A Visit to haifa circa 2018
Winner: The Robert Day Award for Fiction
Selected by Alexia Arthurs Devon RossLina says that only girls who grow up lonely will develop an appetite for opulence. It is her way of reminding me of my excessive greed and her anticipation that I will soon find some sort of financial footing so that she and my father can retire in Naples, drink wine and chat with their children only through phone screens. Although I do desire opulence, there is a difference between growing up lonely and growing up alone. I don’t tell Lina this because of her upbringing in Shirakawa—a village in the Japanese alps so small that it’s practically extraneous—which must have been lonely for a woman who so heartedly desired to grow up, immigrate to America and experience the world. She is excited to be in Haifa for the summer, wearing Dorin Frankfurt blouses and drinking ouzo instead of wine. Being opulent as ever.
It is June when we arrive at the peak of a vigorous heat wave. The car that picks us up from Ben Gurion has a broken air conditioner, so the driver keeps the windows down throughout the ride to the Carmel. Daisy—Lina’s daughter and my stepsister—sits in the middle seat and fans herself with the glossy visitor’s pamphlet she picked up at the airport. There’s a satellite image of Israel on the cover, and Daisy’s face turns pink when she stops her fanning to examine it. “Have you noticed how the Israeli land is green, but the Palestinian land is mostly desert?”
My father—the son of a famed Palmach captain—turns around in the passenger’s seat to tell Daisy that her observation is incorrect and that there is no such thing as Palestinian land.
Daisy says, “It’s here on the map.”
My father shakes his head. “All of the middle east is a sand pit.”
But Haifa is full of mountains and greenery. A much cooler breeze runs off the Mediterranean. The hills are lush and smell of rosemary, and the old potato fields bloom with shepherd’s purse. There is traffic going north on Kvish 2, and the driver offers us each a cigarette before lighting one himself. We are all smokers but for different reasons: my father because he is addicted, Lina because she likes to prove that she can be fun, and Daisy because she lives in New York and studies fashion and cigarettes for her are an accessory. I smoke because it’s what everyone on the highway is doing. Israel, as a state, does not seem fazed by the threat of lung cancer, and I have a theory that their general intrepidness is a consequence of their passed-along national trauma, though it may also be a cultural blasé adopted from the Europeans who bled eastward after the Shoah. Daisy snaps a photograph of the cigarette packaging with the disposable camera she’s wearing like a bracelet. She says it looks like a bag of flour and deserves to be captured on film because of its apparent ancientness. My father turns around again and tells her that if she’s looking for antiques, Savta will do.
We veer off past Hecht Park and the Mount Carmel Hotel, into the small coastal district where my father grew up. Pomelo and lemon stands line the street, turning the air sweet. The vendors wear colorful bandanas in their hair, and one of them—a tall, pale man with the Haganah symbol on his hat—waves at the taxi as we go by.
Savta’s villa is gated in the front, and it takes the driver a long time to unload our luggage from the trunk. My father is impatient;
he curses as he buzzes the intercom again and again. “She can’t hear you. She’s ninety-three,” Lina says. “Call her on the phone.” It is Beri Katz who finally lets us in, appearing from the side of the villa with a pool skimmer in his hand. My father and I hardly recognize him. My father shouts na’ar berekhott, which is Hebrew for pool boy, and as Beri walks toward us I remember his face. The last time I saw Beri Katz, he was twelve years old with a cast on his arm from a football accident. Now I figure he is nearly seventeen and more than six feet tall with hair that falls in front of his face. Daisy says he is handsome and smiles a lot as he opens the gate and takes our luggage. The stone path that leads to Savta’s front door is lined with jasmine, and I stop to break one off its stem. Lina puts a hand on my wrist and scowls at me, which is imposing considering this is my ancestral homeland and not hers. I jerk my wrist away and flick the flower onto the footpath.
Inside is all tile and beige and the door to the screened-in sunroom is propped open, making the villa smell of wind and sunscreen. Beri is speaking Hebrew to my father, something about the upcoming mayoral elections and the woman candidate whose campaign has enraptured the city. Beri calls her impressive. My father uses the word doha, which has a similar meaning to repulsive or obnoxious. Daisy always says that a man who is perturbed by a woman’s success is a man who has been scorned by them, which is also her argument for why we, as women, should be kinder to men. I don’t often listen to Daisy’s dating advice but that first part, at least in the case of Beri and my father, makes sense. I doubt Beri has ever been scorned by a woman. He drops our bags outside the guest bedrooms and tells us in English that he’s been looking forward to our stay, which is something that Daisy seems excited about.
We find Savta in the living room, half asleep in her russet wing chair, wearing a turtleneck despite the heat. When she sees me, she touches my face, her thumbs tracing the dark circles that
have lived under my eyes since childhood. Savta credits my poor complexion to an oversaturated American diet. She offers me the vegetables and leftover chraime in her fridge. She says, “You’re taking after your mother’s physique. So frail,” before turning to Lina and Daisy. Savta has never met Daisy before, but she touches her face anyway, frowning at the freckles that form a little bridge over her nose. “Oh, Lina.” Savta is famously disapproving. “She looks nothing like you.”
My father and Savta have always gotten along, and I think it is because he is her only child. Also he resembles my saba, who was killed in a car bombing in the 80s. While Lina goes to freshen up, and Daisy and I pick at the chraime with our forks, my father and Savta sit in the sunroom, smoking cigarettes and sipping the lemon water Beri had poured into glasses before returning to the pool with his skimmer and tester kit. “Is Beri Greek?” Daisy asks, watching him through the window. She seems uninterested in the fish but pushes her fork around as though to appear polite. “Or Italian or something?”
I shrug. “He’s Ashkenazi, but his parents are fascists.”
“I was worried I would meet a fascist here.”
“They’re not very different from the fascists back home.”
“I’ve only met capitalists in New York,” says Daisy. “But most of them pretend to be socialists.” She cocks her head and taps her finger against her lips, watching as Beri uses the end of his shirt to wipe his forehead. Daisy is nineteen, and I am recently twenty, and Beri, at seventeen, seems impossibly young, though Daisy, who spent the last year sleeping with a middle-aged prêt-à-porter designer in Soho, doesn’t appear to care. She is one of those people who believes souls can be born old and life can reincarnate. At our parents’ wedding last year, she’d stopped me outside the reception hall and, while staring wide-eyed at the rustic centerpieces and the white checkered dance floor, said, “I’ve been here in a past life.”
As I am forking the rest of the chraime into the trash, Lina emerges from the guest hall wearing a sun hat and a long white cover-up. Daisy uses the disposable camera to take her picture. They have a full itinerary of sites they want to see in Haifa, caves to visit, gardens to roam, food to try. Lina expects that I’ll show them around. She runs her hand down my back and encourages me to change out of my airport clothes, and since I am selective about who I let touch me, I slide away.
There is only one window in the villa that glimpses the sea, and it is above the shower in the upstairs bathroom—a greasy porthole that swings outward on its hinges, opening toward the mountainside. The water glints beyond the hills, looking very blue and faraway. Daisy and I must stand on the lip of the tub to see outside, holding our cigarettes over the sill. In the few days since our arrival, Daisy and Lina have done a lot; they’ve eaten grape leaves in Wadi Nisnas; they’ve ridden the Carmelit and picnicked near the old monastery; they’ve purchased a collection of eccentric little bowls from the Armenian ceramics shop down the street. Daisy’s disposable camera is full, and as we stand in the bathroom, she searches the internet for a place she can buy another.
Downstairs my father speaks loudly into the phone, working despite the eight-hour difference between Haifa and his office in Chicago. His voice is loud and boisterous, and when he laughs, Daisy and I give each other looks. Sometimes I can’t believe we are not actually related. We irritate and tire of each other like real sisters might. It’s easy for me to anticipate her thoughts, and Daisy has gotten good at speaking for me, especially during social engagements where I rarely prefer to talk.
Daisy nods out the window, toward the gate at the top of the sloping drive, where Beri is pulling up on a buzzing electric scooter, a brown paper bag bungeed to the suede seat. He waves at us as he
waits for the gate to draw back, then he walks the scooter inside. Daisy rests her folded arms on the window’s ledge. Beri shouts up in our direction. “For a country so gripped by turmoil, there sure is a lull in the middle of the day, right ladies?” His accent makes him sound astute, and Daisy is smiling. She puts her chin on her wrists and says, “Or maybe we just can’t see it from here,” but it is not clear if Beri hears her because he doesn’t look at us again as he walks toward the villa with the grocery bag, disappearing behind the wall of jasmine. Daisy straightens, touching the chiffony straps of her tank top. It surprises me how listless some girls can be, seeking one affair after the next. Although I try, I am not always like that. I tire easily, exhausted by minor interactions, expended by the most standard questions on the topic of my personal life or postgraduate ambitions. I would rather be ignored. In fact, I’d be revived by it. Since Daisy has excitement, she leaves the bathroom and disappears down the stairs, and I am left to close the heavy window by myself.
Inside Beri’s grocery bag are tomatoes, oranges, bread, eggs and a loaf of halva wrapped in foil. “Made by my uncle at his bakery,” Beri tells us as he loads the groceries into Savta’s kitchen cupboards. From her spot in the living room, Savta shouts to Beri in Hebrew, directing him to place the tomatoes in the sunlight and to position the eggs beside the butter dish. She points to the envelope on the counter that contains his shekels—allowance for his day of work—and tells him he can have it once the pool is cleaned. In the front hall, my father paces, still on the phone and the noise of it all feels suddenly profuse. Daisy looks at me expectantly, perhaps wanting a translation of all the things Savta barks at Beri, but my Hebrew is weak, so instead I place the halva on a serving dish and roll the foil back, showing Daisy the marbled layers of tahini, sugar and sliced pistachios. “It is an acquired taste,” Beri says in English. “But my uncle makes it sweet.”
When Beri retreats outside to check the pool, Savta turns to Lina, who’s seated beside her, and proceeds to carry on whatever conversation had been interrupted. Savta, like many people her age, could talk, slowly and pointlessly, all day about no distinct topic with no true chronology. She talks about my saba and his service or the kibbutz where she lived as a twenty-year-old refugee. Her stories are uninteresting because, though full of detail, they lack substance, dancing around whatever anguished point such pivotal historic experiences should conjure in a person, which irritates me. History is perhaps the last good argument for Israeli redemption, and it would please me to hear Savta admit it. Sometimes she talks about my mother: her beauty, her anger, the tragedy in the wake of her death. Really, Savta means this as a compliment to Lina, beaming at the joyousness of my father—in love again!—but mostly, I find it rude. Whenever I am caught in conversation with Savta, I try to steer the topic onto politics or the latest global crisis, anything I can think of in order to deter a mention of my mother.
As Savta drones, Lina glances at Daisy and me apologetically. I carry the halva into the living area and set it on the table between them. Daisy sits on the arm of Lina’s chair and picks at the halva with her fingers. Savta stops talking and reaches out to pinch Daisy’s thigh. “Girls like you should not be indulging in such fattening foods. If you’re looking for a treat, there is avatiach at the shops.”
Daisy breaks another bit of halva off the loaf and lets it crumble into her mouth. “I am open to having both,” she says, and because Beri is young and resilient and still outside cleaning the pool, I take a couple shekels out of his envelope on our way out the door.
Since no one is looking, and Daisy doesn’t mind, we also decide to take Beri’s scooter. Daisy sits on the seat and holds my waist while I steer, my palms sweating on the handlebars as we
dodge cars and frivolous beachgoers. I try to teach Daisy to say bevakasha when making a purchase or asking for directions to the washroom, but her pronunciation is off, and she punches me in the shoulder when I laugh at her, which makes us swerve.
We find a little shop by the Carmel Beach Promenade that sells avatiach the way I remember: frozen on a stick and slightly sour. Daisy calls it “beachy” and steps outside while I pay the cashier. Not every part of Haifa is beautiful, and the promenade is not an exception; the street is dusty and worn, crowded with the green buses that idle at their stops. The dumpsters and recycling bins overflow with trash. Even inside the shop, paint peels off the walls in long strips, and the security grates above the doors rattle loudly in the breeze. The cashier asks if I’m local, and I tell him that my mother once lived in Ein Hod.
“Is she an artist?” he says.
I reply lif’amim as I accept my change and hurry out the door.
I find Daisy with the scooter outside the neighboring grocery store, sucking her popsicle while she noses through a vendor’s kiosk full of underwater disposable cameras. “Are there any good reefs for snorkeling?” she says, as if she thinks I would actually go near the water, and as I am trying to teach her how to ask the clerk that same question in Hebrew, a group of Israeli boys, slightly older than Daisy and myself, pull up on a Land Cruiser. They’re towing a pair of wave-runners on a trailer, and as the driver slows down, a few of the boys hang out the window, waving and calling in our direction. Their attention, I assume, is mainly directed at Daisy, who—with her height and freckles and her prepossessing features—often attracts flirtations. Daisy is Nordic on her paternal side, Japanese on Lina’s, and happened to acquire only the most efficacious traits from either parent. I am multi-racial too—my mother was Cuban—but my heritage is not as obvious as Daisy’s; I look just like the Israelis in the Land Cruiser.
The boys invite us to sit on the wave runners while a few of them go into the store. Their English is not good, and the shortest one keeps leaning close to me saying “You like?” and I can’t figure out if he’s pointing at my avatiach or the wave-runner or possibly my yellow-striped tank top, because his eyes are focused on Daisy, to the right of me, who is throwing her head back and laughing a lot, and when she sees that I am not laughing, she widens her eyes forcefully as if in an attempt to coax me into doing the same. It seems to be what the shortest boy is waiting for. I cannot express how much pressure is put on girls to give other people a good time, no matter where in the world they happen to be. And when one of the boys returns from inside the store, having purchased the underwater camera Daisy had earlier been admiring, she gives him a kiss on the cheek and says, “Toda raba!” emphatically until each of them have gone red in their faces. We leave quickly afterward, afraid that they may change their minds and suddenly expect us to pay.
The scooter runs out of charge on our way back to the villa, so Daisy and I take turns pushing it up the hill. When we get to the top, Beri is there, sitting beside the purple tamarisk that pokes through Savta’s gate. Daisy is more apologetic because she has genuine empathy. She says that although she is sorry, she is glad to have provided some adversity, since nothing is more memorable than struggle.
Beri scratches his head and takes the scooter from me. “If you needed a ride, you should have let me know. I could have warned you it was low on power.”
Lina and my father—who is now off the phone—are sipping from mugs in the front garden, and when they see us, Lina shouts and smacks me lightly on the arm. She tells me how rude it is to steal someone’s property. She looks at my father and says, “Why don’t you tell her?” My father, who’s never been much of
a disciplinarian, agrees then proceeds to ask Daisy about her new camera and whether it’s the same as her old one, and while Lina stares at him cockeyed, I manage to escape, slipping around the backside of the villa and stepping into the shallow end of the pool. Even though it has just been cleaned, the water has a murk to it and leaves skitter across its surface. I have an unconventional belief that emotional numbness is not an adverse quality but a strength, something that must be practiced and improved. The easiest way to achieve this sort of constant insouciance is by turning any sort of emotion into amusement. Beri walking his scooter up the hill: Amusing. Robust Israeli boys: Amusing. Lina: Amusing. My mother is Amusing, too. And sometimes when I’m alone in a quiet space and I’m sure that nobody’s listening, I’ll let myself smile and laugh about it.
In July we are invited to Shabbos at the Katz’s. The house is huge and beautiful, with blue trim around the windows and all the plants arranged neatly in terracotta. There’s a fountain out front and cushioned patio furniture in the paved nook beside the entryway. Daisy is not surprised by their wealth; she says it’s exactly what she’d expect from a fascist. My father tells us that Raviv Katz obtained his fortune through his entrepreneurial spirit and his investment in real estate. He says that real estate is an excellent career path and that, if I get the chance, I should speak to Raviv about the specifics. My father says it’s never too late to change my pursuits; he’s worried I’ll end up with a degree in English.
All the lights are on inside the house even though it is barely dusk. The candelabra has been placed in the middle of the dining room, along with a framed copy of the Shabbat Blessing. Most of Beri’s extended family is there, and they are all wearing black. A few of the married women have wigs. Beri’s mother is called
Esti, and she is very young. She puts her hand on Beri’s shoulder when she greets us. Daisy is wearing a short white dress. Mine is longer and green with an open back. Esti stares at us before she compliments our outfits, which are only questionably appropriate. Lina seems to think this too. She says, “You know how girls are. They love to wear what’s in style.” This comment appears to hurt Daisy physically; her style is her main personality trait, her livelihood! Daisy abides by only one rule when getting dressed: if there’s a chance that you will be judged for the clothes you have on, wear them. She says that although clothing is admittedly superficial, it fosters courage, and when there’s courage, there’s beauty, and beauty is what gets you places.
Beri stands close to his mother while Esti proceeds to question us about all the things we’ve been up to and whether we’ll make a trip down to Tel Aviv before our flight home. Lina says that she and Daisy are planning on it, and Esti frowns at me. “Not you? Don’t you want to see all that you can? It’s good to be worldly. Most Americans are not.” And I tell her that because I was raised Jewish, Israel does not instill any new credence. If anything it makes me like the religion less. I say that if I want to expand my perspective, I’ll go to Cuba, which is a mistake, because it makes Esti look at me with pity. Esti says, “What about the artist’s colony? You have to go there.” Lina makes sure to answer before I say anything sad. “Of course,” she says. “I’ve been dying to see it myself.”
While my father takes a much-disapproved of phone call, Lina and Daisy invite themselves on a house tour, so I hold Savta by the arm and bring her into the kitchen, where all the appliances are gleaming and white. The two of us have spent the afternoon baking challah, some with poppy seeds, some with sesame. I did all the mixing and kneading, while Savta said the blessings and braided the dough. Savta claims that the first time she had challah, as a twenty-year-old leaving British internment, she knew she was finally home. Her family, like many French Jews, had barely been
religious throughout her childhood, and only now, at ninety-three, will she admit the devastation of such irony, which is perhaps why she’s always pressuring me to pray. She probably deserves a more devout grandchild.
Savta and I organize the challah at the head of the counter. She encourages me to speak in Hebrew and help the other women set out the meal. One woman, who layers horseradish into the gefilte fish, holds a screaming toddler on her hip, and when she sees that my hands are free, passes the baby to me. Its hair is long, but I can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl, and it tugs restlessly at the neckline of my dress. When Beri enters the kitchen, I quickly pass the baby to him. He is resistant at first, but then accepts the child. “She just wants her mother,” he says to me, but his voice has an edge, and I wonder if he’s still upset about the scooter.
As the sky darkens, a crowd gathers in the dining room to watch Esti and her sisters light the candelabra. They wave their hands over the flames before they cover their eyes. It is the women who commence Shabbos, the women who are expected to always be bringing light. Daisy sits in the chair next to me and says that it’s beautiful. I think it is a lot of pressure. Beri sits across from us when the meal starts, and Daisy asks him a lot of rather intimate questions about his life, about bombing drills at his school, the beaches he hangs around, how much money he makes working for Savta and what he intends to do with it. Beri says he is saving his funds for after his government-required stint in the military, and because I once made Daisy watch a documentary about corruption in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), she gasps and says, “If Israel wants to be a stratocracy, the lawmakers should do the policing themselves. It’s terrible all the suffering your government forces young people to impose.”
Beri shrugs. “But wasn’t it Dostoevsky who said that man is extraordinarily, passionately in love with suffering? If anything it will provide perspective.”
Daisy taps her fingers on her plate. “Boys who are versed in Russian lit should never be trusted with guns.”
The table goes quiet when my father and Lina digress into their wedding story and how they met four years ago during a golf tournament at Shoreacres. I excuse myself to the bathroom and instead wander into the kitchen where I take a bottle of cabernet from the Katz’s wine fridge. Since I don’t prefer to drink from the bottle, I open the cupboards and help myself to a crystal coupe, too. There is something gratifying about drinking wine outside in the summer, especially when you’re wearing a dress and uncomfortable shoes and there’s a party going on somewhere in the background. I sit on the edge of the Katz’s fountain and drink from the coupe. Orange koi circle in the water, their tiny whiskers burbling on the surface. I always feel sorry for enclosed animals. It seems cruel considering the Mediterranean is practically in direct sight. I am on my second glass of wine when Daisy and Beri come outside; they stand on the porch and lean their backs against the house, and I freeze, holding the coupe against my lips so as not to be seen. I am not close enough to hear what they’re saying, but I can tell that Daisy is doing most of the conversational work. She pulls a cigarette out of her purse and lights it. Beri rubs his nose. When they kiss Daisy stands in front of him, pressing him into the wall, the cigarette dangling lamely at her side. It’s annoying how good they look together, tall and thin, their dark hair catching the reflection of the porch lights. I lay myself flat along the rim of the fountain. The koi fish splash near my head. I turn onto my stomach and let the coupe tip forward; the wine trickles into the water and the koi swim happily toward it.
I have a photograph of my mother in Ein Hod, where she did a year-long residency in ’89, painting impressionistic landscapes
and portraits. In the photo she is eighteen and barefoot, sitting on a shaded bench outside her barrack, her tarps and brushes spilling out of the valise at her side. Daisy wants to recreate this photograph on our trip to the artist’s village. She thinks it will be revitalizing for me, a highlight of our jaunt overseas. Lina calls the idea wonderful and finds a map on the information website before we leave Savta and the villa in the morning. While my father takes a phone call from the car, Lina, Daisy and I roam the Yemini Garden, where faces have been carved into trees and abstract sculptures erect from gangly beds of flowers. A man in a kippah and an aloha shirt stands stoically at an easel near the walking path, painting a mulberry tree. There is a paper on the back of his canvas that reads !שקט and when Daisy asks what it means, I tell her that it is the sign of a serious artist, or at least the ruse of somebody who’s trying to be. My father says his memory is bad. He gets lost on his way from the car, and the three of us have to walk all the way back to the parking lot to meet him, which is not easy in the heat. He claims to not remember anything from when he used to visit here years ago, after he met my mother at a bar near the coast and demanded to know why a woman so young and so striking would ever be drinking alone. If she had not died, they would still be married, but that thought feels too hurtful to say in front of Lina.
For most of the morning, we sweat and circle the village, trekking down to the music box museum and back again. There is a woman selling jewelry outside a pottery studio. Daisy and I spend a long time looking at the earrings while the woman smiles at us. Daisy picks a pair of large golden heart drops, and as she pays, the woman leans across the table and grabs Daisy’s face. “Yaffa,” she says, and Daisy, who is perhaps not in the mood to be physically handled, takes her earrings and jerks away, leaving me to thank the woman for the both of us. In the week since she kissed Beri
at Shabbos, Daisy has been roiling, always pink in her cheeks and picking at the skin around her fingernails. It’s as if something has possessed her. She’s started wearing makeup in the mornings and is sticking to the same cycle of white blouses that accentuate her tan. A few days ago, while we were smoking our cigarettes in the bathroom window, Daisy turned to me and said, “You know that horrible feeling—the one that is always being mistaken for love— that flips your stomach around and makes you lose your breath?” Beri had just pulled up at the gate and was taking his time, freeing another grocery bag from a tangle of bungee cables. I do know the feeling, although I’m not convinced that it is unassociated with love. After that, Daisy took a long drag from her cigarette and confided that she’d always wanted an international lover. “Not for anything serious. Just for fun.”
I stared at her for a long time. “What other way is there?”
At noon we eat salads on the patio of a shady cafe. Lina puts her glasses on and plays a word game on her phone. After a while, my father asks me if I’d like to see the barracks. “They’re just up that hill, I believe.”
Lina says, “I’m sure she would love to see the barracks,” without looking up.
I don’t know why they are called barracks. Really, they are condominiums for the visiting artists, quaint but nice with homely colors and lots of trees. We find a bench at the top of the hill that Daisy becomes convinced is the bench. She makes me take the photograph out of my backpack so we can compare the backgrounds. I insist it’s not the same bench. Daisy insists it must be. My father says he doesn’t remember any benches and that the photo could have come from the Bahai Gardens in Haifa, which is something Daisy and I both disagree with. Daisy hands me her disposable camera and throws herself onto the bench, saying, “If you’re not going to take a picture on it, I will. Someone has to
preserve your ancestry, and don’t you want artifacts?” My father sits beside her and takes a cigarette out of his pocket. He reminds us that it is a long walk back to the car.
Lina says, “Do you remember which barrack she lived in?” And my father rubs his temples. Lina gestures to me. “I think she would like to know.”
My father exhales toward the trees. “It was so long ago.”
While Daisy stays on the bench with my father, Lina and I cut through the grass, entering the narrow quadrant that connects four of the condos. We find another painter working on the stoop of his porch. Lina shouts and waves at him. He looks startled to see us, and I wonder if maybe he would consider our approach as some sort of breach in security. The serenity is certainly shattered. Luckily, the painter speaks English, so I don’t have to talk. He tells us that he’s never heard of my mother and that the condos had been refurbished around 2006. “There are some archives,” he says, “in the main gallery but not very much.”
On our way back to my father, Lina walks slowly. She says, “You must be a little upset,” and touches the ends of my hair. I often disappoint the people who want to know how I am feeling. When someone asks, I can never find the words. Sometimes I wonder if this is a symptom of having been raised an only child, alone with my parents. Or if it is an outward reaction to some sort of subliminal guilt, an unconscious understanding that the most complicated emotions are often the most troubling and any complication that I experienced would have in some way contributed to the complications my mother struggled with. I figure my father would see it differently. His mother survived the Holocaust; he didn’t believe in depression until my mother was dead.
There is nobody in the main gallery when we arrive, but the paintings are beautiful. My father finds a large portrait of a mamey
fruit and plants himself in front of it while Lina strides around, saying “Hello? Hello?” Finally she turns to Daisy and me with her hands on her hips and says, “You’d think with all this art, there’d be more people around,” before she ventures outside in search of assistance.
Daisy and I wind up roaming a display of welded sculptures, scooting around a mechanical-looking dog and tilting our heads at the junkyard scraps that have been molded into a human torso. There is a large metal bowl near the back windows, and Daisy stops in front of it to glimpse her reflection, pushing her hair aside to admire her new earrings. After a minute, she wrinkles her nose and whispers, “I’m wondering if these would be better in silver,” and when we look up again, a woman with a name tag is walking by, pulling a vacuum along on its wheels. “Excuse me,” Daisy says, and for a moment I think she is going to ask for an opinion on the earrings, but instead she says my mother’s name and inquires about the possibility of archives. The woman is apologetic when she tells us that everything they have is on display. She says, “But I do love her piece. I wish we had more from that artist.”
“You have one piece?” Daisy looks at me as if I should have known, and the woman points us back to the front of the gallery, to the mamey painting my father’s still staring at. It is much more detailed up close, with all its brush strokes pointing downward and a darkness creeping in along the sides of the canvas. It gives the impression that the fruit is about to turn.
Daisy’s shoulder touches mine when she says, “Your mama painted that?” It catches me off guard, and I can feel my eyes starting to sting. I press my fingers to my tear duct until the feeling passes, and then I let my hands drop away from my face.
The morning we’re supposed to leave for the airport is sticky from a recent rain. I open all the windows in the guest room while
I pack, hoping an unwonted wind might be tempted to find its way inside. I am leaving Haifa with more clothes than when I arrived, so I pack strategically, putting shirts inside each other and balling small garments in the corners of the suitcase, which is a trick I learned from Daisy, who had enough foresight to pack everything last night.
It takes me a few tries to fully zip my suitcase, but once I am done, I go out to the living room, where everyone is drinking the coffee Beri brought from the grocery store. My father is on the phone with the cab company, who apparently is running late, while Lina and Daisy huddle around the computer, checking the weather reports in both Munich and New York, where we will be connecting flights. Savta pats the cushion of the empty chair beside her, and I sit down, turning my head to look out the sunroom window, where Beri is running the skimmer through the pool. Savta follows my gaze. She says, “Are you going to say goodbye?”
And I wait for Beri to look up before I wave at him.
Lina turns away from the computer and tells me not to be rude. I say that if anyone owes Beri a proper goodbye, it is Daisy.
“You really are something else,” Daisy says. I hope she means it graciously, even though her tone is vindictive.
When the cab finally arrives, Daisy is the first to stand, saying “I’m tired of this milieu” as she hurries out the door. Savta touches my arm before I go, too. She tells me, in Hebrew, to make sure I receive copies of all Daisy’s photographs, and the best ones, of course, I should send back to her. She says it will be uplifting for us to see Haifa again through the lens of someone who’s gracing it for the first time, the way she and I and my mother once did.
