the holy land

My teeth are a little slimy feeling but otherwise everything seems fine. I’m sitting at my grandfather’s desk in the room with two windows, both of them sealed at the edges with masking tape. In front of me, the window looks out onto variously colored concrete that differentiates parking lot (grey) from sidewalk (red and black striped), and behind the concrete a small playground with a sand-and-grass base; out of the window to my left I can see a very small bulldozer with no behind to speak of carrying shovelfuls at a time of dirt from the corner of the parking lot somewhere very far away before returning for more. It makes around one trip every two minutes, lending an automotive punctuation to the morning. My grandparents, similarly sized, are sitting next to each other in the living room, so still and with postures so similar that you might have bought a male and female version from the doll series reading grandparents: torso twisted roughly twenty-five degrees to the left of center, right shoulder somewhat slumped and left shoulder somewhat lifted, head bent a bit to parallel the angle of the book and eyebrows raised as if to say, “You don’t say!” My mother’s getting dressed in the next room over, having emerged from the shower in the regulation padded dressing gown with small flower print. I, a rebellious child who only eats half her oatmeal, will wait to shower until we get back from the store, where I am hoping I can procure a toothbrush.

My plane out of Chicago was a couple of hours late—apparently they couldn’t get out of wherever they were coming from—so by the time we landed in Newark, there was less than half an hour left of my original three hour layover. I jogged from the gate to the airport train, tapped and jittered annoyingly from terminal A to terminal C, got a mysterious reprimand from the headscarved African American woman who checked my identification for security at terminal C (“Hold your head up, Anna.”), and didn’t bother putting anything away after security but sprinted like a track and field tenth grader to the gate, holding my laptop and passport in one hand. “Are you coming from Chicago?” the lady checking tickets at the empty gate called out as I ran up. “Your mother’s waiting for you on the plane.” “Ah, Bairn-shtain?” the man checking in stragglers on the plane pronounced it Russian-style, as they all do here, and crossed me off his little list. “Your mother is waiting for you.” And so she was, down the other aisle, standing up and waving both hands. We piled in and faced each other so thoroughly that it was only as we were disembarking ten hours later that the man in the window seat—who had somehow managed to leave it and return to it without either of us noticing—could ask what language we were speaking, and whether this was our first time here.

In the meantime there were many important things to discuss. For one thing there was the matter of airplane food, which tastes almost decent, it turns out, in the “Hindu” version, and which has also sometimes a decent fruit version. I was discouraged from eating what was called chicken and handed a sandwich from David instead. Which brought up David’s fruitcakes—the most delicious fruitcakes ever, a justification of the concept of fruitcake. We were carrying one for my aunt and uncle, and one for us and my grandparents. Really, it’ll make you understand why people eat fruitcake, my mother assured me. Mmmmm! I can’t wait.

Then there were the presents. Various presents for various relations, and then presents from other people’s relations—a collection of pills for my grandparents’ neighbor whose sister in Brighton Beach had gotten the prescription that she, the neighbor, needed, but wasn’t sure how best to send it. To send it by post cost money. But to send it with my mother was dangerous: it was a big crime to transport medicine from country to country, and she did not want to put my mother in danger. My mother got in touch with the sister’s daughter, thinking that she may be a little less risk-averse, but got the same story. “When you go through customs, the first question they always ask you is, ‘Are you carrying any medicines?’” the sister’s daughter insisted. It was a very dangerous undertaking. Perhaps they should just forget about the pills. After several telephone calls, my mother finally convinced them with the reasoning that, since they were only sending to her, it wasn’t international; and as for her, she was taking it across the border of her own free will. Finally, the day before she was leaving, she got a package with some pills, the names carefully ripped off the labels.

Then there was sleep.

Then there was passport control, always a thrill in Israel. We went up together, so I barely had to talk. “So, you immigrated from here to America?” “No, from Russia to America. My parents came here.” “When did they come here?” “1991.” “And when did you go to America?” “Long ago.” “When?” “1980.” “So, you never lived in Israel with your parents?” “No.” “Why not?” “Well…” “Why don’t you make aliya?” “Well, it’s difficult.” “Why difficult? Your parents are already here.” “Yes, but my husband is American.” “So bring him too.” “Well…” You wonder what this line of questioning accomplishes. Certainly it does not get you any new information about whether my mother is a terrorist, or sympathizes with Palestinians, or is likely to overstay her visa and stay on here as an illegal migrant laborer—presumably the sorts of things that someone in a passport control booth would be worried about. I can imagine that he sometimes gets a mother-daughter team who look vaguely like us but reply enthusiastically that, yes indeed, they are planning to make aliya just as soon as everything is settled with the pregnant sister in Jersey. But if the people he talks to have, like us, no plan and no desire to move to Israel, it’s difficult to imagine these questions inspiring them to change their minds. It strikes me, actually, as a recognizably Jewish approach to a situation you don’t approve of: the passport controlman sounds like nothing so much as my grandmother, pushing a plate of oatmeal at me and telling I’m too thin, I need to eat. I don’t eat it, of course, because I’m not hungry; nu, but okay, at least she tried. She knows she’s in the right, anyway. So nu, okay, we can enter the country. At the end of the interview he glanced at my passport. “You were born in Moscow?” Surprised. “Yes.” “How old are you? Twenty?” Which is kind of a funny question for a person holding your passport to ask, now that I think about it.

It didn’t occur to us until we were waiting for our luggage that my suitcase probably goes to the gym less regularly than I do, and had probably not run fast enough to catch the right plane. When it failed to arrive I went to file the claim, which involved taking the piece of paper with my name and the contents of the suitcase written on it over to one of the people at customs and having him sign it. The person I accosted was busy actually scanning the insides of other people’s actual luggage and had no time to waste on my virtualities, signing my piece of paper without looking at it and sparing himself the details of my addictions (“slippers, coffee, coffeemaker”) and my medical procedures (“suture removal kit”). I then took my paper back over to the girl at the desk, just barely slipping through the mob that was closing in on her from all sides, and in return got a phone number in English just before she disappeared beneath the Hebrew-speaking mass.

The next day would be an adventure of homebound maneuvering. I called the airline, who had an English line with a number that supposedly went with the driver. I called the number and spoke in English to a guy who was not the driver, but who could give me the driver’s number, but “the driver does not speak English.” So the guy called the driver for me, and I called him back; the driver would be here around two thirty. Around two thirty we get a call; it’s the driver, he speaks a little English, he’s lost. Actually, everyone gets lost here; the doctors who get called out for my grandparents’ emergencies get lost. We’re trying to figure out how to direct him here, I say something to my mother, and hear the driver call into the phone, “A vi po ruskii govoriti, nu chtozhe mi golovou morochim? (Oh you speak Russian! What are we messing with our heads for?)” It was a satisfying moment, in an aural cinematic kind of way, but even as a Russian speaker he was still lost and still incapable of giving a decent description of where he was. Finally my mother lulled him into admitting that there was a store right across the street from where he was parked, and we ran out of the house and down the little hilly lawn that leads down to the street where he was, as my mother had kind of suspected, standing, right across from the Russian store we buy all our food from. (So now, halfway through the story, I can brush my teeth.)

But that was all the next day. Now we’re still at the airport.

Outside, in the airport, my mother waited for me with my cousin, who had that day become father to a second child, a baby boy. The first child, a little girl, was with my uncle and aunt, who brought her to my grandparents’ soon after we got there. She walked in all curls and cheeks, carrying a doll on each arm. One doll was dressed in pink. Its name was “Masha.” The other doll was dressed in blue. Its name was “Bebi Boy.” When she saw the real Bebi Boy in the hospital the next day, we’re told, she was delighted, and started wheeling him around and playing with him until it was time for him to go, at which point she became incensed that someone was taking her dollie away.

This morning, while my mother was still asleep, the husband of the neighbor with the sister in Brighton Beach came by to pick up the medicine. Someone handed him the plastic bag my mother had sleepily picked out from her collection, and a small silver-colored tiara with a fur-lined base. For his great-granddaughter. “Were there any dresses?” He asked. “There were supposed to be some dresses for the little girl as well. Could you check to see if there were any dresses?” I went to my mother’s room. No dresses, I reported back. He twisted the handles of the plastic bag.

“That’s a shame.”

“There were supposed to be some dresses.”

“For Purim, you see, she likes to dress up. They were supposed to send a couple of dresses for her.”

We diverted him onto other topics, our newborn great-grandson. He has six great-grandchildren already: one grandson has one child, one granddaughter has two, and another granddaughter, she married a religious guy, so they have three. My mother got up. He thanked her, then asked again about the dresses. No, she repeated, no dresses; but they said they’d send another package with someone else. All she was taking were the pills and the crown. He got up and thanked her again, seemingly trying to think of what an appropriate counter-favor would be—offering to send something to America?—and made his exit. We started our morning milling about, me with an updated version of the familiar wrangle over how much breakfast I’m supposed to eat. My grandmother has been strictly warned not to force food on me, so now my grandfather tries to force food on me while my grandmother scolds him, it’s like the same piece with an extra instrument: we’re exploring a more complex harmonic structure.

The phone keeps ringing with five-minute conversations to welcome my mother. One of these lasts suspiciously long, with my mother apparently interrupted at every sentence until she bursts out in a kind of howling laughter that you wouldn’t quite know what to make of. She hangs up. It was the woman with the sister in Brighton Beach. They’d opened up the plastic bag, but instead of a bottle of pills they had found inside it a big biscuit of some sort. So they had figured, logically enough, that her sister in Brighton Beach had taken all the pills and baked them into this big biscuit, to hide them from the customs agents. They had taken to and destroyed the biscuit, reducing it to crumbs. But they had found no pills. So, it seems that they had thought better of it and decided not to send the pills after all?

A little while later the husband came by again to pick up the right bag, and he was smart to come and go quickly, because I don’t think my mother will ever forgive him for the destruction of her fruitcake. “Biscuit, indeed!”