“Really?” His eyebrows arched. “You talked about me?”
“Of course.”
“It’s good to finally meet you.” Sean shook his hand.
I tucked my hands in my pockets, looked at the street, then back at him. We both smiled.
“You want candles?” he said. “For Shabbat?”
“Sure,” I said, though I didn’t, really.
“One? Or did you want two?”
“Sure,” I said.
He handed me a plastic bag with two candles. Later, I read in the attached pamphlet that a single woman lights one and a married woman lights two. Was that his way of asking?
“You want to lay tefillin?” he asked Sean in English, and then asked me in Hebrew, “Jewish?”
“No,” I said.
“What’s that? A belt?” Sean studied the tefillin. “You Israelis are obsessed with belts.”
Raz burst into a generous laugh. I laughed too, glad to see he hadn’t lost his sense of humor.
“You seem happy,” I said.
“Baruch HaShem.” He raised his chin. God bless.
I moved a strand of hair from my lips and shifted my weight. “You know, I thought I’d never see you again.”
“Don’t say that.” He broke into a grin. “We’re all going to meet soon. Redemption day is coming!”
My smile froze. Some guy came to use the tefillin and I said goodbye and walked away.
“You okay?” Sean put his arm around my shoulder.
I nodded. I wished I had said more, told him that I was happy now too, that I was writing; asked if he remembered our bike rides, our swims, if he ever missed those days. If he ever thought about me.
I glanced over my shoulder to look at him one last time. He was wrapping tefillin over the man’s arm, his hand moving in circles, continually, expertly, as though it was spinning poi.
NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED
MY GRANDMOTHER SITS in her front yard watching the street, stoic in her tinted glasses, silver curls poking out from her flower-printed headscarf. Michal Street, a dirt road leading to the local synagogue, is under the spell of siesta. The small, plain houses appear deserted, their shutters closed to keep the daylight out. Sedated street cats saunter along the bushy hedges in search of shade, and laundry is hanging limply on saggy clotheslines. Behind chain-link fences, chickens cluck, bobbing their heads.
It’s April and cool for the season, the breeze a thin, silky scarf. The sky is the color of white linen that was accidentally laundered with a blue sock. My mother pushes the rusty metal gate, which loudly squeaks its discontent.
My grandmother squints up at me. It’s been two years since we last saw each other. In this time, she’s aged and shrunken, while I’ve gained weight, my skin darkened from a winter spent on a Thai beach. If she has an opinion on my disheveled appearance, my blistered, flip-flopped feet, my near-dreaded hair or the shells I have weaved into it, she keeps it to herself.
My aunt, on the other hand, walks out of the house and gulps when she sees me. “What happened to you? You look like burnt toast!”
My mother laughs.
“Thanks,” I say. “That’s nice.”
I bend to hug Savta, bury my face in the crease of her shoulder. She smells, as always, of fenugreek and cilantro and Nivea Creme. “How are you, Savta?”
She dismisses me with a hand, as if swatting a fly. “Yofi,” she mutters. Beautiful in Hebrew. And then, “Hara.” Shit in Arabic.
* * *
—
MY GRANDMOTHER HAS lived in this house, with a slab of cracked concrete for a garden, for sixty years. When my grandparents arrived from Yemen in 1935, they joined a few Yemeni families to establish a new village east of Petah Tikva, across the highway from the Arabic village of Fajja and amidst citrus orchards and swamps.
For the first few years, the family lived in a Yemeni-style mud hut my grandfather had erected on their lot, using sun-dried mud bricks mixed with straw, as was customary in Yemen. He didn’t know then how much it rained in Israel, how muggy the air by the sea could get, so humid it’s like breathing water. Still, the hut withstood the damp climate and remained standing long after the family moved into the two-bedroom concrete bungalow my grandfather built beside it. As a kid, I used to sneak into the hut with my cousins: I remember the cool, earthy smell of it, the brown film left on my hand when I touched the walls.
Evelyn, my grandmother’s Filipina caretaker, emerges from the kitchen carrying a tray with tweezers, cotton balls, and candy-pink nail polish. “Savta,” she says in her oddly accented Hebrew, flavored with Tagalog and Yemeni she’s picked up from my grandmother. “Ready to get pretty?”
Savta’s face lights up. “I’m so lucky,” she says. “I thank God for bringing me a nice girl to paint my nails and pluck my hairs.”
* * *
—
BACK AT MY mother’s house, I settle into my childhood room. The mural of the New York skyline I painted at fifteen is looking sad, faded, with early mold blooming on its sky. I drape a sarong over the window to cover the broken slats and hang a mobile I made in Thailand on a rusty nail: a small crooked branch with shells and beads dangling on a fishing wire. I remember collecting those shells with Raz—feet wet, body salty and bronzed and free—and I deeply, achingly miss him and the uncomplicated life I led on that beach.
Back home, life is all complications. The second Intifada has been raging for two and a half years. Suicide bombers explode in buses, cafés, and restaurants. The tension is relentless, like an omnipresent hum. I try not to watch the news, not to read the papers, but “the situation”—the bland euphemism Israelis use for the conflict—is everywhere, a barbed wire wound through everyday life. Every decision you make, to meet a friend for coffee, to take a specific route home, might be fatal. We walk down city streets staring at each other; we gulp our cappuccinos and inhale our lunches, eyes glued to the front door. We never sit by large windows, never doze off on buses. We cut short conversations with acquaintances on the street, don’t lounge on benches or stop to smell flowers, because a moving target is harder to hit. It’s exhausting.
From the back of the closet, I retrieve my mixing bowl, carved out of a coconut shell from Goa, and a long bamboo bong a Nepalese sadhu baba made me a few years ago. The bong gurgles as I slowly light the mixture of grass and tobacco. I blow the thick smoke out the window. The world slows down a notch.
In the late afternoon, I go for a walk in my neighborhood, barefoot, as though I could absorb the earth’s grounding energy through the worn asphalt. In a park by my house, I run my hand over the bark of trees, sit on the grass and place my palm flat on the ground. But even the city is glaring at me, rolling her eyes, grunting, “Get a job.”
It’s only been a week and already I feel like I’m suffocating, already contemplating an exit strategy: I could go work in Tokyo or Berlin. I just need to make enough money for my ticket out. I roll another joint and pretend that my convictions aren’t beginning to falter, that my newly acquired beach Zen isn’t slipping away like a wet fish from my hands. The smoke clouds the looks of judgment and frustration from family and friends. It helps me retain my fleeting sense of peace for just a moment longer.
* * *
—
I FIND A job as a waitress at a restaurant on a Tel Aviv beach: rows of low wooden tables and bright yellow chairs wedged in the sand. My mother’s house in Petah Tikva is only thirteen kilometers away, and I figure I can crash on friends’ couches if I miss the last bus. I have done that before. In the mid-nineties, I waited tables just south of here at Banana Beach, a Tel Aviv institution then in its first days. I was twenty-three and hopeful, as was the country. Buses didn’t explode and tourists flocked the seawall. It was one of the best summers of my life. I am delighted for the opportunity to relive those days, to trudge barefoot in the sand, swim in t
he dark sea during lulls between rushes. I am comfortable working nights and sleeping till the afternoon, at home on the edges, places where I can almost fall: where the land meets the sea; on the margins of days.
During shifts, my co-workers and I furtively smoke joints and guzzle shots, and at the end of the night we go for drinks. If we finish late, we go for breakfast, sit on patios and watch, bleary and astonished, as the city awakens to another hectic day, a jarring transition from the short-lived stillness of dawn. We watch people hurrying to their office jobs all bright and alert and coffeed-up, with their suits and uniforms, earphones and travel mugs, and we pity their boring structured lives. We will never be like this, we think.
My co-workers—all of them younger—see me as someone who has sidestepped the conventional trajectory, who presents an alternative to the traditional model of living. They call me “the Turtle,” for I always carry my home with me, never know where I’ll be crashing at the end of the night. The name pleases me.
After a few shifts, I begin forgetting to arrange for places to stay. Or I start to feel like an inconvenience to my friends, slinking in in the middle of the night to claim their couches. I detect a hint of impatience in their eyes, a frustration with my newly returned hippie ways, with what they must see as a refusal to grow up. “You don’t have any money, do you?” my friend Omer asks with a fatherly sigh when I visit. He pulls his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and hands me a stack of folded twenties.
With nowhere to go, I wander the night streets, or I sit on the beach with my backpack and a bag of pot. Sometimes, one of my young co-workers joins me, usually a boy. Nothing ever happens, but the tension is enough to keep me up until the sun soars from behind the weathered buildings of Tel Aviv, the city fleetingly blushing like a young, timid girl, and the buses to Petah Tikva start running.
* * *
∙ ∙ ∙
SAVTA IS OVER ninety years old. No one knows her exact age because in Yemen dates weren’t recorded, birthdays weren’t celebrated. When I’m with her, I can’t help but be mindful of the looming end, the impermanence of things. But she is also a reminder of my beginning, of a past I sometimes forget while in Canada, where I’ve been living alone, unfettered and unanchored.
Savta’s name is Esther, like the biblical Jewish queen, wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus. It suits her: her raised chin, her natural gift for drama, the size of her clan. Except it is not her name at all, but a Hebraized name given to her upon arriving in Israel, not by the authorities—the practice of renaming immigrants would not begin until the founding of Israel in 1948—but by her cousin, who had been in Palestine since the early twentieth century and was versed in the ways of the place. She told Savta that she must have a Hebrew name to be initiated into this new society. That new name was the harbinger of a new era, but it also represented an erasure of Savta’s past, her culture and her language, an act of silencing done in the name of assimilation.
She was born Salha (a name her family and friends would continue to use her entire life) moments before her twin sister, Saida, in Haidan a-Sham, a northern Yemeni village flanked by steep mountains that were freckled with caves. Her childhood was marked with tragedy and abandonment. Her father died when she was two, and shortly after that, her mother left her and her twin sister in Yemen and walked to Israel with a new husband. Nobody could explain to me why she left. Perhaps nobody knew. The twins stayed with family in the village, where girls were married off at a prepubescent age and bore many children; where Jewish men worked as artisans, had many wives, and died of unnamed epidemics.
In the family, we called her Savta. Hebrew for “grandmother.”
Growing up, hanging out with Savta was not my idea of a good time. We had no common language: she barely understood my modern Hebrew, while I struggled to follow her heavily accented one. Her wit and wry sense of humor were lost on me. In elementary school, I weaved elaborate fantasies in which my grandmother was a European pioneer who’d paved roads and planted trees in the land of Israel, and my grandfather was a partisan in the concentration camps in Poland. I envied my classmates whose grandmothers took them to matinées and cafés in Tel Aviv, where they sat with their puffed hair and tailored skirts, speaking Yiddish as they sipped their filtered coffee, leaving lipstick stamps on the edge of their cups. My grandmother didn’t watch movies and I couldn’t imagine her lounging at a café. Savta drank her coffee with hawayij, a Yemeni mixture of herbs that tinted the coffee a rusty shade and floated on the surface like leaves in a pond. Even as a child, I knew you couldn’t find hawayij in Tel Aviv cafés.
In one yellowed picture from my childhood, I am dressed in authentic Yemeni clothing: an embroidered tunic with red-and-yellow stitching and a hood, a row of silver coins arranged over my bangs. This was the extent of my interest in my heritage: a Purim costume passed around by my cousins, just like the Dutch girl outfit I had worn the year before or the Japanese kimono I donned the year after.
By the time I graduated from high school, I could discuss the Zionist movement and their immigration to Israel in detail, but I knew next to nothing about my own heritage, which, along with other Mizrahi narratives, was only briefly covered in our history textbooks. In literature class, I was rarely taught work by Mizrahi authors, or by Palestinian authors for that matter, as though our country was a European enclave accidentally dropped into the heart of the Middle East, as though 20 percent of Israeli citizens weren’t Palestinian Arabs, and Mizrahi Jews who came from Arab lands didn’t make up half the Jewish population.
* * *
—
TODAY, I BROUGHT a video camera to Savta’s house. My family is used to me endlessly documenting, snapping shots with the old single-lens K1000 I had bought on Granville Street in Vancouver during my photography studies. But the video camera is a new toy. I borrowed it from my friend Elsin to videotape a family party and I enjoy fooling around with it. I pan over the old photos by my grandmother’s raised bed: my two handsome uncles as young men, flashing the charming family grin; a smiling granddaughter in a ponytail. The camera settles on my grandmother. She sits between my mother and my aunt Rivka, staring at me, blinking slowly.
“Yafa,” I say to her, the feminine form of beautiful in Hebrew.
She snorts.
“How do you say beautiful in Yemeni?”
“Halya,” my mother answers.
“That’s Hatma’s daughter’s name,” Rivka says. “You know who Hatma was? Your grandfather’s wife.”
“His first wife?”
Savta scoffs, unimpressed. “Yes. She was first.”
Once, in a drawer in my mother’s bedside table, I found a Palestine Immigrant Certificate for Saleh Mahdoon, my grandfather, issued by the Jewish Agency for Palestine in Aden, a port city in the south of Yemen, on December 14, 1934. The picture showed my grandfather and his two wives, one on each side, black-and-white ghosts, cheeks sunken from hunger: my grandmother and her tsara, the biblical word for a sister-wife, also translated as “trouble.” In Israel, my grandmother, for whom the first wife was more trouble than sister, quickly discerned that polygamy wasn’t practiced among the local Jews. “It’s me or her,” she told my grandfather, and then took two-year-old Rivka with her and left. My grandfather followed her soon after. The first wife never forgave my grandmother this transgression, and forbade her daughter, Halya, my mother’s half-sister, from seeing her siblings. Even after the first wife had passed, the daughter continued to reject her half-siblings’ efforts to reconcile, carried on the inheritance of hurt and indignation until the end of her days.
“And then he married you?” I ask my grandmother.
“Then he married another one. Then me.”
“So he had three wives? Wow. I didn’t know that.” I look at my mother accusingly. There is so much she hasn’t told us. We didn’t even know about my mother’s estranged half-sister until my brother happ
ened to run into her son in the army and he explained the family relations. “I’m sure I mentioned her,” my mom said when my brother confronted her. “Didn’t I?”
“The second wife’s brother got jealous,” Savta says, “because his father loved your grandfather very much. So the brother did ish’here on your grandfather. He drugged him.”
I glance at my mother, who translates the Arabic word: “A spell.”
“Wait, what?” I move the camera so I can look at Savta eye to eye. “The second wife’s brother tried to kill Saba? What happened then?”
“His father-in-law saved him. He gave him oil to drink. Bottle after bottle.”
My mother arches her eyebrows. “I’ve never heard this story.”
Rivka shakes her head. “Me neither.”
My grandmother’s stories always came about accidentally, reluctantly, always a slip of the tongue. Stories to her were luxuries, like dreams and regrets. Perhaps she believed, like many immigrants, that to become a true Israeli, she had to leave the past behind, along with the stories that encompassed it. Or maybe it was her children who rejected her stories; like many first-generation sabras—native-born Israelis—they wished to disassociate themselves from their parents’ diasporic history, assert their differences, and stake a claim for their own distinct identity.
“After that, your grandfather couldn’t stay there,” Savta says. “He moved away with Hatma and then he married me. You know how long the second wife waited for him? Waiting, hoping. Maybe he’ll come back for her. Until she realized: en samara.”
No use.
I picture this woman, standing on curvy dunes I borrow from Aladdin, searching the horizon for my grandfather. I file this romantic snapshot in my imaginary family album, the one I carry with me in place of actual photographs.
The Art of Leaving Page 16