Light Years Away: Chapter 2
"I told them the computer is in a locked room, and she’d have no access to any devices. But Gedalya wouldn’t let her come. He’s too much of a tzaddik”
"Baruch haba,” Nechami says, welcoming Dudi into her office.
Her brother, tall and strong, sits down on a plastic chair and winces. “You could use some nice low armchairs here,” he remarks.
“And a lot of other things too,” she agrees, showing him the list she’s made. “Little by little, the bird builds her nest. Every month I put some money aside for furnishing and decorating this place. This week we painted the walls.”
He stands up and scrutinizes the birds, running a finger over the metallic paint, feeling its texture. He’s impressed. He sits down again, with a heavy sigh.
“I thought you’d come with Yaffa’le,” she says. “Weren’t you talking about a family evening in Jerusalem?”
“We talked about it.” His face hardened. “I wanted to go out somewhere with her, after we worked on the booklet here with you. But we couldn’t get a babysitter.”
“Oysh. That’s hard.” She remembers what that was like. The nights, mainly the nights. No babysitter was willing to come and watch three babies who cried nonstop. It seemed like every week at least one of them had an ear infection, or was teething, or had some nasty old virus in their poor little tummy. Even if she managed to get a babysitter, she’d usually be summoned home early because somebody was vomiting or screaming. In winter, the winds rattled the windows, and in summer, the bright evenings beckoned her to go out with friends, but she was shackled to the house, a lonely prisoner without parole. Shua learned till 1 a.m., and he was happy.
“Very hard.” Dudi’s face takes on a blank expression. “When your own brother won’t send his daughter over to you, that’s really hard.”
“You mean Gedalya?”
“Yup.”
“Well, maybe Tovi has schoolwork, or a test,” she says, groping for an explanation. She was used to being the family sponge. Tomorrow she’d be hearing from Shifra about Dudi’s chutzpah, asking her to send Tovi over to babysit. “To that house, with all those books and devices and electronics, they want me to send my daughter? No, thank you!”
“She doesn’t have a test,” Dudi said flatly. “Tovi would have loved to come. And I promised to drive her home afterward, right to the door. I told them the computer is in a locked room, and she’d have no access to any devices. But Gedalya wouldn’t let her come. He’s too much of a tzaddik.”
“That hurts,” Nechami says. Yet she understands the other side, too, so well that it hurts equally.
“Yup. So Yaffa’le had to stay home with Avital, thanks to our dear brother who had to go and ruin our plans.”
There are several things Nechami could say, and doesn’t. She could say that a person has a right to choose where, or where not, to send his daughter. She could say she hopes that when Avital is bigger, Dudi and Yaffa’le won’t let her go to just any house, either. Everyone has their boundaries, she refrains from saying. The question is only where they place them.
“Well, nu, shoin… let’s get started.” Dudi draws his chair closer to her workstation. “Helium. Symbol, He. I want you to build me an atom with two protons and two neutrons in the nucleus, and two electrons orbiting it.”
She opens the previous file: H — hydrogen. She copies the basic shape, and adds the particles. Pairs. A pair of protons. A pair of neutrons. A pair of electrons. A noble gas, helium. Non-reactive.
“I’ve got the text in a file, here.” He hands her a USB flash drive. She opens InDesign, copies Dudi’s text and pastes it in. She learns that the world’s helium supplies are endangered. “People use helium all the time,” Dudi says, directing his accusation at the whole human race. “And then it escapes out of our atmosphere, into outer space, never to return.”
“And is that such a disaster? So we won’t have helium balloons at parties anymore. Or is it also used for something else?”
“Lots of something elses. It’s used to cool medical devices, for one thing. If we run out of helium, how will Tovi do the MRIs for her surgery?”
“Isn’t there any way of producing more helium?” she asks. Sometimes she’s genuinely interested in this scientific stuff. She renders the image: a single, noble atom. A coupled atom.
“You can’t produce helium. It’s a natural element, there’s no way of synthesizing it. Maybe we need to find a way of getting it back after it rises to the atmosphere. It’s not a good thing to get too high, you know that, Nechami.”
She doesn’t know whether that’s a jab, advice for life, or just a logical statement.
She lets the words go, lets them disappear into space.
***
Tovi
A few weeks ago, Ima woke me up in the middle of the night, and we went down to the Shaarei Chesed office on the next street. I was so tired and cold, I was yawning all the way there, and Ima kept saying, “I just hope she doesn’t catch cold.”
Mr. Moses the askan and his wife were waiting for us in the office, and there was a camera connected to a computer.
“Come, Tovi, sit here,” Mrs. Moses said, pointing to a chair in front of the computer screen. “Your meeting with the doctor starts in five minutes.”
I looked at Abba, and then at Ima.
“It’s all right,” they said. “Dr. Barclay doesn’t do surgical procedures without meeting the patient first.”
I made a face. I didn’t like that word, “surgical.” It’s all about sharp knives and cutting.
And then, with a big, American “Hello-o-o,” Dr. Barclay appeared, filling the whole screen. Abba went and stood in a corner of the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. Ima sat down next to me, and Mrs. Moses sat at my other side, so she could translate.
“Shalom,” I said to the doctor, with what I hoped was a refined smile. I don’t really know how to do refined smiles, or what makes them different from regular smiles, but I tried.
“I’m Lisette Barclay,” she said, waving at me. I didn’t need a translation for that.
“Ani Tovi,” I said. I liked her from the very start. If I had to get cut with sharp knives, at least someone nice would be doing it.
She didn’t ask me right away to take off my headband, and that was a big point in her favor. First she asked me how I was. Tired, of course. How else could I be at four o’clock in the morning? She explained that until now, she’d been busy all day with patients, and she told me about an 11-year-old boy who’d had an ear transplant that morning.
“Would you like a new ear, too?” she asked me. I understood, even without Mrs. Moses translating.
“Sure I would. That’s why I’m here.”
“Why do you want an ear?”
“Because everyone else has two ears.”
“And why else?”
“So I can hear even better.” I have very good hearing in my right ear, and the inner ear on my left side can also hear well. Dr. Barclay knew that. She’d already seen all my test results, and she was the one who asked for CT and MRI scans. “Cuz you’re going to open up my hearing canal, right?”
She didn’t answer right away. Then she answered with a lot of complicated words, but Mrs. Moses’s translation was just, “It depends on the circumstances,” and “if possible.” Then, in a polite, roundabout American way that I thought was pretty amusing, the doctor asked me If I would take off my headband. I took it off.
“Only for you,” I told her. “My friends never see me without it.”
“I appreciate your trust!” she said, laughing. She asked me to turn, to look to the right. To move away, to come in closer. And she asked me questions.
I could see on the screen that her clinic was all blue, green, and yellow. I asked her to move the camera so I could get a better look at the interesting doll on the shelf behind her. Dr. Barclay was happy to do it for me, but my father made that noise in his throat that he always makes when he disapproves.
“Is this necessary for the medical procedure?” he asked Mr. Moses.
“It’s building trust,” Mr. Moses told him. “That’s the first step in any healing process.”
It really was a beautiful doll. “If you come here, you can play with her,” Dr. Barclay promised. And then she looked at her watch. “Okay, Tovi, our time’s up. We’ll be in touch! See you!”
Abba wasn’t so sure all that business was really necessary, with the computer and everything. We went out into the cold air of 4:30 a.m. I was having some trouble breathing. I felt like the four hundred-dollar bills I saw Abba slip into Mr. Moses’s hand were stuck in my throat. And that was only for this first meeting with the doctor. Just so she would look at my medical file and talk with me a bit.
But the kupat cholim would pay for the operation, I told myself, trying to breathe deeply. I imagined a big plane taking me to America, landing in California. I pictured myself in a blue and yellow clinic. A nice doctor telling me not to worry, and then… a few things I mustn’t think about… and then, I imagined myself looking in the mirror and seeing myself just as I am today — but with two ears.
Walking back home tiredly, I smiled to myself. I didn’t think this dream might be like a helium balloon with nothing to tie it down, escaping straight into the sky.
to be continued…
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 846)
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Her son looks at her directly. He’d gone to speak with his father, not with her. He’d intentionally come while she was out
“You don’t need to explain it to me,” Dudi whispers back. “Obviously that would be the right thing to do. But what happened to all your sacred principles?”
Shua points to a piece of jewelry. “This one here… is this suitable for a very chareidi woman?” he asks
“Maybe I was wrong to bring you here with me,” Abba says to him, with a look that silently adds, “Don’t you dare say anything uncalled-for in front of my daughter”
