We planned on spending Saturday together as a family driving in the north to the museum where Orna's artwork is currently on display. I woke up at 7:30 in the morning and found Orna and Oded sitting and watching the news.
"There has been a change of plans," Oded said. "There was a terrorist attack last night in Tel Aviv. A suicide bomber blew up himself and four other people. 50 were injured- at a pub near the boardwalk, The Stage. Do you know this place? The bombing means that I will have to be at work during the afternoon."
We sat together in our pajamas watching the footage from the night before. This is not the first time that I have sat in this room watching similar footage. Nor is it the first time that adventures or dinners have been suddenly cancelled because Oded was on call at the time of an explosion.
I watched for a little while, unable to understand the newcasters. Oded interpreted for me. "This is the first time that Hamas and other groups have come out to deny the charges. No one has claimed responsibility. There are suspicions that it was Hezbullah or some other group outside of the territories." The hope is that it is one of these groups so that the Israelis will not respond with violence or abandon peace talks as a way of punishing Abu Mazen for not controlling the extremists.
I watched for a few more minutes, my stomache and spirits sinking. It was the second time since I came that I thought, "What have I done?" The first time was when we were looking for apartments and we went into one in the center of Tel-Aviv, a slightly quieter section of town where the noise is merely obnoxious rather than
deafening. Motorcycles whiz by, squeezing themselves between honking cars that manuever down one way streets, narrow enough to be nearly impassable. The cars parked on both sides are left half on the sidewalk to leave some room for the traffic. Gigantic trees with dusty leaves arch over the streets and are so entangled that even at noon it appears to be dusk. Night seems to begin at 4:00 in the afternoon. Late at night, bats flutter among the leaves and swoop through the city. Stray cats, nearly as plentiful as squirrels in Boston, lounge around on sidewalks, garden walls and the hoods of cars. Passersby shout and laugh to each other or into their cell phones.
The apartment we saw was on the ground floor with windows covered with bars and chicken wire. The air was thick with the smell of cats, the floor was tiled in brown, red, green and yellow symetrical patterns that seemed intentionally designed to produce vertigo. We shoved open the back door that let into a yard of about two
square meters with a dead tree. Not even weeds were growing. Nothing but broken branches covered the soft dust of the earth.
"It's perfect!" Orna said when we left. "You can really do something with it. I can really see you sitting there in the yard with Yuval having breakfast. You can make the apartment so young and beautiful."
"Hmmm," I said while thinking- Oh my god. What have I done? I will never feel at home in this city. "Let's think about it and see some more apartments," I said.
One apartment had windows that faced directly into a parking garage. The level of the apartment and the cars was such that the windshields of the parked cars, which were about 1 meter from the house, faced directly into the living room. Another one was even smaller than our apartment in Brookline.
Orna suggested we stop for a dinner break. She sensed my deepening gloom. "We can eat here," she said. "This place is great." The restaurant was full of traditional Eastern European Jewish food. Gefilte fish, matzah balls, chopped liver. It reminded me of being in New York with my mom and sister. I took them to a Jewish deli and
after watching their stricken faces as they perused the menu for a few minutes, I suggested we try another place. Their sighs of relief when they left the restaurant were audible.
I asked for an English menu in order to save time and saw "bellybuttons" listed as one of the entrees. I checked the Hebrew and sure enough, there it said in Hebrew: bellybuttons. "Orna, what are belly buttons?"
"They are so great! We have to get some."
"But what are they?"
"I don't know in English exactly, but you know how you eat the heart and the liver of the chicken, there is some other part in the stomache that is called the belly button. You'll love them!"
I personally don't eat the heart and liver of chickens, but I let it go. And, just a reminder, chickens come from eggs and thus don't have belly buttons. In spite of this we ate belly buttons. Not surprisingly, they tasted like chicken. I think they were kidneys, but being unfamiliar with chicken intestines, it is highly possible that I am totally wrong.
While we ate, Orna spoke again about the apartment with the dead tree in the small yard. "I don't want to be pushy, but I do think it is perfect, you can paint the place in bright colors and it will be just beautiful. You can make it so young."
"Don't you think it smelled like cats?" The backyard probably serves as a gigantic litterbox for the entire neighborhood. No wonder there are no plants growing.
"No, you'll clean it- it will be great. Young and fresh."
"Orna, I don't want to live somewhere 'young'. We have already done young and poor. We don't want to have to paint the bars on the windows in bright colors and kick open the door just to get in and out. We are ready to live like grown ups in a house without damaged walls covered with strategically placed furniture."
"You're right," she said. "You have a good job and you are going to make good money. You should live somewhere you can feel at home and stay for a while. Somewhere with enough space to have a nursery so you don't have to move again and you can live like grown ups."
I ate some more belly buttons.
In the end, we found an apartment. It will be lovely soon, with a dining room, kitchen, living room, one bedroom and a terrace that is partially enclosed with blinds that are heavy enough to block out some of the summer's heat and the winter's chill. Glassed in, it was pointed out, it will work perfectly as a nursery.
Last night we met with my new landlords and ladies, the two sisters and their husbands, to work out the details of the lease for our apartment. I hate negotiations. I hate them more when I can only vaguely grasp what is going on around me. We decided in advance that my parents-in-law would negotiate for me so everything would be quicker and easier.
The negotiations went like this. "They are talking about the furniture," I said to myself. "I wonder what they want to do about the furniture?" Orna turned to me and said, by way of explanation- "we are talking about the furniture." Then she returned to the conversation. "Ah, now they are talking about the water bill," I thought. Oded turned to me, "We are talking about the water bill." And so on, through the rent and security deposit, etc. Periodically throughout the meeting, the landlady who sat closest to me would grab my leg and say, "Sweetheart!" and smile at me reassuringly. Things would heat up for a few minutes and then calm back down and she would grab my arm and say again, "Sweetheart!" I sat there in silence the whole time, unsure of what brought on these spontaneous outbursts or how to respond to them. At the end of the meeting, she hugged me. We took photos of the place to show Yuval and in one photo, both sisters spontaneously hugged me and pressed their cheeks against mine while they smiled for the camera. Much handshaking, hugging and kissing accompanied our goodbyes.
I don't know how specific the news any of you received about the bombing in Tel Aviv was. One of the people who died was a bride to be who had gathered her closest friends from all over the country in order to celebrate and in order to hand out her wedding invitations in person. The groom-to-be in still unconcious and his condition is critical. In class we listened to the news and learned the words for die, kill, murder, assasinate, responsibility, deny, guilt, to be wounded, the wounded, critical condition, hospitalization.
Today I met a woman from Texas studying at the ulpan. I asked her what she thought of Israel. "I love it. It is just too dangerous in the States. I just feel so much safer here. I can walk down the street alone at night. The quality of life is so much better."
I asked the same question of a woman from France. She is religious Jewish and she felt there was no future for her in Paris. When she was young she could rearrange to take tests on days other than Saturdays, but now it is harder and with religious clothing forbidden she feels like her voice is being silenced and as the conflict between the secular French and the religious Arab immigrants continues to grow, she thinks it will get worse.
There is another blonde shiksa in my class. My teacher referred to us jokingly as the new wave of immigrants. "Israeli men go out into the world and marry beautiful blondes and then bring them back home. Your numbers are growing." This sense of community is encouraging to me. Not just the blond shiksas, but the immigrant experience in general. Whether or not we stay here, I feel like we have joined the ranks of a large group of people in many different places facing similar challenges. Jhumpa Lahiri handles this subject wonderfully in her book of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies. The last story is of a Bengali immigrant who moved first to London and then to Boston and is reflecting on his life.
"Whenever [my son] is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle that he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
I read this on Saturday, still depressed from the suicide bomb and cried. It's starting to wear on me, the stress of being away from Yuval and not living in my own place, studying a language intensely and trying to build a new life, not to mention the building anticipation of starting a job in such a foreign environment. I feel
strengthened by the solidarity I feel with so many people who have had similar and harder experiences. I love that I am joining ranks with people I admire. But I still don't know quite what the hell I am doing here or if I will ever feel at home.
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