by Adi Alsaid
“I was going to tell you about David,” Ñaño Toto said. “I wanted to tell you before the others. You know you’re my number one person.”
“Then why are you leaving?” But I knew why. I had a feeling in my gut. Also, I had read the text message that wasn’t meant for me.
“Because I met someone. I love him and we want to start a life together.” He looked at me. I made sure that I didn’t look away when I told him that I loved him.
We drove in silence all the way home. My mom and grandma and Lily would come home with tía Felicia way after midnight. But for a few hours we had the house to ourselves. We knew that things were going to be different. Or maybe they wouldn’t. But no matter what, I’ll be there because my uncle will need me when he brings David home to meet the family, and I will be there just like he was for me my whole life.
Get ready for a new school year, Yoda. There’s the Halloween dance at the end of next month, and I have to bake a cake to make up for the one I ruined. I have to decide if some friendships are worth saving or letting go. I have to try to teach my family to speak, because now I’m certain of how powerful words can be. It’s a whole lot of firsts. I feel like I’m changing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for all of it to happen at once. But I can only ever be the girl I’ve always been. Ecuadorkian and proud of it.
Love,
Paola
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zoraida Córdova is the author of many fantasy novels including Incendiary, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: A Crash of Fate, the Brooklyn Brujas series, and the Vicious Deep trilogy. Her novel Labyrinth Lost won the International Latino Book Award for Best Young Adult Novel in 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft, and Come On In. She is the co-editor of the anthology Vampires Never Get Old. Zoraida was born in Ecuador and raised in Queens, New York. When she isn’t working on her next novel, she’s planning a new adventure.
FLEEING, LEAVING, MOVING
Adi Alsaid
For Shmuli to exist, borders had needed to be crossed.
Now came another. He had a student visa printed into his passport that told him so, made the move official, despite his trepidation. He would not die on the crossing, there was no risk of that at all. The plane, maybe, but no more risk than anyone took on any given day.
This was merely a matter of paperwork and lines at the airport. This was not like the Syrian border in 1948. His grandmother, a baby then, had wanted to wail for the discomfort of the journey, but a hand had been clamped over her mouth so that the British soldiers, the Lebanese soldiers, the many men out there looking for human beings not allowed to go from one place to another, would not hear her distress. That hand might have almost killed her, his grandmother always said, but it saved her, too. Silenced her into survival.
No such danger for Shmuli, though there had been a moment when his earphones weren’t all the way in and he hit Play before boarding the flight, and someone had cast a dirty glance his way.
Yes, without mere survival, without that hand clamped over his grandmother’s infant mouth, Shmuli would not be on that plane, would not be on the planet at all. 1948, notably, would have ended him, and 1941, too; probably many other examples could have been dug up before that. Years when the world would have ended Shmuli’s grandparents or great-grandparents or some other descendant had they not escaped from one place to the other. The accounts of many of those years, however, were simply lost. His great-grandparents had survived 1941 and 1948; they had crossed away from danger, and so Shmuli existed.
Shmuli, though, did not exist on mere survival. He was a specific human being, unmatched by any other human being who was living during his time, or, indeed, any who had come before. Not in skills, or any particular sort of excellence (although he was a terrific sleeper, and not too shabby at video games and school), but merely in the specific details that made him who he was. The way, for example, that after a meal he pushed himself away from the table, turned parallel to it, and crossed his legs as he digested. He did this only because he had learned the behavior from his father. His father learned the behavior from his own father, who had done it only because the dining room where he’d lived in Yaffo did not have space between the table and the wall to properly relax after a meal the way he had been able to do in Plovdiv, and so he was forced to turn parallel to the table.
Shmuli would not have been Shmuli if he did not sit this way after a meal. Anyone who knew him would say so. His friends constantly pointed it out, laughed about it, would miss it now that he was leaving them and no one was there to turn awkwardly away from the table.
And for Shmuli to sit this way after a meal, be it kebab or falafel or bife de chorizo, his grandparents had to have left Bulgaria for Israel. Yes, yes, his grandparents would have died if they had not left. But the kitchen. The kitchen taught Shmuli’s grandfather, Solomon, to sit this way.
And Shmuli’s father, Itzhak, watched him do it over and over again—push himself back, lean one elbow on the table, turn his body, and cross his legs. Sometimes he would chew languidly on a toothpick while he did this, and sometimes, tired from his day at work, he would cover his eyes with his hand and briefly nap. But always, he sat this way. For years and years, Shmuli’s father watched Solomon and learned the behavior the way children so naturally pick up their parents’ quirks. By the time Itzhak was a teenager running around the beaches of Tel Aviv, a surfboard tucked beneath his armpit, he was doing it too.
Either Shmuli picked it up the same way—watching his father do it over and over again—or the repetition worked its way so deep into Itzhak’s muscle memory that it reached the genes, reached the DNA itself, and he passed it along to his son so that his son had no chance to resist it.
The first time Shmuli sat the same way, the kitchen in Plovdiv was long forgotten, as were the ones in Yaffo and in Tel Aviv. Now they sat in a dining room in Buenos Aires, where Shmuli, a chubby and happy seven-year-old, adopted another one of the facets of his life that would shape who he was: Spanish.
God, Spanish. Imagine if Shmuli had not crossed the border into Argentina and discovered Spanish. It wasn’t so much that Shmuli thought in Spanish, it was that his whole world was colored by it, its sentences flowing like rivers, its sounds the only music Shmuli could move to. Sure, he knew Hebrew. Passably anyway. But to know a language was not to be in that language, not necessarily. And if Shmuli had been raised in Tel Aviv instead of Buenos Aires, he would not have had the language which he loved so dearly that he’d run out at sixteen and gotten it imprinted onto his skin, to his parents’ deep chagrin, to the rolling taking place in his grandparents’ graves.
Yes, he spoke English too. Well enough that he sometimes made a little money online by writing American kids’ essays for them (a racket born out of a slow summer break in January, while kids in the northern hemisphere shivered in their boots on their way to school), well enough that he was on that plane on the way to an American university. But without Spanish, the Shmuli that had come to exist because of mere luck, because of his ancestors’ survival, would not truly be Shmuli. He’d be some other kid. One who couldn’t reach across the airplane aisle like he was doing now and helping the old lady fill out her customs form.
* * *
Shmuli’s parents had lived some extra risk too, but rather than experiencing it while fleeing, they’d chosen to take themselves out of harm’s way when they left Israel and its wars. A beautiful place, sure, but why subject children to that? They could take their children away without clamping a hand over their gasping little mouths. They had come from somewhere else, kind of, and felt no loyalty to the land. Appreciation, sure. But the world was wide, and so Itzhak and Dehlia took their two children and their few belongings and they went.
* * *
What a difference the verbs made, Shmuli thought, as the
plane touched down. Fleeing, leaving, moving. The world seemed to have very different reactions to each, somehow hating people more the less choice they had.
If you had options and chose the United States, could afford the visas and the tuition, you were the right kind of immigrant. If the only choice you had was to leave or die, to maybe die in the act of leaving, to live a harder life than everyone else in the new country, well, then, you were a scourge.
This was the source of Shmuli’s trepidations: a country that would be angered by his existence, by his ancestors’ unwillingness to remain in one place. A country that would not understand that the borders his ancestors had crossed were yes, yes, yes, crucial and all that: but they were more than that. They’d made him who he was.
Plenty of people would find his story fascinating and welcome him with open arms. Even those people who were pissed that he’d come wouldn’t recognize him, because of the color of his skin, because of his lack of accent, because they couldn’t point to one place on the map and say, that, that’s the place you should return to.
But they might have hated his grandparents. Huddled on a boat across the Caspian Sea, hidden under blankets across the Syrian Desert. How could Shmuli live in this place with people who might hate his ancestors’ survival?
* * *
Anyway, in the history of his family, a crossed border had always been the right move, complicated though it might have been. So Shmuli was looking forward to how this move might change him. How would it add to this unique person who existed unmatched in the world.
He stepped forward in line, his hand clutching his manila envelope of documents, nervous, as if he was getting away with something. He eyed the three agents assigned to his side of the arrival hall, trying to suss out kindness within them. There was a chance, he knew, that they could turn him away. Find him suspicious for one reason or another, despite the visa, despite the envelope. They had that power, though Shmuli knew they were much more likely to use it if his passport said Syria instead of Argentina, if his skin were darker, his English not as good.
Would it always feel like that, in this country? Like he was getting away with something?
* * *
Sixty years earlier, Shmuli’s maternal grandmother, Deborah, had felt that way too. Even after her family had left the ma’abara, and the recency of her arrival, or its origin, could not be so easily discovered by the others. Still the feeling seemed to follow her like a stench, like an extra limb growing from the side of her head, drawing leers. From the camp to Jerusalem to the kibbutz to Tel Aviv.
“I knew nothing of the journey,” she wanted to tell them. “I know nothing of that other place.” They had, most of them, crossed borders. But it seemed to matter which ones, and how. She had lived in the camps on the outskirts of the city, and they had not, so she must have been broken in some way, less deserving of this place this Jewish diaspora had fled to (and in doing so had caused others to flee).
The immense flood of people had slowed by then, some even pouring back out to wherever it was they’d come from, or to a third place, like Deborah’s daughter would eventually do. The camps had all shut down too, and Deborah knew that a lot of the feeling was simply that: a feeling. Still, it felt like she was getting away with something. Like her parents had broken some infallible law of humanity and were on land that was not meant for them. It was meant for some other Jewish family, one who’d survived the Holocaust, one who’d come from a more Jewish place. The right kind of immigrant, if any.
This might have been why, when Itzhak and Dehlia, years later, announced they were going to Argentina, Deborah didn’t hesitate to say she would follow them across the world.
* * *
Shmuli stepped forward in line. A little boy who’d probably been awake too long was wailing at his mother’s side, tugging at her hand, yelling that one syllable that children in almost every language seemed to have deep within them: “Ma!” Several people, likely as tired and worn down by the day as the child was, cast dirty glances at the mother, who was attempting to juggle the carriage, her purse, the passports, a half-eaten sleeve of cookies.
He wanted to reach out and offer a hand, though those immigration lines always felt so disapproving, like the rules had all changed and any one of your actions could be punished. Plus, she was at the other end of the line, making it hard for him to simply tuck his manila folder under his arm and provide her with some momentary respite.
It felt wrong not to be able to help, like a cramp or an itch he couldn’t scratch, and so he looked away from the mother, scanned the other faces in line. There was something great about the US, how difficult it was to know if someone was local or foreign by appearance alone. Looking at the line for residents, at the foreign line, at the customs agents themselves, it was impossible to distinguish between them with any clarity.
Another step forward, only a few steps away now from officially entering. Weird, too, how you could be in a country but not officially in it until you left a certain part of the airport. What a new thing that was, delineating non-country zones within countries. Shmuli wondered how many more borders had been created since the inception of airports, since the human invention of lines between countries had been blurred by other human inventions.
* * *
In 1941, his paternal grandmother was whisked away from Bulgaria with nothing but what she could hold in her hands. They were small hands, and so she carried little: her pillowcase, her favorite doll, and a saltshaker, because she felt the need to grab just one last thing and it was the only one in sight her hands could hold.
In the future, people would hear this story of fleeing so many times, yet find a way to separate it from the stories that continued. They would forget that the tragedy lay not just in the reason for the fleeing, but in how many succeeded in fleeing only to be turned away. Shmuli’s grandparents had not been turned away, and so he existed.
That saltshaker shaped Shmuli, too. Quite literally, because he was ten when he flung it across the room toward his friend, an unfortunate game of catch gone wrong. When he crossed over in his bare feet to the shards littering the floor, one split his toe open. The scar had faded somewhat, but he could still see it curling around the edge of his foot whenever he clipped his toenails. A pinkish white wink, a scythe. It still, to that very day, made him feel a pang of guilt that had far outlasted the pain of the wound itself. He could still see his grandmother’s face as she swept the pieces together and gathered them into a plastic bag, which she didn’t have the heart to throw out.
She’d died a few years later with the bag still in her bedside table, in the back of the drawer next to her bracelets and passport and the pictures she’d kept of her grandchildren, each one of them a miracle made possible by migration.
* * *
Finally, Shmuli was called forward to an officer. The officer was a black woman who, in his brief amateur observation from the line (not brief enough), seemed to be the friendliest of the officers. He stepped up to the window, set his passport down, the customs form tucked into the page where his visa had been stamped a few weeks earlier.
He said good morning, wondering if his relative lack of accent made him less suspicious or more. She didn’t seem to care one way or another and simply asked him for his I-20. He dug his fingers into the envelope, flipping through all the documents he knew he didn’t need but his mom had made him bring anyway. In the adjacent line, an officer was speaking heavily accented Spanish at a woman who was struggling to understand. Shmuli wanted to tell her that if she pretended she didn’t need this, they’d be more okay with her. But of course he didn’t say that, didn’t know if the thought had an ounce of truth to it or was just something that was on his mind because of all these things that had shaped him.
His own customs agent typed away, barely looking at him. Then she reached for the I-20 and started to rise from her seat. “Come with me,” she said, his passport in her h
and. She led him to a room with six or seven rows of chairs all facing a window. There were a handful of people in the room, all looking bored and nervous to varying degrees. Shmuli wanted to rail against this decision to bring him into this room; he wanted to go collect his bag, wanted to make it to his university soon, wanted to enter this new stage of his life. But deep down he’d been expecting something like this all along, and knew that a complaint here would only worsen his mood. It was a luxury his relatives did not have: complaints about waiting rooms.
* * *
When they left for Buenos Aires, Dehlia and Itzhak were grilled by friends and relatives about why they would go to a place in such economic disarray. “It’s actually turning around for them,” they said. “The shekel will go far, and the rockets cannot reach.”
“It’s been a good year,” their friends said, meaning not that many bombings. Meaning: how can you leave home?
“It will continue to be one,” Dehlia and Itzhak answered, and raised their glasses.
In Argentina the streets still showed signs of riots, but the glass had been cleaned up and stores were opening, and there was no waiting around for life to come to them. At the synagogue they met Jewish families who had them over for shabbat, though they’d never made it a priority to celebrate back in Israel. Shmuli and his little brother made friends, started rolling their tongues with ease. They played soccer in the streets and the parks, which would make the grassy fields of Shmuli’s future university’s intramural fields a luxury.