After Dachau Read Online Free PDF Page A

glare. “Mrs. Hastings, I’m not saying
anything
at this point. You know as much as I do—and a great deal more, since you’ve known her from birth!”
    “But you’ve got to do something!”
    “What the devil would you suggest, Mrs. Hastings? Do you want me to sedate her again?”
    “No,” the woman said, suitably crushed.
    “Well, I do have a suggestion,” said the nurse. “You’re a man, and Mrs. Hastings is upset. I’d like to go in there alone and see if I can talk to her.”
    The doctor checked the crack again and watched for half a minute. “All right. That’s probably a good idea. Just go slow with her.”
    “I’m not an
idiot
,” the nurse said, and pushed her way in.
    When she caught Mallory’s eye, she put her index finger to her lips in the universal “no talking” gesture. Mallory looked at her gravely, then lifted her chained right hand as if to reply. The restraint visibly upset her, and the nurse released her from it. Then she offered her some water, which she took gratefully through a straw.
    In a quiet tone the nurse said, “Can you hear me all right?”
    Mallory nodded.
    “Can you speak?”
    Mallory shook her head, then shrugged and nodded, then shook her head again.
    “You don’t know whether you can speak or not, is that it?”
    Mallory nodded emphatically. And lifted her right handto sign rapidly. The nurse glanced at the door, hoping that the gesture had been caught.
    “Do you speak sign language?”
    Mallory nodded.
    “I’ll get someone here who talks sign. Will that be okay?”
    Again she nodded.
    The nurse thought for a moment then again asked if Mallory could hear her.
    Mallory signed wildly, pointing to her ears and to the nurse’s lips, then shook her head.
    Inspired, the nurse put her hand over her mouth and asked the question again.
    The young woman began thrashing in her bed.
    “Okay, okay,” the nurse said. “I understand. You’re reading my lips, right?”
    Mallory nodded.
    Once a sign reader had been brought in, the situation became clearer—and simultaneously more mysterious.
    Mallory could hear but didn’t understand what she heard. The reason? She was deaf. No one seemed able to follow this. How could she be deaf if she heard what was being said? If she could hear it, why couldn’t she understand it?
    Because she was deaf.
    The translator explained it this way. “The last thing she remembers before she woke up in this bed is being deaf. She could read lips, but, because she was deaf, she didn’t know what sounds were being produced by those lips. So when she started hearing those sounds here today, she didn’t know what to make of them. And she still doesn’t. She can hear ustalking, but it’s just gibberish unless she uses her eyes to read our lips.”
    “This is ridiculous,” Mrs. Hastings declared emphatically. “There has never been a single thing wrong with Mallory’s hearing. She studied violin, for God’s sake!”
    “Have you ever studied violin, Mallory?” asked the translator. When Mallory was finished signing, the translator turned to the others and said, “She wants to know who Mallory is.”
    Mrs. Hastings swayed and would’ve fallen if the doctor hadn’t grabbed her.

EVERY MEDICAL SPECIALIST within two hundred miles wanted a chance to solve the mystery, which only seemed to deepen as time went on. As far as anyone could tell, Mallory’s ears and vocal apparatus worked as well as anyone else’s and always had done so. Physically, she was a normal, healthy young woman. No grounds, neurological or psychological, could be found for what everyone understood to be a condition of amnesia. Emotionally, she was an impenetrable conundrum.
    Teams of speech therapists worked with her daily to build a connection in her mind between the spoken language she was hearing and the facial language she was seeing, and, of course, to teach her how to speak (again). She was indifferent to their efforts, often ignoring them completely or