Last night in Israel

12:14 am

My visit has felt the most productive at nights, somehow. So far, I have gone to an awesome dance show by the Batsheva Dance Company (which featured some surprising nudity) with my aunt, spent time at family dinners, taught my cousin’s 4-year-old daughter how to take pictures with a digital camera (and watched her guffaw when I showed her a video clip of her dancing and being silly), and smoked a hookah and drank arrack with my uncle, and watched nighttime surfers ride the waves during dinner.

This is my last night in Israel, and a special one.

After a day of fighting bureaucracy with bureaucracy and losing nonetheless (Canadians Score with American Bureaucratic Aid; Turkish Alien Reports She Feels ‘Defeated Yet Undeterred’), I took a cab out to Nahalat Binyamin, a street of artisans. It made me happy to recognize a couple of the artisans from a year and a half ago, and to notice a couple of them for the first time, like the old man whom I watched for a while as he blew glass figurines. I met my aunt for lunch, and she left me with the same charge as my grandmother – to spend some money on myself. It’s always easier for me to spend money on other people, but I managed to find a couple of things to buy. I have such a particular taste, it seems, that my family members have begun leaving it up to me to buy myself presents. Works for me. Works for them. Sometimes, it turns out, I prefer not to be surprised.

After my first day hanging out around town by myself (at last!), I felt exhausted, dehydrated, and heavy with a humongous headache. A brief afternoon nap, dinner with the little cousins, and finally, my grandmother and I had some quiet time alone. We lay on a sofa each in the living room, the house completely dark, and after I told her about my day fighting Canadian bureaucracy, she told me about how she and my grandfather took a trip to North America with a tour, but had to be left behind when it was time to fly to Toronto on the way to see the Niagara Falls because the travel agent failed to realize their passports were Turkish and not Israeli like the others and that they would need visas. The travel agent drove to the consulate that day and got them their visas. Still, a day behind, they finally caught up with the rest of the group in Toronto (after struggling tremendously to find their way without a tour guide who speaks English, and managing to communicate by sign language and in Spanish as much as possible). “We got to see the Niagara Falls only in pictures,” my grandmother laughs now; she said she was crying at the London airport trying to figure out how to get to their gate to catch the flight in Toronto. They got a free round-trip ticket to Turkey out of the travel agent’s oversight. Then, she told me how she, my grandfather, and my aunt (who had just finished seventh or eighth grade) took a trip around Europe by car and drove around Italy, France, Spain, and England. She said my grandfather didn’t have much knowledge of how to go around Europe because they didn’t have large highways in Turkey back then, but one thing he did have was courage. “I don’t know how he managed it,” she said, “but we traveled by car for about two months…except in London. They drive on the opposite side there, so he didn’t use the car.” She told me about how they traveled all over Turkey by car, about how my grandfather always took them somewhere every holiday (I made a mental note to ask my mom about it, who, I’m surprised, has never mentioned it to me), and about driving all over Israel, too, when they moved here, about how he got into a car accident while visiting Israel when a truck ran a red light and hit my grandfather, how he had to stay in the hospital for two weeks having suffered broken ribs and a leg injury (not to mentioned a totaled car he had miraculously left alive), but got in a car and drove as soon as he could to my grandmother’s amazement.

I had no idea my grandfather was so adventurous. All I remember is a quiet man who sat in his chair in the corner and gave one-word answers to my attempts at engaging him in reminiscing, storytelling.I always cry when I think about it, and it was so wonderful to learn —even if through second-hand stories—that he was different, and that he was quiet because he was really sick and he became withdrawn because he endured so many different ailments silently. (Of course I am crying now.) I always thought that Moshe, my cousin who died in a motorcycle accident three years ago, was the one person in my family who shared the same adventurous spirit, the same wanderlust with me. I always thought my mother’s side of the family was the more “settled” and “grown up” side. I’ve never been happier to have been so wrong.