The Best Place on Earth

by Ayelet Tsabari

  Sagit opens the door and taps her foot. I lower my voice to a whisper. “Oren. I have to go. Tell them you need to see an army shrink, okay? And call me after five. Everything will be okay.” I hang up.

  Sagit purses her lips. “I thought we had a discussion about personal phone calls.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It was an emergency.”

  For the rest of the day, every time I catch her gaze, she’s looking at me funny. I have an awful feeling in my gut.

  When I get home, Vicky is sprawled in her underwear on our faded corduroy couch, watching a telenovela. Her legs are on the coffee table in front of the TV, and the spaces between her toes are stuffed with cotton balls. She’s blowing on her long red fingernails. I sit next to her, stretch my legs on the table, nudging an overflowing ashtray and an empty coffee mug. The shutters are closed to block out the heat and noise, but you can still hear the city. We live right on Allenby Street, opposite the market, and the street never stops: buses and people and cars and sirens and vendors and street cats and taxis and car alarms. In the evenings, when it cools down, we open the windows and the city barges into our home.

  “I’m meeting Dan at the bar tonight,” she says. “Remember Dan? I met him there last week.”

  I yawn.

  “Come with me.” She curls up to me. “A drink will do you good.”

  Vicky and I strut in our strappy sandals down Allenby Street, arm in arm. She has let me borrow her silver minidress for the evening, to cheer me up. A Subaru blasting Middle Eastern pop slows down to a crawl beside us and two guys look out the passenger window. “Where are you going, pretty ladies?” asks the one in the passenger seat.

  “We already have dates, honey.” Vicky exhales cigarette smoke. Behind them a taxi honks its horn. “Okay, okay.” The driver waves his hand and takes off. The sidewalk is littered with cigarette butts and plastic wrappers. A gang of emaciated street cats are fighting for scraps by the garbage bin. Before I moved here I used to think Tel Aviv was all long beaches and white houses with rounded balconies, but Allenby is lined with crumbling buildings in grey and yellow, leaning against each other like a row of crooked teeth. Sometimes I miss the silence and open spaces of the desert.

  Dan is already at the bar, and he’s brought a friend. His name is Gabi and he’s got a pretty cute face, though his chest is broad and bulky, a bit too big for his height. He tells me he just finished his service, he works in security now. I let him buy me drinks and feed me lines I’ve heard a thousand times. When he goes to the washroom I check my phone and see I’ve missed a call from Oren. I bum a smoke from Vicky and step outside to call him, but the phone just rings. Gabi walks out. He has a bit of a swagger, and his chin is tilted up, as if he’s trying to gain a few extra centimetres. “What are you doing out here all alone?”

  In the bright light of the street lamp, he doesn’t look so cute anymore, a little Neanderthal, his face too boxy, dumb-looking. “I had to make a call.”

  “You want to get out of here?”

  “I think I’m just going to go in, finish my beer.” I drop my cigarette and stub it out with my heel.

  Once we’re back inside, Gabi turns me toward him for a dance, his hands a little too low on my back. I laugh. It’s Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly”—not the most danceable song. Gabi leans over and kisses me. He smells like Johnnie Walker. I move my face.

  “Come on, don’t be a tease.”

  “I’m not,” I say sweetly, moving away from him. “I’m just not feeling too good.”

  “Come on.” He breathes in my ear.

  I glance at Vicky but she’s laughing with Dan, leaning forward, her hand on his wrist. “I tell you what.” I feign a smile. “Why don’t I give you my phone number and we’ll get together another time.” He weaves his fingers through my hair, pulls me closer and sticks his fat tongue down my throat. I push him away and this time I say loudly, “I said no.”

  Shai, the bartender, steps from behind the bar. “Is there a problem?”

  “No problem.” Gabi smiles like a hyena.

  “There’s definitely a problem,” I say.

  “Whore,” Gabi hisses.

  “Out.” Shai places his hand on his shoulder. “You’re done here.”

  Gabi shakes Shai’s hand off and raises both hands. He walks out slowly, shooting a cold look at me.

  “You okay?” Shai puts his arm around me and looks at me with concern. He smells like laundry soap. I put my face in his chest and start to cry.

  Back at the apartment, I sit on the couch, staring at the streaks of light from passing cars crawling up the cracked white walls, across the dog-eared poster of Bob Marley. The window is open, and the night sky is black and foggy. You can hardly see stars.

  “Are you okay?” Vicky asks, stepping into the apartment, tossing her purse on the chair. “What the hell happened?”

  “I should have just stayed home,” I say.

  Vicky sits next to me and hands me a Marlboro Light. “What’s going on?”

  I lean my head back against the couch and inhale deeply. “Things are stressful at the clinic. And Oren is freaking out on me. I don’t know what to do with him.”

  Vicky stares at me like she’s about to say something, then shakes her head.

  “What?”

  “You know exactly what you have to do with him,” she says.

  By the time I get to bed it’s three in the morning and I can’t sleep. Cats in heat are yowling and moaning outside my window. I hear a car door slamming, girls laughing. An alarm goes off, causing a choir of dogs to howl. I press my hands over my ears. I moved to Tel Aviv to start fresh, and now everything is going to shit again. I tell myself I’m going to stop selling gimelim, quit drinking, break up with Oren. Maybe I can take up swimming. I’ve been living in this city for six months, two blocks from the beach, and I’ve never gone in the water. I can see it from our living room windows, peeking blue between the buildings.

  When I fall asleep I dream I’m swimming all the way to the string of rocks that break the waves, taking long, well-formed strokes, immersing my head in the water. Everything goes silent and peaceful, the city finally muted.

  Outside the office, Buzaglo singsongs, “Yael, Yael, Yael. Why must you be so cruel?” I smile tightly. I’m not in the mood today. Before I open the door, Shuli steps outside. “Heads up, there are officers here to see you.”

  I pause. “To see me?”

  “What have you done?” She grins.

  “I keep telling you.” Buzaglo shakes his head with mock gravity. “This girl is trouble.”

  As soon as I walk into the office, Sagit corners me. I don’t even get to drop my bag. “Can I see you in my office?” She gives me a fake, saccharine smile. I glance at her office and see three officers standing behind the glass, looking at me grimly. My heart beats inside my mouth. I take two steps backwards. “I forgot something,” I say. “I’ll be right back.” I turn around and walk out, colliding with Buzaglo at the door. He steps aside.

  “Yael?” Sagit calls after me. I pick up my pace and make it through the gate. I hear Sagit calling, “Stop her,” in a high-pitched voice, but I’m already off the base. I bump into a soldier and he grabs me by the elbow. I look up at him and whisper, “Please.” He lets me go.

  I start running. Across four lanes of traffic on Ibn Gabirol and up Dizengoff. I take a left on King George. My phone rings non-stop, vibrating against my thigh. King George is crowded and people are staring at me, parting as I run through. “Soldier,” some call after me. “You okay?” I turn onto a narrow street, pass Meir Park on my left: mothers pushing strollers, people walking their dogs, lovers kissing on a bench. When I reach Trumpeldor Street, I slow down and catch my breath. At the end of the street I see a shimmering patch of blue. The sea. I can smell it, the salty, fishy breeze. For the first time since I started running, I look back. The street is empty, the windswept buildings seem deserted, their windows shut, everything momentarily still. I can hear bir
ds chirping, leaves rustling, the whisper of waves crashing on the beach.

  I check my phone. I have seven missed calls. But they’re not all from the clinic. Vicky, my mother, a friend of Oren’s from Haifa. I close my eyes and picture the officers in Sagit’s office. I realize they weren’t wearing army police caps but purple caps. Purple. Oren’s unit. Their grim faces, Sagit’s pleading tone. I can’t breathe. My heart becomes heavy, full of water, sinking slowly like a punctured boat. The ring of my phone startles me. I look at it, surprised, as if I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. And then I place it carefully on a stone fence and carry on running. Toward the blue.

  INVISIBLE

  A rental van was parked in front of Savta’s house early Saturday morning. Rosalynn had tilted the shutters in the living room to let in air, and watched as a young, lanky man climbed out of the front seat of the van, opened the back doors and started piling boxes on the unpaved road.

  Savta called from the washroom and Rosalynn hurried over, placing two hands under her employer’s armpits and shifting her into her wheelchair. It was easier to lift her now; over the past few months Savta had become smaller, lighter than she had been a year ago, when Rosalynn had first started working here. Then, she had called her employer Mrs. Hadad. Now she was Savta: Hebrew for grandmother. It was what her family called her. It was the name Savta preferred.

  Rosalynn wheeled the old woman into the living room and set her by the window, where a beam of sunlight filled with dust particles fell into her lap. The sound of men singing at the synagogue down the street crept into the room, and Savta closed her eyes, humming along. Rosalynn wiped Savta’s watery eyes with a handkerchief. “Someone moving into the back?” she asked.

  Savta nodded. “Ilan’s friend. Good boy.”

  Rosalynn slipped her fingers through the plastic slats, peeking out. The young man slammed the van’s back doors. There was no furniture to speak of, just one queen-size mattress leaning against the chain-link fence. He hoisted a few boxes and walked past the house to the small shed in the back, which had been empty since the young Ethiopian couple had moved out months ago. On his way back to the van, he glanced at Rosalynn, his eyes startling blue behind black, thin-framed glasses, and she quickly stepped away from the window.

  “Why you hiding?” Savta said. “Boy don’t bite.”

  Blushing, Rosalynn retreated into the kitchen. She boiled water for tea and watched as the man balanced the mattress on his head. He jerked his head to get a loose strand of his auburn hair out of his eyes, and Rosalynn admired the warm, rich colour of it, like autumn leaves, and the dramatic lines of his jaw and cheeks. She poured Savta a cup of black tea with mint and steered her outside, to her barren front yard, the old concrete cracked and strewn with weeds. The morning was fresh, the first after many hot, stuffy fall mornings to offer a bit of breeze. Rosalynn loved when the weather cooled like this, which it almost never did back home in the Philippines. There, the air often felt saturated, as though it could be wrung into a bucket.

  At the synagogue down the street, the morning service had come to an end, and a steady stream of men in white-buttoned shirts tucked into dress pants, white kippahs on their heads, wrists crossed behind their backs, strolled past the house. Savta nodded at two elderly Yemeni women who walked by, both in loose dresses with colourful prints and head scarves, just like the ones Savta wore. The women slowed down, exchanged a few words in Arabic, clucked their tongues at something Savta had said and went on their way. The street fell silent again.

  Rosalynn pulled a lip gloss from her pocket and quickly applied it, and then brushed her hair with her fingers, contemplating tying it up. Savta watched her. “You know,” Savta said. “I was beautiful once, like you.”

  “You’re still beautiful,” Rosalynn said.

  “I’m old.” Savta sighed, her shoulders rising, then dropping.

  “You’re not that old.” Rosalynn dabbed Savta’s puffy eyes. “You want me to paint your nails today?”

  “Too old.” Savta waved her hand, fingers heavy with silver rings. “I wish God take me away.”

  “Shush.” Rosalynn frowned. “Don’t speak like that.”

  “Then I can be with my husband, may he rest in heaven.” Savta looked up. “My husband, he save me. In Yemen the government”—she spat, cursing in Arabic—“they take all the Jewish orphans.”

  This was Savta’s favourite story, one she never tired of relating. Years of working for elderly people had turned Rosalynn into a patient, engaged listener. Her first employer in Israel had been a frail holocaust survivor with a faded number on her wrinkly arm. Even though Rosalynn understood little at first, she nodded when her employer spoke, patted her shoulder when she cried. It was easier now, even with Savta’s heavily accented Hebrew. Savta had told Rosalynn about her parents, who had died when she was a little girl in Yemen, about how the authorities had threatened to convert her to Islam. She told her how she had walked for weeks through the desert, from San’a to Aden, with a group of Jews on their way to Israel. How she too had worked in people’s homes when she arrived, cleaning and doing laundry for the rich Ashkenazi.

  A rickety scooter pulled up to the front of the house and shuddered to a halt, a cloud of dust trailing behind it. Ilan hopped off, removing his helmet with jerky, fast movements, shaking loose the black, curly ‘fro he’d been growing ever since his release from the army. “Savta.” He bounced into the yard, arms open for a hug. He kissed his grandmother’s cheeks noisily. “How are you?”

  Savta didn’t reply, suddenly hard of hearing. Rosalynn knew she was angry at her grandchildren for not visiting more often. “In Yemen,” she had told her, “the grandmother was queen.”

  “Savta,” Rosalynn said loudly. “Ilan came to see you. He asks how are you.”

  “Hara,” Savta muttered—shit in Arabic. “That’s how I am.”

  Ilan burst into a short laugh and turned to Rosalynn. “You met Yaniv yet?”

  Rosalynn shook her head no.

  “Yaniv, my man,” Ilan hollered.

  Yaniv stepped cautiously from the back, his shoulders hunched. He towered over Ilan, who—like many Yemenis Rosalynn knew—was small and wiry. Up close, he looked younger than she had first guessed; his narrow, freckled face had an unfinished quality, yet to settle into itself. His longish hair, tucked behind his ears, suggested he was also recently out of the army. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his deep-set eyes seeming sad, the blue speckled with black. When he shook her hand, it disappeared into his large, warm palm.

  Over the following week, Rosalynn watched Yaniv settling into the shed. He woke up early and was often gone by the time Rosalynn and Savta came outside to drink their morning tea. He returned in the evenings, his clothes smeared with paint. As Rosalynn removed laundry from the lines in the front yard, she peeked down the grassy trail that led to the shed. She could hear him hammering nails into the walls, dragging things across the floor. One day, he hauled a dusty, worn-out couch off the street, leaving it under the plastic awning outside his door, where it sagged into the broken paving stones. He often sat there in the evenings, quietly strumming his guitar.

  Rosalynn welcomed the sound of his music; by then she had almost grown accustomed to the quiet evenings here in Rosh HaAyin. In the beginning, she had been unnerved by the lack of traffic, the abundance of stars, the insistent chirping of crickets. She had moved to this small town, inhabited mostly by elderly Yemenis, almost a year ago, after her visa had expired with her employer’s passing. She had thought about going home then, to her young daughter, Carmen, but her husband—a good-for-nothing drunk she had married at twenty-one—was long gone, and her family was relying on her to provide: not just for her daughter, but for her mother, her siblings, their families. “Maybe stay a little longer,” her mother had pleaded on the phone. Her friend Beatrice, who had been living in Israel for fifteen years now, married to an Israeli, recommended her to the Hadad family, who had hired her under the t
able, paying her in cash.

  The old neighbourhood in which Savta lived was pressed against the borders of town, edged by a narrow highway and open, yellow fields spread out against a big sky. To the east, the ruins of an ancient fortress stood atop a softly curved hill. It felt like a world away, not just from Manila, but from the rich neighbourhood where she had lived with her previous employer in Tel Aviv, where she had had her own ensuite bathroom in the basement of a large villa, and where the murmur of the city—like a pulse—was always present. She looked forward to her days off, when she travelled back to Tel Aviv for a night out with her girlfriends, all of them Filipina caregivers like her.

  At nights, after Savta went to bed, the neighbourhood swallowed up by darkness, Rosalynn missed home, missed Carmen, who was now almost thirteen. It had been eight years since she’d last seen her: Carmen was just a pigtailed little girl then, playing with her rag dolls in the mud outside their shed. Now, thanks to the money Rosalynn had been sending every month, Carmen was living with Rosalynn’s mom and extended family in a house Rosalynn had paid for, sleeping on a firm mattress, dressed in nice clothes, playing with Barbie dolls. Rosalynn called her mother twice a week, and her mother answered Rosalynn’s questions—how were Carmen’s grades? How tall was she now? Had her breasts grown yet? Had she gotten her period? Did she eat her vegetables?—before passing her on to Carmen, when Rosalynn would feel tears flooding her throat. She became good at speaking through them, forcing herself to smile.

  From her room at the back of Savta’s house, Rosalynn could spy on Yaniv through the lemon tree branches, trace his silhouette—not more than seven steps away—through the open shutters, hear him play guitar, smell the coffee he brewed in the mornings. He spent most evenings alone, except when Ilan showed up unannounced, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, dressed in dark jeans and a tight T-shirt and smelling of too much aftershave. Ilan tried to get Yaniv to come out with him to a bar or a club in Tel Aviv, but Yaniv always said no. His friends would stay for a beer or a joint, and she could hear their chatter and laughter. Rosalynn envied their freedom: at their age she was already a mother, was already struggling with marital problems and money.