Amir had been living in his new foster home for barely a week when he began climbing out from his bedroom window at night, onto the roof of the back porch that stood just beneath it, to watch the stars and feel the cool evening air bathe his skin. He didn’t like being indoors. The young orphan’s dreams often seemed like the color of night itself, Amir waking in the morning with no memory of anything but black, vague feelings of anxiety and unease. At times, though, his dreams would be backlit as with thin shards of a crescent moon’s light…hints of things seen, silhouettes of familiar forms strangely obscured in meaning. The images that visited him in sleep sat unmoving in an ominous silence, like the form of a figure lurking in the shadows of a darkened alley.
“Minka!” a voice called out into the dark, the sound of his sister’s name ringing deep within the cavern of his psyche. It was, he realized, his own voice that had called out for her. She had been there, so close that he could still feel her presence. She had been frightened. Desperate. In need of something or someone.
Those were the nights Amir woke up in a sweat, breathing in short, sharp gasps of air, his muscles cramped. Then he would slide out the window and into the night. From the porch roof beneath his bedroom window, he was able to step onto the limb of an old sugar maple that grew next to the house. After climbing down to the ground, he sat silently in the yard or walked over to the edge of the woods, where he waited, listening…watching for shadows of nocturnal creatures moving quietly through the dark. One evening, on the night of a full moon, he ventured into the forest. Stepping into the woods, he came onto a trail. The wonder of the moonlit landscape drew him farther and farther along. Painted all about the woodland floor were magical replicas of daylight’s shadows: as clear and precise in their outlines, but softer in form and beautifully eerie.
Walking slowly, carefully along the path, Amir came to a stop. If any forest animals were about, he wouldn’t be able to hear them. He would have to stand quietly, make no sound, and then, if he was lucky, he might catch sight of some nocturnal animal wandering the woods. Looking about him, he felt as though he was on the inside of a film in which a boy stood alone in a strange but beautiful forest—a remote, otherworldly landscape where he could feel, if not at home, at least a sense of belonging.
Standing there, bathed in moonlight, stars showing through the gaps in the canopy of leaves above, Amir was carried back in time and space. Comforted, held in the arms of nature, he approached a memory that he had held at bay, its remembrance calling forth the faces of those who filled it and the impossibility of their absence from his life now and forevermore.
“Mama i Tata,” he spoke, his lips forming the words but their sound not exiting his mouth. “Mama i Tata,” he repeated, the image of his mother and father appearing in his thought, the first time he’d dared to consciously call them forth since they’d disappeared from his life.
“Gdje si ti? Gdje si ti?” Amir asked of the sky as he peered up into it. “Minka, gdje si?” his lips soundlessly whispered. And though there was no response from the heavens as to where his family might be, he sensed a distant, unfathomable answer coming from somewhere beyond his human reach…something touching him somewhere.
Amir’s chest filled with a deep and heavy breath, the air filling his lungs tinged with a sadness that entered his body and sat there inside of him, weighting him down into the earth. He let out his breath and then breathed deeply again, the effort of his questions having drained him of all energy. After a time he turned from the woods and made his way back to the foster home, where he climbed the tree that grew next to the house, then stepped onto the porch roof and through the window into his bedroom. Lying down on his bed, he closed his eyes. Now the world kept its distance, no sight, nor sound, nor voice interrupting his mind’s journey into the refuge of sleep.
Chapter 9
When Amir had first arrived at the foster home, there had been no sense that his free-fall into a world dictated by the laws of chaos, begun the day of his family’s death, had ended. For the young orphan it felt like just another stop along a road that seemed to have no direction, destination, or apparent purpose. If some people had difficulty in identifying with him, an orphaned child who could neither hear nor speak, then the emotional isolation Amir felt within himself was even greater than that coming from those who couldn’t see the person behind the disability.
To Amir, his silent relationship with the world seemed right and just. Amir always assumed that his hearing had been lost in the explosion that had come when the soldiers had invaded his home—the deafening sound that was the last memory he held of life with his family. His inability to hear thus felt proper and reasonable. The strength of this sensibility overrode even the physical healing of his ears. That the vibration of sound waves had over time begun to make their way back to Amir’s brain was lost to his conscious mind.
There was no rational explanation for the loss of Amir’s speech. Yet there was no question within the boy as to why that sense had been lost along with his ability to hear. Something within him understood that his muteness helped anchor him, supported his deafness, and provided a ledge of emotional and mental stability where he might safely rest from the tumult of a world he no longer understood. In Amir’s mind his ability to speak was simply gone, as though it had never been there in the first place, so he neither questioned nor lamented its absence, even though he understood his condition placed him at a disadvantage.
Of the five senses, sight, hearing, and speech are those by which people predominantly come to know one another. And because the radar of people’s speech received no echo back from him, there were those for whom Amir’s presence registered but the weakest of blips. They could see him with their eyes, but with the absence of his ability to speak or hear their words, he was, to an extent, only partially visible to them. That it might be their own perspective that was limited, and not the object of their view, rarely seemed to cross their minds.
Amir did not question where he stood with regard to being normal or a somehow lesser being in the eyes of others. Amir, at eleven years of age, lived in a world that had not yet become so finely defined. He felt, rather, afloat in a consciousness much larger than his own…a lone specimen of life treading water in an endless expanse of sea, with no land nor vessel of safety and security in sight. To him, the world of humanity was not what it seemed. It was a mirage of forms and meanings that posed as a rational, reliable, and constant place but was actually filled with gaps of polar opposite, flashes of erratic and random moments marked by chaos and denial. Amir had experienced both the deepest of love and the darkest of hate—confused and damaged, he no longer knew what to believe in.
The young Bosnian orphan’s stay at the Thorensons’ was meant to be temporary. The foster parents’ house served as a transitional residence for children on their journey from whatever trauma had taken them from their birth family’s home to what would be their permanent placement while under the care of the agency responsible for them. In the case of refugee children coming from foreign countries, a complete medical exam was required before any determination of a final placement could be made. Amir’s initial physical examination resulted in his being referred to a pediatric eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.
The eye, ear, nose, and throat physician told Amir’s caseworker that his exam of Amir had shed more light on the boy’s condition by what he hadn’t been able to determine than by what he had. His report stated that he had found some evidence of scar tissue in both of Amir’s inner ears, indicating that at some point there had been an external source of damage, though not enough to cause any permanent loss of hearing. The specialist hadn’t been able to find any other structural damage that might account for the boy’s deafness. The doctor reported that Amir’s vocal cords seemed to be in perfectly functional condition and that he couldn’t find any apparent cause of either the child’s hearing or speech impairment. The specialist ended by recommending that Amir see someone experienced in treating chi
ldren with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
With summer ending and the school year about to begin, Amir’s caseworker and the Thorensons agreed that Amir should be enrolled in the local elementary school, and they met with a counselor at the school to discuss the boy’s special needs. Given the still-unresolved nature of Amir’s ongoing medical examinations, any question as to whether or not the boy would be at the school for more than a brief period complicated any long-term planning for his education. In the end, it was decided to put him in an age-appropriate class and arrange for an interpreter, tutoring in American Sign Language, as well as other logistical support to help with his integration into his new school and culture.
The school where they sent Amir was big, and he felt confined within its walls and maze-like, windowless passageways. There were many people, he spent many hours locked within, and he worried that the other kids saw him as an oddity. He was lost in a strange land filled with many things and much going on, all moving so fast that he felt dizzied by its blur. As soon as the large yellow school bus delivered him home, the first thing he would do, after meeting the obligation of greeting his foster parents and eating the afterschool snack they had prepared for him and the other boys, was to go off on his own into the wooded area at the back of their home.
“Merhaba vjeverice, sta ima ba?” Amir greeted the gray squirrel, the words of his native language speaking soundlessly within his mind.
The small mammal twitched its tail nervously, then, recognizing the boy, stilled its movement. Its large round eyes looked back at the silent smiling boy who sat a few yards distant, like it, resting on his haunches. Its face seemed to respond to the “Hello squirrel, what’s going on?” in a neutral answer. “Not much,” it said in a quick series of brief chirps. Amir’s smile broadened. Though he could not hear it, he could see the sound emerge into the air by the expression of the animal’s face.
Amir’s greeting had not been one of random introduction but rather one of acquaintance. He had come to know the squirrel from his daily forays into the woods. He recognized it by its coloration, its size, its partially missing tail, and most of all its body language, which responded to his presence in friendly trust. Amir had carefully observed the places where the squirrel had built its nests and knew the location of some its many food caches.
“Kako si, jesi dobro?” Amir asked.
“I’m fine, everything is OK, but I am very busy,” the squirrel seemed to respond before running off to continue its foraging.
“Vidimo se,” see you later, Amir said, then rose to continue on his way as well.
He walked farther into the woods until he came to a place that had long ago been a homestead, the only remnants of which were an old stone foundation now fallen in on itself and half-filled with rocks, decomposed plants, and leaves come to rest there during the many years since its abandonment. When he had first come across it, he knew before even seeing the collapsed foundation that the place had once been somebody’s habitat. The trees were larger than any others in the surrounding woods, they grew at evenly spaced distance from one another, and the undergrowth beneath them was sparse and open. The woods here reminded him of his home in Bosnia. The trees and undergrowth were different, the landscape and views not as dramatic, but the sense of people once having worked the land by the sweat of their own bodies was the same. It had been that way with his family. He could feel it here, too…some family, once upon a time, had lived here as if planted into the earth, just like the crops they grew and harvested with their own hands.
One tree in particular called out to him: an ancient red oak that stood tall and broad, its great round crown calling out to the heavens. Supported by a trunk still sturdy and strong after nearly two centuries of life, it stood out like a venerable, wise monk among a gathering of young novices. How it and the others spotted about the old property had survived was a mystery and near miracle for trees such as these, whose beauty, for some, lay in the value of their flesh cut and stacked into boards of wide, clear, unblemished wood.
When he had discovered the tree, Amir sat for a time looking at it and the land its majestic presence stood tall in protection over. He lay on the ground, still and quiet, looking up into the great crown of leaves above him, the nerve endings in his skin alive and attentive, listening to a language of sensation that came from the large life form that loomed above him. Trees could speak. In his child’s mind, unhindered by intellectual bias, he knew this. And even before he had lost his powers of hearing and speech, he understood that the communication came in a silence that could be heard only with a stillness of being as great as that of the tree itself.
Amir had a deep and instinctive respect for these monarchs of the plant world. He could visualize their slow, persevering growth through the ages and the extremes of weather they must have endured—floods, winds, lightning, the freeze of winter wind, and the heat of burning summer sun—not to mention diseases, the assault of humankind, and all the surrounding plants birthed by nature and competing for survival. On his tenth birthday, the year before the war had landed on his family’s doorstep, his father, Asaf, had given Amir a book about trees, with illustrations of some of the world’s monumental species.
“Papa, look at this!” Amir had called out excitedly. “They say this tree is nearly five thousand years old! Can you believe this? Can that be true?”
“I’m sure it must,” Asaf had answered, “but I had no idea a tree could live so long. That is older than anything I can think of, except the earth itself.”
“And look at this one!” Amir continued excitedly. “It says the tree is one hundred and fifteen meters tall. Could I even see the top of it then?”
“Ha-ha,” laughed Asaf. “If you stood near it, I suppose not. I think you would have to stand at some distance to see the very top of it. But then the other trees around might block its view.”
“These old trees must be very wise from having lived so long,” Amir said, his face suddenly turning contemplative.
“Yes, I think you are right,” Asaf smiled in reply. “They must be very wise indeed.”
The first time Amir climbed the old oak in the forest behind his foster family’s house, he roamed about it with his body, just as his eyes had initially wandered its form. Amir explored its branches not only to find a vantage point from which to look out onto the surrounding landscape, as he liked to do, but also to know its body, as a blind person might touch the face of a friend to better know him. Several days later, when he came across some old flooring boards his foster parents had discarded, Amir thought to build a small platform in the venerable oak, like the ones he had in the trees behind his home in Bosnia.
Gathering enough boards and some rope with which to lash them down, he returned to the long-abandoned homestead. He knew just the right place to fashion his platform. Just over halfway up the eighty-foot tree grew two sturdy boughs whose close proximity to each other made them perfect supports for his observation post. Carrying up one board at a time, he tied the planks securely to the limbs until he had made a platform large enough for him to comfortably sit or even lay down upon, with his legs extended out onto the smaller branches growing from the boughs.
Having finished its construction, Amir sat upon the boards of his perch with a sense of satisfaction—a task taken on and completed, a thing now existing that just hours before hadn’t. He looked outward through the gaps between the curtained layers of green leaves moving and shifting in a slow dance with the mild and pleasant autumn wind. The breeze washed over his skin gently and peacefully, the scent of the earth carried on its breath. Amir lay down and looked upward to stare into the tree’s great crown. The maple leaves had already begun turning, to shades of red and gold, but the green oak leaves seemed more determined to hold their color, though soon enough they would follow suit. Amir could already see the paling of some oak leaves to translucent green, on their journey to more flamboyant dress.
The daydreams that drifted in and out of h
is consciousness, like the clouds passing high over his head, were quiet, slow, and of gentle form, unlike the visions that sometimes visited him in sleep. As he stared up into the leaves his sister, Minka, appeared in his mind. The image came from deep within his emotion’s recall, and he smiled at the clear, innocent beauty of her face. She used to like to run her fingers through his hair to straighten out any unruly strands. If it was particularly unkempt from play, or perhaps from a late afternoon nap, she would take a brush to it instead, stroking gently across his scalp and finishing with a kiss to the top of his head. There were times, too, when she would get annoyed with him. Sometimes he would follow her and her friends and not leave them alone. If he felt rejected by her, he would sometimes behave badly, make irritating comments or say something stupid that made no sense at all, just to insert himself into a conversation he hadn’t been invited to in the first place.
Minka’s face was round, with clear, soft, pale skin and hazel eyes like his. Her lips, like her eyebrows, were thin but were held in a gentle, kind manner. Her features were elegant and soft in form and to Amir seemed like those of women whose photos he had seen in magazines modeling clothes for others to admire. Her hair was like his: fine, smooth, and chestnut brown; it was beautiful on its own, even without the face it accentuated.
As the picture of his sister grew fuller and clearer, Amir began to shift his mind to other thoughts. He was afraid to let the image of Minka come any closer, knowing that the presence of her memory had been triggered by another remembrance of her the prior evening, one that was not sentimental and gentle as this, but disturbing and ridden with anxiety. It had come during the hours of his sleep, and whether it had been just the product of dream or the play of actual memory, he could not say. The images had been too painful to bring forth from the archives of his mind into conscious thought. It had begun with the anxious look of his father, telling him to hide the hunting rifle.
The Solace of Trees Page 9