The Best Place on Earth

by Ayelet Tsabari

  “Three hundred metres.” Josie pointed at a sign. They could see the shores of the lake now; hunks of salt floating in the water like misplaced ice floes. His ears popped. The lower they got the deeper his heart sank. Why would his dad choose to live here? At least in the city there was a crowd one could disappear into, streets and buildings in neat rows, the space organized and contained. The desert had always made David uncomfortable, how wide open and vast it was, its landscape hard and bony, like knuckles on a fist. And there was the silence, and the deadly heat—a monster ready to open its mouth and swallow him whole.

  The village was lush with pink bougainvillea and groves of date palms. Small houses lined a narrow road, sprinklers rotating in the middle of green lawns. “This is so adorable,” Josie said. The sun was setting over the Judaean Hills, colouring the shores of the Dead Sea mauve. The rental car crunched gravel as David inched his way along the main road, hunched over the wheel, squinting to read the house numbers. When he saw his father standing outside a small one-storey with a red tiled roof, watering flower beds, his heart flipped. After all these years, his dad still had this effect on him. “This is it,” he said.

  “That’s your dad?” Josie’s voice curled in surprise.

  His dad grinned and waved. He was wearing faded jeans, a buttoned-up shirt and a cowboy hat. His Ray-Bans made him look like he was still in the army, though he’d retired a few years ago. He was fit and tanned. The Marlboro Man. David looked at his own skin, white from a Canadian winter, his thin arms. He watched his dad through the glass as if there were still oceans and continents between them. His father, sun-kissed in the warm desert; David frozen in his chilled air-conditioned car.

  His father walked toward the car and tried opening David’s door, which was locked. David smiled at him briefly, then unlocked the door. “Open the trunk,” his dad ordered in a thundering voice that David hadn’t inherited. “I’ll get the suitcases.”

  Josie stepped out. “Mr. Sharabi,” she said with a large, comfortable smile. “So good to finally meet you.”

  “Call me Eitan,” his father said, opening his arms to hug her. David watched her little frame in his father’s giant arms and found himself cringing. His father turned to him, grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him into an embrace. “Dudu,” he said. “I’m so glad you came.”

  Josie laughed.

  “It’s a common nickname in Israel,” David said, cheeks turning pink. “I knew you’d laugh.”

  “I’m not.” She suppressed a smile.

  Inside, the house was small with a dark tiled floor and arched windows. The living room was furnished with the black leather couches and red Persian rug David remembered from his father’s previous apartment. In the guest room, a worn-out corduroy armchair sagged next to a dusty chest of drawers. Books were stacked on top of the chest: Israeli classics like Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, poems by Alterman and Bialik, a biography of Ben-Gurion and a glossy book about the Jews of Yemen. The futon was neatly made with striped sheets. David found it difficult to picture his father tucking in the sheets, meticulously straightening the blanket on top. He heaved the suitcase onto the futon and unzipped it.

  Josie threw herself on the mattress. The wood squeaked under her weight. She turned on her belly and shuffled toward him, looking up at him with a suggestive smile. “Now I know where you got your good looks from.” She grabbed his sleeve and tried to drag him onto the bed.

  “Don’t,” David said.

  “We’re on vacation.”

  He pulled out their toiletry bag and placed it on the chest. “Everybody says I look like my mom.”

  Josie cocked her head and looked at him. “You do have different skin tones, he’s really dark. But you have the same eyes. And the smile.”

  “He has like four inches on me. And I have my mom’s smile,” David said. “Do you want to use the shower first?”

  Josie looked at him a bit longer, then shrugged and hopped off the bed.

  David was in seventh grade when he introduced Sharon Mizrahi to his dad. He’d met her in drama class and had had a devastating crush on her for the entire year. She’d been way out of his league, with long mocha legs, chocolate brown hair he could smell from where he sat in class, right behind her. She dated guys in the ninth grade. When they were assigned to do a dialogue together, he could not believe his luck. The afternoon Sharon came over to work on the assignment, his dad happened to be at home. Sharon giggled and blushed when his dad smiled in greeting. In David’s bedroom Sharon whispered, “Wow, David, your dad is like a movie star.”

  When he was eighteen, after moving to Vancouver with his mom, he started dating Leah Rosen. She was his first serious girlfriend, his first everything. One day they were lying in his dorm room bed after making love, talking about marriage and babies. Leah’s cheek was on his chest and she was playing with his belly hair when she said, “I know you’ll age well, because I’ve seen photos of your father and he’s smoking hot.”

  David pushed her off him.

  He’d almost forgotten about all that. Living away from his dad, in Vancouver, and later in Montreal, had been good for him. He’d actually begun to develop some confidence. He was doing well at grad school, had published a few reviews in the local paper, and he had Josie, who found his neuroses endearing. She wasn’t impressed by this macho stuff; she liked skinny boys, the artsy-nerdy type. She was the one who had asked him out, during his second year of university in Montreal. He’d seen her around; she was hard to miss, an art student with the kind of blonde curls you usually see on postcard angels. But she had a mouth on her that wasn’t angelic at all: she swore, yelled, smoked and drank. David was intimidated and infatuated. She wore leg warmers when they weren’t in style and a single feathery earring. She had a tattoo of a gecko on the back of her neck. She didn’t wear a bra.

  He stepped out of the room to find that his father had prepared dinner, set a table on the lawn with a white cloth over it, three place settings, a bowl of finely chopped salad and a bottle of red wine.

  “Wow,” David said. “You cooked?” His father grinned, inserting a corkscrew into the top of the bottle. David looked at the yard. The flowers, the mowed lawn, the fresh herbs: basil, cilantro, mint. His father was retired now. Perhaps he’d mellowed, become domesticated.

  “You’ve got to love men who can cook.” Josie emerged from the house dressed in a strapless blue summer dress and a grey cardigan, smelling clean, her curls shiny and wet. “David has a kitchen phobia.”

  “Mademoiselle.” His father held the wine bottle in front of Josie and she nodded.

  David leaned back in his seat, sipped wine and looked around while his dad brought over steaming plates piled with roasted chicken and mashed potatoes. The desert lurked at the back of the house, and David felt wary of its presence. A bright ribbon of leftover sunlight traced the tips of the Judaean Hills behind them, and the sea was marbled with pink and purple. Stars began to appear, spreading across the sky like a rash.

  Josie sighed. “This is so magical. This is the calmest place I’ve ever been to.”

  David’s father laughed. “And the West Bank is right there.” He pointed vaguely south.

  “What brought you here, Eitan?” Josie sipped her red wine.

  His dad sliced a piece of his chicken and stabbed it with his fork. “I always wanted to live in the desert.”

  “You did?” David blurted out. He wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I always thought of you as a Tel Aviv kind of guy.”

  “I was barely there,” his dad said. “I pretty much went wherever they sent me. But the desert—it’s always been my dream. There’s just so much space here. It’s like you can really breathe.”

  “Must get lonely sometimes,” Josie said. “No?”

  “I found the city lonelier,” he said. “All these people, and no one gives a shit.”

  David excused himself and went to the washroom. He washed his face, wiped it with a towel and looked at himself in the mirror.
It had only been a few hours, but he already felt different, as if he’d lost the little confidence he possessed, regressed to his younger self. He didn’t particularly enjoy small talk, had never been good at it. The whole thing was awkward: the three of them, around the table. It reminded him of all the times he had sat at dinners with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend of the week. David had been fifteen—his limbs growing long and awkward, his forehead sprouting acne—when his parents divorced, when he started spending weekends at his dad’s new apartment in the north end of Tel Aviv. Even when his father wasn’t dating, his apartment reeked of bachelor: empty bottles of wine lined up on the balcony, dimmer switches on the walls, a bedroom with dark silky sheets and melted remnants of candles on the bedside table. He’d been mortified when his father tried to talk to him about sex, inquiring about girls in his school in an attempt to bond. Some nights he could hear stifled breath, the bed squeaking, the mumbled whispers and giggles that followed. Now, his mind, which constantly produced images of car wrecks and terrorist attacks and crashing planes, people jumping in front of metro trains, was picturing his dad and Josie kissing over the table. He had to close his eyes and shake his head to erase the image. He threw some more cold water on his face before going outside. When he returned, Josie was laughing, head back, her bare shoulders gleaming in the moonlight.

  He helped clear the table, wash the dishes, and then wiped his hands with a kitchen towel and announced in Hebrew that he was going to turn in.

  “Oh,” his father said, pausing. “Already?”

  “I’m beat,” David said.

  “Oh come on.” His father switched to English. “It’s not even midnight. Is he always like this?” He turned to Josie, who shrugged. “I got some good Scotch. Would grow hair on your chest.”

  “How about tomorrow, Aba.” David yawned.

  Josie followed David into the guest room and sat down next to him. “Your dad wants to spend time with you.”

  “It’s been a long day,” David said. “I’m tired.”

  “We came all this way …”

  “Let it go.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed a moment longer, and then walked out.

  When he woke up, Josie wasn’t in bed. The red numbers on the digital clock radio read 1:05. He threw the sheet off, got up and walked out of the room. The house was dark and the moon cast rectangular shapes on the tiled floor. He heard muffled voices from the yard. He stood by the screen door, next to a coat rack heaped with his father’s jackets. He could smell cologne on the fabric and recoiled, surprised by his reaction. His father and Josie were still sitting around the table. Josie was wrapped in a blanket now, holding a cigarette and laughing, her body angled toward his father. His father sat with his back to the door. They seemed cozy together. Josie was describing David’s mom’s recent visit to Montreal. “—such a sweetheart,” she said. “Of course she wouldn’t let us cook a thing, which was a real treat.”

  His father sighed. “I used to dream about her roast when I was stuck with my unit for weeks.”

  “So what exactly did you do in the army?” Josie said, shaking ice in her Scotch glass. David tensed.

  “I was commander of a troop,” his father said. “You don’t want to hear about that. It’s boring.”

  “Oh my God, are you kidding?” Josie laughed. “I’ve never met an IDF officer before.”

  David stared in disbelief. Josie was the kind of girl who refused to watch violent movies, who marched in peace rallies, who judged men who joined the Canadian army. When they had first met and she found out he was from Israel, she looked him up and down and asked, “Did you have to go to the army?”

  “I had to,” he said, “but I didn’t.”

  “Wow,” she said. “A refusenik.”

  He hadn’t corrected her then, or since. He liked that she was impressed. Nobody else had ever been. His mother had been relieved, of course, but even she thought that it would make his life difficult in Israel. The truth was, his not going to the army had nothing to do with ideology. He was terrified. In the first interview he told them he was severely depressed. He said he’d kill himself if they made him go. He even manufactured some tears, all those years of drama school finally paying off. His dad was furious. He told David he would have no future in Israel, this would be a stain on his record forever, nobody would ever hire him. He told him he was not a man, would never be a man, called him a coward, worse than those Orthodox yeshiva students. “At least they believe in something!” Soon after that, his mother decided to move back to Vancouver, and David joined her, eager to get away from the army, away from his dad’s fury and disappointment.

  Josie came to bed half an hour later, smelling of Scotch and cigarettes.

  “Since when are you so fascinated by the Israeli army?” he said into the dark.

  “Come on, who isn’t?” She laughed.

  He lifted his head to reposition his pillow, smacking it twice before lying back down.

  Josie was quiet. “Are you mad at me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Did it bother you that I was talking to him?”

  David snorted a laugh. “My dad could never resist a beautiful woman.”

  “That’s crazy,” Josie said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said and turned his back to her.

  The smell of brewed coffee, rich and laced with cardamom, woke him. He sat up in bed and Josie squinted at him and put a pillow over her face. His dad was going to take them to the beach today. “I’m not going,” she said.

  “What? You have to come.”

  “No,” she said, taking off the pillow. “I’ve decided. I’m going to hang out here and read a book.”

  “Josie …”

  “Go.” Josie shooed him, waving her hand.

  His dad leaned against the counter in Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless shirt, reading the paper. The kitchen was immaculate, the cabinets streaked with sunlight. He smiled when David walked into the kitchen. “Coffee?”

  David nodded.

  His father poured thick muddy liquid into a cup from a small pot on the stove. “You guys ready to go?”

  David blew on his coffee. “I am,” he said. “Josie is staying here.”

  “Everything okay?”

  He took a quick sip from his coffee, burning his lip. “She just wants some time alone.”

  David pointed his remote key at the rental car, which beeped open, flashing its lights. His dad was walking in the opposite direction. They both paused and looked at each other. “Oh,” David said. “How far is it?”

  “Not far. Maybe thirty minutes.”

  David glanced up. The sun was climbing up in the sky. “It’s pretty hot already.”

  His father waved his hand. “You’ve been living in Canada too long. Toughen up.”

  “Aba, you know I’m not much of a hiker. I’m going to slow you down. You’re going to get annoyed.”

  “It’s just a little walk. It will be good for you.” He could hear the irritation in his dad’s voice.

  David sighed, scratching his head.

  “Fine.” His father turned around. “Forget it.”

  “No, no, we’ll walk,” David heard himself say.

  They walked in silence for a while, out of the village and down the road. The Dead Sea sparkled in the distance. His father walked one step ahead of him, the sound of his sandals against the stones hard and purposeful, his dark, muscular calves bulging. They made it to a T junction, where a rusty signpost pointed south, toward Eilat, and north, to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The highway was empty, a long black snake disappearing into wavering haze, the asphalt shimmering wet in the distance. They crossed the road and hiked across a desert plain strewn with shrubs. The sun, which had risen from behind the Jordanian mountains, was blasting hot on David’s skin, washing out the landscape. David thought of the last time he’d walked in the desert, in sixth grade, on a school trip. He had become overheated, and eventually twisted his ankle and
had to return with a chaperone to the bus. He was happy to sit alone in the air-conditioning, eating snacks and sweets his mom had packed for him. When he’d lived in Israel, the news would sometimes report lost, dehydrated hikers who had gotten stranded in canyons, lain broken-boned at the bottom of cliffs, been swallowed up by sinkholes that cracked open without notice. There were snakes and jackals and foxes roaming the area, even leopards. Now it made sense, he thought. Of course his father would choose to live out here, build a home in this harsh and hostile land.

  “Josie is great,” his father said, already three steps ahead. “I have to say I’m very impressed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His father laughed. “I’m happy for you. She’s the real deal.” He half turned to David. “Reminds me of your mom. Feisty.”

  David didn’t answer. He could do without the small talk. They reached a small cliff overlooking the water. David watched the view: a cluster of luxury hotels dotted with palm trees on the far right, the salt-mining fields spread out beyond. His father began walking down the rocky trail to the beach, skipping downhill with quick steps, no hands. David followed more cautiously, holding on to the wall, sweat trickling down his face.

  “So how is your mom?” His dad looked over his shoulder.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Is she seeing anybody?”

  “Aba, please.”

  “What?”

  “Why would you ask me that?”

  “Can’t I care about what happens to my ex-wife?”

  David shook his head to himself.

  They made it down to the beach, which was wider than David remembered from childhood trips; the waterline had receded. They were walking on a stretch that had once been underwater. David was out of breath, sweaty and irritated. They had four more days here, four more awkward evenings and dinners—his father and Josie laughing while he ate in silence. He resented Josie now, for finding his father charming. She was supposed to be on his side. And what was so charming about his dad anyway? He wasn’t particularly smart or witty; his sense of humour was not very sophisticated. Once, in Vancouver, David had asked his mother what had drawn her to him. His mother had gazed up from the dishes she was washing, her eyes all dreamy. “There was something about Eitan,” she said. “Everybody wanted to be around him. He made people feel special.” She’s still in love with him, David had thought in dismay.