The Miracle of Love

by Ondine Sherman

Shhh! I replied. There might be a God. If there is one, it’s bound to be in this part of the world. At least I’m hedging my bets.

  If I couldn’t work out this conundrum logically, I would do as the Greeks taught: solve it through mythos, not logos. Going back to the great philosophers for answers didn’t appeal to me; rather I would turn to the spiritual path. Like many before me, perhaps even my own ancestors, I would search for answers in the God of the Torah, the Old Testament, while others would look to Buddha, or Brahman.

  Dear God, if you exist, I prayed, which I’m not sure about, I muttered, and you are listening . . . can you please help?

  I wondered whether it was rude to only speak to God once you needed him/her. But maybe this was my moment; I was being called.

  Menachem Mendel Schneerson, whose face is plastered on posters across Israel, once said: ‘Pain is a lonely experience. Still, we must strive to recognise that our pain is, in some form, God’s way of communicating with us.’

  Okay, I was here, and I was listening. Well, of course I should say some thankyous first so you know I’m also grateful for everything I have and not just whining about what I don’t have. So, thank you for my husband, who I love so much, and my parents and brother and his wife and their kids. And thank you for my beautiful daughter who is gorgeous . . . I took a moment to soak up the wave of adoration I felt for Jasmine . . . and for all of us being healthy. Thank you, too, for Dov and Lev who I love so very much . . . and God, it is on this subject that I would like to ask you something . . .

  My throat constricted and I heard a small gasp come from my mouth.

  How had God made such a big debut in my life? I wondered. Was it when Dror and I had pondered, ‘What were the chances?’ as we sat on the kerb outside the ultrasound clinic? The odds of having identical twins were one in ten thousand.

  ‘It’s an act of God,’ I had said when curious people in shops and on the street peered into the pram and asked if there were twins in my family or whether we’d done IVF (Israelis have no qualms about enquiring into your personal life). I had never used that phrase before, but it had seemed apt for our situation.

  And what about Dror’s theory of God’s existence? Dov and Lev looked exactly the same—same weight, same height—and for years Jasmine and my parents never learned who was who. ‘Which one’s this?’ they inevitably asked. Dov and Lev also mirrored each other’s sleep positions: tummy down in their cots; right hand up, left down; left up, right down; left knee bent, right straight; left straight, right bent. They both sighed when in deep sleep, quiet lullabies that sounded like doves. But they each had a different feeling, a unique energy. I had noticed it from birth and others who knew them well, like Dror and Efrat, agreed. Lev was emotional and expressive. Dov was subtle and calm. I had a secret language with Dov; he understood me and I him. We laughed together. Lev was very sociable, craved broader acknowledgment, and was the favourite twin with Efrat’s boyfriend at the ice-cream shop. Lev took cues from Dov. Dov listened to nobody.

  Dror conceded that he now believed we all had souls, or something completely removed from our scientific understanding of the human mind or body. But it was to science we turned, not God, when we were forced to consider the possibility that Dov and Lev might have a genetic disease. What were the chances of us having identical twins who also had a rare genetic disorder? One in ten thousand multiplied by, what, one in a million? How many zeros was that? Dror had spent years doing statistical modelling in his PhD, and he rejected the mathematical probability of a genetic disease as just too unlikely. I agreed.

  But lying in my Tel Aviv bed, I abandoned science and statistical probabilities to plead to the divine.

  Please God, if you do one thing, apart from keeping us healthy and alive, of course, that’s the most important thing, well . . . Focus. If you do one more thing, knowing I’m extremely grateful for everything you have already given me . . . Would I ever get to the point?

  Please help Dov and Lev to walk and talk. Please? My throat constricted again. Words like lead bullets. Please, please, please . . .

  I wondered whether it was okay to beg God and added a few more pleases, figuring that it couldn’t hurt. No, I was asking for too much.

  If I had to choose, if you can only do one thing, I suppose I would pick talking. I would love to be able to talk with them. I want to hear them say ‘Mummy’. What wouldn’t I do to hear them call me. Easy to say, Ondine. But what would you sacrifice for it? Lose a limb? Yes. Two? Yes. Blindness? Deafness? Yes, yes. My eyes filled with tears. So, God, if you do exist, and I really hope that you do, answer this prayer. Thank you.

  Efrat had grown up in a religious Jewish household where she’d been instructed to follow the rules: dress modestly, marry young and pray at the right time in the right way. Otherwise, her elders had said, she would be struck down by God’s wrath. As a teenager, tired of the compliance, she’d tested her parents’ beliefs. She’d picked a leaf on Shabbat, the sacred day of rest when no human action can interfere with the natural order. On Shabbat Orthodox Jews aren’t allowed to turn on lights, shop, drive, cook, write, shave or even pick a flower. She had been blatantly disobedient. Nothing happened. So she discarded the fear and the religious ways and lived the life of a secular Jew. Tel Aviv was the best spot: great bars, cool fashion and hot men. Nevertheless, she knew the religious community and maintained many superstitions. I picked up a few, such as saying, ‘Hamsa, hamsa, hamsa, tfu, tfu, tfu’ to ward off the evil eye when something positive was predicted.

  Efrat told me about a ‘special’ woman—a rebbetzin or rabbi’s wife. Rabbis’ wives are often considered spiritual counsellors in the religious communities and Devorah was one of these women. Like a fortune teller, she was said to be able to answer any question, and Efrat’s friends and family had reported amazing results. She wondered if I’d like to visit Devorah.

  How does that work? I wondered. I hadn’t even known that this practice was part of Judaism, but then again, I didn’t know a lot of things about my own original culture.

  Efrat and I planned to leave for our visit to Devorah at 7 pm: just enough time to put the boys to sleep and read Jasmine a story before I handed her over to her dad. Dror thought the whole concept of Devorah being able to foretell our future not much more than superstition, but a part of him also had faith in the mystical tradition. ‘Can’t hurt,’ he’d told me when I’d asked what he thought. ‘Something positive may come of it.’ But Dror couldn’t come to the rebbetzin—men went to rabbis. This was women’s business.

  I took two bottles from the twelve on the drying rack, spooned in formula and added filtered water. I put on the kettle for more sterilised water. Shaking the bottles, I went upstairs, where Dov and Lev were lying on the change table. Efrat was blowing raspberries on Lev’s tummy and he giggled in delight. Dov looked over at him and whacked Lev’s head with his left arm, hand in a fist. Lev blinked and stopped laughing. Efrat kissed Lev’s temple before turning to Dov. ‘Achshav atah, Dov dovony. Now it’s your turn,’ she cooed, using the nickname that translated as ‘cherry’.

  I pulled open the pyjama drawer and selected a red-striped pyjama onesie. We usually found something red to dress Lev in—a quick way to identify him. I pulled the legs over Lev’s pointed hypertonal feet and under his bottom. I pushed his knees towards his chest, curling him into the foetal position. Meital, the physio, encouraged me to do this regularly. Lev smiled, loving the feeling of being squashed into a ball. I then picked him up and turned him around in the crook of my right arm, grabbing the bottle and sitting down on the nearby armchair. I balanced the bottle on the arm of the chair and threaded his hands through the rest of the pyjama suit, finally zipping it up.

  Now it was time for our nightly back tickle routine—they were both extremely ticklish. Lev jerked his body left and right as my fingernails made their way up his spine. He looked at me before opening his mouth into a smile.

  ‘Okay Levy Lev, time for your bottle.’ I turned him over then
tested the bottle teat with my mouth. The formula was especially thick to prevent colic, so it often got stuck in the hole. The boys didn’t get traditional colic; rather the muscles inside their chest, like the ones on the outside, were weak and left them with pockets of air after they drank. I kneaded the teat, shook the bottle again and retested. Fine.

  After he’d finished the milk, I bent Lev over my forearm so I could feel any air bubbles. I found one just under the right side of his ribcage and gently massaged it. He burped and a stream of milk dribbled down his chin and onto my skirt.

  ‘Good boy.’ I kissed him on the neck and swung him into his cot.

  ‘Noodles?’ I called out to Jasmine. ‘Noodles!’

  ‘Yes, Mummy, what?’ I heard her call from downstairs over the noise of Dora the Explorer.

  ‘Come, sweetie,’ I said, wiping my skirt with a baby wipe. ‘It’s time for teeth and a story.’

  What kind of God would want to prevent my innocent children from having a normal life? How was their future tied to mine? I wished I could believe in a God who had a map for my life, who knew what was best for me and planned it accordingly. If God were a benevolent parent, kind and compassionate, as he was supposed to be, he would fix this, without delay.

  Don’t be so self-centred, I scolded myself. People go through much, much more terrible things than this. The news, after all, was full of murders, war and natural disasters that fell on innocent people—on children. But the principle was the same: good, innocent people suffering while the baddies were blessed with health, wealth and happiness. Like a Hollywood action movie without the happy ending.

  After his wife died of cancer, a grief-stricken C.S. Lewis wrote: What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?

  So far I had to agree, but either way I was ready to find out for sure.

  ‘You ready?’ I asked Efrat.

  ‘Yulla,’ she said, stopping in front of the mirror to put on some lip gloss. ‘Let’s go.’

  As I stepped out of our apartment, a cold wind slapped my cheek. I nervously adjusted my long skirt and rewrapped the heavy scarf around my shoulders.

  A taxi took us out of the city centre to a nondescript suburb of tall grey apartment blocks. Balconies were wrapped in closed shutters. We walked down a dark laneway and stepped through the rear entrance of a building to find a crowd of people milling around a doorway.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

  ‘Slicha geveret, ma anachnu osim?’ Efrat asked a woman standing nearby before translating her response: ‘Write your name on the piece of paper.’ The woman handed us blank pages from a small notepad. ‘Give it to Devorah’s helper when she next comes to the door, and then . . . wait,’ Efrat translated again.

  Over two hours passed and slowly the crowd thinned; it was nearly ten when we sat down, tired and defeated, on the concrete steps. I didn’t know what to expect and was becoming more and more anxious. Men and women milled around, unusually quiet for Israelis. I had no conversation to offer Efrat and played with my shoelaces under my long green skirt. Bought this in a hippie market near Byron Bay, I thought. I could see the stall in between the hemp bags and the rainbow crochet bikinis . . . How far away I was now . . . How I wished . . .

  Finally we were beckoned into the darkened room. I made Efrat go first. Behind a large wooden desk covered in books sat a small woman. Bookcases lined the walls behind her and I scanned them for something familiar. Thick black leather, gold-embossed . . . these didn’t look like any novels I had ever read. We sat down in front of the desk.

  ‘Shalom,’ I said, unsure of the correct greeting for this situation. ‘My name is Ondine and this is Efrat.’

  ‘Naim meod, Shmi Devorah,’ she said. ‘Nice to meet you. I’m Devorah.’

  She was petite, with a wig of straight dark hair (married Orthodox women must cover their natural hair), and wore a high-collared white shirt and a shapeless black jacket. She said something quickly in Hebrew that I didn’t understand.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked. ‘I’m from Australia . . . my Hebrew isn’t very good.’

  She shook her head.

  I looked to Efrat for help, then said, ‘I’m worried about my children. I want to know if they will be all right.’

  Efrat repeated the words and Devorah nodded. She stood up and took a book down from her shelf. Slowly she read.

  Tears came to my eyes and I held my breath in expectation of an answer. I wondered if she was reading the Torah. I couldn’t tell.

  ‘They have a problem in this area,’ Devorah indicated, rubbing the right side of her neck with her hand. I nodded. This was right—their heads constantly lolled to the side, Dov to the right and Lev to the left. I was impressed.

  ‘I think it is something to do with their hormones,’ she continued. No one had mentioned hormones yet and we had seen the best doctors.

  ‘Maybe an operation will help them in the future.’ My growing belief suddenly evaporated. What kind of operation could possibly fix them?

  She paused again and started leafing through pages.‘It is written that they will walk and talk . . . eventually,’ Efrat translated.

  ‘Really?’ I asked Efrat to make sure.

  Efrat spoke to her again and Devorah responded. ‘Yes, that’s what she said.’

  I was confused. Who was this woman? How could she make such predictions? What book was she looking in and what did she mean when she said that it was ‘written’—where, when, by whom? I was happy, deep down, that she had said they would be okay, but my rational mind didn’t believe her.

  We walked out of the room into the dim light of the courtyard. We were told to wait. Devorah’s helper came out minutes later and handed me a small book and a plastic ziplock bag with a piece of paper and a tea-light candle.

  Once home I rushed upstairs to Dror. He was in bed, watching soccer on TV. ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

  I sat down next to him. ‘That was such a weird experience. And now I can’t work out what I’m supposed to do. Look.’ I showed him the pocket-sized book of prayers she had given me. ‘Tehillim? Heard of them?’

  ‘They’re psalms by King David,’ he said. ‘The Orthodox believe they are powerful, but I think they’re really just historical poems and writings.’

  I knew how Dror’s mind worked: a tangle of seeming contradictions. He was fiercely protective and proud of Israel, and believed passionately that all Jews should live in it, fight for it, die for it. Yet he was full of disdain for most of the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who saw themselves continuing the Jewish heritage on which Israel was founded. He was angry at most of the seven hundred thousand ‘black-hat’ community members who didn’t serve in the army, instead capitalising on an exemption in the law that allowed them to learn in yeshivot (learning institutions for Orthodox Jews) rather than enlist. He believed these Israelis took advantage of taxpayer dollars, often not working but living off government payments, and he was indignant that their large families strained the already fragile Israeli economy. He hated their black suits, a custom brought over from the Eastern European diaspora. They also spoke Yiddish, a language that conjured up the dark twentieth-century past in which so many were ordered to the gas chambers.

  ‘But I’m supposed to light candles and recite these every night.’ I took the small slip of paper from my bag. ‘She gave me a list of which psalms to do on which days. Is this . . .’ I pointed to the Hebrew letter aleph. ‘Sunday or Monday?’

  ‘Sunday.’

  ‘So weird. How can this work? She also told me . . .’ I needed Dror’s concentration and the sound of the TV commentary suddenly felt overwhelmingly loud. I pressed mute. ‘She told me that they will walk and talk.’

  Dror didn’t respond.

  ‘It’s good to hear, right? Right?’ I looked at him eagerly, full of hope that he would believe this too, that together, if we shared
the faith, maybe, just maybe, it would happen.

  ‘Right. Really good.’ He took my hand and squeezed it. His hand felt warm and rough. I would start the prayers tomorrow.

  THIRTEEN

  Two weeks later my mother called.

  ‘How’s Jasmine?’ Her voice had sounded sedated for a while now but I still hadn’t got used to it.

  ‘Good, fine. How are you, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, I miss her so much. So very much,’ she said with a big sigh.

  Mum worried about her granddaughter and the effect that our ‘war’ against the faceless enemy was having on her. In fact, we were all concerned about Jasmine, and Dror and I would often talk about ways to ensure she received enough of our attention, and how we could sustain joyful activities in her life. We committed to outings with her—regular hikes in nature reserves where we could marvel at wildflowers and show her animal tracks and scats. We tried to continue other simple pleasures we’d enjoyed before Dov and Lev were born, like biking by the beach, stopping to sit on a park bench for ice cream. The strategy seemed to be working: Jasmine was by all appearances happy and contented. ‘Save money for therapy later,’ we joked, but it wasn’t funny. I wanted Jasmine to be okay.

  I knew now that Mum wasn’t only missing Jasmine, she was in anguish about Dov and Lev. But she wasn’t letting me in. Part of me wished she would so I could do the same. We could sit together in agony. Hand in hand. And the other part knew it to be impossible. I wasn’t ready to share the pain, as that would make it real. I held on to the uncomfortable contradictions of denial and hope with gripped claws.

  ‘Well, I was speaking to Leanne about the boys . . .’

  ‘Leanne?’ I asked, digging in my memory unsuccessfully.

  ‘Monique’s mother-in-law, who comes to our Passover get-togethers from time to time. Well, you know how I’ve been feeling terrible. Don’t want to worry you, darling. But anyway, she was sweet, Leanne. So many people have been very caring of me lately. Lynn has become like a sister to me. She made me chocolate fudge and has been coming to the house every week . . .’ I smiled. My mother’s first cousin, Lynn, made the most delicious desserts.