My Life with Kangaroos: A Deaf Woman's Remarkable Story

19. My Brother and I

209 19 My Brother and I MY SOMEWHAT younger brother, Peter, who was also born without hearing and, moreover, suffered from other disabilities, should really have a chapter to himself. So far I have mentioned him only here and there in passing and merely touched upon his disabilities. For forty long years and right up to the death of my mother I was tortured by a scene in a dream. It was always the same situation , in which my brother played the main role and which never failed to put me into a renewed state of panic. In tears, my mother would remind me that I formerly had a younger brother, Peter, who had wandered off into the forest, never to be seen again. Every time I was confronted with this scene in my dream, I would be shocked to the core and would react to it almost as if paralyzed . My reaction in the dream was always the same: Stiff with fear, I would stare at my mother, unable to find a single word of consolation for her. Just as if I were paralyzed, I would then see my brother sinking helplessly into the earth and yet with a rapturous smile on his lips, and then the ground would quickly be covered with layers of colorful autumn leaves. Was this uncanny dream an expression of a deeply lodged sense of guilt? In the meantime, I am quite sure it was. 9781563685590_My Life with Kangaroos.indd 209 4/8/13 11:04 AM 210 MY LIFE WITH KANGAROOS ONE day when I was eight years old, I went on a walk with my brother and Auntie through a deep, dark forest. It was spring, and the ground beneath the trees where the warm rays of the sun shone through was covered with many kinds of flowers. We were just going down an incline when Auntie suddenly said that she wanted to take another path so that she could pick a few flowers. I was to continue on down with my brother, and we would meet each other at the bottom. I gently took my brother’s hand, but he disengaged it from mine, turned around, and went back uphill. Afraid of losing sight of Auntie, I ran on and found her. She was annoyed: “Foolish girl! Why didn’t you bring your brother? Where is he?” I read what she was saying from her lips, and my heart skipped a beat. I was ashamed of myself. Despite this, I pulled myself together, took heart, and ran as well as I could straight back uphill. I can still well remember how my heart throbbed as I fought my way through a tangle of bushes, stumps, and branches, past twigs and glittering, entwined foliage, thinking only about how to find Peter! Then I caught sight of him, struggling away in front of me up the hill, waving his arms cheerfully in the air above his head. Everything about him seemed to be full of bliss, and this was understandable, as I knew how he loved trees. I grabbed him rather roughly and turned him around the way he should go. This curt action left traces of shame in me; I felt that I had not done justice to Peter and that I had left him in the lurch. Some decades later, I related the mysterious, recurring riddle of this painful dream to my mother and her companion, Fritz. I wanted to free myself at last from these feelings of guilt and add that this incident had held me in check ever since. So I told them everything that had inspired these feelings, including how I had once left Peter all alone in the forest. I asked them both to interpret the dream for me. “Peter is with us in body and soul and woven into our existence, but a small part of his mind has gone away—the means by which he can speak to us,” Fritz replied with much sympathy. 9781563685590_My Life with Kangaroos.indd 210 4/8/13 11:04 AM My Brother and I 211 My Brother Is Different THERE was much truth in these words. At Peter’s birth, a forceps delivery, he had lost blood, thereby affecting the brain, and, as a result, the speech center had been irreparably damaged.36 If one had gone about the birth in a more sensible way, Peter would...