I N THE FOURTH year of our word-driven, wordless contact, a note arrived. “Kid, the last story was especially nice. Thank you. Hanna.
It was lined paper, torn out of a notebook, and cut smooth. The message was right up at the top, and filled three lines. It was written in blue smudged ballpoint pen. Hanna had been pressing hard on the pen; the letters went through to the other side. She had also written the address with a great deal of pressure; the imprint was legible on the bottom and top halves of the paper, which was folded in the middle.
At first glance, one might have taken it for a child’s handwriting. But what is clumsy and awkward in children’s handwriting was forceful here. You could see the resistance Hanna had had to overcome to make the lines into letters and the letters into words. A child’s hand will wander off this way and that, and has to be kept on track. Hanna’s hand didn’t want to go anywhere and had to be forced. The lines that formed the letters started again each time on the upstroke, the downstroke, and before the curves and loops. And each letter was a victory over a fresh struggle, and had a new slant or slope, and often the wrong height or width.
I read the note and was filled with joy and jubilation. “She can write, she can write!” In these years I had read everything I could lay my hands on to do with illiteracy. I knew about the helplessness in everyday activities, finding one’s way or finding an address or choosing a meal in a restaurant, about how illiterates anxiously stick to prescribed patterns and familiar routines, about how much energy it takes to conceal one’s inability to read and write, energy lost to actual living. Illiteracy is dependence. By finding the courage to learn to read and write, Hanna had advanced from dependence to independence, a step towards liberation.
Then I looked at Hanna’s handwriting and saw how much energy and struggle the writing had cost her. I was proud of her. At the same time, I was sorry for her, sorry for her delayed and failed life, sorry for the delays and failures of life in general. I thought that if the right time gets missed, if one has refused or been refused something for too long, it’s too late, even if it is finally tackled with energy and received with joy. Or is there no such thing as “too late”? Is there only “late,” and is “late” always better than “never”? I don’t know.
After the first note came a steady stream of others. They were always only a few lines, a thank you, a wish to hear more of a particular author or to hear no more, a comment on an author or a poem or a story or a character in a novel, an observation about prison. “The forsythia is already in flower in the yard” or “I like the fact that there have been so many storms this summer” or “From my window I can see the birds flocking to fly south”—often it was Hanna’s note that first made me pay attention to the forsythia, the summer storms, or the flocks of birds. Her remarks about literature often landed astonishingly on the mark. “Schnitzler barks, Stefan Zweig is a dead dog” or “Keller needs a woman” or “Goethe’s poems are like tiny paintings in beautiful frames” or “Lenz must write on a typewriter.” Because she knew nothing about the authors, she assumed they were contemporaries, unless something indicated this was obviously impossible. I was astonished at how much older literature can actually be read as if it were contemporary; to anyone ignorant of history, it would be easy to see ways of life in earlier times simply as ways of life in foreign countries.
I never wrote to Hanna. But I kept reading to her. When I spent a year in America, I sent cassettes from there. When I was on vacation or was particularly busy, it might take longer for me to finish the next cassette; I never established a definite rhythm, but sent cassettes sometimes every week or two weeks, and sometimes only every three or four weeks. I didn’t worry that Hanna might not need my cassettes now that she had learned to read by herself. She could read as well. Reading aloud was my way of speaking to her, with her.
I kept all her notes. The handwriting changed. At first she forced the letters into the same slant and the right height and width. Once she had managed that, she became lighter and more confident. Her handwriting never became fluid, but it acquired something of the severe beauty that characterizes the writing of old people who have written little in their lives.