Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  The Normatovs have seen Sofia grow calmly but powerfully defiant. Suddenly everything is about Lexington, about deaf culture and her precious new language, ASL. It is difficult for a parent not to harbor some resentment toward the school. The very institution to which Mrs. Normatov has felt such gratitude, such bottomless deference, has become a rival for her child’s allegiance, and now evokes mistrust and jealousy as well.

  The tension weighs heavily on Sofia, too. As strident as she appears to her family, she is privately racked with doubt. A tremendous sense of family loyalty and her own emerging identification with deafness ride on her shoulders, pressing into her their respective burdens of guilt and desire. How can she balance a commitment to her family’s culture with the pull she feels toward deaf culture?

  During the Sabbath dinner last week, Sofia dropped the subject of Gallaudet and draped herself in silence for the remainder of the meal. Later she cleared the table and washed the dishes with equal taciturnity, not once leaving the din of her own unvoiced thoughts. She was not sulking; she was thinking.

  After supper, Mrs. Normatov remained alone at the table, a cup of hot tea and a plate of fruit and almonds set before her on the clear plastic tablecloth protector. With deep contentment she selected apples, pears, and kiwis, first peeling the skins in long coils, then slicing the fruit into disks. These she urged on her husband, her daughters, her sons-in-law, who were playing cards and backgammon on the big gold sofa, browsing through photo albums, and laughing at the baby, who danced with a toy chicken in front of the television. Although they declined, Mrs. Normatov pressed the fruit on them anyway. She smiled in amused vindication when they eventually polished off the treats, a molar shining gold in the back of her mouth.

  Sofia was too tired to try to catch on to the conversation or to ask one of her older sisters to explain. She felt torn, split, incapable of reconciling the two portions of her life. She observed the after-dinner fare being passed around, her mother binding everyone together with uncanny will, feeding them what she could offer. Sofia was both shut out and drawn in by the easy banter ricocheting about the room in a blend of Russian and Farsi, incomprehensible to her but familiar just the same. That night the thickness of family feeling seemed a force impossible to resist. She would accept this path, resign herself to the loss of Gallaudet.

  Later, after the married sisters had departed and the parents had gone to bed, the little sister followed the big one into the kitchen. The Sabbath candles, left burning on the counter, had melted near the vanishing point, reduced to two soft bits of light floating in pools of wax. On the stove, two tremendous pots sat over low gas flames. One was filled with rice, the other with bahsh, a Bukharan dish of water, potatoes, eggs, and a tea bag to give the food a sepia tone. This is the traditional lunch fare on the Sabbath in Samarkand. The food would cook overnight, as no one may turn the stove off or on during the Sabbath.

  The Normatovs follow the no-work rules of Sabbath with some flexibility: Sofia began doing the dishes. She washed them very quietly for a deaf person (deaf people stereotypically being pot-bangers and silverware-crashers), suggesting a conscientiousness born of years of coaching by or admonishments from family members. Irina watched her sister’s hands dip in and out of the hot soapy water. The apartment was dark and still except for here in the kitchen, this spot of warmth. The high window next to the refrigerator was a cube of pitch. Irina stole a handful of rice from the pot on the stove and licked the grains from her palm, waiting for Sofia’s hands to be finished so they could talk.

  But Sofia was tired. “All right now, it’s late. To bed,” she ordered after only a minute of chat. One Sabbath candle was out, the other a wan blue filament. She herded Irina toward their bedroom. But nothing with Irina could be this easy, and the younger girl suddenly became churlish. She would do anything to prolong this time together.

  “You’re not really deaf,” she accused.

  This was an old routine, and Irina was just an immature kid. Why, then, did Sofia let it rile her? “Yes, I am!” she snapped back.

  Irina saw that her first strike had hit its target precisely; all she had to do now was aim gentle blows around the edges. “Nooo, you’re only hard of hearing.”

  “I am not, I’m deaf!”

  “You can hear!” Irina taunted.

  “Without a hearing aid I’m deaf! I couldn’t go to Lexington if I wasn’t deaf!”

  All her life, Sofia has been taught to use speech, language, residual hearing, and lip reading to compensate for her deafness, to broaden her choices and opportunities in the hearing world. But no matter what level of proficiency she achieves with these skills, they manage to fail her in one way or another. They either fall short of gaining her real access to the hearing world or they distance her from the deaf community, which looks on the too-enthusiastic development of these skills with some suspicion: does she idealize hearing people, is she rejecting her own deafness?

  “I don’t believe you,” Irina persisted. “You’re not deaf. You speak too well!”

  Later that night, the only one in her family still awake, Sofia, in tears, called a friend. Through a watery blur she watched the words her own fingers typed in electric blue letters across the TTY screen: I FEEL MY NUMBER ONE HOME IS SCHOOL SECOND HOME IS FAMILY I FEEL I GREW UP AT SCHOOL FROM AGE THREE TO NOW I MUST BREAK THE HABIT AND LEARN TO LOVE FIRST HOME THEN SCHOOL.

  Sofia’s next stop after the laundromat is Pat and Joe’s, the deli where Lex kids flock after school. It is late enough in the afternoon for it to stand peaceful, nearly deserted. Sofia enters and goes straight to the cash register, her order forms at the ready, her index finger stuck into the yearbook at the page with the advertisement placed by this establishment last year. She decides to show the cashier the material first, without any verbal introduction. The cashier has been snacking from a bag of fried sesame sticks; she licks her fingers and rubs them on her pants before examining the wordlessly offered paraphernalia. Sofia glances idly at the rack of chewing gum and batteries.

  “I give to manager,” the cashier determines out loud. She scrapes a waist-length hank of black hair over one shoulder and looks at Sofia for approval. Sofia, sensing this shift in attention, brings her gaze back to the cashier and waits expectantly, oblivious to the response that has already been made. They look at each other, locked in this puzzled stalemate, until the door swings open and the woman from the laundromat breezes in to trade her coins for bills.

  “Oh yeah,” she says, assessing the scene. “Just give it to the manager,” she advises the dark-haired cashier, blithely swinging behind the register and clanking her apronful of money on the counter. “Take the form, it’s for their yearbook.” Nodding follows, and multiple exchanges: yearbook for order form, quarters for bills, welcome for thanks. The transaction completed, Sofia leaves Pat and Joe’s without having used a word of English.

  Sofia has been practicing the art of translation since she was sent away to the school for the deaf in Leningrad at age three. She is a learned practitioner of the skills of communication, seasoned enough to know that regardless of what means are employed, the interaction is successful if the message gets across. Interpreters (both professional and impromptu), gestures and mime, notes and diagrams, signed and spoken languages—for Sofia there is no hierarchy, no sense in valuing one method of communication more or less than any other. Despite all the haranguing of the hearing and deaf establishments, all the stormy theoretical debates over ASL and English, in real life most deaf people must be agile code-switchers, ready to employ various combinations of all these methods at any given time.

  On a recent afternoon, Sofia was fishing around in her jacket pocket for some change to lend to her friend Sheema when she came up instead with the cap to a bottle of Rolaids. Sheema exploded with the mirth produced in many adolescents by any reference to intestinal gas. Her gentle brown eyes narrowed quizzically as she tried to grab the cap from Sofia’s hand. “What’re you carrying around that for?” she gib
ed, at once teasing and curious.

  “Shut up, you,” returned Sofia easily, jamming the red plastic cap back in her pocket and going a little pink. “My sister sent me to the drugstore for it, and I brought the cap from the old bottle to show the guy.”

  “Oh!” Sheema nodded in commiseration. ”Wait, let me see it,” she demanded, sticking her hand out for the bottle cap. Sofia retrieved it and plunked it into Sheema’s palm. “R-O-L-A-I-D-S,” fingerspelled Sheema. “Rolaids.” She tested the word orally, found it odd, and made a face. “Better to show the cap,” she agreed, nestling it snugly back in her friend’s pocket.

  Now Sofia heads for the bank, whose main doors are already closed. An earnest young man at the walk-up window accepts an order form through the money slot. Sofia hurries on. The Chinese restaurant is next. The early drinkers in overcoats appear rooted to bar stools, and an old cop show plays on the television set mounted over their heads. Sofia wrinkles her nose; cigarette smoke hangs visibly in the air around the bar. She launches her pitch: “Would you please like to sponsor our yearbook?”

  The manager comes toward her, wiping his hands on a white cloth and squinting furiously. “Yellow book?” he queries.

  She has no idea what he is saying. It is a clash of accents. For all her American speech lessons at Lexington, Sofia still trills her r‘s in the Russian way, giving the word “year” two syllables. The manager of the Chinese restaurant transmutes the r’s to l’s, and once again Sofia finds herself staring, bewildered, at someone who is staring in equal bewilderment back at her.

  “Yearrrbook,” she repeats, but as this proves no more illuminating, she extends the book toward the man. The smoke is stale, raunchy. She does not know whether the television sound is on or off, so she cannot modify her voice accordingly. She lets the man discover for himself why she has come, and waits uncomfortably, trying to breathe without exactly inhaling, taking the air in little shallow sips.

  Eventually, the manager accepts an order form without making any promises. Sofia is relieved just to be back outside, breathing the cold, gasoliney air of the parking lot.

  With ten shops left and the afternoon darkening, Sofia zips her jacket and speeds her step. Some of the managers are in and some are not; some are friendly and some are impatient; some shove pencil and paper at her, refusing to try face-to-face communication. One will make no attempt to communicate at all but shoos her from his beauty parlor as though she were drunk or deranged.

  Sofia often gets saddled with tasks such as these because she is so capable and responsible. Her reliability is less remarkable for her deafness than it is for her age. But in tandem with her verbal acuity and relative ease in functioning in the world at large, it makes it easy to forget that she is a teenager, with all the typical growing pains of adolescence. Instead people call on her to perform an unusual array of tasks. Perhaps the most demanding and conflict-ridden of these is the rearing of Irina.

  Charming, maddening Irina is Sofia’s special charge, and both sisters know it. Their relationship is unusually close and fiery. The seven years between them are insufficient to guarantee Sofia unchallenged authority, yet their parents have habitually assigned her responsibility for Irina; as a result, a kind of elimination dance has ensued, with the two sisters perpetually retesting their liberties and limits.

  When Irina is kept in class during lunch to work on her reading, it is Sofia who takes time from her own day to visit the supervisor’s office and demand, “Are you punishing her for being confused?” And when she is informed, “No, it’s because she’s not doing her homework,” it is Sofia who pushes aside her own homework and works with Irina in the evenings to make sure everything gets done.

  When Irina wakes in the night, wanting a snack or comforting because of a nightmare, it is Sofia she goes to, Sofia who cares for her. They communicate in their own silent language, without disturbing the others. It is Sofia whom Irina asks for a poem at bedtime, Sofia who indulges, signing “Moon Near Stars,” the ASL poem she wrote for English class, its liquid rhythms spinning from her fingers like a visual lullaby.

  When Irina stays after school to rehearse for the dance show, it is Sofia who waits around to take her home on public transportation. And when Sofia goes out with her deaf friends, it is Irina who increasingly insists on going along, despite Sofia’s efforts at dissuasion. Through her big sister, Irina has glimpsed a portal into the deaf community, and with steel-jawed efficiency she has clamped on, determined not to be left behind.

  Sofia’s relationship with her deaf sister is full of implications about her own deafness. To Irina, Sofia is often a hero: Sofia can make herself understood in Russian, can stand up to their mother and articulate for them both. Irina was only eight when the Normatovs emigrated; she never reached Sofia’s level of fluency in speaking or lip-reading Russian. It falls to Sofia, then, to serve as the interlocutor for Irina with the hearing family members.

  But if at such times she is Sofia the Hero, she can be Sofia the Betrayer as well. Because of her ability to bridge the gap within the family, the family sees it as Sofia’s duty to do so; therefore, they perceive withholding this service as the worst kind of treason. When she declines to advocate for Irina, when she refuses to assume the duties of a parent, it invariably upsets everyone. Sofia is the only one who can be the bridge, and until she submits to that task once again, the atmosphere around the apartment is thick with grousing and blame. In fact, Sofia has begun to wonder how much of her parents’ objections to her going to Gallaudet actually stems from their anxiety about being left to rear Irina alone.

  Last Saturday, in the aftermath of the almost-fight during Sabbath dinner, Sofia raised the question quite bluntly, asking her mother, “What would you do if I left, if I were gone? How would you communicate with Irina?”

  Mrs. Normatov responded with equal candor. “Can’t you teach her to be more like you? To have better speech, better Russian, be more mature?”

  Sofia considered this and answered truthfully, “No, I can’t. It’s too hard.”

  It was a rare exchange, untinged with anger or defensiveness. They had the living room to themselves, and rested there in the bleak gray light that filtered through the curtains, a frothy cream-and-gold fabric drawn against the winter afternoon. In the absence of tension, Sofia felt that the room was charged with possibility.

  “Mama, tell me,” she begged, “how did it happen when I was born and you found out I was deaf? How did you find the school in Leningrad? Tell me the whole story.” She already knew bits and pieces, but she had never heard it in full, and she needed it now, all at once, straight from her mother’s lips.

  Mrs. Normatov became brusque in an attempt to shake off the request, but Sofia persevered until she relented. She had been sixteen when she wed her uncle Iluysha, a match that was not unusual in their culture. She had hoped for a large family, a great brood of at least eight children. She gave birth to Adalina, her first, when she was eighteen, and Nadezdha two years later—two perfect daughters. Three years later Sofia was bom, and if there was any disappointment over having yet another girl, it was canceled by the blessing of a third healthy baby.

  Sofia was two years old when her mother noticed that something was not right. If the baby’s back was turned and Mrs. Normatov called to her, she didn’t respond. She told her husband, who replied, “Nonsense!” and repeated the experiment himself. Perhaps he took a step as he called, sending a vibration through the floorboards; perhaps the baby caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye. In any case, that time she responded. “There, you see?” Mr. Normatov soothed his wife. But she would not be comforted.

  A visit to a local doctor shortly thereafter proved her right: Sofia had a hearing impairment. However, in Samarkand they could not get access to an audiologist or the technology that would allow for a detailed diagnosis and recommendation for treatment. It was Mrs. Normatov’s grandmother, Mr. Normatov’s mother, who told her what she must do: “Put her in a special school.”r />
  For Jews living in the Asian part of the Soviet Union, this was no easy feat. Fueled by the grief and guilt that most hearing parents first experience upon learning that their child is deaf, Mrs. Normatov sought answers through a labyrinthine series of connections. After months of letter-writing, she finally found someone who would agree to help: the friend of the husband of a sister of a friend. This man was a Jewish doctor, a hearing specialist in Leningrad. Mrs. Normatov left Ada and Nelly with her grandmother and took the baby north, only to be told by the doctor that the best thing would be to leave Sofia in Leningrad, in the oral school, where she would learn to talk.

  Mrs. Normatov did as she was told. She returned to Samarkand in a severe depression, feeling tired and aged, defeated, dried up. When Irina was born deaf, seven years later, her mother simply sent her along to join her sister in Leningrad. After that Mrs. Normatov made sure that she would bear no more children.

  Sofia received the story from her mother, who cried as she told it, in the muted shadows of late afternoon. For the first time, it included the true, bitter ending, the part of the message that goes “Having no children is better than having deaf children.”

  “I don’t blame you” is what Sofia summoned herself to say to her mother after the story was finished. “I don’t blame you. I know you went through a lot. So have I. And I’m proud to be deaf. You need to accept that.”

  A few days later, Sofia was in the room when Mrs. Normatov asked Irina to hang her clean clothes on the drying rack. Irina complied, and when she was through, Mrs. Normatov surprised both daughters by signing, “Thank you.”

  Irina’s large eyes went round behind her glasses. She leaped toward her mother in amazement and lavished kisses on her cheeks.