This might have been why, when Itzhak and Dehlia, years later, announced they were going to Argentina, Deborah didn’t hesitate to say she would follow them across the world.
Shmuli stepped forward in line. A little boy who’d probably been awake too long was wailing at his mother’s side, tugging at her hand, yelling that one syllable that children in almost every language seemed to have deep within them: “Ma!” Several people, likely as tired and worn down by the day as the child was, cast dirty glances at the mother, who was attempting to juggle the carriage, her purse, the passports, a half-eaten sleeve of cookies.
He wanted to reach out and offer a hand, though those immigration lines always felt so disapproving, like the rules had all changed and any one of your actions could be punished. Plus, she was at the other end of the line, making it hard for him to simply tuck his manila folder under his arm and provide her with some momentary respite.
It felt wrong not to be able to help, like a cramp or an itch he couldn’t scratch, and so he looked away from the mother, scanned the other faces in line. There was something great about the US, how difficult it was to know if someone was local or foreign by appearance alone. Looking at the line for residents, at the foreign line, at the customs agents themselves, it was impossible to distinguish between them with any clarity.
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
