The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  Leyla gave me a sideways glance whenever I talked about Ali. “I know you miss home,” she said. “And he may look like it, but he’s not it.”

  Leyla is scary smart. Sometimes it is intimidating, other times infuriating. At twenty-three she had already lived in half a dozen countries. She became an observant Muslim of her own volition on a trip to Africa; her secular Egyptian parents hadn’t raised her that way. I couldn’t understand her choice to become religious, but I admired her resolve. We talked about everything, questioned everything, including the hijab, including God, including my commitment issues and my inexplicable attraction to Ali.

  “You have nothing in common,” she said. Ali didn’t read. His favorite movie was Analyze This. He made no sense in my world.

  Still, we had the army. We had backgammon. We had summers and heat and food and music and language. To Leyla I said, “I know. It’s physical, okay? It’s not like I want him to be my boyfriend.” Then, cheekily: “Think of it as my contribution to world peace.” Leyla rolled her eyes, not dignifying my quip with a response.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST TIME Ali and I hung out alone was at a peace march. George W. Bush had just announced his plan for invading Iraq, and worry about the impending war was palpable. Our Iraqi friends were especially concerned; their families still lived there. We all met downtown and marched in the rain, yelling, “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!” We were invigorated by the energy of the crowd, buoyed by the sounds of our voices becoming one with the mass.

  By then Leyla and I had gotten together with Ali, Ibrahim, and Firaz a few times, mostly at bars and a couple of art openings, and Ali and I had spent some time chatting, or I did, uttering drunken nonsense I later regretted. At the peace rally Ali and I lost the group and found shelter from the rain in the lobby of an office building, where we finally had a serious, sober conversation. I took pictures of him that day. In one photograph, he stands in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery like a tourist, stiff in his high-rise jeans and old-fashioned leather jacket. He had asked me to take that one. Another is a close-up shot of his Roman profile, looking away with a half-smile, appearing shy, self-conscious.

  * * *

  —

  ONE EVENING LEYLA and I go to the apartment Ali shares with Firaz in the suburb of Burnaby, to watch The Prince of Egypt. We end up staying late, after the trains stop running, so Firaz and Ali laid out mattresses on the floor. Leyla and Firaz fall asleep beside us, but Ali and I stay up talking in whispers. We speak of our troubled homelands, share stories from our days as reluctant soldiers, from our time sitting in shelters, listening to bombs or missiles falling, wearing gas masks. I tell him that my first suitor had arrived at our house with a gas mask during the first Gulf War. “Thanks a lot for that, by the way,” I say. Ali laughs so hard he can’t talk.

  Night sneaks in through a crack in the window, the smell of dry, cool air, of no rain. We rest our heads on the pillows and Ali starts singing, softly, in Arabic. I close my eyes and give in to the honeyed sound of the throaty, familiar syllables. I fall asleep to it as though it were the sweetest lullaby.

  In the middle of the night, we cling to each other, and Ali strokes my body with large, warm hands. A storm begins brewing in my belly. Then it all ends before it starts. “Go to sleep,” he says, when I turn to him.

  “Why?”

  “It’s better that way.”

  I wake up in the morning wondering if I had dreamed it all.

  * * *

  —

  “WHY DON’T YOU ever call me?” I ask him the next time we meet. After the night I stayed over, he disappeared. Weeks went by. The one time we were all supposed to get together, he canceled last minute, leaving a message on Ibrahim’s phone.

  We are sitting on the swings at Grandview Park. Our friends are at Bukowski’s, now our regular bar on Commercial Drive. When I stepped outside for a smoke, I asked Ali to join me, then grabbed him by the hand and brought him here, to the park. It’s my spot. I have been coming here at night since summer. I’d smoke a joint, swing as high as I could, and watch the city lights flicker in the distance. Sometimes an arctic wind would sneak under layer after layer of clothing, stabbing me with ice needles, and I’d be seized by a sweet pang of loneliness, the thrill of anonymity. I’d look around with surprise that I was here, of all places. Half a world away from home. Alone. Free.

  “You left that morning without saying goodbye,” he says. He does not look at me.

  “I left a note. I had to go to work.”

  “You should have woken me up.”

  We swing side by side, until we tire and slow down. I grab the rope of his swing and pull myself closer to him. I can smell his cologne: fresh, sharp.

  “So…Mexico,” Ali says, out of nowhere.

  “Oh no. I changed my mind,” I say. “I think I should go east. Thailand, maybe. It makes more sense.”

  “Of course.” He stands up, brushes off his jeans. “Shall we go back?”

  Disappointment sours my mouth.

  That night, on the phone from Israel, my sister calls me a heartless bitch for leading Ali on. She does that in the nicest of ways. It’s 4:00 A.M. Vancouver time; on the other end I hear traffic, the hum of midday Tel Aviv. Earlier that day a suicide attack had killed eleven civilians on a bus in Jerusalem. Hamas had taken responsibility. But my sister never mentions such things and I never ask. Our time to speak is too precious to waste on bad news. I sit on the bench outside the apartment door, lean my head against the wooden panels, and chain-smoke.

  “Do you think that maybe he likes you?” she says. “Maybe he doesn’t show it in the way you’re used to. He’s from a different culture.”

  She’s right, of course. Ali is unlike any guy I’ve ever met. It’s like he is from a different generation altogether. The East Van hippie boys are so much easier.

  “Just be careful,” she says.

  When I wake up the next morning, I am overcome by hangover and remorse. I regret the stupid things I say when I’m drunk, feel sorry for coming on too strong, for playing with his heart. I tell myself to let Ali go, move on.

  That weekend, Leyla and I go dancing at a Middle Eastern night at the Anza Club, an event hall in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. A guy in white pants, hair smoothed by too much gel, zeros in on me. He tells me he’s from Lebanon. He is movie-star handsome and he knows it, dancing around me, singing to me with animated facial expressions, hand mocking his beating heart. The whole thing is over-the-top. Still, when he asks, I give him my phone number just to see his reaction. He stares at my name on the note with a frown, abandoning the theatrics.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Israel,” I say and watch the smile fade from his face.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIME AT THE end of that fall, Leyla takes off her hijab. One day I come home and her curls, tightly wound, are free. She’s always been stunning. Now she is luminous.

  We spend Christmas together, a few Muslims, one Jewish girl, and Rana’s boyfriend, who is Anglo-Canadian. We cook turkey with all the fixings.

  Leyla steals sips from my wineglass. She has borrowed my low-neck blouse, my dangly earrings and tight jeans. At some point in the night, she stands at the doorway smoking my cigarettes, blows smoke to the side, and announces, “Look at me, I’m Ayelet.” Everyone laughs.

  Ali and I are cordial. I don’t touch him. I don’t flirt.

  After dinner, the boys teach us a traditional Iraqi game called Mheibis. Rana volunteers her ring and Leyla one of her silk scarves. The game is generally played in two teams, but the boys modify the rules to accommodate a smaller group. One player walks by and covertly slips the ring into someone’s hand. Another player has to find the ring while the rest of us exercise our best poker faces. It is a game of deception and trickery, of car
eful observation. Psychological warfare. The player in charge of finding the ring can interrogate, manipulate, or intimidate in order to expose the ring bearer. When it is Ali’s turn to hide the ring, he stops by me and looks me in the eye long enough for me to miss a beat. His hand grabs my hand under the cloth. He does not slip the ring into it. I do my best to mask my relief; I am a terrible liar. My face tells the truth even when my words don’t.

  On New Year’s Eve we go to Bukowski’s and some drunken girl asks us if we are all one family. “No, we’re just all Arabs,” Leyla says. We look at each other and smile. We do look a little bit like family. When it’s midnight, we hug and kiss each other on the cheek. Ali’s lips just barely miss mine.

  In January, Palestinian suicide bombers explode in Tel Aviv’s central bus station, killing twenty-three. My family doesn’t call. Leyla and I march from Library Square to the Vancouver Art Gallery to protest the planned invasion of Iraq with thousands of people chanting “Stop the war” and “Drop sanctions, not bombs.” Protesters form a drum circle on the steps of the art gallery. We listen to a lecture about the UN sanctions against Iraq at Simon Fraser University. We attend a candlelit vigil. It feels good to be a part of a movement, to be engaged in something positive, proactive, when back home everything is such a disaster. It makes me feel a little less helpless.

  When we go out at night, Leyla starts ordering her own drinks. At home, she smokes my pot. The two of us get rowdy at Super Valu while shopping for Nutella. We stumble back home from the bar singing our hearts out. One day, stoned, we look at The Province’s cover page in a newsstand and see a picture from a peace rally we attended the day before. Leyla leans in and squints at the wide-angle photo of the crowd. “Look!” she gasps. We are right in the middle of the photo, two tiny figures, mouths open in mid-chant, chins raised, expressions focused, earnest. We bend over laughing, tears in our eyes. I glance at the photo again; I love seeing the two of us captured on film, our friendship, our intentions, eternalized.

  I don’t see Ali for a while.

  * * *

  —

  LEYLA STARTS DATING a friend I introduced to her. A woman.

  “You know you’re going to hell, right?” Ibrahim tells me. Everyone laughs.

  “They’re calling me the Jewish devil,” I complain to Leyla. “They say it’s all my fault. The hijab. The drinking.”

  Leyla gives me a look. “Well, you did break my prayer stone.”

  “That was an accident!”

  She holds back a smile.

  One night, we lie together in her bed, talking. We’ve been sharing body products and laundry detergent and bedsheets for so long that we even smell the same, the way siblings and lovers do. Leyla lies on her side, studying me. “What would you do if you stayed?”

  I stiffen, immediately feeling like the air is sucked out of the room. “I don’t know.”

  “What about writing?”

  “What about it?”

  “Maybe you could take a program or something.”

  I stare out the window. It has been so long since I’ve written anything that I’ve begun to feel that the dream is dead. Maybe writing isn’t my calling, after all. And besides, I have no money for school and I couldn’t possibly write in English, so what’s the point? “It’s not that simple,” I say.

  “Sometimes I think you don’t really want to go,” Leyla says.

  “What? Why?”

  “You haven’t given notice at work. And you don’t have a ticket, or a plan.”

  But I have to go. Leaving is the only thing I know how to do. That seemed to be the one stable thing in my life, the ritual of picking up, throwing out or giving away the little I have, packing and taking off. That was what home had become for me. But then I think of leaving Leyla and my heart crumbles. It’s a familiar ache. It’s how I feel every time I leave Israel. My family.

  Leyla lies on her back, looks at the ceiling. “There must be something so limiting and lonely about needing to be free all the time.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I TELL my friends that I’ve decided to go to Montreal, they burst into laughter. “Montreal, at this time of year? Are you nuts?”

  But I’ve never experienced a real winter and I’m curious. Besides, tickets from Montreal to Asia are dirt cheap.

  It has started to rain, finally, after weeks of atypically dry weather, and I welcome it with gratitude, like something bottled has been released. I inhale the fresh smell of wet earth, admire streaks of lights reflecting on the pavement.

  Leyla is falling in love, and I hardly see her. As with everything she does, she is passionate, committed. I wonder how it feels to know something with such certainty, to believe in it with all you have, even when you fear it may not last. I can’t even commit to a brand of cigarettes. I haven’t seen our friends for a while: perhaps they’re busy; perhaps Leyla was the glue that kept us together. After a few days the novelty of the rain wears off and it’s another Vancouver winter: gloomy, wet to the bone.

  I take my citizenship test, buy a one-way ticket to Montreal, and prepare to move my stuff into storage: twelve boxes, a backpack full of clothes, one rolled mattress, a duvet in a garbage bag.

  One day on the bus, a couple of weeks before I leave, a man sits next to me smelling of Ali’s cologne, and I suddenly ache for his warm hands, his winking eye, his guttural K. That evening I call Ali and invite him to the birthday party of a friend, an Algerian girl I had met at belly dancing class. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because Leyla has been sleeping at her girlfriend’s and I miss the sound of her key in the door, miss when she was my wife. Maybe it’s because I’m leaving soon; what harm can it do now?

  At the party, my friends—most of them immigrants themselves—don’t know what to make of Ali, of us. He stands out in his outdated attire, in his frozen smile—the smile I recognize from my first years in Canada, the smile I used to plaster on when I couldn’t follow the speed of conversation, didn’t get the joke, the cultural reference. He looks like he did in the picture I captured on the steps of the art gallery. When he passes up on the joint, he hands it to me, holding it out from his body, pinched between two fingers, like it is something both delicate and repulsive. I laugh out of tune with my friends, aware of his gaze, my discomfort exacerbated by the down-pull of the pot. On the way home he looks at me. “You shouldn’t smoke so much pot,” he says. He sneaks a warm hand into my cold one and my heart freezes.

  * * *

  —

  I WIN OUR last backgammon game. It’s a spectacular, satisfying win. Ali is graceful about it. He leans back, his gaze lingering on me, so full of warmth and affection that his sharply drawn face softens at the edges. I urgently reset the board and avoid his eyes.

  Rain starts up on the way back home, fat, warm drops. We stand outside the house, saying goodbye. I’m about to give Ali a hug when he leans over and kisses me. At first, I’m startled, but then I kiss him back and wrap my arms around him, let him lean me against the side of the house, let his hands travel under my clothes, onto my belly, my rib cage, the small of my back. He pulls away for a moment. “Let’s go in,” I say.

  He steps away. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He hesitates, looks up at the rain. “You’re leaving.” He chews on the inside of his lip. “If I go in, I’ll get more attached, and it will just hurt more.”

  We stand in the rain, wet, starting to shiver. The moment is gone. He plants a soft kiss on my lips, a period at the end of a sentence. Then he tucks his hands into his pockets and looks at me askance, shaking his head and chuckling.

  “What?”

  “You know, you play backgammon like you live your life.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “You play aggressively, you constantly take risks, you don’t want to build houses. You leave yourself open al
l over the place, and when things get dicey, you run away.”

  I smile as if he has said something funny. I smile because I can’t think of anything to say.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  THIS IS WHERE this story ends, or the version of it that I wrote years ago, soon after Ali and I said our goodbyes. This is where my memory chose to check out: Ali makes this insightful observation, which makes me feel seen, which makes me realize that perhaps I hadn’t given him enough credit, and we part, never to see each other again. But reading through my diaries reveals a different ending. A part of the story I purposely forgot. It turns out I had reshaped the story into one I could live with, omitting the parts that made me look like a jerk.

  Toward the end of my army service, after all those transfers and reassignments, I was stationed at a unit that worked to ensure safety in training. We dealt with accidents, with moments of inattention and thoughtlessness, with “friendly fire,” that careless and cynical phrase with its playful alliteration, not just an oxymoron but a crime of language, really. The lack of intent never mattered. Soldiers were hurt. If anything, it was all the more infuriating because it could have been prevented.

  So this is how our story really ends.

  A few days before my trip to Montreal, I have my goodbye party at the smoking room at Mona’s Lebanese Cuisine, an establishment I love for its food and music and energy, and where I will end up working for six years after I return from traveling, immersing myself in the Arabic community, becoming a part of the family that runs the place, feeling, finally, at home in the city.