Some men whistled when she walked by, because she was beautiful and sexy and had a way of looking you boldly in the face until you lowered your eyes. But, when she shopped and spoke with the monotone, guttural voice of the deaf, people laughed. In Alexandria, Egypt, where we lived until we were summarily exiled, like all of the country’s Jews, that’s what you did when someone was different. It wasn’t full-throated laughter; it was derision, the stepchild of contempt, which is as mirthless as it is cruel. She couldn’t hear their laughter, but she read it in their faces. This must be how she finally understood why people always smirked when she thought she was speaking like everyone else. Who knows how long it took her to realize that she was unlike other children, why some turned away, or others, meaning to be kind, had a diffident way when they allowed her to play with them?
Born in Alexandria in 1924 in the wake of British colonial rule, my mother belonged to a middle-class, French-speaking Jewish family. Her father had done well as a bicycle merchant and spared no expense to find a cure for her deafness. Her mother took her to see the most prominent audiologists in Europe, but returned more disheartened after each appointment. There was, the doctors said, no cure. Her child had lost her hearing to meningitis when she was a few months old, and from meningitis there was no coming back. Her ears were healthy, but meningitis had touched the part of her brain responsible for hearing.
In those days, there was nothing resembling deaf pride. Deafness was a stigma. The very poor often neglected their deaf children, condemning them to a lifetime of menial labor. Children remained illiterate, and their language was primitive, gestural. In the snobbish view of my mother’s parents, if you couldn’t cure deafness, you learned to hide it. If you weren’t ashamed of it, you were taught to be. You learned how to lip-read, not sign; you learned to speak with your voice, not your hands. You didn’t eat with your hands; why on earth would you speak with them?
My mother was initially enrolled in a Jewish French day school, but within weeks her parents and the teachers realized that the school couldn’t accommodate a deaf child, so she was shipped off to a specialized school in Paris, overseen by nuns. It turned out to be more of a finishing school than a school for the deaf. She was taught good posture by walking with a book on her head and by holding books between her elbows and her waist when she sat at a dinner table. She picked up sewing, knitting, and needlepoint. But she was a volatile, rambunctious child and had grown into a tomboy who collected bicycles from her father’s shop. She didn’t like to play with dolls. She had no patience for French savoir or for French grace and deportment.
She came back to Alexandria two years later, where she was turned over to a well-intentioned and innovative Greek woman who ran a French private school for the deaf in her villa. The school was welcoming and forgiving, and vibrated with a sense of its mission. Classwork, however, consisted of long, gruelling hours learning how to mimic sounds that my mother would never be able to hear. The rest of the time was devoted to lipreading sessions: frontal lipreading and, in my mother’s case, because she was a quick learner, profile lipreading. She learned how to read and write, acquired a rudimentary knowledge of sign language, was taught history and some literature, and at graduation was awarded a French bronze medal by a general who happened to be passing through Alexandria.
Still, she had spent her first eighteen years learning how to do what couldn’t have seemed more unnatural: pretending to hear. It was no better than teaching a blind person to count his steps from this pillar to that post so as not to be caught with a white stick. She learned to laugh at a joke even if she would have needed to hear the play on words in the punch line. She nodded at precisely the right intervals to someone speaking to her in Russian, to the point where the Russian was convinced that she understood everything he’d been saying.
The Greek headmistress was idolized by her students, but her method had disastrous consequences for my mother’s ability to process and synthesize complex ideas. Past a certain threshold, things simply stopped making sense to her. She could talk politics if you outlined the promises made by a Presidential candidate, but she was unable to think through the inconsistencies in his agenda, even when they were explained to her. She lacked the conceptual framework or the symbolic sophistication to acquire and use an abstract vocabulary. She might like a painting by Monet, but she couldn’t discuss the beauty of a poem by Baudelaire.
When I asked her a question such as “Can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift?” or “Is the Cretan lying when he says that all Cretans are liars?,” she did not understand it. Did she think in words? I’d ask. She did not know. If not in words, how did she organize her thoughts? She did not know that, either. Does anyone? Asked when she realized she was deaf, or what life was like without hearing, or whether she minded not hearing Bach or Beethoven, she’d say she hadn’t really thought about it. You might as well have asked a blind person to describe colors. Wit, too, eluded her, though she loved comedy, jesting, and slapstick. She was an accomplished mimic and was drawn to the voiceless Harpo Marx, whose jokes were rooted not in speech but in body language.
She had a circle of devoted deaf friends, but unlike a deaf person today, who might be able to finger-spell every word in the Oxford English Dictionary, they used a language without an alphabet, just a shorthand lingo of hand and facial signs whose vocabulary seldom exceeded five hundred words. Her friends could discuss sewing, recipes, horoscopes. They could tell you they loved you, and they could be unsparingly kind with children and old people when they touched them, because hands speak more intimately than words. But intimacy is one thing, and complex ideas quite another.
After leaving school, my mother volunteered as a nurse in Alexandria. She drew blood, gave injections, and eventually served in a hospital, caring for wounded British soldiers during the Second World War. She dated a few of them, and would take them out for a spin on the motorbike that her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday. She liked to go to parties, and had a surprising gift for fast dancing. She became a coveted partner for anyone who wanted to jitterbug or go for an early-morning swim at the beach.
When my father met her, she wasn’t yet twenty. He was stunned by her beauty, her warmth, her unusual mixture of meekness and in-your-face boldness. That was how she compensated for being deaf, and it sometimes made you forget that she was. She charmed his friends and his family, except for his parents. Her future father-in-law called her “the cripple,” his wife “a gold-digger.” But my father refused to listen to them, and three years later they were married. In her wedding pictures, she is beaming. Her Greek teacher applauded her triumph: she had married out of the deaf ghetto.
Now I can see that with a better education she might have become someone else. Her intelligence and her combative perseverance in the face of so many obstacles in Egypt as a Jew—and, after Egypt, in Italy and then the U.S.—would have made her a great career woman. She might have become a physician or a psychiatrist. In a less enlightened age, she remained a housewife. Even though she was well off, she was not only a woman but a deaf woman. Two strikes.
She spoke and understood French, learned Greek and basic Arabic, and when we landed in Italy she picked up Italian by going to the market every day. When she didn’t understand something, she pretended that she did until she got it. She almost always got it. In the consulate in Naples, weeks before immigrating to the United States, in 1968, she had her first encounter with American English. She was asked to raise her right hand and repeat the oath of allegiance. She babbled some soft-spoken sounds that the American functionary was happy to mistake for the oath. The scene was so awkward that it brought out nervous giggles in my brother and me. My mother laughed with us as we walked out of the building, but my father had to be told why it was funny.
Her deafness had always stood like an insuperable wall between them, and the longer they stayed married the more difficult it was to scale. In retrospect, it had always stood there. My father loved classical music; she had never been to a concert. He read long Russian novels and modern French writers whose prose was cadenced and brilliant. She preferred fashion magazines. He liked to stay at home and read after work; she liked to go dancing and have friends over for dinner. She had grown up enjoying American movies, because in Egypt they had French subtitles; he preferred French films, which had no subtitles and were therefore lost on her, because lipreading actors on the screen proved almost impossible. His friends spoke about the most rarefied things imaginable: the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, the archeological digs around Alexandria, the novels of Curzio Malaparte; she loved gossip.
Not long after they were married, they both realized how utterly unsuited they were. They loved each other until the very end, but they misunderstood and insulted each other, and quarrelled every day. He often went out when her deaf friends visited. In the nineteen-sixties, he left home altogether for a few years, coming back just weeks before we were to leave Egypt. Those of her friends who married out of the deaf community had tumultuous marriages, too. Only those who stayed with the deaf seemed to find as much happiness as the hearing.
My mother never really did learn English. Lip movements were not clear or declarative enough, unless you seemed to parody what you were saying for comic effect. She didn’t like it when I exaggerated my lip movements to her in public, because they proclaimed her deafness. Many pitied her, and some made an effort to cross the barrier. Some well-meaning people tried to communicate with her by mimicking the speech of the deaf, aping a raucous voice and making distorted faces. Others spoke loudly, as though raising the decibel level might get their point across. She could tell they were yelling. Then there were those who, try as they might, were never able to understand what my mother was saying to them, and those who didn’t care to make the effort. They refused to look her in the face or even to acknowledge her presence at the dining table.
Or people just laughed.
When friends at the playground asked why my mother spoke with that strange voice, I would say, “Because that is how she speaks.” Her voice didn’t sound strange until it was pointed out to me. It was Mom’s voice—the voice that woke me up in the morning, that called out to me at the beach, that soothed me and told me tales at bedtime.
Sometimes I tried to persuade myself that she was not really deaf. She was a mischievous prankster, and what better way to keep everyone hopping than to pretend she was deaf, the way every child has, at one point or another, pretended to be blind, or played dead? For some reason, she had forgotten to stop playing her prank. To test her, I would slide behind her when she wasn’t looking and yell in her ear. No response. Not a shudder. What amazing control she had. I sometimes ran to her and said that someone was ringing the doorbell. She opened the door; then, realizing I had played a low trick on her, she would laugh it off, because wasn’t it funny how the joy of her life—me—had hatched this practical joke to remind her, like everyone else, that she was deaf. One day, I watched her get dressed up to go out with my father and, as she was fastening a pair of earrings, I told her she was beautiful. Yes, I am beautiful. But it doesn’t change anything. I am still deaf—meaning, And don’t you forget it.
It was difficult for a child to reconcile her ready smile, her love of comedy and good fellowship with her enduring grief as a wife and a deaf person. She always cried with her friends. They all cried. But those of us who have lived with the deaf stop feeling sorry for them. Instead, one jumps quickly from pity to cruelty, like a pebble skittering on shallow water, without understanding what it means to live without sound. I seldom have been able to sit still and force myself to feel her seclusion. It was much easier to lose my temper when she wouldn’t listen, because she never listened—because part of understanding what you said seemed to involve a mixture of guesswork and intuition, where the shading of facts meant more than the facts themselves.
Nothing was a greater ordeal than making phone calls for my mother. She often asked my brother or me to help her, dialling the number and speaking for her as she stood there, watching every word. She appreciated it and was proud that at so young an age we were able to call the plumber, her friends, her seamstress. She told me that I was her ears. “He is her ears,” her mother-in-law would proclaim. She meant, Thank the good Lord there was someone to do her dirty work for her. Otherwise, how could that poor woman survive?
There were two ways to get out of making phone calls. One was to hide. The other was to lie. I would dial the number, wait a while, and then tell her that the line was busy. Five minutes later, the line was still busy. It never occurred to me that the call might be urgent or, when her husband failed to show up for dinner, that she was desperate to talk to a friend or a relative, anyone to shield her from her loneliness. Sometimes men called, but, with my brother and me as go-betweens, the conversations were awkward. The men never called again.
When I went to graduate school, it fell to my brother to stand by as a middleman. I would speak to him, he would relay the message, and in the background I would make out her voice telling him what to say, which he would relay back to me. Sometimes I would ask him to put her on the phone and let her tell me whatever came to mind, because I missed her voice, and wanted to hear her say the things she had always said to me, slurring her words a bit, ungrammatical, words that weren’t necessarily words even, just sounds that reached far back to my childhood, when I didn’t know words.
As a child, I had fantasized that someday someone would invent a gizmo that would allow my mother to telephone another deaf person. The miracle occurred about thirty years ago, when I obtained a teletypewriter for her. For the first time in her life, she was able to communicate with her deaf friends without involving me or my brother. She could type long messages in broken English and arrange to see them. Then, seven years ago, I installed a device on her TV that allowed her to communicate visually with friends around the country. Most were too old to travel, so this was a godsend.
Open to any new experience, she fell in love with each technological advance. (My father, ever reluctant to approach anything new, remained attached to his shortwave radio.) Several years ago, when my mother was in her mid-eighties, I bought her an iPad, so that she could Skype and FaceTime for hours with friends abroad, people she hadn’t seen in ages. It was better than anything I had imagined as a boy. She could call me when I was at home, at the office, at the gym, even at Starbucks. I could FaceTime with her and not worry where she was or how she was doing. After my father died, she insisted on living alone, and my biggest fear was that she would fall and hurt herself. FaceTime also meant that I was spared having to visit her so often, as she well understood: “Does this mean that you’re not coming over tonight because we’re speaking with my iPad?”
My mother, for all her deficits, was among the most sagacious people I have known. Language was a prosthesis, a grafted limb that she had learned to live with but that remained peripheral because she could do without it. She had more immediate ways of communicating. She was acutely discerning and had a flair for people and situations—from the Latin verb fragrare, to scent. Her radar was always on: whom to trust, what to believe, and how to read an inflection. She made up in scent what she had lost in her deafness. She taught me spices, naming them in a grocery store by dipping her palm into the burlap bags and letting me sniff each handful. She taught me to recognize her perfumes, the smell of damp wool, the smell of leaking gas. When I write about scent, I am channelling not Proust but my mother.
People were often immediately drawn to her. You might attribute this to the expansive good cheer she radiated whenever she went out. But my mother was a profoundly unhappy soul. I think it was her unhindered capacity to let intimacy happen at a glance, with everyone—rich, poor, good, bad, butcher, postman, grandee, or Senegalese workers at supermarkets on the Upper West Side who helped her without knowing that she, too, was a native French speaker. If she had been dropped into Kandahar or Islamabad, she would have had no trouble finding the cut of beef she wanted and haggling over the price until she prevailed, while making friends with others in the marketplace.
She made you want to offer intimacy, too. Better yet, she made you reach into yourself to find it, in case you’d mislaid it or never knew you had it in you to give. This was her language, and, as with prisoners in separate cells learning to tap a new language with its own peculiar grammar and alphabet, she taught you to speak it. Sometimes my friends, within an hour of meeting her, forgot that she couldn’t hear them and came to understand everything she said, even when they couldn’t understand a word of French, much less French spoken by a deaf person. I’d try to step in and interpret for them. “I get it,” my friend would say. “I understand perfectly,” my mother would say—meaning, Leave us alone and stop meddling, we’re doing just fine. I was the one not understanding.
One day a few years ago, I stopped by my mother’s apartment during a jog on a very cold day, to warm up and catch my breath, and see how she was doing. She had been watching TV. I sat next to her and explained that I wasn’t able to come to dinner that night because I was going out with friends, but that I might drop in the next day for our ritual Scotch and dinner. She liked that. What did I want her to cook? I suggested her baked ziti, with the top slightly crisp. She thought it was a great idea. I had forgotten to remove my ski mask, and the entire conversation took place with my lips covered. She was listening to me by following the movement of my eyebrows.
In the new world where my mother ended her days, you got respect and had equal rights, you thrived with dignity and security. She liked it better than the Old World. But it wasn’t her home. Now that I think of what Shakespeare might have called her “unaccommodated” language, I realize how much I miss its immediate, tactile quality, from another age, when your face was your bond, not your words. I owe this language not to the books I read or studied but to my mother, who had no faith in, and no talent or much patience for, words. ♦
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