The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  There is a yellowing, black-and-white family portrait hanging in Savta’s living room that I love looking at. My grandmother, my grandfather, who died when I was little, and their six children, all clad in their best garments, everyone smiling charmingly except for my mother, the petulant child in the corner, black curls held by a pin, one shoulder raised, lips down-turned, forehead scrunched. My aunts all laugh and say that this is where I got my sulk from. I know my mother inherited that expression from her own mother, but in the picture, Savta is smiling wider than I had ever seen her do in real life, face open and unwrinkled, eyes warm. She looks young, beautiful, and happy. I wish I had known that woman.

  My uncles carry the dining table and set it inside the sukkah they’ve erected in the front yard, with white sheets slung between poles for walls and dried palm leaves for a roof. Holiday drawings my cousins and I made are pinned on the sheets, and colorful paper garlands are strung across the ceiling. Everything else is the same: one of my uncles does the kiddush in an undulating, singsong Yemeni accent, and we all chant “Amen” in unison. We pass along the wineglass and sip a little bit of the dark red sweetness, which stings our throats and warms our bellies. One of my cousins throws the lahoh—the sticky Yemeni pita that is dappled with holes—on her face so it looks like a silly mask, and the rest of us giggle into our bowls of yellow soup.

  After dinner, my mom, aunts, and female cousins pile up the dirty dishes and carry them inside while the men stretch their legs and argue about things like politics and the war in Lebanon and the huge protest that happened the week before in Tel Aviv and whether Ariel Sharon should resign as minister of defense. They crack sunflower seeds and spit the shells into little mounds by their coffee mugs. I watch my cousins climb into their fathers’ laps, cozying tiredly into their wide chests, and I feel like there’s a bone stuck in my throat that won’t go down. When no one is looking, I crawl under the table and sit there hugging my knees and watching their feet, biting my nails until it hurts. I make myself small, invisible. I’m good at that. I’m flexible and agile and can squeeze myself into the smallest spaces, like in the niche at the top of the stairs leading to the roof, or inside the laundry chute, or in the back, between the olive trees, in a small path I cleared under a bush. Once I fell asleep in the gap between the couch and the wall, and everyone went crazy looking for me.

  Savta pulls up the tablecloth and nudges me, nodding toward the kitchen. I crawl out, drag my feet, back hunched, but instead of going in, I watch the women through the window: they are loud and curvy and strong-minded and effortlessly charming, their curls bouncy or blow-dried or hennaed, their throaty “het” and “ayin” melodic—syllables I swallow, flatten, learned in school to pronounce incorrectly, like an Ashkenazi. They fill that tiny room with motion and perfume and chatter and bursts of laughter. Water is running and food is placed in bowls and stacked in the fridge. It is a secret sorority to which I’ve been granted entrance, invited to bask in their womanly prowess thanks to my DNA and gender. They seem happy, content to be doing what they’re doing, to share in one another’s company, but I hate washing dishes and I don’t like the smell in Savta’s kitchen, years of spices that have ripened and soured. My aunts tell my mom that it is her fault I am so lazy, that she spoiled me because I was her baby for seven years before my brother was born.

  I look back at the dirt road. The darkness teems with nocturnal wildlife: crickets chirp deafeningly in the background and things rustle in the trees and in the shadows. The other sukkahs on the street glow brightly, floating squares of light in the night, and the people inside them are silhouettes, like in a shadow-puppet show we saw in school. They raise their glasses, their plates and forks clink. They sing holiday songs, voices booming through the crisp air. I’m standing in the dark, watching their lives.

  * * *

  —

  IN OCTOBER, WHEN it starts to get cool in the evenings, Ima pulls down the gas heater and bags of warm clothes smelling of mildew and winter from the top of the closet, and I find the sweater she knitted me last year, when she had time to knit, with blue and pink stripes. Inhaling its scent, I remember the times I wore it, back when Aba was well, when Ima was happy. Every single item of clothing is now a souvenir from better days.

  At a class party on Friday, Alon and I slow dance among the other couples and the space between us feels solid, like there’s an extra body in there. We can’t seem to move in sync: one of us is always a little too slow to catch up. Last week after school, I ran fast and scaled a fence, and Alon said, “Why do you have to act so tough all the time? Like you’re a boy?” I close my eyes and for a moment imagine dancing with Danny instead.

  At recess, I sit on the stone bleachers and watch the boys play soccer. Alon scores and then circles the field, grinning. His arm extends up like he is Oded Machnes on TV, the best soccer player in the whole country. Alon is such a show-off. He used to wave at me and I sat taller, proud that he was my boyfriend. He never does that anymore. My gaze wanders, scans the crowds for Danny. He and Yoel invited Nurit and me to work on a group project after school. I spot him hanging out with the geeky kids on the barricades. He is the complete opposite of Alon: he is humble and soft-spoken, and he is the first of many boys and men I will fall for because they seem to possess my father’s sensibilities. He looks up and smiles and I stare at my feet, cheeks burning.

  Danny lives in a new high-rise opposite school. The stucco walls outside are still white, yet to be blackened by years of smog and rain. From his room, you can see the orange groves that border our city. He has a blue wall-to-wall carpet instead of tile floors, and its touch is ticklish under my feet. I curl my toes to grasp at the strands. Danny’s mom serves us chocolate wafers and raspberry syrup with water. We study and then play Monopoly for a while, and Danny steals glances at me when he thinks I’m not looking. Nurit says he’s too shy. He hardly ever speaks in class, even though he’s really smart and knows the answers to almost everything. He’s funny too. We get each other’s sense of humor, which is a lot more than I can say about Alon, who doesn’t really have a sense of humor at all.

  Sometimes, in my dreams, we hug like grown-ups do.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN ABA RETURNS from the hospital after a few weeks, my brother and I are so excited that we bounce on his bed until Ima yells at us to stop. I snuggle up to Aba and read him my new poems. His body feels brittle and bony. We take short walks and sometimes we run into people, and Aba stops and talks to them at length and I try to be patient and not fuss. Everyone knows my father in the neighborhood. They hold his hand in both their palms and then pinch my cheeks and pat my head.

  One night I wake up to urgent voices from the living room, heavy feet climbing up the stairs. I tiptoe out of my room and watch from the landing. There are paramedics in the living room and Aba is lying on a stretcher. Ima holds his hand and nods at the paramedic with a furrowed brow. Aba has been home only a week.

  The nights after Aba returns to the hospital, I hear stifled sobs creeping through the walls.

  * * *

  —

  MY AUNTS TELL Ima that she should go see a special rabbi, a mekubal, who can help lift the curse. “Someone put the evil eye on you,” the younger sister says, smoking out the open window, her kinky curls tied in a messy bun.

  “Nonsense.” Ima waves her hand.

  My aunts’ faces are a variation of my mother’s, like artwork that was reproduced with slight modifications. They are all beautiful and weary, their skin marked with years of raising many children, of cooking and cleaning and shopping and breastfeeding and not sleeping. Despite their hardships, their beauty only seems to deepen with the years. I wish I had inherited the good looks from my maternal family instead of their sulk and bad temper.

  They sit around the kitchen table, drinking Turkish coffee with milk in glass mugs—the grinds heaping thickly on the bottom—and eatin
g my mom’s ka’adid cookies, crumbly and freckled with nigella seeds. My oldest aunt, Rivka, bounces my baby brother on her knees and he squeals and giggles. Ima frowns at her coffee. Her cheeks are sunken now and her skin is sallow.

  Eventually, my aunts go to the rabbi without her. When they come back, they say the rabbi knew that the incident had happened in water. “But it didn’t,” Ima says. “He was playing soccer.”

  “By the swimming pool!” my aunt says.

  The rabbi also said we must check the mezuzahs on all the doorframes. I can hear the resolve in Ima’s voice weakening. Later that week, unsmiling men in beards and kippahs unscrew the mezuzahs affixed on our doorposts and pry out the scrolls that are rolled inside like tiny SOS notes. They unfold the parchment papers and inspect the neatly scribed Torah verses through a magnifying glass.

  They tell us the scrolls were faulty—they found typos in them—and must be replaced immediately. I’m relieved that the source of our troubles has been identified, and awed by the power of the written word.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WEEKS PASS and Aba doesn’t get better, my aunts go back to the rabbi and return with another remedy. The rabbi concluded, based on numerological calculations, that we must legally change my baby brother’s name. Many years ago, my aunt had changed her own name following a rabbi’s advice and her luck turned, though her sisters never stopped calling her by her birth name. My mother gives in more quickly this time. At night I stand over my brother’s crib and watch him sleep and I am flooded with sorrow. He is only one year old and he’s perfect, with his tiny button nose and round face, his skin dark like my dad’s. I like his old name. I don’t want things to change.

  * * *

  —

  ALON SLIPS ME a note in class. “I want to ask you to stop wearing jeans with holes. I don’t want people thinking my girlfriend is poor.”

  I write back without thinking. “I’ll wear whatever I want. I am not your girlfriend anymore, so there.”

  When I get home, the front door is locked. I walk to the back to see if the car is there, and I find Ima sitting in the driver’s seat, head over the wheel, shoulders quivering. I steal away without her noticing me and go to Nurit’s.

  * * *

  —

  ON A SCHOOL trip to the Galilee, while everyone is frolicking in the aisle of the bus, singing and laughing, I watch the road winding up and down lush hills and remember the trips we used to take up north as a family before my baby brother was born, all seven of us cramped into my dad’s Cortina, and me always stuck in the middle because I was the littlest. Back when we lived in our old place, Aba used to take me out of school sometimes and bring me to work with him. We’d drive to the court in Haifa or Jerusalem or Netanya, and I’d get to sit in the passenger seat like a grown-up. On the way there, we’d stop at a bookstore so I could pick a book to read while he worked. Once, we parked on the side of the highway and watched migrating birds and Aba told me about their journey. Another time, we walked along the seawall in Netanya and the breeze made my hair crazy, and even though I was already too big for it, he carried me for a bit, and it was nice to feel small because Ima was already pregnant and soon I wasn’t going to be his baby anymore.

  The tears come all at once. I press my face against the cool window so no one will see me and wipe my tears as soon as they leap out. From the gap between the window and the armrest, I suddenly see Danny watching me from a few seats down. I quickly move away from the window. When we get off the bus, we don’t speak but his eyes search mine and stay on me a moment longer.

  * * *

  —

  MY COUSIN MALKA, who is old enough to be my mom and teaches at my school, suggests to my mother that I see the school counselor. At the counselor’s office, Malka sits behind me, by the door. The counselor’s name is Rachel and she has a sympathetic smile plastered on her darkly painted lips. It looks fake, like a joker’s mask. “I know this is a difficult time for you,” she says softly. “I know you are very close with your father. Would you like to talk about it?”

  I turn to look at Malka. She gives me an encouraging nod. The distant echo of a teacher’s voice travels in through the open window. I don’t want to talk about my father, because talking would make this real. Because then I would cry and I don’t want to cry. I don’t talk about it with anyone. Not my siblings. Not my mom. Not even Nurit. I don’t even write about it in my diary.

  I know about death. Savta Sarah, my father’s mother, died two years ago, and my father didn’t shave for thirty days afterward. He was sad and strange-looking, and I was sad too, but mostly for him, because I didn’t really know her. I was one of many grandchildren that filled her tiny house in Sha’ariya every second Friday. She didn’t speak Hebrew well and I didn’t speak her dialect of Yemeni Judeo-Arabic. Their home was dark and cramped and smelled of cooking and of basil, which grew wild in their yard among the weeds and broken things that lay there in disarray.

  I know about death because in the news they keep reading names of soldiers who die in Lebanon, and every Remembrance Day we grieve the heroes who gave their lives for our country, and every Holocaust Day we mourn the six million Jews who perished in the camps. Our country is haunted by its dead, weighed down by loss and remembrance.

  When I was younger, I’d wake up some nights breathless from dreams so vivid I would later confuse them for memories, dreams in which I fell off the balcony or was run over by a car. I would race over to my parents’ room, sobbing, “I don’t want to die.” My parents hugged and soothed me; they said everything was okay, I wasn’t going to die for a very, very long time.

  The counselor is waiting for me to say something. Finally, I say, “I’m worried.”

  Rachel leans forward, her smile now softer, sincere. “What are you worried about?”

  I look at my lap and bite my nails; they taste like pencils and dust. “I worry he’ll die,” I say. It just slips out. I feel like I broke some spell by uttering those words, and now my throat is full of tears and I don’t want them to burst out in front of this woman I don’t know, in front of my cousin, who is probably going to tell my mother, but the tears stream out anyway now, silently, so many of them that they are dripping from my chin and my nose into my lap.

  The counselor says some empty, sympathetic things. She urges me to go on, but I can’t. I can’t tell her of the awful thoughts I’ve had since I allowed myself to imagine. Like how the girls in class might be nicer to me if he died, how they might treat me more kindly, feel bad for what they did to me last year. I don’t tell her how, for a brief moment—not even a second, really—I almost thought it wouldn’t be so bad. And how hard I tried to take that thought back, erase it from my mind, but like trying to undo my turning on the light on Yom Kippur, I couldn’t. The past could not be changed. My sins could not be rewritten.

  * * *

  —

  DANNY AND I are alone in his room one afternoon when he says, voice shaky, “I have to tell you something.” My heart races. But then Yoel walks in with a glass of water.

  “Did you tell her?” he asks. Nurit walks in too.

  Danny quickly says, “No.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Danny fiddles with a thread of carpet. “My father got a job in America,” he says, the way he says everything, softly, with a little smile. “We’re moving there.” He looks everywhere but at me.

  I swallow. In my head, I try that sentence on. My father got a job in America.

  Nurit glances at me. “When?”

  “Next month.” For the first time, his gaze lands on me, but I stare hard at the carpet, afraid that if I look up, my face will tell him everything.

  “It’s just for a year or two,” he hastens to add. “We’re coming back.”

  A lifetime.

  * * *

  —

  DANNY WILL CO
ME back for a visit the following year. By then, everything will be different. My father will die in his hospital bed on an ordinary Friday in the spring. He will die in the same hospital I was born in almost ten years before. I will sleep an entire night ignorant of that loss, and the next morning, I will wake up still unknowing, un-orphaned (and for the first few weeks after his death, every morning will begin with the same blissful amnesia before I am hijacked by remembering).

  That morning, Shabbat morning, my mom will call me from her bed and I will be happy to snuggle up to her, to soak up the comforting softness of her body. But the room will be dark and airless, and the figure on the bed that is my mother will look like a broken, withered version of herself, and she will have terrible news.

  That moment, crystallized in my memory through the fog of grief, will be the fork in the road where my future splits in two: what could have happened had he lived and what happened because he didn’t. And as I grow up, I will try to live as wildly and loudly as I can to outdo the enormity of this moment, to diminish it.

  Later that day, my childhood idol, Ofra Haza, will win second place at the Eurovision Song Contest, dressed in a glittery outfit and singing “Israel is alive” in Munich, of all places. The war in Lebanon will continue. Soldiers will die. It will rain, obviously, because what else could the sky do?