All Roads Lead to Jerusalem

by Jenny Lynn Jones

  It was as the poet, Adrienne Rich, so perfectly expressed it; I wrote my book while “waiting for the iron to heat.” It was a frustrating process, painful, exhausting, and even disappointing. But in Safa, despite its rigid social structure, I had a rare opportunity—I was temporarily unpinned from the daily pressures of marriage, and that was no small thing.

  Yes, I sat on that bathtub crying after my first day of work, not only out of fear for my son (although that was a major part), but also for the years of guilt and pressure that had held me back from experiencing life for so long. I cried out of frustration at the constant barter and trade I’d run (and I believe many married women run) in exchange for too few moments of freedom. I didn’t come here to stay the same, or even more likely, more of a model of sacrifice. Of course, there had to be a reasonable balance.

  CHAPTER 11

  Solomon’s Playground

  Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.

  -KHALIL GIBRAN

  The morning after Karim’s close call on the stairwell, I woke up early. I now realized that I was out of my frickin’ mind for leaving the house in such a dangerous state, something I could partly blame on a delusional case of “travelers omnipotence”—that strange feeling of invincibility that sometimes crops up in a new locale, as if the rules of common sense at play back home in the real world somehow no longer apply. Although there was nothing like a West Bank version of Girls Gone Wild! to lure me into temptation, my having considered it okay to leave a four-story hole in the middle of my house had to be just as mind-bendingly stupid. It only took that one moment the night before, though, to snap my common sense back on board with a vengeance. Now, all thrusters were on fire, full speed ahead, with visions of Karim dead at the bottom of the stairwell.

  I crawled out of bed and padded across the cool stone floor, careful not to wake the kids splayed out on their foam mattresses. Heading for the door, I caught my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe and stopped, taking in the rapid transformation my body had already undergone once removed from my Washington State McDiet. I gazed at myself, as if looking at a stranger—a barefoot, wild-haired, much thinner stranger—wearing the long, satin nightgown Asya had given me a few years ago when we were still friends.

  Even so early, a warm, Mediterranean breeze wafted in, blowing the sheers across the arched windows like white clouds on their way to a final, delicious swirl against my body, and for a moment, I felt good. Then I remembered Karim.

  Glaring at myself, I turned from the mirror and continued to the door, reaching up on my tiptoes to grab the key I’d hidden on the doorjamb after locking us all in the room for the night. In Safa, like most Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the custom was to install individual key-locks on each door, making it theoretically possible to lock someone inside. It was an idea antithetical to my ingrained North American obsession with fire safety. But then again, so were the bars on the windows, immovable, drilled right into the stone masonry. At first, the idea of the key locks and the bars really bothered me, but now I was actually starting to appreciate them in that death-trap-waiting-to-happen house we now occupied. What better way was there to keep Karim from hurling himself down the stairwell when I wasn’t looking? As for the fire danger, I tried to console myself that at least the house was made of stone.

  I let myself out of the room, closed the door quietly behind me and went straight to the loveseat, pushing it until it was firmly wedged against the entrance to the stairway. It wasn’t a great solution, but it would work until I could get the construction workers to close it off somehow. Satisfied, I brewed a cup of strong coffee and sat at the kitchen table staring out the window, doing my best to keep mental images of splattered babies, garage door guillotines and disco fire-traps at bay.

  When the kids finally awoke, I gave them their new “usual” breakfast—mortadella, eggs fried in fragrant goat butter, fresh farmer’s cheese, cracked green olives, and za’atar, a mix of wild thyme, oregano, salt and sesame seeds eaten with fresh, hot taboon bread and olive oil. Together, it gave the tongue a salty, lemony, delicious mix of oily-spicy-goodness to start the day, and it was all washed down with steaming, sweet sage tea, freshly picked from the small herb patch next to the orchard.

  When we finished, I grabbed Karim and headed out and across the road to Khalid’s, where he and Asya were sitting outside by a fire, simmering grapes into dibis, the thick, dark syrup that would be a staple during the coming winter. Deep in discussion, they barely noticed my approach, but I was sure they’d noticed his other wife, Sawsan, puttering in the adjoining field, picking sprigs of mint along with stray snippets of their conversation.

  Yelling to Karim to stay away from the tick-covered dogs lounging with their puppies on the road, I cleared my throat, wishing them a good morning.

  “Sabah al khair,” I said, watching Asya prod and stoke the fire like a witch over her brew.

  “Sabah ennour” “Morning of light.” They responded in unison, as I pulled up a plastic chair just out of range of the thick column of smoke, and got straight to the point—at least, as straight as I could make it with my grammar issues.

  “Karim run up stairs!” I started. “Big hole! I must go fast and I catch his foot before death!”

  A long moment passed while they deciphered my cryptic exclamation, but their wide-eyed expressions reassured me that I’d been understood.

  “Alhamdullah!” they exclaimed. “Thank God he’s okay!”

  “Yes, Alhamdulillah,” I agreed. “’But, I wanted to ask you to.”

  “You have to be more careful!” Asya interrupted. “Where were you?!”

  I paused for a second, fighting the sudden urge to reach out and squeeze her neck—hard, and took in a long, slow breath. “Well, I shouldn’t have to worry about him falling into a hole inside his own house, Asya. Anyway,” I continued, turning to Khalid, “If you could please tell the workers to find a way to install a doorway to the stairs, and to fix the garage door….”

  There, again I paused. Damn, I had no idea how to say motor or safety cut-off in Arabic. “Umm….See…” I stammered, “I want the door to stop if children are under…it must have a light that knows there are children before it kills them.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Asya shoot me a smirking once-over, and I cursed my pitiful vocabulary. For God’s sakes, I sounded like a flaming idiot. No wonder she thought she could mess with me—I seemed too stupid to notice.

  Sighing, I tried to explain myself again; finally mixing in some pantomime to be sure Khalid understood my meaning. Then I excused myself, removed a bulging-eyed puppy from Karim’s enthusiastic embrace, and headed home, ready for my next step.

  I was determined to hire a reliable baby-sitter—with or without my mother-in-law’s approval—so I called Dr. Muhammad’s wife, Sameeha, and asked her to arrange a meeting that evening with a possible candidate she had mentioned a few days before.

  Ra’eda was an excellent choice, she told me. Not only did she really need the work, but she was from outside the tribe, and was an educated townie from Beit Ommar. All of these points raised the odds that she would actually take on the job. The problem was domestic work is highly regarded in Palestinian culture, but getting paid for it is not. I didn’t understand the rationale, but it meant that finding someone to babysit for pay from the village itself was well-nigh impossible. Still, I could see Grandma wasn’t up to the task, whether or not she insisted she was, so while she may not have intentionally sabotaged my first day by disappearing, I was now forewarned not to take any more chances.

  Unfortunately, news spreads as fast in Safa as if it were carried on the wind—and there, the weather ‘tis mighty blustery. That meant when evening came, so did my mother-in-law, trailed by the evil sisters-in-law like some kind of anti-babysitter posse. Obviously aware of my plan to bring in an “outsider,” they settled on the sofas in the living
room, watching and whispering to each other as I continued to scurry around readying the house for my meeting, growing more sweaty and flustered by the moment.

  Doing my best to ignore them, I busied myself filling the ridiculous gilded tissue box (de rigueur salon décor in the village), moving the nested tea tables into place, and bringing out plates of cookies and the tea glasses and readying the demitasse coffee service for my visitor, all the while mentally rehearsing Arabic responses to the verbal onslaught I knew would start any moment.

  Unable to contain herself any longer, my mother-in-law called me back from the kitchen, where I was starting the fresh mint tea.

  “Who are you bringing here?” she demanded. “I told you I would take care of the children.”

  “Amtee,” I responded, “I know you would, but it’s too much work for you. Besides, Ahmad told me that I should find someone to help out when I’m not at home, and the house is dangerous…”

  “But she will be expensive!” she interrupted, closing one eye and wagging her finger at me. “Besides, you already paid the workers too much money, and now you want a new door, too! Where will Ahmad find all this money!”

  I flashed Asya a quick glare.

  “But Ahmad wants it,” I said, using my husband’s wishes as an immutable defense, “What can I do?” putting up my hands helplessly, as if a babysitter was the last thing on earth I wanted myself.

  I excused myself to bring in the tray of tea, passing it to each woman in order of their age. When I reached Asya, second to last, she took her glass and blew on its surface, cooling the searing hot liquid and sending sprigs of Sawsan’s mint swirling: a bright green tempest in her cup.

  Having given up hope that the women would leave before getting a look at “the girl,” I resigned myself to sitting down and waiting with them, willfully ignoring my mother-in-law’s continuing lament over my wretched excess.

  When Ra’eda finally made her entrance—more than an hour late—she was dressed in the West Bank equivalent of business attire: knee length polyester blazer, slacks, pointy high heels, sequined white headscarf and intricate make-up. She exuded an attitude of superiority that immediately put me off. In fact, from the moment she arrived, she gave the impression that it was I who was applying for the privilege of employing her, deflected my questions, and generally came across as a stuck-up sourpuss. I couldn’t stand her, and that was even before she began talking to my sister-in-laws about me, since I was obviously too clueless to understand the discussion.

  “Well, she does speak some Arabic, doesn’t she?” she asked, “Does she really pray? And her kids, poor things, don’t they speak any Arabic at all?”

  By the time she finally left, telling me she would “think about” the job, I was furious. There was no way in hell I would hire such a dour, nosy bitch of a woman—an opinion, by the way, my sister-in-laws shared. Their negative assessments also included the breadth of her ass, the shade of her skin, and her city accent. It was actually one of the first times I was tempted to agree with them.

  My “poor kids,” indeed! I certainly had no intention of calling her back. That’s why I was so surprised the next morning when she suddenly showed up for work.

  I was hanging laundry on the line between the columns on the orchard veranda, clipping my bras and underwear underneath T-shirts and towels as I’d been instructed for “modesty’s sake,” when I heard footsteps behind me. Turning, I was shocked to see Ra’eda, in all ways a very different person than the night before. Sans makeup and in work clothes, she told me that she was happy to have met me, that she wanted the job very much, and that she’d only acted aloof for the benefit of the other women in the room. She actually smiled!

  “I only have one request,” she said. “Please, if you could just tell your mother and sisters-in-law that you decided to hire me to teach the children Arabic, and don’t tell them if I cook or clean anything…I don’t want them to say I’m a maid.”

  I agreed, still a little wary, but disarmed by her abrupt personality change. The truth was, she was the best option I had. Besides, I knew she would do a good job because my mother-in-law wouldn’t be able to stop herself from checking in on her all day. After all, someone would have to make sure that her son was getting his money’s worth. Heck, maybe she’d be so focused on the babysitter that she’d lay off my faults for a while. Yes, I thought. This might work out after all.

  CHAPTER 12

  What Would Solomon Do?

  Instinct is the nose of the mind.

  -MADAME DE GIRARDIN

  Athough some things seemed to be coming together—I liked my job, my students seemed to like me, and I was slowly figuring out the daily details of life in the West Bank, the kids were a different story. In fact, by the time the heat of mid-July hit its zenith, so did their homesickness. It was almost two full months since our arrival, and Ibrahim and Amani were both miserable.

  Karim was too young to know the difference, but Ibrahim and Amani were fed up with the constant visitors, or “invasions,” as Amani put it, which were the norm in the village. If they were lonely in America, there was no such thing in Safa, where no one discusses having the necessity of “calling ahead,” or even knocking, for that matter. In fact, it was common for me to suddenly turn around to find someone standing behind me.

  Almost as bad, if the door was locked—a rare occurrence, with the kids coming in and out all day—the would-be visitor simply climbed the barred windows, popped their head in, and yelled until I answered. I couldn’t even pretend that I wasn’t at home unless I was willing, and sometimes I was, to hide behind walls or crawl across the floor to stay out of sight.

  In addition to the constant company, the kids hated other things about village life, foremost among them Safa’s lack of Xboxes, cable TV, “real toys” and the English language. Amani, in particular, was so frustrated by her cousins’ inability to grasp her inability to understand their Arabic (and that exponential increases in volume were not helpful), that she would often break into tears and run away from them, locking herself in her room.

  But the worst moment had to be the morning I awoke to news that Ibrahim had packed his suitcase (including such useful items as his Power Rangers action figures, DVDs and a few cans of Pepsi), and run away while I slept. Thankfully, his uncle happened upon him as he neared the outskirts of the village, striding along, rolling suitcase in tow, determined to walk all the way back to America.

  It was at that moment that I realized I’d have to work harder to make the place more of a home for them (well, that and the fact there seemed to be some serious holes in Ibrahim’s geography skills needing attention). Sure, I was doing a lot of running around working my stuff out, but Ibrahim and Amani needed a break from the village, too, as much as they needed to somehow believe the place could be fun.

  Unfortunately, the West Bank isn’t exactly associated with either fun or entertainment, so after giving it some thought, I decided that the best approach would be something like a hippie-type home-schooling program of bonding with the ol’homeland. After all, I’d dragged them here. It was time they started to identify with the place, the history, the religion—this place was just full of religion! I would make this a year they’d never forget, and by the end of it they would be the youngest experts on Terra Sancta around. I decided then that the first step on my new agenda should involve an outing to the hands-down coolest place this side of Jerusalem—Solomon’s Pools.

  I’d visited the pools, known locally as Buraik Solayman, shortly after my wedding thirteen years before, and I remembered the place as much for its historical origins as for its beauty. Made up of three open reservoirs, each more than a football field in length and up to fifty feet deep, Solomon’s Pools nestled in stepped formation in the middle of a vast, wooded valley just outside of Bethlehem. Legend said they were built by King Solomon and a legion of spirits and demons placed under his power by God, but most historians agreed that the pools were actually built by King Herod during the Sec
ond Temple period.

  Whatever their origins, the place represented an amazing technological feat in that era, serving the Temple Mount in distant Jerusalem with an uninterrupted supply of fresh water via a series of gently sloping aqueducts, portions of which remain.

  It was the place’s more recent history that I knew would spark the kids’ imagination, though, for today Solomon’s Pools are associated with the hundreds of drownings that have happened there over the years. Apparently, victims were pulled down under the green water’s surface, never to be seen again. Although I tended to believe the culprit was the long swamp weeds growing from the pools’ murky depths, I knew that the kids (Goosebumps series aficionados) would be fascinated by the story. Also, since the pools were now almost completely drained by the Palestinian Authority, presumably to prevent more tragedies, the kids wouldn’t be in danger of falling prey to the site’s mysterious curse.

  The drive to the pools covered a winding road that snaked past two refugee camps, a large settlement bloc, and some of the most beautiful countryside in the Holy Land. As we drove, we opened the windows and car roof and blasted the latest Arabic pop song “Girl in a Short Skirt” as we whizzed past old, abandoned houses dotting the roadside, miles of vineyards, stepped fields, and stone fences. We were forced to slow occasionally on the way to pass donkeys laden with firewood and piles of grape leaves, shepherds driving their sheep between the fields, and even the occasional camel loping along, looking bored with the world. The kids seemed to brighten with every passing mile.

  When we finally pulled off the pavement of the main highway and onto the mud-baked road leading to the pools, the kids’ collective intake of breath and loud “Wow!!!” told me that the spot would be a hit. There, in front of my dusty windshield, we could see the first pool stretching out as if it had been carved from the earth by God Himself, adorned with blocks of stone as big as a car stacked down inside like giant stairs, beckoning the kids to come and explore.