LEONARD KRIEGEL
575
end. His mother had been pregnant with him during the terrible final winter
of that war, what people old enough to remember in Western Holland still
call the
Hungerwinter.
Men and women crawled in the fields and ate tulip
bulbs to keep from starving. The inadequate nutrition available to his mother
was what physicians blamed for the overwhelming genetic weakness in
Michael's arms and legs.
I had already lived for two full decades with the effects of what my
virus had done to me. Diligent exercise had given me considerable strength
in my arms and shoulders. I could walk mile after mile on my crutches, the
fifteen pounds of leather and steel strapped to my legs no more than a
metaphor for my sense of power then. Michael's mobility was extremely
limited. He was dependent upon his parents and his two younger brothers -
both of them strong and athletic - to get around.
In August 1968, as Russian tanks rolled into Prague, I returned to the
Netherlands for a second Fulbright year. By this time, my family had grown
with the addition of another son. Once again, we were welcomed by
Michael's family, and the two of us renewed our conversations about our
lives and our struggles. I wasn't surprised when, a year later, soon after our
return to New York, a letter fi'om Michael announced his imminent marriage.
It
was a moving letter, but I still wish there was some way to write this
without speaking of it. Michael wanted me to know that my example had
given him hope. He was ready to lead a "normal" life.
I am not a modest man. And I take a great deal of pride in what I
have been able to make of my life despite formidable obstacles. But I never
wanted to serve as anyone's model of how to live with a severe physical
handicap. Looking back, however, it seems almost inevitable that I became
such a model for Michael. His mother had translated my first book, an ac–
count of my encounter with the polio virus, into Dutch. And when he and I
talked, Michael would speak quite openly about his feelings, his thoughts, his
fears and ambitions, his crippled state. Just before we left Holland in June
1969, I learned that he had decided to study for the ministry. He had chosen
to be "normal." With God's help, he wrote, he would taste the sacrament of
marriage.
As
a skeptic, I was more suspicious of God's help than was Michael.
But in the letter I wrote back, I spoke of how splendidly he had come
through, by which I meant not that he had "overcome his handicap" but that
he had absorbed the pain of the cripple into his strength as a man. Michael
understood what it had taken me years to learn - that a cripple validates his
life by creating a sense of his selfhood out of physical pain and chaos. Of
course, Michael was a Christian, and for a Christian suffering binds one to
God. But Michael also understood that it was suffering which gave him the
right to choose survival. A nonbeliever could only envy his capacity for faith.
From my painfully secular position, the cripple's presence merely testified to
