Ayelet Tsabari - The Best Place on Earth

Im just about to cross the street to Caf Rimon when I see Natalie sitting on the shaded patio and my heart skips, trips and falls over itself. I stop walking, pull my squished cigarette pack out from the back pocket of my jeans, tap it and dig out a half-smoked cigarette. Then I lean against the stone wall behind me and light it.

Downtown Jerusalem is busy at midday. Cars creep along the congested street, music pouring out from their open windows. The narrow sidewalks made narrower by the goods overflowing from the storefronts are swarming with people, lugging bags from the Mahane Yehuda Market. Orthodox high-school girls in long skirts saunter by me, giggling when they pass three young soldiers with kippahs on their heads, M-16s slung over their shoulders. Across the street, a group of pink-faced tourists probably Christian pilgrims who have disregarded the warnings against travelling to Israel in these dangerous times take photos of themselves next to an unremarkable alley. Natalie is hidden and revealed in intervals, glimpsed in the gaps between the vehicles and faces, through bus windows, a choppy sequence of still images, like a stop-motion video.

Its been seven years since I last saw her. After we broke up and by broke up, I mean she ripped my heart out of my chest and stomped on it with both feet she sort of disappeared. She lost touch with all of the friends we had back then. No one knew where she lived or what she was up to. No one ever ran into her. She was just gone.

I flick my cigarette butt on the asphalt, my eyes trying to register what they see, my brain slow to compute. At first I try to convince myself that it doesnt mean what I think it means. Of course she would look different. Shes thirty-five now, no longer the twenty-something Natalie from my memories, with the thick black curls she used to braid with shells and beads, the flimsy wrap skirts she had brought from India, the tie-dyed halter tops that exposed her delicate, jutting shoulder blades. There must be a perfectly good reason other than the obvious why shed be covering her hair, wearing a skirt down to her ankles and a long-sleeved shirt on a summer day. Orthodox women dont usually wear glittery and bohemian-looking scarves like that as a head scarf, dont let strands of hair fall out on the sides. They definitely dont look that smoking hot in clothes designed to make them invisible to men like me.

A part of me wants to walk away, pretend I havent seen her, keep my memory of her undisturbed. But then a businessman jaywalks into traffic while speaking loudly into his phone, setting off a series of honks and yells, and Natalie looks up at the commotion, and her gaze wanders over and fixes on me. Ive been staring for so long that Ive almost forgotten she can see me too. Her face broadens in surprise, then brightens. She extends her arm for a wave. I cross the street, wishing I had shaved this morning.

Lior. She stands up, her eyes glinting like two spoons. We dont hug, the space between us thick with past embraces, with a history of touching.

Wow, Natalie, youre

Dossit, she completes my sentence, smiling as if shes swallowed sunshine.

This is huge, I say, and she laughs. I quickly give her the onceover: her skirt is embroidered with flowers at the hem, her shirt is a vintage tunic with a floral print. Of course, shes a hippiedossit: one of those cool New Age Orthodox Jews often former Tel Avivians who found God but didnt lose their chic. Wow. I stroke the stubble on my chin. I had no idea.

Seven years now. Baruch Hashem. She gazes up. God bless.

Seven years, I repeat. Right after we broke up.

If youre shocked now you should have seen me then. She laughs again. I was much stricter in the beginning. I had myself covered from head to toe.

No kidding, I say. My mind is struggling to reconstruct the past seven years, replace the set of imaginary lives Id created for her in my head. An ashram in the desert, a commune in the Galilee, a temple in India. Never this.

Your hair, she says with a quick jerk of her chin.

Yeah. I rub my shaved head, the smooth patch in the middle Im grateful she cant see. All gone.

You look good like that.

And youre married. I gesture at the head scarf.

Yes. Her smile seems to fade a little. Remember Gadi?

I frown.

Sure you do. He was in my Judaism class in university.

Natalie used to complain about being forced to take Judaism classes as a part of the curriculum at Bar-Ilan University. Gadi an American who had moved from New York to find his inner Jew came over to our house a couple of times to help her study.

Weve been married for six years now.

Wow. Its like shes dug her fingernail into a scab, unearthing an old wound. Fucking Gadi. I knew he was trying to get into her pants. Natalie said I was crazy.

It was after we broke up, she quickly adds.

I nod and smile because I dont know what else to do. And kids? You probably have a troop by now. By the way her face crumbles, tightens around the lips, I know Ive asked the wrong question. Sorry, I say.

Her tan cheeks turn burgundy. Its okay.

We both look away. I use the opportunity to scan the patio, which I would have done earlier had I not been distracted. A couple holding hands over a half-eaten Greek salad, a young mother rocking a stroller with one hand while flipping through a magazine with the other, an old man bent over a notebook, two female soldiers sharing a cigarette. One of them glances at me, sizing me up. We are all trained to identify potential threats.

So what are you doing in Jerusalem? Natalie asks.

House-sitting in Ein Kerem.

Alone?

Yeah. I slide my hands into my pockets and hike up my jeans. My girlfriend stayed in Tel Aviv. Listen, can I join you?

Actually, I was just leaving.

Its a public place, I say. Its not like were in a closed room or anything.

She glances around the patio, checks her phone and finally says, Why not? A cup of coffee. Its been so long.

I slide into the chair opposite her and she heads to the washroom. I follow her with my gaze, the outline of her hips against her skirt. Shelly, the young waitress-slash film student whom I met here earlier this week shakes her head at me with a smile.

Natalie and I were twenty-two when we met. We had both just moved to Tel Aviv, me from the suburbs, her from a kibbutz in the Galilee. We worked at the same bar on Sheinkin back when Sheinkin was the place to be saving money for the big trip after the army. We fell in love like you do in your twenties, drowning into each other, blending until the boundaries of our selves blurred. It was the nineties: the Gulf War was over, Rabin was elected prime minister and everyone thought peace was possible, and that soon wed be partying in Beirut, eating hummus in Damascus and driving along the Mediterranean coast to Turkey. Tel Aviv was just gaining a reputation for being a party capital ir lelo hafsaka the city that never stops, and magazines in London and New York began covering its nightlife, including it on lists for the best clubs, the best beaches. Natalie and I rented an apartment on Shalom Aleichem, not too far from the beach, with old painted tile floors and a rounded white balcony, which we decorated with furniture we found by dumpsters. We smoked sandy grass from Egypt in bongs that we had bought at a twenty-four-hour kiosk, had sex in the washrooms of bars, and sat at a beach restaurant at four in the morning drinking hot water with mint leaves and eating hummus between swims in the dark, velvety waters of the Mediterranean. On weekends we hitched rides to trance parties in forests and did ecstasy, and on holidays we went to Sinai, slept in a straw hut by the sea and played backgammon with the Bedouins. We felt like we were a part of a generation, and that life had been made just for us and wed never be sick and never grow old and nothing bad would ever happen to us. Now, more than a decade later, Rabin is dead after being assassinated at a peace rally; suicide bombers explode in buses and cafs; our friends have all moved to the suburbs, bought apartments and had kids; Natalie is a married Orthodox and Im unemployed and dating a twenty-four-year-old.