The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  * * *

  —

  I PICTURE MY grandmother arriving in Palestine, bewildered by this new place and its pale-skinned Jews, men without side curls holding hands with scarfless women in khaki shorts, and their language—staccato and strange. Hebrew? Yiddish? I think of my first time landing in North America, the language chewy and clunky in my mouth. Despite knowing English from school, I felt powerless and isolated, frustrated at not being able to express myself with the richness and precision I’d been accustomed to. Savta (unlike my grandfather, who knew Hebrew from prayer) had to learn Hebrew from scratch.

  In Israel, Yemeni immigrants gained a reputation for being intrinsically naïve, demure, and “so nice!”—seemingly positive stereotypes that were in fact belittling, as if they were children or the nation’s pets. But my grandmother wasn’t nice; she was a strong, feisty woman who spoke her mind, “a feminist,” my aunt once called her. She often scolded her twin sister, Saida, telling her to stand up for herself, to not let her husband control her. She walked away from a polygamous marriage that didn’t suit her.

  How did it feel to be so voiceless?

  Many years later, I will find out about the “women’s songs,” a form of oral poetry that Jewish Yemeni women composed and sang in Arabic and performed in birth and henna ceremonies, while doing housework or craftwork. Through these poems, the women voiced their heartaches and sorrows: they lamented their lost youth, wept over their fate as child brides, pined for their parents’ home, complained about a hostile first wife. The songs were memorized, constantly rewritten, and passed on from mother to daughter. It was their form of protest, a poetry of dissent. But that tradition was largely discontinued upon arrival in Israel. It never made it to my generation. Growing up, I never heard Savta sing, although my youngest uncle remembers her singing to him while doing her housework, her voice lovely and filled with deep sadness.

  When I learn about that rich literary tradition I hadn’t even known existed, hadn’t known I belonged to, a tradition now on the verge of extinction, I will pay a Yemeni singer in Israel to teach me these songs, and the Yemeni words of my ancestors will roll out of my mouth effortlessly, as though they’ve been waiting for me to utter them all along. I will sing with my mother and my aunts, and they will look at me and each other, amazed that I know these songs, that I can pronounce the Yemeni words, and that I cared enough to learn, chose to be a part of them, and allowed them to be a part of me. And I will wish my grandmother were there to hear me speaking her language. I will wish she were there to join us in singing.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  SUMMER DOESN’T END in Israel. It fades, falters, and then strikes again with renewed vigor. September comes and goes and it’s still too hot. Work does not let up.

  One evening I recognize Aviva, the editor of a women’s magazine I worked for in my early twenties, and I am aware of the tray I am carrying, the piles of empty mugs and grimy ashtrays, the stained apron cinched around my waist, the fact that there is nowhere to hide. This woman took a chance on me when I was twenty, straight out of army service. I was their youngest writer, driven and prolific and bursting with potential. Now I’m thirty and already a has-been.

  She stops, hand on her chest. “Ayelet?”

  We hug. I’m sweaty and sandy and barefoot, and she carries a little purse and smells of perfume.

  “So what are you doing right now?”

  I look around and half-shrug. “Well, I’m making some money while I’m here.”

  “So you’re here now!” Her face brightens. “Give us a call. We’d love to hear from you.”

  I smile and nod. I don’t tell her that I might be leaving again soon, that I haven’t written anything publishable in years.

  At the end of the shift, my co-workers and I go for drinks. We are refugees of the night, all thirsty for something: love, attention, distraction. Tonight we party harder than usual. Sitting at a sidewalk table outside HaMinzar, everyone drinks too much, flirts with each other, makeup smeared, sand in our hair. The night is so dense, so brimming with sex and alcohol and possibilities, that it feels infinite, as though the day will never come. In the bathroom, my shift supervisor, smelling of whiskey and cigarettes, drags me into a stall and kisses me, and I push her gently away, stunned. Time to go.

  Elsin is sleeping at her girlfriend’s. Too inebriated to sleep, I smoke and write poetry, smoke and watch TV, and then I smoke some more. I get up and make it halfway to the kitchen when the darkness rushes in, like blinds drawn with a snap. By now, I know my way by heart, using my memory as a white cane. The blindness usually disperses by the time I get to the kitchen. This time, it doesn’t. I turn to the wall unseeing, start lowering myself to the floor, but not quickly enough. I hit the floor hard. Then my body is doing something new: it is convulsing, arms and legs limply slapping the floor.

  When I wake up, cold tiles under my cheek, I have no idea how long I’ve been lying there. The phone is too far and it’s still night and I’m alone. I stay lying on the floor until the milky morning light pours in from the kitchen window. I listen to the city waking up, buses growling, radios blaring, alarms chirping from neighboring apartments. I concentrate on the feeling of the floor underneath me, the solidness of it under my body. There’s comfort in that. I think: there’s nowhere else to fall from here. I think: things need to change.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  ON MY LAST visit to my grandmother, I set the camera on the bedside table so it frames the two of us on her bed. Savta is wearing a maroon cardigan, a heavy gold necklace. She seems more at ease speaking to me directly. This is the most engaged she’s been since we started our interviews.

  It’s November—nearly seven months since I arrived in Israel—and it finally begins to feel like fall. Days are short and sunny; evenings are cool enough for a sweater. The restaurant starts closing earlier, the beach too cool and windy to draw customers at night. I’ve made enough money for a cheap ticket to the U.S. From there I will board a bus to Vancouver. I’m leaving next week.

  I haven’t smoked pot in a few weeks. It is the longest I’ve gone in eight years. The light of day is more blinding without the fog, the graininess in my vision gone. Sometimes my heart palpitates with fear. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with my hands. I take deep, long, measured breaths instead of smoking. I’m still figuring it out.

  “Saba went away,” Savta tells me. “Faraway place. After some time, I hear the Arabs talking. They said he is sick. Smallpox. Then one day Saba came near our house and called my aunt, the one who raised me, because my mother—she left me when I was two!” She spits and mumbles a string of curses in Arabic.

  “Saba called my aunt, ‘Ama, ya ama! ta’ali!’ Auntie, auntie. Come here! He didn’t want to come in, because smallpox is very contagious. When she came, he said, ‘Tell Salha to meet me by the tree tomorrow, outside the village. I will do vaccination from the pus in my wounds.’ The next day I came to meet him by the tree and he cut me with a knife here.” She slit her wrist with a finger. “And then he put pus from his wounds on my cut and tied it up.”

  “With a bandage?”

  “Bandage.” She snorts. “With cloth. We had no bandage. And believe me, after eight days I had some smallpox wounds, but only a little bit and that’s it. His vaccine worked. I was fine.”

  “Why did Saba go away?”

  “To sell in the souk. He made jewelry. For ears, for fingers. Silver, that Yemeni women wear. Whatever you want. In Israel? No. Here, he looked for job like anyone. Worked in orchards. Sometimes they kicked him out from there. Go home! You don’t know how to work!”

  “Why?”

  “Because he didn’t know how to work!”

  We both laugh. So much for a natural laborer. Her eyes water. She lifts her glasses and wipes them with a handkerchief.

  In the kitchen, I boil water
for Savta’s tea and look out the small window at the row of forgotten dresses that sway on the clothesline like ghosts. I remember standing there as a child after Friday night dinners, looking in, watching my aunts and female cousins all crammed into the tiny room and feeling like an outsider. Their vitality still emanates from the walls like the smell of old spices, clinging to the cabinets, the chipped countertop, the porcelain sink that is veined with gray scratches.

  Now I long to be in the room with them and listen. I want to ask questions. I want to know everything, because the more I know, the more at home I feel in my own skin, because being here, immersed in my culture and my history, anchors me, brings me closer to an earlier version of myself, the one who stayed behind when I left. It links me to all the women who came before me and all the stories they never told.

  My grandmother sips her tea, her glasses steaming.

  “Savta, do you have any jewelry left from Saba?”

  She shakes her head. “We didn’t bring. You know how I dressed in Yemen? Like a queen, all my fingers rings, even my toes. On my neck. All silver.” She reties her scarf. “So what was I saying? We got by, thank God.”

  I lean over and hug her. Unlike my mother, a champion hugger whose body is a physical extension of her love, my grandmother rarely initiates touch. She gazes at me for a long moment as if seeing me for the first time. “Do you love me?”

  I’m startled. “Very much. What kind of a question is that?”

  “Question!” She rests her arm on my leg. “What’s that on your hand?”

  “A bracelet.”

  She grabs my wrist—an excuse to touch—and looks closely. “What kind of bracelet?”

  “A bracelet from gems. I made it. See? I’m like my grandfather.”

  “You be healthy. May you have a bracelet of gold.”

  She lets my wrist drop on her open palm and taps her other hand on it. She mumbles something in Yemeni.

  “What does it mean?” I ask.

  “May God give you a good husband,” she says. “Insha’Allah.”

  God willing.

  III.

  RETURN

  I, who had lived so much of my life looking elsewhere, was slowly coming to acknowledge that not-belonging, also, can be a kind of belonging. There are all sorts of nations on this earth. It is a lonelier citizenship, perhaps, but a vast one.

  —ESI EDUGYAN, Dreaming of Elsewhere

  TOUGH CHICK

  Main offense: assault

  Weapon used: physical force

  Weapon status: real

  Drugs/alcohol involved: yes

  I LIKE CONSTABLE LOUIE. He has a reassuring smile and he looks me straight in the eye. When I see him standing at the door in his stiff uniform and chunky belt, the glint of polished metal on his chest, I don’t think, Shit! The police! What did I do?

  He’s here bearing gifts. It took the police three months to put together a photographic lineup and three more days for me to figure out a place for us to meet—a tricky task, since I don’t live in or hang out at the kind of places where cops are welcome. My East Vancouver apartment is out of the question. The landlord just cleared the last of his grow-op and the entire house reeks of weed. The owner of the coffee shop I frequent said flat out, “Well, you can’t bring him here. We have customers who are affiliated, if you know what I mean.” We end up meeting at Sean’s studio apartment, on the top floor of a redbrick building on Commercial Drive. Constable Louie has been here once before, when he came to take my statement after the assault. Only this time, I tell him I live here, with Sean. For a moment, I savor the taste of that lie in my mouth.

  I invite him in, babble about the weather; can you believe it’s already January? Did you have a good Christmas? I have high hopes for this photo lineup. I’ve been telling everyone that I could identify those kids anywhere, that their faces are imprinted into my mind. But it’s been three months since that Halloween night and I can’t help but wonder. Every time I see a group of teenagers huddling outside a pizzeria, I think it’s them. I lower my gaze and pick up my pace, my cellphone clutched in my sweaty palm, my finger hovering over the Send key, the 911 digits already dialed, ready to fire up.

  On October 31 2004 at 5:00 PM the victim boarded Vancouver bus No. 20 going north on Commercial toward Downtown.

  * * *

  —

  I SIT AT the bus stop, crammed between a skeletal bride and a young mother with Spider-Man in her lap, wishing I didn’t have to go to work. It’s Saturday night, the restaurant where I work is going to be packed, and they’ll probably make me wear a stupid witch hat. I hate work and I hate Sean, the guy I’ve been sort of seeing these past few months. I can’t stop replaying the fight we had the night before. In fact, I think I should end it. Better now, before we get too attached. Before someone gets hurt.

  On the way to the bus stop, I ran into my friend Ivy.

  “How’s Sean?” she asked after we hugged.

  I inhaled from my cigarette. “Sean’s an asshole.”

  Ivy smiled with her mouth closed.

  “I’m thinking of picking up another cute boy at work tonight,” I said.

  “Of course you are.” She nodded at the sidewalk.

  “What?”

  She gave me a level look. “The only reason you want to hook up with someone else is to prove to yourself you’re not attached to Sean.”

  I scoffed. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

  “And every time you say ‘whatever,’ what you’re really saying is ‘I love him.’ ”

  “Anyway,” I said, forcefully stubbing my cigarette butt with my boot, “I’m late for work.”

  * * *

  —

  SEAN AND I met at my regular Commercial Drive coffee shop in the spring. He was sitting at the only sidewalk table—a tall, exceptionally handsome man in a pair of worn-out jeans, his hair thick and his features rugged, bent over the New York Times crossword puzzle. We drank our Americanos, smoked our Belmonts, and chatted. He pronounced my name perfectly, which I found extraordinary. He worked on tugboats on the Salish Sea, he said, two weeks off, two weeks on. A perfect arrangement. Hadn’t I just been asking the universe for a part-time boyfriend? When a gust of cool wind swept over the patio, I hugged my arms and said I was cold. “Why don’t you pick up a stranger from the street and ask him to warm you up?” he said, and I shot back, “You’re a stranger. You warm me up.” He chuckled, then studied me for a moment. I couldn’t see his eyes through the sunglasses. I wondered what color they were.

  The following day, I ran into him at the café again, and that night we went to see a music show at the Marine Club, where we kissed in the smoking room. His eyes, I found, were blue. So blue they seemed to carry the sea in their spheres.

  Over the next few weeks, we hung out casually, went out for drinks or stayed in, sipping single-malt scotch and listening to music in his studio apartment. Sean had an impressive collection of old records and he played several instruments. He drove a 1966 baby-blue Valiant, wore fedoras, and used vintage suitcases for actual travel. His kitchen had several chef knives and a well-stocked spice cabinet with the labels all facing the right way. He was nothing like the guys I usually fell for: he took way too much space, had an opinion about everything, which he expressed loudly and often, and he flirted with everyone, charming waitresses and old ladies and service clerks. It infuriated me. I wasn’t used to being with a man who drew that much attention. I also wasn’t used to dating someone who didn’t need me, who seemed to enjoy being by himself as much as I did.

  Maybe we were too much alike. Like me, Sean had been single for a couple of years and was content. He was also a traveler, recently back from Central America, with his own arsenal of sordid affairs and drug-infused escapades. He loved the sea as much as I did, so much so that he made that passion into a career, which I found more romantic tha
n I cared to admit: the idea of a man attuned to storms, at home with unpredictability and unknowing, a man who understood the meaning of clouds, who could decipher the tides and the winds.

  And there was his passion for books. A few weeks after we started dating, I called him one afternoon and he yawned into the phone.

  “Partying all night?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I was so into my book that I stayed up all night reading.”

  I liked him despite myself. Meanwhile, he never expressed any serious intentions. We weren’t exclusive. It was going nowhere. It was time to call it quits.

  * * *

  —

  COMMERCIAL DRIVE VIBRATES with pre-party energy. All around the neighborhood, people prepare their performance pieces for the Parade of Lost Souls, a Halloween tradition in East Van; mothers fill bowls with candies for trick-or-treat, place candles in the hairy guts of carved pumpkins. The air tastes volatile, a mix of alcohol and exhaust fumes, like everything is about to burst.

  Or maybe it’s just me.

  Halloween makes me uneasy. Where I come from, nobody drapes sheets on trees to make them look like ghosts, digs pretend graves in backyards, or hangs skeletons from porches. In Israel, death is a serious matter.