The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  * * *

  —

  ONCE AGAIN, I was transferred. This time I had outdone myself: I got myself thrown out of a unit they usually threw people into. I was in limbo, floating between temporary units. In the meantime, the army decided to conduct a full security check on me. My friends were summoned for an interview. I was strangely flattered.

  My best friend, Shira, who was an officer now, looking sharp with her ranks and an M16 casually slung over her shoulder, was losing her patience. “Why can’t you just make the best of it, like the rest of us?” she asked. In the interview, she told the intelligence officer, “Her biggest problem is that she will drive you crazy. I don’t see that being a major security threat.”

  One Friday afternoon my mother and I sat at the kitchen table. Chicken stew steamed on the stove and the sun painted the cabinets gold. I was reading the weekend papers and didn’t look up when she asked, “Why are you doing this to yourself? Why are you fighting so hard?”

  I blurted without thinking, “Because I’m smarter than them.”

  “Oh, honey.” My mother looked at me wearily. “But they are the ones calling the shots. You can’t fight a whole army.”

  * * *

  —

  NEAR THE END of my service, I was assigned to a new unit, working under a colonel who was willing to take a chance on me and whom I didn’t hate so much. I made a friend in the new unit, Elsin, a punk rock kid from south Tel Aviv who hated the army as much as I did. Going to work was not so dreadful when she was around. Sometimes we even had fun. One day, while our boss was out, we invented a game called “put things back in their place.” It involved stretching the phone receiver cord to the other side of the room and hurling it back, trying to place it in its cradle. On hot days, we took extended lunch breaks and went to the beach, folded our pants, removed our army shoes, and dipped our feet in the water.

  I was also in love, which seemed to have mitigated my rage. My first real boyfriend, a soft-spoken, blue-eyed kibbutznik named Gilad, served with Shira in the north of Israel, and I lived for the weekends, when he was on leave and we could be reunited. Once I finished the army, we were going to move in together, live in his studio apartment in the kibbutz, and work to save money for the customary after-the-army trip. I just had to keep my head low for a few more weeks.

  By then, I was the most senior soldier in my unit, with a new rank—a sergeant, granted solely for my length of service—sewn onto my sleeves. My new position afforded me a level of respect among newer soldiers and an unspoken license to slack on my duties. But I was still outranked by officers, no matter how young and inexperienced they might be. Resentful of the arbitrariness of military hierarchy, I made no effort to conceal my disregard for these young officers’ command, but never went as far as to risk disciplinary action.

  A few weeks before the end of my service, a young, cocky officer from our unit marched into the office and told me to go clean the grounds with the rest of the staff. Tomer was handsome, Ashkenazi, and entitled, and he suffered from a classic case of sagemet. Derived from sagam, for “second lieutenant”—the rank awarded right after officers’ course—sagemet was a common malady among young officers, who, buoyed by their new rank, began conducting themselves with an inflated air of importance.

  Tomer wasn’t my direct superior, so he rarely had reason to boss me around, but when he did, it drove me crazy. Perhaps it was the affected tone of authority, the forced deepening of his voice, the smug smirk on his face. He just seemed to enjoy it way too much. That day I looked up at him and flatly said, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m busy. I’m eating a carrot,” I said, taking a bite and staring at the computer screen. Elsin, standing behind him, stifled a giggle.

  Tomer glared at her, then crossed his arms and cleared his throat. “Get up now.”

  “I have to stay at the office,” I said, and as I spoke it aloud, my rationale began to make sense. “The colonel is out.”

  “You can lock the office for a few minutes.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It’s an order.”

  I snorted. “Um, no.”

  He stormed out of the room fuming and came back waving the written complaint for disobeying his order. My tenth trial.

  Gilad exhaled loudly over the phone. “You promised to stay out of trouble! You’re on probation! Do you want to go to jail? What were you thinking?”

  But I wasn’t thinking. As with my screaming at the high-ranking officer—the incident that had gotten me on probation in the first place—defying Tomer wasn’t rational. I was so desperate to maintain a semblance of autonomy and dignity in a system designed to repress that it got the better of me.

  A few days later, I appeared in front of the female major who had grown to despise me over the last two years. When I walked in, she sighed deeply, eyebrows raised in a “now what?” expression. She went through the routine protocol and then asked, “Do you agree to be judged by me?” I looked straight ahead, voice steady, and said, “No.”

  The noncommissioned officer who accompanied me elbowed me in the ribs.

  The major looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  The major scoffed. She scrawled something on paper and said that my case would be passed on to her superior, the highest-ranking female officer in the whole district. “Do you understand that her decision will be final?” I did.

  Asking to transfer the trial was a right available to all soldiers, but very few took advantage of it. I had nothing to lose. I knew the major would have likely sent my sorry ass to jail. With a new judge, one who wasn’t biased against me, I still had a chance.

  The trial was scheduled three weeks before the end of my service. I forwent my contact lenses that day in favor of black-rimmed glasses, braided my hair neatly. It was the same “good girl” look I had donned for my interview with the colonel, in the hope that it would offset the impression my behavior sheet made.

  The lieutenant colonel eyed me and then read the complaint aloud. “How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty,” I said.

  She leaned back in her leather chair while I gave her my rehearsed defense. I explained that I was the only secretary left at the office, and that the one time I had left it unattended, I had been charged with abandoning a post.

  The officer perused the complaint again, then gazed up and studied me. I stood as straight as I could, chin up. Then she told me to step outside while she called the unit to verify my story.

  It was the only time in my military history that I was acquitted. I never went to jail.

  * * *

  —

  WE HAD A cold parting, the army and I, a limp handshake with no eye contact. I didn’t have a goodbye party as many soldiers did. There was no cake made, no cards exchanged, and no tears shed. I packed my things in a hurry and left, worried that if I stayed another minute, I would somehow find a way to fuck everything up again and end up in jail. As I walked out into the sunny afternoon, I waved at the new girl who pressed buttons at the gate, and then stood for a moment on the busy Tel Aviv street with my eyes closed against the warm sunshine. Buses and cars zoomed by, music pouring out from their open windows. From a nearby patio, I heard the clatter of dishes, the tinkling of cutlery, the soft hum of conversation. A woman walked by, her heels tapping purposefully on the tattered pavement. I inhaled the city air—car exhaust, cigarette smoke, perfume, swirled with a touch of salty breeze—and felt lighter, younger, and freer than I had known possible. This, I thought, is what the rest of your life could be like.

  A SLEEPLESS BEAST

  I AM SITTING IN THE PASSENGER SEAT of a dusty pickup truck next to my friend Shelly’s father. I’m eighteen and a few months into my mandatory army service. Shelly is asleep in the backseat, long freckled limbs, auburn ringlets hiding her eyes
. Leonard Cohen is playing on the tape deck. Outside, the luscious greens of Tel Aviv give way to smeared yellows. Water bottles roll at my feet, crinkling empty bags of chips and Bamba. An open can of Coke and a Styrofoam cup with fragrant coffee are lodged in the cup holders between us. I sit back, stretch out my legs. My lungs expand and my muscles soften; my body unwinds, changing gears into desert mode.

  Shelly’s father had picked me up from the army base first. Shelly’s unit had the day off and her place was closer to the highway, en route to Eilat. When I walked out of the gate, he rolled down his window, smiling widely at me as if we knew each other already, and then got out of the car to throw my backpack in the trunk. He was in his mid-forties, fit and spry, with dark, ropy legs in white shorts, a thick salt-and-pepper beard, and Shelly’s intense eyes under thin-framed glasses. He seemed cool enough, for an old guy. When we started chatting, traversing Tel Aviv’s mad traffic on our way to pick Shelly up from her rented apartment, I found him laid-back and friendly, a lot like Shelly.

  “I need to change from my uniform,” I said, eager to transition from soldier to civilian on vacation. “Can we stop somewhere with a bathroom?”

  He glanced at his watch, and then at the jammed traffic. “Why don’t you just change here?” he said casually. “I won’t look.”

  So I did. Unbuttoning khaki and slipping on a T-shirt, wriggling out of my pants in favor of a cotton skirt, letting my hair down. As he promised, he didn’t look.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN SHELLY HAD called to ask if it was okay if her father joined us on our weekend trip to Eilat, I was not thrilled. We had planned to hitchhike—the uniform was good for catching rides—and sleep at the youth hostel downtown. We planned to swim, drink, and meet cute boys.

  “He’s really cool,” Shelly said. “He’s not like a regular dad. And it means we won’t have to hitchhike or pay for a hostel: we can just camp somewhere. He’s going to bring food and a pot for coffee. He can make fire. We can still do the same things. He promised not to be in the way if we got with some boys.”

  Really? I had no personal frame of reference—my father died before I was ten—but I suspected he would not have been that cool. Sometimes, I tried to imagine what our relationship would have looked like, how our closeness would have survived my rebellious teenage years, the emergence of my sexuality. I marveled at fathers, curiously observing my friends’ dynamics with their dads, envying their intimacy, their disagreements, even their fights.

  “It would just be easier,” Shelly said. “But whatever.”

  The idea of not having to hitchhike or pay for accommodation was appealing. Halfheartedly, I agreed.

  Now, after we stopped for gas and some food, Shelly has fallen asleep. Her father and I talk about music and travel. He loves Eilat, and he loves the desert, as do I. I’d been going to the southern desert town regularly since I was sixteen, when Maariv LaNoar, the magazine I had worked for, sent me to write a piece about a scuba diving course. As an angst-ridden teenager, my work at the magazine had been my salvation. It offered a sense of accomplishment I had not found in my studies and provided me with the pocket money my mother couldn’t afford. Once the editors recognized my dedication and dependability, they began rewarding me with assignments such as that one, introducing me to the luxuries most of my friends took for granted. I returned from Eilat changed, in love with the desert, with the Red Sea—so unlike my former love, the murkier, shallower Mediterranean—and with scuba diving. Diving, for me, was the ultimate escape, a world so unlike anything we know, where nothing works the way we expect it to, where even our most basic needs are altered: the way we move, communicate, breathe. On land, I talk too much. I don’t know what else to do with myself around people. Underwater, I relish the silence, the buoyancy, find the rhythmic sound of my measured breathing comforting, meditative. Diving is the closest to feeling at peace as I may ever get.

  For the last two years of high school, I had gone to Eilat almost every holiday, sometimes with my friend Shira and sometimes alone, always staying at the windswept, musty youth hostel at the diving club. In Eilat, I was free to be anybody, blend in with the tourists, the backpackers, and the adventure divers. In Eilat, I bravely kissed boys I’d just met and flirted with handsome instructors in their twenties. In Eilat, sandy-haired tourists from Nordic countries, to whom the ordinariness of my olive skin and black curls was a novelty, told me I was beautiful. And I was: my hair smoothed by the dry desert air, my skin tanned and showing in the dead of winter, because in Eilat, it was warm year-round. I was a better version of myself in the desert.

  When I was a child, the arid landscape had inspired different emotions in me. Every time my family drove south, my stomach tightened as soon we left the city and the desert unfurled in front of us like an unrolling rug. The vastness had seemed menacing, the heat and silence as absolute as death, the desolation a mirror of my own loneliness. Now, my chest is filled with exhilaration. The desert feels extreme, but in a good way, and loving it is radical, a thrill. I love how simple it is, clean-lined, raw, and—similar to the depth of the sea—uncomplicated by human interventions. I love the hint of threat and mystery, the risk inherent in it.

  To love the desert is to love a beast.

  The road winds around hills and drops into canyons and craters. Then a long, faded asphalt narrows down into a haze—an arrow pointing south, surrounded by an expanse of nothing and the largest, bluest sky. The mountains of Jordan loom in the far distance, unattainable. The towns and kibbutzim we cross are dusty mirages; even their trees appear un-green, coated with wandering sand.

  Growing up, I watched Hollywood movies and envied the magnitude of America, coveted its open roads, wished I could just drive off whenever I needed to get away. In a country so small that you could travel north to south in less than seven hours and east to west in two, hemmed in from all directions by inhospitable neighbors and shifting, elusive boundaries, where the only firm border, ironically, was the sea, a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Eilat was the closest one could get to feeling “on the road.”

  Deep into the Arava plains, Israel’s small stretch of middle-of-nowhere, the desert is already embedded into my skin. Wild acacia trees pepper the dusty savanna, and tumbleweeds roll across the wavering asphalt. I am feeling free and relaxed, optimistic about this weekend, enjoying the soft music, the wind in my hair, and the calmness of the desert on my eyelids.

  Then Shelly’s father reaches over as if to grab the coffee between us, but instead, he takes my hand and begins stroking it.

  I freeze in my seat.

  * * *

  —

  SHELLY AND I first met in basic training. We slept on neighboring beds in the same tent, sharing the same air, and by the end of basic training were as intimately close as two girls who had spent a month in extreme conditions could be. We had other things in common: anger issues, a history of loss, a cynical outlook. There was a hint of mystery about Shelly that both intimidated and intrigued me. She didn’t talk about her life much, but I knew she didn’t have it easy. Her mother had died when she was little, and she grew up with relatives. She didn’t mention why she hadn’t stayed with her father and I never asked. I wondered if it was her rough upbringing that made her so fierce, someone you didn’t want to mess with, someone you wanted on your side. I wished I were that resilient, that cool, and was pleased she chose me as a friend.

  When we found out we were both stationed at the same large base in Tel Aviv—I at the army ombudsman’s office and she at human resources, a short walk from my office—we were overjoyed. At first, our relationship was limited to office hours. We chatted on the army phones and took coffee breaks and lunches together, bitched about our officers and our jobs. Sometimes, she was sent to fetch files from our archives and we’d sneak a shared-moment break while she smoked on the front steps. As time passed, our friendship deepened. The civilian l
ife I’d once had, my writing career, my high school friendships, seemed to be halted. Most of my friends were posted away from home and returned only on weekends. This base—this uniform, these people I saw daily—had become my world.

  I was assigned to a senior adjudicating officer whose job was to arbitrate complaints soldiers made about rights they were denied or unjust punishments they were given. As his secretary, I filed complaints, set up meetings, and made calls to pre-interview plaintiffs and defendants, most of them young men. Too insecure about my looks and inexperience, I found the anonymity of the phone to be a safe space to experiment with flirting. Soon, I was carrying on elaborate phone affairs, usually with the defendants—young officers whose confidence, arrogance, and dark side I found alluring. They were not accused of legal infractions, mind you; no real crimes, only moments of poor judgment and abuse of power. And though I was sympathetic to the plaintiffs who were treated unfairly—always cheering for the underdog—I was fascinated by the defendants’ questionable morals, enthralled by their hunger for power, their failure to be good officers, their failure to be good. In that way, they were like me. Flawed. Human.

  Most of the affairs ended in disappointment and heartache once we met, and I became awkward and shy face-to-face, unable to maintain my on-the-phone confidence. There was a marine officer who drove all the way from Haifa to my mother’s house in Petah Tikva. “I’m coming right now,” he said. I said no. He said yes. And then he was there, climbing up the stairs to my room while I preened in front of the mirror, tossing my hair one way, then another. Once he was there, in my room, impossibly handsome, I couldn’t look him in the eye, didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  There was that artillery sergeant who was witty and charming over the phone, and appeared sweet and unassuming in person when he came to pick me up for a party in his kibbutz. We drank and danced in a large, smoky barn that had been converted into a bar, and then teetered outside. The trails were wet and the air tasted like it does after rain, fresh and cool and full of promise. We ran into a girl he knew, and he said, “Hey! This is…” and then paused and stared at me, unblinking. I waited for a minute, because I thought, No way. This is not happening. The girl smiled at me with pity. I punched his arm, which seemed to jolt his memory, because he laughed and said, “Ayelet! I’m sorry, I’m drunk.”