The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  I stared at him. “She’s not my cousin.”

  “Right. Second cousin.”

  I said nothing. I gave him the money.

  I said nothing because growing up in Israel in a large Yemeni family, I came to regard most Yemenis as relatives to some degree. I used to joke that all Yemenis were related unless proven otherwise.

  On the flight, I found Yifat in the smoking section, slid into the seat next to her, and lit a cigarette. “So…we’re cousins?”

  She looked at me with surprise. “You didn’t know?”

  I shook my head.

  “We have the same great-grandmother,” she said. “Shama.”

  “The evil one? The one who left my grandmother in Yemen and moved to Israel with a new man?”

  “Well, that’s not exactly how it happened.” Yifat shifted in her seat. “But yes. After she arrived in Israel with her third husband, she had another son. That son was my grandfather.”

  “So your grandfather and my grandmother are brother and sister?”

  She nodded, squishing her cigarette in the metal ashtray between us. “You got it.”

  My knowledge of my family history was so scant that although I knew my grandmother had lost a brother in the 1948 war, it had never occurred to me to ask where that brother came from. Was he left in Yemen too? Was he a half-brother? I dismissed that detail as another complication in our family tree that I couldn’t be bothered deciphering. Who could keep track? We were a big family, and there were plural marriages and marriages between cousins and, apparently, polygamy too. When I first discovered my grandfather had been married to two wives at the same time (rather than one after the other, as I had originally assumed), I asked my mother, “How come no one told me that?” and she said, “You never asked.”

  * * *

  —

  BACK IN ISRAEL, Yifat and I bonded over our reverse culture shock, spending our afternoons smoking pot and watching movies in her parents’ house in Sha’ariya. We decided we needed a vacation to ease us back into the real world and hitchhiked to the Sinai desert in Egypt. Sinai offered a simpler existence, a world of primary colors: yellow dunes, blue water and skies, long black roads snaking through red mountains. We smoked desert weed full of sand and seeds that popped loudly, played backgammon with the Bedouins, swam in the warm sea—its floor slipping from under our feet into a wall of coral reef swarming with fish. We slept in a straw hut, the sand covered with striped rugs bleached by sunlight. We wondered if that was what Yemen looked like, if that was how our grandparents had lived.

  One night, as we sat watching the string of gleaming lights across the Red Sea that underlined Saudi Arabia’s shores—so close to the land of our ancestors—I said, “What did you mean on the plane? Why did Shama leave the twins behind?”

  “She had no choice,” Yifat said. “Her mother-in-law wouldn’t let her take them. The twins were the only thing she had left from her dead son. She told Shama it was too dangerous; they were too little; they wouldn’t survive the trip to Israel. She said, ‘You can leave, but the twins must stay here.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  OVER FRIDAY DINNER at my mother’s, I told my family what Yifat had said. My mother was serving thin, yellow Yemeni soup with lahoh, a flat sticky pita that looked like a sponge speckled with holes.

  “That’s not true,” my mother said. “That’s not what happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  My mother gave me a sharp look. “There’s always a choice.”

  “Well, I just think it’s interesting—”

  “What’s so interesting?” my mother interjected, waving a ladle. “She was a selfish bitch and a terrible mother, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “And a bit of a harlot by the sound of it.” My uncle laughed. “I mean, three husbands? That would be like six today!”

  “There must be more to the story,” I said. “Maybe I could write about it one day.”

  My uncle softened, wrapped his arm around my shoulder, and said, “I understand why you’re curious, but there’s no way to find out the truth, is there?”

  It’s hard to accept that some secrets really do end up in graves with the people who carried them, that the truth, like lahoh, is sticky and full of holes.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  WE DECIDED TO have a home birth, although we didn’t tell our families that. During my hypno-birthing classes, I was coming around to the idea of birth as natural, something that has become unnecessarily medicalized, something my body knew how to do. I drew reassurance from my maternal ancestry: my mother’s births were all natural and fairly easy; my grandmother gave birth to five of her six children at home. When my youngest uncle was born, my aunt Mazal ran to get the midwife in the middle of the night. She remembers my grandfather in the corner of their mud hut, making himself scarce, and the other kids sleeping through the whole thing.

  I can do this, I thought. I am my mother’s daughter. My grandmother’s granddaughter. I have their hips.

  But after twenty-four hours of laboring at home, quietly, inwardly, my midwife came to check on me. “Hmmm,” she said with her hand inside my cervix.

  “Hmmm? What are you feeling?”

  She smiled and said something no woman wants to hear during labor: “I’m not sure. Something I haven’t felt before.”

  An ambulance rushed me to the hospital through wet, sleepy Toronto streets. It turned out my baby was presenting her face first, looking out into the world, curious, impatient. It was a rarity, the doctor said. My midwife told me I was lucky; other doctors might have chosen to perform a cesarean at that point. Our daughter was born not in the intimacy of our home but in a room crowded with nurses and doctors who wanted to witness the unusual delivery. She was not placed on my chest but whisked to the corner of the room to be examined. Sean went with her, held her little hand in his. It was he who was with her first. Not me.

  I was lucky. If this were Yemen, we might not have made it.

  When they finally placed her warm, wrinkled body on my breasts, she appeared to be smiling serenely, with a full head of jet-black hair that would later shed, be replaced by a lighter brown. Her head was bruised and swollen from the forceps. She was the newest thing I had ever seen, a whole world inside three and a half kilos, and I was terrified of her beauty and fragility.

  In the middle of the night, I woke up startled by her absence. Sean and our baby were sleeping together on the folding bed beside me, his body coiled around hers in a protective half circle. I remembered he took her for a walk while I slept, but it had been four hours and she needed to be fed. They looked so peaceful together, father and daughter, her face a little, softer replication of his. But shouldn’t she have slept with me on the first night of her life? Now she had gone too long without nursing. I felt, vaguely, that I was doing it all wrong, failing already.

  And there was the question of love: I loved her, sometimes to tears, but it wasn’t the instantaneous falling in love described by some of my friends, the elated ecstasy some mothers spoke about, like drugs, they said. This was nothing like drugs, and I knew drugs. I searched for it, desperately. Did I love her wrong, or just not enough? One day during that blurry first week, I called my friend Nancy, a mother of two, from the depths of my bed, crying. “What am I supposed to feel? Is this enough love?”

  Those first days were dazed and stagnant, fragmented into strange, unnatural patterns of sleep and wakefulness, punctuated by diaper changes and brief forays into the kitchen to eat the food Sean had prepared. Much of my time was spent nursing in bed. Once I’d mastered breastfeeding (which had been a battle at first, yet more evidence of my incompetence), it became my answer for everything. My body kept my baby alive. It knew what to do even when I didn’t.

  Most of the time I felt like I was underwater, mute and ungainly
and out of breath, exiled into a new world where I was unversed in the native tongue and the local customs and the perception of time, stripped of my identity and my history. This sense of foreignness should have comforted me in its familiarity, but instead I felt profoundly alienated and invariably lonely—a stranger in my own skin, my own life.

  I was also gripped by fear, disturbed by nightmares. I thought of my young mother raising all six of us on her own after my father died. She was only a year older than I was now. How did she manage? And then I worried about my own health, my heart, my genes, and felt guilty for waiting for as long as I had. Motherhood introduced a new degree of vulnerability I could have never conceived of, the kind of weakness I had spent my life trying to stave off. It made me lose my edge, peeled away my toughness. Underneath, I was completely exposed.

  I was envious of Sean for being so adaptable, for being happy and unafraid, and for being the dad, a role that inherently allowed for more leeway, even though he had quit his job as a chief officer on a boat that sailed for six weeks at a time and taken paternity leave for ten months (thanks to Canada’s generous parental leave policy). Even though he shared more than half the load, was more present than any father I had ever known. I may have done nights by myself (we figured at least one of us should be well rested and fully functioning), but he changed almost all diapers during the day, carried her more frequently than I did. At three months, he stayed with her two evenings a week while I taught continuing studies at the University of Toronto for extra cash. He was with her while I was promoting my newly released book, attending readings and interviews and launches. He knew what was in the diaper bag. I didn’t.

  In my mothers’ group (all of them envious of me for this cushy introduction to parenting, which made me feel even more guilty for having the audacity to complain), one mother suggested they should invite Sean to the group, rather than me.

  On the rare occasions that I took her out on my own, I was often flustered to the point of panic while trying to change her in public or calm her through her crying fits. Once, I burst into tears at the beach parking lot because Sean had sent me to get the car seat and I couldn’t figure out how to unlatch it. It was a basic skill every mother had figured out by now, but I had never done it before.

  I went to the park with a fellow writer who had given birth just a few months before me. Her face had the serene glow new mothers are known for, an expression of unruffled contentment. She spoke the whole way home about how happy she was, how she no longer cared about work or writing. “I just don’t want to talk about anything other than my baby,” she said. I nodded, but I couldn’t relate. My old self was still there, dying to talk about books and literature. She was just trapped.

  In the fall I went on a book tour with Sean and the baby in tow. They stayed in hotel rooms while I spoke onstage, mingled with authors in the hospitality suite, feeling like a fugitive on the loose, until my cellphone beeped, “She’s up. Hurry,” and I’d abandon everything mid-conversation and rush back to the hotel room, remove my fancy dress and my non-breastfeeding bra, and lie there, her hungry little mouth searching for my nipple.

  While we visited the Vancouver Writers Festival, I also got to see Yifat. In yet another extraordinary string of events, she had fallen in love with my best friend from the photography program in Vancouver, whom I had brought to Israel for a visit in my late twenties. From that first chance meeting in Varanasi, our lives kept intersecting, interweaving. Then we were both pregnant at the same time, and gave birth a few weeks apart.

  Motherhood suited Yifat; she appeared natural and relaxed. Like my grandmother, her great-aunt, she gave birth at home. “Aren’t children fun?” she said as we watched our two babies babbling on the carpet.

  We were descendants of the same great-grandmother. Was it all about perception? After all, Yifat wasn’t told our great-grandmother was a bad mother. Or did it have nothing to do with her, and everything to do with me?

  * * *

  —

  AS SOON AS Sean’s paternity leave ended and he went back to work, fortunately at a nearby port that allowed him to return home almost daily, I plummeted down a deep, dark hole. Was it possible to get postpartum depression ten months after birth? Google didn’t offer a clear answer. Even with Sean around, I felt insulated and inept, bored and guilty for it; now I was feeling abandoned. Everyone left. Sean. My childless friends, which made for most of them. I had no family in the city. No support system. I wasn’t good at asking for help; I was better at maintaining a semblance of competence and cheer. I missed my mother and my sister more than ever, wished I lived closer to them, wondered, as I often did during winter, why on earth I thought living in Canada was a good idea. My days with the baby were long and isolating, the two of us shipwrecked and alone. By the time Sean came home, he’d find me in the kitchen with eyes dimmed and lips downturned. I remembered that expression from my mother’s face. But of course, she had six children and had lost the love of her life. What was my problem?

  I posted a semi-comical cry for help on Facebook and an old friend said, “Many people can help you raise your child but only you can be the writer you are. Get childcare ASAP.”

  I nearly wept with gratitude. But another part of me thought, Really?

  A few weeks after Sean went back to work, I landed a well-paying writer-in-residence gig at a school in Toronto. Our neighbor agreed to babysit and so I took the job. I cherished the short hours I spent there, particularly the times between consults, when I could write. In that little cluttered, tucked-away office I felt closest to my pre-maternal self, saw glimpses of her, longed to hold on to them.

  On my first day there, I met with Aga, the writing teacher who had arranged for my gig. I had been thinking about her, remembering something she said when I was pregnant and going on about how I wanted more than one child. Coming from a large, close-knit family, I couldn’t imagine having less than two. “Not me,” she had said. “I’m selfish. I like to write. I like to travel. It’s just so much easier with one.” I had marveled at the nonchalant way in which she uttered those words.

  When I arrived at the school, Aga was visibly pregnant. I was almost disappointed.

  “You were so convincing!” I said. “What happened?”

  “I love motherhood.” She beamed. “I’m not like you. I don’t need to write. I’d rather just hang out with my baby all day. I think writing is just more important to you than it is to me.”

  In her words I heard, “You’re different.” I heard, “Writing is more important to you than being a mother.”

  But I also heard a compliment. I was a real writer.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  IN MY MID-THIRTIES, after an almost decadelong writing block, I enrolled in a part-time writing program in Vancouver. Finally, I was writing and reading daily, living the life I had always wished for. I was the happiest I’d been in years.

  Once I started writing, I knew I wanted to tell Yemeni stories, inspired by the tales I had coaxed out of my grandmother a few years ago. It was my chance to rectify my childhood experience of never seeing myself and my family in the books I admired, an opportunity to celebrate the rich traditions of my community. I began digging into our past, frequently calling my family with questions. Since my great-grandmother’s character continued to fascinate me, her story became the focal point of my research.

  Some families have diaries, old love letters wrapped in a string, yellow-edged photos of ancestors from the old country. Others have heirlooms that have been passed down for generations, a collection of porcelain knickknacks or a set of silverware that their grandmother would have them mark for inheritance. My family didn’t even know how old my grandmother was. In Yemen, no birth certificates were issued, no recipes written, no photographs taken. My grandmother’s village didn’t appear on most maps, and an internet search for my maternal surname yielded zero results.<
br />
  Browsing through history books, hoping to at least construct the background that would provide context to my family’s past, has also proved futile. Little has been written about the lives of northern Yemeni Jews—a minority that lived, literally, on the margins of Yemeni society, in remote mountainous areas near the Saudi border, sometimes referred to as the “wild north.”

  Living in a place absent of my family history, a land that held none of our memories, I found myself drawn to Yemen. It was the only place—other than Israel—we could trace our past to. I remembered a trip Anand and I had taken to the Indian village from which his family descended, and how I envied him that experience, wishing it were possible for me to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors. But even though I was armed with my new Canadian passport, traveling to war-ravaged Yemen was extremely ill-advised. The improbability of such a visit lent the experience a magnified significance in my head. I didn’t delude myself into believing it could feel like home, but I imagined a sense of relief, of closure, like a misalignment in my being would correct itself, a riddle solved.

  * * *

  —

  ONCE I COMPLETED the writing program, I traveled to Israel for a lengthy research trip, determined to find some answers. It wasn’t just the truth behind the story I was after; I needed to know more for the same reason I had wished to go to Yemen: to unlock the past as if it were a key to my present. A part of me believed that if I knew more about Shama, I’d understand a part of myself that I couldn’t relate to my living ancestors. I drew parallels in our lives: I too had had many relationships; I’d left my loved ones and my country to follow a man. Maybe I could understand her choices.