The Best Place on Earth

by Ayelet Tsabari

  Some days, burning Ami’s clothes didn’t seem like such a bad idea. She was a nobody, Ami had sworn over and over again. It was so long ago. He hardly remembered her face. “What, you want a name?” He flapped his arms. “Rona, I think.”

  “You think?” she screamed. “You think?”

  Naomi pushed her cart out through the automatic glass doors to the pristine arrivals area, searching for her sister’s full head of blonde curls. It had been a while since she last saw Tamar. Her sister didn’t visit often. “This country drives me nuts,” she had said the last time she came to Jerusalem, over three years ago. “No, let me rephrase.” Tamar had cleared her throat. “I love the country, I hate the people.” Naomi wanted to tell Tamar that she was, and always would be, an Israeli. They had grown up running in the narrow streets of Sha’arei Tsedek, spent afternoons riding their bikes in the Mahane Yehuda Market, pinching cashews and peanuts from the Armenian vendor on the corner of Yafo Street.

  Tamar waited at the end of the corridor, her long arm waving like a flag. Naomi quickened her pace when she noticed a slender, bearded man standing next to her sister. His long hair was thinning on top and tied in a ponytail. He wore a sleeveless shirt with a faded print and loose Thai pants.

  They hugged, and Naomi held Tamar out at arm’s length. “Look at you. How come I grow old but you never age?”

  Tamar laughed, pushing Naomi’s arm off her. “Shut up. You look great.”

  “I’m Carlos.” The man shook Naomi’s hand firmly, his black, small eyes penetrating hers. He was older than his attire suggested, fine lines etched into his tanned skin. Tamar cuddled up to him. Naomi busied herself with her luggage, rearranging her suitcases on the cart.

  Outside, summer was at its best, the sky a flawless blue, the dry air smelling of mowed lawn. The three of them sat together in the front seat of a pickup truck, Tamar’s long legs straddling the gear stick. Naomi rested her head against the truck’s window, giving in to the fogginess of jet lag. She squinted to read the slogan on a passing car’s licence plate. “Beautiful British Columbia. The Best Place on Earth.” She scoffed quietly. According to whom? She was from Jerusalem, after all, the holiest place on earth, a place so laden with history it made tourists crazy. She grew up seeing delusional tourists loitering by the Old City’s gates, touching the ancient bricks, delivering mumbled sermons in foreign languages about Jesus and redemption. Once, she wrote a psychology paper about the Jerusalem syndrome, suggesting it was often resolved by simply removing the patient from the city. “If leaving Jerusalem is all it takes to cure a psychosis,” her professor had scribbled next to it, “then we should all leave.”

  She had hardly ever left Jerusalem herself. She didn’t even like going to Tel Aviv. Maybe this was exactly what she needed to cure herself of her delusions, or at least get some perspective. She watched the mountains in the distance shimmering in the hot afternoon. She rolled her window down and inhaled; the air tasted green, fresh.

  Naomi slept for much of the ferry ride, and Tamar was grateful for the opportunity to study her sister’s face, inventory the changes. Naomi frowned in her sleep. Tamar wondered again what had brought on this visit. When she had pressed over the phone, Naomi had said dryly, “I’m not dying. I’m just coming for a visit.”

  Naomi’s hair had new white strands threaded through it, and the laugh lines that fanned from the corner of her eyes had deepened since Tamar had last seen her. It always surprised Tamar to see that her sister had aged. Whenever she thought of Naomi, she pictured her at twenty-five, even though she was three years older than Tamar. Tamar had called to wish her a happy fortieth birthday a couple of months ago.

  “I can see the resemblance.” Carlos, back from the ferry café with two chai lattes, sat beside her and cocked his head as if to mimic Naomi’s.

  “Really?” Tamar said. “I look like my dad. Naomi looks like my mom.”

  “Still,” he insisted. “You have the same cheekbones. Something about your facial structure.”

  Back in Jerusalem, a stranger would occasionally recognize Tamar by her resemblance to her father. Everybody knew her father. His family was one of the oldest Jewish families in the city, having arrived in the sixteenth century, after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. Once, a woman on the number 18 bus had stared at Tamar for five stops before saying with curled lips and narrowed eyes, “You must be Shlomo Delarosa’s daughter.” The woman’s hair was bleached and her nails long and golden; she wore tacky high-heeled boots. Tamar didn’t ask her how she knew her dad, didn’t want to know. She hated that she looked like him, that their relationship was evident in her face, that sometimes she caught her mother looking at her with a mixture of affection and derision.

  “You two are so much alike,” her mother had said after she witnessed one of Tamar’s many fights with her father. Although Tamar protested, she knew her mother was right. She had inherited her father’s temper, his intensity and his charm. This temper, her contempt for authority, had made her army service insufferable: a series of trials, detentions and reassignments. Her father, who had been an officer in the army—had fought in three wars—was appalled by her behaviour. A temper wasn’t the only thing they’d had in common. She had never thought herself very good at relationships. Not until Carlos.

  Outside the ferry window, Galiano Island was dark blue against the lighter sky. Small houses clung to the shore and a row of boats was moored at the marina. She rested her head on Carlos’s shoulder. She didn’t like remembering how angry she’d been back then, before coming to BC. When she first arrived in Vancouver, she hadn’t planned on staying long; it was just another stop, like the year spent selling sandwiches for office buildings in New York City, the months spent driving an ice cream truck in California. But in BC she noticed herself slowing down, unwinding, as if she’d been holding her breath for twenty-four years and could finally let it out. It was in BC that she learned to forgive her father, though he never forgave her for leaving; when she called home he often didn’t want to speak to her, and when he did, he was short, demanding to know when she was coming back. The day Naomi phoned to tell her about her father’s stroke, Tamar had just moved into a new apartment in East Vancouver, her few boxes piled unopened in her new living room. Tamar boarded a plane to Tel Aviv the next morning. By the time she landed in Israel, eighteen hours later, he was gone.

  Tamar’s house, wooden and painted red, was on the other side of the island, a twenty-minute ride from the ferry terminal on skinny roads that curved around bays and hills. Inside, it smelled like fresh herbs, garlic and essential oils. Naomi noticed that there was nothing Israeli or Jewish about it, no mezuzahs on the door frames, no hamsas like the ones their mother had hung all over their home for good luck, no dangling strings with blue beads to repel the evil eye, no calendar with Jewish holidays marked upon it. Tamar proudly showed her the patio, which was framed by luscious forest. Even though it was past nine, the sky was a quiet, steady pink. The lingering daylight made Naomi uneasy. In Israel the sun had never set later than 8:00 p.m.

  Tamar asked about Yoav and Ben, and Naomi was relieved to talk about her children. She told Tamar about Ben’s new girlfriend, Yoav’s new interest in cooking. She felt a stab of guilt; she couldn’t remember the last time she had left the kids alone with Ami for more than a day. She calculated the time difference; the kids would just be waking up now. She hoped Ami had made them sandwiches, wasn’t just giving them money. She pictured her boys scampering around the house, Yoav pounding on the bathroom door, the two of them downing their juice standing up, bickering and pushing each other on their way out the door.

  They sipped their tea in silence. Naomi looked into the living room. Through the glass it looked staged, like a display in a department store: the earthy toned walls, the row of black-and-white travel photographs in silver frames, the wooden Buddha head above the mantle.

  “You never told me you had a new boyfriend,” Naomi said.

  Tamar smiled. “I wanted to
tell you in person.”

  Naomi took a sip, looking at Tamar sideways. “Is he Jewish?”

  Tamar laughed in a short burst and shook her head. “I forgot Israelis always ask that. You know, people actually consider that rude in other parts of the world. It’s like asking people what their sexual orientation is.”

  Naomi turned to face the forest and bowed toward her mug. The treetops swayed like a coordinated dance troupe, their rustling leaves a thousand tiny jazz-hands. “It’s so quiet here,” she said with a nervous laugh. She fought a yawn, wishing for darkness to come.

  “When I first moved here the quiet used to freak me out,” Carlos said. He had snuck up on them, creeping barefoot like a thief. He grinned at Naomi, his teeth large and perfectly white. “Hopefully one day we’ll be able to live here full time. Right now, we have to keep going back to the city for work.”

  “Carlos joined my business,” Tamar said, leaning toward him. “I do video and he does stills. We offer package deals.”

  “That’s great,” Naomi said, running her finger along the wooden railing.

  “Especially for weddings. People like to hire a husband and wife team.”

  “But … you’re not married, are you?” Naomi stared, confused.

  “Well, not officially,” Carlos said. Tamar tilted her head and smiled at her. Naomi felt ancient, backward. She looked up, relieved to see stars starting to appear, filling up the sky. A distant choir of crickets and frogs followed, breaking the silence.

  Tamar and Carlos tiptoed around their bedroom, speaking in whispers, not used to having another person in the house. It occurred to Tamar that this is how it would be if they ever had children, the house no longer theirs alone. She squeezed toothpaste onto her brush and caught a glance of her face in the mirror, brow furrowed. The visit had just begun and already it wasn’t going as well as she’d hoped. She wasn’t sure that Naomi liked Carlos, and for the first time, she really wanted her to approve of a man.

  When she first met Carlos, on a shoot at a wedding in West Vancouver, Tamar wasn’t thinking romance. She had enjoyed working with him, impressed by how thoughtful he was in his movements, possessing an awareness of space that she had rarely witnessed in men. Over lunch, as they sat together at a table, he pulled out a card and handed it to her, suggesting they keep in touch, maybe recommend the other to prospective clients. When he called the following week to ask her out, she thought it was business related, but over a vegetarian Indian dinner at a Commercial Drive restaurant, she reconsidered. He may have been twelve years older, but she found herself envying his youthfulness, his enthusiasm, his energy. But it was his goodness that got her in the end, the kind of sincere kindness she had always admired in others and was afraid she didn’t possess.

  Carlos walked into the bathroom and reached around her to grab the floss from the medicine cabinet. “I changed my mind,” he said as Tamar spat toothpaste into the sink. “I can’t even see the resemblance anymore.”

  “I know,” she said, looking at him through the mirror. “We were really close once.”

  “Really?”

  “Inseparable.” She nodded. “We got into so much trouble together.”

  “You? Trouble?” He glanced at her with a lopsided smile. “Impossible.” He threaded the floss between his teeth. “I would expect Naomi to keep you in check, being the eldest and all.”

  “She did,” Tamar said. “Especially when we were kids.” She dried her face. “Okay, maybe I got us into trouble.” Carlos laughed. Some of Tamar’s best memories were with Naomi, or if not the best, then at least the most intense. Tamar, at sixteen, convincing Naomi to take her to a bar at the Russian compound, and then getting so drunk that Naomi had to hold her hair while she puked in an alley. Tamar (seventeen? eighteen?) dragging Naomi, recently dumped and heartbroken, out of her room late at night to the Mahane Yehuda Market, handing her cracked dishes she had stolen from their mother’s kitchen, and urging her to smash them against a wall to vent her anger. When windows in the nearby buildings turned yellow and a woman screamed, “We’re calling the police!” the two of them ran back home, laughing so hard they couldn’t breathe. Hitchhiking together to Eilat on a whim the summer before Naomi enlisted in the army, sleeping on the beach with a bunch of stoned hippies they had met along the way; and then later, in their early twenties, driving to Sinai in a beaten Fiat their father had advised Tamar against buying, and picking up cute hitchhikers: uniformed soldiers and European backpackers Tamar flirted with. The car died on the way back, outside Dimona, and the two of them stood and watched a finger of smoke rising from the engine up to the desert sky.

  And then, an older memory flickered, out of place: eight-year-old Naomi sneaking Tamar outside through the kitchen door to play in the street, two girls in nightgowns under a lone street light, the sounds of fighting and crying from their home faint, blending with the buzz of traffic and mosquitoes and television sets from other homes.

  After Tamar moved to BC, she had called her sister almost every week, but eventually life took over. Every now and then they’d make vows that they’d call every Tuesday, email every Friday, but nothing stuck.

  Then, on Tamar’s last visit to Israel, something had shifted between them. She had missed Jerusalem so much when she was in Canada, but having finally made it there, she couldn’t wait to go back to BC. For the first time, she saw the city through a foreigner’s eyes: the chaos, the traffic, the aggression, what Israelis loved calling “passion.” It was as if the city was stuffing itself into your throat. She no longer belonged.

  “You have an accent,” Naomi had said one evening over dinner.

  “What?” Tamar laughed. “That’s crazy.”

  “You do. Your l is too soft, your t is too sharp. You speak funny.”

  Tamar had tried talking to Naomi about the distance between them, bringing it up in a polite, Canadian way, but somehow Naomi got annoyed, accusing her of being passive-aggressive. Tamar wondered whether Naomi resented her for not having children or a husband, for never having wanted a family, for being carefree and travelling the world while she was stuck in a life that so much resembled their mother’s.

  After that visit, it was hard to just call. Or rather, it was easy not to, to let months pass by. Tamar felt guilty about it, aware of the passing time, dreading the day something happened, because things happened, especially in Jerusalem, and then she’d realize how much she was missing out on, the way she had felt when her mother died of a heart attack—two years after their father—leaving no time for goodbyes. Naomi was the only family she had left.

  Sometimes Tamar tried to imagine what life would have been like if she and her sister lived in the same city, like their mother and her sister, who had visited each other almost daily, had taken care of each other’s children. Tamar hardly knew her nephews. She hadn’t been there to help raise them. She never sent them birthday gifts. And they grew so fast, in three-, four-year increments. Carlos spoke to his niece and nephew in Toronto often, calling his mother and sister at least once a week. A few months ago, the entire family had visited their apartment in Vancouver, hijacking their home for a few days, filling it with lively chatter and loose laughter, drinking wine in the afternoons and talking late into the night. They had such an easy way of communicating, such intimacy and comfort, that it made Tamar feel lonely, then guilty.

  She watched Carlos now as he turned on his reading lamp, stripping off his clothes and hanging them over the chair. She hadn’t shared these thoughts with him, harbouring an irrational fear that he’d leave her if he knew how strained her own family relations were. He desperately wanted a family, had told her so early on. And although a part of her—for the first time in her life—yearned to share the experience with him, she was terrified that she was not right for the task, that like her father, she was bound to fuck it up. Things with Carlos were so good. She didn’t want anything to change.

  Naomi woke up at dawn. At first, she thought she was in her own bed, Ami by
her side. She rolled onto her back, startled by his absence. It reminded her of the bus rides she used to take through the desert to see Ami in Be’er Sheva, where he’d been at university. She often fell asleep in her seat, letting her head drop on a stranger’s shoulder, mistaking him for Ami.

  She got up and tiptoed into the kitchen, made tea and stepped outside with her mug. The sky was pastel, a watered-down version of its daytime self. A couple of faded stars flickered weakly and a brilliant orange belt embraced the horizon. She warmed her hands around the cup and breathed in the cold, foreign morning air. It was peaceful, serene. The best place on earth. Yet, somehow, it made her feel anxious and lonely. What was she doing here? What was she thinking? She sat on the deck and cried.

  She felt the warmth of the sun tickling her skin and looked up. On a patch of grass she saw Tamar and Carlos frozen, each with their legs spread in a wide stance, one arm extended up to the sky and the other touching the earth, their faces golden with sunlight. They looked like twins in their matching yoga outfits, their long ponytails. Naomi ducked. They hadn’t seen her.

  After breakfast she asked to use the computer to check the news. “Please don’t,” Tamar said. “You’re on vacation.” She had stopped reading news from Israel years ago, she said. “It’s all bad anyway.” Naomi turned on the computer, typing in Ynet’s URL. A pigua in Jerusalem. Her heart stopped. She scrolled down with shaky hands, skimming over the first few lines. She had to call home. Make sure the kids were okay. Then she noticed the date. The attack had taken place yesterday.