In the City

            While I’m talking to my dad on my phone outside the train station, I spot an American penny left unattended on the ground.  I don’t pick it up, just stare at it while I listen to his comforting voice on the other end of the line.  If Tyler was here, he’d pick it up, call it even luckier because it found its way here, from the other side of the world.  Maybe he’d even call it a sign that it’s time to come home. 

            But what is home these days anyway?  This city, it envelopes my life.  I was born here, in Tel Aviv.  My mom and brother died here.  Yet, I haven’t called this country my home in fifteen years.  And now I’m back here, speaking my mother tongue with a careful hesitance, like I’m trying to recall the idioms I’ve forgotten, gain back a flawlessness with the language that I used to possess as a child.  

            This city, it makes me come alive, even as the air is thick with sand blown here from Africa, while the rains threaten to come and wash all of it away.  I dance in the clubs, I kiss guys I’ve barely met, I jog along the beach, and almost every week, I wander through the market, carefully choosing delectable items from a place that feels indescribable.  Turkish delight one day.  A braided challah roll the next.  Sometimes a piece of halva.  Even though I was born here, even though I’ve been here before, I still managed to be the poor fool who accidentally bought thirty American dollars worth.  Word to the wise, it’s delicious, but you only want a very small piece.  

            At the same time, the sand hangs thick in the air, it’s cold and rainy, and when I go down to the beach at this time of year, the wind whips up the sand so rapidly that it stings your eyes.  Israel is a melting pot of Jewish people from every country that has a Jewish population.  The only prerequisite for automatic citizenship is being a member of the tribe, and in many cases, depending on the age of arrival, joining the army.  

            My dad sits alone in our house in our quiet Cape Cod town as he speaks to me, across continents, thanks to the US plan that so many Israeli phone companies offer because there are so many Americans here.  “I’m thinking about visiting over Purim.”  And my breath hitches.              

            “Are you sure you want to?”  I ask, staring at the American penny on the ground, willing myself away from this conversation with it.  “Maybe you should come for Passover instead.  I thought, maybe--.”  I hesitate. “Maybe, I’d leave over Purim.  Go to Greece or something.  I have time off.”            

            His voice is soft but tortured, “I could meet you there instead if you’d like.”  

            “Let me think about.”  I say softly.  

            “Okay, just let me know.”  He leaves it be, and I’m grateful for it.  “Are you going to Erez and Esther’s house for Shabbat tomorrow night?” 

            “Yes, I was planning on it.”  I’ve been staying with cousins, but right after I got here, they went back to the states for a few months.  I’ve made some friends, especially in the army.  But on the weekends, people go back to their families and their hometowns for Shabbat.  I travel or go back to an empty house, unless one of my dad’s friends I haven’t seen since childhood, takes pity on me.  I know that I’m privileged enough to be able to survive in Tel Aviv on the pittance they pay in the Israeli Defense Forces.  I don’t have to pinch pennies like most Israelis, because my dad can afford to help me out.  I know that’s why a lot of Americans decide not to stay in Israel after all.  Too expensive with wages that don’t match up, even in the professional sector.  

            “Alright, I’ll talk to you on Sunday then.  I love you, Erica.”

            “I love you too, dad.”  I answer in English.  When he hangs up, I step into the train station, check the train schedules on the screen, and seeing that a train is about to depart to my stop, sprint down the stairs, muscling through the crowd, and hop onto the train.  In Tel Aviv, you have to act like you mean it.  

At home, I’m hesitant, terrified to say what I mean, do exactly what I mean.  I hang back awkwardly.  I’m passive, quiet, unaggressive.  But, in Tel Aviv, you have to be the opposite.  That’s one thing I hate about this city.  It’s that “You snooze, you lose mentality”.  I once waited for a sherut (a shared van) from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for fifteen minutes.  I was maybe the third person to arrive, but by the time it arrived, there was a gaggle of real Israelis standing there waiting.  The doors opened, and so many Israelis shoved past me, that I didn’t get a seat, and had to wait for the next one.  I was half an hour late to meet my friends.  I don’t like it, and sometimes it’s mad frustrating, but sometimes you have to change to fit in with a city, or the city leaves you behind.  

            There’s no seats on the train, so I grab a pole to hold onto and hold onto my phone with my free hand.  I scroll through the Instagram photos that I’ve posted since I came here.  A crepe place in the train station I pass through every day.  A guy standing outside the train station every morning selling the best bagels I’ve ever had.  Surfers braving gnarly waves on a winter’s day.  Me kite surfing on an equally windy morning.  Soldiers standing at the border between Israel and Lebanon.  Even a shot from the top of the mountain that overlooks Syria.  

I have several new comments, ranging from “What a great experience” to “How beautiful” to “We miss you”, the latter of which came from my roommates back at Dartmouth.  

I’ve been taking thousands of pictures, and posting the very best on Instagram, and sitting on the train most mornings scrolling through, to see if maybe his name will pop up in the comments or slide into my DMs.  It doesn’t.   

            Graham texts me though, “Can I visit you for Spring Break?  It looks amazing over there.”  I sigh, staring out the window and not registering what I see.  Tel Aviv is more than an epicenter of the Jewish Holy Land, more than a haven for culturally Jewish people, vegans, surfers, partiers, and those searching for the best the start up nation has to offer.  Tel Aviv is more than $1 pasta from Cofix, more than mint lemonade at a beachside bar, and more than really good hummus and tabouleh.  It is all of those things and so much more. 

            There’s a lot of people I wish would visit me here.  I do want my dad to come.  I wouldn’t mind showing Graham around.  He’s a good friend, and he knows where we stand now.  We’d have a lot of fun here.  My roommates have promised to come at the beginning of the summer.  I’ve warned them it’ll be deadly hot, but they say they don’t care.  They want to know what all the fuss is about, why Allie and I always talked about it like it was nirvana.  

            God, I wish Allie was here.  

            When I first met Tyler, I was like “This guy gets me.”  And it wasn’t even about the fact that he was Jewish, though that was certainly a benefit.  We just clicked.  But, within a month, he was introducing me to his ex who he was “still friends with” and before I knew it, they were an item, before I even had a chance to tell him how I felt.  I wanted to hate Allie, but we clicked immediately too.  She became my best friend, and when she died of cancer last summer, even though we knew it was coming, I was just as devastated as Tyler.  

But, it turns out that grieving someone, while also being in love with someone who was in love with the person you’re both grieving, is almost as messy as being in love with your best friend’s boyfriend while she’s alive.  Eventually, I had to leave, because if I didn’t, I would’ve been strangled by those feelings, strangled by both his heartbreak and by his indifference to me.  I wanted to be there for him, and for months I tried, but sometimes you have to be there for yourself, before you break into pieces, with no one besides you left to pick up the pieces.  

            Yet, I sit on this train, I walk the streets of the city, and I look for both of them everywhere I go.  I look for them in the faces of all the other young soldiers and students on the train every morning, in the faces of the young people dancing in the clubs, but instead, I see them in the runners who jog down the promenade at all hours of the day, in the tourists who mill around the stalls in the shuk (market) when I go on Fridays, in the hostels I sometimes stay at on the weekends, when I need to get away from the city.  

            I look for my brother too.  Asher.  And my mother.  Sometimes I walk by the Dizengoff Center, the mall where they were killed in a terrorist attack sixteen years ago.  I was only five and a half years old, but I won’t forget the blast, the screams, the way my father held onto me protectively, and then the way he cried when he knelt beside the broken bodies of my mother and brother, the latter who was still wearing his Mordecai costume for Purim, our version of Halloween.  

            How can I love a city where such horrible things could happen to young children and young parents, just because of political and religious differences?  Just because there has been so much historical conflict over a piece of land?  A piece of land that means everything to both the Jewish and the Muslim people.  A piece of land that is our tether to a better history than one fraught with heartbreak and persecution.  A piece of land that is our refuge from a world that still continues to persecute us for our religious beliefs.  

            The people here adapt, remember the terrorist attacks, but still move on.  A few weeks after I got here, one of my neighbors mentioned a terrorist running around town.  He hadn’t done anything yet, but had implied he was planning on it.  She said nonchalantly, “We grow them like mushrooms around here”.  Her words shook me to the core.  A terrorist a mushroom. Normal.  A bit of a joke.  When the end result is anything but.  Her words took me back to the Dizengoff Center at the age of 5, staring down at the blood on my arm, before I realized that my injury was just a boo boo.  My mom and brother – well there were no words in my 5-year-old vocabulary, in any language, to describe exactly what I was looking at.  

In New York City, they moved on after 9/11, maybe.  But 9/11 was never just one of a series of unfortunate events rocking a nation.  9/11 was a rare event.  But that’s not the case here.  Here, we just pray and hope things will stay quiet for a while.  But then, someone gets stabbed on a bus, or worse, and we just try to get back to normal again.  God knows how.  With prayer, Friday night dinners with our friends and families, and pomegranate juice, I guess.  

            I text Graham back, “I think I’m going to meet up with my dad over your Spring break.  You should come over the summer if you can though.”  

            He answers back with a sad face, and I feel guilty because I’m not explaining it right to him.  He just thinks I’m blowing him off.  We don’t have the kind of relationship where we talk about things like this, especially by text.  Most of my friends don’t even know I ever had a brother.  And I don’t talk about my mom too much.  But the train’s too loud to talk on the phone so I sigh and write him back, “Spring Break is over Purim.  It’s kind of like Halloween.  That’s when my mom died.”

            “You never really talk about what happened to your mom.”  He writes.  

            “Have you ever heard of the Dizengoff Bombing?”  I write.  He doesn’t respond right away, so I know he’s looking it up.  

            He responds a little later, “I’m sorry, Erica.  I didn’t know.”  

            I sigh.  No one knows.  That was always kind of the point.  I was just a normal American girl living a normal American life.  

            “We all miss you, you know.”  He responds.  “Even Tyler.” 

            Really?  If that’s true, why won’t he text me?  It’s not the 17^th century.  If he wanted to talk to me, it wouldn’t be hard.  “I miss you all too.”  

            But, this was my choice.  I’m the one who dropped out of Dartmouth to join the army, not them.  When I get off the train, I walk through the dark streets of the suburb of Herziliyah, and duck into my favorite quiche place.  I order in perfect Hebrew and sit down, looking back at my phone, as I wait for my order.  

            “What’s it like there?”  Graham asks.  “Really?” 

            “Well, trains don’t run on Saturdays, and almost everything closes.” 

            “Like… everything?”  He texts back.  

            “Museums.  A lot of restaurants.  Some tourist stuff does stay open.  But the trains are shut down… so yeah… And it rains a lot.  Oh, and my laptop charger broke the other weekend, and I had to wait until Shabbat was over to go to the apple store at the Dizengoff Center to one.  And it’s freezing.  They don’t know how to insulate here.  I spend most nights falling asleep in the living room next to the space heater.”  I reread my ramble and consider rescinding my message.  But I can’t lie and say everything is perfect here.  Back at Dartmouth, I tried to do that.  I put on an act like I was okay when I wasn’t, like I was happy with the way things were, when I wasn’t.  I promised myself I wouldn’t do that to myself again so I won’t.  

            “So… you hate it?”  Graham messages after taking a beat.  “You’re leaving the army early and coming home?”

            The waiter brings me my order, and I take a bite and smile.  “No, the quiche is too good for me to leave.”  I respond to Graham, adding a selfie of my meal.  “Also I don’t think I’m allowed to leave the army and just come home.” 

            “Damn.  Remind me to yell at the US Military for disqualifying you due to your knee injury.”  Even though I’m alone, I have to laugh, because Graham’s right.  There are so many moments and decisions and consequences that lead people down the paths they go on.  And if the US Military had wanted me, I’d still be in Dartmouth’s ROTC program.  But life takes you where it does, and here I am, so may as well take advantage of it.  

            After dinner, I walk down to the harbor, and look out at the boats docked here in this beautiful country I get to call home.  While I’m walking, I hear a sudden noise that sounds like an explosion, and I start sprinting up the road, thinking “This is it, this is where my life ends”.  But, when I look back, all I see is a transformer sparking.  A stupid transformer.  A word that’s hardly in my vocabulary, but was enough to scare me half to death.  

And that’s the irony of it.  Everyone at home thinks of Israel as the place where you’re going to die in a terrorist attack, but the odds of that are so low.  When I came here, everyone I knew who was Jewish, was like “Oh, have a great time”.  But the ones who weren’t?  Who forgot I was born here, were like “Oh, honey, are you sure you want to do that?  The Israeli Defense Forces, really?”  Wonder what they’d think now, since I’m in an office all day, and the only thing I have to be scared of is a malfunctioning transformer.  The truth is, you’re probably more likely to get mugged on a city street or shot in the United States, than you are to die in a terror attack in Israel.  Even though Asher and my mom fall into the side of the statistics I don’t like.  

            As I walk home, I regret leaving the city so early after work tonight.  The loud traffic, the bustle of the people, the crowds that could potentially hold both monsters or angels and the tall buildings.  I do like it out here too, in this quiet suburb, but at the same time, there’s a such thing as too quiet.  There’s a such thing as a city that makes you breathe just by being a part of it.  

Some people compare Tel Aviv to New York City, but that’s not it.  It’s not quite Western, but it’s not quite Middle Eastern either, although there’s some level of influence on both sides, with American English spoken in the streets and Falafel and Schwarma offered on every corner.  It’s just Israel.  Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it, sometimes I can’t imagine being anywhere else, and sometimes I curse the decisions that brought me back here.  

There’s a lot I don’t know about life and death, but one thing I’m starting to realize is running from the past and present won’t change it.  I pull out my phone and call my dad.  He doesn’t answer, so I leave a message in Hebrew, “Hi, it’s me.  I changed my mind.  Please come for Purim.”