Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  Sofia’s own family had practiced Judaism secretly at home in Samarkand. But she spent most of her childhood away at the school for the deaf in Leningrad, cut off from both her family and her religion.

  She touches the chai on the chain around her neck. She has traveled halfway around the world to a country where Judaism can be openly practiced; she has met a rabbi willing to work with a deaf student; she has labored over Hebrew and religious studies; she has wrestled with her family’s reticence. Now it looks as though she may have surmounted all of these obstacles only to be thwarted by the time of the month, a phase of the moon.

  After English there is biology, and after biology, math. When it is finally one o’clock, Sofia makes her way anxiously to the guidance office instead of the lunchroom. Louann Katz is at her desk, and yes—before Sofia has even quite sat down—yes, the rabbi has called, she says, they talked for thirty minutes and everything is fine, fine, and here is the rabbi’s home phone number for Sofia if she wants to call.

  A sweet tiredness washes through Sofia’s muscles as Louann tries to convey everything the rabbi has said: that having her period is a wonderful thing, a God-given gift, that there is no more appropriate time to have her bat mitzvah than during this time of potential creativity, this time of celebration. But knowing that this perspective might clash with the Normatovs’, the rabbi has emphasized that she will respect Sofia’s wishes and support her either way. She has left the ultimate decision in Sofia’s own hands.

  Sofia thinks of her mother, who she knows is still embarrassed by the idea of her deaf daughter’s speaking in public. She thinks of her father, who only a month ago began to show his support by helping her practice the Hebrew readings. She thinks of Rabbi Donna and the Lexington staff members who have helped her prepare, who are rooting for her, who are planning on attending the ceremony tomorrow. She thinks of herself. And she tells Louann her decision.

  “My family believed in God and they always celebrated holidays,” Sofia had written in that school essay two years ago, “but I couldn’t celebrate with my family because I was in a residential school. I was in a dorm school for the deaf.” For too many years she has been apart. Too much has been left out, too many connections have been missed. It is time to start recovering the pieces, filling in the holes.

  “Sofia, I watched the sun rise this morning.”

  They are standing on the bema, facing each other. Behind them colored light glows dully from two panels of stained glass. The room is long and low-ceilinged. A fake candle atop the ark flicks pointy orange light at odd intervals.

  “I watched the sun rise because I had a great deal of trouble writing this piece. I had tried several times during the week to jot down some thoughts. Last night I stayed up late ripping up page after page, dissatisfied with anything I had written.”

  Sofia glances at Rabbi Donna, tall and gentle in her dark robe and many-colored tallis. Then she looks back at Liz Wolter, who stands beside the rabbi, interpreting her words.

  “And so I got up early, watched the sun rise, and realized why I was having trouble writing about you—because how do you do justice to something or someone so beautiful?”

  It is December seventh, the sixth day of Chanukah. Sofia has chosen this day to have her bat mitzvah because Chanukah is her favorite holiday; it celebrates religious freedom. She chose the date almost a year ago, and now that it has arrived it is perfect: blue and gold and spare.

  Driving out to Long Island with her family this morning, Sofia watched the trees that lined the roads. They looked kind and elderly, like great-aunts. Snow lay in patches deep in the woods. It seemed to come up between piles of leaves like milk through cereal. In Port Washington, they drove down streets where large plywood snowmen decorated the lampposts.

  They reached the Port Jewish Center, a modern square cement building with a rutted parking lot. Sofia’s mother and grown sisters, Ada and Nelly, picked gingerly across muddy potholes in their high-heeled shoes. Sofia asked only a handful of guests outside her nuclear family: an uncle, a few teachers, a Lexington student named Ruben. She has closer friends at school, but these she did not invite. Ruben is another deaf Russian Jewish immigrant; his mother has become friends with her mother.

  Inside, more and more strangers kept arriving. The rabbi sent a letter to the congregation shortly before Thanksgiving, inviting them to participate, both by attending the service and by preparing food for the reception afterward. “Sofia’s family is struggling here in the United States,” she explained in the letter, “and yet I feel strongly that there should be some kind of special oneg after the service.” All morning, in answer to the call for a celebration, the tables in the back corner were quietly stocked with Tupperware bowls, pans wrapped in aluminum foil, paper shopping bags, plastic bottles of seltzer.

  By ten-thirty, more than fifty people had taken their seats in the congregation. A man in a blue velvet yarmulke set up a video camera in the back. A woman with white hair and glasses on a chain around her neck sat at the organ. The Normatovs assembled themselves on the right half of the front row, the Lexington teachers and Ruben on the left. Irina, who had been racing about all morning, looking importantly flustered in a birthday-cake dress of pink ruffles and striking up conversations with anyone who spoke English or Russian or ASL, now aligned herself with the Lexington contingent.

  Upstairs, Rabbi Donna broke one of her own rules; she gave the bat mitzvah girl a gift, a tallis of her own, embroidered with glossy white threads. She helped Sofia arrange the prayer shawl over the shoulders of her suit, which is really Ada’s suit, a grown-up suit of ivory lace with rhinestone buttons on the jacket.

  “How do you feel?” the rabbi asked, giving her a squeeze.

  “I feel Jewish.”

  Then they started together down the stairs.

  Now Sofia, standing at the bema after the cantor’s first song, looks out at all the familiar and strange faces and says in as clear a voice as she can, “Please rise.”

  The congregation hesitates, unsure of what she has said, until a man toward the back repeats her request and they hastily get to their feet. Sofia reads the prayer with her eyes cast down, dark hair spilling over her tallis, its fringe dripping like candle wax. Her right hand, perched on the podium under a small gold lamp, unconsciously fingerspells the words she speaks in her Russian-deaf accent. Mrs. Normatov rises, carrying Ada’s one-year-old son, David, on her hip. She walks the baby, who is not crying, out of the room.

  After the opening prayers, the cantor sings again. Sofia seeks out Louann Katz, seated down in front, and smiles. Irina sidles up to stand just in front of the bema, squirming a little to get her sister’s attention. In one hand she clutches a bag of Chanukah chocolates, coin shapes wrapped up in gold foil. With her free hand she signs, “This is boring. All this standing up and sitting down and standing up and sit—”

  Sofia replies with tiny, discreet movements: a thumbnail touched to her lips, fingertips lightly slapping the back of one wrist. “Just be patient — I’m warning you.” An indulgent smile twitches at her mouth and she looks away. Some of the congregants are smiling back at her in amusement.

  The service continues smoothly after that, except for one slight gaffe, when Sofia announces in the middle of the cantor’s song, “We continue silently,” which elicits suppressed giggles from the congregation and a sideways glance from the cantor. Ada and Nelly take turns ducking into the aisle in their stocking feet to take photographs. Irina almost sits still. Mrs. Normatov, still holding little David like a shield, remains hovering around the doorway, but once she catches Sofia’s eye and waves the baby’s hand at her.

  When the rabbi summons them, the entire Normatov family steps up to the bema. They participate in opening the ark and bringing out the Torah; they read from it—a privilege that they would have to pay for in their own synagogue—and all together they march around the temple with the Torah carried before them. Even Sofia’s mother walks with them now, hiding her smile in the b
aby’s neck while he waves a soggy piece of pumpernickel bagel in the air.

  Then Sofia takes the pulpit. She thanks everyone who has helped her, apologizing first to her parents for choosing to sign her speech and have it interpreted. Then Ada makes a speech and presents Sofia with a gold bracelet from the family. “We have a very strange feeling, my family. It’s hard to explain, but we are related to everyone here and would like to thank you.” She pauses, breathing through a sob. The skin under her eyes shines wetly. “That strange feeling? It’s a happy feeling,” she explains. Then someone hands a bunch of red and white carnations to Sofia. Around the congregation purses snap open and shut, releasing tissues. The man working the video camera blows his nose spiritedly.

  Now the rabbi takes her place at the microphone. Sofia looks into Donna Berman’s eyes, and at Liz, and back again.

  “How do you do justice to someone so beautiful?” the rabbi says, and Sofia feels something rise and quake in her chest. “Where do you find the words to describe her adequately? Sofia, a flood of adjectives comes to my mind when I think of you. You are strong, even stubborn.” Here Sofia grins. “You are determined, highly intelligent. There is a nobility about you, a grace, a dignity that is unique. Say ‘Sofia’ to anyone at the Lexington School for the Deaf and they will smile. People are warmed by you.

  “Sofia, to look into your eyes is to see worlds. There isn’t anything you can’t do—God has blessed you with so many gifts. It is up to you to decide which world or worlds you will explore. Your mind and your heart have wings; let them carry you to a place of fulfillment and peace.”

  Behind Sofia, her family watches and listens. They are all squarely built, with jet hair and firm mouths, strong and ordinarily stolid. But now they sit in damp-cheeked wonder. What are these worlds that Sofia can decide to explore? As a deaf woman in Russia, she could have worked either in a factory or as a seamstress. The entire fall term before the family emigrated, she was kept out of school in order to take sewing lessons with a dressmaker in Samarkand.

  “Sofia, you have been our teacher today. You have taught us about courage, about diligence, about the value of freedom and the preciousness of our faith. You wanted your bat mitzvah to take place during Chanukah because Chanukah celebrates religious freedom. Having come to this country in search of freedom, this was a most appropriate choice. But there is another reason why Chanukah is such a perfect time for your bat mitzvah, and that’s because you, Sofia, have a special light within you, and like the shammes on the menorah, you go through your life inspiring others to let their own light shine forth. It is a special gift you bring to the world.”

  Sofia brings a hand to her face and artlessly sweeps it under each eye. The rabbi waits until she is again looking at the interpreter.

  “And so as I watched the sun rise this morning, it made me think of you. Like a sunrise, you are brilliant—brilliant in terms of your intelligence and ability, brilliant in terms of the sacred light which shines through you.”

  Sofia has had only coffee this morning. Wings seem to beat in her stomach. Her eyes swim.

  “Welcome home,” says the rabbi.

  When they hug, Sofia’s hearing aid gets jogged and it whistles, a high pipping sound. It sounds like a signal, like a message in code. Something has been recovered.

  7

  Falling Within the Banana

  James sits behind the sealed door of the soundproof chamber. His connection with the rest of the world consists of one large plate of Plexiglas that appears semi-opaque, as though it might have been smeared with shortening. He takes a Mr. Potato Head from the shelf beside him and idly begins removing its plastic features.

  “Your new girlfriend,” comments his friend Paul Escobar, who is waiting in the antechamber for a pass back to class. A glass passageway connects Lexington’s Hearing and Speech Center, at the northern edge of the block, with the rest of the building. The center serves the outside community as well as Lexington’s students, who come here when they need a hearing aid repaired or their hearing tested. The state recommends that students be tested once every three years, but Lexington conducts hearing exams annually for students under the age of eight, every two years for older students.

  James catches Paul’s remark through the bleary window and snaps his head back in derision. Paul grins slowly, his eyes half lidded, freckles curving across his light brown face. A small girl in a navy blue coat wanders into the room. James waves Mr. Potato Head’s spindly arm at her and she smiles, all huge pink gums and little baby teeth, until she spots an otoscope on the desk across the room and eyes its shiny metal cone with grim recognition. She taps Paul’s knee and points to it, her eyebrows lifted.

  “Goes in ear, shines light,” he explains in sign and voice. Paul’s speech is extremely intelligible, although he tends to pronounce just the English glosses for his signs rather than complete sentences. He speaks a hybrid tongue common among many deaf people—not quite English, not quite ASL.

  The girl, her suspicions confirmed, makes a great show of recoiling from the object. She shakes her head vehemently at Paul, a fat pigtail wagging from her crown.

  Now the audiologist comes into the room brandishing James’s file. The holidays have just ended, and appointments are running slightly behind schedule. As she sits at the desk opposite James’s window, she flips the file open, reaches for a pen, and checks the dials on the pure tone audiometer, the device that will transmit a series of tones, at different frequencies and decibels, into the chamber where James waits.

  The little girl ventures further into the room and stands beneath James’s window. She waves, hoping for further contact with Mr. Potato Head, but James is looking beyond her at Paul, laughing at something he has signed.

  The audiologist’s back stiffens. A harried edge glimmers through her thin glaze of amiability. She turns to the little girl and points to the hall as she speaks broadly. “Okay, I think you need to find your mother now. Mother. Go out and find your mother.” She watches the child’s retreat, then addresses James through the window, her hands stifffingered and halting. “I didn’t understand you, sign it again.”

  He squints, puzzled, then shakes his head. “No, no, I’m talking to him,” he says, indicating Paul, who sits against the opposite wall, legs luxuriously splayed and ending in pristine white high-tops the size of cinder blocks. His eyes like deeply hooded slots, his face muscular and sealed off, Paul inclines his modest goatee in acknowledgment.

  “Oh.” The audiologist shuts her eyes briefly; it is almost possible to perceive her count to ten. She swivels in her chair, rises, and stands above Paul. “Okay. Will you move to that other chair, please? Because you’ll make him laugh.” She doesn’t sign now. Paul receives her message through residual hearing (which he happens to have a fair amount of) and lip reading. He regards her coolly, appearing to consider her request.

  “I’ve known him seventeen years,” he tells her, his speech clear, if faintly hollow-sounding. “Grew up together.”

  “Wow,” she says brightly. “Seventeen years is a long time.”

  “Yeah, he’s a boring man.”

  “He is not boring,” contradicts the audiologist, confused by the apparent non sequitur. But Paul has shifted slightly, unhooked an arm from the back of the chair next to him; she can tell he is going to acquiesce, so already she has lost interest in the conversation. “Okay, just move to this chair,” she reminds him once before returning to her desk to administer James’s hearing test.

  “Boring” carries a greater variety of connotations in ASL than in English. In sign language, especially in the hands of young adults, it can mean “dull” or “intensely annoying” or “detestable” or “worthless.” Paul applies it to James as a generic term of disparagement; of course, what he means is that James is his homeboy and he loves him more than he would ever be caught dead expressing.

  James and Paul actually met thirteen years ago, when they were both in first grade at St. Joseph’s School for the Deaf
in the Bronx. Lexington has the only high school for the deaf in New York’s five boroughs, but the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan all have primary schools for deaf children, who usually attend in their home borough. When he was three and four, James went to a prekindergarten program in public school with hearing children. Then he became deaf.

  Lexington’s social history of James lists his etiology simply as “illness at the age of five.” On his audiological chart, this has been construed to mean bacterial meningitis, the most common cause of deafness in people who lose their hearing as children. But James’s mother remembers it differently; Delores Taylor says her son became deaf from the kiss of a dog. She tells the story easily, as though describing the plot of a television show. It was a Saturday evening in late summer when somebody brought a stray dog into the hallway of their public housing project, where the five Taylor children were playing. She tells how this dog, sweet and sloppy and wriggling, full of beans, licked James on the face, right on the mouth. Her voice is as rich and grainy as crystallized syrup.

  “And all of a sudden, Sunday morning when I got him up to feed him, I noticed he didn’t get out the bed. Now James was five and he never wet the bed, but this morning we kept calling him and waking him up and he didn’t answer us, he didn’t move, and he peed the bed. When I told him, ‘Come on, Jamie, get out the bed,’ he just looked at me, and he didn’t say anything, he just looked.”

  When Mrs. Taylor lifted her son and set him on the floor, he collapsed. His skin felt hot and papery and she could swear he was losing weight before her eyes, just vanishing. So she picked him up and ran with him down fourteen flights of stairs, across three blocks from Webster to Washington to Third Avenue, to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Health Center. From there they were rushed to Montefiore Hospital.