The Best Place on Earth (13 page)

Rosalynn wheeled the old woman into the living room and set her by the window, where a beam of sunlight filled with dust particles fell into her lap. The sound of men singing at the synagogue down the street crept into the room, and Savta closed her eyes, humming along. Rosalynn wiped Savta’s watery eyes with a handkerchief. “Someone moving into the back?” she asked.

Savta nodded. “Ilan’s friend. Good boy.”

Rosalynn slipped her fingers through the plastic slats, peeking out. The young man slammed the van’s back doors. There was no furniture to speak of, just one queen-size mattress leaning against the chain-link fence. He hoisted a few boxes and walked past the house to the small shed in the back, which had been empty since the young Ethiopian couple had moved out months ago. On his way back to the van, he glanced at Rosalynn, his eyes startling blue behind black, thin-framed glasses, and she quickly stepped away from the window.

“Why you hiding?” Savta said. “Boy don’t bite.”

Blushing, Rosalynn retreated into the kitchen. She boiled water for tea and watched as the man balanced the mattress on his head. He jerked his head to get a loose strand of his auburn hair out of his eyes, and Rosalynn admired the warm, rich colour of it, like autumn leaves, and the dramatic lines of his jaw and cheeks. She poured Savta a cup of black tea with mint and steered her outside, to her barren front yard, the old concrete cracked and strewn with weeds. The morning was fresh, the first after many hot, stuffy fall mornings to offer a bit of breeze. Rosalynn loved when the weather cooled like this, which it almost never did back home in the Philippines. There, the air often felt saturated, as though it could be wrung into a bucket.

At the synagogue down the street, the morning service had come
to an end, and a steady stream of men in white-buttoned shirts tucked into dress pants, white kippahs on their heads, wrists crossed behind their backs, strolled past the house. Savta nodded at two elderly Yemeni women who walked by, both in loose dresses with colourful prints and head scarves, just like the ones Savta wore. The women slowed down, exchanged a few words in Arabic, clucked their tongues at something Savta had said and went on their way. The street fell silent again.

Rosalynn pulled a lip gloss from her pocket and quickly applied it, and then brushed her hair with her fingers, contemplating tying it up. Savta watched her. “You know,” Savta said. “I was beautiful once, like you.”

“You’re still beautiful,” Rosalynn said.

“I’m old.” Savta sighed, her shoulders rising, then dropping.

“You’re not that old.” Rosalynn dabbed Savta’s puffy eyes. “You want me to paint your nails today?”

“Too old.” Savta waved her hand, fingers heavy with silver rings. “I wish God take me away.”

“Shush.” Rosalynn frowned. “Don’t speak like that.”

“Then I can be with my husband, may he rest in heaven.” Savta looked up. “My husband, he save me. In Yemen the government”—she spat, cursing in Arabic—“they take all the Jewish orphans.”

This was Savta’s favourite story, one she never tired of relating. Years of working for elderly people had turned Rosalynn into a patient, engaged listener. Her first employer in Israel had been a frail holocaust survivor with a faded number on her wrinkly arm. Even though Rosalynn understood little at first, she nodded when her employer spoke, patted her shoulder when she cried. It was easier now, even with Savta’s heavily accented Hebrew. Savta had told Rosalynn about her parents, who had died when she was a little
girl in Yemen, about how the authorities had threatened to convert her to Islam. She told her how she had walked for weeks through the desert, from San’a to Aden, with a group of Jews on their way to Israel. How she too had worked in people’s homes when she arrived, cleaning and doing laundry for the rich Ashkenazi.

A rickety scooter pulled up to the front of the house and shuddered to a halt, a cloud of dust trailing behind it. Ilan hopped off, removing his helmet with jerky, fast movements, shaking loose the black, curly ‘fro he’d been growing ever since his release from the army. “Savta.” He bounced into the yard, arms open for a hug. He kissed his grandmother’s cheeks noisily. “How are you?”

Savta didn’t reply, suddenly hard of hearing. Rosalynn knew she was angry at her grandchildren for not visiting more often. “In Yemen,” she had told her, “the grandmother was queen.”

“Savta,” Rosalynn said loudly. “Ilan came to see you. He asks how are you.”

“Hara,” Savta muttered—
shit
in Arabic. “That’s how I am.”

Ilan burst into a short laugh and turned to Rosalynn. “You met Yaniv yet?”

Rosalynn shook her head no.

“Yaniv, my man,” Ilan hollered.

Yaniv stepped cautiously from the back, his shoulders hunched. He towered over Ilan, who—like many Yemenis Rosalynn knew—was small and wiry. Up close, he looked younger than she had first guessed; his narrow, freckled face had an unfinished quality, yet to settle into itself. His longish hair, tucked behind his ears, suggested he was also recently out of the army. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, his deep-set eyes seeming sad, the blue speckled with black. When he shook her hand, it disappeared into his large, warm palm.

Over the following week,
Rosalynn watched Yaniv settling into the shed. He woke up early and was often gone by the time Rosalynn and Savta came outside to drink their morning tea. He returned in the evenings, his clothes smeared with paint. As Rosalynn removed laundry from the lines in the front yard, she peeked down the grassy trail that led to the shed. She could hear him hammering nails into the walls, dragging things across the floor. One day, he hauled a dusty, worn-out couch off the street, leaving it under the plastic awning outside his door, where it sagged into the broken paving stones. He often sat there in the evenings, quietly strumming his guitar.

Rosalynn welcomed the sound of his music; by then she had almost grown accustomed to the quiet evenings here in Rosh HaAyin. In the beginning, she had been unnerved by the lack of traffic, the abundance of stars, the insistent chirping of crickets. She had moved to this small town, inhabited mostly by elderly Yemenis, almost a year ago, after her visa had expired with her employer’s passing. She had thought about going home then, to her young daughter, Carmen, but her husband—a good-for-nothing drunk she had married at twenty-one—was long gone, and her family was relying on her to provide: not just for her daughter, but for her mother, her siblings, their families. “Maybe stay a little longer,” her mother had pleaded on the phone. Her friend Beatrice, who had been living in Israel for fifteen years now, married to an Israeli, recommended her to the Hadad family, who had hired her under the table, paying her in cash.

The old neighbourhood in which Savta lived was pressed against the borders of town, edged by a narrow highway and open, yellow fields spread out against a big sky. To the east, the ruins of an ancient fortress stood atop a softly curved hill. It felt like a world
away, not just from Manila, but from the rich neighbourhood where she had lived with her previous employer in Tel Aviv, where she had had her own ensuite bathroom in the basement of a large villa, and where the murmur of the city—like a pulse—was always present. She looked forward to her days off, when she travelled back to Tel Aviv for a night out with her girlfriends, all of them Filipina caregivers like her.

At nights, after Savta went to bed, the neighbourhood swallowed up by darkness, Rosalynn missed home, missed Carmen, who was now almost thirteen. It had been eight years since she’d last seen her: Carmen was just a pigtailed little girl then, playing with her rag dolls in the mud outside their shed. Now, thanks to the money Rosalynn had been sending every month, Carmen was living with Rosalynn’s mom and extended family in a house Rosalynn had paid for, sleeping on a firm mattress, dressed in nice clothes, playing with Barbie dolls. Rosalynn called her mother twice a week, and her mother answered Rosalynn’s questions—how were Carmen’s grades? How tall was she now? Had her breasts grown yet? Had she gotten her period? Did she eat her vegetables?—before passing her on to Carmen, when Rosalynn would feel tears flooding her throat. She became good at speaking through them, forcing herself to smile.

From her room at the back of Savta’s house,
Rosalynn could spy on Yaniv through the lemon tree branches, trace his silhouette—not more than seven steps away—through the open shutters, hear him play guitar, smell the coffee he brewed in the mornings. He spent most evenings alone, except when Ilan showed up unannounced, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, dressed in dark jeans
and a tight T-shirt and smelling of too much aftershave. Ilan tried to get Yaniv to come out with him to a bar or a club in Tel Aviv, but Yaniv always said no. His friends would stay for a beer or a joint, and she could hear their chatter and laughter. Rosalynn envied their freedom: at their age she was already a mother, was already struggling with marital problems and money.

A couple of times she was woken up at night by Yaniv yelling in his sleep; a short, sharp cry, the words incoherent. She lay in bed with her eyes open, hearing nothing after that but the drone of crickets, a rooster calling, the murmur of a faraway car on the highway. In the mornings, she wondered if she had imagined it.

One Friday morning,
after she had heard him coughing through the night, Rosalynn noticed Yaniv’s shutters were still closed. Through her daily chores, the door to the shed remained closed, the coughing persisted. During Savta’s afternoon nap, as the neighbourhood began closing up for the Shabbat—last buses speeding up on the emptying streets, shopkeepers pulling down metal shutters, men heaving bags of groceries onto kitchen counters—Rosalynn walked to Yaniv’s shed and stood outside his door. She looked at the chipped wood, leaned in to listen, turned to gaze at the street behind her. Then she heard him cough inside and rapped lightly on the door. When he opened it, he was wrapped in a blanket, squinting against the bright daylight. The room smelled of sleep and moisture. His nose was red. “You’re sick,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Just a cold.”

“Okay,” she said. “First, let’s open your windows. You need air. Go sit outside.”

He obeyed, slouching on the couch. She went to Savta’s and came
back with a cup of steaming tea, lemon slices and grated ginger floating on top, and a pill, which he leaned his head back to swallow. “Thank you,” he said, hands around the cup, glasses steaming. “You’re an angel.”

“Just a mother,” she said, and immediately regretted it.

“You have kids?” His eyes widened.

“A girl. She’s almost thirteen.”

“Thirteen!” he exclaimed. “What, you were fifteen when you had her?”

She laughed, bashful.

“No, really, how old are you?”

“Not polite,” she reprimanded him.

She came back after dinner,
carrying a bowl of turmeric-yellow chicken soup. It was already dark out and cool enough that she needed a sweater. The neighbourhood had settled into its Friday night lull: Shabbat candles flickered in windows; families gathered around dinner tables for kiddush; children, reluctant to eat, played in the quiet streets. Yaniv was sitting on the couch, covered in a blanket and playing his guitar, his long legs spread on either side of the milk crate he used as a coffee table. He straightened up in his seat when he saw her.

“Feeling better?” Rosalynn said, her Hebrew sounding awkward to her all of a sudden.

“Much better.” He nodded. “And what’s this? You brought me soup? You are too nice to me.” He went inside to fetch a spoon, and she caught a glimpse of a hot plate on the counter, a lidded pot. It occurred to her that he may already have made himself dinner. Embarrassed, she placed the soup on the milk crate. “You
can keep for later,” she called to him, half turning to leave.

“No way.” He came out with two glasses of water, handing her one. “I love Yemeni soup. Ilan’s mom used to make it all the time when I lived with them.”

She looked at him. “You lived at Aviva’s house?”

He sat down on the couch. “When I was a kid. My mom … she was going through some stuff, so Ilan’s mother took me in for a couple of years. Why are you standing? Sit.”

She sat at the other end of the couch. It was the first time she had heard of an Israeli mother who had left her child with someone else. There were many mothers like Rosalynn among the migrant workers—her friend Jemma had three kids back in the Philippines—and she knew that Israelis judged them, pitied them. She didn’t know how to explain that she did what was best for her daughter, that leaving her behind was the biggest sacrifice she could have made for her.

She watched Yaniv: he ate ravenously, uttering sounds of pleasure. She felt sad for the abandoned kid he’d been, and then a fleeting stab of guilt.

The following evening,
as Rosalynn was spooning rice and vegetables onto dinner plates, Savta said, “So now you take care of Yaniv too, ha? Maybe you don’t have time for me anymore?”

“What? No,” Rosalynn hurried to say, but Savta winked and waved her hand. “Yaniv is a good boy. Hard life. No money. His father died in the war when he’s only a baby. His mother, she put him different places every time.”

Rosalynn set a plate in front of Savta, tucked a napkin into her collar.

“No woman to feed him. Maybe you call him for dinner?”

Rosalynn, who had just sat down, got up too fast, pushed her chair back. She eyed her reflection in the mirror by the door, moistened her lips, fluffed up her long black hair.

When Yaniv opened the door, his hair wet and brushed behind his ears, he seemed to brighten at the sight of her. “Savta invites you for dinner,” she said. “I mean, if you’re not busy.”

After dinner,
Savta and Yaniv sat at either end of the Formica table, sipping tea while Rosalynn washed the dishes. Savta grabbed Yaniv’s hand, holding it between hers. “We take care of you now.” Yaniv laughed. “I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing that all my life.”

“We take care of you,” Savta repeated, tapping on his hand. “You know, I was an orphan. My parents they die in Yemen.” She blinked her eyes, tears pooling at the edges.