This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (17 page)

The directions to Aunt Itta’s apartment were simple: straight up the hill and back down the other side. Follow the road to your left until you hit the bottom at Rabbi Yehuda Street. It was building number three, the fourth floor.

I waved good-bye to my aunt, who was shouting down instructions from the second floor, and started slowly up the hill, passing the grocery where Chayala and I had bought milk for her mother and where we’d seen the hell-going soldier. I laughed to myself as I sipped ice-cold water from the bottle my aunt had given me, switching on the tiny handheld fan for relief.

Before leaving my aunt’s apartment, I had wanted to ask her a few questions, about Nachum and the changes in him—whether any of it was true. Because I was scared that my mother had lied, that my Aunt Itta had backed up her story out of pity and kindness, and that the image of Nachum in my mother’s mind was a delusion, a mirage created by desperate hope.

It was like that with special children. I had seen it happen—mothers believing what others said only out of pity. It was that way in the bungalow colony a few summers back, when some teenage girls had complimented Mrs. Leiber about her two-year-old Down syndrome son. They had looked at him, smiles stretched wide across their faces, eyes oozing sincerity.

“Oh, he’s so
cute!
He speaks
very
clearly for such a child. It’s
amazing
what he can do,” they said.

When every word a child speaks is a miracle, it does not say much about real change.

So I hadn’t asked my aunt about my brother. Maybe I was scared that she, too, would lie to me. And if she wouldn’t, then did I really want to hear the truth?

I passed the intersection at the top of the hill, and the large building that housed the Tnuva dairy factory. Enormous steel silos loomed up over the gates. I could see a worker, like a miniature plaything, climbing the ladder on its side. To my left, the road meandered down Geulah Street and its bustling shops and kiosks. To my right, the avenue split into a four-lane road, traffic crawling past a long row of old apartment buildings.

A city bus drove by just then, its tires squealing and grinding to an abrupt halt, the driver shouting at passengers,
“Achorah! Achorah!
To the back!”

Not far from where I stood, about a half hour’s walk away, was Jerusalem’s central train station, the one Nachum had gone searching for when he was eight years old.

A short, grizzled man shoved a bouquet of wilting roses in my face. “Five shekel!” he shouted. “Only five shekel! Practically free!” An elderly, sharp-faced woman pushed by him, ordering him to stop and leave the girl alone. Did he not see that no one wanted his wilting flowers? Quickly, I walked away, down the hill.

My mother had learned of Nachum’s disappearance weeks after it happened. Savtah Miriam, in New York for Passover, had looked out the car window on the way from JFK airport and said, “How are you going to drive in such weather? This is what the rain was like the day Nachum ran away—”

Aunt Chana, sitting in the back, had pinched my grandmother hard, but my mother had already heard. Savtah Miriam promised her that nothing had happened, really nothing, but my mother pulled the car to the side of the road. She took the key out of the ignition.

“This car will not move,” she said very quietly, “until I know what happened to my son.”

“Oh, it was nothing, really nothing,” my grandmother had nervously said. Though maybe just a small something. Shortly after my mother had left Nachum in Israel, no one could find the boy for five terrifying hours. It was as if he’d disappeared from the face of the earth.

In the end, my grandmother was forced to explain about that afternoon when, somehow, the staff at the school for children with special needs had not noticed that there was one fewer child on the van going home. Somehow the monitoring teacher had closed the door of the vehicle and told the driver that it was time to go—already they were off schedule.

Inside the building, my brother had waited patiently. He had waited for the silence to settle in, for the sounds of ticking clock hands to echo in the empty corridors, telling him that everyone was gone. Then, cautiously, he opened the door of the supply closet and stepped out. Quickly, he left the building and began to run.

Aunt Itta had stood outside on Rabbi Yehuda Street the way she did every day, waiting for the school van to come. But when the door opened, the assistant teacher facing her looked pale and scared.

“Nachum is not in the van,” she said. “I checked three times, under every seat. I checked behind the—”

Aunt Itta, fear rising in her throat, said, “What do you mean,
he’s not in the van? Where is the child?
”

On the steps going up to the fourth floor, Aunt Itta had shouted at her daughters to come down, now! Nachum was gone. He had never gotten in the van.

The pale teacher could not explain how it had happened. She drove back to the school with Ayalah and Batya. Aunt Itta called Uncle Zev from where he was studying at the synagogue. The teacher called the principal as the girls searched the building. They searched the classrooms, the cellar, and behind a pile of desks; they searched the storage room, the school yard, and the empty supply closet. They called Nachum’s name softly, then loudly, pleading for him to come out.

Someone called the police.

“We have never had such an incident before,” said the grim-faced principal to the men in blue uniforms. “This child is a problem—no teacher can control him. Our children are always accounted for.”

Ayalah and Batya stood outside, wondering which way to look first. The rain pounded against their umbrellas and gusts of wind swirled angrily. It rarely ever rained this way in Jerusalem.

On the other side of the city, Nachum walked, his wool jacket wrapped around him like a cold, wet sponge. For blocks on end he had run, past familiar buildings and synagogues, past supermarkets and bus stops, until he no longer recognized the streets around him, the empty corners and shuttered stores.

Somewhere past the center of the city, he stopped. Maybe he was too cold; maybe in the pouring rain he had lost his hawklike sense of direction, which had been pointing him toward the central train station. Maybe it was the large puddle he saw, like a tiny pond in the middle of the road, behind a corner kiosk. Nachum looked down at the puddle, at the plunking, pattering drops falling in it. Then he began to jump.

In the dimly lit kiosk, a man with walnut-colored skin and a Star of David necklace pulled down the shutters. Not since Noah’s flood had rain come down like this. There was not a mortal soul in sight, no business to wait for—not in this weather. The man came out the side door. He opened his umbrella, but the thrashing wind blew it right out of his hand, turned it inside out, and sent it spinning across the street. The man cursed. Stepping out, he pulled up the zipper of his jacket, the hood over his head, and ran.

But then he stopped, one foot in the street, one still on the curb. He turned, shielding his eyes from the rain, and stepped closer, a bit closer, just to see if there really was a boy there, a lone young boy, jumping in a puddle behind his shuttered kiosk.

On the boy’s head was a drenched
kippa;
dark side curls stuck to his cheeks. Streams of water poured from his wool jacket and from the tzitzit strings hanging from his pants. The boy was perhaps seven or eight. The nearest religious neighborhood was miles away.

The man called out to the boy.

“
Yeled!
Little boy!
Eiphah Ima?
Where is your mother?”

But the boy who looked up at him did not speak, could not tell him that he was in fact looking for his mother. He went back to jumping.

The man bent closer, trying to find the boy’s eyes. “
Mah atah oseh pah l’vad?
What are you doing here? Why are you alone?”

But the boy did not look up again. He looked only at the puddle as he jumped up and down, splashing, splashing in the rain.

At the local police station on Rachalvi Street, Uncle Zev sat, white as a ghost. He watched the men standing around murmuring as an officer mapped out the city streets. An hour earlier, Uncle Zev had called a neighbor, who had called his cousin, who had called the neighbors and the men from the shul.

The child had been gone for nearly three hours. The rain would not let up. The police dogs could not follow a scent in such weather. The rain could go on all night this way, but they could not wait for it to stop. They needed to search now.

The officer pointed at the map. If the boy went west, he would reach the highway. If he went east, he would reach the old city and its Arab neighborhoods. The checkpoints and surrounding police stations had been notified, soldiers alerted at the borders. All vehicles were to be checked for a child, age eight, who did not speak.

The rain came down in sheets, curtains of water sweeping across the city. It was as if a dam had broken in the sky above, said the men. Not since Noah had there been such rain.

Behind the shuttered kiosk, a mile or two away, Nachum stopped jumping.

He stood in the puddle, shivering, and stared, mesmerized, at the plunking raindrops in the pond, tiny rippling circles, widening in ringlike patterns. He did not face the hooded man, nor the second one, who had joined him. He could see their mouths moving, making urgent sounds. Their hands gestured toward him; scared, he stepped back. They moved away. My brother waited. Then, as they watched, he jumped in and out, in and out of the puddle again.

The men would not leave. Sometimes they looked around the corner, as if expecting someone to come. They murmured worriedly with each other. Surely there must be a parent, a babysitter, an older sibling—somebody—searching for this child.

From down the block a car approached. A man wearing a small knitted
kippa
peered out through the windshield. The car slowed down, the driver looking curiously, then suspiciously, at the two bareheaded Middle Eastern men standing over a shivering boy with side curls who squinted back at him in the glare of the headlights.

Fear flashed through his mind.
Arabs,
he thought.
Arabs!
No child with a
kippa
wandered these streets. And he slammed on the brakes and jumped out, striding up to the curb.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded. Then, finally noticing one man’s Star of David pendant, he lowered his voice, relieved. “What’s happening?” he asked. “What are you doing with the boy?”

The men stared at him, confused. “We don’t know,” the hooded one said. “I found him here, outside my kiosk, jumping in the puddle. The boy does not speak—he does not answer any questions. It’s like he doesn’t see us at all. We’ve been standing here for half an hour. He won’t budge from the puddle.”

The man in the knitted
kippa
bent down, his hands gentle on Nachum’s trembling arms. The boy was ice-cold, his lips quivering blue, his fists clenched against the sides of his jacket.

“Yeled,”
the man said. “
Boh.
Come inside the car. It’s warm in there. I will drive you back home.”

The man pushed the boy gently forward, one hand on each shoulder. Maybe Nachum was too tired, maybe he realized he would not reach the trains that day, and that’s why he followed the man. He left the puddle and got into the car.

The man in the
kippa
told the others that he’d take the boy back home. Then he pulled off the boy’s jacket, his shoes, and his frigid socks. He wiped off his face and hands with a paper towel, turning the heat on the highest setting. Gently, he asked the boy for his name, and if he knew where he lived.

But the boy did not speak. He stared at the windshield wipers, his eyes transfixed by the blades swinging right to left, right to left. The boy did not seem to hear, to know where he’d come from, or where it was he planned to go. It was as if the rain had dropped him from the sky.

The man drove west, to the religious neighborhoods where the ultraorthodox lived. He circled block after block, went up one hill and down another. Perhaps the child would point or show a glimmer of recognition upon seeing a building he knew. In the seat to the man’s right, the boy gazed out the window, looking, looking for the lost trains.

It was dark outside, and much time had passed since he’d found Nachum standing in the puddle, when the man pulled up at the first police station. Holding the boy’s hand, he took him inside and sat him down. He woke the police officer dozing at his desk, and told him what had happened. The officer picked up the phone and dialed the surrounding stations. He told them that the lost boy was here, brought in by a man in a knitted
kippa.

And this is how the story came to an end. Hours after he’d disappeared from the supply closet in the school that was not for autistic children, my brother was brought home in the cold rain by Uncle Zev and some men from shul. Aunt Itta wrapped him up in dry pajamas and warm towels, all the while weeping in relief.

It took days for Aunt Itta to understand why Nachum had run away and what he had been looking for. Maybe it was through picture cards, or the objects he meticulously drew. Maybe it was the broken sounds he made that explained that at the central station there were many trains. The trains rode out on steel tracks to different, faraway places. There was the train that took people to Haifa, to Tel Aviv, and to the shores of Eilat. Nachum was looking for the train that took people to America, to New York. On the train, he’d hide in the luggage compartment or under the seats. Then he’d wait for the train to reach the stop across the sea, to take him back home to his mother in New York.

Several months after Nachum ran away, he was diagnosed with autism. Six months or so after that, he was finally transferred to Jerusalem’s only school for autistic children.

When the principal told my mother that the school was not very Orthodox, my mother laughed. When the principal told her that ultraorthodox families refused to send their children there, no matter how severe their issues were, my mother cried. She said, “You worry about my son’s autism. Let God worry for his religion.”

In the summer of 1991, Nachum began attending the Jerusalem school. And the story began to change.