The Anatomy of Exile

Brooklyn, New York, 1972

Early one Sunday morning in late July, Salim flung the front door open and shouted, “Get up, get the hell up.” He’d just come home from an all-night shift at the TSS store on 42nd Street in Manhattan, where he moonlighted as a security guard on weekends. Tamar and the children scrambled into the living room. For the four years and seven months they’d been in America, she had dreaded this day. She had watched him go from a man in full control of his emotions to someone at the mercy of them.

Something awful must have happened: a fire, a death, or maybe he’d been robbed at gunpoint. The newspapers were full of such crimes. The children gaped and rubbed sleep from their eyes. Ruby leaned against the open window, where not a breath of air stirred the curtains. Bleary eyed and yawning, she tugged on the Betty Boop T-shirt that barely reached her thighs, a distasteful character, in Tamar’s mind—all that faux innocence and cartoonish sexuality, and couldn’t her daughter have put on a pair of shorts? Rachel stood in first position as if about to jeté out of the room. She was a serious student of ballet and had developed the muscular litheness that comes from hours of practice. Ari looked ready to burst into tears: mouth dry, crusted with saliva, toes polished red. Rachel had used him as a dummy model to hone her manicuring skills. His face was as pudgy as an overstuffed doll. At age eleven, he towered over Rachel and was a smidgeon under Ruby’s height while surpassing her in weight. When he walked, his thighs clapped together and his belly jiggled. Tamar had never imagined having an overweight child. Salim said he was the same at that age, but she blamed it on the harsh American winters when they were shut indoors with nothing to do but fress like chazers.

Tamar wrapped her arms around her youngest children and stood beside Ruby, letting all three know she was there to buffer Salim’s anger, a role that had become more commonplace in the last few years. He looked them over, his face greased with sweat. He seemed to be searching for a signpost that would lead him out of the forest of his turmoil, and when he couldn’t find it, he ordered them to clean the house. He marched into the bathroom. She followed close behind.

“Are you all right?”

He glared at his reflection in the mirror and, without warning, smashed it with his fist. The glass shattered. He grunted in pain. There was blood, but he wouldn’t let her tend to him. Shocked and quite frightened, she said, “Tell me what’s wrong,” and gave him a washcloth to wrap around his bleeding knuckles.

“Please. Just clean this filthy house,” he said.

They had moved into the Calliope Garden Apartments eight months after they’d arrived in New York. Their first apartment was a basement on Brighton 9th Street. Salim brought them there straight from the airport. The December sky banked with nickel-hued clouds.

“Welcome to America.” He had brandished the house key.

They were jet-lagged and hungry. The flight from Tel Aviv with three children was endless. Winter had just begun, and the cold bit through their woolen coats. Seagulls circled above them like vultures. Tamar shuddered at their cawing. Ari and Rachel bickered, and Ruby retreated into an accusing silence, the muscles in her face working to hold back tears.

The basement was one room with an alcove, where the landlord had installed a bathroom with a chain-pull toilet and a tiny shower stall. There was a sofa bed she and Salim slept on. At night she rolled out thin foam mattresses for the kids and in the morning rolled them back up. They ate sitting on the floor. Salim laughed and said it was “just like home.”

“Home? Not Frug Street in Tel Aviv. My God, not even Kafr Ma’an, the abandoned Arab village where we had nothing.”

“Damascus.” His eyes clouded and she knew he was thinking about his sister, Hadas, killed after the ’67 war, the reason they had left Israel.

She hated the basement apartment. In letters to her mother, she never alluded to the way the walls iced over in winter or that in summer the humidity was so thick, mosquitoes feasted on them at night and the children woke swollen-eyed and blinded until the antihistamine took effect.

At least now they had decent rooms and neighbors they liked. The Calliope Garden Apartments were a collection of four attached buildings, four stories high with glossy black fire escapes on their facades, stacked one on top of the other. The first time she saw them, she mistook the ladders and rails for balconies that connected the apartments to one another. Later she learned they were an escape route in case of fire. Those first weeks she’d lived in a state of anxiety, waiting for flames to engulf them, and spent nights formulating the quickest route to safety.

There was no garden at the Calliope Garden Apartments. Nothing grew in the patches of dirt on either side of the entrance doors to any of the buildings. In the back of buildings A and B was a communal courtyard and a staircase that led to a cellar where tenants stored old furniture and suitcases with stickers from European cities and state fairs. There was a washing machine that jitterbugged a dozen inches during a rinse cycle and a porcelain laundry sink crackled with age. It was the same layout for Buildings C and D. Like their apartment on Frug Street, the tenants’ lives drifted into theirs. Each apartment was its own country and her neighbors’ affairs bled into hers. She knew when Mrs. Kantor’s baby was colicky and when Mrs. Eliopoulos’s toy poodle, Zeus, needed a walk. Helena Eliopoulos was her closest friend in the building. A widow, a childless mother, an immigrant.

The command to clean the house mobilized them. Rachel and Ari started in their bedroom. Ruby tackled the kitchen, and Tamar the living room. Salim watched them with the same intensity he reserved for customers browsing the aisles at the TSS store, or the employees he managed at the plastics factory where he was the day foreman. When the apartment shone, he went to bed and Tamar sent Rachel and Ari downstairs to play in the courtyard. Ruby left without telling her where she was going. Ruby worried her. Her daughter had become secretive and always smelled of cigarettes. Last week, she caught a whiff of alcohol on her breath. There was no way to know who she was hanging around with and what she was doing because she never brought anyone home. When she asked why, Ruby said, “Who’d want to meet a bunch of refugees?”

Tamar gathered the pieces of bathroom mirror and caught the dozen reflections of herself, each differing depending on the angle of the shard, not one a true replica.

Salim didn’t eat dinner that night. He didn’t come out of their bedroom and she didn’t bring him a plate. When she went to bed, she found the blinds open, the courtyard lights on, and Salim stretched out, looking toward the window. Long shadows bisected the ceiling.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I expect you are.” She stripped out of her clothes and lay beside him, unyielding.

He pulled her on top of him, kneading her lower back. “I love you.”

She resented the way her body softened against his. “Well, I hate you,” she said.

“Me, too.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Forgive me.” When they’d applied for their visas to America, Salim said all he’d have to do was work hard and dollars would rain on him and the rain would cleanse him and make him whole again. But it had been nearly five years of ten-hour workdays, six, sometimes seven days a week. He sat up and lit a cigarette. “Last night I caught a fourteen-year-old stealing a pack of diapers for his baby sister. It was like seeing myself at that age. I must’ve stolen milk at least ten times from Salach’s grocery when my mother couldn’t afford it. He finally gave me a job stacking shelves so he could keep an eye on me. I paid for the diapers and told the kid to get the hell out and never come back.”

“You did a mitzvah. Is that what upset you?”

He closed his eyes.

“Salim?”

“The D train this morning.”

“What about it?”

“The car was empty except for an old man sleeping it off. Ya’Allah, he stank. Clothes filthy, mouth wide open.”

“Did he wake up, bother you?”

“He didn’t wake up, but he bothered me.” He threw his legs over the side of the bed. “I was tired. My mind wasn’t right.”

“What do you mean?”

He pulled the blinds up farther. His body illuminated by the courtyard lights. “Promise not to laugh?”

“Of course.”

“He reminded me of my father. In Damascus and then again in Haifa, until the day he died, he hauled scrap metal on his back. I stared at that old man’s mouth, and watched it turn into my father’s. The longer I stared, the wider it became. I felt like I was falling inside him, slipping into that disgusting old man’s body, into my father’s body. I was afraid and felt like I was choking. Had to open my collar button just to get a breath, and then another, and before I knew it, the shirt was off and then the train stopped at the station before ours. I burst out of there and ran home. Don’t know how many miles. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t hear my footsteps hit the concrete or my breath or feel my heart beating. It was like I was dead.”

She came to him and pressed her lips to his chest. “Your heartbeat is strong, but you’re exhausted. Anybody working like you do would feel the same.”

He put his arms around her. “Tell me you love me and that I’m not crazy.”

“I love you so much and you’re not crazy, Salim.” He kissed the top of her head.

“I think. . .” She hesitated.

“What?” He planted a kiss on her shoulder.

“It’s time to stop, ya habibi,” she said, using the Arabic endearment, foreign on her tongue.

“Working?” He gave her earlobe a gentle bite.

She shivered. “Working so hard. The hours you put in. For what? All those days turning into weeks and months. Years, Salim. We’ve saved enough money. Let’s go home.”

He dropped his arms from around her waist.

“My father used to say time was a tyrant,” she said. “You leave when it’s dark, come home when it’s dark, and there’s always more work, more time away from us that we’ll never get back.”

He hung his head. “Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Undermine me.”

“No, habibi, that’s not what I was doing.”

“Forget I said anything.”

“Salim,” she implored, but he was already climbing back into bed.

By Friday, the incident was nearly forgotten, absorbed the way the body absorbs a blow. She prepared for Shabbat, washed the floors in the manner Salim disliked, on her hands and knees, too reminiscent of his mother cleaning the homes of rich Ashkenazim in Tel Aviv.

“Be an American,” he said. “Use a mop.”

She scrubbed so hard polish chipped off the wood. Wood wasn’t like stone. It could burn and warp. Larvae could be writhing below the surface, carpenter ants gnawing highways that stretched from one room to another, leaving the planks beneath her hollow. At home, the floor was made of stone tiles, something she could plant her feet on and wouldn’t give way.

She washed out the rags, pinned them to the clothesline outside the kitchen window, unrolled the area rug in the living room, and returned the coffee table and end tables to their places. She wiped down the doorposts and lintels, window casements and radiators, cove bases where dust collected like snow. She had just climbed onto a chair to rehang the curtains in the dining room when a car pulled up to the curb with a flurry of horns and shouts, “Mabruk, ya salam.” The Arabic words were so unexpected, she nearly fell; her hand pressed against the windowpane for support. Shaken, she gripped the chairback and stepped down, the curtain rod clattering to the floor.

Two teenage boys, brothers she assumed, sprang out of the station wagon. The older, stockier of the two wrapped his arm around the younger boy and drilled a knuckle into the top of his head. He shrieked and the older one released him. From her perch two stories above, she worried her children would get hurt and called down to Ruby on the front stoop.

“Where’s Rachel and Ari?”

Ruby pointed to the vestibule. Tamar signaled for her to come upstairs but her daughter resumed watching the boys, who were now wrestling. The two laughing, grunting, grappling, and rolling. Their T-shirts high on their torsos. A man, whom she took to be the boys’ father, barked an order and the boys came apart like puzzle pieces and began to unload the car.

It was past four and Salim would be home from the factory soon. She climbed back up on the chair and attached the curtain rod to the post. The Shabbat meal was cooked and waiting on the stove. His TSS uniform pressed. Everything was prepared.

Tamar saw the boys’ mother emerge from the car. She wore a navy blue djellaba and hijab and pointed to the mattresses that flopped over the roof of the station wagon and to the assortment of table lamps and chairs peeking through the open windows. The parents supervised while the boys removed the items from the car. Cardboard boxes leaned drunkenly next to empty dresser drawers on the sidewalk. Their father stood beside them. He was tall and well-built, graying hair cut close to the temples. The mother checked the lamps for damage.

Salim turned the corner, his lunch pail swinging in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other. Her heart squeezed at the sight of them. He used to bring flowers home every Friday, but that was in Israel. Here they saved every penny to take back with them. Until then she lived in two countries, in two tenses. In America, it was always the present tense, as if she’d been born that day fully formed. Israel was where the past sheared into the future. Salim greeted the family and shook hands with the father and the sons. They spoke in Arabic. Fragments of their conversation drifted through the window. The man, the woman, and Salim threw their heads back and laughed. Tamar bit her lip and returned to her chores. She snapped the white tablecloth into place, setting the table with the embroidered napkins from home and the cutlery she’d found on sale in a shop on Church Avenue.

A short while later, Salim’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. She ran to open the door so he wouldn’t have to search for his key. He was surprised to see her there. She took his lunch pail and the flowers. “Thank you,” she said, and raised her lips for a kiss. The smell of machine oil and sweat clung to his shirt. He brushed his mouth against hers.

“Want something to drink first or a shower?”

“Shower. Come talk to me,” he said.

After putting the flowers in a vase, she followed him into the bathroom, telling him how well Ari did on his math test, looking at her feet when he stripped off his shirt, marveling that after so many years, she could still feel shy around him. His name tag on the pocket was frayed at the edges and needed mending. Sal was his American name. People at work called him Sal. The neighbors called him Sal. They called her Tammy. Sal and Tammy, like two characters in a play.

“I saw you talking to that family,” she said.

“They’re moving in upstairs, but only for a year.”

“How come?”

“Because, motek, they’re waiting for their house to be built on Long Island. Man, they really made it.” He stepped out of his trousers.

“What do you mean?”

“They own a good business and they’re building a house. Doing it up just the way they want.”

She frowned. “Who are they?”

“The Mahmoudis, Ibrahim and Radwa. The older boy is Hussein. The younger is Faisal. He’s Ruby’s age.”

“Muslims,” she said.

“You’ll never guess from where.” He grinned.

“Home?”

“Yaffa. God, it was good to speak Arabic again. I forgot how much I missed it.”

She picked up his clothes and it struck her that every conversation he had with her was filtered from Arabic to Hebrew and lately even English.

“So our new neighbors are really our neighbors.” She straightened up.

He chuckled.

Her shoulders relaxed. “I’ll put these in the wash.”

His body was paler now away from the Israeli sun. Still, he was beautiful. His muscles roped around bone, joints locking and unlocking with precision, flanks long and powerful, with only a slight softness to a once defined belly. He turned on the water and vapor gathered at the edges of the new mirror he’d installed the day after he had smashed it.

“I’m sorry I put you through that,” he’d said, barely looking at her.

“It’s all right,” she’d said.

Water cascaded against the shower curtain. The steam laced with the Pine Sol she’d used to clean the tub. He stepped into the shower, and something of the old Salim was there in the way he ran the soap over his torso and looked at her with a roguish grin. “Like what you see?”

Flushed, she held his clothes against her chest and imagined his lips covering hers, the clothes dropping to the floor as he pulled her into the shower. Water pounding their backs. The curtain shuddering and he down on his knees, pressing his mouth to her until her legs quaked.

The kids barreled through the front door. “Ask me later.” She sped away.

She tried to time everything so he wouldn’t have to rush through dinner to get to his next job. After the meal, she thought they’d stroll on Ocean Parkway, walk to the subway station, stand under the streetlamp, and kiss like young lovers. But he’d sent Ruby out for cigarettes, and God only knew what took her so long. By the time she returned, he was livid. He barely had an hour.

“Where were you?” Tamar hissed.

“Sorry, I stopped in at the library and lost track of time.” The library closed at five on Friday, and it was already past six. There was no time to question her daughter.

“Get anything good?” Ari asked.

“Nah.” Ruby bent over her plate.

There was a bit of talk around the table, from Tamar mostly, and the kids piped in now and then about the stray cat they’d adopted. Salim remained silent.

“What cat?” Tamar asked.

“A kitten,” Rachel said excitedly. “We made a bed for him in a cardboard box.”

“Where is it?”

“In the hallway in Building A, next to Sarah’s apartment. We named him chatool for cat in Hebrew.”

“Well, don’t forget summer arts and crafts classes begin at the synagogue on Monday. No time for pets.” She turned to Ruby. “Mrs. Eliopoulos asked me to go with her to the social security office. I don’t know how long I’ll be, so you’ll need to take the kids. I don’t want them going on their own yet.”

Salim frowned. “Why do you have to go with Mrs. E?”

Tamar spooned beets onto his plate. “She doesn’t have anyone else.”

“Tell her you don’t have time.”

“I’ve already promised to help her.”

“You want to help someone?” His voice rose. “Help your family.”

She gripped the stem of her wineglass. Ari shoved a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. Salim slammed his knife down on the table.

“Help me, goddamn it.”

Everything grew quiet.

“I don’t know what more I can do,” she said. In a way, she was relieved. The flirtatious banter in the shower, the laughter downstairs with the Mahmoudis, felt like a trick of the light, a sleight of hand, obfuscating the real Salim Abadi.

Rachel heaved a sob.

Tamar watched Salim visibly collect himself before turning to Rachel. “Sha, sha,” he said, patting her hand. “It’s okay.”

The light grew brighter and objects lost their definition: the silver wine goblet, the bowls of food, the platters all blurred.

“Did something happen today?” Tamar asked, unsure if she wanted to know.

“I can pick up the kids.” Ruby dredged a piece of challah in the gravy on her plate.

Salim picked up his knife and fork. “I feel like I’m drowning. Don’t you see what’s going on?” he asked.

Tamar folded her napkin and placed it on the table beside her plate. The inside of her cheek rough from gnawing on it. “I’m sorry. But I don’t want to see. I just want to be us again. I don’t care about the money or the villa you want to buy. I want to go home.” Her voice climbed. The children sank farther in their chairs.

Salim hunched over his plate. “I can’t. Not yet.” His breath came fast in between bites.

“Why?”

He didn’t answer.

Whatever stopped him from returning home, she thought, had little to do with the realities there and everything to do with his need to succeed here. He was terrified that he’d fail at the one thing he’d set out to do—become a rich man in America. Money, he was desperate to believe, would soothe the pain of loss and guarantee passage into a land with no memory, a land without his late sister, Hadas.  Hadas had been his connection to Israel, not her, not the children. Tamar looked around the table at them and smiled, hoping to alleviate the worry she saw on their faces. She caught Ruby’s eye. A soft light fell across her daughter’s cheek, and the heavy sweep of her hair recalled Hadas’s beauty. She remembered the first time seeing Hadas run deep into the village, toward the river, toward her lover, Daoud. Her blue dress like a bolt of sky that had fallen to earth. The two disappearing into the trees. Tamar stared at her hands, rough with housework, the skin calloused, nails chipped, and hid them in her lap. She’d always thought that, of all her children, Ruby resembled her the most. Now it seemed she favored Hadas.

“Ima,” Ruby said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of the kids. You go with Mrs. E.”

The Shabbat candles burned low, and night closed in. An orchestra of crickets chirped, and from far away came the sounds of boys running. Their shouts, their sneakered feet bashing the pavement, echoed through the streets. A car whipped down Avenue C like a dream sailing by. The flowers Salim had brought home were beginning to wilt. Everyone picked at the food congealing on their plates. Salim rose, his foot catching on the leg of the chair. There was an uncustomary twitch in his shoulders. He straightened his back and stepped away from the table. His fork scraped the china. Rachel winced at the sound.

“Forgive me.” He caressed her cheek, then glanced around the table.

Tamar felt sorry for him, to be so driven he couldn’t see what he was losing.

She entered the bedroom behind him. Dressed in his security uniform, he swung the nightstick and looked at himself in the full-length mirror. Her muscles coiled with the strain of having to appear normal. Everything they were was more tenuous now. A word, an action, could ruin them. She had to remember that; she had to keep herself in check because in time his outburst would dissolve like salt in rain, while her words would drill into the foundation of their marriage. She couldn’t say, for instance, “I don’t trust you to make the right decisions for this family.”

“Never expected to wear a uniform here,” he said.

Resting her forehead in the valley between his shoulders, she felt him relax and lean against her. A well of mercy rose in her, and she thought this, too, was love.

“I can barely stand to wear it. Just putting it on. . .” He seemed baffled, but she understood. It was too reminiscent of home, of the war, of his sister Hadas and Kafr Ma’an, the Arab village. The world took bits out of them, whittled them down.

She straightened Salim’s lapel. “I miss you. I miss us.”

She heard someone call Ruby’s name from outside and went to see who it was. The yard lights were on, and in a bright pool stood the young Mahmoudi boy, Faisal, tall, lanky,  with curly hair. He gazed up at their kitchen window. Tamar turned to find Ruby pressed against the glass like a moth pinned to a screen. Salim must not have heard Faisal and bent to rub the nose of a shoe with his sleeve.

“I’m scared that one day I’ll stop missing you,” she said.

He bounced the nightstick on the tip of his shoe. “I have to go.”

“Don’t you worry about what’s happening to us?”

“Every day.”

“Then let’s go home. Moti says he’ll help you find another job. A desk job at the bank, or you could return to the defense plant. You had a good position there. You can’t really like what you’re doing here, manufacturing plastic tablecloths and doing guard duty in a dime store.”

“You spoke to Moti, Hadas’s husband?” He gripped the club. “How could you talk to him about me? That traitor. Remarried six months after my sister was killed. Not even cold in her grave.”

“It was eighteen months,” she said. “What else could he do? He needed help with his household, with his children. His eldest, Tehila couldn’t take it all on. She’s just a kid. We weren’t there for them, Salim.”

He flinched.

“He called to get your permission, begging you to understand that he was lonely and desperate for help,” she said. “People can go mad with such loneliness. That woman he married will never replace your sister. I feel sorry for her.”

He left without a word, his silence a contrail that filled the rooms. The kids were relieved and turned on the television. Ruby cleared the table and said, “I don’t ever want to be like you.”