The Blackberry Bush (18 page)

As she glides and “dances” through the room, it’s clear that her seemingly inborn awkwardness has been lifted out of her. She is the central hub of this little universe of unconditional love and acceptance that she has created.

On the left wall a bold mural painted in bright colors is titled P
SALM
89:2. The Hebrew-lettered words
Chesed, Amen, Olam, Shamayim
splash about the wall. “Everlasting Love,” “Solid Support,” “Big and Boundless,” “Water-colored Sky” are the meanings to those Middle Eastern Bible concepts that float around in the core of human dreaming and vision.

Painted swirls of water burst out of the sky and through a broken stone wall. The mural sings silently somehow. You can hear it with your spirit. The mural is signed at the bottom:

Happy 40th, Kati!
—Zara

Kati often hums songs from Sunday worship during the week; it’s as if she’s always about to break into song. The gospel choir at Hope Lutheran has developed new forms of spontaneous singing, which are attracting attention from all around the Los Angeles area. The new songs are composed right in the moment, based on the prayers of the people present that day, collected earlier, and no one really knows where they will end up. A growing contingent of local neighborhood Orthodox Jews is showing up at Hope to experience this, and one of them is teaching a course at the church on the Hebrew concepts in the psalms (which inspired the mural). The pastor forbids recording of this singing, believing that its “present” nature is sacred, and that to replay it would miss the point.

Kati floats over to the door on our right and pulls down her apron and goggles from a hook, calling out, “Shop time!”

The older children hurry to join her (and we follow along before the door closes) into the shop in the next room. It is filled with tools. Even as tool time with Opa was therapy for Kati, she now guides the children through the art of crafting as a means to unlocking new connections in their minds. Only a handful at a time ever come with her into the shop—she likes to spend time with each student, and, of course, make sure they are all safe.

A framed portrait of Opa hangs on the wall above the main workbench. Many of the tools are from his workshop in Germany, which Kati had shipped over.

She has achieved remarkable results with the children, reaching levels of dexterity and skill thought unattainable for Down syndrome kids.

It has been a long time since that day on the beach, yet Kati will always remember....

2031
Melrose District
Los Angeles, California

Kati

I
T DIDN
’
T GO WELL
, a couple of decades ago, when I told Mutti I wasn’t going to attend USC after all, and a few years later, that I was dating a Pakistani. Both of us made a lot of threats…none of which were carried out, thank God. Saahir talked to my parents one night when I was at Zara’s a few months after the rescue, and that helped some. Guess it’s hard to argue with someone like Saahir, because he’s so straight up, reasonable, and friendly.

I don’t think Mutti and I will ever be on the same wavelength…and Dad? He still doesn’t figure much in my world. Our relationship will never be easy, but at least now we three can coexist on the planet without as much stress.

As for dating Saahir, it was so clear he was headed somewhere in life, and I wanted to go that somewhere with him. Saahir is physically unremarkable. No woman would be drawn to a picture of him. But I was always attracted to his brightness and energy. He seems to know what to do, without any hesitation, and I love being around that. Even better, he loves me for
me
…even when I was invisible to everyone else. It just took me years to notice his interest.

As for the career I chose, well, it sort of happened. As a girl, I was always disappointed when the weekly church sessions with the special-needs kids ended. Some of my happiest teen memories were from church—when the kids in my class would run and cling to my legs. I was so starving for human touch, I’d simply melt at the beginning of each Sunday class.

So when I got older, I kept working with special-needs kids. Slowly, it grew into a regular class, and then a school. My second-oldest, our son, volunteers there now. It’s as if Opa skipped a generation and reappeared in young Ebrahim.

The kids in my class embody for me a key Hebrew concept from the Psalms:
Chesed,
pronounced “KHEH-sud.” It means God’s unconditional and unearned love for everyone on earth. I unconditionally love and accept my students, and they do the same for me, as both teacher and friend. (You see, Opa Harald’s legacy still does live on—in me and in my students.)

As I look around the workshop here at the school, I also see the movie posters for the stage sets I’ve worked on. Some of the films were embarrassingly bad, but the sets were good! I still hang out at the studio and plan on doing at least two or three more major projects at some point.

That night at the Cliffs awakened a voice inside me. It was the same voice I first started to hear while leaning on Opa’s shoulder, listening to the organist in Germany. The more I listened to the voice—so still and small that you can miss it—the more my awkwardness went away and I started to feel peaceful. I haven’t been chronically agitated in years.

The voice would start to sing when I was with Saahir at the store or driving around LA with him, when I was in church with the special-needs kids, when I thought about having a child, and then more children. The voice helped me embrace my incurable skinniness and my rather remarkable nose. The voice would sing calmness into me when Mutti raged against my “foolish” decisions.

The more the voice sang, the less I needed to steal alcohol and binge drink from my parents’ cabinet. By the time I married Saahir, who was raised as an alcohol-free Muslim, I rarely drank—although I still enjoy sneaking a glass of primo Justin Isosceles wine with Zara once in a while. It was within the verses of that inner song that I stopped lying to my parents and started implementing the vision for the special-needs school.

Now the voice sings when the woodchips fly on my latest project, and when I put on one of Walter’s sea chest watches.

That day at the Cliffs re-indexed my whole life and emotional orientation. Now I get up in the morning and feel joy. I no longer index my decisions around pleasing people and meeting impossible expectations. I decide based on an audience of one—the
Shekinah
voice, as my Orthodox Jewish girlfriends in the neighborhood say.

I still haven’t cut my hair, but I no longer wear it long to spite Mutti. Like reading the rings of a redwood trunk, each twist in my long braid merely reminds me of the path I’ve taken—the long and winding journey that brought me here, to this moment. Also, Saahir’s mother, a traditional Pakistani with hair as long as mine, loves to comb it out for me and rebraid it. She says often, “Long hair, long life!” in her singsong Urdu accent.

She also—at first with hesitation, thinking I would ignore or reject it—gave me her mother’s heirloom gold nose stud, which I first wore at our wedding, a gift that had been handed down through her family for generations. She wept when I agreed to pierce my nose and wear it for the rest of my life. It was also a deliberate action, on my part, to affirm my nose and my appearance—that central feature of my face I used to see as my ugliest feature. I now love the way God made me.

When I pass on, I’ll leave it for one of my granddaughters. I also wore a traditional Pakistani wedding dress with flamboyant colors. As you can imagine, Mutti was not pleased. But I’ve learned to love her without having to meet her expectations. We’ve actually begun to get along. I so regret being angry with her as a teen. I now see that my resentment of her expectations was just as ensnaring as the expectations themselves.

It’s been quite a process for her too. It’s good that Saahir and I are very prosperous. It helps her look past the eccentric braid, fedoras, tattoo, men’s watches, and nose stud. Bless her heart. And I think my children like her better than they like me—that seems to run in the family. Yet the kids help me see all the good in her that I was blind to at their age.

I’ve started to repeat Mutti’s fave Dutch phrase: “
Doe normal, dan doe je al gek genoeg
(Act normal, and then you’ll already act crazy enough).”

A few years after the Cliffs, I started to see that all the beautiful things that Opa had said about me were true. But not in a comparative way. No one is more beautiful than anyone else. I am not special, and neither are you. You see,
special
always carries comparative baggage. I learned this from working with the kids at church. Every human is infinitely and equally valuable. We don’t raise that value by achieving more than others. Our Creator creates us equal.

I don’t work with these children because I’m better than these “needy” kids and want to “help” them with my superiority. Instead, I create a loving community with them to celebrate our equality and shared human fellowship. I level the playing field so we can unlock our gifts together. Whenever I see sweet little Roberta’s cherubic smile, Jamie happily clapping out of rhythm to music, or remember the day five-year-old Marcus spoke his first words, my cup of joy and thankfulness overflows. Then I celebrate, once again, the day at the Cliffs, where my life took a completely different path.

I know now, without doubt, that we were all put on this earth for a reason, and sometimes it’s the subtle little things—the seemingly random, chance encounters—that lead to huge breakthroughs that lead us to discover this.

I’m convinced that our “goodness” (my church friends call it “holiness”) comes not from effort but by yielding to this infinite love and goodness that God keeps piling up for us. It’s not about effort and discipline but rather about opening ourselves up to all that God has for us. And listening to the ongoing singing of the
Shekinah
voice.

Faith is a process, I’ve discovered. I don’t have everything figured out—far from it. But I find comfort in the fact that the Jesus I’ve come to know was not perfect because he was gifted at meeting complex expectations. He was perfect because he followed the voice of God, because he did what his Father asked him to do.

That same passion is what has led me to where I am today.

And I love my life.

Angelo

A
teen girl’s voice wakes Kati from her daydream musings.

Looking up from her project, the teenager beckons Kati over with both of her hands straight in the air. Her name is Rose, and she has been working on her chessboard for a year and a half. Rose has been spontaneously elated by its developing beauty and wants to share the moment with Kati.

As Kati approaches her, Rose runs her fingers once more across the beautifully oiled wooden chessboard squares. She reaches up and takes Kati’s head with both hands, kisses her on the forehead, exactly on the spot where Opa used to kiss her, and then young Rose lets out an uninhibited cheer and claps with glee.

Kati touches her own just-kissed forehead with her tattooed hand and drinks in the unearned love shown by Rose. Love flowing straight from God. Piling up faster than she can ever use it.

Standing, Kati walks past a full-length mirror on the way back to the tool bench. A tall, lean, quirky-looking woman with a sparkle in her eye looks back at her. Kati brushes a couple of stray hairs away from her forehead and pauses for an unrushed look at herself from top to bottom. She flashes herself her high-beam smile and loves what she sees.

The intercom bell rings, and the receptionist calls out, “Kati, package for you in the office.”

Kati couldn’t be more surprised by the contents of the package, or the note that accompanied it:

Dear Katarina,

I would like to think that I saved your life, but I sometimes doubt that it actually happened. I don’t mean this romantically, but literally—you are the girl of my dreams. I’ll explain later. My wife, Lindsey, and I would love to meet you. I believe that this watch is yours. My contact info is on the printed chip under my signature.

Josh

Katarina holds the shattered Ziffer à Grande Complication 1924 in her tattooed right hand, undoes the IWC, and slowly buckles Walter’s broken Ziffer onto her left wrist.

Rechecking the note, she sees a red-ink stamp of the Dornbusch family shield at the bottom by the signature. That simply can’t be. But it is. She puts on her fedora and leaves immediately, hoping to find Josh within a few hours.

Her backstory is about to light up, this very day, in ways she can’t imagine....

2031
Zarzamora, California

Josh

H
OW COULD SOMETHING
that big and heavy be missing?

I’ve looked all over the house and workshop for it.

Occasionally I get promptings to do things that I don’t fully understand. A few months ago, while doodling my millionth edition of the ThornHeart on some paper during a staff meeting, I got the urge to recreate the design in iron. And so I did.