Strangers in a strange land, we didn’t even have our National Health cards. But though we as yet had no official existence, the doctor came an hour after we called him. In blessed England, the land of socialized medicine and impersonal bureaucratic care, the doctor came daily, unasked, as a matter of course. But the affliction was as mysterious to him as to us. Elly had no fever, no looseness of the bowels, no signs of infection — only the continued, meaningless revolt of the empty stomach, preceded by the same whimpering and followed by the exhausted resignation of the mute. The doctor feared dehydration, but she would not lick the sweets he gave her and refused the water. Without words there was no way to explain to her that she was sick, that water would make her better. A child without speech is as unreachable as a sick animal. I forced a spoonful of water down to be vomited up again, and waited. These were quiet days and I could work on the house. Elly made no demands and there was nothing to do for her.
On the sixth day the vomiting stopped. Elly drank half a glass of water and ate a lollipop. (It hadn’t been easy to find it. Later on she ate British sweets readily enough, but at first they were the wrong shape. ) She sat up. Next day we carried her downstairs to the kitchen. Shakily but without hesitation she led me to the refrigerator. She took my hand and put it on the door handle. When I had opened the door she took my wrist with her firm, feathery touch and moved it to take out an egg.
Elly had not had an egg for more than two years — half her lifetime. Eggs were not on her list of edible substances. As far as I knew she knew nothing about them, for cooking, like so much else that was human, did not interest her — she watched it, if at all, with unseeing eyes. I took out the egg in some astonishment. To the innocent eye it is by no means obvious that an egg is food; someone who had never seen one would find it scarcely more promising than an oyster. But Elly, it developed, knew all about this egg, including how she wanted it cooked (scrambled) and what pan to use, all of which she indicated with her delicate light grip. She requested six eggs in the hour, and she spent the next week sitting in the kitchen,eating eggs by dozens. She couldn’t, of course, have chosen a better convalescent food. In a week she was well.
But she was curiously changed. There was, for one thing, no more need to worry about how to muffle the crashing of her crib. For years that rhythmic rocking had been a part of Elly; in a life of limited activities it was, if nothing else, one of the few things she did. She had been too weak to rock during her illness. She never rocked again.
She was cheerful enough inside. But though at home she had ranged the neighbourhood, barefoot through the roughest brush, now she would not voluntarily set foot outside the house. Active as ever indoors, her movements out of doors were no longer free and open; she did not run or jump, but squatted in one place and dug in the sand or played with pebbles — and that only as long as someone stayed with her. She would no longer walk with us on our small excursions round the neighbourhood. We would coax her along a few steps — only a few, for she would whimper and then, if we persisted, cry. We would carry her for twenty feet or so, put her down, and coax a few more steps out of her, and thus, picking her up and putting her down, maintain the fiction of a walk. It was only a fiction. But we dared not let her seem to herself to succeed in regressing to her babyhood.
These changes were permanent. Although we were able, with tact and care and many weeks, to get her to walk normally again, not once while we were in England did she step over the threshold of her own accord, and even since we have returned to her familiar ranging-grounds here at home, she has not moved alone out of sight of the house.
We began to wonder about the meaning of that sudden illness that had no ascertainable cause, only consequences. Could this be what a traumatic experience was — mysterious phrase, plucked out of the sophisticated air we breathe, not really understood? Was the trip a psychic trauma, unexpressed and for Elly inexpressible, internalized, and manifesting itself the only way it could, in physical symptoms? Elly had seemed to take the move serenely. But we had failed to imagine what it must be like for a child of four to leave her home behind without a word of explanation. For a week or so it seems a visit like any other. But as the days pass and there is no return, it becomes plain that home has simply disappeared — been annihilated, swallowed up and gone. Without speech, the child can ask no questions, give no form to anxiety. No explanation can reach her, even if one should be offered. She has no hint that home still exists, that it was abandoned for a reason, that one day she will return there. A single inexplicable convulsion has overnight abolished her physical world. For, lacking words, remote from people, her world was above all the physically known — toys, furniture, houses, streets. When these disappeared, for all she knew for ever, who can know how much seemed to disappear with them? To what degree was her own frail selfhood locked into those vanished rooms? Did they express in space, in the only way she could appreciate, the sense of time, the continuity of personality, the past?
Such questions have no answers, and we never found out the nature of that unique illness. But if we had waited for sure knowledge to determine our actions with Elly, we would have never acted at all. In a few months we would be moving again, to yet another house; we would spend the summer in Austria before we made our way back to America to show Elly that home was not for ever lost. How could I prepare her? Though Elly was acquiring single words, little by little, as the months passed, they were all simple nouns. There were none in which I could discuss with her such subtleties as place and time and cause-no ‘when’, no ‘back’, ‘again’, or ‘soon’; no ‘go’, no ‘because’; no ‘Austria’, ‘England’, or ‘America’; not even ‘home’. Without words, how can one convey a shared recognition of what is not present to the senses? Does one discuss past and future with a cat?
It was at this time that I began to simmer in my mind the problem of giving Elly a usable memory.
The operative word was usable. We knew she had a memory, and no ordinary one. We had become accustomed to its prodigies. One day, when she was a little over two years old, without speech, without comprehension, with no apparent capacity to attend to her surroundings, she had disappeared. This was unprecedented. She was a baby; she had been walking only three months; she had never gone anywhere alone. Where to look, when no direction was more likely than another? Then I remembered that the day before I had taken her, in her stroller (she was not yet a steady walking companion), a new way downtown, via the parking lot near her father’s office. She had been so enchanted with the stripes and arrows painted on the surfacing that I had taken her out of the stroller and let her crawl about on them. It was a frail clue, but there was no other. Without expectations, I began by looking there. I found her absorbed, on hands and knees, circling the one-way arrow, her tiny body less conspicuous to an oncoming car than a dog’s would have been.
To reach that parking lot she had to cross three large backyards and two streets, to ignore two possible turnings and make a third. On foot, she had followed a route she had traversed only once before, and then not under her own power. She had moved fast; though it seemed longer, from the time I missed her to the time I found her was only a few minutes. A remarkable performance for any two-year-old; it is hard to convey its impact coming from a child who seems not to see, to hear, or to register impressions — who for days at a time shows none of the common signs of intelligence at all. I tested her. A mother with an abnormal baby is always testing. On our walks I would deliberately lag behind and let her lead me home. She never hesitated, never took a wrong turn. A single visit and her knowledge was infallible. What’s more, it needed no reinforcement; at three and a half she led me behind a screen of trees to find a house she had visited once only, and that six months before. After eight months, on her second visit to the Hampstead Clinic, she led us unerringly to Number 21 Maresfield Gardens, one of an endless row of identical houses — and those who know England know that row houses in England are more identical than anywhere else in the world. I had become so dulled to this capacity that only the most extraordinary instances startled me. I took it so much for granted that I was surprised when the bright, verbal children of my neighbour failed to remember the location of every room in my house. Elly needed no second lessons.