“Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?”
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Who Am I?”
I.
Today we sold our old house in Israel. It’s raining outside and the smell of the Bay fills the cul-de-sac to the brim, brackish-sweet like a fish. The asphalt has a new paint of glossy black. Ivy green climbs the tree in my window, its thick leaves floating up the red wiry vine, glistening wet in the pastel light of today’s rain clouds.
My dad’s in the other room on his phone. He says something in Hebrew. His voice feels patchy and smooth at the same time, like a eucalyptus bark—shedding pieces of itself, tired, hopeful.
“I’m sad,” he says to the person on the other side. He’s looking out to the slab of concrete we call a backyard, to the tall bushes that line its edges, to the lustrous wooden fence at the end. He leans against the wall and sighs.
The sun seems to flicker like a fluorescent light, like a lamp at night, though it’s 11 in the morning in winter in California and such a beautiful drizzly day. I see Mom pulling into the driveway, and getting out in a red coat and red sunglasses carrying a bag with two baguettes.
Today, they’re looking at houses. Today, they’re buying a new car. They just sold our old house and they have money to spare. They bought the house in shekels and are selling it in shekels—but the dollar has sunk in the last ten years, and the shekel has risen, and the world has changed and so have our lives.
I can’t believe it’s been ten years. None of us can.
For breakfast we eat forgotten memories. With each bite we lose another family legend, another history—like a whispered word, unheard, forgotten forever in the folds of time; we begin to remember nothing, to look back at nothing. In a few years, our memories of the house will be reduced to fading photos in burnished albums.
One day, the memories will all be lost, like everything else.
II.
We bike along the foothills, my dad and I. Today’s cold—colder than yesterday. The world is white and green.
I forget to change gears before a hill and I stand at the bottom of a mountain with a distressed chain, left alone to consider whether I should push the bicycle up towards the crest or turn back around and bike into the valley.
Deer gather across the road, wading through weeds—never moving, never stirring, a quiet painting as perfect as a human thought. They watch me lean against the seat of my bike, pooling in air with heavy, protracted sighs.
After a few miles of climbing and cycling, the fog begins to sink into us, enveloping us, leaving parts of itself on our skin. Droplets seem to appear out of nowhere and slip down our shirts, into our ears; the wind as we roll down mists us with specks of rain.
“We have to return,” Dad yells from behind me. I can barely make out the words, but I nod my head and pull on the brakes.
“We have to return. It’s starting to rain.”
Our bikes churn up the hill. Maybe because we know there’s lunch waiting up there, and a warm car.
At the inn we chew our square burgers lathered with horseradish and ketchup over long tables etched with what seem like hundreds of names and words and thoughts, crisscrossed and carved deep into the wood.
Our fingers are red with the cold. We want to order beer but we had ran out of cash.
“Remember,” I ask, “that one bike ride? In Neve Oz?”
He remembers.
III.
An eternity ago we took our bikes on a day like today and cycled into the desert.
Hills of red dirt waiting to be burrowed through and constructed on. Once, years before, it was an orchard—a forest of orange trees where I played as an infant.
We biked for hours or what seemed like hours, wrapped in grey coats against the Israeli cold, towards where our old apartment used to stand. Time ebbed and flowed like water. The road slit straight through the sands, like a caesura at the heart of a poem, and we were the sole listeners of its punctual silence.
On our way back the clouds opened their arms and let the water trickle down their curves. It always starts on the nose. A lonely, cold speck of—of what? It might’ve been rain. It could’ve been—the wind, a speck of sand, a neuron misfiring into the empty recesses of sense and feeling.
We didn’t need to say anything. Our feet did the talking. We flew against the wind, against the drizzle, our hands exposed and licked by ice, by wind—feeling it like a curtain of frost flowing against our knuckles, against our faces, the bike turning by itself and the thunder sounding from a million miles away, like the earth groaning, like the body pushing, fervent, burning, knowing.
I remember the smell of it, like a newborn world, lush and green, elicited from prodded, picked dirt. I remember how the earth flushed with the rainfall—how it became inflamed with red, how the color blazed through the dead fields like wildfire. I remember how when we got home, we slumped into the sofas by the fireplace and read stories, flames playing against the marble floor, windows washed in a white screen of water.
We listened to the echoing pitter-patter of it against the black, metal chimney. I fazed into sleep.
IV.
We woke up this morning without a house.
Can you imagine? A family waking up homeless in their beds. It felt like we’d just sold my childhood—the ruins of it, at least, like the demolition of King Arthur’s castle, burning the last copy of the Bible: Where would all the stories go? Where would our remembered memories flow to, like brooks returning to the swamps they branched from?
We have different ways of mourning. I write a memoir. My sister mourns on the Internet. Mom mourns with food. Dad mourns by screaming at Mom.
We make pasta with pesto for dinner.
We eat it listening to Verdi.
Our new Honda Accord is parked outside. Its darkened headlights watch the garage door. Before dinner is over I go to my room and sit on the bed.
I think, every family needs a home. My hands feel smooth against my cheek. It’s seven and I lie in bed awake, the pillow case rustling against my ears.
Thoughts surge.
V.
It’s been so long that only darkness evokes memories from my old house now. I lie under a winter blanket and the darkness feels as thick as blood coursing through night’s veins, seeping under the sheets, soaking them, soaking my back.
Is this the same night that blanketed me years ago—in my old room, in my old home—the same blackness creeping across my skin, the same darkness filling every thought, every pore in my core?
Is this how it felt when I was a child?
But I used to sleep with the lights on. Some nights I’d have trouble sleeping and I’d dim the lights until they ran out of glow. I used to think that when I turned off the lights, the walls were stripped of their skin, the floor of its fur, the lamp of its soul. I felt like I was killing the world.
Outside, streetlights burned orange holes into the night.
I feared death. Maybe that’s why I was scared of the dark. I remember standing on our laundry balcony over a field of dirt and imagining a battle waging down there—fires burning, soldiers shooting, terrorists blowing themselves up like left-over flecks of fireworks exploding in the darkness.
Or was it a nightmare that had seared into my mind?
To be Continued...
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