“Come back soon,” Dedushka says. He glances over at my grandma, who is chewing on what looks like a cold leg of chicken, her face covered in some kind of sauce. “Say goodbye, Mila.”
“I’ll meet you in the car,” my dad says, and skedaddles.
“Don’t forget us,” Babushka says. “College is important but so are your grandparents.”
“She lives in Israel,” Dedushka repeats. “Anna is the one who—”
“Ah. Yes, that’s right,” my grandma says nodding, still chewing on the chicken skin. “Masha lives in Israel, and never visits, that ungrateful girl.”
“I’m Masha,” I explain. “I’m here now.”
She looks at me as if she hadn’t noticed me there before. “Oh, okay.” She folds her hands together on her lap and looks to my grandpa. “Where does Masha live, Sasha? Italy?”
“Israel,” he answers gruffly, sitting down on an armchair beside the couch. All the energy he had seems to have deflated
“Babushka, I’m visiting right now!” I explain, trying to keep myself from getting annoyed. Then I take a deep breath. It’s not her fault, I remind myself. She’d always been easy to get annoyed with; my whole life she was judgmental and sort of mean, causing fights with anyone she could find to fight with, fights so intense that she no longer speaks with any of her living siblings or their kids. Usually I could laugh her judginess away. This, however, is no longer the case. Now that she is obviously sick, it’s more sad than funny or annoying.
“Right,” she says, nodding, staring into space. “Did you know my brother is trying to take my plot at the cemetery? My own brother!”
“Huh?” I say. “Can he even do that?”
“Enough, Mila. No one is taking your grave, for the hundredth time!” He shakes his head at me and apologizes for her. “I don’t know where she gets this idea.”
“It’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s not her fault either,” I explain. But my grandpa doesn’t believe this; I can tell from the expression in his eyes, which is still a little angry. He wrings his tiny, hairy hands together and closes them around each other. Sweat pools in the front of his white wifebeater tank top. Behind him, the radiator starts hissing. He stares at me, brows furrowed, serious now.
“Masha, I have to ask you: your sister’s not in trouble, is she?”
“What have you heard?”
Dedushka looks towards the windows, which are covered in lace curtains and a layer of snow. They face a parking lot with several large Dumpsters in a row. An old woman is standing there waiting for a tiny white dog to relieve itself in the dead grass. “I gave her some money a few weeks ago, but since then I haven’t been able to reach her. What happened to her phone?”
“Oh… I think it broke.”
“Did she go on a trip? She wrote us a few letters.”
“I think so.”
“But she’s okay?”
“She is totally fine. She had a fight with Papa.” I really do believe now that she’s okay. And if she’s okay that means I can go home. I only wish I could take her with me. I can’t stop thinking about how much better off we’d be if we’d never received that letter from the American embassy approving our refugee status; if we’d gone straight to Israel, like we’d originally planned. Israel is where we belong, that’s as clear as day now. My parents chose America for financial purposes, and the cost of this was everything that had gone wrong. Money isn’t enough, not the lack of it nor the surplus, to replace what you lose when you uproot an entire generation of people from their home. Money alone cannot take the place of community, culture, physical closeness. In Israel, it would have all been different. This would have never happened to Anna there. She wouldn’t have needed it.
“I see,” Dedushka says. From below, my dad beeps his horn in the parking lot. I know it’s him because I can see his car from here. I stand to go, but my grandpa looks so miserable that I first have to give him another hug. He is even sweatier than he was earlier. My grandma, on the other hand, is covered now in two blankets and looks dry as a bone. I am filled with so much love for them it’s like a balloon that could pop if I stand there any longer. “Well, as long as she is okay.”
“See you soon, Dedushka,” I say, blinking back tears. I hadn’t realized till now how much I’d missed them being abroad all these years; how much I will miss them when I return. He doesn’t ask me why I’m in town, which I’m grateful for. It occurs to me that he might not care why. Then he squeezes me so tight I can’t breathe again.
“Oh, Mashinka, you and your sister are my life. Please come back more often. When are you flying home?”
I don’t know the answer to this. My dad only bought me a one-way ticket. Possibly this was a hint, but I choose to believe it’s because he doesn’t know how long this might take. “I’ll come say bye before I go, I promise.”
I move to my grandma and give her another hug, too. A piece of food that is stuck to her cheek falls to the side of my sweater, and I quickly flick it off. “You tell my son Pavel I’m not dead yet and he better visit me soon. He’s forgotten about me, his own mother!”
“He was just here, what are you talking about!” Dedushka yells.
“I’m a useless old lady now,” Babushka laments. “Oy, you better hope you don’t live this long, my granddaughter. Sixty, seventy, okay. But eighty? Put yourself out of your misery first.”
“Mila, for God’s sake!” my grandpa screams, getting angry again.
“It’s not her fault,” I explain again, patting my grandpa’s shoulder. Because of the work I do in Israel, tutoring and helping new immigrants translate official documents, I’ve spent a lot of time around elderly Russians, and they seem to take dementia extra hard. It’s probably because no one lived that long in Soviet Ukraine, so they never had a chance to witness what happens to people when they reach such an advanced age. Instead of being sad, they get angry, like the other person is merely trying to annoy them. “She’s sick, Dedushka.”
He continues to shake his head in bewilderment. “He was just here,” he repeats, almost as if to himself.
“I know,” I tell him, patting his shiny bald forehead like I used to do when I was little.
Once I’m outside again, my stomach aches with so many conflicting emotions I almost feel like I could throw up. I’ve only been gone a few years; in some ways, nothing has changed at all. But in others, it’s like an entire lifetime has passed. My grandparents have always been old, in my mind. In some ways my grandma is right. Seventy is old. Eighty-three and eighty-five? Practically ancient. You can die from a cold. And that’s if we even know their real ages. What if I never see them again?
How could I ever repay them for what they did for us? Can anyone really ever repay anyone?
I get into the car, squeezing the envelope in my fist. It’s like a little bright star emanating from my pocket. Then I turn to Papa.
I try to take in the image of him, smoking a cigarette with his shoulders slumped, drinking his third espresso in a row. My father who is most certainly only going to get older, too, the longer I am away. I am already thinking about how I will remember this moment, how the trip will settle into my brain and feel less and less real the more days pass in Israel with David. And the more days pass, the more I will remember what I already spent so much time learning before and forgot: it’s hard for me to be apart from my family—but it’s harder to be with them. Not everyone is meant to share space. I prefer to love them all from afar. Because we are so different, it’s the only way I can be myself.
I also want to forgive them. I’ve spent the last five years trying to ignore the shadow of guilt I feel every time I have a good conversation with David’s parents instead of my own. I was so mad at them for being unable to accept me that sometimes I couldn’t see straight. It felt like I could only see myself in opposition to them. This was, in part, why I’d left, and why I’d enjoyed Judaism, too. Sure, it has rules, but for the most part its followers can do as they please and believe in God as much as they choose. In contemporary Hebrew, Ba’al T’shuva describes a Jew from a secular background who becomes observant. T’shuva also means to atone for one’s wrongdoings. So in a way, becoming religious in Israel is a process of also atoning for your past. In the month before Yom Kippur, rabbis preach T’shuva, or atonement, between people and personal relationships; on Yom Kippur, we seek reconciliation between us and God. If I’m being honest, I’d always skipped straight to the latter.