'Where's Marty? Where's Sauly?'

What it means to lose a twin

VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor

Marty Diskin, left, and his twin brother, Saul, traveled together in New Mexico after Marty's bone marrow transplant.

Photo courtesy of Saul Diskin

What's it like to begin your life as a twin? And continue it as just half of that perfectly matched set?

In "The End of the Twins, A Memoir of Losing a Brother" (The Overlook Press, $26.95, hardcover), Saul Diskin captures the pathos of twinhood, chronicling his brother Marty's battle with leukemia and his own role as a bone marrow donor. His compelling memoir illuminates the unique blood relationship the brothers shared and the complex forces that shored them up when Marty faced a fatal illness and eventual death.

"Being able to exchange a part of our body is sweetly appropriate," Saul writes in a letter to Marty just before the brothers' bone marrow transplant. "But that is the mechanical part. The rest of what I give you comes from the secret place we share, from a place deeper than my heart."

Alternating flashbacks of their childhood with a precise retelling of Marty's medical history, Saul Diskin unselfconsciously reveals those ties that come from a place "deeper than my heart." He describes the inevitable rending as each of the two mirror images grows up and asserts his independence. He depicts their ultimate repair as one brother valiantly tries to save the other, capitalizing on their shared genetic pool.

The twins, Saul and Martin Diskin, were born in Harlem in the middle of the Depression. Their father had come to New York by way of his native Lithuania; their mother from Odessa. Their childhood, an amalgam of stoopball and hide and seek, trips to the public library and the hum of everyday existence, played out in the tenements of successively better Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Life was meted out in small pleasures, measured in mundane milestones: a move to a newer, bigger apartment; the first car; the first "real" family vacation.

"Our parents were so happy to live in this country," says Diskin in a recent interview. "It was important to Marty and me to explain our parents background" as context for the brothers' evolving relationship.

As children, Saul and Marty were inseparable.

"Marty and I did virtually everything together," writes Diskin in his book. "We arose in beds separated by two feet, dressed exactly alike and ate breakfast together, complaining with equal fervor about the mandatory dose of cod liver oil. We went to the same school, sat in the same classroom. After school we came home together and either played with the same friends in the street or read books together, lying on our bellies on the floor next to each other."

He describes the almost symbiotic relationship they shared, as he recounts an episode when Marty ventured up to the roof of their five-story Brooklyn walk-up, leaving Saul distractedly to follow in search of his other half. Reliving the frightening episode, he writes: "Where's Marty? Why did he go up to the roof without me? Why didn't he wait for me? How did he get there?"

The incident ends when a panicked Saul reaches the roof and imagines Marty sliding over the parapet, hitting the ground with an agonizing crunch. "Where's Marty? " he asks nervously. "No more Marty. No more twins."

That anxiety resurfaces in October 1971, when Marty writes Saul that he is suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a life-threatening disease. The brothers then had been separated for years by geography, family and careers.

Diskin recalls his reaction: "I read the letter several times, put it carefully in my pocket so that nobody could learn my secret, and left my small and crowded office in Phoenix so that no one would see me cry. I walked around the streets for an hour or so crying and snuffling, unable to clarify my thoughts. All I knew in that moment was that my brother, my twin brother, that part of me that I knew would always be there with me, was leaving, was tearing something loose from my body, from my mind, from my existence. If he died, it was the end of me. I was bereft."

For the next 20 years, the disease remained dormant. Marty pursued his work as a cultural anthropologist, doing field research in Latin America, writing and speaking widely, and residing with his wife and two children in a Boston suburb. Saul and his wife, Arline, remained in Phoenix, where Saul built his real estate investment business and the couple raised three children.

In the winter of 1990-1991, the disease reared its ugly head. A virulent sinus infection was its harbinger, initiating the roller-coaster ride of hope and despair that accompanies the fatal illness of a loved one.

In his book, Diskin chronicles the ups and downs, the bouts of chemotherapy, the remissions, the recurrences. He writes cogently of blood counts and blood transfusions, of the coldness of the medical system and the compassion of many of its practitioners. His grasp of medical detail is impressive as his ability to distill it to its essence.

In August 1993, Diskin traveled to Yale-New Haven Hospital as a donor for a bone marrow transplant for his twin brother. It was their last hope.

"The End of the Twins" began as scribbled notes that Diskin jotted down during the long days spent in the hospital during the last two years of his brother's life. "I carried the pad with me to the hospital," he recounts. Calling it "totemic insulation," he found it therapeutic, providing an escape as well as catharsis.

"In a sick room, you are watching all those awful things. ... I could leave and go scribble notes," he explains of his itinerant wandering through the hospital corridors in search of an empty room where he could gather his thoughts.

Looking back, Diskin says that in some primitive way, writing allowed him some modicum of control and comfort. "I had always been worshipful of words," he says. "And words, writing, can be a form of prayer."

Diskin, who describes himself as "self-taught, well-read," says he probably always wanted to be a writer. He had been an indifferent student, graduating from Erasmus High School in Brooklyn (while his brother attended the more competitive Stuyvesant in Manhattan) and completing one ill-fated year in college at the University of Vermont and a single writing course at the New School of Social Research. By age 22, he was married and soon after that became a father.

"I had to get a job and support my family," he says, putting literary aspirations and accomplishments, which then amounted to unpublished poetry and short stories, on the back burner.

Nearly 40 years later, his first book was published.

"I was driven by trying to explain what happened between Marty and me," he says.

When Diskin showed the first half of his completed manuscript to his brother, Marty initially quibbled about details in his childhood recollections. Eventually, "He said, 'It's a good book.' "

Diskin discovered new depth in trying to describe the relationship between his brother and himself. "I had never thought that I could articulate my feelings," he says.

But he does, sometimes so openly that the reader almost turns away from revelations that seem too personal, too real.

"A writer has to speak from the heart. (Good writing) is true to the human condition, to human behavior," Diskin explains.

His descriptions of the grinding routine of hospital visits, of the need for respite and the intense guilt that often accompanies a few stolen hours away, are lucent. His recounting of the compelling physical need to be there, and the overwhelming sense of dread that something will happen if you are not, speaks to anyone who has had to deal with the prolonged illness of a dear one.

And his medical reporting, gleaned from extensive reading and research augmented with long conversations with medical professionals, shines.

He is awed by the interest of the medical community in his writing.

"I called doctors in the field. They took my calls, spent time with me, refused payment."

The book, published June 18 and available at Valley bookstores, took Diskin two years to write and another two to revise. He said the book changed substantively in its revision, guided by a three-page structural review prepared by an editor on his agent's staff. In the process, he pared the medical portions by some 40 percent and beefed up the number of flashbacks, drawing a richer portrait of the relationship he shared with his brother.

The end product, the book itself, is just a book, Diskin insists. "It's not my brother."

"Each of us dies. (Losing a loved one) is like having a phantom limb. There never will be closure. You don't get over it, you just incorporate it into your life."

He writes at the end of his book: "Marty is dead. ... I'll always remember him. He'll live for me within the ache of memory. But what will I be, what will this thing, this Saul, be, without the other part? Will the emptiness ever be filled? I heard the wild moan of the little boy, crying in a voice I didn't recognize, maybe the child's voice of the twins, begging to know, 'Where's Marty?' 'Where's Sauly?'"

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