After a week of burned eggs and three burned pans, Dad concluded that hard-boiled eggs were the healthiest option. “Thank God that Mom is coming back today,” he said.
We took two buses to meet her at the terminal at Tel Aviv airport. We stood waiting outside the Arrivals area. And waited. Dad was holding a rolled-up newspaper, and I was clutching a bouquet of prickly roses wrapped in noisy cellophane. The passengers who emerged, one after the other, pushing trolleys loaded with huge suitcases, searched for a familiar face there to greet them and were greeted by congestion, clamor and loud shouts. Relatives rushed over and fell upon their loved ones with hugs and kisses. With whoops of joy, children jumped onto the suitcases piled on the trolleys, yelling, “What did you bring me?” But Mom didn’t appear. Slowly, the stream of passengers dwindled, and there was still no sign of her. Dad became nervous and started chain-smoking. He asked every passenger coming out if this was the flight from Germany and when they nodded, he muttered to himself and me, “Where is she? Why doesn’t she come out?” After more than two hours of nerve-racking waiting, my flowers were wilting. Dad decided to go and find out what happened, to see if Mom had even been on the flight.
Then we saw her. A tiny woman in a brown dress, carrying only a small handbag. She looked upset and exhausted and could barely stand on her feet. I wanted to run up to her and give her a big hug, but it seemed too babyish a thing to do and not suitable for my age. Instead, I walked up to her in a way I thought was very nonchalant and held out my hand. Like a grown-up. But Mom grabbed me and hugged me tightly and kissed me hard on the face and wet my cheeks with her tears. I knew my face must look like a mess with all the lipstick she had probably smeared all over my face. She whispered in my ear how much she had missed me and then casually asked Dad if he had managed food-wise. Dad said that everything had been great, we ate wonderfully, and added that he even thought I had put on some weight. Luckily, there were no chickens around to protest how he had abused their eggs and burned omelets. Mom and Dad didn’t embrace and didn’t kiss and didn’t say anything else to each other. But I was concerned about something else entirely.
“Where’s your suitcase?” I asked Mom.
“It got lost. That’s why it took so long. I had to fill out a million forms at Lost and Found.”
“It sometimes happens that a suitcase is sent somewhere else,” Dad intervened.
“I hope not—all the presents I brought are in the suitcase. Don’t be sad. They promised to find it and deliver it to the house.” Mom thought I was concerned because of the gifts, but I was worried about the fact that the suitcase had disappeared.
We got to the Tel Aviv central bus station and got on the number-sixty bus for Ramat Amidar. Dad had kept silent for too long, so now he burst out in nonstop yammering in the two languages that annoyed me most: Polish and Yiddish. I was boiling with rage, because in Israel people should speak Hebrew and not Diaspora languages. Had we been at home, I would have demanded they stop and given them a speech about Ben Yehuda and the fight for Hebrew, and Dad, who actually loved Hebrew and had mastered it wonderfully, would have said that with all due respect to other languages, there are some Yiddish words that just can’t be replaced, like krekhtsen, for example. But we were on the bus and didn’t want to make a scene. Mom noticed that I was staring at her, but didn’t understand why.
“It is me. I haven’t changed. Why are you looking at me so strangely? I only went away for a week. I won’t ever go away again. I promise,” she said and stroked my cheeks. But I was thinking about how so many bad things were happening to me all at once. First I had lost the best friend I ever had, and now, out of all the suitcases, Mom’s was the one that had gone missing.