This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (24 page)

My brother absorbed this.

“I don’t, I don’t…I don’t remember either,” he said, followed by a moment of thought. “It’s hard to remember.”

“It is,” I said.

Then firmly, he informed me, “Today. Today. Today, I am not like then. It was something—sih-something from when I was a boy.”

I said, “Yes.”

“Today, today, today, I am diffehr’ent. I still have pih-roblems—I still have pih-roblems. But, but—not like then.”

“I know,” I said. “I was writing about the past. A long time ago.”

“About the past. About the past. Yes. In the past, I was vih-very autistic. You remember.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then—then I didn’t talk,” he said. “Didn’t talk. Now I can talk. I can talk.”

I tried to reassure him.

“It was long ago,” I said to Nachum. “Today you are almost like me, like everyone.”

There was a silence as he pondered this.

“Nih-not like everyone,” he said. “I am nih-not like everyone. I have still, I have still specific, sih-psychiatric pih-roblems that obstih-ruct, obstih-ruct, obstih-ruh—that bother me. In the dih-daily routine. Thi-that’s why I go to a psychologist, a psychologist. To help me think…

“Kacha zeh, kachah zeh,”
he finished. “It’s the way it is.”

“It’s true,” I said.

“Whi-when, when I was a boy,” my brother went on, “I was autistic…I was vih-very autistic…autistic.” He repeated himself again and again, as if to better observe himself at that distance. “I, I, I…I was autistic. But nih-now I am not like that.”

“You are not,” I repeated. “You are not like that anymore.”

“Nih-now I can talk.”

“Right. You can talk.”

“Nih-now…now I can remember.”

“Now you remember everything.”

“Now…nih-now…now we can do things together.”

“Now we do things together.”

“Nih-now I am just your brother. Your other, crazy bih-rother from Israel.”

He chuckled at the memory of that long-ago joke.

“Yes,” I said, and nothing more, because what more was there to say? Now he was just my brother, my deeply pondering brother, and I his amazed sister.

Judy Brown wrote the controversial novel
Hush
—a finalist for the 2011 Sydney Taylor Award for outstanding book on the Jewish experience—under a pseudonym because she feared backlash from the Chassidic world. Brown’s identity has since been revealed and she has left Chassidism. She has been profiled in the
 
New York Times Magazine
and has written for the
Huffington Post
and the
Jewish Daily Forward.
Brown holds a master’s degree in creative writing and lives in New York City.

judybrownhush.com/hush/

facebook.com/JudyBrownHush

Hush

(written under the pseudonym Eishes Chayil)

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