“Finished?” I surprised her with a hug from behind in her workroom.
“The work isn’t here – it’s in the living room,” she said.
“So should we go there?” I asked, as if it were miles away.
“Close your eyes, and open them only when I say so.”
I closed my eyes. Lily led me five careful steps from her workroom to the living room.
“Now!” she whispered in my ear.
I was stunned.
On the living room floor, with the furniture pushed aside, lay the completed work. It was composed of twelve white cardboard sheets, arranged like a crossword puzzle, three by four. On each was a drawing, in black and white and in color, of a disabled or handicapped patient: A man on crutches, several wheelchair users – one of whom seemed to be in an imaginary race, an elderly woman walking with a cane accompanied by a nurse, an amputee with a cane in motion, and opposite him, an amputee missing an arm standing and staring. An old woman in a wheelchair gazing at a pregnant woman leaning on a crutch, and a few more disabled figures in different postures or movements.
All of the figures in the drawings wore dark sunglasses.
“When this is hung on the wall, it will be “Wallpaper of the Disabled,” she told me.
For the first time, Lily didn’t wait for me to name her work – she named it herself.
“Wallpaper of the Disabled?” I repeated.
“Yes, ‘Wallpaper of the Disabled.’ They will hang proudly on the wall.”
“Every time I’m hospitalized, I look at those who sit in wheelchairs. I feel they’re embarrassed, even ashamed,” she explained the work.
“I don’t want them to be ashamed. Look how they all hide theireyes. But in Rehovot, at the exhibition, and afterward here in our living room, they’ll be free. I want those who don’t want to see them in the hospital to see them today here, and tomorrow in the exhibition. They’re human beings. You can’t just erase them, ignore them.”
“I never thought of it that way,” I thought to myself, moved by her sensitivity.
“For you, the hospital is another world,” she continued. “You go there as a doctor, as a husband. I go as a patient. Think about it – the perspectives we each have on the same place where we met are completely different.”
“Are you angry with me?” I sensed a kind of restrained anger in her voice.
“I could never be angry with you. I love you too much.”
“But Lily, you go in and out of hospital. Each time you get a new chance.”
“Yes, I go in and out. But the disabled remain disabled forever. If not in the hospital, then everywhere else. It doesn’t matter where they are, they are always hiding.”
“So you’re bringing them out – to living rooms. To the gallery. To the spotlight.” I tried to understand.
“I wish I could. But I know no one would dare hang this, this wallpaper, on their wall at home.”
“Yes… regular wallpaper usually has flowers, sun, sea, light.”
“They’re much more than flowers, than sun and light. They are the light. They are life. Despite all the suffering and rejection by society, they live,” she said with a clear and calm voice.
On one hand, I was stunned; on the other, I understood that not only was there truth in her words, but her act was profoundly special.
I awaited the encounter with the public at the exhibition.
Saul, Lily’s brother, and I worked together on how to displaythe works. The museum management allowed us to hang the collage of the disabled on the wall.
“It’s very impressive,” I told her when we finished hanging the works.
“Do you like it?”
