The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  I’m so tired.

  * * *

  —

  SOPHIE AND I both run out of money around the same time. We need to go home but the buses are on strike and we’re stuck. The beach is finally empty of tourists and vendors. It’s just us, the locals, and the core community of aging hippies. Some mornings we are the only table at the Moonrise; other restaurants have shut down, preparing for monsoons. “Maybe we should just stay—maybe it’s a sign,” I tell Sophie, and she laughs. But I am not kidding. Maybe I could be happy here, away from the “land that devours its inhabitants,” as the spies in the book of Numbers described Israel—as if loss was bound to geography, trapped inside my country’s fluctuating borders.

  Eventually we find a ride to Pune with an older Portuguese guy. Fabrizio gives us gifts when we leave: a porcupine’s quill, a mixing bowl for charas he carved from a coconut shell. We promise to write, go visit him in Sardinia. “I love you, little monkeys,” he says. The three of us hug, standing together in a sweaty, teary clump. On the way to Pune, the car swimming in pitch black, Sophie feels me up under the blanket.

  * * *

  —

  WE SPEND A few days in Pune with old friends of Sophie’s: Aurelia and the two Marcos. They rent an apartment near the ashram, and we all sleep in one big bed, a few mattresses thrown in a row. Aurelia is a dreadlocked hippie who loves to walk around buck naked, her pubic hair red and curly. “Ma ke cazzo voi?” Sophie says to her and even I understand; it translates as “What the fuck do you want?” but literally means “What cock do you want?” We all laugh.

  The trains to Delhi are full for at least a month and now I’m stuck in Pune, broke and overwhelmed. Life here is full of errands and itineraries and mosquitoes and the sound of trains. The mornings are too bright, the traffic too shrill. It’s a little bit like home. One afternoon, after smoking chillums all morning, I faint in a convenience store. I lean on the doorframe and lower myself to lie down on the dusty floor, blink to get my vision back.

  “You stop smiling since we got here,” Sophie says when I return. She stands behind me and wraps her arms around my chest. “Please smile. For me.”

  * * *

  —

  IN THE SHOWER one night, the electricity goes out. It’s a windowless room shared by all the apartments in the building. The room falls into total darkness, and then it’s lit psychedelic pink; a few rectangles in brilliant colors chase themselves in circles like a merry-go-round. I follow them, transfixed, and then get disoriented, my heart tapping against the inside of my chest. I reach for the door, and stumble. It’s not there; there’s more space than I thought. The walls have collapsed and I’m locked in a black-and-pink desert. The tapping in my heart goes into double time. A flashback. I haven’t done acid in four days. The door is there, I tell myself. You’re in the room. This isn’t real. Then the electricity clicks back, shining fluorescent light over the cream tiles and my skin, covered in goosebumps and beads of water and sweat.

  * * *

  —

  THE DAY BEFORE we go our separate ways—Sophie on a plane to Rome and me on the train to Delhi to fly home to Tel Aviv—I help Sophie and Aurelia wrap up pieces of hash they’re going to swallow and smuggle back to Italy.

  At night Sophie whispers into my nape, “Why do I love you so much?” We fall asleep hugging, two question marks. When we wake up, our heads are touching, our bodies face each other in a heart shape.

  * * *

  —

  THE TWENTY-HOUR TRAIN to Delhi ends up taking days. There’s been an accident. I smoke my last joint at a deserted train station in Maharashtra: infinite plains of yellow and no life in sight. We’ve stopped here for a few hours while they’re figuring out a new route. We end up detouring through Bhopal. For three days I sleep and wake in the train. This train, this compartment, becomes my world, my buffer zone between Goa and Israel. Sometimes I wish it would keep going, never arrive.

  At dinnertime, the passengers pull out tin containers from their bags and dip fingers and rotis into them. The compartment fills with the comforting smell of homemade cooking. I stare out the window. Since I finished my charas, I’ve lost my appetite. I’m also down to my last few rupees. The mother of the family that shares my compartment stares at me with narrowed eyes. For the rest of the journey, she offers pakoras, samosas, sweet ladoos. In the afternoons, I play cards with the grandmother, a beautiful woman with a silver braid and a white sari who reminds me of my own grandmother.

  I smoke my Gold Flakes sitting on the steps of the train, listening to Janis Joplin on my Discman. The door is wide-open and the countryside speeds past me: fields of blood-red chilies, rice paddies, groves of coconut and date. Barefoot kids run alongside the train, waving and shouting. Pieces of saris flap between the window bars as the train snakes across the state of Madhya Pradesh. I write in my journal, make lists of things to do when I get home, plan cleanses, meditation, an exercise routine. But my list-making brain has difficulties restarting; it feels sluggish, like a car that’s been parked for too long.

  On the last night, I sit on the steps after everyone falls asleep, hear the snores of passengers, catch the pungent smell of a bidi cigarette smoked from an open window. I lean my head on the doorframe and stare at the black cellophane night. The train chugs away, its rhythm as soothing as the crashing of waves that I fell asleep to in Goa. Then I see luminous green stars dangling off the trees, flickering off and on like a chain of Christmas lights, a psychedelic connect-the-dots. For a moment, my heart stops. I close my eyes and open them, willing the green lights to disappear. They disengage from the tree and disperse as if someone blew into them, skip between the tree branches, swoop and swerve alongside the train. Fireflies. Not a flashback. This is the real thing. One firefly lands on my arm and breathes light into it. I hold my breath. I don’t want to scare it away. I want this moment to last.

  THE MARRYING KIND

  IT’S MY WEDDING DAY, and I’m barefoot in a deep blue sari, hunched over a cigarette outside a North Vancouver home. The December day is cold and wet, and the snowy path had to be shoveled before guests arrived. I take a few urgent puffs, like a high school student in a bathroom stall, and flick the cigarette onto the pavement. I rub my henna-painted hands together and breathe into them to keep warm.

  My new brother-in-law pokes his head out the door. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say, forcing a smile. “Just getting some fresh air.”

  I’m not going back in. Not quite yet.

  Inside the house, thirty-odd guests I just met are pretending to be my family. Looking at them through the steamy windows, I’m almost fooled. They could be my family: a bunch of olive- and brown-skinned people with dark hair and dark eyes. From where I’m standing, it’s hard to tell that the women wear saris and that everybody looks more Indian than Israeli.

  I look Indian too. I look Indian to Indians in Vancouver who have asked me for directions in Hindi, to the girl who yelled at me, “You fucking Punjabi!” when I didn’t give her a cigarette on Commercial Drive. I even looked Indian in India, where the locals berated me for dressing like a Westerner and walking around with white boys.

  I’ve never looked more Indian than I do today. My wrists are heavy with sparkling bangles, and I’m neatly tucked in six meters of shimmering blue silk embroidered with gold and red stones. Anand’s cousins helped with the sari, wrapping it around me as if I were a gift with many layers, draping one end over the shoulder and stuffing the other into my skirt. I’m only wearing a thin line of eyeliner, and my fingernails are chewed down and unpainted. But my hands and feet (which are bare because I can’t walk in heels and don’t own a pair of dressy shoes) are covered in intricate amber-colored designs.

  Anand’s aunt hired an artist to draw on the henna the night before—a small, informal gathering that was attended by a few of Anand’s female cousins. I thought about the henna ceremo
nies in my family—elaborate affairs, complete with live music, traditional dancing, and heaps of food—imagined my mother and my aunts carrying baskets with flowers and candles. If I chose to have a henna back home, I would have worn three different traditional outfits, donned ornate Yemeni silver jewelry, and placed a spectacular headgear, weighing twenty-two pounds, atop my head. But somehow, it never even occurred to me to have a Yemeni henna ceremony. Then again, it never occurred to me to have a party at all.

  The door swings open, letting out warmth, broken conversation, and the smell of curry. My boyfriend—husband?—steps out and looks around suspiciously, as if expecting to see someone else. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. I’m coming in.”

  I take one more look at the empty suburban street. It is frozen still: the snow-topped houses, the parked cars, the cotton ball bushes. My feet start to feel numb. If I’d had shoes on, I might have walked away, down the trail, up the slushy road. My bangles would have jingled as I strode off, and the free end of the sari would have fluttered behind me, a splash of blue against all this gray and white.

  “Are you coming?” Anand is holding the door open.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN WE MET, two years ago, on my third trip to India, I wasn’t thinking marriage. I was twenty-three, sitting outside a bungalow on a remote beach when he walked by. He looked a bit like Jesus, skinny and brown, long-haired and unshaven, his features carved in long, dramatic strokes. He carried a guitar case and a small backpack slung over his shoulder. When we started talking, I discovered he was an Indo-Canadian from Vancouver who didn’t speak a word of Hindi.

  One night we shared a bottle of cheap whiskey around a beach bonfire and talked until everybody left and the fire died out. Within days, we were throwing around I love yous in both Hebrew and English. After two weeks, we called our families to announce our state of bliss. We wandered through India delirious and glossy-eyed, made love in guesthouses crawling with wildlife, throwing lemons at rats as they scurried across the ceiling beams, shooing monkeys that slunk into our room and rifled through our backpacks for food. We cooked meals outside straw huts, shared sleepers on overnight trains, licked acid stamps and swallowed ecstasy at parties on sandy beaches.

  We separated at a crowded train station in Pune, a classic scene from a Bollywood movie: a woman holds on to her lover’s hand, extended from between the metal bars of the train’s window. They utter declarations of love and cry. They vow to meet again. The train conductor blows his whistle, and the train starts chugging away slowly. The woman runs alongside the train until she can’t continue. The train disappears into a cloud of smoke.

  Over the following year, we managed to maintain a transatlantic relationship. Back in my real life in Israel, as my time in Goa and my affair with Sophie began to ebb into the glimmer of memory, I made a conscious decision to recommit to Anand. I told him all about Sophie and reassured him that he had nothing to worry about. He said he understood, regarded it as harmless experimentation, and mentioned a woman he had gone on a date with while working up north. I didn’t pry.

  For a few months, I waited tables in Tel Aviv while he planted trees in northern British Columbia. We wrote each other long, sappy love letters, and sometimes, when he was out of the bush, we spoke on the phone. At the end of that summer, he joined me in Tel Aviv for a few months, and then we were off to India again. Then, back on that train platform, we replayed our teary goodbyes before returning each to our own home.

  Finally, when I’d made enough money for a ticket, I flew to Canada to be with him, lugging a suitcase filled with Hebrew books and—because I was a delusional Levantine with no concept of Canadian winters—a bunch of tie-dyed tank tops and flimsy dresses I had bought in India. I was hoping to travel in B.C. for a while and then find a job. Maybe I’d stay for a year or two if I liked it. Who knows? I’d been living like a nomad for the past four years, so I wouldn’t mind the change.

  Vancouver was beautiful that summer, golden and warm, and the days long and languid. I’d never seen the sun set that late before. We found a one-bedroom apartment in the West End, facing English Bay and a daily display of sunsets, bought IKEA furniture and a foam mattress. An old American car. A set of Teflon pots. On warm nights, the air soaked with the salty ocean breeze, we could hear the water lapping the shore through our open windows.

  Other times, I explored the city alone while Anand worked. Vancouver was like a cover girl on a glossy magazine: breathtaking, distant, cold. I walked through its sterile streets, its manicured parks, aware that this was a place my ancestors had never set foot in, a place laden with other people’s history. I had no friends, knew of no Israelis who lived in the city, and unlike in New York and Los Angeles—the two other North American cities in which I had briefly dwelled—I never heard Hebrew on the street. Unspoken, my own Hebrew started to wither, feel beside the point, a linguistic island. At the same time, my adopted English was still clunky and unwieldy. I was discouraged by my failure to convey complex thoughts, annoyed by my inability to fight with my boyfriend in an eloquent way, embarrassed by my frequent mispronunciations and misunderstandings. As an immigrant, my identity was already under review, but as a writer whose sense of self was strongly tied to language, a part of me felt erased. I stopped writing altogether.

  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT AFTER dinner, Anand and I started talking about the future. “I’m thinking maybe I could go to college here,” I said. I had found a vocational program I liked, where I could study film and photography, discover new ways to tell stories that didn’t require words.

  Anand glanced at me carefully. He had done some research these past few days. Apparently, the only way I could stay in Canada, get a work permit, and apply for student loans was to get married.

  I tensed up.

  At twenty-five, I’d never planned on getting married; never understood why people bothered. Growing up, I didn’t throw white scarves over my head for veils or gaze dreamily at wedding dresses in magazines. I blamed my father for my textbook fear of abandonment. But my tourist visa was running out and so was my money, so if I wanted to stay with Anand, I had to make a decision. Fast.

  “I don’t want to get married,” I whined over the phone to my sister in Israel. “Why do I have to? It’s not fair. Why does it even matter? It’s just a stupid piece of paper anyway.”

  “If it’s just a stupid piece of paper,” my sister said, “what difference does it make?”

  * * *

  —

  “OKAY,” I TOLD Anand as we lay in bed that night.

  He looked up from his book.

  “Okay,” I repeated. “If we absolutely have to get married, then I want it to be really small, just us. Nobody has to know. We’re doing it for the papers. That’s all. And”—I paused for emphasis—“there’s going to be no husband-wife talk. You’re my boyfriend. Not my husband. Is that clear?”

  Anand grinned.

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS before the ceremony, Anand called his father to tell him about the wedding and inform him that he was not invited. In fact, nobody was. It was just a little thing we had to do to sort out the papers. I heard his father yelling on the other end (I could make out the words “customs,” “tradition,” and “community”) and watched sweat beading on Anand’s brow as he struggled to throw in a word. Finally, he slouched onto the couch and nodded into the phone, defeated.

  “My dad is throwing a party,” he said after he hung up, rubbing his temples. “Just close family members, nothing big.”

  Within days, his father had arranged a catering service, a cake, and a proper sari for me to wear. Fifty guests were invited, and my boyfriend’s aunt volunteered her large North Vancouver home. He wanted us to have real wedding bands, replace the 150-rupee rings we had bought each other in India, but we refused;
we liked ours, his shaped like an Om and mine like a flower with a moonstone in it. I called my mother in Israel and assured her that there was no need for her to borrow money to fly to Vancouver, that it was just a formality. My mother sighed but didn’t push. I figured she was so relieved to see me married off that she chose to pretend it was the real deal, or at least hope it would turn into one.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE MORNING of the wedding, I woke up at 3:00 A.M., flushed with sweat, remembering a visit I made to a fortune-teller in the mountains of Israel the year before, for an article I was working on. My friend Elsin and I had driven her beat-up VW bug two hours north of Tel Aviv and up precarious mountain roads to see her. It was a hot day and the car wasn’t air-conditioned. The fortune-teller greeted us in jeans and a T-shirt, not quite the mystical character I had expected, and led us to her living room, which had no crystal balls or velvet curtains. Children’s toys were scattered on the carpet. She opened my cards on a table marked with crescent-shaped stains left by coffee mugs and then leaned over to examine my palm. Her face lit up. “Good news!” she announced. “You’re going to be married by twenty-five!”