Questioning Return

by Beth Kissileff

  Would anyone take her in this year? Who would be her friends? She knew that part of the Fulbright fellowship was meeting with the others once a month and presenting their work to each other. She always had things in common with other future academics: similar priorities and values, a shared frame of reference, even a knowledge of the quirks and flamboyancies of the most prominent senior people in each field. It was easier, Wendy generally found, to be friends with someone who shared something in common with you—someone who knew someone you knew, had been to the same school or camp, knew a place you did. She remembered one of her friends telling her as she left Princeton, “Maybe you will find the best friend you’ve ever had there.”

  She was again jostled by someone at her side. She knew that, somewhere in the airport, there was a shared cab to Jerusalem, but wasn’t sure how to find it. Wendy was dazed, blinking in the bright summer sun, trying to find her way; but there were tears in her eyes. From the intensity of the sun? From exhaustion at not having slept well on the plane? Or from a larger anxiety about what she was doing here at all?

  “Do you know where you’re going?” a familiar voice asked.

  “No,” Wendy responded, turning to see Professor Lamdan, now pushing an airport luggage cart filled with suitcases and boxes of Little Tykes and Fisher Price toys, gifts for his grandchildren. She noted his six blue numbers on the forearm that carefully gripped the cart, and asked why she was feeling sorry for herself. How, she wondered, had Lamdan figured out where he was going?

  She looked at him gratefully and said, “I’m looking for a shared cab to Jerusalem.”

  “Come, it’s over here,” he said gesturing. “It must be a bit overwhelming to be here for the first time. For me, every time, it’s a miracle. The Gemara says the air of Eretz Yisrael makes one wise.” He stopped and paused for breath, his intake of the molecules of the Holy Land’s air slow and careful.

  She followed after him, pushing her own off-kilter cart—the heaviness of the duffel bags making her progress forward an exercise in awkwardness—and marveling at the dignity in his gait. He looked weak, because he was so physically skinny, yet strong, striding in front of her, pushing his luggage cart. What did it cost him, that single-mindedness of putting one foot in front of the other? Maybe it was indeed heroic to keep going, no matter what.

  Having followed Lamdan, putting his one foot in front of the other, she and he were at the end of the path from the airport to the parking area, where cars were everywhere, horns honking. He maneuvered his cart in front of the van they would share, spoke to the driver in Hebrew, and gestured at Wendy, indicating she was coming also. She stood next to him, catching only the words “yofee,” “fine,” and “Yerushalayim,” Jerusalem. The driver yanked their bags off the luggage carts and heaved them to the storage area in the rear of the van. Lamdan gestured to Wendy to get in. There were three rows of seats—the back one had a mother and two young children in it; her older two were in the middle row. Lamdan got in and filled out that row, so Wendy sat by the window in the front row of seats. She rested her head against the window of the van and closed her eyes.

  TWO

  Walking in Jerusalem

  Jerusalem was a place where history is not a one-way street; here the resurrection of old glories still seemed possible.

  —SAMUEL HEILMAN, A Walker in Jerusalem

  Friday morning, Wendy was walking around her apartment, getting ready for her day’s task, to go to the shuk, open-air market, and buy things she’d need this year for her place. Wendy picked up the metal grogger on a shelf in the living room. It was a small, cheap thing with its caricatured pictures of the dense Persian king, his heinously evil advisor and rapturously beautiful Jewish queen portrayed in clashing tones of turquoise blue, hot pink, and neon orange. Was it a sacrilege to throw it away? She had misgivings about whether it was worth saving; yet it made a slight mewl of protest as it was being tossed to the garbage pile, the plastic cogs grinding angrily in complaint. Would its made-in-Taiwan apparatus be strong enough to hold up to repeated ritual protests against the evil Haman? It seemed to personify uncertainty, which was what led to her desire to keep it, unnecessary and ugly though it was.

  The prohibitive cost of overseas shipping meant that each item from her Princeton apartment took on a larger significance. When she was packing that place up, she felt like, with each piece of her apartment she took apart or discarded, a bit of her identity was being obliterated, rubbed away—a bit of finger gone here, a brown eye there, now some locks of her black shoulder-length curly hair. If her stuff defined her, with less of it, she was lesser too. She remembered seeing a billboard for a real estate agency: “Nothing defines you more than the home in which you live.” Despite her graduate student status and lack of both cash and the ability to reside in this place longer than an academic year, she wanted the things in her apartment to be part of her self-definition. She hoped it was a scintillating agglomeration of things. She wanted a visitor to her apartment to pick up any random item—book, poster, vase—and know there would be a captivating story behind it. It all added up, she hoped, to a picture of herself that was appealing—as a friend, or as a love interest.

  She replaced the grogger on the shelf and tried to list what she needed. Extra kitchen items. She would use the pots for whatever she wanted so she wouldn’t have to worry about using the kosher pots in the apartment the wrong way. In her apartment in Princeton, Wendy didn’t cook much beyond spaghetti, eggs, and soy hot dogs. Cooking was a skill graduate students at Princeton did not hone. Friendships and parties were not focused on food—if people wanted to be in a group they went out to a bar or restaurant. If the department had a potluck gathering, people brought things from a takeout store. Cooking was not part of the life of the mind, and it brought no one closer to tenure, the scale by which all was rated in the world of graduate student priorities. As they frequently reminded themselves, mantra-like, the work is all that matters.

  Wendy wandered around, getting ready to leave her apartment, looking for her sunglasses, keys, and wallet. She hoped, looking at the sunny space where her still-unpurchased desk would go, this would be where she’d begin her dissertation. There was something magical about the thought—this is where it would begin. How do I really know where I came from? Hadn’t Freud written that the mystery of origin is one of the greatest to humans? Enmeshed within this city, woven tightly into this place that is the omphalos mundi, the absolute center of the religious world, source and foundation of three religions, would be the beginnings of the lifetime opus of Wendy Dora Goldberg, sure to be of field-changing, paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering proportions. She laughed aloud at her own grandiosity.

  Before leaving, she put a small notebook in her purse, remembering the admonition of Violet Dohrmann, the anthropologist on her dissertation committee: “An anthropologist doesn’t know what she thinks of a situation until she goes home and writes about it.”

  After going over her list of needed items, she left her apartment and walked down Mishael Street to Yehoshua ben Nun, a quiet residential street with bougainvillea framing the stone gates of the apartment houses. She admired the trees. Eucalyptus? Hopefully, she’d learn the names of the Middle Eastern flora. She noticed the cats trawling the green garbage containers for sustenance; they were beginning to have a certain charm, scrawny and disorderly though they were. The quality of the sunlight attracted her notice. Did the light somehow pierce things that normally didn’t respond to its rays? But not knowing the names of the things that surrounded her, or even why she noticed the light, made her feel alien, appreciative as she was growing of Jerusalem’s beauty.

  There was a meow from a feral cat somewhere in the alley, and a scurrying of paws. Wendy remembered the note of caution her friend Leora Lerner gave her when she came to pick up Wendy’s cat and care for him for the year. Leora had spent time studying in Jerusalem before college, and visited relatives here frequently.

  Leora had cautioned her, “Do not adopt
a cat from the streets of Jerusalem. Once they’ve lived wild, they can’t be tamed. They don’t change.”

  Wendy remembered asking curiously, “Why can’t they change? People do. Or say they do—that’s the whole point of my study.”

  Leora had planted her hands firmly on her hips. Wendy recalled the gesture and intonation, as Leora opined, “Animals don’t.”

  Wendy moved away from the cat noises to see Rail’s Felafel across the street. She turned left, following the directions from her landlady how to exchange her American dollars for shekalim. She saw the money-exchange kiosk and entered a space with enough room for three or possibly four people to stand sideways and a window with a teller in front of her. Behind the teller was a blackboard with flags for different countries and the exchange rate for each currency posted. Wendy felt like she was engaging in some kind of illegal activity when she slid her hundred dollars in cash under the glass window. She felt furtive, pulling the cash out, glancing around, not wanting anyone to know where it came from or how much she had. She thought of the Off Track Betting windows she passed when she went through the George Washington Bridge bus terminal on the way from visiting her brother Joel and his family in New Jersey back to college at Columbia. At OTB, people slid things back and forth under the glass, hoping for profit and gain. As she took her four hundred shekel notes and some assorted change, she hoped she was not being cheated because it seemed like there were fewer shekalim than she’d thought there would be. Of course, she could look at the rate and do the math, but her concern was more that she didn’t quite know how things work in a new country.

  Walking out the door, she decided the OTB analogy wasn’t completely farfetched; this year was a bet. If she stayed here, hung around with religious people, listened, took notes, wrote it all up, she’d get material for a dissertation. Then she could get some articles out of it, get published and on conference panels, and get a job. But maybe not. She could be stuck in a series of one-year visiting positions—or none at all. Or, become so mired in the research that she’d never begin to actually write the thing. Or, worst of all, get so frustrated by the enormity and scope of the project that she’d just give up, and run straight to law school, screaming at the stupidity of having wasted four years as a graduate student with nothing to show for herself.

  For now, she would just enjoy getting to know a new place, discovering the small things that pleased her in the neighborhood. There was a movie theater on nearby Lloyd Cremieux Street, and bars and cafés lining Emek Refaim, the main drag. Every other store seemed to be either a hair salon or a store offering some kind of arty accessory: clothing or jewelry or housewares. There was a grocery store, a video store, and quite a few felafel and pizza places. At all times, there were people on the street, going to the stores, hanging out at cafés and restaurants. More than either New Bay or Princeton, there was street life. At all hours, people strolled the main boulevard, sat in outdoor cafés, and enjoyed being on the street.

  She noticed the street sign, Rahel Emainu, Rachel our mother. Streets named for biblical characters were so different from those in her parents’ neighborhood in New York, where streets were named for cities in North Carolina: Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Wilmington, Greensboro, Goldsboro, Asheville, Fayetteville. Wendy had always felt vaguely dislocated by living in a place that was planned to evoke vistas of elsewhere.

  She found the bus stop for Mahane Yehuda, the open-air market on Jaffa Road. She asked the driver to indicate to her where she should get off. The other passengers overheard. At her stop, Jewish grandmothers were gesturing to her in Hebrew, Russian, French, Spanish, and English that it was time for her to descend. She followed the others off the bus and watched as they fanned out through both the narrow covered stalls entirely full of shoppers and the wider outdoor area separating the two sections. She smelled fresh bread and saw a young Arab boy carrying stacks of pita on a wooden tray on his head, selling them ten in a plastic bag, which had condensation on it from the warmth of their freshness. She saw a booth that sold only spices, all with gorgeous colors: the deep rust of paprika, the bright yellow of turmeric, the fragrant green of basil and oregano, arrayed in large conical piles which the merchant scooped and weighed. There was one kiosk with just halvah, a sesame seed candy that came in a dazzling assortment of flavors: espresso, peanut butter, pistachio, and chocolate. She saw every kind of kosher fish available in Israel, arranged carefully on ice to keep it fresh. Other stalls had dried rice and beans, or all kinds of teas, salads, and meats.

  Everywhere she could hear vendors hawking their wares, screaming loudly, “Avatiach, hamesh shekel! Avatiach le’kvod shabbat.” She paused to look around, and one of the merchants beckoned to her and offered a taste of watermelon, avatiach. She bought half a melon to satisfy him, placed it in her backpack, and immediately regretted having bought the heaviest item first. She passed a store with delicious-looking salads of all kinds in a freestanding refrigerated display case and ordered a number of them. When she finished ordering, she handed over her money, holding up fingers for the number of bills the vendor requested. Walking away, she did the monetary conversion and realized she had spent almost forty bucks, a large sum for her student budget. She turned to the right to one of the many alleyways inside the shuk and found a group of stores all selling housewares. She purchased a spaghetti pot, a soup pot, a frying pan, and two plates, two cups, and silverware for less money than she paid for the salads.

  She went back outside, somehow finding the way through the winding alleys of the narrow shuk, all leading to the wide area between the two sides of the market, and looked for a bakery to get something to bring to dinner tonight with the cousin of her friend Leora from Princeton. She spotted the bakery with the longest line and figured it must be the best. She was usually impatient waiting in line, but somehow the smells emanating from inside the store, and the anticipation she felt seeing customers exit with looks of pronounced satisfaction on their faces, relaxed her. Her usual frustration with waiting in line was her feeling that she was doing nothing; now she was listening to the Hebrew around her, absorbing the atmosphere. On her turn to order, she chose entirely by visual cues, pointing at the items she wanted and holding up her fingers to indicate the amount.

  Walking back to the bus stop on Rehov Yaffo, Wendy reflected on how much more satisfying this experience was than a trip to an ordinary American grocery store. At the shuk, all the food is on display; there is no layer of artificiality, plastic wrap or anything else, between seller and consumer. She remembered her grandmother Essie saying that when the A and P supermarket first opened, she was positive it would be a huge financial flop because no one would be willing to pay more for lettuce with plastic on it. Maybe that was the difference between America and Israel—people were willing to pay for barriers between themselves and their food, to obstruct their encounter with sources of nourishment.

  At Mahane Yehuda, the smells of the fresh pita and spices and the alluring look of all the fresh foods enticed Wendy to spend much more than she had planned. Would this too be a metaphor for the rest of her year, becoming sucked in to something she hadn’t known about, released from her usual level of detachment from ordinary things of life like food? Would she be pulled in unexpected ways to things she hadn’t anticipated?

  She liked the lack of pretense in the market, the obviousness of vendors yelling for customers, the pushing and shoving of the crowds of Friday morning shoppers trying to get the best bargains. Even if she didn’t celebrate Sabbath, it was her Jewish culture, not Sunday, emphasized as a day of rest here. She’d never thought about being excluded by Sunday, but now that she was here, she liked this activity filled, errand-doing Friday. Wendy found her bus stop and successfully navigated her bags and bundles aboard the bus for the return trip, excited that she was able to recognize the corner stop of Rahel Emeinu and Emek Refaim.

  Wendy now had a bit of time before she and her landlady, Amalia Hausman, would share a cab to Amalia’s granddaughter’s ne
w apartment for a Shabbat evening meal. Wendy had heard about this apartment because Amalia was the great-aunt of her Princeton friend Leora, who facilitated the arrangement when Wendy wasn’t sure how to find a place to live. Amalia was in her seventies and had lived in Israel most of her life; she was fortunate in her birth to a German Jewish family astute enough to leave their fatherland for Israel in the early 1930s. Leora’s grandfather, Amalia’s brother, had lit out for the States as a young man, met an American woman, and raised his family there. Leora had told Wendy the story about her great-grandfather, Amalia’s father, who owned a silver factory. One day, he was asked to put a Nazi flag up over his property. He told his wife the time had come to leave, and they did, in 1933. Neither Amalia’s father nor her mother had other close relatives who survived. Wendy and Leora were both fascinated with alternate possibilities and spent hours discussing what if: Would either of them have known when to leave? What if Leora’s grandfather had remained in Israel? What if Wendy’s great-grandparents had stayed in Poland, not come to America? The speculation made Wendy realize that there are so many plausible ways in which anyone’s life could be completely different, something that she wanted to get her subjects to admit, but that many, with their belief that God was guiding them constantly, refused to.

  After putting her groceries in the fridge and her pots on the shelves, Wendy had two hours before dinner at Shani’s. She decided to try to do some reading. She gazed at her bookshelf. Textual Soulmates: Professors on the Texts They Love, was an anthology purchased out of voyeurism and curiosity, to see whether there was still ardor and enthusiasm in the ranks of the tenured. That was something that worried her—would she retain her zest for a subject, any subject, over time, or would what started as passionate interest devolve into the chore of necessary deadlines and obligations, devoid of joy or thrill? Wendy had read a few of the essays by professors she knew and knew of, but, still, it was nice to be reminded that many professors do their work out of interest and love. Holding the volume, knowing it existed and was full of excitement for its topic, reassured her somehow. She wanted to love her work and to interest others in it, get them to love it as well.