Best yet, though, was the fact that in spite of the place’s historic importance, it was virtually deserted—deemed too dangerous for typical tourists after a series of politically motivated knife attacks upon Israeli settlers in the area, and declared legally off-limits to Israeli civilians (the military could go wherever they wanted, however) because of the area’s designation by the Israeli government as a Palestinian autonomous zone. This meant the kids could play as if the place was their own private playground.
I was happy to see that they took full advantage of the situation, sliding down the pool’s sloping sides, walking along the ruined aqueducts, and picking up broken shards of pottery and ancient jug-handles for their “collections.” They even found a dark stone shaft in the hillside leading into a hidden, underground passageway, and I promised them that next time we’d come back with a rope so I could climb down and find out what was inside. They were thrilled, and I, for a moment, got to feel like Supermom.
The magic of the place seemed to be a charm for us all, and that day marked a kind of turning point. Although it was still taking some time for them to adjust, Amani and Ibrahim’s smiles returned—especially when I found a store in Hebron where they carried some of their favorite snacks from America—including Twinkies!—which they took pride in introducing to their cousins.
Soon they were playing soccer in the road, making up games, and climbing trees with their cousins instead of avoiding them, and showing off their favorite cartoons from their American DVD collections—which the kids loved, even if they couldn’t understand the dialogue.
So, too, their cousins showed them their games, shared their favorite snacks, and even tried to defend their young American visitors from me and anyone else they happened to cross when they were misbehaving. Soon Ibrahim and Amani were picking up Arabic at a rapid pace, their cousins in turn learning almost as many words from them in English. No doubt about it, we were all finally settling in, something we celebrated by decorating the first floor of the house with off-season Christmas lights, revamped in the market as flashing star and crescents for the upcoming Ramadan holiday.
Even our excessive visitor problem seemed to ease a bit after I figured out that if I visited family and neighbors more often in their homes, they would come less often to mine! In fact, it was during one of these visits at our doctor relative’s home for a delicious dinner of stuffed grape leaves, fresh roasted chicken, and French fries—ah, I loved Sameeha and the doctor—that another guest (one of the legion of middle-aged, advice-spouting male cousins) informed me that it was a “very bad idea” to take my kids outside Safa.
According to him, my yellow-plated car put us at risk from the Palestinian locals, should they take a notion to stone us. Further, my Palestinian appearance might provoke the nearby Jewish settlers, who had, um…guns—especially if I used “their” roads while out and about. According to him, Safa was the only safe place to be.
It was a frustrating predicament. Clearly, he was right on some level, and I wasn’t so naive as to think the West Bank was just like home in Washington. Still, the more time I spent with the family in the village, the more I noticed that their years of rural isolation may have warped their perspective a bit. After all, at first they’d told me that my car might be stoned in the neighboring town, Beit Ommar, but I hadn’t had problems there, in Hebron, or in any of the smaller neighboring villages.
But the man had a point, and rare as they might be, attacks did happen. I had to be careful, but I couldn’t exactly keep the kids in the house all the time. Although I couldn’t deny that his advice had rattled me, I sensed that I would have to find a balance on my own.
Thanking Sameeha for the dinner, the kids and I headed outside for the short walk home, under a shining moon that more than made up for the lack of street lights. I carried Karim, who had fallen into a fast sleep, and our footfalls crunched on the rocky path, answering the cricket-song that seemed to echo from every direction.
Walking along, I felt a simple, contented peace that I hadn’t felt for the longest time—and surely never in downtown Seattle at night. We were much safer here, I thought, especially in tiny Safa. It was all a matter of weighing risk in a calm and logical way.
Nearing home, we passed out of the glow of distant city lights, glittering from across the hills and into the shadow of our house, dark and seemingly ready for sleep as we were. Even the crickets seemed to quiet down. It was only when we rounded the corner and were face to face with the Israeli Army unit crouching in my driveway that I realized sleep wouldn’t come easily that night.
CHAPTER 13
Tribal Life, Ta’mre Style
We should manage our fortune as we do our health—enjoy it when good, be patient when it is bad, and never apply violent remedies except in an extreme necessity
-FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
We stared at each other in a moment of shocked silence—me, my three kids, and them—five men in black greasepaint, mushroom-like camouflage caps and night vision goggles. Why the hell are they in my driveway? Then, without a word, we walked past each other, they striding by us into the night—and us into the house for a fitful night’s sleep
When I woke the next morning, I made for Huda’s and told them about the patrol (over some of her delicious, hot, homemade bread), but I was surprised to hear that, according to them, it was “adee,” an Arabic word that meant “normal” almost always, as in, “Oh, that shit?! Yeah, its adee.”
Oh. Okay…
I had no choice but to try to take their comfort with the status quo as a good sign, even though my husband said that when he was growing up in Safa he almost never saw the military. Well, apparently, it was adee now. A couple of days later, though, I learned that the military might not be the only thing I should worry about in the village.
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and I was just about to settle into a nice, little nap when Amani and a group of her cousins burst into the house in a panic. Panting and wide-eyed, the girls unleashed a flood of Arabic that I couldn’t understand until Amani finally caught her breath enough to tell me that there was a huge fight outside, complete with “sticks and lots of blood.”
Having no idea what she could be talking about—soldiers, criminals, kids, what? I ran outside where I saw a crowd surrounding two Red Crescent ambulances (the Middle Eastern version of the Red Cross), their medics loading four bloody men onto boards. It was mayhem, and everyone seemed to be upset and running around. More and more people gathered between the houses until the crowd started to resemble a mob—complete with—no kidding—people brandishing clubs.
Everyone was shouting, and many of them seemed to be teetering on the verge of hysteria, but I couldn’t understand anything. Then I found Huda and her daughter, Manar, among the mass of women who were also gathered, and they explained in slower, simpler Arabic that four men from “our tribe” had been attacked in the neighboring town. The crowd, the clubs and the shouting were all part of the beginnings of a tosha; a tribal battle that could morph into an outright “war.”
Although I knew Palestine was a tribal society, and I’d heard that the Ta’mre tribe that my husband’s family belonged to was notorious for their ferocity, I always assumed actual tribal battles were a remote possibility. I certainly didn’t expect to actually see a clash in front of me. But in the West Bank, where local laws are still hit or miss, and police are scarce and unreliable at best, having a tribe behind you can offer a kind of protection. The fiercer one’s tribe is, the less likely anyone else will mess with you.
In general, actual tribal fights were rare in the area because the Ta’mre had several thousand members and strong organization. All it took was one phone call to the Mukhtar, or chief, to bring out the rest of the tribe, which would descend like locusts from dozens of neighboring communities in and around Bethlehem. Because of this, people mostly stayed on their good behavior.
Today, though, because a pair of hot-headed brothers had decided to take their
chances and attack the four men (now headed to the hospital) for some trivial slight in town, and because the brothers were from a rival tribe, their entire clan and home town could face “our” wrath. It was crazy, Wild West stuff. Still, the thought that this is my kids’ tribe occurred to me, and I realized that I was oddly pleased at the notion.
CHAPTER 14
Take the Heat
And finally Winter, with its bitin’, whinin wind, and all the land will be mantled with snow.
-ROY BEAN
After the ambulances left for the hospital, everyone cleared out of the road while they waited for a tribal council meeting at the home of the injured men to decide how to proceed. Although the village women weren’t directly involved in the meeting, children stationed at the open windows and doorways ferried the news to the rest of us, waiting in our homes to see what would happen next.
According to the reports, many tribal members had argued for a full-on assault involving the entire tribe, but thankfully, calmer heads prevailed. Instead, the parties settled on what was called an atwah, in this case a three-day cooling-off period during which both sides agreed to monetary compensation in lieu of battle, and everyone was relieved because people died in these kinds of situations every year. In fact, my mother-in-law’s first husband (Dr. Muhammad’s father) had been killed in a fight similar to this one. Thankfully, though, this time the clubs were stowed away; the attackers’ families were safe again, and we could go to the grocery store, which was on the opposing tribe’s turf, without fear of an attack. I could still get my nefarious Pepsi fix and nobody died. Who could ask for more?
Happily, the next weeks went calmly; there weren’t any more fights, and I didn’t see any more soldiers in my driveway. The children’s cousins started school—all cute in their striped uniforms—and Amani even convinced me to let her try out fourth grade instead of home school. But when I went with her to her first class, we entered the classroom just in time to see the pretty, gentle- looking teacher smack the hell out of a doll-like little girl in pigtails for forgetting her notebook at home. It was Amani’s first and last day at school.
The construction workers had finally finished the garage, electricity and the stairs, and were then focused on finishing up installing the heating system before winter set in, hoisting the large, industrial looking boiler and fuel tank up to the roof to connect it to the radiators below.
Although the cooking routine remained under control, thanks to Huda’s daughters and the babysitter, who covered for me on the days I had to work, I was looking forward to the day the house would just be finished already and the workers gone. I’d been troubled by the persistent feeling that I owed them more than the money we were paying them—nothing sexual, of course, but the feeling that they must be taken care of—water, tea, food…Somehow I never felt that I did enough for them, perhaps a feeling mirrored from my on-hold marriage. It was this feeling that I needed to take care of the needs of men because they were men…(after all, Ra’eda didn’t expect me to make her lunch every day) filled me with a bitterness disproportionate to the actual effort required of me, as if I’d somehow overdosed on “feminine domesticity” pills.
It didn’t help that the workers were completely incompetent. Unfortunately, it was only after they’d accidentally flooded the house with hundreds of gallons of dirty water that they admitted the important fact that they’d never actually worked on radiators before. They did finish the project, eventually, though, and although by the end we’d shelled out a cool 15,000 dollars, I felt relieved, especially as the first cold evenings set in and Khalid finally set about teaching me how to fire up the thing.
We both trudged up to the fourth floor where the boiler sat in all its glory, flanked by a tank of diesel as big as my car, and a quarter full. The smell up here was heavenly—a mixture of curing cement, wet rebar, seeping fuel and fire, and I breathed it in as deeply as I could without looking like a huffer. Interrupting me from my olfactory reverie, Khalid explained that once I flipped the “big switch” downstairs, all I had to do was come up, make sure that the tank was open to the boiler, and push the start button. That was it.
Okay, I thought. Easy enough. I tried it, and sure enough, there was a satisfying whoosh of the ignition, and the boiler’s round window flashed white, then red, its roaring inferno pushing blessed heat into the rooms below. Let there be warmth!
And on that night, there was. On the second and third, too. However, when the chill of the fourth night descended, something was wrong. I flipped the “big switch,” and nothing. No satisfying tick-tick-tick of the radiators accepting water and steam.
I started to pray.
Putting on a pair of flip-flops and a jacket, I grabbed the flashlight and crunched up the cement and rebar ramps leading up to the roof. When I got there, however, the boiler—shiny, awesome, expensive—was dark and silent. I reached down and pushed its own start button, just as Khalid had shown me. Still nothing. Shit, I thought. I’ll have to tell Khalid it’s broken…As I turned to leave, though, my flashlight glinted on the fuel gage. Empty. Two thousand Shekels (more than five hundred dollars) had lasted for exactly three nights of heat for what amounted to a small, two-bedroom space. I might as well burn the money bill by bill.
I told Khalid about the problem the next day, expecting him to find a leak, a diesel thief, something wrong. After he and his friend Omar poked around awhile upstairs, however, the only suggestion they could come up with was that I should seal off half of the radiators to conserve heat. Conserve? How could it be possible to burn through what must have been hundreds of liters of diesel in just three nights?
I was frustrated and worried. On one hand, I noticed a definite tone in Khalid’s and Omar’s voices, a look between them as if I’d somehow managed—probably due to a mixture of womanly stupidity and foreign decadence—to consume more fuel than a semi on a cross-country haul. What the hell?! I doubted that it was even possible to use that much heat, even if I’d turned the entire first floor into a sauna. But the fact that they weren’t considering that there must be a mechanical problem or a leak in the system made me suspect that there might be a thief somewhere in the system, perhaps siphoning fuel from the long line leading up to the tank and that was a scary thought. Plus, there was the pressing problem that the weather was by then getting seriously cold.
Still not budging on their assessment of the problem, and without any modifications on the heating system that I could see, they called for the diesel truck to pump up more fuel to the tank, trickles dripping from the makeshift coupling outside the front door. It was a problem, particularly because I had to shell out another two thousand shekels, which left me with a mere three hundred for the rest of the week (about eighty dollars). For a family of four, that was stretching it.
Three days later, with half the radiators shut off, the tank was empty again, this time the problem vaguely chalked up to some kind of miscalculation; some mysterious incompatibility of house and design that made the boiler completely useless (unless I was willing to spend two thousand Shekels every three days all winter long).
When the real cold came the following week, I closed off all of the first floor’s rooms except the kitchen, bathroom, and family room, and hung heavy blankets over the house’s inside arches to make a single, heatable space, and fired up one of the locally produced space heaters, known as a soba. This was little more than a hollow metal box containing a propane tank and a hose, faced with a large, exposed vertical burner, but it really cranked out the heat. I’d just have to forget the fact that it was also dangerous as hell.
Still, it was better than freezing, and I just happened to have brought along a carbon monoxide detector from America (an unexpected benefit of my obsessive “what-if” packing philosophy). All I could do was try to forget that we’d just wasted $15,000, although I did find it odd that my husband’s family members weren’t as horrified as me by the waste. Still, then again I sensed that there was an unspoken assumption that I had u
nlimited money to burn—which certainly wasn’t the case. Regardless, I tried to be grateful that we were at least warm and comfortable, and as we all slept, spread out on our mattresses under the fiery glow of the soba, in our now, one room home (for the rest of the winter anyway), I realized I was.
Part
Three
Small Battles on the Road
CHAPTER 15
Off-Limits
Curiosity does, no less than devotion, pilgrims make.
-ABRAHAM COWLEY
In travel books, the Holy Land often seems like the back lot of a Universal Studios guest tour. X would mark the spots where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, King Herod slew the innocents, Jesus’ first fell on his way to his Crucifixion, the stone from whence Muhammad rose to heaven.…
If you are a history buff, or of a religious bent, being here can bring about something close to a compulsion to see every single site, to hit the “God trail” and get in as many prayers as you can. I suspect it’s a feeling that many spiritual pilgrims have shared over the centuries, although I wasn’t exactly a pilgrim. I now lived here, and that meant that I had to learn to pace myself as a local should. It was something that rarely affected true locals—this manic attraction to the “holy sites”—but almost always appeared in transplants like myself, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian. There was even a name for the disorder in its most extreme form: “Jerusalem Syndrome.”
In clinical terms, Jerusalem Syndrome is a manifestation of delusions or obsessions, even psychoses triggered by Jerusalem (and the rest of the Holy Land) that has been known to affect religious travelers of all faiths. These pilgrims, although “previously balanced,” somehow came unhinged in the Holy Land, believing they heard the voice of God, saw angels, or were Jesus, Moses, or another religious figure—in fact, one man, Denis Rohan, an Australian Christian afflicted with the syndrome, could have started World War III when he, believing he was the Lord’s “emissary,” tried to burn down the Aqsa Mosque in 1969, in order to pave the way for the second coming of Jesus.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 6
