Before we moved to Iran from Turkey, my mother dropped my sister N. and I at our aunts and uncles in Israel, then to a summer camp in Kibbutz Na’an, where my uncle and his wife Dvora and his five children lived. My mother left on a trip to Europe. She may have met my father there where he used to buy cranes and other equipment, or she may have gone to a spa somewhere, to ponder her life and divorce. Divorce in the late 1950’s for a woman was more like a step short of death. She came back looking somehow different, my seven-year-old brain couldn’t decipher the physical changes – was it then that her hair turned blonde? A new glint in her eye? A determination perhaps, or a new elegance.
But I was overjoyed to have her back when she came to collect us. My aunt Dvora was not a very motherly, but rather harsh, in the Israeli way. I was too soft, too polite for a sabra, and so a bit of harshness was needed to toughen me up.
When we arrived in Iran, what struck me was how empty everything looked. The arid landscape was empty of trees and vegetation. The house my father had rented for us had been recently built on the empty hillsides outside the city, and filled with empty rooms. A kidney shaped pool lay in the middle of an empty garden. There was a woman with him who had helped him find it, who looked empty too, like she didn't belong.
After only a few nights, kept awake by the incessant barking and howling of wild dogs, my mother found an apartment for us on a wide tree lined avenue in the city, overlooking a walled garden. There were walls everywhere, which made any walk feel empty. The black chadors worn by women were also walls. On the street we lived on the sewers were covered, unlike so many streets that had bridges over the dirty canals between sidewalk and street. The sewers were without cover, in contrast to everything else.
Our family was reduced to my parents with just my sister N. and I. My oldest sister was finishing high school with my grandparents in Israel, and my brother, for reasons I did not know, was sent to a military boarding school there. The subtraction added to my sense of emptiness. The sister who had shielded me and consoled me was not there.
And even my parents seemed absent. They took to speaking in “German” which was really Yiddish, so that we wouldn’t understand them. Another wall meant to keep us out, but the unhappiness blew right in.
this is so wonderful! meshing the unhappy girl with the landscape, the walls, everywhere
ReplyDeleteWow! So much isolation shuffled around countries and living spaces while the parents do their thing, losing siblings that were supportive. Emptiness and then walls. And the last Line!! "Another wall meant to keep us out, but the unhappiness blew right in." Powerful!
ReplyDeleteIt's so fascinating the way that the narrator has been dragged all over the near east, as a child, to Turkey and Iran and Israel. Places that aren't safe for Jews or westerners to live anymore (I guess Israel isn't safe anymore now either).
ReplyDeleteI am very drawn in by the descriptions of emptiness. That landscape feels so desolate and joyless. That spark of joy the child feels when her mother returns is so out of keeping with the rest of the piece, which is almost silent and sepulchral. Very atmospheric and interesting!
ReplyDeleteMy heart hurts for this child, shuffled around like so much baggage. This resonates for me in such a personal way...the walls that both confine and shut out...my deaf parents would not teach us their language of sign so we were shut out of their conversations as well as their deaf world. The wall between hearing and deaf could only be breached by a common language which I shared with my hearing brother...and when he left home..."the unhappiness blew right in."
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