New Country
Kristin Brace
In the days when my Aunt Olenka opened her door to strangers, a single refrain shaped her lips more than any other: “No, no. It's Dari-oos.” My cousin was a musical prodigy at age eleven, and by the time he was thirteen, his mother was keen on letting all of New York City know it. My mother and younger brother Marek and I were living in Olenka's apartment at the time, along with my Aunt Irene. It had been nearly a year since I'd lost my hearing and yet the world I found myself in was still new, undefinable in the old way, and full of mystery and surprise where once all things had been ordinary. I was twelve years old. It's hard to say if my perception would have changed in some ways regardless of the accident and my subsequent deafness; the world opens up to people at different times in different ways. I'm on the brink now of new possibilities, as a candidate for cochlear implants. How far technology has advanced in just over thirty years.
A week before the first spectacle, I saw my mother's auburn head beside Olenka's glossy black one, bent low over the dining room table. They mulled over the perfect string of words to beckon the curious. The five-cent newspaper ad did the trick. People flocked from all corners of the city, a weary passel in browns and grays with hope alight in their eyes. “The Holy Spirit Moves Through His Fingers,” the ad read. When it came time for Darius' first show, I tucked myself into the far corner next to a piano leg, where I would be able to feel the music running through the cool lacquered wood. From there I could watch my cousin's hands. I imagined I would see the Holy Spirit flowing through his fingers like blood through veins, or sap through a maple tree when the earth warms enough for it to run.
My mother, Teodora, and her sisters welcomed visitors at the door and accepted the penny charge. The entryway smelled of sharp January air and of the newspapers people stuffed in their shoes for warmth. They kept their coats on because we had no room to put them all. The strangers settled on every chair in the cramped apartment. When the best seats were taken, they perched on chair arms and hunkered down on the floor. They leaned against walls, resting their heads back as they waited for the music, content looking, as if they'd traveled far and through many obstacles, and this moment was the only thing they'd ever wanted.
The aunties served coffee strengthened with chicory and passed out gingersnaps made with molasses from Uncle Bertie's upstate farm. I stayed hidden by the piano so I wouldn't have to help. I made myself small as possible with my knees tucked up to my chin. My green wool tights stretched thin over my kneecaps and the pale skin shone through with the color of new leaves in Spring. I longed to be back at Uncle Bertie's farm, away from the city with its crust of dirty snow and the hordes of children pushing and twisting up their faces in the cement schoolyard. I wanted to sink my fingers into the plush wool of a sheep, but for now, the faded scarlet rug beneath me would have to do. It sat at an angle under the piano. I traced my fingers along its abstract shapes, turning them into bean plants and chickens and a man with a hat. So many people who had walked across this rug were connected to me by blood. It had come all the way from the Old Country, rolled tight in the dark hull of a ship, rocked for months beneath the surface of the icy water.
. . .
I didn't know, that January of 1944, that those were hard times even here in the States, away from all the fighting. That my aunties and mother made a showing of Darius as much to keep up their spirits as for the collected pennies. Although, even with the door opening all the time to let in the strangers, we didn't have to pay for heat the days that Darius played, with all those bodies keeping the place warm. But I didn't think until years later how all those women, my mother and her sisters, were yearning for the day when their men would come home, when the rationed life would be full again, brimming with laughter and joy. They were so strong and capable that to look at them, cordial and smiling, you'd think their scheme of turning music into money was the fulfillment of their greatest dreams.
Another thing I didn't know then was the sight of my father's face. Our only tangible connection was through the envelopes he sent containing money for my mother, his scratchy black script like so many twigs tossed down to create our address. He'd left to work at a steel company in Pittsburgh when I was two. Marek hadn't yet been born. My mother never spoke of him, and I didn't know if he would be coming back. I dreamed of him often, a faceless man that took me up in his arms and hugged me with his chin against my hair. He swung me up onto his shoulders and I was high above everybody, looking down at the earth the way a bird does when it flies. I wondered if Darius was already forgetting his father's face. My Uncle Edmund, a doctor, had been tending to soldiers in North Africa for well over a year.
I thought I missed my unknown father the way Aunt Irene missed Uncle Clay, fighting with the Allies in France. The swing of her hips as she circled the room with her tray didn't reveal the fact that she missed him more than anything, more than a fish in a desert misses water, she told us. From my hiding spot I could see her orange flame of hair disappear when she bent to serve a stranger, then pop up again as she continued her circuit. My mother and Aunt Olenka took turns brewing coffee in the kitchen, each pot weaker than the last. As for me, I stayed curled up by the piano leg. Somehow, not being able to hear all of those strangers made them larger than life: their gestures and expressions, their foreign smells. The room was overpowered by their presence.
The day Darius first played for strangers, afternoon sunlight slanted through the window and spilled across the piano keys. They reflected light back onto his face in such a way that even the most devout unbelievers must have felt a holy shiver through their bodies, seeing him illuminated so. Darius stared down unsmiling for a moment, then slowly raised his hands and wiggled his fingers over the keyboard. You could see the room become utterly quiet then. Part of it came from the stillness that always settles over late afternoons in winter, when the sun shines its brightest knowing it hasn't long before night snuffs it out. The rest of the quiet flowed from all those people wishing and waiting in the same direction. It was a moment almost as beautiful as the music itself.
. . .
One day in early June, the air blew over the windowsill fresh and damp and I gulped it in, thirsty for a taste of the earth. As the sun broke through the last of the storm clouds and golden pendants of light slipped from the eaves, a burly man in formal military dress knocked at our door. We'd held our final concert a month before and I thought maybe the man had read our ad in an old newspaper. I ran to fetch Aunt Irene from the kitchen, where she sat circling want ads for typists and seamstresses. When we returned to the door together, I saw the man's adam's apple lurch above his stiff collar. As it so often did these days, a particular feeling flooded through me. I sensed it as strongly as if someone had draped a heavy cloak across my shoulders: the man was delivering bad news. He swept his cap off his head and held it tenderly across his middle. The movement brought a faint whiff of pipe smoke to my nose, something I hadn't smelled since my uncles were around. I tried to read the man's lips but the words weren't clear on his unfamiliar mouth.
Suddenly my aunt crumpled onto the rug. Her skirt rose like a small parachute around her torso and settled over her legs. She pressed her palms against her face then pulled them away and beat at the floor. Little bits of dust rose from the rug. Her face looked like the theater mask in one of her books, too exaggerated to be real. The man backed out of the doorway, nodding with his head kept low, and pulled the door closed.
The funeral for Uncle Clay was held the following week. St. Jozef's was packed tight with mourners in black. When I looked at individual faces, I saw that they were people I knew, but when I closed my eyes it felt like one giant body pressing against me. Incense hung stale in the air. Throughout the service, women whisked white hankies from their pocketbooks the way magicians pull birds from their sleeves, then crumpled them in their hands. My mother squeezed against me on one side, Aunt Olenka on the other. When the priest sat down, Olenka nudged Darius. He rose from the pew and maneuvered his way around everyone's legs and up to the front of the church. As he passed in front of us I thought he looked like an old man, somebody's ancestor captured in a black and white daguerreotype from the Old Country. With his back to us, Darius climbed the three marble stairs. He wove between the trumpet heads of lilies toward the piano. It sat only a few feet from the coffin in which Uncle Clay was enclosed, and it struck me that the two structures were remarkably similar in shape and size. As Darius poised himself to play, I imagined our uncle rising out of his coffin the way music rose from the piano. He would slap his knee and wipe his eyes, tickled at how well he'd pulled off his awful farce.
It was the first time in months that I couldn't sit beside the piano and feel the vibrations of Darius' music. It was the first time, too, as I saw the faces around me contorted in grief, that I was glad for the silence that had been with me for nearly a year. I pulled it close around me like a down comforter in the dead of winter.
. . .
After the funeral, as the light lingered over the city and Aunt Irene paced the living room from dusk till dawn, I couldn't sleep for wanting to be at the farm. My mother could never understand my desire to return to the place where I'd lost my hearing. Once school was let out for the summer and my mother and Marek and I had settled in at Uncle Bertie's, I found the perfect sentence to explain myself. It was in one of the books on my uncle's shelf. I traced my finger under the words so my mother could read it: “Communication with plants and animals is far less demanding than with other human beings.” Good point, she mouthed to me, and directed a meaningful look toward her sister-in-law Agnes, who folded sheets and pillowcases in the next room. Our laughter caught Agnes' attention and she shot us a look that said she suspected we were laughing at her. Sometimes I imagined I could hear myself laughing: the helpless feeling of it hadn't changed, and the memory of its sound echoed in my head.
In the past, my mother had always goaded Agnes about her insistence on calling Bertie by his full name. I'd never heard my mother call him “Bernard,” but after the accident I read the name on her lips. She made him get rid of the horse that had thrown me and forbade me to go near the creatures again. Despite their tiffs, my mother and Agnes enjoyed a friendly rivalry in the kitchen, though they never would have believed that one day, after Uncle Bertie had died in his old age, my mother would move out to the farm to live with Aunt Agnes. Each swore her own recipe for a particular dish was superior, but over the summers of my adolescence it became harder and harder to tell whose pierogi or kolacky was whose, so we all knew they heeded each other's culinary tips.
Eating had become altogether different for me. Without any noise to disturb me, I noticed new flavors and textures in my mouth. But I would have preferred to know what Uncle Bertie was joking about across the table. I started to feel like Aunt Agnes, as though everyone was laughing at me. Either that, or like I'd been forgotten.
“What's so funny?” I'd ask, and I'd see my cousins’ hands fly to their faces to cover their giggles. I already sounded different to them. More often than not, I stumbled from family gatherings that summer with tears hot in my eyes. Sometimes my mother followed me and placed a cool hand on the nape of my neck. Most often I ran to some shady nook where no one could find me. But even my usual haunts had changed: without the call of birds or the rustle of wind in the leaves, nothing felt the same. In the city, I had never fit in. But I thought I would feel the same ease in the country as I had in the past. Now, all the color and noise within me had nowhere to go: it rammed up against the wall of silence that stood between me and my familiar world. Leaning against my favorite oak tree in the meadow, I felt not freedom but a wild and suffocating fear. For the first time, I was furious with my father. If he were present, I thought, then perhaps we could afford carbon microphone aids, the rudimentary hearing devices that well-to-do parents provided for their deaf children. They were the luckiest of us unlucky ones. Sometimes, my divided heart turned against my old self and my mother's love. I'd see her gentle, pitying smile and want nothing more than to pummel her with my fists.
But I could never sulk for long. New sights and ideas were waiting to be discovered at every turn, even if the process had changed. One day that summer I enlisted my brother Marek and our three “country cousins” as my pupils, promising them a week's worth of gingersnaps if they were obedient. My communication was comprised of a mixture of hand gestures and sentences scrawled on the notebook I always carried. I set up a ramshackle classroom outside, with overturned milk pails as stools and a slim birch branch as a pointer. Dahlia, the youngest, smuggled some of Uncle Bertie's old button-down shirts from the attic to serve as lab coats. On a fragment of chalkboard Marek had salvaged from a rundown schoolhouse, I wrote up the premise of the day's scientific quest: “Can tadpoles live outside their natural habitat?” I wanted to see what would happen when we caught and placed them in containers of water from different sources. Would they perish instantly, or not even know the difference?
It was a high-skied day with wispy clouds skimming over the distant treetops. The war was like something in a storybook, a tale we'd left closed tight on a shelf. We tromped through sweet-smelling grass to the stream, where red-winged blackbirds rose from the reeds at the deepest part. For a moment I was overcome with sadness that I would never again hear their cries. Then Marek snatched from my hand the old strainer I'd wheedled away from Aunt Agnes earlier that day. My cousins and Marek and I scoured the still water along the bank for a while, but soon the younger children gave up and splashed in. As I watched the flying drops catch the sun, I tried to recall the sound of splashing. I remembered my mother giving Marek his bath in the kitchen sink when he was a baby, how he'd been amazed that his hands went straight through the running water.
That night I leaned into my pillow against the headboard of my bed. My mother reclined at its foot, her long hair spilling over her shoulders and onto the white coverlet. The dormer room where I slept was just big enough for the bed and a nightstand before the ceiling sloped down to the floor. Windows on opposite sides of the room gave us a cross-breeze as we passed our clipboard and paper back and forth.
What did Aunt Olenka's letter say? I wrote against my knees. I'd seen my mother pull the envelope from the stack of mail at lunch. I passed her the clipboard and watched her hand move fluidly over her neat script.
Edmund is expected in September, I read when she passed it back. How happy Aunt Olenka would be. I wondered how Aunt Irene would feel when her sister's husband returned, knowing that hers never would. Darius will just miss him, my mother's response continued. He leaves for music school at the end of summer.
I sank deeper against my pillow until my knees bisected the view of my mother. I didn't want to think about the end of summer. It meant returning to the city and settling into what was to be my new routine. I wouldn't go to the city school anymore, for in those days there were no methods in place to integrate the learning of deaf children. I'd read once about schools for children like me, but they were all expensive and far away. I imagined my stack of textbooks growing higher and higher on the kitchen table, until I was hidden not only from the audible world, but from the visible world, as well. Irene, coming home from her part-time job, would sit in the living room as evening came on, the way Aunt Olenka reported. She'd forget to switch on the lamp, never remember to eat.
I watched my mother's bare feet shift at the far corner of the bed. I didn't know what to write. Finally, I asked, Will we move out once Uncle Edmund comes back? I loved my tall, dark-haired uncle, with his mix of seriousness and joviality, but I felt the apartment would become too small when he returned. Mother and Marek and I would be relegated to the shadows of their sunny, reunited family. We'd be with Irene and her dimming hair.
No, came my mother's reply. She snatched back the clipboard and added, We can't afford to live on our own.
I asked her what had happened to the money she'd been saving from her seasonal job at Alfie's Corner Market.
Food, shoes, clothes... I read. She took the clipboard back.
The air grew still as I watched my mother's hand hover above the paper. I pushed the covers off my knees and stretched out my legs. My mother smoothed her free hand absently over the top of my foot, the way my grandmother used to do. She put her pen to the paper, hesitated, and wrote.
Your father hasn't sent money for several months.
I scribbled as fast as I could, What?!? Why didn't you tell me sooner? I felt suddenly guilty, as if my recent anger at him had somehow made him forget us.
I kept thinking it would turn up eventually, all at once. And I didn't want you to worry.
Why isn't he sending it? I knew she wouldn't have the answer.
Franciszka, I need to tell you something.
Tell me. My eyes welled up with tears. This form of communication was painfully slow.
I've done some research, and I know that your father won't be coming back. I'm sorry.
A little fist reached in and squeezed my heart. I realized then that I'd always harbored within me the hope of his return. But how do you know?
She wouldn't respond.
. . .
That fall, Aunt Olenka threw a party for Uncle Edmund. She kept the curtains pulled back to let in the last of the mellow sunshine. When the apartment began filling up we opened the windows for fresh air. The scent of baked ham wafted past me and into the street as I watched for guests to arrive. Sometimes they looked up at our window and their mouths shaped into a greeting when they saw me. I waved at them and when they started up the stairs, I dashed to open the door before they could knock. Most people we knew were aware that I could no longer hear, but a few still had to be told. Many had taken to smiling at me whenever they looked my way, as if I were a small child that needed humoring.
Olenka, rosy-cheeked, floated about the main room greeting people. She clapped her hands together and leaned back dramatically when someone said something funny. Uncle Edmund, who had arrived two weeks ago, appeared shorter than I remembered, and his skin was a deep red-brown from the North African sun. Men thumped him on the back and women kissed his cheeks. Everyone's lips said, welcome home, welcome home.
An invisible thread connected Edmund and Olenka to one another. It allowed them to look up in unison from the people they were talking with and smile into each other's eyes. When I passed through the thread I felt its magnetic tingle. I thought maybe a similar thread kept our whole family connected, like a great invisible spider web spread out across the world. I wondered when my father had let go of his silvery strand for good.
Suddenly the thread connecting my aunt and uncle was snugged up between them and they were in each other's arms, dancing. I saw a record spinning on the player. My mother left Irene in the kitchen and the two of us pushed aside the furniture. Aunt Olenka had rearranged it before Edmund's arrival. Out with the old, in with the new, was her motto. The piano and rug were now in the corner nearest the door. A patch of the rug had been faded to mauve by the sun. I stood in the pale spot and leaned my elbow on the piano. The floor vibrated under my feet as everyone danced the polka. I felt gawky and foolish at first, standing there by myself. I was sure I'd chosen the wrong dress, but they were all too small. When it seemed that no one even noticed me, I felt a shadow of loneliness creeping towards me along the wall. It came over me in a shiver and clinked up my vertebrae, like the vibrations of one of Darius' scales plunked out note by note.
That's when Uncle Edmund caught my eye. He winked and handed off Aunt Olenka to Marek, who was manning the record player. Uncle Edmund had learned some basic sign language to teach the soldiers who had lost their hearing during battle. He'd been demonstrating a little each day. It was thrilling to think that we could make sense of each others' flapping hands. Edmund sat down on the piano bench and signed slowly, I have something for you. He pulled a folded paper from his breast pocket. His brown eyes twinkled as I took it from him, perplexed. I scanned the formal-looking document and found that it was a scholarship application for the Pittsburgh School for the Deaf. I felt a squeal rise up from my throat and I clapped a hand over my mouth. But I couldn't stop bouncing on my toes like they were made of springs. You want to? he signed. I gave him a look that said, clear as any signing, Do you really have to ask?
Looking back, it seems as though my life—like everyone's, I suppose—has been a series of unknowns. From the night of Uncle Edmund's homecoming party, it would be another six weeks before I discovered that I'd received the largest scholarship available. I'd find out that despite taking me away from my family, it would open up to me a world of knowledge and companionship with others who perceived the world as I did. I would meet my future husband there; years later, when our children were in school, I'd return to the familiar rooms as a teacher.
I had no inkling, at that moment, that in two years I would have the irrepressible urge to locate my father. I would find him—after the trial and error process I'd come to love in biology class—just seven blocks from my boardinghouse. My toes would be numb as I entered the modest but well-kept neighborhood and stopped before a small two-story home that corresponded to the address in my hand. The front curtains would not yet be closed against the coming evening, and a full-figured blonde woman in purple would be visible bending over a table. She would spoon steaming food onto the plates of two elementary-aged children. A man would walk into the room, and I would gasp—a sharp, stinging intake of air—to see that he looked like the grown-up version of my brother Marek. My father—the other children’s father—would tousle their hair, pull his chair out from the table, and raise his glass of wine to his new wife.
. . .
As we toasted Uncle Edmund that fall evening, I noticed what I thought of as a “listening look” come over people's faces. A few turned toward the door. It suddenly burst open and there stood a handsome, dark-haired young man. It took me a moment to realize it was Darius. Uncle Edmund turned on the piano bench. For a moment he stared at his son. Then he leaped up and threw his arms around him. The two embraced for a long time. Everyone crowded around. There was so much love and gladness in that hug that there was enough to spare. You could feel the happiness surging through each person until the apartment overflowed.
Later, as Darius prepared to play the piano, Uncle Edmund signed to me, He took the train in, just to surprise his father. He couldn't stop beaming. I looked across the room at Marek. He held onto the edge of the record player like it might fall over if he didn't hold it up. I felt so certain then of an inner drifting I'd often sensed in my brother: not knowing our father, he felt uncertain of his origins; and without roots, branching out in any direction at all seemed to him unbearably overwhelming. I wish I could have told him that one day he'd be surrounded on all sides by a pretty wife and six children, a noisy, loving entourage to help him keep his bearings.
I was getting too old to sit on the rug while Darius played, so I stood with my hands spread like the webbed feet of a frog on the back of the piano. I wanted to take in as much as possible. Darius grinned at me, wiggled his fingers above the keyboard, and began to play. It was a bouncy, rollicking tune. Just when I felt sure I'd figured out the pattern the notes would take, the music surprised me, sending a booming vibration into my veins instead of a patter, or a trill in place of a low roll.
Aunt Irene caught my attention from across the room. She looked strange to me, and I realized it was because she was wearing lipstick. She held out her hands and nodded for me to come dance. I shrugged, content to stay where I could hear through my fingers. Then she gave me her “no-nonsense” look that I'd thought I might never see again. As I wove through the crowd, the kitchen smells of ham and fresh-baked bread got kicked around with the sour-sweet scent of the dancers' bodies.
Irene squared her shoulders and clasped my hands firmly in her own. She wiggled my arms a little to make me loosen up, then began bobbing her head to the rhythm of the music. I nodded along with her to catch the beat, laughing because I thought we must look like the chickens pecking for feed at Uncle Bertie's. I wondered if Aunt Irene was missing Uncle Clay even now as she grinned. When I was older, the two of us would become friends, each having learned to live without things that by the natural order should have been ours. Aunt Irene squeezed my hands. I've never found a better way to say, Let's dance! Sometimes, when I visit her at the nursing home a few miles from my house, Irene turns the polka music up loud enough that I can feel its vibration through the floor. We dance, and Irene jabs a thumb at the locked door where the nurses knock, trying to make us turn the music down. She ignores them and we throw back our heads and laugh.
I wonder what it would be like to hear my laughter again. To hear anything at all. I've only mentioned the possibility of the implants to a few people; one, a friend who sent me a note full of exclamation points and hope. She wrote, Pretty soon I'll be able to say, 'Welcome to a new world!' I've lived in two different worlds already: the hearing world of my childhood, and the new, silent existence from age eleven onward, the slow revelation of its own particular riches. I think of my father, his old life ending as my own began, his sideways slip to an alternate reality of his new family, his new life. Re-entering the auditory world, if it's possible, will be like stepping into another country. Like an immigrant going back to the homeland and finding everything changed.
Kristin Brace
Kristin Brace’s poetry collection Toward the Wild Abundance received the 2018 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize (Michigan State University Press, 2019). Other books include Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin, and Each Darkness Inside (Finishing Line Press, 2018 and 2019). Brace earned an MFA in Writing from Spalding University and her work has appeared in a variety of literary journals. She makes her home in west Michigan with her husband, the entrepreneur and inventor Neal Brace. Find her online at kristinbrace.com.