Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

Hava is already distracted, though, turning around to look through the back of the vehicle at where the two kids are still dragging the box, a little quicker now. Gershon looks out at the sea, the blue moon of the Earth hanging still above it. Where is Yoheved at this moment, he thinks; what is she doing? It’s four years in the future where she is, four years since she’s sent this girl, this Hava, to him on the ship. Hava, the last insult, Gershon suddenly understands. Pretty, unmourning Hava is Yoheved’s last forgiveness, sent out to him across the unbridgeable distance. Hava is her way of forgiving him, and he will have to suffer it.

Gershon turns the vehicle around and then stops. Below, the kids have almost got the crate to their cave. They’ll live on that bread for months, Gershon idly thinks.

And how could Hava ever understand that it was, all of it — New Jerusalem, yes, but also Earth, also the real Jerusalem; Yoheved combing her hair slowly by light of his dorm room’s open window the morning after their first night together; Shmuli trundling around the small apartment, his laughter rising, rising; also Hava’s own life, the slightly sweaty scent of the first boy from school that made her smile, her father’s rough hand in the garden as the late afternoon sun slid past the brim of his wide hat; and also the future, the years and years to come, Hava’s skin cool against Gershon’s in bed; and still somewhere, continuing, Shmuli’s squeals of delight at being chased around the kitchen — all of it was the territory of grief. You are always living in it, he wants to say. You have never lived anywhere else.

One child has disappeared into the cave. The end of the box is still visible. Gershon can see they are already celebrating.

A child is sick. A child is sick. You open the door to the room, or you look up, or you wake up and there is your son, sick, changed, and even with the scaled-down hospital bed they use in the pediatric oncology unit, even though he’s been there for months, there is still a micromoment of near panic, of your reptilian brain sending up the signal, running the sentence through every level of your mental processes. A child is sick. A child is sick. You want to tell someone. Though, of course, they all already know.

Sunday breaks on the pediatric oncology ward; I can see the sun, with its tired golden aspect, creeping down the wide corridor from the huge windows at the end of the floor, where the playroom is. Some of the children have been encouraged to paint the smaller windowpanes over with pictures that are supposed to “best represent themselves” in the words of the “play specialist,” a woman with short, auburn curls whose whole body seems to have been wrinkled, like a balled-up napkin. My son Haim painted his square of glass completely black; he did this with an undefined level of self-satisfied humor, depending on how much irony you believe an eight-year-old to be capable of. It seemed at least clear that he meant to piss off the play specialist. “It’s too bright in here,” he said flatly, when she asked him to explain his work.

In his quiet, angry humor he is most like me, though this seems to be merely an unfortunate genetic accident to everyone (my mother-in-law, my own mother, a plurality of the nurses) except my wife, Charlie, to whom it is a continuous insult. “Is this real life?” Haim sometimes deadpans as they wheel him back from the radiation therapy, parroting a popular Internet clip. “Will this be forever?”

The first time Charlie heard him do this she looked right at me, made her eyes go hard and flat, glaring. There is too much awareness in his tone when he says this kind of thing, his face held too purposefully empty, affect disarmed, hollowed out by what seems to be his unnervingly firm grasp of his situation. This disturbs the nurses, either because this prescience in an eight-year-old is spooky, or because it undermines the game we’re all playing, pretending he might get better.

I think they’re also unsettled by how it’s never clear how much he really means by what he says, how much he seems to be accusing whoever is listening of some responsibility for his sickness — a sense that is both discomfiting and mysterious even to me. This is another way that Haim is like me, at least to Charlie: the way he guards his thoughts jealously, until often when he speaks it’s like a judgment is being pronounced, though you can never be quite sure what the ruling is, exactly. I go back and forth about whether or not it’s terrible that I find his caustic, indicting little one-liners funny.

This morning I’ve not noticed Haim waking up, the gurgle of him trying to remaster his throat and breathing.

“Where is Charlie?” he asks, groggy. He’s called his mother by her first name ever since she stopped coming to the hospital consistently. It’s clear he means this as an insult to her, though when she does show up he offers the formality dully, like instead of meaning it to really hurt her he just wants the situation between the two of them to be clear.

His question, though, is really meant to be a jab at me. A taunt, maybe. It’s useless to try to tell which one, how much malice this stormily intelligent young son of mine can muster. He asks where she is every morning, mostly because he knows that I don’t know. It’s his version of a benediction for the day, a dry thesis for the kind of uselessness his hours will inevitably prove to be. I don’t know where Charlie is. I don’t know if she’s on one of her jags, in which case she is probably wrapped up in the covers of our bed or cocooned on our couch in front of the TV, paralyzed by depression; I don’t know if she’s not left the flat for days, if she’s eaten this week. Or she could be gone, vanished during one of her different periods, wandering any of the tourist sites of our little island country, as she calls it.

When I answer I try to say something different every time.

“She’s on a sailing adventure,” I say today. It’s unclear how much I’m taunting him back, how much I’m just tired. “There’s a squall kicking up. She’s somewhere cold, somewhere where the tips of the waves are being sliced off by the wind and stinging her face.”

Most days I don’t say anything.

We’re waiting for the people from radiology to come get Haim for his targeted therapy. He has to be under sedation for it, which he likes; a few hours’ escape from full-blown consciousness. But this means he can’t eat anything beforehand, so we don’t talk much until it’s time, because not being able to eat makes Haim miserable. When he wakes up afterward, after sleeping off the sedatives for a few hours, the imagination in his food order will be something to behold. Breakfast burritos! French fries! Sardines! Each time when the food comes he marshals the cart in with fussy waves of the laminated menu, an annoyed maître d’. There is a moment, once I’ve got the dishes arrayed out in front of him on the tray of his hospital bed, when he regards it all greedily, not touching anything yet, and he seems, for a few seconds anyway, to have been completely transported, to have come into some other kind of life entirely.

•

These things don’t have a beginning, not really. I’ve reached now the age of narrative, and it’s important to remember that this structure is false, an imposed will, quirk of myself as a thirty-four-year-old man, of an age (reached perhaps a decade or so prematurely) when I have begun to be concerned with the story of what’s happened to me. I once heard an old writer say that the problem with the young is that, for them, the past is still only what’s happened. That is, that they have yet to be drawn into the necessary sadness of thinking about the future with the anima of nostalgia. And if this is so, then I’ve certainly reached that age, which is never made more clear than when I think of Charlie — Charlie who one doesn’t meet but finds oneself in the middle of, like an unannounced storm; everywhere, suddenly, the light is just different.