The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  “Why is that?” Gilad asks.

  “She’s very nice,” the old woman hastens to say. “What is she, Yemeni?” And she gives him a knowing look. “Not for you.”

  Gilad and Nadav tell me that story later, on the drive back to Manhattan. They find it hilarious, that blatant, old-generation racism of some elderly Ashkenazi Jews, the kind who call Mizrahi Jews like me shvartze chayes, “black animals” in Yiddish. I’m not laughing. I know how Gilad and I look to her: me, the girl from the Yemeni neighborhood east of Tel Aviv whose uneducated grandparents walked barefoot from Yemen to Israel, lived in poverty, had too many children; and Gilad, the blue-eyed kibbutznik whose pioneer family—salt of the earth!—all served in the air force. I wish we were still together just so I could prove her wrong. Then I wish I were back in India, where everyone looked like me.

  In New York people think I’m Indian, Persian, Spanish, Turkish, Moroccan, Lebanese, Brazilian, Italian. They speak to me in all kinds of languages. I resist the temptation to pretend to be who they want me to be. I enjoy being claimed by so many nationalities; I like the idea of having a facial structure that is malleable, shifting, as though it makes me a citizen of the world. In my desperate wish to belong, I accept every invitation.

  But after a while, it makes me feel untethered, adrift, as though I no longer know the most basic thing about myself. As though I belong nowhere.

  Walking down Ninth Avenue one day, I hear someone call after me, “Yemeni! Yemeni!” and I turn to see a large man in a white galabiya outside a convenience store, waving with a large grin. I look behind me, and then hesitantly walk toward him.

  “You’re Yemeni!” he says. “I’m Yemeni too!”

  I have never met a Yemeni outside of Israel, a Yemeni who wasn’t Jewish. He invites me into his convenience store, gestures toward the stool, and hollers to his brother in the back to make coffee. I am surprised and proud for being recognized, feel validated and seen.

  The brother emerges carrying a tin tray, three small cups with dark, sweet-smelling coffee. “You should come with us to Yemen,” he says.

  “I can’t,” I say. “I have an Israeli passport.”

  “Nonsense.” He waves a hand. “We’ll dress you up like a local woman. No one would know.” And they burst out laughing.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN GILAD AND Nadav leave for Canada, I ask to catch a ride. I’ve never been to Canada, and I have a high school friend in Montreal.

  We drive to Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Montreal, Toronto. The three of us sneak into darkened campgrounds late at night, sleep in one tent, shoulder to shoulder, and slip out early morning so we don’t have to pay the fees. Every few nights we splurge on a motel. We eat most of our breakfasts at Denny’s, $2.99 for two strips of bacon, two greasy eggs, and two pancakes. It keeps us full until the evening. After a few days, I don’t even feel nauseous.

  Somewhere past Toronto, Gilad and I get into a huge fight. Perhaps I tried to get out of contributing for gas: the New York–based Hebrew paper I’ve been freelancing for still hasn’t paid me, my Visa bill is racking up, my Israeli bank account is in overdraft, and aren’t they traveling that way anyway?

  Gilad says I am spoiled and entitled. He’s been mean and cold for days now. In Toronto he told me that maybe our love wasn’t so special, or else it wouldn’t have ended with me falling for someone else. He said that his family (who once felt like my family) don’t know we’re traveling together, that they think he should stay away from me, that even Nadav, whom I still consider my friend, has expressed concerns about him getting hurt again. Then he and Nadav went on a double date with two Canadian girls on our last night in Toronto, leaving me to watch TV alone in our grim motel room.

  Now, driving through a Canadian forest smudged by the first colors of fall, he loses his temper and yells at me, which he has never done before. His composure—reminiscent of my father’s—was a part of what drew me to him: a yin to my yang. At first, I am too stunned to respond, and then I scream, “Stop the car!” slam the door, and storm out. Marching down the side of the highway, I consider hitchhiking back to New York or Montreal, think of my backpack in the trunk. Gilad and Nadav stare at me through the windshield and finally they inch beside me. “Just get in,” Gilad says, not apologizing. I walk a little farther before I slide, sulking, into the backseat and sit pressed against the door as though ready to bolt. It’s all my fault. I’m the one who broke his heart and wrecked everything, so there’s really no way he’ll ever be apologizing. For anything. He has a free pass for a long time. Maybe for life. It enrages me. Because I wish for a redo but can’t have it. Because I can never forgive myself for ruining the one good thing I had. Because sometimes, in moments of fleeting clarity, I can see that I gave in to fear. I didn’t want to be caught unprepared again. I had to leave first.

  They drop me off at the Greyhound station in Buffalo, where I board a bus back to Manhattan. They continue west, toward Vancouver.

  * * *

  —

  ON ROSH HASHANAH, I am alone. Shira is in the Bahamas with her boyfriend. I smoke a cigarette and sip beer by a window washed with rain, overlooking the bleak concrete courtyard. When I call my family to wish them Shana Tova, the noise and commotion on the other end spill into my empty apartment, the echo bouncing from the walls.

  “When are you coming home?” Ima yells. “And don’t say in a couple of months! You’ve been saying that for six months already.”

  For the first time I answer honestly, “I don’t know.”

  “Just come home,” she says. “You don’t sound happy.”

  I say nothing. I don’t know how to tell her that some days, it feels like I might never be back. How to explain that losing Aba at an age when my identity was still entwined with his, when he was my homeland, made me feel exiled, displaced. How sometimes his absence pulsates in my body like a phantom limb or an excised organ. I want to tell her I am not done searching yet. I want to say being happy has nothing to do with it. But it’s noisy in the background, and she seems distracted, and I still don’t have the words.

  * * *

  —

  I LEAVE NEW York when the leaves start to fall, pile crackly and colorful on the gray pavement, leaving skeletons for trees. I’m leaving because the imminent winter terrifies me and my money is running out, and because maybe it is time for a new dream. Shira is leaving too, heading back to Israel to start university. Chasing sunshine, I fly to Los Angeles, where I’ll be staying with my high school friend Dorit, who has moved there, and hopefully find some under-the-table work to make money for my travels.

  L.A. is rows of obscenely shaved palm trees, smoggy sunsets, a dry, warm smell that reminds me of Israeli summers. The California appeal is lost on me; I’m used to sunshine, palm trees, and beaches, and I haven’t been away long enough to appreciate its resemblance to home. Also, I don’t have a car. My friend Dorit has found God since we last saw each other, and in her house, everything is split into two: two sinks, two sets of cutlery, two sets of dishes in separate cupboards labeled DAIRY and MEAT. I marvel at her faith, the simplicity of following imposed guidelines.

  I find a job at a hair salon on Beverly Boulevard, opposite CBS Studios. My boss is a stout, sleek-haired Moroccan-Israeli with an inflated ego and a red convertible. He hates Muslims, gays, and blacks. Whenever one of his regulars comes in, aging women with puffy gray hair, he exclaims, “I’m in love with you! Do you know that I’m in love with you?”

  As I shampoo the greasy receding hair of TV executives, massage flaky scalps, fold tinfoil for highlights, sweep piles of hair, I practice the things I will tell Gilad when I see him. Maybe it’s not over; maybe I can still fix this. Then I worry he might not even call when he gets to L.A. on his travels. What if he doesn’t want to see me? When I catch a glimpse of my reflection, I look away. It�
�s hard to forgive yourself in a place full of mirrors.

  When Gilad and Nadav roll into town, they drop by the hair salon and I have never been happier to see anybody. We hug hard. A few days later, I pack my stuff and leave with them. My boss doesn’t pay me the money he owes me. I rack up more charges on my Visa. In desperation, I call my second-oldest brother, who transfers a few hundred dollars into my account, for the second time since I started my travels. “I am doing it because our father did the same for me,” he says. “And you deserve to have someone bailing you out too.” I will call him again from Nepal, a few months later, for my ticket home. But never again after that.

  Gilad, Nadav, and I drive into the desert—Nevada, Utah, Arizona—like a scene from a road trip movie, an old American car cruising toward a hot, shimmering horizon; long hair flapping out open windows; dusty, tanned forearms leaning on the ledge. My chest swells, breathes in the dry, warm air. I am almost happy.

  Somewhere between Vegas and the Grand Canyon, Gilad and I fall a little bit back in love, and it’s like New York was to me, familiar but new, and not quite what I had hoped it would be. Too much has happened. It’s too late to start over. In Utah one morning, the three of us wake up to our night breath frozen in crisp sheets on the inside of our tent. We drive south, chasing warmth again, down to Tijuana, where Gilad and I sip margaritas at roadside cafés and have sex in rooms infested with cockroaches.

  * * *

  —

  IN SAN DIEGO, on our way to the famous zoo, the music on the radio stops and the announcer says, “Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.” Gilad swerves the car and parks it on the side of the road, and we sit and stare at the radio for answers. Outside, the day is sunny. People are walking, laughing, sipping coffee, like the world hasn’t just changed forever. I fight the urge to jump out of the car and shake them.

  We find a motel and I can hardly speak to the attendant when I ask for a room. She eyes me suspiciously, even after I say, clearly upset, “Sorry, our prime minister was just assassinated,” thinking she should understand. I always found it curious, the way American characters on TV reacted to the assassination of JFK, as if they knew him personally, but now I can’t stop crying. The assassin, we learn as the day progresses, was a fundamentalist right-wing Jew. He shot Rabin after a heartfelt speech he made at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. On CNN, we watch Rabin onstage singing “Shir LaShalom” (“A Song for Peace”), with singer Miri Aloni, and he looks happy, hopeful, almost childlike at that moment, a man with a dream. He smiles at his wife, letting her into the car a moment before he’s shot. I know that the country I left is no more; Israel will never be the same after today. And for a moment, I think, I can’t go back. Later, I watch young people lighting candles in the square outside city hall in Tel Aviv, forming circles on the pavement, and I long to be with them. This is a day Israelis will look back on, a moment we will forever retell, like trauma survivors. “Where were you when Rabin was killed?” people will ask and answer.

  Nadav sits on one bed, Gilad and I on the other, legs stuffed under the floral bedcover, brushing against each other. Gilad squeezes my hand, and I lean my head on his shoulder, tears streaming. I feel bonded with him, not just by grief but by this memory, forever our answer to this question. It will always be him and me on the way to the San Diego Zoo, him and me on this hotel bed, watching CNN and holding each other on the day Rabin was assassinated.

  * * *

  —

  THE CAR DIES in New Mexico. I’m driving a desert road late at night when it overheats, coughs, and clatters into silence. We sit in the silvered darkness and look at each other. We manage to crawl a few kilometers at a time, stopping to let the car cool in between, until we make it to El Paso in the morning. No one wants to buy the car, battered and wearied from the long trip, the paint chipped, the rear dented, so we leave it outside the Greyhound station with the keys in the ignition, pry off the license plates as souvenirs, pose for photos on the roof, and board a bus to New Orleans. After a few days there, fueled by alcohol and pot and sporting long beaded necklaces, we head to Florida.

  In Miami, Nadav decides to go back to Israel. He has no energy left in him for a backpacking trip. For a couple of weeks, it’s just Gilad and me in the humid tropical heat. We spend those days making love desperately, feverishly, like when we first fell in love. Only now, it feels like the last time.

  We say goodbye at a train station in Miami. Gilad is catching a train to the airport, from where he’ll be flying off to Peru, and I’m heading back to a wintry New York the following day, and from there to India. We embrace on a bench trapped between two trains going in opposite directions.

  Gilad looks at me for a long moment. “Do you want to come with me to South America?”

  I hold my breath to listen for an answer. Then I whisper, “No,” eyes brimming.

  “It’s okay to fall in love,” he says before he leaves and my heart squeezes into a crumpled ball. I watch him board the train, the backpack strapped on his shoulders, and memorize his slender frame, his shaved head, his confident walk. I look for him through the windows, but the train moves too fast, the faces all a blur.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE PLANE to Bombay, I sit next to a young Indian American woman who’s going back with her family. I tell her it is my first time to Bombay. On my first trip to India, I traveled up north.

  “Where will you be staying in Bombay?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But we’re arriving at 9:00 P.M.!”

  “I’ll be okay,” I say, feigning confidence in the hope that it will stick. I have no place to stay, no guidebook to the south of India, no idea where I’m going next. My heart quickens whenever I let myself think of the future. I press Play on my Walkman, fast-forward until I find “Leaving on a Jet Plane” by Peter, Paul and Mary on my friend’s mixed tape. I watch New York through the window getting smaller. Feel something, I tell myself. Hurry. Don’t miss it. But then the clouds close over it like curtains, and the city is gone.

  MISSING IN ACTION

  THE NIGHT I MEET SOPHIE, I’m sitting on a rock in the jungle, grinding my teeth and clutching a water bottle.

  “You have rolling papers?” she says. Her voice is raspy, her Italian accent as thick as mango juice. And she’s beautiful; her hair, skin, and eyes are in matching shades of gold and sand. I reach for my bag, fish out a pack of rollies.

  She grabs a couple of papers, turns as if about to leave, but then stops and looks at me. “You comfortable on this rock?”

  “Very,” I say. “Try it. But I warn you: you might never leave.”

  She climbs up and sits beside me, shifts her bottom until she finds an accommodating crevice. “You are right.” She laughs.

  “And it’s higher up, so you have the best view from here,” I say. “You can see the whole tree.”

  The rock is a few steps up the trail from an ancient banyan tree in the middle of the jungle in Goa. Under the canopy of the tree, people from all over the world recline on bamboo mats, spread over a wide flat area created by aerial roots. They smoke joints, pass chillum pipes, play didgeridoos and drums. Some of these people live here, sleep in hammocks and bathe in the spring. Others, like me, come to visit from rooms rented on the nearby beach. Beside the trunk, somebody has set up a temple to Shiva, and visitors place coconuts and incense as gifts to the sacred tree. Thick roots hang off the branches like beaded curtains, separating us from the surrounding forest.

  Pauli, “the Wizard,” sits cross-legged in the center, swaying to the drumbeat. When he showed up after midnight, someone hollered, “It’s a party now!” Pauli is a Roma Austrian man in his late fifties, tall and scrawny, with pliable limbs, a scarred face, and twitchy eyes. He told me stories about the time he spent in prison in Europe, about his battle with drug addiction, about escaping from juvenile detention to t
he jungles of India at the age of thirteen with the help of his gangster father. People say he takes fifty drops of LSD at a time. Pauli concocts his own liquid LSD and shares it free of charge. Nobody knows or seems to care how he can afford to be so generous. We stand in a line and open our mouths as if we are kids in an impoverished country and he’s giving us malaria pills. When he drops them in, he counts loudly to ensure that we get the dosage we asked for. I took two drops. I’ve been sitting on this rock ever since, grinding my teeth and trying to breathe away the panic; drinking gallons of water that go through me, my body an empty, hollow tube.

  “I see you before.” Sophie licks the adhesive strip on the paper, looking at me sideways. Strands of her blond hair fall on her face and she tucks them behind her ear. “Always you sit at the restaurant and write. What do you write?”

  “Just stuff.” I flick my lighter on and off. Lately, it’s been mostly diary entries, something to keep me busy while traveling alone, which I’ve been doing intermittently for the past couple of years.

  “In…how you say, ebreo?”

  “Hebrew. Yes.”

  Sophie lights the joint and blows out smoke.

  “This is your work in Israel? Writing?”

  I hesitate. “I freelance. Sometimes.” I find it disorienting to talk about work right now. The truth is, I have been doing a lot less freelance journalism since I started traveling: waitressing is faster and better money. I hope she doesn’t ask about my time in the Israeli army next, because that would be a total buzzkill. Most travelers I meet are fascinated by this topic, especially men, who seem aroused by the idea of a woman toting a gun. Traveling after the army is a rite of passage in Israel. After spending some of their best years confined to uniforms and bases, reduced to digits and ranks, forced into a rigid world of rules and orders, most young Israelis need to break loose. Among backpackers in Asia and South America, Israelis are known to be rowdy, loud, intense, with a reputation for partying the hardest, for doing the most drugs. I was no exception.