The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  I opened the brown paper bag and sniffed it, the blend of spices instantly transporting me into her kitchen.

  This time I got to watch as she prepared the soup, scribbling the steps on the back of a used envelope. We stood side by side, mother and daughter, shoulders touching, gazing into the pot, waiting for the water to boil. She added chicken drumsticks and thighs and dished the excess fat out with a spoon. She dropped in a full onion, which would later disintegrate into translucent rings, and chunks of tomato, peppers, potatoes, and carrots. She sliced garlic straight into the pot, and finally threw in an entire bouquet of cilantro. While she poured hawayij into the soup, I stirred the yellow into the water with a wooden spoon.

  * * *

  —

  THE AROMA OF Yemeni soup lingers in my kitchen for days after I cook it. I grew up trying to shake this smell off me. Now it lives in my house, a permanent stamp on my walls, a pungent greeting that welcomes my guests. When the hawayij my mother had given me in Los Angeles was finished, I started making my own: grinding cardamom, cumin, turmeric, chilies, and coriander in a mortar and pestle, the way my grandmother and great-grandmother had done before me. When I stand by my electric stove and pour hawayij into the pot, I’m a Jewish Yemeni woman making soup. I forget I live in a cold and strange city, ten time zones away from my family. I’m home.

  UGAT SHMARIM

  ONE WINTRY CANADIAN NIGHT I’m stunned by an intense craving for my mother’s cake. I decide to call my mother for the recipe. I need to make it, this one time. I need to know how.

  It’s been two years since I last made it to Israel, a year since my mother and I met in Los Angeles. So much has changed: Sean and I moved to Toronto so I could attend an MFA program in creative writing, and after years of talking around the subject, we started trying for a baby. But Toronto is still not home, and this apartment in up-and-coming Parkdale still doesn’t feel like a proper place for a family. In respites between writing, I spend hours toiling away in the kitchen, filling it up with the smells of my childhood in an effort to make the place feel homier, to make me more motherly, the only way I know how.

  None of my siblings have ever dared to try making this cake. I always assumed it was too difficult. But today I’m feeling courageous, confident in my skills. I call my mother with the admission that we’re more alike than I ever cared to admit. Cleaning gives me peace of mind; a full fridge makes me feel rich; when I’m in the kitchen, I don’t like interruption; I cook by intuition, rarely following a recipe. If anyone can make this cake, I can.

  My mother is already in bed but she’s delighted that I want to make the cake, eager to pass on the recipe. “Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work the first time,” she says. “It takes practice. Keep trying.”

  Writing down the recipe takes a while. Some of the ingredients, like a cube of yeast commonly used in Israel, are unavailable in Canada; others come in different packages, different sizes. And when my mother calls for four cups of flour, she doesn’t mean standard cups. “You know the small glasses we have at home?”

  “I think so.”

  “Your father wouldn’t drink coffee in any other cup. You know the ones?”

  My father passed away nearly three decades ago.

  “What’s the secret?” I say. “For the recipe?”

  She laughs. “No secret.”

  I proudly tell her of my new invention, a vegan split pea soup. She tells me she made a Chinese recipe from TV. “Chinese!” she repeats in awe. I recommend the salmon cakes I found in an issue of Oprah’s magazine. “I don’t like salomon,” she says, pronouncing it the way many Israelis do. We don’t agree on everything. I find her beef too well-done. I use less oil in my cooking, choose ingredients that are natural, organic. She sneers at my decision to use chicken broth in my Yemeni soup rather than a bouillon cube.

  We’ve been talking for almost an hour. She hasn’t asked me about babies once, though I know she wants to.

  Then I say, “Next time I’m in Israel, I’m going to watch you make jichnoon.”

  “It would be my pleasure.” I can hear her smile.

  * * *

  —

  THE SMELL OF cake lurks in the kitchen at first, nothing but a hint, then it brims over: warm, sweet, wholesome, homey. I feel as though I’m bathing in its silky aroma. “Do you smell it?” I clutch Sean’s hand and whisper, afraid to disturb the moment. “I can’t believe it’s coming from my oven.”

  IF I FORGET YOU

  “IT’S GOING TO BE YOUR LAST TIME in the house,” my mother said, stirring a pot and wiping her hands on the checkered kitchen towel permanently draped over her shoulder. It was early morning in Israel, blue and cool, and everything was coated with the surreal haze that followed extended air travel, tinged with strangeness and fatigue, the inconceivability of being here, now.

  “You say that every year.” I stared into the fridge, comforted by the predictable display of layered Pyrex and fresh produce.

  “No,” she said. “This time we have a date.”

  Sean and I had just arrived for our annual escape from Canadian winter, a tradition we started after we had moved to Toronto, where his work on the lakes shut down through the season. Since I could do my writing and teaching from anywhere, we decided to spend the winter months in Israel, soak up sun, and enjoy time with family and friends. But this visit was different. In previous trips, Sean had boarded the plane with a guitar case while I lugged my heavy camera equipment. This time, we replaced these items with a stroller, a car seat, and a baby carrier. And, well, a seven- month-old baby. Our daughter was born two years after we decided to give this baby thing a real shot. It was her first visit to Israel, her first time meeting many of her relatives. Her first—and apparently last—stay at my childhood home.

  Carrying her up the cobblestoned path to the front door, I introduced her to my childhood landmarks. In the forgiving early morning light, suffused with nostalgia, the house appeared stately and handsome. It was easy to overlook the years of neglect: the cracks and scars and bruises, the patched-up holes in the roof, the untended lawn littered with weeds. I pointed at the giant palm tree that soared over the red-tile roof, the row of olive trees my father had planted in the back, one for each member of the family, until one of the trees inexplicably perished shortly after his death. On the north side of the house, a shallow pit yawned in the earth where the ancient lemon tree once stood. My mother used to reach out from the second-floor kitchen window to pluck plump fruit straight off the branches. How devastated I was the year I returned to see the tree gone, succumbed to sickness and uprooted, the first hint at the impermanence of our home.

  My mother cooed at the baby and covered her with noisy kisses, and my daughter yielded to her, instantly recognizing my mother’s body as a familiar, safe place to cling to. They had met once before, when my mother ceremoniously arrived in Toronto days after my daughter was born, overjoyed and relieved that I finally had become a mother after years of hesitating and procrastinating, and ready to impart all her knowledge to me. I had never made my mom happier. I was thirty-nine, the same age my mother had been when she had her sixth.

  I placed my coffee mug on the window ledge and looked out. Our street began to wake up from its slumber: radio chattered from the neighbors’ open windows, a baby cried, a phone pealed from a nearby house. Looking west, the city ascended into four- and five-story apartment buildings, lackluster rectangles in shades of beige with laundry lines slung under their windows, their roofs bristling with water heaters and antennas. Palm trees poked between the buildings like weeds in a cracked pavement. My mother joined me, and I leaned into her soft body and breathed her in: sugar, flour, citrus, too many spices to name, a hint of soap and laundry detergent. This was the household’s signature fragrance. In a few days, that same blend would emanate from my own skin. Many years ago, while I was living in New York, my mother
had sent me a bag of winter clothes through a friend traveling to the U.S., and as soon as I opened it, that smell burst out and flooded my lonely apartment, and I sat on the floor, holding the clothes to my nose, and cried.

  In two months, right after we leave for Canada, the house would be bulldozed and an apartment building erected on its ruins, where my mom and her partner, Nissim, would gracefully retire. It was the right thing to do: selling the lot was my mother’s retirement plan, and the house was falling apart anyway. But it didn’t make it any easier. An act so violent, so final. An erasure of our past.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS SEVEN years old when my parents started building their dream home. At the time, my family—father, mother, and six children—was living in a cramped three-bedroom apartment in downtown Petah Tikva. Our fifth-floor apartment had wood paneling in the hallway, orange Formica cupboards in the kitchen, and small terrazzo tiles for a floor—the kind that graced every Israeli home built in the mid-twentieth century. The windows were barred for safety, with wide ledges on which we fearlessly sat, legs swinging outside, watching the busy street below, and sometimes hurling down old toys just to watch them crash. An enclosed balcony was converted into an extra room for my oldest brother, with sheets draped over the sliding glass doors for privacy. In the afternoons we rode the slow, clattering elevator (which often got stuck) downstairs, drew hopscotch grids in chalk on the pavement, played catch or hide-and-seek with our neighbors, until the sun sank heavy and swollen behind the buildings, streetlights clicked on, and shutters rattled open—our mother calling us from the window for dinner.

  My father was elated when he found cheap land for sale in Mahane Yehuda, a Yemeni neighborhood halfway between downtown and Sha’ariya. Mahane Yehuda—where he was born and raised for the first few years of his life—was a village once, founded by Yemeni immigrants in 1913, a jumble of sheds, huts, and small stone houses, dissected by dirt roads. Later, the city expanded around the village, swallowing it whole.

  My father had been saving for this house his whole life. Sometimes, on the way back from the beach, he’d take the long way home and drive through the affluent suburb of Savyon, eye the rows of lavish villas and their sprawling lawns, and dream about the house he’d build for his family one day. Fortunately for my father, once construction began, several tradesmen—a carpenter, a window maker, an electrician—offered their services for free, returning favors for the many pro bono cases he had taken on throughout his career, which helped lower the overall cost.

  During the year it was built, my father took us to the house every Saturday and we walked around the skeleton of it—all concrete and brick and poking metal wires. The windows were gaping mouths, and through them, the sun shone a dusty beam on my father. “Here”—he pointed—“is where the kitchen will be.” His voice echoed as if he were in an empty theater.

  The split-level house was inspired by a synagogue’s floor plan: boys resided on the bottom floor, girls on the top. It was built to suit our family’s needs, more specifically my mother’s. Small hatches in each floor led to a laundry chute, so my mother wouldn’t have to collect our dirty clothes from our rooms. Adjacent to the kitchen were a pantry and a laundry room with clotheslines extended outside its window and a large, square sink for hand-laundering in which many next-generation babies would later bath. My father also installed a shower in the garage, his grand gesture to my mother the neat freak, so when we came back from the beach on Saturdays, we could rinse off the sand before stepping on her pristine floors.

  The first day in the house, we ran through it and reveled in its newness. We inhaled the aroma of fresh paint and sawdust, admired the sheen on the tile floors, the glare on the glass windows. After years of sharing small living quarters, we viewed the six-bedroom house as infinitely large, a boundless playground filled with cozy nooks and secret crawl spaces. When my cousins played hide-and-seek with me, they would run up and down the stairs until they were out of breath, and still they couldn’t find me.

  My father enjoyed the house he had built for less than a year before he suffered a heart attack. He was ill for a few months, and for a while, there was talk of installing a special lift. A contractor came by and drew marks on the wall where the elevator would launch. My father passed away before it was set up. The gashes on the wall, crudely carved and showing the gray, crumbly matter inside, remained there for years after he was gone.

  In the months after my father’s death, the house seemed grotesque, forsaken. We disappeared into our own grief, passed each other in the hallways like strangers. Whenever I was alone at home, I’d turn the lights on in every room, scared of the black pits that gaped past the doors, threatening to suck me in. At night I couldn’t sleep, listening to the house creak and groan, to the whistle of the wind stirring leaves on the roof. Obsessed with death and the afterlife, I was convinced the dead were trying to communicate with me. During the days, spring showed off its new colors, and the smell of orange and almond blossoms nudged its way in through the wooden shutters, oblivious to our loss.

  * * *

  —

  YEARS PASSED AND the house livened and filled up again, while the novelty of it settled into the comfortable, cozy familiarity of a home. We threw parties on the front lawn, even two weddings, and barbecues on the roof. On hot days, classmates would stop by on their way back from school, and I’d bring out the garden hose and spray us all with water. Some of our best friends had keys to the house and would come and go as they pleased, open the fridge and help themselves to food. Girlfriends and boyfriends often slept over, and cousins and uncles and aunts came by for coffee or lunch, or for jichnoon on Shabbat morning. Even during the first Gulf War, our home was brimming with people. Guests who happened to be visiting when the siren sounded joined us in the bomb shelter in the basement, including, once, a Canadian friend of my brother’s who was visibly shaken by the sounds of explosions, his eyes wide behind the gas mask. Another time, my mother and her friends, fatalistic and immersed in their game of cards, couldn’t be bothered with going to the shelter. A photo shows them playing cards around the kitchen table with their gas masks on.

  Eventually, after our respective army services, my siblings and I started leaving. One by one. Room by room. We moved to a kibbutz, to Tel Aviv, to New York, to Amsterdam. We went traveling or on an exchange student program. But we always came back—between trips, between apartments, between boyfriends. We’d show up with our bags, our suitcases, our boxes, and stay awhile—a few weeks, a few months, a year. Sometimes we’d bring our partners. Save for a few adjustments here and there, our rooms remained untouched in our absence. In my closet, I still had skimpy tie-dyed halter tops from Goa and dozens of scribbled notebooks and letters. Outside my window, the remaining olive trees had grown thicker and taller, heavy with green fruit that brushed the second-floor windows.

  Our mother was always happy for the company, even after she met Nissim, who eventually moved in. By the time the two met, she had been a widow for twelve years. Twelve years of scoffing at the idea of meeting a man as though it were a joke. Nissim was a carpenter who refurbished old furniture in his dusty, cluttered shop in the flea market in Jaffa, where Tel Avivi hipsters came to purchase antiques and dine in one of the many restaurants that had opened since the place became trendy. He was also a widower, had also raised his young children on his own. My mother laughed frequently, began wearing lipstick and doing her hair. The two of them went dancing and took vacations in Eilat and Turkey. She was the happiest I had seen her since my childhood.

  * * *

  —

  SEAN AND I settled into my old room and placed a well-used crib against the wall. I inspected the room with narrow eyes: the paint was peeling and the walls were cracked and flaking, swollen with moisture. Most of the wooden shutters were broken or missing slats, and windows were wedged in their tracks, crooked. The rickety sliding door frequently
slipped out of its groove and flapped noisily on windy nights. Outlets hung on loose screws, the electric wires exposed. I plugged a radiator into the safest-looking outlet, stuffed a board in the back of the door to keep it from clattering, and draped a towel over the rattling window to block some of the wind that crept through the gaps.

  The house had not been built for weather to begin with—too large and spacious to be properly heated or cooled—and the last thirty-odd years of disrepair had made it even less hospitable, the upkeep too expensive for a single mother of six to afford. What had once seemed like a luxurious villa was now a drafty, derelict concrete monster, invaded by wildlife. Cockroaches, ants, lizards, and mice were a common sight. Pigeons cooed on windowsills and crows crowded the roof. In the yard, packs of stray cats lazed in the sunshine and porcupines hid in bushes. Once, my mother found a black snake slinking on the kitchen floor. My youngest brother killed it with an ornamental machete, a gift from an uncle who had returned from South America.

  On the coldest, wettest night of a spectacular Mediterranean storm that had flooded the desert and buried Jerusalem in snow, it started to rain in my baby’s crib. We brought her into the bed with us and woke up to her coughing and sniffling, her little body feverish against ours. It was her first cold. To catch the rain, Sean and I placed one bucket in our room and three large pots in the living room, and spread towels on the kitchen floor—all of which needed to be replaced several times a day. We sat huddled in our coats by the radiator and could still see our breath.

  Staying in the house for the first time as a mother, I began to resent it. It made my baby sick. The house was a hazard, a death trap. Then one day, we looked the other way for a moment, and our daughter toppled down a half-flight of stairs, miraculously unharmed. I blamed the house. The floors on which my baby wanted to crawl were covered in icy water, the bitter wind was whistling through the rattling slats, the outlets were precarious, the mold was blooming wildly on the walls.