Another step forward, only a few steps away now from officially entering. Weird, too, how you could be in a country but not officially in it until you left a certain part of the airport. What a new thing that was, delineating non-country zones within countries. Shmuli wondered how many more borders had been created since the inception of airports, since the human invention of lines between countries had been blurred by other human inventions.
* * *
In 1941, his paternal grandmother was whisked away from Bulgaria with nothing but what she could hold in her hands. They were small hands, and so she carried little: her pillowcase, her favorite doll, and a saltshaker, because she felt the need to grab just one last thing and it was the only one in sight her hands could hold.
In the future, people would hear this story of fleeing so many times, yet find a way to separate it from the stories that continued. They would forget that the tragedy lay not just in the reason for the fleeing, but in how many succeeded in fleeing only to be turned away. Shmuli’s grandparents had not been turned away, and so he existed.
That saltshaker shaped Shmuli, too. Quite literally, because he was ten when he flung it across the room toward his friend, an unfortunate game of catch gone wrong. When he crossed over in his bare feet to the shards littering the floor, one split his toe open. The scar had faded somewhat, but he could still see it curling around the edge of his foot whenever he clipped his toenails. A pinkish white wink, a scythe. It still, to that very day, made him feel a pang of guilt that had far outlasted the pain of the wound itself. He could still see his grandmother’s face as she swept the pieces together and gathered them into a plastic bag, which she didn’t have the heart to throw out.
She’d died a few years later with the bag still in her bedside table, in the back of the drawer next to her bracelets and passport and the pictures she’d kept of her grandchildren, each one of them a miracle made possible by migration.
* * *
Finally, Shmuli was called forward to an officer. The officer was a black woman who, in his brief amateur observation from the line (not brief enough), seemed to be the friendliest of the officers. He stepped up to the window, set his passport down, the customs form tucked into the page where his visa had been stamped a few weeks earlier.
He said good morning, wondering if his relative lack of accent made him less suspicious or more. She didn’t seem to care one way or another and simply asked him for his I-20. He dug his fingers into the envelope, flipping through all the documents he knew he didn’t need but his mom had made him bring anyway. In the adjacent line, an officer was speaking heavily accented Spanish at a woman who was struggling to understand. Shmuli wanted to tell her that if she pretended she didn’t need this, they’d be more okay with her. But of course he didn’t say that, didn’t know if the thought had an ounce of truth to it or was just something that was on his mind because of all these things that had shaped him.
His own customs agent typed away, barely looking at him. Then she reached for the I-20 and started to rise from her seat. “Come with me,” she said, his passport in her hand. She led him to a room with six or seven rows of chairs all facing a window. There were a handful of people in the room, all looking bored and nervous to varying degrees. Shmuli wanted to rail against this decision to bring him into this room; he wanted to go collect his bag, wanted to make it to his university soon, wanted to enter this new stage of his life. But deep down he’d been expecting something like this all along, and knew that a complaint here would only worsen his mood. It was a luxury his relatives did not have: complaints about waiting rooms.
* * *
When they left for Buenos Aires, Dehlia and Itzhak were grilled by friends and relatives about why they would go to a place in such economic disarray. “It’s actually turning around for them,” they said. “The shekel will go far, and the rockets cannot reach.”
“It’s been a good year,” their friends said, meaning not that many bombings. Meaning: how can you leave home?
“It will continue to be one,” Dehlia and Itzhak answered, and raised their glasses.
In Argentina the streets still showed signs of riots, but the glass had been cleaned up and stores were opening, and there was no waiting around for life to come to them. At the synagogue they met Jewish families who had them over for shabbat, though they’d never made it a priority to celebrate back in Israel. Shmuli and his little brother made friends, started rolling their tongues with ease. They played soccer in the streets and the parks, which would make the grassy fields of Shmuli’s future university’s intramural fields a luxury.
He would become fast and limber, bold in the way he threw himself at the ball on that luxurious grass, not having to fear for scrapes and cuts. A girl on his co-ed team would at first laugh at his movements, then feel a tingle of anticipation before their games, longing to see him again. The temporariness of his visa would cause her anxiety even before they were together, and eventually, when he had to cross a border yet again, she would decide how her life, too, would be shaped by migration.
But that would come later, after he learned to sit parallel to the table, after Spanish imprinted itself into him, after that little room in which he waited a mere half hour, and, without a hand clamped to his mouth, without anyone hunting him down, without him having to flee, his passport was stamped, and he was waved through into the country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adi Alsaid is the author of several young adult novels, including Let’s Get Lost, Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak, and We Didn’t Ask for This. He was born and raised in Mexico City and now lives in Chicago.
More books from critically acclaimed author
ADI ALSAID!
More books from Adi Alsaid:
We Didn’t Ask For This
Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak
North of Happy
Never Always Sometimes
Let’s Get Lost
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ISBN-13: 9781488069383
Come On In
Copyright © 2020 by Adi Alsaid
All the Colors of Goodbye
Copyright © 2020 by Nafiza Azad
The Wedding
Copyright © 2020 by Sara Farizan
Where I’m From
Copyright © 2020 by Misa Sugiura