The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  A few weeks into dating, Sean asked, “Didn’t you say you were a writer?” and when I nodded, apprehensive, he said, “Oh, are you one of these writers who never writes?” For our one-year anniversary, he requested a story. Riddled with clichés and grammatical errors, it was the first story I wrote in English. After that, more followed, and Sean proofread and commented on all of them. When I took the leap and enrolled in a part-time writing program in Vancouver, he carefully suggested that I reduce my hectic schedule from six waitressing shifts a week to four. “I know you don’t like to ask for help,” he said. “But we’ll be okay.” At the end of that year, I won a literary contest and had my first essay published in a literary magazine. I couldn’t have done it without him.

  Our relationship opened me up to the liberties that lie within commitment, within the security of a nurturing, happy relationship, and released me from my encumbering need to be free at all costs. It was a discovery that echoed my journey into writing in English, my astounding realization that creative freedom could be unearthed within the constraints of a second language, a vastness within the limitations that gave space for invention and fantasy.

  I wasn’t ready to consider that one day I might find the same unexpected freedom within the confines of motherhood. Motherhood itself seemed inconceivable. I knew children changed everything. I had seen it happen. On my last visit to Israel, I spent a few months with my sister after she had given birth. My sister had been my best friend ever since I was old enough to bridge our seven-year gap; I looked up to her, admired her resilience in the face of her losses. She somehow managed to hold on to a childlike sense of wonder and enthusiasm most adults lose much earlier: she goofed around like a kid, frequently invented new words (I once dubbed her the reviver of the Hebrew language), and came up with funny observations about everything she saw. Upon meeting her, most of my friends became her friends too. But as a mother, she was anxious, overprotective. I watched her with my mother, witnessing a new bond forming between them that didn’t include me. Maternity created a barrier between us, and the only way for me to break through it was to join her on the other side. But I needed more time. Four years into dating—partly due to his frequent absences—Sean and I were still in the honeymoon phase. I was terrified of losing what we had, terrified of losing everything: the writing career I had finally devoted myself to, my freedom, my nomadic lifestyle. Myself.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  AFTER SEAN GOES back to work, I sit at my desk to write. Looking out the window, I spot our neighbor and house manager, Little Bernard, climbing up the stairs to his house. Bernard is not actually little. He’s a Portuguese man with a thick gray beard and square glasses. He lives next door with his wife, Maria, who always wears an apron around her waist. We call him Little Bernard to distinguish him from Big Bernard, who is our landlord, and a burly guy. This name has stuck so well that when I call his house and Maria answers, I say, “May I speak to Little Bernard?” and instantly want to bury myself. Maria doesn’t seem to notice, or maybe she’s heard it before. She puts him on the phone.

  Bernard and Maria’s back deck faces ours, and I can see right down into their yard from my office window. I see Bernard gardening, hammering nails, and sawing wood, Maria hanging laundry, picking fruit off the plum tree, and playing with their grandchildren. Every Sunday, their kids climb up the stairs with their families for a weekly brunch. Watching them makes me think of home, of warm Mediterranean nights, of Friday dinners at my mother’s, the house full of chatter, running feet, and the smells of cooking. Once I saw Bernard giving Maria a red rose from their garden. She wiped her hands on her apron before she took the rose and smelled it.

  There’s nothing Bernard cannot do. An electrician by trade, he has fixed our leaky pipes, our toilet, and our furnace. Bernard comes upstairs armed with a large knife and a flashlight. I haven’t seen a single hornet all day, so I’m afraid he’s going to think I’m crazy. He shines a beam into the nook and summons me over. I reluctantly agree to look, tilt my head and see what looks like a large gray cotton ball, a clump of moss stuck to the side of the rafter. I don’t want to stay for the carnage, so I go to my office and close the door.

  A few minutes later Bernard comes downstairs carrying my bedroom rug and gingerly unfolds it to show me three little mummies, baby hornets covered in white silk. A family. I cover my mouth.

  “You’re lucky it was only one couple,” Bernard says. “Hornets aren’t as bad as wasps. They don’t multiply as fast.”

  “Oh my God.” I look away. “You’re a lifesaver. Thank you so much.”

  Back at my office I stare at the flickering cursor on my screen. Gazing outside past Bernard and Maria’s backyard, past the Burnaby hills, blue and misty in the distance, I am filled with deep, inexplicable sadness. I lean my face into my hands, fingers pressing onto my eyelids. When I remove my hands, everything is blurry.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up to a frantic buzz in my ceiling. The mother is back. I imagine her flying into the nook, her confusion as she finds the empty nest. I bury my head under the sheet and press the fabric over my ears. “This sucks,” I whisper to the pillow.

  I contemplate sneaking downstairs to pee. Two days ago, as I hurried to get away from the hornets, I slipped on the pull-down staircase and toppled down a half-flight of stairs, landing with a loud thud. The wooden steps were polished and there were no handrails. This house is not a place for a baby, our landlord cautioned us when we moved in. That’s why he and his wife moved out after their child was born. I snickered at his warning, which seemed irrelevant to our life at the time. It’s a great house for parties, though, with a deck for smokers that offers a spectacular view to the mountains, a living room large enough to be transformed into a dance floor, and even a nook made for a DJ stand. Our house parties have become a legend.

  * * *

  —

  MY RECURRING DEATH dreams went on for a while before I figured them out. One day, a few weeks after my birthday, I just knew: the dreams were my body’s way of telling me to procreate. The death, that sense of loss, signified the end of my life as I knew it, the passing of a self I had grown fond of. My body was succumbing to a primordial, physiological need, having a conversation with time and biology I wasn’t privy to. For a few days I grieved, cried over the ordinariness of my uterus, resented my body for wanting a family when all I wanted was to party. But the dreams stopped. And the crying, eventually, stopped too. Maybe I didn’t really want to party all that much—not anymore.

  * * *

  —

  I GRAB MY phone from the bedside table and call Sean from the warm insides of my cocoon. “The mother is back,” I say. “She’s going to come after me and avenge her dead babies.”

  Sean laughs, inhales cigarette smoke.

  “They were just a young couple,” I say, feigning melodrama. “All they wanted was to build a home and raise their family in domestic bliss, and I ruined it.”

  Sean laughs again. The boat’s radio chatters in the background. I trace the seam of the sheet with my finger.

  “I wonder if the father will be coming next,” I say.

  “You know there’s no actual father, right?” Sean says. “It’s a matriarchal society. The male just comes and goes. He doesn’t take part in building the nest or anything. I think he dies after mating.”

  “Great,” I say. “That’s really great.”

  It’s getting too hot. I peel the sheet off my head and look around. The buzzing has stopped. The house is quiet and empty again. I can hear the bell ringing from the nearby school, the muffled squeals of children running out to play. I fling the sheet off my sweaty body, kick it until it falls in a heap on the floor.

  “You okay?” Sean asks.

  “I miss you,” I say.

  “I miss you too,” he says. “Only six days to g
o.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Only six more days to go.”

  YEMENI SOUP AND OTHER RECIPES

  UGAT SHMARIM

  MY MOTHER PREPARES A CAKE that makes people forget. They forget their troubles, their diets, and their calorie count. They forget they only came by for a minute—they had other plans, places to go—and then they forget they promised themselves they would have only one slice.

  Ugat shmarim—literally translated as “yeast cake”—looks like a braided Danish or a Jewish-style babka, European delicacies that made their way into Israeli cuisine and into my mother’s Jewish Yemeni kitchen. Every Friday, before Shabbat, my mother mixes flour, eggs, sugar, lemon rind, and yeast. She throws in a package of margarine: that way the cake is parve, not dairy, and can be consumed after a meaty dinner. While the dough rises, she beats cocoa and sugar with margarine, vanilla, and egg white for the chocolate filling. She flattens the dough on a flour-dusted table, applies a generous helping of chocolate, and braids it into a strudel. For thirty minutes the house smells so sweet you want to devour the air. When the cake is done right, the inside is moist and dense, the top is crisp, glossy with brushed yolk, and every slice presents a chocolate swirl that makes you dizzy with desire.

  Relatives and friends who ask for the recipe often come back scowling. “It didn’t turn out like yours,” they say. “What’s the secret?” Secret, as in key ingredient. As in: What have you left out?

  “Secret!” My mother scoffs. “You think I’d hide something from you?”

  Whenever I fly back to Canada, I smuggle the contraband cake past customs agents, wrapped in foil and tucked between my socks. I eat some right away and freeze the rest for when I’m craving a taste of home. When I reheat it, the smell permeates my house, drapes over me like a comfort blanket. It pulls me back and away. It’s a cake that makes me remember.

  My Canadian friends who share it with me ask, “Do you know the recipe?”

  “Oh no. I could never make it,” I say. “It’s way too complicated. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I WAS nine, I found a cookbook in our house. Children Cooking had a bright yellow cover and pictures of children in chef hats, making smiley faces on toast with julienned red peppers for a mouth and sliced cucumbers for eyes. Their aprons were spotless and their kitchen immaculate. The recipes had names like Smiling Eggs, Moses in the Cradle, and Boat Sandwiches. During my mother’s siesta, I decided to try my hand at a recipe, imagining how pleased she would be that I had made something for her for once. I chose chocolate balls dusted with coconut flakes: an Israeli staple dessert popular at children’s birthday parties. My mother had never made it; for our birthdays, she baked intricate cakes with frosting, layered with filo, and topped with shaved chocolate. I found all the ingredients in her pantry, except for coconut flakes, and decided it would do.

  I climbed on the counter to fetch a bowl, then hopped off, letting the cupboard door slam. “Sheket!” my mother yelled from her bedroom. I flinched. Every day between two and four, we tiptoed around the house, speaking in hushed voices. Sometimes I imagined her lying there, stiff and alert with her eyes closed; that would explain why she never seemed rested.

  I crushed biscuits, mixed them with cocoa, sugar, milk, vanilla, and margarine. I dipped my finger in the bowl, amazed to discover I’d created something yummier than the sum of its parts, the way I had felt the first time I wrote words that joined into a sentence. I rolled the paste between my palms, forming muddy-looking balls.

  I’d just finished the last ball and was admiring my creation when my mother walked in. She stood at the door in her gown, squinting. She ignored the plate heaped with chocolate balls on the table and headed straight to the counter. “What’s this?” She grimaced at the splashes of milk. “And this?” She pointed at the dishes in the sink.

  “I was going to clean it,” I said.

  She started wiping the counter in rapid, urgent motions.

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  She looked at me and sighed. My shirt was smeared with chocolate. I wasn’t wearing an apron.

  That day the line was drawn. I abandoned my cooking aspirations. For the next few years, my contribution in the kitchen was restricted to dish washing. Sometimes, my mother asked me to cut the tips off the okras, a tedious task I hated, since it coated my fingers with sticky little hairs and sent me into an itching frenzy.

  * * *

  —

  I CALL MY mother from Toronto. It’s Friday, dinnertime in Israel. She shouts orders as she speaks to me: “Turn off the oven. We’re missing a glass. Why with your hands? Use a fork!”

  “You’re busy,” I say.

  “No, not busy. What is it?”

  “I was just wondering…how come I never learned to cook growing up?”

  “How come?” She raises her voice. “You weren’t interested in cooking!”

  I hear my sister in the background: “That’s because you didn’t want us in your kitchen.”

  “Not true!” My mother is practically yelling. “You never asked.”

  My family calls her to sit down, join them, stop hovering between the stove and the table. “The salad isn’t dressed yet,” she cries. “Stop picking!”

  “Go.” I swallow. “We’ll talk later.”

  CHOPPED SALAD

  MY MOTHER SERVES SALAD with lunch, dinner, and on Saturday mornings, with our traditional breakfast of jichnoon, a Yemeni Shabbat bread served with brown eggs. Tomatoes, cucumbers, and a few slivers of white onion, generously dressed with fresh lemon, olive oil, and rock salt. Like most of her recipes, it only sounds simple.

  Every Thursday my mother drives to the shuk at the edge of our city, a labyrinth of intersecting alleys lined with produce stands. She marches up and down the market, fondling peaches, stroking avocados, and tasting grapes, carefully selecting the freshest cilantro, firmest tomatoes, and sweetest apples. Watermelons are the only gamble. Despite the shopkeepers’ promises, you can’t tell a sweet, juicy watermelon by the sound it makes when you knock on it.

  She takes note of the best produce and its corresponding vendor, mapping it in her mind as if formulating a strategic battle plan, then returns to the winning vendors and buys kilos of everything, making a couple of runs to fill the trunk with baskets.

  As a kid, I trailed behind—grimacing at the stench of rotten vegetables, the slippery bits of lettuce and smashed fruit, the slimy tread of my sneakers—while my mom haggled with the vendors. “Your parsley looks tired today.” She crinkled her nose at one vendor. “Why so expensive?” she complained to another.

  “Especially for you: five shekels.” The vendor winked. “Because you’re so beautiful.”

  She waved a bill, frowning. “Should you be talking to women like that? You’re wearing a kippah.”

  * * *

  —

  MAKING THE SALAD was the one food preparation activity we were encouraged to engage in. We struggled to dice the vegetables as small as possible, competing for our mother’s final approval. A coarsely chopped salad was referred to with contempt as an “elephant’s salad”; a finely chopped salad earned the much sought-after label of “mice salad”; but none of us could do it as well as our mother, who was so skilled with the knife that she sliced the vegetables without using a cutting board. She cupped a tomato in her hand, and in a series of swift motions, slashed it up and down and side to side like an apron-wearing Jedi master. She then opened her palm as if releasing a dove to let the tiny pieces drop into the bowl. “I’ve never seen anybody do that,” I told her when I grew to appreciate her rare talent. She smiled modestly. “I saw a French chef on TV do it once.”

  SCHNITZELS

  EVERY DAY, when my father came home from his law office for siesta, we ate lunch as a family. I was delighted
whenever my mom made schnitzels: this Austrian dish, brought to Israel by European Jews, was a national favorite, adopted into the mishmash national cuisine alongside shish kebab, couscous, and pizza. My mother modified the original recipe to make it her own. She never hammered the chicken breast, cutting it instead into long, fat strips. She added garlic to the beaten eggs, then dipped a chicken strip in, dredged it in breadcrumbs, and dropped it into hot oil until it was golden and crispy on the outside, moist and tender on the inside.

  The one time my mother visited me in Vancouver, she walked through our kitchen, arms crossed, nodding like an art collector at a gallery. She ran her hand along our stove and our IKEA island, eyed the steel pans hanging on the wall.

  “Do you have chicken breasts?” She gazed into my freezer. “Potatoes?”

  Sean and I had planned elaborate meals to impress her, but she wouldn’t have any of that. She was happiest when she could cook for us. I watched her sashay between the stove, the sink, the fridge, training her body for a new dance routine, marking her space. She was at home when she cooked. It didn’t matter that she was half a world away from her comfort zone. Kitchens were pockets of solace in every house, a neutral territory, a gastronomic Switzerland.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER MY FATHER passed away, my young mother spent most of her days in the kitchen. She didn’t speak much, rarely looked at us, but she cooked endlessly, with furious, careless motions. When she dug in the drawers for a pan, she’d bang the pots against each other in a high-pitched cacophony. She chopped vegetables with homicidal intent, and when she tossed schnitzels into the sizzling oil, it sounded like a scream. She disappeared into the kitchen, became one with the appliances. Food replaced her words; cooking became her currency.