Review
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“It’s impossible not to be awestruck by the depth
and power rendered in [Ayelet] Tsabari’s stories.”—Elle
“Tsabari creates complex, conflicted, prickly people you'll want
to get to know better.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“There’s remarkable in Ayelet Tsabari’s The Best Place on
Earth, which interweaves stories of discrimination, loss,
displacement, sex, death, religion, and a host of other issues.
And yet, despite the range of viewpoints and the different facets
of Israeli society explored, this is a collection that always
stays intensely personal, the broader forces of history moving
not merely across nations but within the souls of her beautifully
conceived characters.”—Phil Klay, National Book Award–winning
author of Redeployment
“With incredible compassion and a delicate touch, Ayelet Tsabari
explores the heartbreak inherent in forming bonds, whether with
another person or with a whole country. The Best Place on Earth,
a complicated love song to Israel, is a sure-footed and
stunningly skillful debut.”—Shelly Oria, author of New York 1,
Tel Aviv 0
“Powerful . . . brilliant . . . These stories . . . depict
minorities so skillfully, with such a light and accurate
touch.”—The Daily Beast
“Highly recommended . . . Compelling and compassionate;
[Tsabari’s stories] speak out from the heart of Israeli society
and experiences. . . . The stories of The Best Place on Earth
leave you wishing they wouldn’t end.”—The Times of Israel
“This short story collection is a fiction debut for Tsabari, but
it demonstrates that she is already a talented storyteller. . . .
Her writing has an immediacy and power that invites readers into
her characters’ psyches. . . . Tsabari’s characters will step off
the page to captivate readers.”—Publishers Weekly
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About the Author
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Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family
of Yemeni descent. After serving in the Israeli army, she
traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia, North America,
and Europe, and now lives in Toronto, where she teaches creative
writing at the University of Toronto. The Best Place on Earth won
the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was
long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story
Award. In addition to writing, she has worked as a photographer
and journalist.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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I’m just about to cross the street to Café Rimon
when I see Natalie sitting on the shaded patio and my heart
skips, trips and falls over itself. I stop walking, pull my
squished pack out from the back pocket of my jeans, tap
it and dig out a half--smoked . Then I lean against the
stone wall behind me and light it.
Downtown Jerusalem is busy at midday. Cars creep along the
congested street, music pouring out from their open windows. The
narrow sidewalks—made narrower by the goods overflowing from the
storefronts—are swarming with people, lugging bags from the
Mahane Yehuda Market. Orthodox high-school girls in long skirts
saunter by me, giggling when they pass three young soldiers with
kippahs on their heads, M-16s slung over their shoulders. Across
the street, a group of pink-faced tourists—probably Christian
pilgrims who have disregarded the warnings against traveling to
Israel in these dangerous times—take photos of themselves next to
an unremarkable alley. Natalie is hidden and revealed in
intervals, glimpsed in the gaps between the vehicles and faces,
through bus windows, a choppy sequence of still images, like a
stop-motion video.
It’s been seven years since I last saw her. After we broke
up—and by broke up, I mean she ripped my heart out of my chest
and stomped on it with both feet—she sort of disappeared. She
lost touch with all of the friends we had back then. No one knew
where she lived or what she was up to. No one ever ran into her.
She was just gone.
I flick my butt on the asphalt, my eyes trying to
register what they see, my brain slow to compute. At first I try
to convince myself that it doesn’t mean what I think it means. Of
course she would look different. She’s thirty-five now, no longer
the twentysomething Natalie from my memories, with the thick
black curls she used to braid with shells and beads, the flimsy
wrap skirts she had brought from India, the tie-dyed halter tops
that exposed her delicate, jutting shoulder blades. There must be
a perfectly good reason—other than the obvious—why she’d be
covering her hair, wearing a skirt down to her ankles and a
long--sleeved shirt on a summer day. Orthodox women don’t usually
wear glittery and bohemian-looking ves like that as a head
f, don’t let strands of hair fall out on the sides. They
definitely don’t look that smoking hot in clothes designed to
make them invisible to men like me.
A part of me wants to walk away, pretend I haven’t seen her,
keep my memory of her undisturbed. But then a businessman
jaywalks into traffic while speaking loudly into his phone,
setting off a series of honks and yells, and Natalie looks up at
the commotion, and her gaze wanders over and fixes on me. I’ve
been staring for so long that I’ve almost forgotten she can see
me too. Her face broadens in surprise, then brightens. She
extends her arm for a wave. I cross the street, wishing I had
shaved this morning.
“Lior.” She stands up, her eyes glinting like two spoons. We
don’t hug, the space between us thick with past embraces, with a
history of touching.
“Wow, Natalie, you’re . . .”
“Dossit,” she completes my sentence, smiling as if she’s
swallowed sunshine.
“This is huge,” I say, and she laughs. I quickly give her the
once-over: her skirt is embroidered with flowers at the hem, her
shirt is a vintage tunic with a floral print. Of course, she’s a
hippie-dossit: one of those cool New Age -Orthodox Jews—often
former Tel Avivians—who found God but didn’t lose their chic.
“Wow.” I stroke the stubble on my chin. “I had no idea.”
“Seven years now. Baruch Hashem.” She gazes up. God bless.
“Seven years,” I repeat. Right after we broke up.
“If you’re shocked now you should have seen me then.” She laughs
again. “I was much stricter in the beginning. I had myself
covered from head to toe.”
“No kidding,” I say. My mind is struggling to reconstruct the
past seven years, replace the set of imaginary lives I’d created
for her in my head. An ashram in the desert, a commune in the
Galilee, a temple in India. Never this.
“Your hair,” she says with a quick jerk of her chin.
“Yeah.” I rub my shaved head, the smooth patch in the middle I’m
grateful she can’t see. “All gone.”
“You look good like that.”
“And you’re married.” I gesture at the head f.
“Yes.” Her smile seems to fade a little. “Remember Gadi?”
I frown.
“Sure you do. He was in my Judaism class in university.”
Natalie used to complain about being forced to take Judaism
classes as a part of the curriculum at Bar-Ilan University.
Gadi—an American who had moved from New York to find his inner
Jew—came over to our house a couple of times to help her study.
“We’ve been married for six years now.”
“Wow.” It’s like she’s dug her fingernail into a scab,
unearthing an old wound. Fucking Gadi. I knew he was trying to
get into her pants. Natalie said I was crazy.
“It was after we broke up,” she quickly adds.
I nod and smile because I don’t know what else to do. “And kids?
You probably have a troop by now.” By the way her face crumbles,
tightens around the lips, I know I’ve asked the wrong question.
“Sorry,” I say.
Her tan cheeks turn burdy. “It’s okay.”
We both look away. I use the rtunity to scan the patio,
which I would have done earlier had I not been distracted. A
couple holding hands over a half-eaten Greek salad, a young
mother rocking a stroller with one hand while flipping through a
magazine with the other, an old man bent over a , two
female soldiers sharing a . One of them glances at me,
sizing me up. We are all trained to identify potential threats.
“So what are you doing in Jerusalem?” Natalie asks.
“House-sitting in Ein Kerem.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.” I slide my hands into my pockets and hike up my jeans.
“My girlfriend stayed in Tel Aviv. Listen, can I join you?”
“Actually, I was just leaving.”
“It’s a public place,” I say. “It’s not like we’re in a closed
room or anything.”
She glances around the patio, checks her phone and finally says,
“Why not? A cup of coffee. It’s been so long.”
I slide into the chair site her and she heads to the
washroom. I follow her with my gaze, the outline of her hips
against her skirt. Shelly, the young waitress-slash-film student
whom I met here earlier this week shakes her head at me with a
smile.
Natalie and I were twenty-two when we met. We had both just
moved to Tel Aviv, me from the suburbs, her from a kibbutz in the
Galilee. We worked at the same bar on Sheinkin—back when Sheinkin
was the place to be—saving money for the big trip after the army.
We fell in love like you do in your twenties, drowning into each
other, blending until the boundaries of our selves blurred.
It was the nineties: the Gulf War was over, Rabin was elected
prime minister and everyone thought peace was possible, and that
soon we’d be partying in Beirut, eating hummus in Damascus and
driving along the Mediterranean coast to Turkey. Tel Aviv was
just gaining a reputation for being a party capital—ir lelo
hafsaka—the city that never stops, and magazines in London and
New York began covering its nightlife, including it on lists for
the best clubs, the best beaches. Natalie and I rented an
apartment on Shalom Aleichem, not too far from the beach, with
old painted tile floors and a rounded white balcony, which we
decorated with furniture we found by dumpsters. We smoked sandy
grass from Egypt in s that we had bought at a
twenty-four-hour kiosk, had sex in the washrooms of bars, and sat
at a beach restaurant at four in the morning drinking hot water
with mint leaves and eating hummus between swims in the dark,
velvety waters of the Mediterranean. On weekends we hitched rides
to trance parties in forests and did ecstasy, and on holidays we
went to Sinai, slept in a straw hut by the sea and played
backgammon with the Bedouins. We felt like we were a part of a
generation, and that life had been made just for us and we’d
never be and never grow old and nothing bad would ever
happen to us. Now, more than a decade later, Rabin is dead after
being assassinated at a peace rally; suicide bombers explode in
buses and cafés; our friends have all moved to the suburbs,
bought apartments and had kids; Natalie is a married Orthodox and
I’m unemployed and dating a twenty-four-year-old.
We order coffee. Cappuccino for her, Turkish for me. I try not
to stare but it’s hard. Her face is the same, heart-shaped and
smiling—her default expression—and her skin flawless, tiny
s just starting by her eyes. Maybe it’s my staring but she
seems restless; she fiddles with everything on the table, her
eyes darting around the patio. She checks her messages. “Gadi is
in New York till tomorrow,” she says. “His mom is not doing so
well.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Why didn’t you go? I’d kill to get out of here
right now.”
“Work,” she says. “Couldn’t get out of school. How about you?
Still in computers?”
“Actually, the company just folded.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Whatever.” I flick my lighter on and off. “Maybe I’ll move to
New Zealand or something.”
She laughs. “And do what?”
“I don’t know, herd sheep?”
She waves her hand. “You love it here.”
“Not as much as I used to.”
She studies the table. I squint up at the stone balconies
hunched over the street, their wooden shutters crooked and
blackened with car exhaust. I realize that things have changed,
that there are certain topics we better not talk about, things
we’d probably never agree on. Our hers’ right to this land,
for one, which rules out both politics and religion, since in
this country the two are joined in a suffocating embrace. But
then again, we almost never talked about these things when we
were together. We were pseudo-hippies; we wanted everyone to get
along so we wouldn’t feel guilty for the terrible things that
were happening in the world while we made love not war.
Sometimes it’s better not to know; it can make you crazy. On the
way here I saw people huddling around the TV screen at a
convenience store, the air around them rigid with alarm. Mouths
open, heads shaking, tongues clucking. A pigua in Haifa, they
said. Nine dead. I didn’t bother to stop. The only advantage to
knowing that there was a suicide bombing earlier today is that it
makes me feel safer now. It’s a warped logic, based in fear. You
take what you can.
Natalie grabs a packet of brown sugar, rips the edge of it and
dumps its contents into her cappuccino. She then spoons the
sugary foam into her mouth just as it starts to melt. No
stirring. I sip my coffee and hold back a smile. Some things
never change.
“So why are you really in Jerusalem?” she asks, pulling the
polished spoon out from between her dark lips.
I lean back in my seat. “How much time do you have?”
It has been a rough few months. Since the second intifada
started, the entire country has been going through a midlife
crisis: the economy ced, the high-tech bubble burst, the
hotels on the seawall emptied, their windows dark. When I was a
teenager, the city was full of tourists; my friends and I used to
hit on them on beaches, offering to help when we saw them
carrying backpacks on street corners, fingers to s.
While I avoided reading the newspapers or watching the news,
carefully constructing a bubble in which I could function without
losing my mind, my girlfriend, Efrat, pored over every page, was
glued to the screen, the cold blue light washing over her face.
She stopped using public transit, rarely went out, stayed away
from the crowded, open Carmel Market, shopping instead at a
smaller, pricier mini-market, where the produce wasn’t as fresh
but where no suicide bomber would waste his ammunition. It was as
though she was in a perpetual state of waiting—for the next news
flash, the next bomb to explode, the next series of phone calls
to friends and family to make sure no one had been hurt. On top
of it all, the anxiety medication she had been prescribed reduced
her sex drive to nil. When she refused to go out with me in the
evenings, I went by myself, finding reasons to stay out later,
pushing her out of my bubble—my safe zone—the gap between us
widening.
Then, on my way back from my parents’ place I ran over a kitten.
I was driving south on the right lane of Ayalon Highway, under
bridges and overpasses, when I saw the little bugger—its eyes
like tiny headlights—coming out of nowhere into my lane, as if on
a suicide mission. I came to a screeching stop, turned my
distress lights on and stepped outside. The kitten was splayed on
the asphalt, not much bigger than my palm, mouth open in
mid-scream, the blood still red and warm underneath it, its
insides purple and pink and brown. He probably belonged to no
one, another stray that would eat from garbage cans and one day
impregnate another cat and make a litter of redundant kitties no
one would ever give a shit about. But seeing it there, its blood
soaking into the asphalt, something broke in me.
I drove home sobbing; the city’s skyline loomed ahead, giant ads
with skinny models draped on the sides of buildings. The radio
played sad songs because there had been two attacks that day. I
was sniffling and howling, snot and tears running down my chin.
When I walked through the door, eyes red, face wet and d,
Efrat jumped off the couch, a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God.
What happened?”
“I ran over a kitten,” I said, and saying it aloud made me burst
into another series of ugly, unmanly sobs.
“A kitten?” She stared at me, confused, then she tried touching
me, saying, “I’m so sorry, baby,” but I shook her off, shuffled
into my office, played video games till two in the morning and
smoked all of our grass.
I spent the following week in my sweatpants. I smoked too much
pot, watched TV, slept into the afternoon. Outside our apartment,
life went on, the city carried on its incessant buzzing, while I
was frozen inside. Something was wrong. I realized that every
step in our relationship had been initiated by Efrat, as if she
was holding the road and I was just tagging along. She asked
to be monogamous; she suggested we move in together. I started to
wonder: Now what? Was I supposed to be an adult? To know what I
wanted? To marry Efrat? Have children? And some nights—I don’t
tell Natalie this part—I thought of her. Over the years, in her
absence, she had become mythical. Every woman I’d ever dated was
required to fill her enormous shoes, and failed.
A friend was going away to India and needed someone to watch his
house in Ein Kerem, a neighborhood on the outskirts of
Jerusalem—more like a village, really—where artists lived in old
Arabic stone houses covered with vines. It was the end of summer,
and Tel Aviv was steeped in its own juices, smelling of ripe
garbage and swathed in dust and sand. Even the nights were
sticky, offering no reprieve. I had been dreaming about getting
away, wishing I could afford a flight somewhere. Anywhere.
Jerusalem, with its dry air and cooler nights, was the closest
thing to Europe.
Natalie is listening to everything without saying a word,
nodding in the right places. She’s no longer fidgeting, as if
listening to my problems makes her forget about hers.
“Do you love her?” she says.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “I think. I want to.”
“You want to?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “They’re not new, these doubts. They’ve
just been getting worse. I’ve been asking myself these questions
pretty much from the beginning. How do you know when someone is
right? How do you know when it’s over? Is a mediocre relationship
better than being alone? Do I love her enough? What’s enough?”
“That’s the problem with you seculars,” Natalie says. “You ask
too many questions.”
“I always thought I’d know more at thirty-five. I’m not where I
thought I’d be.”
“Clearly, neither am I,” Natalie says. She empties a sugar
packet onto a saucer and draws in it with a toothpick. A flower.
A heart.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I still can’t get my head around it. I got
Natalie pregnant twice. The first time was in the alley behind
Haminzar, her unshaven legs wrapped around me, scratching my bum.
We were wasted on arak and lemonade, and she wasn’t on the pill
and I guess I pulled out too late. Natalie was very businesslike
about the : there were no tears, no talk about options;
she wanted it done.
It was different the second time around. We were on her parents’
bed in the kibbutz when we discovered that if I did a little
motion, a little in and up, I hit her G spot and it drove her
wild. We didn’t use anything because she was on the last day of
her period. The night we found out she was pregnant again, we sat
on the dingy couch that took up most of our balcony, bare feet
against the rusty railing, and for about an hour or two we
entertained thoughts of keeping it: talking names, buying a
minivan, renting a little house by the water with a porch and a
hammock. But we were twenty-four and had bodies full of drugs and
alcohol and s, and we had no money and still hadn’t gone
to university. We sat on that couch until morning, drank red wine
straight from the bottle and cried for what would never be.
“There must be a way,” I say.
“Trust me, at this point I’d do anything.” She looks into her
cup, swirls what’s left of her coffee. “It’s complicated. We’ve
been trying for six years. Gadi is waiting for a miracle. Our
relationship is . . .” She trails off, stiffens. “I shouldn’t be
talking to you about this.”
“Come on. You’re talking to a friend about your problems. I just
talked about mine for like, an hour, and they don’t seem quite as
important as yours.”
“What about you?” she says.
“What, children?” I snort. “You’re kidding, right? Look around
you. Why would anybody want to raise children in this country?”
She looks at the street, fingers the silver chain around her
neck—its pendant buried under her collar—and says quietly, “God
has a plan.”
Natalie had always had some sort of faith. When we were
traveling in India, it was the holy cities where she wanted to
stay the longest. In Varanasi she started meditating; in Pushkar
she went on a silent retreat. All I wanted to do in India was get
high, preferably on a tropical beach. Natalie found solace in
yoga, meditation, a bit of Buddhism, a dash of Kabbalah. She
believed in a supportive universe, in things like manifestation,
karma and tikkun: the kabbalistic idea of repairing or correcting
past mistakes in order to achieve balance in the world. A part of
me admired her for that; I loved that it was her own thing, that
it wasn’t rooted in religion. Another part of me thought it was a
hippie mishmash of spiritual nonsense, with holes large enough to
drive a truck through.
“Maybe I don’t have the believer chip,” I tell Natalie. “I’m
just not wired that way, I’m too cynical. Don’t know if I can
change it.”
“You can’t force it,” she says.
“Can I get you guys anything else?” Shelly saunters over, a
whiff of cocoa butter and coffee beans.
“A halvah Danish?” She winks at me.
“Not today.” I smile.
“Just the bill,” Natalie says.
We watch Shelly walking away and Natalie says, “She likes you.”
I shrug it off, examine the hardened remains of my coffee,
finding patterns in the muddy grounds. An ambulance speeds
through the street, and everyone on the patio turns to look.
Natalie’s neck lengthens, revealing a Star of David pendant
hanging on her silver chain.
“Do you ever think about our time together?” I say.
Natalie turns her head quickly, giving me an alarmed look.
“Don’t do that, Lior.”
“I’m just curious,” I say.
She holds her cup in both hands, choosing words. “To be honest,
I don’t think about it much. Sometimes I remember things, but
it’s like remembering a dream, something that happened in a
movie. To a different woman.”
I swallow; my mouth is dry. I feel like such an idiot.
She glances at her phone and says she must go. “It was good to
see you, Lior. Take care of yourself, will you?”
I stand up, raise my hand to touch her and then tuck it into my
pocket instead. “Good luck.”
“Be’ezrat Hashem,” she says. God willing.
I watch her disappear into the crowd, and my heart crumples in
my chest. Shelly strides over, piles our plates and coffee mugs
on a tray. “What was that about?” she asks.
“What?”
“You and this . . . dossit.” She raises one eyebrow.
“Long story.” I smile tightly.
“So . . . I’m almost done.” She shifts on one hip, the tray
perched on her arm. “Want to grab a drink?”
“At this hour?” I laugh.
“I thought you were from Tel Aviv.” She stares at me without
blinking.
I eye her, contemplate the possibility. She has warm hazelnut
eyes, and she’s wearing a vintage blue dress with a gold belt and
gold ballerina shoes. She’s probably twenty-two, in her
experimental slutty phase. I try to pretend I’m single; slip it
on like a new shirt. I’m curious if I still have it, if I can do
it without feeling guilty, if I’d think about Efrat at all.
“Here.” She grabs my wrist, pulls a pen from the pocket of her
apron and scrawls a number. “If you change your mind.”
The bus is full of passengers with their grocery bags. It smells
like cilantro and fish. I stand by the back door, a quick escape
route, and watch through the smeared glass as the city lets up,
gives way to valleys and hills. It’s hard to believe -Jerusalem
is only forty minutes away from Tel Aviv because it feels like
another world. Efrat hates it, says it’s too busy and dirty and
run-down, the streets too crowded, the people too intense. She
gets migraines whenever she’s here.
The bus is almost empty by the time it drops me at Ein Kerem,
the rush and chaos of Jerusalem left behind. Ein Kerem, tucked up
in the city’s sleeve, is bathed in warm afternoon light. I walk
to my new home, sit on the couch outside and watch the valley,
spread open like the palm of one’s hand. I turn on my cell,
glancing at Shelly’s number on my wrist when the phone rings.
“Thank God,” Efrat says. “I was going crazy. Your phone was
off.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“You can’t do that. There was a pigua in Jerusalem. And your mom
was looking for you. She didn’t even know you were in Jerusalem.”
“Shit,” I say. “I forgot to tell her.”
“Well, it’s irresponsible, Lior. The least you can do is leave
your cell on.”
“I said I’m sorry.”
She’s quiet. I can hear her sucking smoke. “I miss
you,” she says.
“Efrat, we talked about this. I just need time to figure shit
out.”
“I just said I missed you. Why do you have to be such a jerk?”
I sigh, suddenly exhausted. “I came here to take a break.
Please.”
“Fine,” she says. “Whatever.”
It’s almost evening by the time I drag myself off the couch and
decide to go for a walk, be a tourist, anything to distract me
from my head. I climb up the path to Hama’ayan Street, where
three narrow roads meet at Mary’s Spring. It’s quiet before
sunset, the pilgrims and tourists and idling buses all gone. A
mosque towers over the spring, with a crescent and a star perched
on its spire. I follow the trickling sound of water under a stone
archway, disturbing a nun who’s bent over the shallow pool,
washing her face in the stream from the rock-hewn tunnel. It’s
musty and cool underneath the curved, low ceilings. On the wall,
a sign advises visitors against drinking the water many of them
consider holy. I have seen pilgrims fill plastic bottles with
this stuff. I wait until the nun leaves and lean over, let a few
icy drops into my mouth. It tastes like rain: earthy and fresh.
I hike up the wide, stone-paved stairs to the Church of the
Visitation. The road is empty, except for a young souvenir vendor
leaning against his modest stall: wooden crosses and rosaries
dangling from hooks, fluttering ves tied over a pole,
postcards stacked on a rotating stand. He nods at me and
continues to play on his phone. The valley yawns to my right,
lush with olive and cypress trees, and the hillside is terraced
and capped with clusters of stone houses. The setting sun is
bouncing off distant car mirrors and water heaters on roofs.
I’m breathless by the time I make it all the way to the top of
the stairs, where a large wrought-iron gate leads to a stone
courtyard, a church and a bell tower with a spiky tip. A huge
mosaic covers the front wall, rimmed with gold: three flying
angels, a woman riding a horse, her arms crossed against her
chest. The place is breezy and graveyard--quiet, the kind of
quiet that hums, that clings to you the way humidity does in the
city. I think I’m alone but then I notice a monk—his face warmly
lit by the setting sun—sitting on a bench in what I realize is an
actual cemetery: a few graves laid between trees and bushes. He’s
looking over the valley; doesn’t move, doesn’t see me, like a
statue.
I walk up a few more stairs, drawn to the sound of voices
singing in some language I can’t make out. The visitors spill out
just as I reach the door to the chapel and I lower my gaze,
afraid they can see through me, know I don’t belong. Once they
are gone I peer in. The high ceilings are covered in murals,
depicting scenes I don’t recognize from stories I don’t know. The
setting sun tints the paintings a rich orange, drawing long
shadows on the tiled floor. I sit in a pew and try to feel
something that isn’t discomfort. I shift in my seat and the wood
creaks, then echoes, amplified. Maybe God is here. Maybe I’ve
never felt him because I’ve looked in all the wrong places. I
close my eyes and try to concentrate, breathe, meditate. I try. I
really fucking try. I feel nothing.
My phone rings. A priest I haven’t noticed before glares at me.
I apologize and hurry outside to answer, surprised to hear
Natalie on the other end.
“Lior.” Her voice is choked. “Have you heard?”
The pigua. “Where?”
“Café Rimon. Seven dead.”
“Oh my God.” I skitter down the stairs to the courtyard, past
the cemetery, through the gate.
“When?”
“About twenty minutes after we left. I just found out.”
Shelly. I glance at her handwriting on my wrist. Did she make it
out in time?
“There are no names yet,” Natalie says as if she can read my
mind.
“I can’t believe it. Twenty minutes?”
“I’m in Ein Kerem,” she says. “I got in the car and drove here,
then I realized I don’t even know where you’re staying.”
“Park by the spring,” I say. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I race down the path. The sky over the valley has grown darker,
d blue, red and purple. The setting sun has sucked the
warmth out of the air, and the ain breeze feels cool on my
skin, billowing out the back of my T--shirt as I run down the
stairs to Hama’ayan Street.
Natalie is washing her hands in the drizzle of the spring, and
then turns and sees me. “Oh, Lior.” She grabs my hand—touches
me—squeezes it with wet, cold fingers. Her eyes are pink. “We
were just there.”
“I know.”
“I keep thinking, what if we’d stayed a bit longer?”
Street lights click on along the street, their warm beams
offsetting the fading daylight’s bluish tones. I look around. The
neighborhood appears new, sharper and clearer somehow, as if it
had just rained.
“It was weird, like I suddenly felt I had to go,” she says. “I
just felt like it was time.”
“I wanted to stay,” I say. “I wanted to talk more.”
“It was weird,” she repeats.
“You saved me,” I say, the words strange in my mouth, my
hand—still in hers—breaking into a sweat.
“I didn’t do anything,” she says.
A car drives down the hill, its headlights blinding us, and
Natalie squints and pulls her hand away. She has that swimming
look in her eyes, before tears. I cross the street, stop and turn
to Natalie. She hesitates but then follows. We walk down the path
to the house, where we are hidden from the road, lower than the
asphalt. We stand by the pomegranate tree. I don’t invite her in.
“I’m sorry I came here.” Her voice shakes; her shoulders quiver.
“I didn’t know where else to go.”
“I’m glad you did,” I say. I picture the patio in my head;
summon up the faces I memorized. “Remember the couple that was
sitting next to us?”
“They spoke French,” she says. “I was admiring her head f. I
remember thinking it looked expensive. And there was that old
guy . . .”
“With the fedora. By the door. He was writing.”
“Oh no.” She puts her hand over her mouth. “The mother with the
stroller.”
“She left right after you did.”
“Thank God.” Her eyes fill with tears. “It was so close today.
One more coffee and we’d be dead. And instead of thinking how
dangerous it would be to have a child in this place, like you
said, it just makes me want one more.” She cups her face with her
palms and breaks into sobs.
I watch Natalie with my hands tightly curled inside my pockets,
going against my instincts, which tell me to hold her, touch her,
console her. But then she bows forward, as though she may fall,
so I open my arms and catch her, and she buries her face in my
chest, her tears soaking through my shirt. I stand there, stiff,
my hands like slabs of dough on her shoulder blades, my head
pulled back, looking up at the stars blinking between the clouds,
at the valley, now dotted with flickering lights, and I’m not
breathing her in, not wiping away her tears, not saying a word,
just being a rock she can lean against. After a long while, her
trembles subside and she sniffles into my chest, and we remain
still, breathing. Her body hardens against me, so slowly that at
first I think I must be imagining it, then her arms tighten
around me, and she’s clinging to me as though we’re suspended
over a cliff and I’m the one at the end of the rope. I can feel
her s through her shirt, the heat from her body. My heart
starts going double time; my erection presses against the fabric
of my jeans. “Natalie,” I breathe out.
She pulls me down onto her and we fall, knees buckling, onto the
earth, which smells sharp, warm, moist, like blood. She has a
determined, focused look in her eyes as she scrambles to open the
zipper of my pants, lifts her skirt and leads me inside her, her
wetness and warmth, and it’s like our bodies have memory, like
they have never been apart. I try to kiss her but she moves her
face and I kiss her neck, drink in her scent—body lotion and
coffee and milk—and I remember: this is how love feels. So many
times over the years I’ve pictured this, fantasized about it: her
body beneath mine, her breath tangled in my breath. She clutches
my shirt with her fists, whispers, “Deeper, deeper,” and I move
up and in, the way I know she likes, and she arches her back, and
cries out when she comes, a quick sharp yelp, and I come too,
collapsing onto her in tremors, and she’s closing on me, holding
me in, and it’s a moment without doubt or question. There’s a
reason we didn’t die in the pigua. Natalie is smiling, her cheeks
glistening with tears. “Don’t pull out yet,” she whispers.
“Stay.” She squeezes me in. I feel her heartbeat against my
chest, soft and fast like a fluttering bird.
When I finally pull out, I roll over and stretch out on the
ground next to her. Through the pomegranate tree branches, the
moon swims in and out of clouds. Natalie tilts her hips up and
raises her legs, folds her knees into her arms like a fist. I
turn on my side, lean on my palm and take all of her in, the
curve of her hips, the line of her neck disappearing into her
blouse. I’m feeling greedy. I want to follow that line; I want to
touch her hair, those black ringlets starting to break free from
her head f. I want to feel the skin of her s, take them
in my mouth one last time. I want to at least glimpse them. I
slide my hand under her shirt, stroke her warm belly.
She puts a firm hand on mine and shakes her head no.
“I love you,” I say.
She smiles like she’s sad. “Aw, Lillosh,” she says, using the
nickname she’d given me. She gets up, buttons the top of her
shirt, glides a hand over her skirt, tucks in strands of hair
into her head f. I memorize her, etching her image into my
brain. I know it’s the last time I will see her. She bends down
beside me and caresses the stubble on my cheek, tipping her head
to look at me. “Thank you,” she says.
I stay on the ground after she leaves, listening to the roar of
her car fading away. I don’t remember when the last time was that
I lay on the earth, felt its pulse, the heat of the day emanating
into my core. I dig into the soil with my nails, let the gritty
roughness sift between my fingers. The night air is crisp and
still, but my body is vibrating: warm, alive, as if I’ve been
turned inside out. A long time passes and I feel I am becoming a
part of this earth, this tree, this night. It feels a little bit
like prayer.
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