For three months we separated, each day removing a layer of our life together—the mattress we’d just purchased, the Noritake Colorwave Green china, and the joint DVD collection. Over time, he agreed that our separation was for the best. He dreamed of a house, a family, and a silver anniversary party. I dreamed of a camel ride to visit the Great Pyramids of Giza. When he eventually admitted that it was better to be fulfilled than be together, the cement block of guilt weighing down my newfound freedom began to lighten.
I spent most newly single nights on the bare floor of my apartment reading travel magazines and drinking red wine. The photos of far away comforted me more than any sympathetic therapist or cathartic girls’ night out could. I wanted to take these pictures of sunrise at Machu Picchu, the Acropolis’s stately grace, and the desperately blue French Polynesian waters and rub them over my body in a baptism of travel and desire—I wanted them in my veins.
My nights settled into this familiar routine of turn page, sip, and sigh; turn page, sip, and sigh—until one page turn resulted in a destination. An image of the golden Taj Mahal appeared at sunrise beneath bold text: INCREDIBLE INDIA.
I took another sip of wine, swallowed, and breathed. I have to go to India, I inhaled. I’m going to India, I exhaled.
Five months later, my tour group arrived in the holy city of Varanasi. The day was jungle-hot and sticky, with dive-bombing insects. We found our way to the river’s side through the walled city, where sacred cows shared paths with lost tourists. Cafés and temples provided views of the expansive mud-brown river, but we traversed the famous ghats, the long, uneven stairways pilgrims took to enter the holy Ganges.
Revelers celebrated the Durga Puja holiday by dancing in the shallow waters. Men splashed and clapped their own music at the base of the stairs and between boats. A lone woman took part from a distance, covered completely in a wet sari. Large stacks of logs and sticks signaled the crematory ghats. Out of respect, we avoided them, casting our curious eyes away from the smoldering piles where Hindus made their transition from this life to the next. A haze had settled over the river, the tired humidity catching the smoke and smell of recent fires.
As I passed funerals and dancing bathers, I decided that this river, this place of transformation, would be the final resting place for my marriage. I would release my engagement-cum-wedding ring into this sacred river with a ceremony of my own.
That evening as the sun faded into a haze, we filled a blue wooden boat big enough for a tour group, crew and sitar player. The river slurped the ghat stairs, sucking Durga Puja remains into her current. A campfire smell pervaded the sludgy damp of the riverside. The brown of the Ganges blended into a muddy pink sunset. The bathers had gone home.
The sitar’s high-pitched plucks were the only sound as our boat glided toward an outer bank that looked like a ribbon resting along India’s girth. Night turned the Ganges from brown to black, and Varanasi’s lights became fireflies in the dark.
In the pocket of my jeans were two things: the ring that had been feeling smaller with each passing day and each advancing adventure, and a slip of paper—a eulogy. It was a departure from the vows promised to husband and God seven and a half years earlier. Divorce vows to be read aloud to ring and river. This little leaf plate with the small dancing flame would be the funeral pyre for my marriage. With her flowing current, I hoped the Ganges would somehow redeem and purify me.
I hunched over, my curved back shielding the ceremony from the surrounding cackles and laughter of my tour group. Too much had been splayed open over the past eight months; I needed to sew it back up amidst the frivolity. Possessions spread over two apartments, bank accounts scrutinized by a judge, a mother-in-law who wrote to me on my anniversary, “If you want to travel, take a vacation. Don’t end your marriage.”
With some semblance of privacy, I faced the river, the burning cup in my lap, ring and vows in hand. I settled into where I was, resigning myself to the lack of seclusion. I had done something similar once on a bright March day in Wisconsin. This time, there were no nervous mothers, no stoic fathers, no 267 guests—just the Ganges and me.
I could do this—with more honesty—in the middle of this holy river, in the middle of India.
By the light of the small candle, I read the vows in a whisper, hoping the sounds of the sitar would cover my words so that only the river would hear them. I placed my ring on my finger and read aloud.
Thank you for the seven years together.
Thank you for your kindness, your love, and your forgiveness.
Whatever anger you have, please release. Whatever blame I have, I release.
Thank you.
I love you and I let you go.
I love you and I let you go.
I love you.
I let you go.
My tears started at the first “you.” I ripped the paper into tiny shreds, placed them next to the rose petals, and removed my ring. After a moment of hesitation, I set it beside the flame. The gold caught the firelight and lit the bowl even more. I bent over, placed the package on the water, and let go. The Ganges took the cup from my hand and carried it along in her current. Soon, my candlelight joined all the others.
When not doing things abroad that make her mother and aunts cringe, Kristin Zibell writes to inspire women to live their travel dreams on her blog TakeYourBigTrip.com. Kristin lives in San Francisco, traveling locally and always planning her next big trip.
EMILY MATCHAR
Birthright
Was this the land of her people, or just another foreign country?
A few hours after landing in Tel Aviv, we were sitting in the fluorescent-lit conference room of a 1970s-era hotel in the Judean Hills, listening to a man named Momo talk about love.
“This trip is a gift,” said Momo to the three hundred of us. “All we ask in return is that you fall in love with Israel, fall in love with a Jew, marry Jewish, make Jewish babies, make aliyah and move to Israel. Is that so much to ask?”
I snorted involuntarily.
Momo was Shlomo “Momo” Lifshitz, a retired IDF officer and president of Birthright Israel, an organization designed to introduce young American Jews to the homeland. With an unrepentantly bald head, linebacker’s build, and a gruff, Israeli-accented baritone, Momo had what you might call “stage presence.” Much of the audience seemed rapt by his words. Or maybe it was the jetlag.
I was twenty-four years old and visiting Israel for the first time on a free Birthright trip. Though as a travel writer I preferred going it alone—and often by the seat of my pants—I wasn’t one to turn down a free trip to a new foreign country, even if it meant riding on a tour bus with a strict minute-to-minute itinerary. Plus, it made my parents and grandparents happy. My paternal grandmother had fled to Palestine from Poland during the 1930s when things started getting ugly for Jews in Central Europe. And my father, who grew up in Baltimore after my grandmother immigrated to the U.S., spent his childhood summers at Zionist camps, learning the Hatikvah and doing wholesome collective labor like building basketball courts.
Still, I wasn’t counting on all the propaganda—though I suppose I should have known. Birthright Israel is often referred to as “Birthrate Israel” because so many former trip participants (there are some 250,000 alums) go on to marry and eventually procreate with each other.
As a non-religious North Carolina-raised Jew who hadn’t seen the inside of a synagogue in years, the very idea of “marry within the tribe” or “Israel-as-homeland” seemed the antithesis of all my liberal multicultural values. And I’d recently begun dating a non-Jewish grad student—a blue-eyed, blond-haired son of the American West whose forebears had trekked across the country in covered wagons nearly a century before my ancestors fled the shtetls of Galicia. It had only been a few months, but I thought there might be something special there.
The day after Momo’s speech, I filed into a bus with two dozen other twenty-somethings and set out to see the country. And within a few days, I began to wonder if there wa
s something wrong with me; despite our group leader’s strenuous efforts, I wasn’t falling in love with Israel.
At a kibbutz in the Galilee, I rolled my eyes through a group-bonding exercise that involved crossing a moat with a rope. In Tel Aviv, I yawned through a rousing lecture on Israeli history and foreign policy. In Eilat, the “Vegas of Israel,” I sat in the corner of a cheesy bar while Israelis dressed like Gucci models gyrated on the dance floor. In Jerusalem, our tour leader berated me for straying from the pack to buy a disposable camera from a street vendor. Somewhere along a stretch of desert highway, the boy behind me on the bus made out noisily with one of the young Israeli soldiers brought along on the trip (both male and female), presumably for this express purpose. I just wasn’t feeling it.
At the Western Wall, the men and women split up to visit their respective sections of the old temple. As we approached, Orthodox women in long-sleeved t-shirts and headscarves passed us walking backwards, leaving the wall but avoiding turning their backs to the holy site.
I reached out and touched the wall. It felt rough and chilly under the cold, white December sun. Next to me, a tiny elderly woman in black prayed silently, her chapped lips moving as she rocked back and forth with her eyes closed.
“Did you feel it?” a woman from my group later asked.
“Feel what?” I asked.
“The power,” she said. Some kind of thrilling, voltaic energy lit her eyes from behind.
“I could tell that it’s a very powerful place for a lot of people,” I said, limply.
“No,” she said, turning her shiny eyes on me. “There was definitely something there. Something that can’t be explained.”
“O.K.,” I said.
What was my problem? Did I lack a sense of awe? Or was I so disconnected from my roots that I couldn’t sense the power that had drawn my ancestors to this place for thousands of years?
Then something started to happen. I began spending the long hours on the bus sitting with Jeff, a Yale medical student, the two of us geeking out over our mutual affinity for bad 1980s kids’ movies. And I bonded with a few of the other women after we were forced to share a tiny room on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights. Someone gave me a nickname. I’d never had a nickname.
In the Negev, we rode camels and ate dinner beneath the stars, a nomadic feast of couscous and spiced meat stew. We slept in a Bedouin tent on stacks of Persian carpets, piled up together like a litter of puppies, encircled by the deep, languid smoke of our hosts’ slow-burning shisha pipes.
As I dozed off under the cold, cloudless sky, it occurred to me that I was becoming part of a group. It was a novel feeling for me—I’d always been the kid at summer camp hiding in the bunk with a book while everyone else linked arms and swayed to the camp anthem during sing-along time.
A few days later, at a Dead Sea bathhouse, we females changed into bikinis in a communal dressing room where several hefty Eastern European bubbies sat in plastic chairs nodding into their ample bosoms. Soon we were cracking each other up with Yiddish-tinged imitations of our grandmothers:
“Oy, what a shayna maidel you are! The boys must be beating down your door!”
“You’ve got such a beautiful punim, if only you lost a few pounds!”
“Have you had your bowel movement yet today, sweetheart?” I chimed in, channeling my notoriously nosy Polish immigrant grandmother.
Outside, the sea was swimming-pool clear and flat as glass all the way across to the pink-tinged mountains of Jordan. It was cold outside, and the only other people on the salt beach were a few goose-pimply Russians floating nonchalantly in their white briefs.
We waded in, the hard-packed salt ground pricking our feet. The water was warmer than the air. I walked in a ways, then sat back and let the water bounce me back to the surface like a cork. My sense of gravity was distorted, my limbs no longer under my control. We all laughed as we slipped and bobbed through the slick, salty water. The sun was beginning to set, turning the surface of the water orange. Someone took a picture.
I called my grad student boyfriend on a pre-paid cell phone later that night, and his voice sounded thin and far away. Next door, the boys from the bus were having an impromptu sing-along with a borrowed guitar and several bottles of kosher wine. Their voices rose, rich and jocular, across the thin room divider.
Are these my people? I asked myself.
On our last day in Israel, we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, where we filed solemnly past grim piles of shoes and broken eyeglasses.
Again my thoughts turned to my grandmother, who fled Poland after her uncle was attacked in the street by teenage thugs hopped up on Hitler’s rhetoric and their own youthful meanness. They’d cut off his long beard. My grandmother’s father, my great-grandfather, saw which way the wind was blowing; he abandoned his factories, packed up his family, and headed for Palestine. They got out just in time. A few more months and their shoes might be on the bottom of a dusty heap in the necropolis of Yad Vashem.
Later that evening, we met with Momo. Once again, he spoke deeply and charismatically about Israel’s splendors. The beaches! The gorgeous women! The brotherhood! But then his voice turned more serious and his eyes began scanning the audience, falling upon our faces one by one.
“The Jewish culture is three-thousand years old,” he said, slowly. “That culture has been passed down to you in an unbroken chain. You do not have the right to break that three-thousand-year-old chain by marrying outside the faith. YOU DO NOT HAVE THAT RIGHT!”
And just like that, the spell was broken. The happy, among-my-people feeling drained from my body as if a cork had been pulled from the sole of my foot.
In college I had dated, very briefly, an orthodox Jewish boy with black hair and green eyes and the cutest little gap between his front teeth. Even though we had nothing in common, I’d fantasized about what it would be like to marry him. I’d have a clear role in life, well-defined loyalties, a distinct place in the community. It might be nice, I thought. Easier.
That’s what it would be like, I realized, to accept Israel’s embrace, to reach out and take those pamphlets on “Volunteer Opportunities in Israel” and “Making Aliyah.” I knew kids who returned from Birthright trips fired up with a sense of purpose and belonging—the success stories. They’d go back to the homeland after college, marry an Israeli, wind up doing their Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their parents would be thrilled.
It would be easier. But it wouldn’t be me.
I’d like to visit Israel again, but this time on my own terms. My husband and I are thinking of going next summer. We’ll buy slabs of halva and bags of dried sumac at the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem and scoop up piles of creamy hummus with pita bread in Tel Aviv cafes. We’ll hike Masada in the glowing dawn, then float like seals in the Dead Sea beneath a pink sky. We’ll see things I wasn’t allowed to see on the Birthright trip, like the sunlight streaming through the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the lively neighborhood markets of the Muslim Quarter.
Yes, my husband. When my grandmother met my grad-student boyfriend, by then my fiancé, she declared him “a lovely boy.” She was dying then, and we’d gone to visit her in Florida knowing—even though she didn’t—that she wouldn’t be able to make it to our wedding. Later, after we’d flown home, she said to my aunt, “He’s not Jewish, you know.” But that was O.K., she added—he was a lovely boy, and we were in love. She couldn’t wait to dance at our wedding.
Emily Matchar is a freelance culture writer and Lonely Planet guidebook author. In the line of duty she’s hot-wired a pickup truck, ridden up a Mexican volcano on a horse with a wooden saddle, and eaten at thirteen different Memphis barbecue joints in 36 hours (not recommended). A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Emily studied English and Spanish at Harvard University. Now she writes for publications like Salon, The Washington Post, Men’s Journal, Outside, Gourmet, and many others. See more of her writing at www.emilymatchar.com.
K
ATE McCAHILL
Spiral-Bound
She found what she was seeking in the last place she looked.
The day I met Teddy, the heat and the grimy streets of Pune had mixed a muggy haze outside, which leached its way into the bookstore, slicking our foreheads and necks. As I examined the travel section, the bell above the door clanged, and Teddy stood for a moment in the doorway, backlit by the sun, and then walked to where I stood, so close I could hear him breathing. I watched from the corner of my eye as he scanned the horror novels and selected an old hardcover. I caught a glimpse of the curling binding: Carrie, by Stephen King. The bell above the bookstore door clanged again; hot wind blew in.
Teddy was a tall black man with close, tight curls and white teeth, save for a brown one toward the molars, which he’d learned to hide by keeping the left side of his mouth closed. Because of this, he talked with only half his mouth, and that, combined with the rotting tooth behind full lips, gave him a sly, crafty look. I wouldn’t learn why he smiled the way he did until later, of course, and so on the day he walked into the bookshop, all I saw was the crooked smile. He was careful about hiding the tooth, practiced at concealing it after so many years. We were four hours northeast of Mumbai, in a city known mostly for an ashram built by the guru Osho.
Teddy’s eyes sidled to mine as we browsed, but I looked away. Aman, my host, had warned me of certain people on my first night in this city. There were those who came to Pune for the money that could be made selling drugs to hippies at the ashram; there were the ones who slipped pills into tourists’ coffees at the German bakery, or took them away by motorbike into the night. Aman was a friend of a friend, a second cousin of a farmer I’d met picking apples near Dehradun, and I figured he was exaggerating a little, protective and trying to scare me into being extra-careful. Still, I took the horror novel in Teddy’s hands as a sign; I kept my eyes averted and continued to browse.
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