The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  Long after he fell asleep, I brushed the sand off my sarong and lumbered back to my bungalow. In the middle of the night, I woke up to pee and found Raz curled inside my hammock. I touched his shoulder. He rubbed his eyes. “Can I come in?”

  I nodded.

  Inside, he undressed, slipped into my bed, and hugged me.

  * * *

  —

  I TAUGHT HIM things, too. Like how to swim mermaid-style. After swimming out far enough, we removed our swimsuits and fastened them on our wrists. Once, I explained to him how to wash his plastic bowl in the absence of dish soap, using water and sand to cut through the oil. I was proud that I had shown him something useful. Most of the time, I taught him the kinds of things that couldn’t make a person happy or help him survive: facts, history, geography, the meaning of long Latin words.

  He tried to teach me how to be still, how to not spew words senselessly, carelessly. I always talked, covering up for awkward silences or any silence, not being able to tell them apart. Sometimes I could see people’s interest waning, their eyes wandering, but I went on talking, trying to fix the uneasiness with more words.

  “Words have power,” he said. “Don’t waste them.”

  He watched me from the bed as I pulled a dwindling pile of bahts from my backpack. “Stop counting your money,” he said.

  “I need to know how much I have left.”

  “Why?”

  “So I know how long I can stay.”

  “You don’t need money to stay. There are ways.”

  The vague, New Agey things he said used to irritate me to no end. Now I paused, fingertips tapping. I put the stack back. If I didn’t know how much I had, perhaps I could make it last longer. I stopped checking the calendar too. My flight was in less than a month.

  Another day, parked on the side of the road, we watched the sunset from a cliff top. The sea was streaked with swirls of red and purple, drizzled like fruit syrup on a dessert plate. “What a great photo,” I sighed. “I wish I’d brought my camera.” He looked at me in a paternal way, this man who was nine years my junior. “You start a lot of sentences with ‘I wish…’ or ‘It’s too bad…’ ” he said. “Why spend so much time counting what you’ve missed?”

  His wisdom always came as a surprise, like the brilliant musings of a child. Other times he was ambiguous, muddled; his language raw, inarticulate, exasperating for someone like me, who strived for linguistic precision. He liked making up words, mixing Hebrew and English, or using certain words because he liked how they sounded, words like bamboozled, which sent him into fits of laughter. Then, out of nowhere, he’d come up with a precise, startling insight, and I’d feel naked in front of an unforgiving mirror in a fluorescent-lit room.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT’S GOING ON between you two?” Tamar asked. We were sitting with Lucy, a fellow Vancouverite, on Tamar’s porch. Raz was climbing up a coconut tree, as agile and fast as a monkey.

  “It’s all so romantic.” Lucy gazed up at him dreamily. “You’re so lucky.”

  Raz and I ate all our meals together, showered together, slept in the same bed. I took to prancing around in his trademark purple sarong. I knew people talked.

  “We’re just friends,” I said.

  “I’d take romance over sex any day,” Lucy said, giving me a knowing look. She’d been sleeping with Chris. I felt a flicker of jealousy when I first found out.

  Tamar followed Raz with her gaze. “There’s something about him,” she said. “Don’t laugh. Sometimes I think he’s enlightened.”

  “Watch out! Coconuts!” Raz yelled. A couple of nuts fell on the sand with a dull thud.

  I cupped my hand above my eyes. He grinned and shook his behind at us, making monkey sounds.

  * * *

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON, WHILE I was swinging in a hammock outside Raz’s bungalow, Kelly came by to pick up her stuff. She avoided my eyes when she spoke, said she’d moved to the other side of the beach. She fiddled with the strap of her backpack, which had left red lines on her pale shoulders. I scrutinized her. She wasn’t very pretty—a little mousy, in fact—yet he’d slept with her and not with me.

  “You’re weird,” I said to Raz after she left. We were lying on his bed looking at the mosquito netting; the candlelight drew erratic shadows on the ceiling.

  “Yeah?” He was amused. “Why?”

  “Well, you won’t sleep with me, for one.”

  He laughed. “So any guy who doesn’t want to sleep with you is weird?”

  “Well, no.” I lay on my side. “But you sleep in the same bed with me, naked.”

  The energy in the room had shifted. Raz went still, staring hard at the ceiling. “No sex, no ego,” he finally said.

  I frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means what it means.”

  I turned onto my back. My feet flared up with a sudden throbbing, pulsating like open wounds. Outside, a gecko croaked with a surprised inflection.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT NIGHT, a newcomer joined our group at the bonfire. Nir was a beautiful Israeli man with mocha skin and a shaved head. He looked about my age. Over the fire, he snuck glances at me. Raz was off somewhere else. I never knew where he went. Sometimes, while we hung out on my porch, he’d take off without a word, smiling as he walked away. Every time he left, I felt a pinch of loss, wishing he’d stay, wanting more. “He’s giving me a taste of my own medicine,” I told Tamar. In Vancouver, I rarely informed Anand of my whereabouts, never called to tell him I would be late or give him an idea of when I’d return. So fiercely attached to my autonomy was I that I refused to surrender any of my liberties in the name of common decency. When friends asked about it, I shrugged. I was a free woman. He was a free man. Just because we were a couple didn’t mean he needed to keep tabs. If I wasn’t home, then I must be somewhere else.

  “The bungalows are full,” Nir, the new guy, said. “Guess I’m sleeping on the beach tonight.”

  “You can sleep in my hammock,” I offered.

  Tamar looked at me with an approving half-smile. She’d been warning me about becoming too emotionally involved with Raz. “You know I love him,” she said. “But he’s not your man. He’s too young.”

  That night I hung out with Nir on my porch. He brought over beer from the restaurant. I lit candles and stuck them in sliced water bottles filled with sand. I went through my story again, how my travels had brought me to Vancouver, how I was at a crossroads. It was refreshing to chat with someone who didn’t judge how much I talked. Someone who wasn’t impervious to my charm. Someone who wanted to sleep with me.

  “Maybe I could just stay here.” I leaned back on my palms. “Work at the restaurant.”

  He laughed, took a swig of beer, and then turned to look at me. “Oh. You’re serious.”

  “Maybe.” I peeled the label off the bottle.

  “You can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wouldn’t you get bored?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You should go back to Israel.”

  I looked sideways at him. “Yeah?”

  “Definitely.” He nodded with mock authority.

  It was getting late. I guzzled the rest of my beer and stood up. “Why don’t you just sleep in my bed?”

  In bed, I tucked the mosquito net under the mattress, said good night, and turned my back to him.

  The next afternoon, Raz found me at the restaurant. Nir had snuck out early in the morning to search for a bungalow and I hadn’t seen him since. Raz and I went swimming far, past the reef, where the water was dark blue. “The new guy slept in your bed last night,” Raz said.

  “So?” I searched his face for jealousy.

  “So nothing.”

 
“Nothing happened.”

  “He seems nice.” He dove in, feet flapping like a mermaid’s tail.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, I caught Nir studying me across the fire, following my gaze following Raz. I turned to look at the water. He picked up a guitar. “This song is for you.”

  “Pour moi?” I put my hand on my heart.

  His voice was surprisingly soft. “You don’t know what you want,” he sang in Hebrew. Raz watched my reaction. I prodded at the fire with a stick, hoping the glow covered up the crimson in my cheeks. Raz grabbed the poi, poured kerosene on the balls, which burst into flames. His face lit up in intervals as he twirled the poi in figure eights around his hips, over his head, across his chest.

  Later, as we swung in our matching hammocks, I said to Raz, “How come you’re so young and so wise, and I’m so old and so stupid?”

  “Don’t be silly.” He pried the cigarette out of my fingers and took a drag. “You’re not old.”

  * * *

  —

  ON MY LAST day, Raz jumped out of bed and started dancing naked around my room. He was always energetic in the morning, as if every day was something extraordinary, the only day we’d ever have. “What should we do today? We can do anything.”

  I stared glumly at the bamboo wall. “I want to stay.”

  “Then stay.”

  “I have no money.”

  “Money shmoney,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

  We rode his bike to town. I called the airline and changed my ticket. Then, sitting on the bench outside the 7-Eleven, we devised a new regime. For breakfast, we’d buy a box of cereal and condensed milk. For lunch: plain rice with sweet chili sauce. We’d share a plate of curry for dinner, drink water from bottles people left behind at the restaurant, snack on fruit off trees.

  “I’ll move in with you,” he said. “We’ll be bums together.”

  Local teens loitered next to us, smoking. They eyed our dirty bare feet and laughed. I loved that he’d stopped wearing flip-flops out of solidarity.

  In moments like this, I thought: Maybe this could actually work.

  On the way back, Raz played tour guide; he loved doing that, calling out everything he saw as if it were wondrous and strange, “Dogs! Goats! Coconut trees! Bananas! A family on a bike! Rice fields, crazy-looking tree, a curry stall. Hungry yet?”

  I held my camera out to the side and snapped shots. The pictures captured the blur of motion and parts of us: bare feet, shell necklaces around our necks, hair blown by wind, mouths open in laughter.

  He made a stop at a secret waterfall he knew about, and I unwrapped my sarong and jumped in, the water breaking over my head in small streams, tumbling down my body. I caught him checking me out and my heart flipped. But then he ran in and joined me, spraying me with water.

  Afterward, we sat drying in the sun. We didn’t speak for a long time. I was becoming better at it. He stared at me. When I looked back, he dropped his gaze. “What?” I said.

  “You’re beautiful.” His voice cracked.

  We continued to sit together without speaking, but it was no longer a comfortable silence. The space between us felt tense, a sarong between two sticks.

  “How are you?” he asked, softly.

  I unclenched my jaw. “Fine.”

  “And the ego?”

  “I don’t know. How’s yours?”

  He laughed.

  Riding back to the beach, I draped my arms around his chest, buried my face in the nape of his neck. At the stop sign, he took my hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  THE NIGHT THAT I didn’t die, I sat on the beach and watched the phosphorescence dancing on the waves, lighting them up like glow sticks at a full moon party. The kerosene had left a nasty tang in my mouth that cut through the taste of dinner, a constant reminder.

  Life is short, I thought, and other clichés people think when they’re faced with death. For a split second, my future snapped open like a Chinese fan. I could change my life. I could do anything. I could cure myself of the eczema, the indecisiveness, the heartache, the writer’s block. I could be happy.

  I walked into the water and swam through the dark silky sheets. Floating on my back and watching the stars, I tried to undo my love for Raz, force it out, the way I was willing away the poison. Reverse the spell. Quick! But it was too late. I was in love with him. It was as ridiculous as thinking that this could be home or that I could go on living without shoes, but it was the truth.

  When I arrived at the bungalow, Raz was in the hammock, listening to my Mizrahi music CDs on my Discman. I sat next to him. He removed the earbuds.

  “Tamar thinks I’m in love with you,” I said in English, though we usually spoke Hebrew. English provided a buffer, the words carried less weight.

  “And what do you think?”

  My voice trembled. “I think she’s right.”

  He pulled me inside the hammock, into his arms. “I love you too.”

  A gecko clucked on the roof, a gentle knocking sound.

  “I lied,” I said. “I know what I want to do.”

  “Yeah?” In the darkness, his pupils disappeared.

  “I want to write.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Stories.”

  “Read me something.”

  “No.” I squirmed.

  He wouldn’t give up, so I reluctantly opened my notebook and read him something I wrote in Montreal, in Hebrew. It was not entirely finished and I wasn’t even sure if it was a story, but I was so pleased to have written anything at all. It was a moonless night, the generator already off, so the darkness consumed everything around us, the bungalows, the trees, all swallowed whole by shadows, hijacked by the night. When I finished, he jumped off the porch and shouted, “That’s it. No more fucking around. You write!”

  * * *

  —

  THE NIGHT BEFORE I left, we sat on the beach with our friends, sharing a bucket of whiskey. I had managed to stretch my funds for a few more weeks, but now I had none left. I didn’t even have enough for a hotel in Bangkok, but I figured someone would let me crash in their room. I passed around my notebook and everybody wrote dedications, scrawled down email addresses and phone numbers, promised to visit.

  “I need shoes for the plane,” I said. “They won’t let me fly barefoot.”

  “The bastards,” Chris said and everyone laughed.

  “What are you going to do?” Lucy asked.

  I stood up. “I’m going to find them.”

  “But you lost them ages ago.”

  “I know.” I looked at Raz for reassurance and he smiled. “They went missing from the front steps of the restaurant. They were black, size ten. I bet if I went right now…”

  “But you looked, like, a million times,” someone said.

  I went anyway. There was one pair of flip-flops on the front steps, black, size ten. I slipped my feet in. They fit perfectly.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE WAY to the ferry, Raz made a stop at the market. He ran around choosing gifts for me and then presented them with the same sense of marvel he used to describe everything we saw on our bike rides. A silver travel mug! Crayons! A magnifying glass! Glittery pens!

  The ferry was already boarding when we arrived. I sniffed his neck when we hugged: smoke, salt, coconut.

  Only on the boat, as the island became a distant green speck, did I remember: that same day, twenty years earlier, my father had died. It was a few months before Raz was born.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER I ARRIVED in Israel, the skin on my feet started falling off. Maybe it was a late reaction to the kerosene, maybe it was a response to an emotional stress
I couldn’t identify and fix, or maybe I was shedding the old me, like a snake, making room for new growth. I cried in the tub, scrubbing my wounds with a homeopathic soap, missing him.

  He wrote me letters, said he loved me, missed me, told me about an affair with a Danish girl he met in Malaysia, about land for sale in Indonesia where we could start a commune. “We’ll get chickens and cows,” he wrote. His letters, like his speech, were barely coherent. He loved using sea instead of see. “I sea things more clearly now,” he wrote. Then he started writing about faith. About God.

  I wasn’t in Israel when he came back from his travels. I’d met someone in Vancouver, fallen in love again. We wrote each other less and less.

  The last email he sent me, after I had written him about Sean, my new boyfriend, said, “I’m disappointed that a Jewish girl ended up with a gentile.” I was heartbroken. I liked him better when he was a secular hippie prophet who climbed trees.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  A FEW YEARS later, Sean and I were strolling on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, looking for a sunny patio, when I noticed a religious man in a black suit and a fedora on the corner, offering passersby the use of tefillin. The tefillin—leather boxes filled with scrolls and attached to leather straps that observant Jewish men wrap around their arms and heads during prayers—lay on a table in front of him. My heart stopped and then opened, like a cuckoo clock door. It was Raz: his dark fiery eyes, his red beard now long and curly. He looked at me and his face brightened.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “It’s been…what? Five, six years?”

  “Something like that.” His smile hadn’t changed, still sunny and childlike. I fought an urge to hug him, wondered if I was allowed to shake his hand. I introduced him to Sean. “He knows all about you,” I said.