When she pushed back his foot his knee bent. She held his knee flat with her elbow and pushed back his foot again, quickly grabbing the end of the ruler to capture the flexed foot before it pointed.
‘Hypertonia,’ she said, looking at me. ‘You need to check this. It’s not normal.’
‘Oh, okay,’ I said.
I gave Dov to Efrat with my left arm and picked up Lev with my right. Dov calmed down as he sucked his dummy.
‘You check this, okay?’ the nurse repeated at the end of the appointment after Lev had shown the same tendency.
Israelis, I thought angrily, so dramatic.
‘They probably just didn’t like her fiddling with their feet. Who would?’ I whispered to Efrat as we buckled them into their pram.
‘She was so rough,’ Efrat agreed.
The following week, Winnie died. A blood clot in her heart, she passed away peacefully during the night on the dog cushion next to our bed. At midnight we wrapped her in a white sheet and put her in the boot of our car, next to a shovel. Dror drove to the beach. ‘She would have wanted to be buried here,’ I told him as the headlights pierced the darkness and settled on sand dunes located high on cliffs above the ocean, typical of much of the Israeli coastline. She loved the sand. Loved the sea. We dug a hole and said goodbye.
I cried and cried.
Three kids under three and still I was compelled to go to the pound. I needed a canine friend. A girlfriend. I took four dogs out for a walk. The fifth was Ketem. She looked at me with soulful eyes that were full of sadness, hope and the possibility of love. White with black butterfly marks on her face, she was the only choice.
Two weeks later Dror and I took Dov and Lev to a paediatrician. She was Brazilian and English came easily to her as a third language. She remeasured and weighed them, and as they lay on their backs she held their clenched fists and pulled them slowly up to a sitting position. Their soft sandy heads fell back like ragdolls’.
‘They were so squished in my stomach,’ I said, thinking that this explained their lack of strength.
Yes, they didn’t have a chance for their muscles to develop in utero, I imagined her replying. It’s very normal and will improve quickly in the next few months. Don’t worry at all.
But instead she said, ‘I’ll book them into the Regional Child Development Centre . . . just to be sure. Maybe they need some physiotherapy.’
‘Really?’ I asked, but my meek voice was blocked by Jasmine’s knotted hair in front of my mouth—she was sitting on my lap.
The doctor was busy typing notes on her computer, then she printed out a referral and handed it to Dror. I looked over. I could only read Dov and Lev’s names in Hebrew and their ages, six months old.
‘It says here . . .’ she said, pointing to the Hebrew script, ‘that it’s urgent, but that’s just to get you an earlier appointment, otherwise you may wait for months.’
I had always thought physiotherapy was for rehabilitating adults after injuries, but I soon learned it is often good for babies and children. ‘What do they do to the kids?’ I asked around. ‘Oh, just exercises to help them get stronger,’ was the consensus. Dror and I had to agree that they were very floppy. Since birth their heads had lolled to the side: Dov to the right and Lev to the left. In fact, it was our neighbours’ five-year-old son, Ronen, who had first picked up the directional difference when he boasted that, unlike most others, he could tell them apart.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said to my mother the following week on the phone. I couldn’t bear the thought of her panic making me panic. ‘Everything’s completely fine, they’re just being extra careful.’
‘Well, always best to be careful. And take the doctor’s advice. We’ll be there in just over two months,’ she said.
No sign of panic at all.
‘I can’t wait to see Jasminnie. I miss her so much. Did she get the card I sent? I bought her the sweetest kimono in Japan and some lovely books.’ I knew Mum missed her. But what about Dov and Lev? They were still small babies. Mum hadn’t had time to bond with them yet.
‘And Dov and Lev, silk pyjamas. Not matching.’ I liked that she acknowledged my concern about them having separate identities.
‘Can’t wait to see them again too. And you too, of course, darling.’
We finally received a date for an appointment at the developmental centre—six weeks after we had filled out the paperwork—and it clashed with Dror’s plans to take Jasmine to LA to visit his family. The plane tickets were non-transferable.
‘I can handle it,’ I said, guilty that I would otherwise prevent Dror from seeing his parents and sister. ‘Efrat will help.’
Efrat and I continued to get along well and I trusted her implicitly with Dov and Lev’s care. She adored them, showing them off to her mother and boyfriend and talking about them with a tone of ownership that felt aunt-like and complementary to mine. I even felt surprisingly comfortable around her in my ugliest pyjamas, Ugg boots and morning hair. Not many got that honour.
We sat in the doctor’s waiting room, happily cuddling Dov and Lev, tickling their feet and chatting. The baby centre was in Jaffa, a dishevelled, mostly Arab neighbourhood close to our apartment. Murals covered the walls, giving the old concrete building a welcoming ambience.
Finally the doctor called us in, pointing to the chairs in front of his broad table. I sat in the chair closest to the wall, Dov on my lap. Unlike the waiting room, this office was nondescript, with the overhead glare of fluorescent light.
The doctor was in his fifties, with short grey hair and a sour downturned mouth. He hardly looked up as he started firing questions at me in Hebrew.
I interrupted him and asked if he could speak in English as I didn’t understand.
‘Ehhh, okay,’ he said grudgingly, English clearly uncomfortable for him. Still, his sour face and bleak tone weren’t helping me like or trust him. ‘Ehhh, so, they are seven months old, yes? Ehhh, the pregnancy. Any problems with the pregnancy?’ He rolled the ‘r’ in ‘pregnancy’ for so long I thought he might cough up a ball of phlegm.
‘Not really . . . Well, um . . .’ I started.
‘You have, your, ehh, family,’ he interrupted. ‘Any . . . there are some malformed people?’
What the fuck? I thought.
‘Ehh, disabled, physic, mental . . .’ It’s okay. It’s just his English.
‘No, nothing, nobody I know about,’ I said. Did suicide and schizophrenia count? Unlikely, and not something to bring up with Efrat around.
‘There were problems with the placenta? Ehhh, any bleeding?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘Something . . . ehh serious illness, when you were, ehh, pregnant?’
‘No. Well, I did have sinusitis and took antibiotics.’
He ignored me, keeping his eyes on the papers in front of him.
‘Labour, it was early? How many weeks?’ He made the ‘h’ into a ‘ch’—usually this would make me smile.
‘I was put on bed rest from twenty-seven weeks but they were born at thirty-seven. Lev was breech. You know, feet first,’ I said. Maybe this would provide a clue.
‘Lack of oxygen at their birth?’ he enquired, then scribbled something on the lined yellow notepad. I noticed his pencil was chewed at the end. Maybe he hated his job. Probably underpaid and resentful.
‘Any problems, ehh, with the birth?’
‘Well, Dov did have a very low temperature and needed a heat lamp. And at five weeks they both got bronchiolitis and had five days on oxygen at hospital. Is that important?’
‘No.’
I tried to smile at him, but he wouldn’t make eye contact.
He stood up, putting the pencil in a glass jar. ‘Tavi’i echad lepo ve toridi et habgadim.’
Efrat nodded and followed him to the examination table. I followed with Dov.
‘Cama bakbookim hem ochlim col yom?’ he asked.
Efrat replied in Hebrew.
‘Ve ech hem shotim, yesh harbe gazzim o l
o, baayot acherot?’ he said.
I only understood the word ‘baayot’; it meant problems. What is he asking her? Ahhggg! I’m the bloody mother!
‘English, please?’ I said sweetly.
‘Yes, yes, okay,’ he responded, without repeating the information.
I was becoming more and more upset and gripped Dov tighter in my arms. The doctor instructed me to put Dov on the table. I removed his top and unbuttoned his onesie, and he lay on his back, naked, innocent and vulnerable while the sour-faced man prodded him. Finished, the doctor swept Dov aside and motioned for Lev to be undressed. He felt their heads and feet, arms and legs. He took out his communist-era looking instrument. Bang bang it went above the knee on each skinny little leg. I flinched.
Okay, he’s just checking their reflexes, I thought. Breathe, Ondine. Fucking BREATHE.
Suddenly, he looked at me. I existed.
‘There’s something . . . ehh, clearly wrong with them,’ he said to me without emotion.
‘Oh,’ I said.
Efrat was blowing raspberries into Dov and Lev’s tummies on the table. She stopped.
‘It could be a metabolic disease . . .’ he said flatly.
I suddenly needed to sit down.
‘. . . or brain damage or a genetic disease. Those are the three possibilities. Three possibilities,’ he repeated and held up three fingers. ‘We need to do tests.’
‘Oh,’ I heard my voice say again. I was no longer there. He returned to his desk. Standing next to Efrat, who hadn’t said a word, I silently dressed my boys as the doctor scribbled on his pad.
I sat back down with Lev on my lap and tickled his neck.
‘You need to do these tests.’ He handed me a piece of paper with a list of jargon and Hebrew words and I stared blankly at the scribble.
‘What do we do after the tests? Call you?’
‘Yes, call me or I will call you.’
‘How long will it take to get the results?’
‘It could be a few weeks, maybe one month, ehhh . . . the holidays,’ he said, looking at his calendar.
‘The holidays, ehh, it may delay it all.’
‘Okay. Thank you.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘Goodbye.’
On the way home in the taxi I sat in silence for a while, not knowing what to say to Efrat. Finally I spat out the words: ‘He was horrible.’
‘Yes, he was so rude,’ Efrat agreed.
‘They’re just slow to develop,’ I said.
Our arms were wrapped tightly around the baby boys on our laps—Israeli taxis didn’t have baby capsules. I was getting used to some of the country’s contradictions. In some ways it was surprisingly progressive: female prime ministers, paid maternity leave, universal healthcare, strong laws against sexual harassment and domestic violence; but in other ways it was shockingly lax, with questionable OH&S standards and poor law enforcement, especially on the roads.
We stared through the grimy taxi windows at the neighbourhood of Jaffa, a fusion of handsome old architecture from the Ottoman Empire and cheap, ugly, relatively modern buildings. Rubbish overflowed from dumpsters into street gutters; half-demolished building sites with mounds of dirt and iron blocked the pavement; and stained grey concrete walls gave the streets a dull cast. Colourful graffiti provided a pleasant contrast. Dark-skinned men gathered to smoke on street corners. My eyes blurred and I gazed unfocused at the surrounding traffic. Sydney felt a long, long way away and, more than ever before, like home. It was too late to call Dror in LA. Despite my fears, I would need to wait until morning.
That night I leaned over the change table and looked into Dov’s bluey-green eyes. I leaned closer so that I could gaze right into them. He looked directly into me.
‘You’re going to be all right, Dovy Dov,’ I said. ‘Right? I am so worried, Dovy.’ I felt the prick of tears. ‘But I know you are going to be okay . . . Right, Dovy?’
He gazed at me tenderly and broke into a smile.
‘Yes! I know!’ I kissed his neck a hundred times. ‘Everyone’s so stupid! We know you are fine. Mummy knows. Silly doctor man.’
The next morning, shaky and trying not to think, I decided to take Dov and Lev for a walk and call Dror on the way.
I checked my phone. Mum had left a message: Just checking how the appointment went, darling. Do give me a call when you can. Your dad is a little worried, as am I.
I didn’t feel like calling back. Or talking at all. Maybe I would send an email.
I carried one baby in each arm from their bedroom; the football hold, as it was called. Carefully I counted the stairs down to the living room. With Dov still in my right arm, I tried to carefully put Lev down on the couch, but he fell down abruptly on the soft cushion.
‘Shit, sorry,’ I said. With furrowed eyebrows he stared quietly at the ceiling. ‘Hold on, sweetie,’ I called out as I walked to the front door and put Dov into the pram.
‘Time for a walk!’ I said brightly, fiddling with the straps under his bottom.
He sat limply by the front door as I retrieved Lev.
‘Yay! A walk!’ I said, trying to brighten my tone further.
Okay, babies in pram: check. What else? Bottles, check; formula powder and bottled water, oops. I ran up the stairs to the kitchen. Okay, six nappies, check. Wipes, check. Spare pants? Oh no, I ran upstairs to their bedroom, rummaged in their drawers and pulled out two pairs of pants. Muslin cloth for reflux, bibs, apple puree, two spoons—the bag was too full to zip up. I opened the front door. Dogs?
‘Ketem! Walkies!’ I called out.
‘Ketem!’ I said, suddenly noticing her by my side. In the short time we’d had her she had become my shadow.
‘What’s going on?’ I touched her face: it was swollen like a soft white blimp. ‘My poor puppy dog.’
I gently kissed the whiskers protruding from her muzzle right where the line of black fur met white. Her eyes were nearly closed. The swelling had surrounded the velvet of her eyelids. She peered up at me, eyes reduced to dark slits.
I called Efrat, anxious that I was disturbing her on her morning off but also knowing that she was my first, my only choice. Who else could I leave my boys with? Only she knew them. She promised to come straight away; just five blocks on her bicycle, she could be at my place in minutes. ‘Oh my God,’ she said as she arrived, flicking her long wet hair behind her back to bend over and inspect Ketem. An intoxicating scent of peach shampoo cocooned us.
I grabbed Ketem’s leash to take her straight to the vet, a short walk from our apartment. Stepping out the door I bumped into a neighbour who, on seeing Ketem, warned me that cat poison had been found on our street last week.
‘You know Rafi?’ she said.
‘Um . . .’
‘The little dog!’ she said in an accusatory tone. ‘Brown with little white patches,’ she added, touching her body to show where the colours were to be found. ‘Nobody has seen him for a week . . . Nobody.’
‘I hope he’s okay.’
She lifted her palms to the sky, a gesture that meant ‘Who knows?’ and in this case could be translated as ‘Probably dead’.
I sat in the veterinary office believing that my new puppy might also die and knowing that this wasn’t the worst of my problems. I rested the full weight of my head on the chair’s white plastic arm.
When the tears came, the Israeli vet nurse was as shocked as I was. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said in a thick accent, ‘it’s just an allergic reaction to a bite, not poison. I’ve given her a shot and the swelling should decrease by tonight. She’s not going to die.’
She handed Ketem back to me on the leash, patted me on the shoulder and gave me a sympathetic smile.
‘It’s not that.’ My voice wobbled. ‘It’s just been a really bad week, I’m sorry.’
I was not a crier and the sound of my tears shocked me. I’m not coping, I gasped to myself. Not coping. I tested the thought again, realising it was now a statement of fact. I had never felt
that before.
Sitting in the vet’s waiting room, I hesitated before calling Dror and waking him. I rang his mobile phone rather than his parents’ landline. In our thirteen years together I had never once asked him directly for help.
‘Hi!’ he said, his voice still sleepy and raw. ‘How did it go? What did the doctor say?’
‘It’s not good. It’s really bad.’ My voice faltered. I took a breath.
‘He thinks there’s something very wrong. He said, “metabolic, brain damage or genetic disease”. I don’t even know what that all means. What does that mean?’
‘It could mean anything,’ Dror answered after a long pause. ‘It covers everything.’
‘He wants to do lots of tests,’ I said. ‘I have to take them to the hospital.’
Dror was silent.
‘Pumpkin,’ I said, stealing a glance at the back door of the clinic. The nurse was still out of sight. There was a brick lodged in my throat and my eyes welled with tears. ‘I need you. Can you please come home?’ I whispered the last words before my voice broke. Deep breath.
‘What was that?’ he asked. ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘Can you come home? Will your parents mind? I don’t know if I can do this alone. Is that okay? I’m sorry to spoil your trip. I know how much they wanted to see Jasmine. Could you change your ticket?’
For nearly twenty-four hours I had been telling myself that everything was all right, that I had just overreacted to a heartless doctor. Sitting in the vet’s office, my friends and family across the world, with a swollen dog and twin babies with something terribly wrong with them, I knew that I was not okay.
‘I’ll get a plane today,’ he said. ‘I’m coming.’ A flood of relief hit me but didn’t dispel the fear and shame that had settled in my gut.
Stay strong, I told myself, taking a deep breath.
The phone was silent. ‘Dror? Are you still there?’
I put the phone to my ear and squeezed it hard. ‘Will we be okay?’ I asked. How I needed to hear his answer. I held my breath, waiting.
The Miracle of Love Page 7
