Two Sisters, One Fire, No Arguing About Dinner

The Distance We Never Named

My sister Naomi and I grew up sharing a bedroom in Johannesburg with two single beds pushed so close together we could reach across the gap and hold hands if one of us had a nightmare. She left for London when she was twenty six, for a boy who didn't work out and a career that did, and somewhere in the thirty years since, the space between our beds turned into an ocean neither of us knew how to swim back across. I stayed. I married a man from our shul, kept a kosher kitchen with two sets of dishes and a separate sink drainer that my children still tease me about, and raised my family inside the same rhythms our mother raised us in. Naomi didn't reject any of it exactly. She just stopped. First it was the odd Friday night dinner skipped because of work, then it was a whole decade where she told me on the phone she still felt Jewish in her heart, which is a sentence I came to dread because I never knew what to say back to it that didn't sound like an accusation.

We loved each other. We just couldn't sit at the same table anymore without one of us feeling judged and the other feeling foreign, and food, of all the ordinary things, became the wall. Every visit home for a wedding or a funeral turned into a quiet negotiation about where we could eat and what she'd order and whether I'd notice, and whether she'd notice me noticing. Neither of us ever said the word estranged. We just got very good at short phone calls.

An Idea Neither of Us Proposed Directly

It was our niece, Naomi's daughter, who first mentioned that there were operators who ran a full Kosher Safari through the bushveld, everything catered and supervised, no compromises needed from anyone at the table. I remember laughing when I heard it, not because it was funny but because it solved a problem I'd never said out loud to anyone but my husband. I mentioned it to Naomi almost as a joke, testing the water, and she went quiet on the phone in a way that told me she'd been thinking about something similar for longer than I had. Within a fortnight we had flights booked to meet each other in Johannesburg for the first time in nine years without a wedding or a coffin as the reason.

I won't pretend I wasn't anxious. Turning sixty this year makes you tired of pretending things are fine when they aren't, but it also makes you tired of wasting the years you have left being careful with the people you love instead of close to them. I packed my siddur and my nerves in the same bag.

Camp, and the Relief of Not Having to Ask

The first evening at camp the air smelled like woodsmoke and something wild and green underneath it, and a waiter set down two plates in front of us, mine and Naomi's, without either of us having to explain anything to anyone. That sounds like such a small thing to write down, but I watched my sister's shoulders drop about two inches when she realised she wasn't going to spend this holiday watching me watch her plate. Nobody at our table asked what she could or couldn't eat. Nobody at our table asked me to explain, again, why I couldn't just relax for once. The whole apparatus that usually sat between us at every family meal simply wasn't there, and in its absence we had nothing left to do but talk to each other like sisters instead of like representatives of two different lives.

She told me things that night I don't think she'd told anyone. About how much she missed Friday nights, the actual smell of them, my mother's chicken soup and the candles, and how she'd never found a way back to it that didn't feel like admitting failure in front of the person she used to be. I told her I'd spent years being angry at her for leaving something I loved, when really I think I was just afraid she'd left me. We sat by the fire long after the others had gone to bed, and a hyena called somewhere out in the dark, and neither of us flinched, because for once we weren't flinching from each other either.

What the Bush Does to People Who Stopped Talking

There's something about being that small in that much darkness, under a sky so thick with stars it looks unfinished, that strips away the version of yourself you perform for other people. Out on the game drives, Naomi would grip my arm every time we spotted something, an elephant crossing ahead of the vehicle at dusk, a leopard draped along a branch like it owned the tree, and I realised I hadn't heard her laugh like that, unguarded, since we were girls sharing a room. We didn't talk about religion again after that first night by the fire, not directly. We didn't need to. She started coming with me to the little service the group held one morning near camp, not because anyone made her, but because she wanted to stand next to me while I said the words she still half remembered.

Our guide mentioned once, almost in passing, that this particular Kosher Tour had been running trips like ours for families who'd never have managed the logistics of keeping kosher in the bush on their own, and I remember thinking that the logistics were never really our problem. Our problem was thirty years of silence that neither of us knew how to break, and it turned out you don't break silence with a big conversation. You break it with small ones, over and over, across a campfire, while someone else handles dinner.

Coming Home

On the last morning, packing our bags in the tent we'd shared like we were girls again, Naomi asked me if I thought we could do this every year, just the two of us. I said yes before I'd even thought about the answer, because for the first time in a long time I wasn't measuring the cost of closeness against the discomfort of difference. We flew home in different directions, her back to London, me back to Johannesburg, but we talk every week now, proper talks, not the clipped ten minute check ins we used to manage.

I still don't know if Naomi will ever keep a kosher home again, and I've stopped needing her to. What I know is that somewhere out there, companies like Kosher Safaris exist because families like ours need a place where the food isn't the argument, so the people can finally be the point. I got my sister back in the bush, not because of anything either of us said, but because for six days nobody had to choose sides at the table, and it turned out that was all the room we ever needed to find our way back to each other.