Before We Say Goodbye Read Online Free Page B

the day they had buried Michael’s arm, she could no longer bear to feel closed in, anywhere. Their flat, for example, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, so packed with African furnishings and thousands of photos of America, and so small that if you took two steps you were already back at the door. The school entrance hall, always so full that you had to jostle your way through. The gym with no windows and the air that kept all the sweat inside. Clothes so tight that it took an effort to put them on and pull them off.
    Yet she had earned those tight-fitting clothes. She had paid for them with months of workouts in front of a Jane Fonda video, and an uncompromising diet that had slimmed down her waist, hips and bottom, and won her the looks of Joseph, Moshe and even Aharon, who was gorgeous and right out of her league. An apple in the morning, salad for lunch, chicken in the evening. Checking herself out in the mirror thirty times a day. Weighing herself on an empty stomach. Measuring herself. Trying on outfit after outfit before deciding what to wear. Getting up half an hour early each morning to give herself the full make-up treatment: foundation, blusher, powder, lipstick, mascara and eyeliner. Watching her face change, take on the shadow of a woman and glow as if she were happy.
    That had been her life, and only two months had passed since that life. Two months since Michael’s flight.
    Like Myriam, Michael had wanted to go away. They both wanted to go away. “We are Americans,” they would say to one another. “What is there here for us? Sooner or later we’ll leave.” Michael really was American; he was born in Texas and so was his mother, whom his father had met in Paris. But one day his parents got sick and tired of McDonald’s, the long cars and the long roads, the gangs in their suburbs. They remembered the Promised Land.
    For her part Myriam felt American because they had moved to California when she was only four months old, because of her father’s job, and hadn’t returned to Israel until she was twelve. And whereas her older brother, Nathan, who was almost fourteen at the time, had been able to study Hebrew for a year before starting his new school, she, being younger, had gone straight into hers. It hadn’t been fun, feeling excluded from everyone’s games for almost a year. And, since then, it had been so much effort, always, to keep up with the others in her schoolwork.
    “It’s so miserable here,” she complained constantly to her mother. “When we gonna go back to California?”
    Since her husband had left, moving to Tel Aviv and leaving her alone in Jerusalem with the children, since everything around her had become so difficult to understand, even Myriam’s mother had begun to ask herself, When we gonna go back to America?
    It wasn’t just the language – other things in this country made life unpleasant. The armed soldiers who filled the streets, for a start. It had been one of the first things Myriam recalled seeing, newly arrived from America; still only young, it had frightened her. It was the years following the first intifada. Her mother had tried to explain it to her – as much as an adult feels like explaining to a child. And she had made that little do for always; she simply never wanted to tackle these issues.
    *   *   *
    “What does it mean to say we’re Jews?” Myriam and Michael would ask one another many times, in heated disagreement with others and their certainties. “Why do we have to stop being American to go back to being fundamentally a Jew? Why at a certain point in life do we have to?”
    And everything was miserable in this city of “fundamentally” Jews, especially compared with California’s open faces and broad shoulders; the noisy laughter; the bellies and backsides wobbling under clothing; the toys in the shop windows; the big bars; the neon signs and strong colours. Here everything was white and monotonous, and black, and dry, and