As she listened to Dr. Caron’s words, a sigh came from deep inside of Margaret’s being and exited her lungs audibly.
Dr. Caron paused and smiled gently at the woman sitting across from him. After a quiet moment, the two talked about the treatment options available to Amir and arranged a date for a return appointment. Margaret already knew from her conversations with Jane Coleman that the agency didn’t have the budget for Amir’s long-term therapy. She would cover the expense herself. This time, though, when she wrote the check, it wouldn’t be a gesture coming from a distance. As Margaret stood to leave, Dr. Caron handed her his card. Thanking him for his efforts on the boy’s behalf, Margaret absentmindedly slipped it into her purse, the mystery of Amir’s past and what he might have suffered in the war weighing heavily on her mind.
Later that evening, seated at the dinner table, Amir shyly observed his dinner companions, looking first to Margaret, then to Alice, and finally to Alice’s husband, Paul. Not since he had last sat down with his own family, the night before they were killed, had he experienced the taking of a meal with such feeling of communion.
Little in Amir’s expression demonstrated the happiness he actually felt in their company. And though his emotions were unable to express it, he was glad to have the others turn in his direction and speak to him, even if he could not hear their words, the three using their smiles, laughter, and the gestures of their hands to include him in the conversation. The man who sat next to Margaret’s daughter attempted to speak to him. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, about the same age as Amir’s father. He was taller than his father, his skin whiter, his hair lighter in color but with gray just beginning to appear. The hair around Asaf’s temples had also begun to lose their darker color to age. Alice’s husband wore a suit. His father had a dark blue sport coat he sometimes wore, though never with a tie. It was apparent to Amir that the man sitting next to him found his work in an office and not on the land—his hands were soft, accustomed to holding only the tools used in writing and speaking on the phone. His eyes were kind, his smile genuine. When Alice or Margaret spoke, the husband would quietly listen, his face showing interest and encouragement of the words being spoken. At their family’s dinner table in Bosnia, it had been much the same, Amir’s father sharing stories of his day, encouraging the others to do the same by showing his interest in what they had to say.
Amir could see that Alice’s husband felt awkward not knowing how to communicate with someone who could neither hear nor speak. Amir smiled back at him in an effort to make the man feel more at ease, but, embarrassed at his own awkwardness, the boy’s lips rose in a small upward arc before quickly falling back to their usual place of rest.
For Alice and Paul, the sharing of the dinner table with the young boy struck a deep chord. They had always wanted to start a family but had decided to wait until their careers had become established. Then time, the master magician, performed its ultimate disappearing act: the days vanishing into memory in the blink of an eye, turning present into past as though with the wave of an illusionist’s wand, leaving them, nearly a decade later, to wonder where all the years had gone.
The following morning, after saying good-bye to Alice and Paul, Margaret and Amir drove home. As they traveled, Margaret glanced every so often to her right to look at Amir. She was struck by how little she really knew of the boy. Yet part of her wondered whether a more detailed knowledge of his life would provide her any deeper understanding of his being than that which she had already come to find in his silence. There he was, sitting beside her in his small boy’s body, his chestnut-colored hair flowing around sea-green eyes that, to those who didn’t know him, seemed as mute as his tongue and belied the reclusive intelligence that hid beneath.
How odd, she marveled, that when you first meet someone who draws your interest, there seems a whole universe to explore. Then, after a time, you think you know them: the way they walk, their facial expressions, their gestures, the sound of their voice, the way they laugh, the way they act…all become known, and as familiar to you as your own daily routine. But whatever happened to that great, horizon-like expanse of their being that you had seen there within them in the beginning? Did it shrink into something smaller? Or did it disappear? Into what, then? Was the once-vast landscape of their being but an illusion? Or did the illusion come later, when you thought you knew all there was to know about them?
That night when he lay in bed, Amir was unable to find shelter in sleep. Removing the bedding from atop him, Amir rose, dressed, and went downstairs, where he sat by a window in the library and looked out into the dark. He could feel a shift within himself. It manifested almost as a physical sensation, but he unconsciously knew it came from a deeper place. The profundity of it frightened him. After a time, he stood to get his coat and then quietly exited the warmth of the house. There was no moon that night, and the sky was blanketed in clouds. Amir walked into the fields, his feet making their way more by touch than by guide of his eyes. Alone, standing in the middle of the clearing, he felt enveloped by a pervasive sense of loneliness as deep as the black of the night itself. A voice within him called out in need of companionship and, heeding its force, he decided to journey through the forest toward the village center.
In the moonless night everything was colored in such deep obscurity that Amir had to find his way through the woods by means of his feet searching out the hollow of the path he walked upon. His eyes sought out breaks in the leafless branches of the tree cover above him, which signaled that he was safely on the trail. It would be easy to take a misstep or two and quickly become lost in the amorphous skeletal woods of early winter. His steps relaxed when he saw the lights of houses blinking between the trees separating him and the small neighborhood that lay across the forest from his house.
Stepping out from the woods onto a roadway, Amir cautiously traversed the quiet street, like one of the nocturnal animals who lived among the people like invisible inhabitants of a hidden, subterranean land. It was cold outside and the wind was picking up. Amir could feel it bite against his skin, slip in under his clothing, and enter into his body to rob it of its heat. The chill of the breeze moved through his hair and entered his ears, his body’s discomfort strangely soothing, distracting his thought from a deeper pain that lay within him.
Amir walked along the street with quiet steps, careful not to disturb the slumber of the darkened homes, their silhouettes barely visible. The serene order of the pitch-black night calmed him, offering an alternate dreamworld to replace the oppressive images that sometimes visited him in sleep. Weeks might pass before such dreams would interrupt his slumber, waking his body with a start, his mind agitated by fleeting images of disturbing scenes, wisps of frightening memory.
Drawn to a massive sugar maple whose denuded limbs reached out into the blackness like arms raised in prayer, the young orphan came to rest. Lowering his body to the ground, Amir leaned his back into the tree, a nook in its massive trunk cradling him against the cold night breeze. Pulling his knees to his chest, he wrapped his arms around his legs and pulled them close, his eyes staring out into the monochrome world of the moonless night. His breathing soon fell into a meditative rhythm. Amir felt each breath of frigid air as it entered his nose, gently traveling from there to lungs and then back again, released to that from which it came. A deep peace settled over him, the perfect black of the night spreading outward toward the heavens, a harmony of being, a kindred emptiness to give meaning to those lost and damaged emotions inside of him that had no name, no destination, nor even path upon which to walk.
The next morning Amir overslept, not rising until mid-morning. Unsure whether or not to wake him, Margaret decided to let him rest according to his own biological clock. Unaware of the visions whose unannounced visits disturbed his sleep, his foster mother was nevertheless fully cognizant of the erratic nature of his sleep patterns and suspected that it was a symptom of some level of emotional disturbance.
Finding herself unable to
speak with Amir about his inner feelings to the depth of detail she wanted, the retired psychology professor sought new paths of communication with her foster son. Later that day, while working with Amir on his homework, an idea came to Margaret. An account of Amir’s time at the UN refugee camp had been in her foster son’s case file, and it had mentioned the name Josif. Margaret wondered whether the name might be a thread to Amir’s past, a thin strand that could lead to the place of the boy’s silent refuge.
Sitting alongside Amir in the library, Margaret signed to her foster son that they should take a short break. They had been working on his English reading lesson for nearly an hour. After a quick snack in the kitchen, they returned to the library, but the idea that had come into her mind earlier returned, and she decided to follow its lead instead of continuing with the lesson.
An old book of names rested on a shelf of her library, purchased years ago when Margaret had been pregnant with Alice. Rising from the table where she and Amir had been working, Margaret walked over to the wall of books where the old, clothbound volume rested and brought it back with her, placing it down in front of Amir. Opening it, she began with her own name, Margaret. Origin, Persian; meaning, child of light. Origin, Greek; meaning, pearl. Margaret pointed to her name written on the page and then to herself. She followed by taking a pad of paper and a pen, writing her name down in large letters, then repeated the action of directing her index finger from the word to herself. With the back of her hand facing her chest, she lowered her thumb in perpendicular angle to her extended index finger and rotated it outward in her foster son’s direction. “Your turn,” she signed.
Meeting his foster mother’s eyes, Amir slowly took the pen in hand and wrote his name.
“Good,” Margaret signed with a smile, turning the pages of the book backward until she came to her daughter’s name, the faded yellow highlight that marked its choice from decades past still noticeable.
“Yes, I know her name,” Amir nodded signing his understanding, though perplexed at the exercise’s purpose.
Leafing forward through the book, Margaret next stopped at the page that held the name Joseph. Listed beneath it were its non-English equivalents. She pointed to one of its alternates, Josif, and waited for some sign of acknowledgement from her foster son. Amir saw there were many names written on the page. The woman pointed to one that had already caught his eye, one that his mind had immediately pretended it had not seen. But still, the image of his friend began to take on form in his thought. The picture was dull, the face blurred, and though it had been less than a year since he had last seen him, Amir’s memory was unable to call up the older boy’s features clearly. Nor in his mind could there be found much detail of their relationship other than small, fleeting impressions passing like the thin tails of high clouds in an otherwise clear, blue sky…Josif listening to the radio, arms flailing at invisible drums…the two of them riding on the bicycle, the older boy pedaling, Amir on the crossbar as they zigzagged crazily down an empty road. The memories weren’t much, but they were all his emotion allowed before constricting into a solid wall. Josif was a dam, and behind him were waters so dark and deep that, if they were to break loose Amir would surely be pulled under and drowned.
Margaret caught the boy’s nearly invisible first reaction at the sight of the name Josif. She sensed the burden of its hidden weight. So why try and push the child to a place that she intuited was so painful to bear that he had withdrawn not only from the world, but also from himself? Yet as long as it was locked away inside of him, though the pain might be dulled, she knew it would never go away.
Once more making the sign for “your turn,” Margaret indicated that Amir should now write down the names of his family members. When her foster son looked back at her with a blank expression, she took out the Bosnian dictionary she used in his English lessons to translate from the one language to the other. She was unsure how to read the boy’s expression. She couldn’t tell whether his face—his eyes wide, brows furrowed, his mouth open—spoke confusion or shock. Moving her chair closer, Margaret sat next to Amir and took the paper he had written his name on, spelling out the words for father, mother, and sister in his native language: otac, mati, and sestra.
Staring at the woman, Amir waited for her to write down the names he had neither spoken nor heard in almost a year. The thought of their sudden appearance on the paper in front of him brought forth both a deep yearning and fear inside of him. His foster mother, though, had released the pen from her hand and looked back at him expectantly.
“Me?” Amir asked, pointing at himself.
“Yes,” Margaret answered, with a nod of her head. The boy’s eyes looked like they were caught in a trance. Margaret could see that the moment hung on a delicate fulcrum that could as easily tilt to paralysis as it could act as the pivot to the opening of a door. Margaret could write the names out herself, but it was Amir, she understood, who needed to bring them forth, who alone could make their memory real. Taking the pen that lay beside him, Margaret placed it in his hand.
Amir’s hand received the writing instrument automatically and, without thought and after a moment’s pause, began to move on its own. Amir’s hand spelled out the first name, slowly, letter by letter, until all four symbols appeared, the brief imprint of ink creating a picture of immense proportion: “Asaf.” “Emina,” the hand continued…“Minka.” The pen fell from Amir’s grip. As Amir stared down at the words that his hand had just written, he felt as if he had been plunged into freezing waters. How could those names, once so familiar, so short a time ago, now appear like something from a past life…distant and foreign to his eyes? And yet the present, in which he sat staring at the written representation of their beings, felt no closer to him than that which had passed. It too seemed to linger just beyond his reach.
Margaret held herself perfectly still, careful to not interrupt the movement of whatever inward journey the boy might be taking. A tear formed in the corner of Amir’s right eye, a solitary droplet edging over the bottom lid, spilling downward, and running along the side of his nose, over the corner of his mouth. Another tear fell, and the boy closed his eyes. His head slowly inclined, lowering itself in Margaret’s direction, as though his neck and shoulders were no longer able to support its weight. She received the boy’s head upon her shoulder, her silence, both within and without, complete. They stayed like that for some time, the only indication that the child was crying was the tears soaking through her blouse.
Chapter 15
Liberated from the dense walls and structured programs of a school system that hadn’t known what to do with him, Amir’s studies blossomed in the eclectic curriculum Margaret Morgan designed for his homeschooling. Under the freer, more creative methods provided by his new foster mother, the boy’s mind felt released to explore its natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Of all his subjects, he enjoyed none more than science. Encouraged by Margaret to create a nature journal, Amir spent long periods of time in the fields and woods, even on the coldest days of winter, sketching the various plants, animals, and birds that drew his interest. Returning home, he and Margaret labeled the drawings with their Bosnian, English, and Latin names, Amir engaging in the exercise with enthusiasm.
On some days, though, Margaret’s foster son seemed unable to concentrate on even the simplest of schoolwork. These occasions were often marked by Amir rising from bed late, tired and groggy, his physical reactions throughout the day slow and lethargic. In addition to not being able to focus his attention on his studies, he could be irritable, moody, and unresponsive to his foster mother’s efforts to engage his interest.
The boy’s behavior, while never crossing the line of disobedience, was trying for Margaret. In some ways, she would have preferred that he act out, manifest whatever he was feeling outside the box of his restraint, the better for both of them to see his emotion and acknowledge its existence. As it was, on these days he was like a heavy stone needing to be moved from place to place by liftin
g its ponderous weight in the smallest of increments.
At day’s end, fatigued by the effort, the retired professor had to remind herself that she had known that the honeymoon was bound to end—that, along with the joy of having the child in her life, there would be difficulties as well. Amir was a child war victim. He had lost his entire family and suffered who-knew-what-else in a conflict whose acts of inhumanity were difficult to believe. This was not a university classroom where she could simply walk in, deliver her wisdom, and then leave.
From her observations, Margaret suspected that there were several issues at play in her foster son’s off-days. Amir exhibited some of the classic signs of sleep deprivation, and when she had asked about his sleeping patterns, he acknowledged that he didn’t always sleep well. When she tried to find out what it was that kept him from resting well, he answered with vague generalizations.
Her professional experience told her that his sleeping problems almost certainly stemmed from a psychological source rather than a physical one. She asked Amir if he was experiencing bad dreams, and though his response was a shrug of his shoulders and tilting of his head in ambiguous gesture, as though it really wasn’t something he was aware of one way or the other, his eyes told Margaret another story, something inside of him speaking in a coded language to her. But when she continued to gently probe, he pulled back. This neither surprised nor frustrated her. Having spent her entire adult life in the study of human psychology, she understood that the mind’s complexities were many and varied. The fact that she and the boy had begun to bond made their relationship both easier and more difficult, clearer and more obscure, closer and more distant.
The Solace of Trees Page 15