The Best Place on Earth (22 page)

“Stop,” she gasped.

He looked up at her, his chin shiny. “You want me to stop doing this or stop altogether?”

She stared at the bars, breathing. “Just … stop.”

He stood up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Okay,” he said. She could see the outline of his erection under the fabric of his jeans. He went to the washroom, and she stepped into her underwear, sat on the bed with her ankles crossed. When he came back his shirt was on.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s my fault. I should have known. You’re just a kid.”

She looked at her feet, stung.

Once Samir’s footsteps
faded in the hallway, Na’ama grabbed the photos and fanned them out on the bed. She fished out the one of Tariq and her and studied it, scrutinizing his face, trying to see what Samir had seen. But the picture was grainy and the light in the room dim and her eyes started to ache. Still, she thought she recognized some of the features that made Tariq handsome—the long nose, the squared jaw, the natural curve of the lips suggesting a smile—clumsily rearranged in her own face. She looked at the photo of her mother: Mira was in her bedroom, the room sparse
and washed in a golden, soft light, the bed behind her unmade. Her hand was stretched out toward the lens, large and blurry, as though trying to take hold of the camera, or maybe draw whoever had taken the photo back to bed. Tariq. Of course. It had to have been Tariq all along. Na’ama overlapped the two photos, holding them under one thumb. The proximity of the two photos, in the same strip of film, in the same envelope hidden in her mother’s closet, told a story, a story she realized then made so much sense she couldn’t believe it had taken her so long to figure out.

She leaned against the wall and her heart unclenched, like an unfurling fist. She rifled through her memory, searching for moments she knew were there all along, dusty, unexplained snapshots she had almost forgotten: furtive smiles and glances, late-night knocks and hushed conversations she couldn’t make out from her bedroom. For a moment, in that dim, bluish moonlight, she could see her mother in the photo as though she was someone new, unrelated to her, a young woman posing in front of her lover in a sun-soaked room, and Na’ama’s heart ached for her. All those years, Mira had been searching for somewhere she’d be as happy as she was in Sinai, longing for the one man she must have really loved.

Na’ama stared at the piece of starry night sky that hung by the door. The noise from the outside dwindled as the night deepened, until it was quiet enough to hear the sighing of the sea. She couldn’t sleep. She lay awake considering every quirk of her character that she couldn’t trace back to her mother, revisiting every memory she had of Tariq. Tariq, who had taken her walking through the desert, teaching her Arabic as he pointed out rocks, lizards, shrubs, trees; Tariq, who had shown her how to play backgammon and
let her win every time, always making a scene of losing, throwing his hands up in the air in mock frustration. It was Tariq, not her mother, to whom she confessed her secret crush on Gil Yanay, Tariq who consoled her when Gil asked Dorit Cohen to be his girlfriend instead.

She stayed up until dawn sneaked in through the window, a cool, light, silky sheet, and then she got up and stuffed the rest of her belongings into her backpack. Outside, the metal shutters of the rental counter and snack bar were pulled down; the fresh water pool was freckled with stars, a sliver of moon askew on its surface. She walked out of the club, heading south along the highway. The sun was just peeking above the Jordanian hills, its rays skittering over the mountaintops, colouring the tips a fiery red. A couple of taxis zoomed by toward the Taba border crossing in the distance. She clutched her passport, grateful she had brought it; it was a habit she had picked up from her mom, the eternal nomad. Now she wondered why she had packed not only her passport, but the photos and the one thing she had from Tariq: a cone shell necklace he had given her the day she and her mother left.

Na’ama remembered burying her face in Tariq’s white galabeya, inhaling its smell—coffee and sweat and smoke. Tariq had put his forehead to hers and then, when he let her hand go, touched his heart. As they drove away, the moshav looked desolate: the plastic sheets that covered the hothouses had flown off across the desert plains, caught on bushes and fences; the Holiday Village was abandoned, ghostly curtains billowing from gaping windows. Her mother cried as Na’ama watched the road disappearing into the mountains from the back window, cried as they crossed into Eilat, and continued to cry halfway through the Negev desert,
Sinai’s less dramatic sibling, plains of brown and yellow strewn with shrubs.

The fluorescent-lit Taba crossing was steps away, a narrow pathway jammed between the sea and the mountains, interrupted by cordons and customs, a couple of idling cars waiting in line. Things were different now, she knew. She heard from people who’d gone back that the houses they had left behind—her house too—were inhabited by Egyptians. A town had been built around the skeleton of the moshav, and rows of straw huts were erected on the dunes, where young Israelis and Europeans vacationed, and a restaurant playing Bob Marley tunes served freshly caught fish. They said the guest house her mother had worked in was still standing, renovated and revamped, and that the fields the Israelis had cultivated—growing melons and flowers—had dried out and turned to thorns.

She changed her Israeli shekels into Egyptian pounds, then walked the few dozen metres from the Israeli side to the Egyptian terminal. To her left, a chain-link fence descended into the water, as though the sea could be divided, as though water didn’t flow between the two countries. An invisible border. It seemed like such an arbitrary place to stop, to separate the land and the sea and the mountains, when it was clearly the same landscape, the same sea.

The Egyptian clerk eyed her as he stamped her passport with a two-week visa, and she smiled and thanked him in Arabic. She gazed over her shoulder at the familiar skyline of Eilat, the hotels ablaze in the morning sun, an orange flame caught in each window. She looked past the Egyptian terminal, to where Bedouin taxi drivers leaned against their dusty station wagons, waiting to take her where she wanted to go.

On the way home from school,
three warplanes slice the sky, leaving a trail of chalk across the blue as they head north. Orli squints and cups her hand over her eyes. “F-15s again,” she says, disappointed. Her dad flies F-16s.

I glance up, say nothing. We’ve been watching warplanes all summer long.

When we get to my building, we throw our school bags on the lawn outside. It’s September and everything seems tired and dull, sucked dry by summer. The grass is yellow and sparse, speckled with patches of cracked earth. Orli ties her hair into a bun, pulls a deck of cards from her bag and shows off her shuffling skills.

“I think it’s going to rain,” she says.

“But it never rains before Rosh Hashanah,” I say. The air does feel heavy with moisture; it’s like being draped in a sheet just out of
a washing machine. I pull a card from the pile and discard it, then change my mind and take it back.

“You can’t do that,” Orli says. “Once the card is down, it’s down.”

“You don’t get to make the rules,” I say.

“They’re not my rules.”

I put my cards down and get up, brush the grass off my jeans. “I changed my mind,” I say. “I have to go in.”

I skip up the stairs two at a time to the second floor, open the door and yell, “I’m home.”

Mom says, “Don’t leave your bag by the door. Every day I have to pick up after you.”

I drop my bag in my room and go into the living room. I turn on the TV. News. Since the war started they break for news all the time, interrupting shows I love, like
Little House on the Prairie.
On the screen a guy from parliament is saying, “This war is leading Israel into an abyss!” and other members of parliament start yelling at him and waving their hands. I turn off the TV and head to the kitchen. Mom stands by the stove, staring into a pot. She wipes her hands on a towel and sits down at the Formica table to read the paper. I read over her shoulder. The front page headline is a big black box with white letters. Black on the front page means many soldiers died in Lebanon. Red is usually some sort of murder. A bad car accident can go either way. If someone dies from a heart attack or a disease, they put it in the obituaries in the back, in little squares with black frames. That’s where they had my dad’s obituary last spring, next to one sponsored by the factory where he worked that said, “To Sara and family, with you in your grief over the loss of your husband and father.” The front of the paper that day had a big black headline with a picture of
an artillery officer who was blown up by a land mine in Lebanon.

The day my father died I called Orli. I was crying really hard, so at first she couldn’t understand me. She came over and took me outside because our apartment was full of people talking and praying, and women carrying steaming Pyrex dishes. We walked on the neighbours’ fence, and I laughed when I lost my balance and almost fell down. Later, I overheard my aunt telling my mom that she had seen me laughing, and that it was inappropriate.

Other things that are inappropriate when your father dies: going to weddings or bar mitzvahs, dressing up all fancy, listening to music really loud, thinking about boys, having fun of any kind.

I get bored with the paper, so I walk over to the counter. There’s a plate of schnitzels by the stove, layered on top of a paper towel. I touch one, and Mom says, without turning her head, “Don’t.”

“I’m hungry,” I say.

“It’s not ready yet.”

“It looks ready.”

Mom doesn’t answer, just flips a page in her newspaper.

She wasn’t always like this. Before Dad got sick we talked about things. Sometimes after ballet class she took me for ice cream, and once we drove all the way to Tel Aviv for no reason and had milkshakes on a terrace overlooking the sea. On the way back the roads were empty and we hit a green wave on Jabutinsky, the traffic lights turning in our favour one after the other. Mom rolled down the windows and cranked the radio way up, and we sang at the top of our lungs until my throat got scratchy.

Now, days can pass and the only things she’ll say to me are, “Don’t touch that,” “Dinner is ready,” “I need you to get milk from the store.” And it’s not like I don’t try to get her attention. I sit in the kitchen while she cooks, follow her around while she
does laundry or cleans. Once, I told her I thought I was in love with Amir from my class. I thought it was pretty big news. Silence. Another time I asked, “Ima, do you believe in God?” because I had started to have my doubts. Nothing.

Instead, she makes other kinds of noise. She digs in the pots and pans drawer really loudly, for a long time, like she just can’t find the right pan, or bumps the broom into the walls when she sweeps, or drags chairs on the floor instead of lifting them. When I still believed in God, I used to make deals with him to bring Dad back. I promised I wouldn’t watch TV on Shabbat, mix dairy and meat behind Mom’s back, or steal money from her purse. When that didn’t work, I offered up Mom. If I had to have one parent, I wanted one who saw me.

Now I don’t bother talking to God. I was hanging out in the empty lot behind our house one day soon after Dad died. The shiva was over. People stopped coming, life went on. I was angry at everyone. Especially God. I threw cans into the abandoned house at the edge of the lot, ripped weeds from the ground and kicked stones. Then I said aloud, “God is an asshole.” I looked up but nothing happened, and I saw that the sky was just a sky, and there was nothing there, just clouds and planes.

I walk to my room, slam the door and turn the radio on loud to listen to the top ten chart on Reshet Gimel, but it’s the news again. The anchor is reading in a very serious voice, “Captain David Yehu, Sergeant Gal Bergman, Lieutenant David Abutbul.” One time last year I actually heard Meirav’s dad’s name on the list. The next day at school, the teacher told us what happened. It was a big deal when he died, because he was a war hero, so they wrote about him in the paper and had a special ceremony in the community centre with a big picture of him, like a fold-out poster
from a teen magazine. Unlike regular people, who get buried covered in a white sheet, Meirav’s dad got buried in a coffin, in the cemetery’s army lot, which looks like a garden, with flowers and trees. My father’s lot is all stone. Meirav’s family got lots of money because they were now a bereaved Israeli Defense Forces family, and the kids were IDF orphans. IDF orphans get to go to a special camp every summer in a nice kibbutz by the beach, with lawns, a pool and a water park, and cool activities like a makeup-for-film workshop and flamenco dancing, all paid for by the army. I wish my father had died in the army instead of in a hospital. There is no Remembrance Day for people who died of a weak heart.

The teacher made us go to the shiva at Meirav’s house, and afterwards Orli and I walked home and Orli was quiet the whole way. It was already dark. You could hear people’s TVs playing the opening jingle for the evening news. We sat on the fence by her house and she said, “You know, I’m scared about my dad, too.” Her eyes were pink and wet. I just sat there and stared at my sneakers, and I thought I should hug her but I couldn’t. I was frozen.

In the afternoon,
Orli comes knocking on my door and suggests we go for a walk to Fege, a neighbourhood pretty far from where we live. She threads a token for the pay phone on my shoelace in case of an emergency. Orli always has one because her mother doesn’t come home from work until four.

I grab my hoodie and tie it around my waist, and meet Orli in the parking lot.

“You told your mom?” Orli asks.

“She’s napping,” I say. “Besides, she won’t mind.” My mom likes Orli. She thinks she’s a good influence.

We walk for a long time. Orli has some money, so she buys us chocolate milk in plastic bags and we puncture holes in them with our teeth and suck on the plastic, letting the bags hang between our lips. We talk about school and gossip about our teachers and classmates. Halfway to Fege, it starts smelling like the bomb shelter in our building, which is always damp and dusty. We look up and it starts to rain, a cloud bursting over our heads. Everything turns dark, as if someone flicked off the light switch. The asphalt is shiny and wet like a giant dead fish, and we have to hop over puddles on the sidewalks. On the sides of the road, rivers flow, full of leaves and plastic bags and candy wrappers. We start laughing, running until we make it to the nearest apartment building and take shelter in the lobby. We sit on the marble floor next to a row of metal mailboxes and a big fake palm tree and wait for the rain to stop. Inside the lobby it’s quiet and cool, and even the smallest sound has an echo. Every now and then people come in, shake their umbrellas and let them drip on the floor while they check their mail. They glance at us and then go upstairs to their apartments, the echo of their footsteps fading away. Nobody asks us anything. Only one older lady smiles and says in a thick Russian accent, “Guess summer is over, eh?” and Orli says, “Guess so.”