her period. Today. The day before she is to enter the temple formally by having a bat mitzvah. Orthodox Judaism says that while a woman is menstruating she is impure, and today, the day before she is to stand on the bema and read from the Torah, the day before she is to become a bat mitzvah, a Daughter of the Commandment, she has become impure. In the dark of the bedroom Ister Normatov listens to the news delivered in the voice of her third daughter, a voice with oddly taut and flattened vowels, and she thinks, “Then there won’t be a bat mitzvah after all.”

  Iluysha and Ister Normatov had not wanted their daughter to have a bat mitzvah in the first place. A year ago, when the rabbi who gave religious training at Lexington School first broached the subject, their answer was no. Why should a deaf child have a bat mitzvah? Their two hearing daughters, after all, have done without the honor; they grew up in the Soviet Union, where Judaism was forbidden. But gradually Mr. Normatov accepted the idea, even grew to like it. As the date for the ceremony approached, he helped Sofia study Hebrew, reading aloud with her in the evenings. But Mrs. Normatov remains opposed. Not this child—she doesn’t want this child speaking aloud before a hearing congregation. Perhaps this is God’s way of saying he doesn’t want Sofia to have a bat mitzvah either.

  Mrs. Normatov, awake in the dark, thinks about this daughter, about how strong-willed, even defiant, she has become in this country, and so she steals out of bed and follows Sofia into the kitchen. “What are you planning to do?” she inquires suspiciously, and sure enough, Sofia replies, “I will call the rabbi. Maybe it will be all right.” They argue then. Snow continues its clean descent past the little window at Sofia’s back while she reads the words on her mother’s lips: you are creating a sin, your bat mitzvah will mean nothing, bad things will happen to you.

  Her mother’s words follow her out the door that morning, a visual echo reverberating across her mind: the lips, the teeth, the dark, knowing eyes. The school bus is already waiting at the curb and she has to run for it, her hair half combed, her stomach empty. She scrambles across the skid marks and turbid slush that already mark the snow. Irina, lagging behind breathlessly on plump legs, protests, but Sofia takes no notice. She will talk with the rabbi. They must hurry and get to school so that she can call the rabbi.

  Only a week ago Wednesday Sofia had been sitting in the school library having her last Hebrew lesson before the bat mitzvah, and everything had finally seemed all right. She had arrived just a few minutes late and Rabbi Donna Berman had already been there, at a round table tucked against the back wall by the fish tank and the heaters. The rabbi stood up, tall and slender in green jeans and sneakers, smiled her warm, im
pish smile, and kissed Sofia hello.

  The first time Sofia met her, slightly over a year ago, she was shocked and delighted to encounter a woman rabbi. Of course, by that time, shock and delight had become almost routine sensations for Sofia. School in America had proved full of surprises: deaf teachers, hearing teachers who signed, Jewish holidays on the school calendar. Every time she turned around, it seemed, another old certainty came crashing splendidly down.

  Last fall, when Rabbi Berman started her religion class at Lexington, Sofia stood out instantly from the other four pupils. The group met only one hour a week and offered no academic credit, but Sofia treated it like a core course, taking the Hebrew alphabet home to study and diving eagerly into this language—her fifth, after Russian, Russian Sign Language, English, and ASL—with innate ability. She began to wear a gold chai, a letter of the Hebrew alphabet and a symbol of luck, on a chain around her neck. She cried upon seeing her first real menorah; until then she had only known the makeshift candle-gouged potato used at secret Chanukah celebrations in Russia.

  What had once been denied was now being offered. Like a load of fresh chickens suddenly stocking yesterday’s barren shelves in a Russian grocery, the promise of Sofia’s religious heritage now appeared before her. She had known too much denial, too many restrictions, not to reach for it. It didn’t matter that this was the fifth alphabet she had to learn, or that she was struggling to learn English at the same time, or that she couldn’t hear the new language, couldn’t sound out the strange words, couldn’t ever—it was hopeless, she was sure—pronounce the Hebrew ch sound. None of that mattered. She would practice for it all day and all night, patience and desire pressed together in her heart like two gold coins in her fist.

  After three months of classes, Rabbi Berman, or Rabbi Donna, as Sofia called her, pulled Sofia aside and asked whether she would like to have a bat mitzvah. Sofia had never actually attended a bat mitzvah. She didn’t know exactly what having one entailed, nor was she entirely sure that her parents, who had practiced Orthodox Judaism since coming to New York, would approve. She did know that at eighteen, she exceeded the traditional bat mitzvah age by five years. But when the rabbi assured her that this was not a problem, Sofia decided to swallow her other qualms, and without initial parental consent, she spent the next nine months preparing for the ceremony.

  It wasn’t until this final lesson, sitting cozily back by the fish tank with Rabbi Donna, that Sofia finally let herself believe it would happen. Bent over the rabbi’s fat leather book, her right thumb looped through the chain from which her chai dangled, her left index finger gliding horizontally along the page, she read aloud. The fingers on her right hand dipped and curled as she unconsciously fingerspelled portions of each Hebrew word.

  The rabbi pulled her chair close and read over Sofia’s shoulder. She stopped Sofia intermittently to correct her pronunciation, attempting to finger spell the proper sound. The rabbi’s fingerspelling was earnest and imperfect; frequently, Sofia had to smile gently and correct her signing as the rabbi corrected her Hebrew.

  Behind them, a class of five middle-school girls had entered the library. The children wore hearing aid receivers strapped around their waists on wide elastic straps. They danced and jostled around the card catalogue in search of books on lizards. Unable to locate the proper subject heading, a few of them buzzed up to Sofia’s table instead and peered interestedly over her shoulder until their teacher shooed them away toward the reptiles.

  “They wait for you to hand it to them,” commented a librarian, leaning across the shelf by the fish tank.

  “Always,” agreed the teacher, switching off the microphone on her lapel. She watched her students sashay at last in the general direction of nonfiction. “On a platter.”

  Sofia, oblivious, read on. Her hair curled like black flames down her rounded back. Rabbi Donna sat close, half curved around her, and Sofia could see her approving nods from the corner of her eye. She worked her thumb in and out of the loop of her necklace, following Hebrew across the page, spelling sounds on her fingers, molding them in her throat. Finally she came to the end of the passage, sighed, smiled, and raised her eyes for approval.

  The rabbi laughed. “You need a sweatband.”

  Sofia frowned.

  “A sweatband? Sweatband.” The rabbi sketched one across her own forehead.

  Sofia nodded. “Oh yah, yah. I know that.” She used only her voice with the rabbi.

  For the past few months, Rabbi Donna had sensed an ambivalence on Sofia’s part; she seemed to be dragging her feet. At one point she had even wondered whether Sofia had changed her mind about the bat mitzvah, and had asked, “Am I forcing you?”

  Sofia had shaken her head. “No, no . . . I just have to check with my mother.”

  Now the rabbi gently brought up logistics. “Sofia, are you making an invitation?”

  “Not yet. I want to.” There would be no engraved cards with sprays of roses for this bat mitzvah, no thick creamy envelopes, no neatly stamped and addressed printed reply cards. After school one day Sofia would print something out on the laser printer in the second-floor computer room—if she ever got a moment in which to do it.

  “Maybe after your bat mitzvah, when you have more time?” suggested Rabbi Donna. She laughed again and laid a warm hand across Sofia’s shoulder blade.

  “How many people?” asked Sofia.

  “The temple has a lot of seats.”

  “Not too many. Better limited,” she suggested anxiously.

  “Can I come?” teased the rabbi.

  Sofia smiled tiredly.

  She hadn’t dreamed that a week and a half later she would be grimly riding on the bus through the snow, preparing to ask the rabbi that very question in earnest.

  As soon as she arrives at Lexington, Sofia places a call, via telephone and TTY and relay service, to the rabbi’s office number. She gets an answering machine and leaves a message to please contact her through her guidance counselor, Louann Katz. She makes the call from Louann’s cubicle in the guidance office. Louann, one of the handful of Lexington staff members invited to the bat mitzvah, is all compact efficiency, warm and brisk and solid. With her strong, rapid signs, she promises to contact Sofia as soon as the rabbi calls back. Then there is nothing to do but get a pass and go to class.

  Sofia tries not to dwell on what the rabbi will say, but the day seems mined with subtle references that propel her back to the subject. In American history, the lesson focuses on religious freedom.

  “Why did dissenters leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1644 and establish their own colony in Rhode Island?” quizzes Janie Moran, smudging the date as she hits the board for emphasis.

  Sofia responds instantly, as though she just happens to have been thinking about that very topic. “They wanted to believe in God on their own, in their own way. Because it’s personal.”

  “Right. Remember, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was incredibly strict.” Janie signs strict sharply, two crooked fingers snapping over the bridge of her nose. It looks like a bridle, with the rider yanking back on the reins.

  Sofia rubs the side of her face and looks over her shoulder at the clock. Not yet ten.

  The morning drags on, miserably chill and damp. In English class, when Sofia asks whether she may go down to her locker and fetch her book, Liz Wolter starts to harass her a bit. “What is it doing in your locker?” she asks sternly, hands on hips. Liz is another Lexington teacher who has been invited to the bat mitzvah—she is to interpret—but Sofia neither details that morning’s events for her nor plays up to the scolding. She only responds wearily, “Yes or no?”

  Liz lets her go and she runs the three flights down the dim, empty stairwell to the basement, wondering again what the rabbi will say. Sofia has to pass near the guidance office on her way back to English. Might the rabbi have called by now? She returns to class without checking.

  Liz Wolter reads out loud from a paperback copy of Rosa Guy’s novel The Friends, which sh
e props open on the table, a stapler weighing the pages down and leaving her hands free to sign. She simultaneously reads aloud and signs, using English-like signs to match the text with generous snippets of ASL tossed in for clarity. Her fine-boned face lifts and contorts with feeling; her narrow shoulders shift as she takes on different characters. Her fingerspelling has the clean precision of an elementary school teacher’s penmanship.

  Sofia rests her chin on her stacked fists and prepares to soak her harried brain in fiction for an hour. But too many details in the novel remind her almost uncannily of her present situation. In today’s chapter, the protagonist, a teenage girl who has immigrated to New York, is sitting in a classroom unable to stop thinking about her mother. Then Liz gets to the part where the fictional class begins to taunt the teacher. “‘She ain’t nothing but a Jew!’” reads Liz. Her chin puckers in disgust as she takes on the part of the students, signing their cruel chant, “‘Miss Lass is a Jew-ew.’”

  The scene is disturbingly familiar. Sofia knows what it is like to be called “dirty Jew.” At her old school, in Leningrad, her dark, Middle Eastern looks made her an easy target for anti-Semitism. When she first came to Lexington, two years ago, she wrote an essay about her experiences which was translated from Russian to English by a school interpreter.

  I want to tell you something about how Jewish people live in Russia and America. In Russia, there is discrimination against Jewish people. In Russia, the government tells people that they can’t believe in God and the government closes some churches and synagogues. Also, in Russia, some Jewish people do not know their religion. They are not free to learn about the holidays or eat kosher food.