The Best Women's Travel Writing (23 page)

EMILY MATCHAR

Birthright

Was this the land of her people, or just another foreign country?

A
few hours after landing in Tel Aviv, we were sitting in the fluorescent-lit conference room of a 1970s-era hotel in the Judean Hills, listening to a man named Momo talk about love.

“This trip is a gift,” said Momo to the three hundred of us. “All we ask in return is that you fall in love with Israel, fall in love with a Jew, marry Jewish, make Jewish babies, make
aliyah
and move to Israel. Is that so much to ask?”

I snorted involuntarily.

Momo was Shlomo “Momo” Lifshitz, a retired IDF officer and president of Birthright Israel, an organization designed to introduce young American Jews to the homeland. With an unrepentantly bald head, linebacker's build, and a gruff, Israeli-accented baritone, Momo had what you might call “stage presence.” Much of the audience seemed rapt by his words. Or maybe it was the jetlag.

I was twenty-four years old and visiting Israel for the first time on a free Birthright trip. Though as a travel writer I preferred going it alone—and often by the seat of my pants—I wasn't one to turn down a free trip to a new foreign country, even if it meant riding on a tour bus with a strict minute-to-minute itinerary. Plus, it made my parents and grandparents happy. My paternal grandmother had fled to Palestine from Poland during the 1930s when things started getting ugly for Jews in Central Europe. And my father, who grew up in Baltimore after my grandmother immigrated to the U.S., spent his childhood summers at Zionist camps, learning the Hatikvah and doing wholesome collective labor like building basketball courts.

Still, I wasn't counting on all the propaganda—though I suppose I should have known. Birthright Israel is often referred to as “Birthrate Israel” because so many former trip participants (there are some 250,000 alums) go on to marry and eventually procreate with each other.

As a non-religious North Carolina-raised Jew who hadn't seen the inside of a synagogue in years, the very idea of “marry within the tribe” or “Israel-as-homeland” seemed the antithesis of all my liberal multicultural values. And I'd recently begun dating a non-Jewish grad student—a blue-eyed, blond-haired son of the American West whose forebears had trekked across the country in covered wagons nearly a century before my ancestors fled the shtetls of Galicia. It had only been a few months, but I thought there might be something special there.

The day after Momo's speech, I filed into a bus with two dozen other twenty-somethings and set out to see the country. And within a few days, I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me; despite our group leader's strenuous efforts, I wasn't falling in love with Israel.

At a kibbutz in the Galilee, I rolled my eyes through a group-bonding exercise that involved crossing a moat with a rope. In Tel Aviv, I yawned through a rousing lecture on Israeli history and foreign policy. In Eilat, the “Vegas of Israel,” I sat in the corner of a cheesy bar while Israelis dressed like Gucci models gyrated on the dance floor. In Jerusalem, our tour leader berated me for straying from the pack to buy a disposable camera from a street vendor. Somewhere along a stretch of desert highway, the boy behind me on the bus made out noisily with one of the young Israeli soldiers brought along on the trip (both male and female), presumably for this express purpose. I just wasn't feeling it.

At the Western Wall, the men and women split up to visit their respective sections of the old temple. As we approached, Orthodox women in long-sleeved t-shirts and headscarves passed us walking backwards, leaving the wall but avoiding turning their backs to the holy site.

I reached out and touched the wall. It felt rough and chilly under the cold, white December sun. Next to me, a tiny elderly woman in black prayed silently, her chapped lips moving as she rocked back and forth with her eyes closed.

“Did you feel it?” a woman from my group later asked.

“Feel what?” I asked.

“The power,” she said. Some kind of thrilling, voltaic energy lit her eyes from behind.

“I could tell that it's a very powerful place for a lot of people,” I said, limply.

“No,” she said, turning her shiny eyes on me. “There was definitely something there. Something that can't be explained.”

“O.K.,” I said.

What was my problem? Did I lack a sense of awe? Or was I so disconnected from my roots that I couldn't sense the power that had drawn my ancestors to this place for thousands of years?

Then something started to happen. I began spending the long hours on the bus sitting with Jeff, a Yale medical student, the two of us geeking out over our mutual affinity for bad 1980s kids' movies. And I bonded with a few of the other women after we were forced to share a tiny room on a kibbutz in the Golan Heights. Someone gave me a nickname. I'd never had a nickname.

In the Negev, we rode camels and ate dinner beneath the stars, a nomadic feast of couscous and spiced meat stew. We slept in a Bedouin tent on stacks of Persian carpets, piled up together like a litter of puppies, encircled by the deep, languid smoke of our hosts' slow-burning shisha pipes.

As I dozed off under the cold, cloudless sky, it occurred to me that I was becoming part of a group. It was a novel feeling for me—I'd always been the kid at summer camp hiding in the bunk with a book while everyone else linked arms and swayed to the camp anthem during sing-along time.

A few days later, at a Dead Sea bathhouse, we females changed into bikinis in a communal dressing room where several hefty Eastern European
bubbies
sat in plastic chairs nodding into their ample bosoms. Soon we were cracking each other up with Yiddish-tinged imitations of our grandmothers:

“Oy, what a
shayna maidel
you are! The boys must be beating down your door!”

“You've got such a beautiful
punim
, if only you lost a few pounds!”

“Have you had your bowel movement yet today, sweetheart?” I chimed in, channeling my notoriously nosy Polish immigrant grandmother.

Outside, the sea was swimming-pool clear and flat as glass all the way across to the pink-tinged mountains of Jordan. It was cold outside, and the only other people on the salt beach were a few goose-pimply Russians floating nonchalantly in their white briefs.

We waded in, the hard-packed salt ground pricking our feet. The water was warmer than the air. I walked in a ways, then sat back and let the water bounce me back to the surface like a cork. My sense of gravity was distorted, my limbs no longer under my control. We all laughed as we slipped and bobbed through the slick, salty water. The sun was beginning to set, turning the surface of the water orange. Someone took a picture.

I called my grad student boyfriend on a pre-paid cell phone later that night, and his voice sounded thin and far away. Next door, the boys from the bus were having an impromptu sing-along with a borrowed guitar and several bottles of kosher wine. Their voices rose, rich and jocular, across the thin room divider.

Are these my people
? I asked myself.

On our last day in Israel, we went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, where we filed solemnly past grim piles of shoes and broken eyeglasses.

Again my thoughts turned to my grandmother, who fled Poland after her uncle was attacked in the street by teenage thugs hopped up on Hitler's rhetoric and their own youthful meanness. They'd cut off his long beard. My grandmother's father, my great-grandfather, saw which way the wind was blowing; he abandoned his factories, packed up his family, and headed for Palestine. They got out just in time. A few more months and their shoes might be on the bottom of a dusty heap in the necropolis of Yad Vashem.

Later that evening, we met with Momo. Once again, he spoke deeply and charismatically about Israel's splendors. The beaches! The gorgeous women! The brotherhood! But then his voice turned more serious and his eyes began scanning the audience, falling upon our faces one by one.

“The Jewish culture is three-thousand years old,” he said, slowly. “That culture has been passed down to you in an unbroken chain. You do not have the right to break that three-thousand-year-old chain by marrying outside the faith. YOU DO NOT HAVE THAT RIGHT!”

And just like that, the spell was broken. The happy, among-my-people feeling drained from my body as if a cork had been pulled from the sole of my foot.

In college I had dated, very briefly, an orthodox Jewish boy with black hair and green eyes and the cutest little gap between his front teeth. Even though we had nothing in common, I'd fantasized about what it would be like to marry him. I'd have a clear role in life, well-defined loyalties, a distinct place in the community. It might be nice, I thought. Easier.

That's what it would be like, I realized, to accept Israel's embrace, to reach out and take those pamphlets on “Volunteer Opportunities in Israel” and “Making Aliyah.” I knew kids who returned from Birthright trips fired up with a sense of purpose and belonging—the success stories. They'd go back to the homeland after college, marry an Israeli, wind up doing their Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Their parents would be thrilled.

It would be easier. But it wouldn't be me.

I'd like to visit Israel again, but this time on my own terms. My husband and I are thinking of going next summer. We'll buy slabs of halva and bags of dried sumac at the Mahane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem and scoop up piles of creamy hummus with pita bread in Tel Aviv cafes. We'll hike Masada in the glowing dawn, then float like seals in the Dead Sea beneath a pink sky. We'll see things I wasn't allowed to see on the Birthright trip, like the sunlight streaming through the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the lively neighborhood markets of the Muslim Quarter.

Yes, my husband. When my grandmother met my grad-student boyfriend, by then my fiancé, she declared him “a lovely boy.” She was dying then, and we'd gone to visit her in Florida knowing—even though she didn't—that she wouldn't be able to make it to our wedding. Later, after we'd flown home, she said to my aunt, “He's not Jewish, you know.” But that was O.K., she added—he was a lovely boy, and we were in love. She couldn't wait to dance at our wedding.

Emily Matchar is a freelance culture writer and
Lonely Planet
guidebook author. In the line of duty she's hot-wired a pickup truck, ridden up a Mexican volcano on a horse with a wooden saddle, and eaten at thirteen different Memphis barbecue joints in 36 hours (not recommended). A native of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Emily studied English and Spanish at Harvard University. Now she writes for publications like
Salon, The Washington Post, Men's Journal, Outside, Gourmet
, and many others. See more of her writing at
www.emilymatchar.com
.

KATE M
c
CAHILL

Spiral-Bound

She found what she was seeking in the last place she looked.

T
he day I met Teddy, the heat and the grimy streets of Pune had mixed a muggy haze outside, which leached its way into the bookstore, slicking our foreheads and necks. As I examined the travel section, the bell above the door clanged, and Teddy stood for a moment in the doorway, backlit by the sun, and then walked to where I stood, so close I could hear him breathing. I watched from the corner of my eye as he scanned the horror novels and selected an old hardcover. I caught a glimpse of the curling binding:
Carrie
, by Stephen King. The bell above the bookstore door clanged again; hot wind blew in.

Teddy was a tall black man with close, tight curls and white teeth, save for a brown one toward the molars, which he'd learned to hide by keeping the left side of his mouth closed. Because of this, he talked with only half his mouth, and that, combined with the rotting tooth behind full lips, gave him a sly, crafty look. I wouldn't learn why he smiled the way he did until later, of course, and so on the day he walked into the bookshop, all I saw was the crooked smile. He was careful about hiding the tooth, practiced at concealing it after so many years. We were four hours northeast of Mumbai, in a city known mostly for an ashram built by the guru Osho.

Teddy's eyes sidled to mine as we browsed, but I looked away. Aman, my host, had warned me of certain people on my first night in this city. There were those who came to Pune for the money that could be made selling drugs to hippies at the ashram; there were the ones who slipped pills into tourists' coffees at the German bakery, or took them away by motorbike into the night. Aman was a friend of a friend, a second cousin of a farmer I'd met picking apples near Dehradun, and I figured he was exaggerating a little, protective and trying to scare me into being extra-careful. Still, I took the horror novel in Teddy's hands as a sign; I kept my eyes averted and continued to browse.

The books on the shelf before me bore beaten bindings and dated titles, and I set my attention on those.
The USSR Today
, one stated gloomily.
Myanmar: Temples of Splendor
, read the cracked yellow spine of another. When I tugged it down, opening the long cover that drew stickily back, a flattened moth broke off and spiraled to the floor. The pages showed Technicolor tourists admiring a crumbling, sunlit temple.

Those books were like the labyrinthian, rutted streets outside, the old men on rickety gray bicycles, even the street children, their cries at once pitiful and joyful, and the beggars with their practiced wheedling. I would remember each one as an enduring Indian staple: worn by time, accustomed to crowds, doggedly resilient. Teddy, on the other hand, was fresh, with pearl buttons on his Western shirt and pointy shoes on his feet. “Have you read this?” I heard him ask. I looked up; he waved
Carrie
. I couldn't help it: I smiled, shook my head, and pretended to look grim. No, he wasn't at all like India's enduring things; he was tall and upfront, his face unlined, his eyes flickering.

“What's wrong?” Teddy asked, seeing the look on my face. “What's it about?” His question was mockingly innocent. Even if you knew nothing about
Carrie
, the cover, with the heroine's body covered in cow's blood, told you everything. “Just joking,” he said at my raised eyebrows and flipped fast through the pages like he was just seeing how long it was, how closely set the type.

“So, you can't stand the gore?” he asked after another moment. When I looked at him, he winked.
Be careful,
a voice inside me said. But Teddy continued talking, and I kept listening. How welcome his English sounded, because everyone who'd told me that English was spoken all over India had been wrong. In the cities, sure—the language was used, marked with that charming and plucky accent, but in other parts of India, it wasn't nearly as common as I'd expected.

“That Stephen King—he's something else,” Teddy remarked, lowering his voice a little as an elderly Indian couple brushed past us. “He's American, like you?”

I could tell by the way he said it that he knew the answer, but I nodded anyway. His own accent sounded imprecise, a little off-kilter, rolling and round. He was from South Africa, if I had to guess.

He looked at me like he was waiting to hear me ask where he was from, but I remembered Aman's warning and said nothing.
Don't push it.
When I looked up from the Myanmar book again, he'd bent to examine the rest of the Stephen King section. I slid my book back beside the others on the shelf, and as I walked toward the door to leave, I ran my fingertips along the soft spines once more. I love the way old books feel, the way they leave their scent on my hands, the way their pages can feel leathery or dusty, brittle and crackling or soft as butter. Anywhere you'll go, you'll find books, if you look hard enough. I like knowing that.

Just before I reached the end of the stack, the pad of my first finger caught on the broken coil of a spiral-bound book, and I drew my hand back. I thought I felt a tiny spark as my fingers left the book. I stopped, peered at it, then eased it out from between the others. It was a loose-leafed notebook, the kind you buy in American drugstores. I felt Teddy glance over, but in that moment, nothing could keep me from lifting the cover and looking inside. There was something funny about it, I just knew. There'd been a spark.

Handwriting choked the inside cover and the very first page: all Sanskrit and all in pencil, delicate marks made by a trembling hand. The words spilled onto the next page, and then the next and the next. In places, the writing ran over itself, and as I turned the pages the characters grew smaller and began to march up and down the margins and snake between each coil of the binding. It was as if the book had been the writer's only source of paper for a very long time.

“Someone's journal,” I heard Teddy whisper beside me.

“Maybe,” I said.
Put it back
, the little voice said,
and leave Teddy. That's what Aman would want you to do
. But I just couldn't take my eyes from those pages. The notebook felt both heavy and flimsy, like the words were weighing down the cheap paper. Teddy didn't try to take the book, didn't say anything else, and together we looked at the pages the way little kids look at picture books without reading the words. The tightness of those lines; their growing frenzy.

Toward the very end of the notebook, we came across a nearly clean page, startling and white like a flat, smooth stone in grass. The lines resembled veins on a wrist, and the only other thing on the page was a signature at the lower right. The signature was both scratchy and looping, if that can describe it: hard at its points, but soft in its curves. How had it happened, this page? I heard Teddy's breath quicken a fragment. Had the writer waited as he filled up every other page for the person who would sign their name on the only blank one? I imagined a prisoner, or someone exiled. Someone banished. Was it a hastily scribbled prayer?

Teddy brushed the signature delicately with one calloused thumb. I reached out myself and felt the way the writing cut into the page. It was impossible to tell whether the signature was a man's or a woman's, in the way it both rolled and cut into the page. I glanced at Teddy; he shrugged. When I returned to the book I felt a little chill, even in the hot store: looking at that page was like seeing a secret.

I felt increasingly guilty as I held it in my hands. What was it doing on these shelves, anyway? I glanced toward the counter at the young shopkeeper, who was typing into her cell phone intently, perched on a stool with her legs crossed. I closed the book, knelt down, and slid it onto the lowest shelf, taking care to tuck it in so that it wasn't easily visible to a browser. Teddy didn't protest. It didn't occur to me to even ask whether the book was for sale, for it seemed a mistake, placed on these shelves by accident when really it belonged in a locked drawer, or behind a pane of glass in a museum. For one selfish second I imagined waiting for Teddy to leave, and then slipping the book into my purse, hurrying back to Aman's and holding it open again, this time alone.

We stood there silently for a while, looking at the place where I'd slid the book back. What could be said, after all, except that those pages held a mystery?

Teddy broke the spell. “Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked, and then, all of a sudden, I was aware once more of the shouts of chai wallas and the shotgun explosions of motorbike engines. No, I didn't have time for coffee; meditations started in an hour, and I still had to meet Aman beforehand. I shook my head.

“Can I at least get your name?” Teddy asked, and I told him.
What the hell; we'd already shared one secret.

“I'm Teddy,” he replied, and plucked
Carrie
back up off the shelf. “I'm taking this one,” he added, grinning.

“Good luck with that,” I said, and without looking again for the spiral-bound book on the shelf, I left the store and went back out into the sunshine.

The ashram wasn't like the rest of Pune, which was built, as far as I could tell, around the wide, trash-littered, dried-up river that divided the city. Aman lived on the northern side, opposite the ashram, up a little street lined with apartment buildings built in the seventies. Most of Pune's streets were unpaved—except for the wide avenues that circled the city center—and were crowded with vegetable stands and bidi shops, vegetable wallahs and munching cows. The deeper you walked into the old city's heart, the farther you stepped back in time: no cars, just cows and bike rickshaws and a crumbling red temple, centuries old. Strings of marigolds for sale.

But the ashram was perpetually manicured, forever gated to keep the scented flowers protected, the wood floors gleaming, and the servants immaculate in their starched white linens. Beggars gathered at the ashram gates, but guards planted there day and night made sure they'd never get inside. You could feel the shift as soon as you entered; gone were the noisy cars, the shouting hawkers, the trash on the ground. Fake waterfalls obliterated all unpleasant noise, and neatly shorn grass or tall, carefully planned stands of trees replaced the city's broken pavement.

I was late to meet Aman after the bookstore, even though I'd been rushing. It always took longer than I thought it would to race back to the flat and change into my red robe. Everyone at the ashram had to wear the red robe, even the guards and front-desk agents. The robes kept us all looking the same, and the most enthusiastic attendees wore the red robes everywhere. Those devout, red-robed souls stuck out like sore thumbs among the city's chai wallahs and rickshaw drivers, fruit vendors and street children. As for me, I hated my robe—it chafed my skin and made me sweat profusely—but when I didn't wear it to the ashram, Aman took offense. He'd given it to me as a gift and wore his each day, washing it carefully in the evenings and putting it out on the little balcony to dry in the night.

I didn't tell Aman about Teddy as we sat sipping our tea before meditation. Of course I didn't, for he'd only frown and warn me. Aman was a little man with large, dark eyes and glasses that magnified them further. I knew he took pride in showing me his city, his ashram, introducing me to his friends and neighbors. It was strange to be led around the city by this little man who'd taken me in with delight; sometimes, I just wanted to walk by myself. Still, I was grateful for Aman's kindness, and I tried not to let my occasional grumpiness show.

I didn't mention the notebook to Aman, either. Instead, I held it in my mind like some precious stone, a thing to be guarded and saved. Aman and I just drank our tea, and he went over our schedule: noon meditation, another at two, and then the White Robe ceremony in the evening.

Aman had taken great pains to ensure that I attended at least one White Robe ceremony. In the first few days after I'd arrived, we'd both been too exhausted; meditation at 5 A.M. followed by afternoons of touring Pune tired us out. But today, Aman was determined. The morning before, he'd sent me across the street to his neighbor's, a woman who lived with her teenaged daughter. They lent me a white robe stamped with cream-colored flowers. Aman laundered it again for me after I brought it home—just in case, he'd said.
In case of what?
I wanted to ask, but bit my tongue; anyway, I figured I knew why. While Aman kept his flat spotless, right down to the shoes lined up by the door, the neighbor's house was just two rooms, smaller than Aman's and stinking of cigarettes, the windows shut tight to preserve the air conditioning. I didn't mind the smell much, just the close, freezing air. The television blared.

Aman drank down the last of his tea, and we made our way to the meditation room. It was just like the website pictures: the whole room sparkled with mosaics made of mirrors. A few dozen people already sat cross-legged on the low, wide steps that rose toward the back of the room, their eyes closed. Silently, Aman and I joined them, and he settled into a lotus position, closing his eyes and slowing his breath.