“Maybe,” I told my mother as she mopped rainwater into a bucket, “it’s nature’s way of helping us let go of the house. So by the time they tear it down, we’ll be thinking, Good riddance.”
“Maybe,” my mother said, unconvinced.
As demolition day approached, the rooms were cleared one by one, the decay more apparent in their bareness. Sean took on the living room, wrapping knickknacks and wineglasses in newspapers, while I volunteered to tackle the books. There were hordes of them. This was a house of eight avid readers and collectors, shoppers at used-book stores, forgetful borrowers, and compulsive gifters of books (many were inscribed from one family member to another). After we left home, Nissim amassed the remaining books and crafted a library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in one of the rooms. But there would be no space for them in my mother’s new apartment. The library had to be dismantled and given away, destroyed, much like the house.
I divided the books into two piles: those I thought my siblings may want to look at first, and ones I figured we could give away. Nissim said he’d take them to his bookseller friend in the market. I started packing the unwanted books into boxes but it was taking forever and was heavy to transport, so Nissim came up with a better idea. He’d open the back of his work truck and fling the books from the second-floor window straight into it. I resisted at first. Like the demolition, it felt too harsh, too disrespectful. But there was so much more work to be done and I had no help and I was exhausted from sleepless nights with an infant, so I relented.
We hurled the books out the open window. I cringed as I watched them crash and pile in the back of his truck in disarray. Nissim drove off with them.
Over Friday dinner at the house, I told my siblings what we had done.
My oldest brother swallowed. “You did what?”
“I didn’t give away everything,” I said. “I left some for you guys to look at.”
He pushed his chair back and hurried to look at the remaining books. I followed, watching as he rifled through the boxes urgently. “Where is the Young Technician series?”
“Um…I might have given those away.”
“You threw away the Young Technician?” He looked up at me. “You shouldn’t have done that. How could you know which books mattered to me? These were my childhood memories.”
“I don’t know. There were so many of them.” My voice faltered. “I was just trying to help.”
“They knew I was going to get rid of the books,” my mother assured me as we cleaned up after dinner. “I’ve been telling them for months now that they should choose what they want to keep. You did nothing wrong. Everyone is just being emotional and sensitive right now.”
“Could we maybe track down the books?” I asked Nissim as he was scouring the pots and pans.
He shook his head. “He only keeps them for a few days and then he throws them away.”
“In the garbage?” My heart sank. “I wouldn’t have done it if I knew.” I had thought I was passing them on to a book aficionado, giving them new life. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had committed some crime against books, and even worse, that I had a part in erasing and bulldozing my siblings’ memories.
That night, I found my mother standing by the entrance to my sister’s room, staring into the void. “I can’t stand the echo.” She gave a mock shudder and shut the door. Then she eyed me, hesitant. “You know, he told me not to sell it.”
“Who?”
“Your father. Before he died.”
I felt a quick welling of anger at my father for saying such an irresponsible thing on his deathbed, but then I was flooded with regret and compassion. My poor young father. He knew he was dying. This house was his labor of love, an extension of him, his way to leave something behind, for us.
My mother’s face crumbled. I’d been silent for too long.
“He meant don’t sell it then,” I said. “And you didn’t. You stayed for thirty years and lived a full life in this house. We all did. Even your grandchildren. He would have wanted you to be comfortable in your old age.”
My mother gave a tepid nod. I realized that to her, this was yet another goodbye to my father, a final farewell to the dream they once shared. I hoped that in the process of letting go, she could find space for forgiveness, absolve herself from the promises she couldn’t keep.
* * *
—
THE DAY AFTER Nissim and my mother moved into a small temporary apartment in the neighborhood, my sister and I went to the house to say our goodbyes. We sat perched on the slanted tile roof facing the hills of Rosh HaAyin and looked out: the sandy path that led to my junior high school had been paved over a few years ago and lined with a row of slender palm trees. When we were growing up, the stream that had run along the path would overflow when it rained heavily, turning the dirt road into a mucky pond on which we used to sail paper boats. Back then our street was flanked with small, plain houses of older Yemeni residents and some newer villas, all lush with fruit trees and tended gardens. Many of these houses had been torn down in recent years, replaced by new apartment buildings that obstructed the view and swallowed the breeze.
Downstairs, I took pictures of my sister waving from the kitchen window to imaginary visitors, pretending to speak on the long-dead intercoms. There was something in that experience that was reminiscent of the trips we had taken there as children, when the house was under construction and we had to imagine it alive. But it was a heartbreaking comparison, as when old age evokes the helplessness of infanthood.
In my room, I uncapped the black marker I had brought with me and stared at the wall, stained by years of cigarette smoke. As a teenager, I had scribbled lines from poems and songs on my walls and once drew the Little Prince in watercolors by my bedside table. Being a fifth child, I was granted more autonomy than my older siblings. My mother had chosen her battles, and the walls of my room didn’t seem to merit one. Now, I wrote “Childhood Room” in the center and drew associative memories and words around it in a circular motion, spreading wider until I covered the entire wall with black ink. Finally, I wrote, “How I always, always came back here.”
On my way out, I unlatched the mezuzah from the house’s main entrance. It was a beautiful and sturdy object, made of heavy metal, with a menorah, a Star of David, and what seemed to be an eye (against the evil eye, I presumed) etched on it. On top, a biblical quote was engraved: “If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten.”
I took the mezuzah back to Canada and vowed one day to affix it to the doorframe in my own house—wherever that may be.
It has been sitting in my makeup drawer in Toronto ever since, waiting.
* * *
—
BY THE TIME Sean, our daughter, and I returned the following winter, the new apartment building was under way. Driving through the neighboring streets, I could see the bulky structure in place of the palm tree that once towered over everything. I averted my gaze, kept driving.
Nissim went to visit the construction site regularly with his tape measure, planning where to put the appliances and his refurbished furniture. He told me they had already laid the tile floors, and that on the large, west-facing balcony (one of the apartment’s best features), they integrated tiles from the old house, which Nissim, in a thoughtful, moving tribute, had removed from the living-room floor before the demolition. “You should go see it,” he said over dinner.
“I’ll wait until they install the elevator,” I said.
One evening, I went to see Aliza, the neighborhood hairdresser who had threaded my upper lip at sixteen after a boy I liked told me I had a mustache. When I got there, a few women were already waiting inside the small room, which reeked of hairspray. “Come back in half an hour,” Aliza said.
Waiting outside the salon, I watched the evening descending over the main street of Mahane Yehuda, two short bl
ocks one could drive through and miss in a blink. I inventoried the changes: The crammed seamstress shop was barred now. The little post office, where people had lined up on the sidewalk, fanning their faces with envelopes, was recently vacated—its seats piled out on the sidewalk. Benny the butcher, who rode a Vespa with a sidecar, had retired, his shop replaced by a kiosk with sidewalk tables where men sat smoking and filling out lottery forms. Everything had changed. Even Aliza—whose shop preserved its eighties decor, with the same accordion curtain separating it from her husband’s barbershop and the same discolored posters featuring outdated hairstyles on the walls—was young and secular once, but now had her graying hair neatly tucked underneath a headscarf. The street was darkening, the winter sky above it bluish and brimming with stars, and the sidewalks bustled with people scrambling to finish their last-minute shopping. I glanced at my phone. I still had twenty-five minutes.
I didn’t plan to walk there, but my feet guided me as though they had their own will, leading me onto the route I’d taken a million times, my way home from the bus stop, from the grocery store, from the newsstand with my stack of pop magazines, from the post office with packages from my European pen pals. I turned right into the lane named after my father, passed by the wooden benches inscribed with lovers’ names, where rowdy teenagers would sit and smoke narghiles all night long, keeping us up. The building loomed above me, its blackened windows like excavated eyes. It was the end of the day and the site was fenced with corrugated iron sheeting to protect it from thieves and squatters. I walked along the perimeter of it, searching for something familiar. It was the same lot, after all, the same address. That tattered piece of sidewalk I was standing on, with the leveled curb that once led into our driveway, hadn’t changed. The concrete fence between our house and Miriam’s, whose roosters called every morning at dawn, was still there. Standing in front of our phantom gate, I began to feel a dizzying sense of disorientation. This was home, my body memory was pointed toward it, but I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t even enter the site.
The day the house had been torn down, my sister called me in Toronto and the two of us beat ourselves up over the demolition as though we could have prevented it. Surely there was a better way, a better solution. It was a futile discussion and we knew it, but we couldn’t stop, both of us sentimental to a fault and unprepared for the magnitude of feelings this loss had evoked. We wanted to turn back time and do it all differently. On the sidewalk in front of what was once our house, I felt the same furious, senseless wish to go back in time and remove this building, reverse the outcome, write an alternate ending.
* * *
—
AT THE AGE of twenty-seven, after traveling extensively and moving across the world, after searching for a suitable definition for home, one that I could live with, one that I could live in, I told my oldest brother with a sweeping hand gesture, “I have many homes.”
Speaking to my oldest brother can be frightening. Eleven years my senior, he is a brilliant man, too sharp, too honest, his gaze too penetrating. He questions everything and he sees right through me. So when I told him how blessed I felt to have many homes, he stared at me deadpan and said, “Or none at all.”
Growing up, I had often felt out of place in my own country, a feeling I couldn’t comprehend or name until much later. It had to do with my father; grief shakes the foundations of your home, unsettles and banishes you. It might have also had something to do with the exclusion of my culture from so many facets of Israeli life, with not seeing myself in literature and in the media, with being taught in school a partial history about the inception of Israel that painted us as mere extras. Or perhaps that failed sense of belonging was an Israeli predicament, because how does one feel at home when home is unsafe, forever contested? When the fear of losing it is so entrenched in us it has become a part of our ethos?
As a roving twentysomething, I enjoyed toying with the idea of home as if it was a fluid negotiable term, a mental RV, a headspace. Home, I loved saying, was the ritual of packing and unpacking, arranging my books (because I always carried books, didn’t travel light) on shelves in a Mexican cabana, a studio apartment in Manhattan, or a hostel in Amsterdam. It was a train compartment in India or a ferry in Greece. It was a colorful woven rug I had bought in a market in Pushkar and carried everywhere with me, strapped to the top of my backpack. Wherever I spread that rug was home. Home became the liminal space in between—between identities, between cultures, between languages—and I was content claiming that space as my own, pleased to be different.
Even my immigration was halfhearted (a privilege, I now know, reserved for the young and fortunate). I moved to Canada following a man, with a backpack and a rug and no real plans of staying. For years, my affair with Canada remained as casual and noncommittal as my romantic entanglements. I owned next to nothing so I could pick up and leave at a moment’s notice, lived in apartments furnished with milk crates I’d covered with sarongs, slept on foamy mattresses thrown on the floor. Home was transient, constantly shifting. Home, essentially, was the act of leaving—not a physical place, but the pattern of walking away from it.
I was so young and shortsighted then that I was oblivious to the repercussions these choices—or rather my refusal to make them, my debilitating indecisiveness—might have on my life later. Leaving, I discovered, did not cure my displacement, but rather reinforced it. I missed Israel the way I once longed for the world outside of it, mimicking my grandparents’ yearning with a self-inflicted exile. I believed I could try other places on, the way one slips into outfits at a clothing store, and if none fit, I could always go back to my starting point as if nothing had happened. I thought everything at home would be waiting for me, unchanged.
“This is your home,” my mother keeps telling me when I visit her new place. “Stop asking me for things.” She is happy here, back on the fifth floor. The apartment is warm, spacious, new, and everything works. For my daughter, this will always be Savta’s house, the scene of many joyful childhood memories. But I keep opening the wrong drawers and I still don’t know where my mom keeps the towels or which switch to turn on in the bathroom. I have no history here; my height isn’t carved on the decaying doorframes. My handprints aren’t stamped inside nooks in which I had hidden as a child. My writing isn’t scribbled over the walls.
My daughter, who’s been a traveler since birth, having flown eleven times in the first year of her life, dragged by her parents to Israel and back, to her grandparents in Victoria, to writers’ festivals and book tours, has begun to use the term “home home” to refer to our residence in Toronto, emphasizing the first “home” with a different inflection and a tip of her head, because when we’re away, we might say we’re going home whenever we return to our temporary sublet, my mother’s house, or the hotel. It is her way of anchoring herself in this transient lifestyle that we have imposed on her. I realize I may have had many homes throughout my life, but I only ever had one true home home, and it was the security of that house that allowed me to leave over and over again, to drift and be flighty, because I knew I could always come back to it.
* * *
—
FOR THE FIRST few months after the house was gone, I was gripped by an urgent desire to own a place. I had never even considered it before. Buying a house meant putting down roots, staying in one place—a notion I had found terrifying and unsettling for most of my young adult life. Of course, I never could have afforded a house then. Now, older and more financially responsible, I was browsing real estate online with Sean and calculating mortgages, reading about up-and-coming neighborhoods, and looking up agents. Once we realized our chances of owning a house were slim, at least in the expensive cities we were considering (Toronto, Vancouver, Tel Aviv—because we still couldn’t decide), then I wanted a metaphorical ownership. I wanted an answer to the question I was often asked in interviews and in Q&As following book events, a fair question considering
my first book was titled The Best Place on Earth and was peopled with transient, nomadic characters searching for a place to call their own. “What is home for you?” readers wanted to know. “What is the best place for you?” And each time, I faltered, stammered.
Eventually, I came up with an answer. Home is where my family is, I say. Wherever Sean and my daughter are. The answer seems to satisfy people. And it is true. But sometimes I worry that instead of having Sean and my daughter ground me, I infect them with my instability. I watch my daughter, who at three is already learning how to leave, how to cope with goodbyes, how to shut down to protect herself from heartache in the hours before departure, to cry over something else, something arbitrary.
* * *
—
SOMETIMES, IMAGES OF the demolition haunt me, as vivid and real as memories. I see the bulldozers ramming into the brick fence the way my sister once drove into it by accident, chipping the fence and denting the bumper. I see the tire marks they leave on the lawn as they slam into the front door like a blind, dumb animal. The olive trees are ripped one by one from their roots, their olives raining down on the metal blade in futile retaliation. The house collapses into itself, buried in a cloud of dust that hides the sun like a sandstorm. Then nothing remains but a pile of rubble, concrete, brick, and poking metal wires.
I tell myself the walls are just walls. Our past isn’t folded into them, our joys and sorrows aren’t etched on the doorframes, our tales have not stuck to the kitchen cupboards like turmeric and nicotine. I remind myself we get to keep our memories and stories, take them with us wherever we go.
The Art of Leaving Page 24
