The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  My grandmother was in her late nineties by then and had moved into a home. When I came to visit, she sat slouched in a wheelchair, looking small and pale and clutching a handkerchief. She barely spoke, and when she did, she didn’t always make sense. “When are we heading up to the second floor?” she said once. I was grateful for the time we had spent together a few years ago, the stories I captured her telling on video. Before I left, I kissed her wrinkly cheek and said, “Ma’asalama.” Go with peace. I could swear her eyes lit up for a moment. She always loved it when I spoke Arabic.

  It was the last time I saw her.

  My extended family regarded my fascination with my great-grandmother with suspicion and annoyance. They also started openly probing me about my plans to spawn, rather than the thinly veiled hint “bekarov etsleh”—soon at yours—so often uttered at bris and birth celebrations. Israeli culture sanctified procreation, perhaps out of subconscious fear of being outnumbered by our enemies. Not having children was not an option. Even having one was considered an oddity. One day, a few aunts and female cousins ambushed me at my aunt Rivka’s house, which had replaced Savta’s home as the family gathering place. I was the oldest female cousin who hadn’t bred yet.

  “What are you waiting for?” they asked.

  “I still have to write my book,” I said, my voice whinier than I had intended.

  “A book?” They exchanged glances. “The book can wait. A baby can’t.”

  * * *

  —

  AFTER A FEW months of research, I managed to patch together an approximate time line of events, filled with overlapping dates and littered with question marks. I drew and redrew a family tree: it looked haunted, its branches entwined and tangled. Despite the many gaps and holes, and the lack of concrete evidence, a story began taking shape.

  My great-grandmother Shama was born in Dawar il Yahood, the Jewish neighborhood in Sa’ada, a walled city in North Yemen, by the Saudi Arabian border. A stopover on the frankincense caravan route, the northwestern town was a cluster of mud houses that clung to each other in fear of the desert. Outside the city walls, a flat, arid land extended like a story with no ending.

  Shama married her cousin Salim Harizi in her teens, as was the tradition in Yemen. After the wedding, she moved to his family home in Haidan a-Sham, a day’s ride on a donkey’s back. A couple of years after their wedding, Shama gave birth to a baby girl. But their joy was overshadowed by Salim’s deteriorating health: a disease had taken over his guts and was eating at him rapidly.

  A couple of years after Salim’s untimely death, Shama married her second husband, Abraham Gurs, my great-grandfather. Abraham was already family—Shama’s younger sister was married to his brother. Abraham’s family was known in Haidan for their generosity and kindness. Word had it that travelers who knocked on the family door asking for a slice of bread were sent off with an entire loaf, which was how their last name, Gurs—a loaf of bread—came to be.

  After the wedding, Shama and Abraham lived with Abraham’s family, in the same house with her sister and her husband, who were unable to conceive. Shama, on the other hand, was blessed with healthy twin girls: one fair and one dark, my grandmother Salha and her sister, Saida.

  Then Abraham fell ill too. It wasn’t long before he passed away.

  After the shiva, Abraham’s mother sent Shama and her eldest daughter back to her mother in Sa’ada. “Times are hard,” she said, “and with my son dead, we can no longer feed all of you. Your sister can take care of the twins in the meantime.”

  Shama was in her late twenties and already twice widowed. A woman in her position was considered bad luck. What man would risk becoming a third victim? Without a husband, she’d live in poverty, reduced to selling the rows of gold-plated silver coins that were sewn onto her wedding dress, altering clothes, and weaving baskets to get by. But then Salem-Zahir Madhala, a tall, handsome silversmith from Sa’ada who was taken by Shama’s beauty, disregarded the curse and asked for her hand in marriage.

  It was the beginning of a new century and more Jews were leaving Yemen for Jerusalem, the Holy Land they’d been praying for. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had made traveling to Palestine easier, and Yemeni Jews could finally fulfill their centuries-long dream. For them, this was a time of redemption, the start of a messianic era. Groups of Jews walked through the desert for weeks, sometimes months, to Aden, where they boarded ships to Jaffa or Haifa.

  In 1912, Salem-Zahir and Shama left their home with a few belongings and little money. They ignored the warnings of their Muslim friends and neighbors, who worried that the Arabs in Palestine might not be so welcoming. They took Shama’s six-year-old daughter and Shama’s mother with them and joined a group on their journey to Aden. On the way, they stopped at Haidan a-Sham, at the Gurs family house, to see Shama’s twin girls.

  For whatever reason, they left without the twins.

  They would make it to Palestine a few months later. There, Shama would give birth to a boy, Yifat’s grandfather. A couple of years after that, she would have a daughter who’d die at birth. A few weeks later, Shama would pass away too, succumbing to complications from the birth.

  I think of Shama leaving my grandmother and her twin sister behind that day. Did she hug them? Cry? Bury her face in the nape of their necks and inhale their sweet smell? Did she beg her mother-in-law to let her take them? Did she try to fight for them? Did she believe she was doing the right thing, that by leaving them with her barren sister, she was offering her the best gift she could have given her? Or maybe she hoped that her sister could care for them until they grew up and were better suited for travel, that one day they would all be reunited in Israel?

  I see her walking away, shoulders trembling, tears streaming. I imagine the mountains and the spirits who lived in them looking on as the family began their journey toward a new life. The mountains had witnessed the lives of the people for centuries. They watched patterns evolving through generations, old roles taken over by new faces, new husbands replacing the dead, girls becoming mothers and mothers becoming grandmothers. Nothing ever changed, but rather shifted ever so slightly, like an ancient folk song played in a new key.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  ONE DAY, WHILE walking on Bloor Street in Toronto with my sleeping baby strapped to my chest, her cheek feathery soft against my skin, I saw a large cellphone ad in a bus shelter featuring a young backpacker against a tropical background, and I was overwhelmed by longing so severe it felt like a physical ache in my chest. I used to be that guy. The kind of person who takes off and leaves whenever she wants, a person with nothing to lose. I could never again be that person. And if I wasn’t her, I wasn’t sure who I was.

  Of course, I didn’t truly want to leave my family, yet I didn’t know how to live without an imminent departure date, couldn’t comprehend the nature of routine. It is human to dream of leaving, I told Sean. Men do it all the time. So many of my friends grew up with absent fathers. Men have their hero’s journey, their On the Road. The image of the traveling man riding toward the sunset is a romantic one. But not women. Not mothers. Mothers stay.

  When I was just over a year old, my mother went on vacation in Europe with my father and left me with her youngest sister. A small abandonment, hardly anything at all. By the time she came back, I was calling my aunt Ima. My mother still talks about it, eyes glistening, as if she was the one wronged in this story. How devastated she was when I refused to come to her, how she cried when I hid behind my aunt’s leg as if my mother were a stranger.

  When I was ten, a few months after my father’s death, my mother traveled to New York for a few weeks with my baby brother. My uncle was working at the Israeli consulate in New York, and my mother needed to get away from the grief that was steeping in our house. I stayed with family, an uncle who had children around my age, only two blocks from our house. My two eldest brothers
were on their mandatory army service, returning only on weekends. My other brother was with relatives, and my sister stayed with friends. I missed my mother so much that some days I sneaked by myself into our vacant house and stayed for hours at a time. I slept there once—I had lied to my uncle, telling him my brother was there with me—a ten-year-old girl alone in her parents’ bed, which still smelled of my mom’s Nivea body lotion. I woke up sick with the flu, crawled to the window, and called for help. A neighbor I didn’t know well walked by and heard me. She came in, made me tea, and scanned the surroundings. “Why are you here alone? Where is your mother?”

  I was sick for two weeks. I wanted my mother, craved the softness and scent of her skin. In my feverish hallucinations, I felt her there, cradling me. I wished I could go to sleep and not wake up until she returned.

  When I got better it was my eleventh birthday. My mother was still in New York. My uncle and aunt threw me a birthday party and I sat there among my many cousins, ate my cake, and wished I was in New York with my mother. I looked out the window and watched the blue sky, and there was grief and death written all over it, grief and death lurking in the trees and everywhere. Then, tired of self-pity, I replaced it with anger. I wanted to run away and never come back. I wanted to be the one doing the leaving.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  THE WEEK BEFORE I returned to Canada from my research trip, Yifat’s mom, Zehava, took me to the cemetery, the same one my father and grandparents are buried in, to visit Shama’s grave. Zehava had been keen to help me with my research. Like me, she’d been haunted by the past. I knew better than to try offering her account to my family. Hers was the other family’s narrative, the family Shama had chosen over us, the wrong story. My aunt had already taken to caustically calling Zehava my “new best friend.”

  The day was sweltering, the evanescent spring melting into an early summer. Zehava and I passed the ominous-looking funeral home at the cemetery’s entrance and ignored the Orthodox men who loitered by it, hoping to make a buck by praying for your dead.

  The lot was in the oldest part of the cemetery, on a little hill. Rows of shiny marble spread out in front of us like a gap-toothed grin. Plain stone-colored high-rises, the city’s newest addition, bordered the cemetery on one end, like an extension of the gravestones they overlooked.

  Zehava had been here before, over ten years ago. She had found a mound of old dirt with a handwritten wooden sign that read: Shama Madhala. “The Yemeni Jews believed the soul had gone elsewhere,” Zehava said. “So why bother spending money on a stone?”

  The cemetery had been renovated since Zehava’s last visit, but she remembered the location of Shama’s grave. I followed her as she counted steps until she paused, frowning. The mounds were gone. In their place, the cemetery had put up flat, body-sized castings of concrete with little square stones like pillows at the head. Some of them were engraved “Yemeni woman” or “Persian child.” Others only had first names, like “Yaakov” or “Hava.” One read: “Drowned in the Yarkon River.” Another: “The Young Daughter of the Sharabi Family.” But Shama’s name was nowhere to be found.

  A computerized system, recently set up to help visitors find their way in the maze of gravestones, was mounted into the wall of a booth in the parking lot, like an ATM. When we typed Shama’s name, a message appeared: “There are no results for this deceased.” We tried different spellings, previous surnames. Nothing. When we searched for Shama’s sister, even her mother, the computer emitted a sheet with her name, date of death, lot and row number.

  We went back and stood on the footpath, hands on our hips. “The sign must have fallen off before the renovation,” I said. I pictured it being tipped over by a gust of wind, carried by a stream of rainwater down the hill, buried in mud and dirt. Lost forever.

  Zehava walked back to the entrance and recalculated her steps. This time she found herself standing by a nameless headstone. A smaller grave, also unmarked, was right beside it: perhaps Shama’s baby who died at birth?

  “It’s here,” Zehava said. “I can feel it.”

  It was a blank slab of concrete, a nameless grave for a woman with no birth certificate, a woman who lived and died and left behind no picture or document. In my search, I found no evidence that my great-grandmother had ever existed. Everywhere I went, I hit a dead end. In the national archives’ census records from those years, she wasn’t listed. In one book, her son—Yifat’s grandfather, who was killed in the war—was said to be the son of the wife who followed her.

  “I’m sorry, Savta,” Zehava said, voice shaking. “Please forgive us.”

  Forgive us? I squinted at Zehava. What was she talking about? I could hear my grandmother’s voice in my head, and she was yelling, “We should be the ones forgiving her for what she’s done. That’s her punishment. For leaving us behind in Yemen, for choosing a man over her children.”

  “I wonder if she ever forgave herself.” I knelt, touching the cool stone. “It’s so sad. How could she have left so little behind?”

  “What do you mean?” Zehava said. “She left us. She left a dynasty.”

  I found a large pebble and placed it on the grave. It’s traditional, a way of saying, We were here. We visited you. We remember.

  * * *

  —

  “WHAT KIND OF woman walks out on her children?” my mother had said to me over the years. During my fraught adolescence, she sometimes threatened to run away from home, phrasing it that way, which made her sound like a teenager herself. She grabbed her purse, made a big scene of her departure, then slipped in quietly later. I don’t know what she did during those hours. We never took her seriously anyway. She couldn’t leave us. She wouldn’t. We knew that much.

  But when I was a child, she was often absent, despite always being around. She disappeared into her sorrow and sadness, into her kitchen and housework. My mother and her sisters often described my grandmother in similar terms. Savta was distant, they said, angry sometimes, often cold.

  Perhaps motherhood is a series of small abandonments, in the same way that life is a series of goodbyes. We are raising our children to survive without us in the world. We are raising them to leave us, raising them to endure our own departure.

  I keep a tally of the times I’ve left my daughter. That first time I went to an industry party, for only two hours, when she was five weeks old and untrained to drink from the bottle of pumped breast milk. That time I didn’t come when she cried because I wanted so badly to sleep, just that once. The first time I paid a caregiver to watch her so I could write. And every time after that. The first time I left her with my friend, just for a lunch meeting, and she clung to my leg and screamed her little heart out as I tried to get out the door. The first time I went away for an overnight speaking engagement in Houston, and I lay in my hotel room at night and, instead of enjoying my first uninterrupted sleep in over a year, felt lonely, missed her, and kept waking up from phantom cries, nipples leaking.

  When she was two and a half, my grandmother’s age when her mother left her, I went to a literary festival in Vancouver for five days. On the third day, I skyped her and she raised a sad look at me and concentrated on her drawing. “You don’t want to speak to me?” I asked and she shook her head no.

  When I came back, her behavior toward me changed. Already, before that, she had displayed a clear preference for her father, which I had done my best to deal with maturely, but now, when I tried to console her after a fall, she pushed me away, squeezed out of my arms. “I want Aba,” she said. “I like Aba better.”

  One day, when I picked her up at daycare, she shoved me and said, “Go away. I don’t want you.” I broke down and cried in the daycare’s hallways. Her rejection made me feel like an unloved child, the way I sometimes felt when my mother retreated to her grief.

  “You’re an exception,” a friend from my mothers’ group said. “Usua
lly it’s the fathers who get rejected that way.”

  Sometimes when I watched the two of them together, both Canadian-born, both native English speakers, I felt like the odd one out. Despite my efforts, she was growing up with his cultural references, not mine—I was the only mother at swimming lessons who didn’t know the lyrics to “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” They had the same eyes, the same hair color (brown with tones of auburn and threads of summer blond), the same skin tone. (“You’re her mother?” a young girl in the park asked in disbelief. “But she’s normal and you’re…” and she stopped, blushing.)

  Sometimes, against my better judgment, I felt abandoned, displaced within my own little family unit. Like many immigrants, I am bound to watch my child grow farther away from me, away from my traditions, my language, and my memories of an Israeli childhood she will never know. I imagine my grandmother must have felt the same way with my mother.

  Scientists have been saying that it may be possible for some emotional inheritance to be passed on biologically through our DNA, that our ancestors’ experience may be hereditary—their traumas and phobias, their love of spicy food, their fear of spiders, and their aversion to patchouli. What they suggest is that we carry with us not just our ancestors’ personality traits, but their memories and emotions. Memories of being abandoned, memories of walking away. I am both the mother who left and the child who was left behind. We all are.

  * * *

  ∙ ∙ ∙

  LATELY, MY DAUGHTER, who’s always been a daddy’s girl, has turned her affections toward me. There’s no real reason for that change of heart—toddlers are fickle like that—and this may just be a temporary phase, but sometimes Sean catches me suppressing a smile, not so secretly pleased. She tells him that she wants me, only me, that she loves me most. She crawls over me, kisses me, snuggles into me in bed, can’t seem to have enough of my touch. She caresses my cheek while gazing into my eyes and whispers, “Ahuva sheli.” My love. It is the purest form of love I have ever known, and I am filled to the brim with it. This bond, this love, is precious and blissful, and there is nothing even remotely like it. These days, motherhood feels like joy. These days, I have no qualms telling people I love being a mother. Perhaps it’s time, or perhaps it’s her age: getting to watch her personality develop and evolve, her interests and her quirks, listening to her speak and form complex thoughts.