From the kitchen she heard water running, dishes clattering. The smell of cooking permeated the room, growing familiar: turmeric and chilies, cumin and garlic. “What are you making?” Reuma said, her hunger awakening.
Ofra smiled. “Matthew wanted to surprise you.”
“Matthew?”
“He’s been making Yemeni soup every Friday. He even learned to make jichnoon. We have a whole Yemeni dinner planned.”
“Matthew cooked?”
Ofra nodded. “He got some recipes from Shoshi—”
“From Shoshi?” Reuma cried. “You should have gotten them from me.”
“Then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, would it?” She looked at Reuma. “Are you okay?”
Reuma didn’t answer. She looked at her lap, twirling her wedding ring on her finger. Ofra hesitated, then placed her hand on Reuma’s shoulder and squeezed. She left, her footsteps tapping on the stairs.
Reuma remained seated a moment longer, then went to the washroom to wash her face. She looked at herself in the mirror; her eyes were red, her skin blotched from crying. She threw water on her face, then pinched and patted her cheeks.
Downstairs, Ofra was setting the table with Yonatan strapped to her chest. Matthew poured salt into the soup and smiled at her over his shoulder. Any other time she would have been pleased by the pungent tang of Yemeni spices in her daughter’s kitchen, by the familiar spread on the table: a finely chopped vegetable salad, a bowl of schug, the cilantro in it smelling fresh, as though it had just been prepared, and even a bowl of hilbe, a spicy fenugreek paste none of her daughters-in-law had ever learned to make. But now Reuma slid into a chair, not offering to help, her hands resting in her lap. She couldn’t help it; knowing it hadn’t been her daughter who prepared the meal soured it for Reuma. These recipes had been passed down through the women of their family for generations.
“Thank you, honey.” Ofra walked by and kissed Matthew on the cheek. “It looks amazing.” She turned to her mother and said in Hebrew, “Can you believe how lucky I am? And wait till you taste his jichnoon.”
“You know,” Reuma couldn’t resist. “My mother always said that women’s hands are better for kneading dough.”
Ofra raised an eyebrow.
“It’s true,” Reuma continued. “Our hands are naturally colder. Men’s hands are too warm.”
Ofra smiled, saying nothing.
Finally Matthew placed a bowl of steaming yellow soup in front of her, his face open and expectant. Reuma examined the soup. It looked right: a shiny film on top, a yellow chicken drumstick, a carrot, half a potato, wilted stems of cilantro. She raised a spoonful of it to her mouth, feeling the urge to criticize—it could have used more garlic, less turmeric—but holding herself back. It tasted different, but it was fresh and spicy.
“So?” Ofra said.
“It’s good.” She nodded, reluctantly, and Matthew grinned, recognizing the word.
Reuma said nothing until she finished the soup. Then she pushed away her bowl and leaned back, letting the heat settle in her stomach. Her daughter sat across the table, nursing Yonatan. Reuma knew she had to give it one last try. She owed it to Shaul, at least. “So what’s going to happen if you come back?” she said.
Ofra looked up. “Come back?”
“Did you ever think about what’s going to happen to Yonatan then? And in the army? He’ll always be different than the other boys. Everyone will make fun of him.”
Matthew glanced up from his plate quickly, tensely. Ofra looked at her as if she was studying her. “I’m not coming back, Ima.”
“Not now, but maybe later.”
“No, Ima.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’m sure. We’re sure. This is my home now.”
“But you’re alone here.”
“We have good friends,” she said. “We have Shabbat dinners with them.”
“You have Shabbat dinners?”
Ofra nodded. “Every week.”
Reuma felt more confused than ever. “It’s not like having a mom here. To help you.”
“Then come here, stay with us. Live with us.”
Reuma stared at her daughter in disbelief.
“You can stay in the guest room,” Ofra said and Matthew nodded. Perhaps he understood Hebrew more than she thought.
“And leave my sister and my friends? And your brothers?”
“It’s up to you,” Ofra hurried to say. “Even just for a while. I could really use your help.”
The snow was falling heavily now. Every time Reuma looked outside she was taken aback. She tried imagining herself living here but could not picture it. She wondered how the city looked in the summer, couldn’t fathom how this bleak landscape could possibly come to life again, though she knew that the trees would turn green and the flowers would bloom. Ofra had told her the summers were hot, sometimes as hot as they were in Israel.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Ofra followed her gaze. “I just love this time of the year. It’s magic. I can’t wait for Yonatan to grow up, so we can make snowmen and snow angels …” She looked at Yonatan and her face softened, her tone changed. “Buy you a tiny little snowsuit.”
Reuma looked at her, surprised: Ofra was smitten with the weather, with the naked trees, with the season; she felt at home in this cold, strange country. Reuma felt a sharp, quick pinch in her heart. Her daughter wasn’t coming home.
Matthew cleared the table and Reuma watched as he began loading the dishwasher, wiping the counters, a towel thrown over his shoulder as Reuma always did. Sleep was tugging at her. “You said you know other Jews who … didn’t,” Reuma said. “How did their families react?”
Ofra glanced at Matthew. “In different ways. Some didn’t mind. One friend’s family didn’t speak to him for two years.”
“You see?” Reuma said.
“What do I see? Is that what you want, Ima? They’re talking to him now, and they missed two years of their grandson’s life.”
Reuma leaned on the table, picking at a hardened turmeric stain on the white tablecloth. “I just … I don’t even know what to think. I can’t accept this.”
Ofra levelled a tired look at her mother. “So what do you want, Ima?”
“I want you to circumcise him,” Reuma said, taken aback by the question. What she wanted was off the table; she wanted to rewrite everything, she wanted the story she had told herself when she was younger, growing old with Shaul, with her family around her, sharing recipes with her only daughter, watching her grandson being circumcised in an event hall by the same Yemeni mohel who had circumcised her children, celebrating the birth at their local synagogue, among friends and family.
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Ofra said sharply. “Now what?”
Reuma thought of Shaul. Though he had always been quicker to lose his temper, he was also first between the two of them to calm down. It was Reuma who held a grudge, who struggled to forgive. She wondered if she had it all wrong. Yes, Shaul would have been furious, disappointed, heartbroken, for weeks, maybe months. He would have yelled, slammed doors, and Reuma would have had to beg him to take it easy. “Your heart,” she would have said. “Your health.” But then it would have been him who would have forgiven his daughter first, his baby girl. He would never have been able to keep it up.
“I don’t know,” Reuma finally said. She looked up, stunned into silence when she saw that her daughter’s face was wet.
Yonatan let go of his mother’s nipple, hanging off her arm while Ofra wiped her tears with the back of her hand. She had hardly touched her soup. “Here.” Reuma stood up and stretched her arms out to her daughter. “You eat.” Ofra looked up and her face brightened. She handed her Yonatan over the table. “Hello, my soul.” Reuma looked at Yonatan’s face and saw her husband, the dimple in his chin, the wide nose, the dark complexion. “You look just like your granddad,” she said, her eyes watering. Yonatan flapped his arms. “Who’s Grandma’s little angel?” she whispered. She placed
him on her shoulder, the weight of his little body against her familiar and comforting.
THE POETS IN THE KITCHEN WINDOW
The missiles started falling on Tel Aviv on the night of January 17, a few hours after Operation Desert Storm began in Iraq. They had been prepared, carrying their gas masks with them everywhere for weeks: cardboard boxes with dangling straps, like purses, which some girls in Uri’s class had decked out with stickers and collages. At school they had run drills, with everyone sitting in a row on the floor, leaning against the wall, elbowing each other and giggling. None of them had ever sat in shelters, had ever even heard a siren. The only war in their lifetime had been the Lebanon War, which erupted in 1982, when Uri was four, and had never really ended. From images he saw on the news, Uri knew that people up north had sat in shelters, knew soldiers had died, even a classmate’s brother, but in Ramat Gan, the suburban town where he lived, hours away from the border, it was sometimes easy to forget.
When the first siren sounded, Uri thought it was a part of a dream. He had been dreaming about wars a lot lately; dreams where he was taller and braver and Ashkenazi, his skin lighter, his eyes blue, like one of those black-and-white pictures of soldiers he had seen in history books, tears glistening in their eyes after they’d liberated Jerusalem. Uri knew the exact day those pictures were taken: June 7, 1967. He had memorized those dates for his school exam, mapping the history of the country through a string of military operations, neatly spaced, one for every decade: the War of Independence in ‘48, Operation Kadesh in ‘56, the Six Day War in ‘67, the Yom Kippur in ’73.
As Uri watched the sepia movies his teacher had screened in history class, the stiff, clownish, fast-moving soldiers waving from tanks and marching in the streets, he wished he had been born earlier, back before independence, when the pioneers had built kibbutzim and paved roads and hid weapons and rebelled against the British, when soldiers cried at the Wailing Wall and there was a purpose, a greater meaning, a larger battle. It seemed like everything of significance had happened before he was born. In his last year of elementary school, he had written a poem about it, titled “Other Wars,” which had won his school poetry contest, earning him publication in the school paper and a month of mockery from the boys in his grade, who recited parts of it with a lisp and substituted the word fag every time war appeared in the poem.
That first night, Uri sat on his parents’ bed with his dad, their gas masks pressing red marks around their faces. Uri had fastened the straps so tight that his chin ached. They had sealed the room a few days earlier: covering the windows with heavy-duty plastic sheeting and duct tape like the IDF spokesman had instructed on TV, storing food, water and board games in the closet. Now they stared at the screen, where a blonde, smiling woman demonstrated strapping on a gas mask, placed a mild-mannered baby in a plastic crib, soothing him through a transparent sleeve. The mask smelled of rubber, like a new toy, and Uri could hear his breathing as though he were underwater. He thought of his mother, wondering if they had sealed her room at the hospital, if the nurses made sure she wore her gas mask. He hoped that her room was high up, where the gas was unlikely to reach. When she was first admitted, his father had told him that she was on a retreat. When Uri figured it out—overhearing hushed phone conversations—his father said that his mother couldn’t have any visitors, but he knew his father visited and his aunt once asked him if he’d been yet. Secretly, he was relieved not to have to visit his mother. It had been hard enough to be around her those few weeks before she left.
When the first missile hit, Uri’s heart lurched in his chest like a jerked knee. His father—looking like a frightened giant ant—wrapped his arm around him and pulled him closer. Five or six more explosions echoed in the distance, sounding like fireworks on Independence Day, or a fighter jet that had broken the sound barrier. And then one more, closer this time; the seventh-floor apartment walls shuddered with the reverberation. Uri’s body was tense, his jaw clenched, but it was the kind of fear that put things into proportion, making every other fear he’d ever felt—of failing a test in school, of jumping headfirst into the swimming pool, of embarrassing himself in front of Avital Ginsberg (back when he used to like her, which he no longer did)—seem trivial. It was the kind of fear that made him stronger, a man.
The following day, Yasmin called. It was a cool, sunny January morning, the air as crisp as broken glass, and Uri and his father sat on the couch in their living room, watching the IDF spokesman on TV. The missiles had fallen in and around Tel Aviv, the spokesman said, pushing his squared glasses over the bridge of his nose. None of the missile heads was chemical, and there were no casualties. He urged everyone to stay at home and keep calm. Then they cut to shots of panicked crowds lining up at Ben Gurion airport.
“I’m coming home,” Yasmin said. The line crackled and her words echoed faintly.
Uri’s heart gave a little start: surprise, delight, anticipation. Then he remembered that he was still mad at her. “When?” he said coolly, turning away from his father’s outstretched arm.
His dad reached over and pried the phone out of his hand. “Don’t come,” he said. “Everyone is leaving. If we had a place to go we’d be leaving too.”
“I’m coming.” Uri could hear his sister’s voice on the other line. “And that’s that.”
Yasmin knocked on their door two days later, clad in an Indian outfit: silky blue pants and a matching tunic studded with white and silver rhinestones, and a long, sheer scarf wrapped around her neck, its one end trailing behind her, brushing the floor. Her hair was short and sprouted small curls, and she had a teardrop-shaped sticker in the middle of her forehead. Even with the tattoos crawling up her arm and the ring threaded through her lip, Uri was startled by how much she had grown to resemble their mother: her smile, her eyes, the fair skin, which Uri had always envied. Yasmin screamed, dropped her bag and swallowed him into a hug: incense, cigarette smoke and foreign spices. “You’re gigantic.” She ruffled his hair, felt his arms. “And what’s this? Muscles? What have you done with my little brother?”
“I’m still the shortest in my class.” He looked into her eyes briefly.
“Well, you’re bigger than I remember.” She flounced in, taking over the space, dropping her bags, tossing her scarf over the couch, removing her earrings and placing them on the table. “Oh my God.” She grabbed him again and hugged him hard. “I missed you so much. Tell me everything. Wait, where’s my gas mask? I’m dying to try it on.”
Uri led her to the safe room and she nodded in appreciation. She pressed the plastic sheet stretched over the window with her palm, as if testing its durability. “Weird,” she said. She threw herself on their parents’ bed, flinging off her flip-flops. “So strange, being here. I was just in India, like, a few hours ago.” She turned and sniffed the bed covers. Uri looked away. “I can’t even smell her anymore,” she said.
“She’s been gone a few weeks,” Uri said.
Yasmin tapped the space beside her and Uri sat down next to her, ankles crossed. He studied the pattern on the wooden door leading to his parents’ washroom. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” she said. “It just seemed like it was best. Seeing me might have driven her over the edge.”
Uri chewed on his bottom lip as if to stop the things he wanted to say from spewing out, things like, “What about Dad and me?” and “Spare me the excuses,” which was his mother’s phrase, one she had often used when speaking to Yasmin.
He had been little when Yasmin was a teenager, but he still remembered the fights she and their mother used to have, spectacular displays of passion and melodrama that left Uri and his dad—the gentle, collected portion of the family—in awe. In high school, Yasmin ran away several times, hitchhiking to Sinai and the Galilee, staying God-knows-where, doing God-knows-what. Even when she was home, she got herself into all kinds of trouble: there was an affair with a substitute teacher, there were nights when she stumbled home late and then passed out on their bathroom floor, dr
unk.
Uri concentrated on his socks, curling and uncurling his toes. Their father walked into the room then and Yasmin jumped off the bed to hug him. Uri took the opportunity to slip out. He grabbed his skateboard and his gas mask and rode the elevator down to the parking lot behind their building, where his dad allowed him to play, close enough that he could make it back if a siren sounded.
It had always been an adjustment, letting Yasmin back into their lives. She had taken off to Sinai right after army service, then Amsterdam, then India, and had come home sporting a new haircut, a new tattoo, a nose ring, a pierced eyebrow. She stayed with them until she found somewhere else to crash, worked and saved money for a few weeks or months, then left again. There was no reason to believe that this time would be any different.
It had been over a year and a half since he’d last seen her—the longest she’d ever been gone—and so much had happened since. Uri wasn’t sure where to start catching up. They had always been close, despite her long absences and the eleven-year gap between them. She was the only fun person in Uri’s family, a group of serious people with stern faces and tight lips, whose gatherings resembled political conferences he had seen on the news. His father had a permanent groove wedged between his eyebrows and his shoulders were stooped in surrender, as though the whole world weighed upon his small, wiry frame. His mother was fun sometimes; on a good day she was shiny and beautiful and charming, she sang, she put on funny accents, she was the life of every party. But her bad days were so bad that it never quite seemed worth it.
Yasmin was the one who took him to movies and to the beach, made him hot chocolate with melted scoops of ice cream. And she was the only one in his family who knew about his poetry. In fact, she had gotten him into it. A few years ago, when she still lived at home, they started a game: sitting at the table over lunch or breakfast or hot chocolate, they gazed through the kitchen window, finding metaphors or stories in the world out there. They watched people on the sidewalk, or falling leaves, or cars in traffic, or shapes in the clouds, or faces in the moon. Yasmin would get excited by the things he said and yell, “Amazing! A poet is born!” She’d slap the table, or let her mouth hang open in awe or pretend to swoon. “Seriously,” she used to say. “If you don’t write it down I’m going to have to kick your ass.” And once she was gone and he had no one to play with, he did.
The Best Place on Earth Page 6
