by Joanne Weber
Catherine, Sophie, and I sat around the table after school that day.
We say: “ . . . ”
Two weeks before Christmas, Gina rushed into the classroom with a book clasped to her chest: a small slim volume.
I eyed her suspiciously.
She explained: “Mrs. Sernich gave this to me. It’s so beautiful.” She thrust the book at me.
It was a book of poetry, Amazing Peace, by Maya Angelou.
I flipped through the pages, bewildered. I thought: There is no way she can read this. Too abstract. The vocabulary would kill her.
Gina touched me on my arm. She signed: “I want to make a sign video of this poem. Do it in ASL. You can teach me.” Her face was glowing, her eyes bright with excitement.
She said: “I want to make copies for my father, my boyfriend and his family. The video will help me learn to become an actress.”
I asked: “Do you know what this is about?”
She said: “Christmas!” Her eyes were shining.
I told Gina that we couldn’t do the whole book, only a section of Maya Angelou’s poetic work about the spirit of Christmas.
Soon I was translating lines about snow-covered villages, the coming of peace, the erasure of division between religions, the spirit that descended upon us all, reminding us that we are human, capable of great things. I prepared a gloss for each line, carefully writing them out underneath the neatly printed words of Maya Angelou on large sheets of newsprint, practised the lines to myself, taking care to incorporate features of ASL poetry, and I thought on these lines, the advent of hope, the charge Angelou made, that we were imbibed with the spirit of creation and need not resort to war, darkness, and deprivation.
Gina giggled in excitement as I shook out the large sheets of newsprint with the ASL gloss I had prepared for the poem.
She began: “It will help me get a job as an actress.”
I nodded hesitantly. I wondered: Do I scold her for her impossible dreams? Or let her remain in her fantasy? I said: “Gina, you’ll need to memorize this.”
Gina sat with the large sheets for a few minutes while I attended to a math question posed by Melissa, who was watching this whole scene with immense curiosity. Soon I felt Gina at my side.
Gina pointed to a word: “JW, how do you make this sign, and what does it mean?”
I struggled to be gentle, to be kind, thinking: She is leaving after all. I said: “Gina, it’s okay. I’ll stand out of the range of the videocamera and you’ll copy me. That way you don’t have to memorize anything.”
Gina copied my signing exactly as if she and I were mimes in a mirror. For the first time, I saw exactly what was on my own face. At first, I was startled. She is too exaggerated, I thought, as she shook out her hands for the signs “lose friends, family, people.” The grief, the loss, the devastation of war, the spreading of hatred marred her face like an ugly crack. I thought: Dear God, is this is what I look like when I sign? Like some feral being? As she signed of hope, and of the peace to come, living in harmony, her face had the excitement of a child kneeling before the crèche on Christmas Eve, opening up her presents.
Every time we rehearsed these lines, I saw these faces appearing before me.
Twenty-Four
JOHANNA
I’ve realized I don’t like Demeter. Her lack of generosity still bothers me. I’ve decided to discard that story. Demeter doesn’t tell me about what I can be. With her, I can only be in one place at one time, either in the dark, or in the light, either above or below, in spring or in winter. Very Greek or Roman, very Western. A stingy woman, she won’t let me be in two places at once. Stories like that aren’t worth bothering with unless you want to nurse yourself through teenage rebellion or tell a third grader how spring comes about in an interesting way.
At night in early spring, I lay awake, thinking: How can I survive five weeks in the United Kingdom? We were to book our flights the next day. I tossed and turned in bed, I thought: What am I supposed to do on this trip? Other than sightseeing? I worried: Murray and our daughters are going to make quick, off-the-cuff decisions and I’ll have to follow behind them on strange streets, through unnamed alleys, and through throngs of crowds, an additional child, while Murray makes all the calls, navigates the road with Anna’s help, she’ll comprehend his mumbling questions regarding the need for directions as he turns another tight, tense corner in London; I’ll have to listen over loud traffic to hear anything they say. I can’t use a sign language interpreter for any performances. Or museum tours. I don’t know British Sign Language. We’ll huddle over maps in subway and train stations and I’ll miss the conversation while I watch fingers travel over various points on the map. I’ll be a child in strange cities and towns. I’ll have no means of escape.
In the coffee shop the next day, I thought: This is not a pilgrimage. We are not going to any holy shrines, not even to Celtic shrines, because Murray is not religious and has no interest in such things. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling I was supposed to do something on this trip, learn something other than historical facts, and I felt my eyes harden in an effort to concentrate on the idea of a pilgrimage, that is not a pilgrimage, only the jostling crowds, the grey skies, the museums, the sudden bursts of rain, the Tower of London, and I thought: Perhaps this pilgrimage is my consent to imprisonment, it will be the equivalent of being buried alive, for a reason I cannot yet fathom, there is simply nothing, nothing but years of being plugged in and out of sound, being at the mercy of some malevolent being delighting at yanking the cord that binds me to sound, speech, language, and communication at random intervals for the entirety of my life. I wanted to protest: But it is hard to live with so much nothingness. I wanted to shout it out to everyone in that coffee house.
Crucible Journal
En route to London: My black pen burst due to the cabin air pressure. It’s been a long day. Started at 6:30 am. Checked in at Saskatoon airport. Meandered around Walmart in the Confederation Mall. Boarded at 11:35 am. The flight to Toronto was uneventful. I’m so cramped and bloated. I think it’s anxiety. Couldn’t really eat dinner after the big breakfast at the hotel. How will Murray and I get along? He’s really trying, so I need not get my defences up so high. We’ve only been together for three years, the girls are now firmly ensconced in their early teens. We no longer have any romantic intentions toward each other, we really have had no time to get close to each other because we had to first pull together as parents to our daughters. Now there’s a weariness in this pulling and yanking at each other. And it’s about to get worse, now that we’re at close quarters and I can’t easily run away from him for a few hours. The crucible in which our foibles will become heated. The beauty of the husband shall emerge. I hope so. I want it to. I watch Murray lay his head back against his seat. He’s anxious too.
Halfway to England: Hearing and Deaf. The opposites that don’t mix, like oil and water. Everyone wants me to be Hearing. It’s what my parents wanted for me as a baby, what teachers wanted for me and what young men wanted for me then too, and my daughters want for me as their mother. Everyone wants me to be integrated seamlessly into the Hearing world, with no, or little, effort on their part, but I want to be Deaf too. The two must mix somehow, so that I can remain intact. Perhaps when I come back, I can stay home, live in the Langley Hall in peace. If I come home. The London bombings happened five days ago. We aren’t finished with terrorism in London yet.
Six-thirty am London. A dreadfully long, crowded, and hot subway ride to Victoria Station, twenty minutes of crowds, noise, heat, and jet lag, the twisting backpack that I’d balanced on top of my suitcase heavier with the 26 ounce bottle of whiskey Murray bought on the plane, over curbs, down flights of stairs, into the subways, and I screamed: “I hate London!”
Murray, Anna, and Paula turned around to look at me, their faces registering shock and embarrassment.
I thought: Already, the crucible is heating up.
We took a break in Garfunkel’s, in the me
zzanine floor overlooking Victoria Station, paying eleven pounds for two meals of eggs and toast, divided between the four of us, it was that expensive, then the train out to Croydon, a district in South London, calmed us with its gentle rocking as we peered out at slate rooftops, ivy covered gates and walls, and red-brick row houses. We picked up the keys to our flat and to our surprise it was a much more spacious apartment than we saw on the internet: very English, chintz, peach tones, flowers, beautiful dishes, clean ceramic tiles, washer and dryer in the kitchen, a tiny balcony with chairs, clean, well kept, and upscale.
Deaf Joanne said: “But the TV is not closed captioned.”
She consoled herself with a book.
The girls and I walked a long way trying to find Whitgift Centre, where we struggled to find the groceries (that elusive jar of peanut butter, where is it?) and joined a long line to the till, with baskets of groceries weighting the crooks of our elbows. Then the power went out.
At first, I thought: It’s another terrorist attack, so soon after the subway bombs.
In the dark, a click, and then nothing.
I started to flick the switches frantically on my hearing aid, until I realized that the battery was dead.
I thought: Now I’m really deaf.
I began to sweat, I looked about me in extreme agitation, my heart began to pound: What if it is a terrorist attack? How can we get out of here unharmed? How can I escape? And keep the girls safe too?
And I couldn’t hear a thing.
I searched my purse for batteries.
I thought: Damn, I left them in my suitcase at the flat.
Sweat ran down my spine and settled in the hollow of my back. I looked up at the ceiling and there were windows allowing some natural light into the store and I signed to the girls: “Don’t move.”
I began to make out the shapes of people all around us. They were all standing still. As if time had stopped. We were about to be whisked to an unknown destination. I could see a bus waiting outside in my imagination, and gunmen in black masks. We waited in the lineup for nearly ten minutes. Then Anna nudged me. In the dark, I tried to lipread her, I made out her basic signs: “The till is closed. We are to leave our groceries on the floor and vacate the building.”
Out in the late afternoon light we blinked, and merged with the subway travellers walking from the nearby station toward their homes.
Back at the flat, my knees shook with relief as I inserted the new battery into my hearing aid. As a flux of noise entered into my head, the comforting sounds of Murray and the girls’ voices, the drone of the television, the low hum and tumble of the washer/dryer in the kitchen, I reminded myself, London is hardly a desert landscape, but there were too many images, sounds, and unfamiliar sights clamouring for my attention, as if everything was vibrating inside my head, molecules jumping around, perhaps heating up to an unbearable temperature.
On the train to Victoria station to begin our day. I read several analyses on terrorism in British newspapers which had been discarded on train seats. Some articles were thoughtful, some callous, and many were impassioned. After reading, I thought:
One of the roots of Islamic terrorism is poverty, the grinding humiliation of not being able to obtain the basic needs for food, health care, employment, water, and shelter, the repeated inability to control one’s destiny, to be always at the mercy of forces beyond one’s control, the Iraqis resent being exploited by the rich Americans, who aren’t satisfied until they’ve obtained it all, the dragon of terror only sleeps for so long until awakened by hunger, it will snatch all those arrogant American bastards who can never get enough oil for their vehicles, according to Al Qaeda, the powerful will crumble soon, fall to their knees, and beg for mercy for having not listened sooner to the cries of the deaf, uh . . . the poor.
Armed policemen stopped us at Piccadilly Station. The tube line was closed due to four small explosions on a train, one from an abandoned knapsack. Stunned, we walked on, looking for a bus stop. The air was muggy. The grass was even browner today. Sweat rolled down my back. I trailed behind Murray and the girls. We finally found a bus stop. The sidewalk was overflowing with people unable to use the subways to get home. We hopped on the double decker even though we had no idea where we’re going. The bus lurched forward. Murray paused to ask a man standing near us where the bus was headed. The man was friendly, even though his white shirt was soaked with the heat. He wiped his brow with his hand.
He said: “I’ll ask the driver for you.”
The driver unleashed a stream of orders and abuse. He yelled: “Siddown! Don’t ask me any questions about anything. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Our new friend came to stand beside us. His face was apologetic. He promised: “I’ll call my friend on my cell phone and get some information for you.”
Outside, thronging crowds. Walking in different directions. London pressed itself down on me. Piccadilly, Drury Lane, and Hyde Park streamed past the windows. But I only saw the terror imprinted in the faces of thousands of Londoners milling about in the streets.
We were grateful to get on a train three hours later at Victoria Station. But we were on the wrong train. It took us out into the country, where we stared at open fields darkening in the summer night. We stood at a lonely station in the dark, waiting for a train back into London. The eeriness of the abandoned station, with its shops closed, and bars drawn down on windows, had me eying the other lone man carrying a briefcase.
I signed to Murray: “Watch him. We don’t know what’s in that briefcase.”
Murray nodded and then signed back to me: “I know why so many people live in London. They think they can’t leave for fields, and an open sky. They can’t handle the nothingness of a field.”
Two days later, a male suspect was shot dead on the tube.
Murray said: “What if that was you, Joanne? If the police called at your back and you kept walking because you couldn’t hear, you would’ve been killed.”
A madness had descended upon London. We’d flown right into a crucible heating up with fear.
We woke up late, and after about two hours of switching trains and buses, during rush hour, we arrived at the Tower of London at 10 am and Murray rented satellite-linked recording devices for himself and the girls, so they could hear the history of the haunted fortress while they walked about, and I followed, clutching a guidebook, looking as hard as I could so I could remember the fleeting visual, emotional, and spiritual traces of memories locked into every stone, even if I didn’t know what they were, and the upper rooms of the Bloody Tower were full of the spirits of prisoners who carved their desperation and lines of encouragement into the stone walls, the most heart-wrenching was a simple “Jane” carved into the limestone by the window, the Nine Days’ Queen, Lady Jane Grey, who was executed at the age of sixteen, and, look, King Henry the Eighth’s last armour, made for him at fifty-eight years of age, huge and could’ve fitted two men inside (okay, one and a half), a breastplate and below it was a huge round protruding ball for his penis, a testament to the overwhelming preoccupation with defence: stone walls, arrow windows, heavy arms, prison, torture, the traitor’s gate where St. Thomas More entered.
I realized: This is the territory of men. They make confining spaces, castles, halls, turrets, even torture chambers. Dark, dark places. Hades. And: The most feminine aspect of the tower was the chapel in the White Tower whose ceiling vaults rise high above our heads.
After five hours of wandering about the tower, I became irritated by the traffic, heat, and the constant prodding by Murray and the girls to keep up with their long-legged strides. I’ve no good reason to be rude and uncooperative, I chastised myself, at least, I’m not a prisoner in the bloody Tower of London, slowly chipping my name into the wall, marking my hours, waiting for death. Five out of seven men who have sworn with their lives to put Lady Jane on the throne, for their own purposes, have abandoned her, except for her father and her husband. While Queen Mary I is proclaimed Queen of Engla
nd at the Cross in Cheapside, Jane’s father enters the throne room to find Jane waiting there alone in the shadows. She steps down wearily from her throne, and asks her father: “Can I go home?”
She blinks as she steps into the spring air. And later, as the axe severs her spinal column.
The train out of central London jolted me against the cotton sleeve of a passenger, who shifted closer to the wall of the train compartment and stared out the window. I thought: These Londoners are polite and cold, each locked into their silence. There’s a tacit agreement between us: “I’ll not bother you if you don’t bother me.” I’ve consented to this non-involvement too, and have turned away from people, burrowing into the den within myself.
I sank into the lulling rhythm of the train and remembered: a closed custody facility brought a twelve-year-old male prostitute to my classroom, picked up for drugs by the Regina City Police: a First Nations child, deaf, and nearly languageless, since he couldn’t comprehend my signs. I asked him how old he was. He merely shrugged, until his worker informed me that he was nearly thirteen. He had no speech, although he had a cochlear implant. But the processor, the external component of the implant, had been lost in a snowbank somewhere on the reserve. I watched the worker sign to him, making shapes obviously gleaned from a book and winced when the signs were made incorrectly. I inwardly shuddered as I watched this young man make the same incorrect signs back to the coordinator. He’d never make himself understood in a Deaf community.
After our meeting, I contacted an ASL instructor from our Regina Deaf community and facilitated his hiring by the school board.
Sophie said: “We’re going to sweat blood for this kid.”