My husband and kids held Palestinian passports, in addition to their US ones. However, because of strict Israeli immigration laws (that also apply in the West Bank because Israel controls all of the Holy Land’s borders), I could not qualify for one. That meant that every time I came back to this country, I would have to apply for a visa of up to three months. While having to renew the visa was going to be hassle, it was worth it just to have the car alone.
Of course I felt guilty for using a privilege that so many Palestinians didn’t have. Still, solidarity only goes so far when you have kids involved, so you take whatever protections you can. A yellow plate meant freedom to go wherever I needed to if the shit hit the fan, and I’d take what I could get in such a situation. However, there were strings attached to that choice, like being mistaken for an Israeli settler in the West Bank and having someone put a rock—or a Molotov cocktail—through our windshield.
Still, I decided that the benefits outweighed the risks, especially if I ever needed to get the kids to a modern hospital. Ultimately, I bought a tiny, used VW Polo from an Palestinian dealer in East Jerusalem and hoped for the best.
CHAPTER 8
The Princess in her Castle
Above all, you must fight conceit, envy, and every kind of ill-feeling in your heart.
-ABRAHAM CAHAN
We began to settle into our house, locally dubbed “the castle,” by the villagers because of its hulking size and its ornate exterior—pillars, arches, and balconies, surrounded by a little peach orchard and stacked stone fences. It really was quite beautiful, and I loved to stand on the roof where I could see the entire village laid out in a vista of vineyards, sky, and low, rolling hills. Inside, though…well, it needed some work. Actually, lots of work.
The house was virtually empty when we arrived, so I bought some furniture and a television to make it homier. Still, it was only habitable on the first floor, lacked reliable electricity, had no heat and was bordered by Safa’s communal tombs (a negative best understood on a misty, wolf-howling night).
The biggest problem, though, was the half-finished main stairwell, with its four stories open to the sky. Because it was the end of May, the hole in the roof wasn’t such a big deal—except for the swarms of mosquitoes, wayward bats, and a rockingly loud muezzin call from the next-door mosque. However, in a few months, winter’s wind and rain would make that opening more of a problem.
It was obvious that I needed to hire construction workers to close the stairwell and connect the house to electricity, but I also knew this was going to be a major inconvenience. Safa was still one of the most conservative villages in the area, and that meant that unrelated men and women typically didn’t talk to each other unless they really, really, had to. Because we had only arrived a couple of weeks ago, I would have to ask a male family member to supervise (and chaperone) the work being done. I was already becoming overwhelmed with what seemed like almost constant visits from my mother- and sister-in-laws, cousins, aunts and nieces. They all seemed hell-bent on helping me learn proper Palestinian housekeeping. They even went so far as to climb through my barred windows if I didn’t open the door quickly enough when they knocked on the door (which they only did if they found it locked). What felt like their constant inspections and critiques—all in Arabic—were starting to get to me and my North American sense of space and privacy. Still, the house needed the work just to make it livable, so I finally asked my father-in-law to hire a contractor.
The first project on the list was to install radiators for the coming winter, which I’d been told were surprisingly cold. Khalid, my brother-in-law, hired three local men to do the work. Although it meant that even more of our privacy was gone (now, with men in the house, I had to wear my scarf inside as well as out), I knew it would be worth it. After all, even in the heat of early summer, I could imagine how cold the stone, high-ceilinged rooms must become in winter. Plus, I had a million things to do, including finding an Arabic tutor for the kids. It would certainly be easier to be out of the house when the men were around.
But then, my mother-in-law told me in slow, simplified Arabic, that it was Ayb, or “shameful,” if I failed to provide home-cooked lunches to the workers each and every day. This was especially bad news because, based on the existing state of the house, the workers would probably be around for an entire year!
I was terrified of displeasing my mother-in-law, especially so early on. At seventy-five, despite her petite size and frail health, she was one of the forces to be reckoned with in the village. She’d even had her arm broken in a rock-throwing fight with her neighbors a couple of years earlier.
That’s not to say that she lacked a sense of humor—it was rather impish, and came out in wicked little bursts here and there. But she was still, first and foremost, the matriarch of the family. Still, I had to tell her about a job I’d arranged for myself while still in America. I’d been hired to tutor English part time in Hebron—which I was supposed to start in a month’s time. However, there was no way I could do that, take care of the kids alone, and cook huge noontime meals every day.
Unfortunately, it seemed that I was right to be nervous, after all. By the time my mother-in-law’s sugar-cube had dissolved in her tea, she’d told me to forget the whole idea of work. After all, she reasoned, I would be too busy. As she already knew, my plan was to home school the kids so that they wouldn’t fall behind with their schoolwork back home, and I had to run the house, cook for the men…ergo, there wouldn’t be enough time for “silly” things outside the village. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it was then: I needed to think of a way to keep my job, and fast. After all, it was the first job I’d had in years and I really wanted to keep it—not to mention that it was my only excuse to get out of the village.
CHAPTER 9
Woman’s Work
Not only is women’s work never done, the definition keeps changing.
-BILL COPELAND
Although it had only been a few weeks since our arrival, I could tell that my mother-in-law didn’t like me very much. Whereas before, my visits with her were always short and buffered by my husband’s presence or the limitations of my meager Arabic, now things were drastically different. It wasn’t only because I was alone, but also because I could increasingly actually decipher some of the language—and one of the first things that became crystal clear was that she still wished her son had married an Arab Palestinian instead of me.
Of course, this wasn’t exactly a revelation. Even my parents were less than pleased when I married Ahmad instead of a good-old, all-terrain-vehicle-riding, duck-hunting native Oregonian. Her attitude still hurt my feelings, though, and my skin prickled whenever I heard the word, ajnabeeyah, “foreign woman.”
It didn’t take long before word filtered back to me through the village grapevine that she thought I was a spoiled, wasteful woman, and that one of her goals was to teach me to be a better wife. And although I tried to keep a detached sense of humor about it—after all, she was a 75-year-old illiterate Bedouin woman who’d spent her years living in tents, raising sheep for a living, and giving birth 15 times at home—I couldn’t deny that it hurt. Still, I couldn’t exactly force her to like me, so I decided that the only solution was to ignore the problem and try not to provoke her too much. Maybe eventually I’d grow on her.
In the meantime, I came up with a bright idea: I’d ask my sister-in-laws, Asya and Sa’eda, if they would be willing to cook extra food on the days I was out at work. They cooked everyday anyway, I reasoned, and lived right across the road from me. In exchange, I could buy both families’ supplies (no small thing, considering they had twelve kids between them). To my delight, they readily agreed when I asked if they would be interested in helping out. Only things didn’t exactly work out as I anticipated.
Unfortunately, my first day at work was also the same day that I found out my mother-in-law was snooping through my garbage to see the amount and kinds of foods I’d been buying from the store. Over here, col
a and fresh milk were considered luxuries, and I supposed that she thought she’d caught me red-handed in wretched excess because I always had them on hand. More, I found a trail of water from my clothes line to her house from her swiping laundry off my line before dawn—presumably because she found my scrubbing skills less than satisfactory. Add to that the rumor filtering back across the street that my sisters-in-law were calling me a princess behind my back.
Perfect.
Had just one of these events come to my attention on that particular day, I might have been able to control my temper, but the quick succession of what felt like an onslaught of negative judgment frayed my last nerve. As fast as a snowflake in Hades, I lost it, and I let my initial impression of detached, benevolent understanding—one I’d been trying so hard to present—boil over in flames. I threw on a scarf and speed-walked across the road to Asya’s house, where I burst into her kitchen, grabbed a couple of the fresh chickens, heads a-loll, and announced in my best Arabic, “I am not a princess!” before I stomped home like a pissed off-well—princess. Thankfully, I finally discovered a solution to the lunch problem—and for the evil sisters-in-law. Unfortunately, this would take some time.
Of all the family members in Safa (and the whole village was related to each other in some way), my favorite was Ahmad’s older sister, Huda, and her family. Always kind, welcoming and humble, Huda was also funny as hell, and she didn’t seem to look at me with the same reserve as most of the other women in the family did. It also didn’t hurt that she didn’t like Sa’eda and Asya much, either.
It was Huda who came up with plan B—for me to prepare the construction men’s food late at night and have her teenaged daughters, Manar and Rawan, warm and deliver the food at the appropriate time to their uncle—who happened to be one of the workers. In one fell swoop, it solved the lunch problem, which had started to feel ridiculously insurmountable. Of course, I knew that my mother-in-law probably wouldn’t like it, but I tried to appease her as much as I could without quitting my job—especially because I hadn’t even started yet!
CHAPTER 10
Angels in the Holy Land
I do not want to be the angel of any home: I want for myself what I want for other women, absolute equality. After that is secured, then men and women can take turns being angels.
-AGNES MACPHAIL
My first day on the job teaching went well. I’d been hired by the husband of a friend, who was kind enough to offer me an obscene amount of money in Palestinian terms to teach his prize engineers advanced English at his small startup in Hebron, and I was excited to meet my first students—whom I intentionally messed with in an introductory email, threatening “wrath” on any slackers among them.
It was a beautiful, sunny Monday afternoon, and the short, twenty-minute drive through the vineyard-covered hills was uneventful except for the single checkpoint I had to cross between towns, which turned out to be a quick and simple passport check. After some difficulty facing the peerlessly aggressive Hebron drivers, the city’s roundabouts, and finally figuring out that in the Holy Land a yellow stoplight literally means get ready to go rather than ready to stop, I found the right building and rode the elevator up to the company’s offices.
When I entered the office everyone seemed confused by me—which I later learned was because their boss had failed to mention that I was a Muslim (and with a name like Jenny Jones, who could blame them)? But they did seem excited and willing to work hard, especially when I told them I believed in novels, stand-up-comedy, and movies as key resources—and that I was (mostly) kidding about my wrath.
Thankfully, they were friendly and seemed eager to learn, if slightly intimidated by my rapid-fire English (which I expected them to try and keep up with from the start). They were also all from the “city,” and I could see by their bug-eyed reactions when I told them that I lived in Safa that they might be able to give me a sense of fresh perspective when the time came.
After the two-hour class, I hurried home as fast as my little car would take me; eager to show my in-laws that my job wasn’t such a big deal after all, and since Grandma was watching the kids (because, according to her, it wasn’t fair for her son to pay his hard-earned money for a babysitter), she would be the first to see that it would all work out just fine.
When I got home, though, I found my house in an uproar. Not only was Grandma missing in action but so were my older kids—who were already reveling in their newfound freedom to roam the village, and were probably off playing with their cousins somewhere—leaving only my two-year-old, alone in the care of his seven-year-old cousin, Jamal, whom I found lying bruised and crying on the couch after losing a game of death-wish limbo with our industrial-strength steel garage door.
A few minutes later, my mother-in-law returned to the scene from wherever she’d been, yelled at Jamal, and, after making sure he could walk normally, sent him home with the threat of a beating. She then turned to me with a disapproving look. See what happens when you’re away?
I did…and more clearly than she could have imagined, but because custom dictated an almost complete deference to one’s parents (and in-laws), I bit my tongue, said nothing, thanked her for her babysitting, and wished her a good evening—all while wondering silently what the hell I was going to do.
That night, I was washing the day’s dishes, scrubbing absent-mindedly, still thinking about the problem and wondering if I should just quit the stupid job, when my thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a shriek behind me. Spinning around, I turned to see Amani staring up at the cursed stairs where Karim had climbed up to the first flight, and was making for the second—right next to the edge of the open stairwell. Dropping the soapy plate from my hands, I ran towards him and sprinted up the steps, just in time to catch him by his ankle as he slipped over the side. For a horrifying moment, he was swinging above the cement floor, two levels below.
I felt sick—just sick—he could have died, and for what? Because I was so wrapped up in my agenda; the job, my problems with the other women, that I left such a glaring problem as an open pit of death in the middle of my house for my kid to fall into?
I carried Karim to bed, a million miserable thoughts swirling in my mind. Once he was settled, I headed to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and cried.
My mother-in-law was right. I should have stayed home where I belonged, I told myself again and again.
It was becoming painfully obvious that the Holy Land probably wasn’t the best place to try for a radical self-transformation, at least, not for me. After all, if I’d wanted to become more of an authentic person, less burdened by the pressure to act the perfect Muslim woman/wife/mother and instead become the woman I needed to be, well, going for it in the Holy Land was probably a mistake. After all, one could argue that the whole problem of women not feeling good enough about themselves had originated on this very soil.
From the earliest recorded civilizations in the region, women have been measured by the extent of their self-sacrifice—a tradition introduced in holy books and raised to an extreme by cultural forces. Today in the Holy Land, the tradition continues through the stealthy use of flattery. The pious woman works her fingers to the bone, a Jewish woman has a “price above rubies,” a faithful “silent and loving” Christian woman is a “gift of the Lord,” and the religious Muslim wife and mother finds that “heaven lies under her feet.” All these women know the seductive charm that spiritual accolades hold for the sad, tired, and uncertain heart. Still, many forget that there’s something called “interpretation,” that male scholars of each faith have accorded to women that leaves them with the short end of the stick.
It could be said that even the Western ideal of “the angel in the house” came from the history of this land, an angel the great Virginia Woolf described as, “intensely sympathetic, charming, and utterly unselfish,” as well as one who “…excelled in the difficult arts of family life, and sacrificed daily.” This “angel,” according to Woolf, always puts others f
irst, “If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it.”
Sure, Palestinian culture is still rooted here in the Holy Land, and they breed their angels by old-school ideals, but what of the West? My Swedish grandmother was possessed by something that told her to always “take the leg,” and she was a Christian woman—but from where do Judeo-Christian mores actually spring?
Yes, I decided…the angel was born here in this rocky soil, and I would follow in Virginia’s bloody footsteps—only I was going to kill my angel in her lair.
“If only I was home where I belong.”
That angel was a cold-hearted bitch. She deserved to die.
To be honest, I had tried to kill off my angel back in America, but it was a half-hearted attempt. I’d been writing my first book and had run into the resistance that always seemed to pop up like a prop in a funhouse when I tried to work on anything “extra” that took time away from the family. Then, as now, I suffered from the double-whammy of my own cultural beliefs about what made a “good woman,” as well as my husband’s inherited expectations. I cooked, cleaned, kept the house in repair, cared for the kids, drove my son to his speech therapy four days a week (a three-hour commute), cooked some more, home-schooled, and then applied a fresh layer of lipstick as my husband’s key turned in the door. The only writing I could do was bits and pieces scribbled in “stolen” moments.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 4
