by André Aciman
On my way to Paris, I skimmed through the pages of “Combray,” the first chapter of In Search of Lost Time. As I read about the steeples of Martinville or Tante Léonie, eternally perched in her bedroom, on the first floor, overlooking rue Saint-Jacques, it occurred to me that I had rushed back to the book not to verify the existence of what I had just seen but to make certain that those places I remembered and loved as though my own childhood had been spent among them had not been altered by the reality of the dull, tile-roofed town shown to me by Anne Borrel. I wanted to return to my first reading of Proust—the way, after seeing a film based on a novel, we struggle to resurrect our private portrait of its characters and their world, only to find that the images we’ve treasured for so long have vanished, like ancient frescoes exposed to daylight by a thoughtless archaeologist. Would my original image of a stone villa with a spacious dining room and a wide staircase leading to the child’s solitary bedroom be able to withstand the newly discovered little house with its squeaky wooden stairwell and drab, sunless rooms? And could this tawdry garden really be the glorious place where Marcel read away entire afternoons on a wicker chair under a chestnut tree, lost to the voices of those calling him inside and to the hourly chime of the church of Saint-Hilaire—whose real name, as I had found out that day, was not Saint-Hilaire but Saint-Jacques, which, moreover, was not really the name of the street watched over by Tante Léonie, who, it turned out, was herself more likely to have been an uncle.
Inside the sepia cover of Swann’s Way I searched also for the sense of wonder I had brought to it that summer evening more than thirty years before, when I’d had the good fortune to be with a man who was the first person to mention Proust to me and who, because he was unable to give me so many things then, had only this to give me, and gave it tentatively, self-consciously, as though he were giving part of himself, as he told me about Proust—how Proust remembered things that everyone else seemed to forget, how he saw through people, though they still managed to fool him, and how he did all those things in sentences that were ever so long—and steered me, as we rushed to buy the first volume before the stores closed, to a writer I have since loved above all others, not just because of who he was and what he wrote, or because of who I became the more I read him, but because on that late-summer evening I already knew I had just received, perhaps without my father’s knowing it, his dearest, most enduring gift of love.
In the Muslim City of Bethlehem
The rain falls on Bethlehem under a light-gray morning sky as fleets of tourist buses creep up the dusty slope leading to Manger Square. The area is crowded with people, pushcarts, and parked vehicles, and the buses must thread their way between rows of taxis before finding a place to unload passengers. The last bus, far older than the rest, looks as if only a miracle could have got its weather-beaten carcass up the hill to Bethlehem. Its pilgrims look weather-beaten, too, and as they mass on the street waiting for their guide, who is arguing with a guide from another tourist company, to usher them to the holy sites, they look uneasily across Manger Square. All of them are wearing the glazed, startled look of people who are at once awed, tired, and disappointed. The Bethlehem they have found looks nothing like the town God’s son might want to be born in. But that’s the whole point. Everything here is meant to test one’s faith.
The pilgrims, mostly women, will soon recover from the shock, but as they take in the unfamiliar place, with its light rain and glistening pavement teeming with boys who scurry about Manger Square brandishing open and mostly broken umbrellas for the tourists, they cannot believe that this may be the holiest moment in their lives. This, the most un-Christmaslike spot in Christendom, is what they will take with them and remember. Many will come to celebrate Christmas this year, as so many pilgrims do, but the festivities will have a different tenor: barring some last-minute hitch, this is the first time in twenty-eight years that Bethlehem will celebrate Christmas without an Israeli presence.
A traditional Midnight Mass is celebrated in the Church of St. Catherine every Christmas Eve and broadcast worldwide. But now that the Israelis have decided to hand over the city to Palestinian authorities a week before Christmas, “maybe they’ll have big celebrations,” says Itzhak, a Jerusalem cabby whom I summon by cellular phone.
I ask whether he really believes this. Itzhak snickers. “The Christians are leaving,” he says. The implication is clear: they’re afraid of the Muslims. Everyone knows, but no one says it: the Christians are the Jews of Bethlehem.
Itzhak is not only a driver but an amateur historian who doubles as a tour guide, which he does by holding on to the steering wheel with one hand and pointing freely with the other, constantly turning around to look you in the face as he expounds on the more subtle aspects of Jewish history. In the end, it seemed safer to sit next to him. He is a burly sort with a thick mustache, deep voice, and muscular body. He speaks good English, has an instinct for wit and paradox, and knows a proverb for every occasion. When he tried to temper my fears of going to Bethlehem by uttering a proverb, I almost said, “Enough with proverbs.” Then I remembered that Sancho Panza had a proverb against proverbs, too.
Like the pilgrim women from the small bus, I, too, am thinking of another Bethlehem, of the one I learned about from Christmas carols. Of distant, imagined evenings draped in snow that is always deep and crisp and even, and of that medieval village that rises in our fantasy each year for at least twelve days, the way a tree inevitably rises in every living room, even in my own, though I am Jewish. It is not so much Christmas I celebrate as that aura of peace, which lasts no longer than my tree, but a peace that I anticipate for months and sometimes lose before even finding it.
I think of the carols I learned long ago in Egypt, carols I still love but that seem so out of place here, even in these incenseridden churches, which are bleak, tense, medieval, and cruel. And I think, too, of the word “Bethlehem” and of the strange place it acquired in the bowdlerized lyrics we used in school in Egypt, where “Bethlehem” replaced another three-syllable word that had suddenly disappeared from our Christmas carols. We sang “Born is the king of Bethlehem,” not “of Israel.”
Bethlehem is poor, dirty, shabby. It is the smells I recognize. A small café on Manger Square, located under a large pine, is called the Christmas Tree; it gives off a smell of skewered-meat sandwiches, of falafel and coffee. It is well situated and the owner, a Christian, has obviously done well. But he paid a price for refusing to close his business during a general strike. Islamic fundamentalists burned his car and bombed his home. I am tempted to order a sandwich, but think twice about doing so.
Not five steps away from the Christmas Tree is the town’s largest mosque. Behind it is Fridays open-air market, crammed with a slovenly array of fruits and vegetables hanging from shops, pushcarts, and portable stalls. Vendors scream out their produce, and women lug heavy loads home, howling at children who have strayed too far, while clusters of men sit around, some doing nothing, others arguing, everyone smoking. A vendor wearing the traditional kaffiyeh is talking on a cellular phone. A small boy has just delivered coffee to three old men and is respectfully kissing the hand of the eldest. A shopkeeper is trying to tape two Santas to his store window. Inside another shop a young man sits cross-legged, wearing only one sneaker; the other shoe is in the hands of an old cobbler trying to sew a torn seam. The tiny barbershop is empty—except for the barber, who reads on his barber seat. Outside the shop, seven youths stand against a wall, idling New York—style.
“This is Bethlehem?” I blurt out to my driver.
“This is Bethlehem,” he replies spiritedly, as though to ask, What did you expect—Jerusalem? Indeed, Bethlehem is not more than twenty minutes from Jerusalem, whose outline we can still see; yet it seems worlds away.
On another day I am driven to Bethlehem by a cabby named Moishe. We had agreed that he would drop me off at Manger Square and go back to the outskirts of the city to wait for my telephone call when I was finished meeting with Elia
s Freij, the mayor of Bethlehem This was my idea, not Moishe’s. He would have waited at Manger Square the whole time, probably near the Israeli police station, which is surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence.
No sooner has he left with his car than a man in his mid-sixties approaches me. “And this is the basilica of the Nativity,” he breaks in, as if we had already been speaking for hours. “And my name is George. And I am Christian. And please, this way,” he adds, warning me not to trip as we enter the church through the Door of Humility. The entrance, he explains, was purposely narrowed to prevent people from riding horses into the church, as well as to force them to bow as they enter. When we are inside, he asks where I come from. I know what he is really asking, and I don’t want to tell him. I say I am from America, but I don’t mention New York. Nor do I tell him I was born in Egypt. He would deduce that I am Jewish, and I don’t want anyone to know—not when I feel I am probably the only Jew in a place where all the other Jews are safely ensconced behind a barbed-wire fence that stretches around the police compound.
George hands me a taper. When I search my pocket, he motions me not to. I ignite the taper with a lighted candle and wedge it in place among others on a tiny crammed candle stand, thinking of a custom a Greek Orthodox nanny had taught me in Alexandria when you want to make a wish or mourn the dead.
Meanwhile, a contingent of women from South America has arrived. The women lie down next to the fourteen-pronged silver star of Bethlehem embedded in the stone floor, marking the spot where Jesus was said to be born. They will be shown the altar of the manger, then the place where the Magi laid their presents down, light a few tapers, and, holding hands, band together around the altar of Christ’s birth and sing lullabies to the child Jesus
As the group prepares to step into the adjoining cloister of the Church of St. Catherine, it is clearly time for me to get rid of George. Impossible. And would I really leave Bethlehem without seeing the church bell? he asks. The bell, as it turns out, is best seen from an alley where, as if by chance, I am led to a small souvenir shop. This was bound to happen. I am now sure that George is in cahoots with its owner. I am wrong. George is the owner. And I am not to feel I must buy something, he says. I scan the shop, feeling totally dispirited, still trying to make the best of things. After all, the business generated by tourism is what keeps Bethlehem alive. There are plenty of shops and factories devoted exclusively to the manufacture of Christian art and trinkets. But I cannot find a thing to buy here. I have rarely seen such ugly merchandise: inlaid mother-of-pearl boxes, sculptured candles that look like bloated human organs, and those carved, unpolished olive-wood statues of the manger, the Magi, and the Crucifixion.
Itzhak, my other cabby, has a theory about olive trees. Twisted, short, yet beautiful, they tie you to the land, he says, because they grow well in this dry, rocky landscape and can be transplanted easily. With olive trees, you could stake out land and make it your own, the way squatters are tied to their land, or the way parents are tied to their children or to each other through their children. During the Intifada, I remember watching on television a group of Arab villagers transplanting very young saplings. No sooner were their roots buried in the soil than an Israeli patrol car swooped into position and a foreman type got out, lumbered up to the two shoots, and yanked them out of the ground. The ban on growing things—or on begetting children—has an ancient history here, not irrelevant to Christmas.
The mayor of Bethlehem agrees with Itzhak’s view of olive trees. The mayor should know. His family, I am told, owns olive groves and has done very well. But, the mayor adds when we’re talking in his office, the trees shouldn’t just tie you to the land. They should bind people together as well. Olives, I am reminded, are a symbol of peace. Mayor Freij dreams of a loose federation of Benelux-type states that will include Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. “Everyone must learn to live together since everyone is destined to live together,” he says.
This implies that everyone should sit together at the same table and enjoy the meal. I wonder why no one has thought of it sooner—until I realize that, in this part of the world, the question is not how to sit three adversaries at the same table but how to sit them on the same chair. These are not just three nations or three religions; each has its subsidiary warring sects and, within each of these, ageless rivalries, fiercely and relentlessly petty, as everything is when God, pride, and land are at stake. Roman Catholics, Armenians, and the Greek Orthodox seldom agree about anything. Among ancient Jews, the same tussling consumed the Essenes, Pharisees, and Sadducees; it continues today among Jews who cannot even agree on what constitutes a Jew. Among Arabs, the bloody claims of the Shiites and Sunnis have wiped entire areas from the face of an earth that has no more cheeks to turn. As for the Christians of Bethlehem, they were so contentious among themselves that European nations were forced to intervene and take sides—a situation that fueled the outbreak of the Crimean War.
You have only to visit the Old City of Jerusalem to sense that even dust from one quarter hates dust from another. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, each corner is zealously guarded by a different sect, and the spite among them is legendary. Tourists would give anything to witness their brawls. In Bethlehem, the Church of the Nativity literally feeds into the Church of St. Catherine through a network of caves, but these churches are of different denominations; the first is Greek Orthodox, the other is Roman Catholic.
Everyone lives on top of one another, for the land belongs to no one, but there is no one to whom this land does not belong. In the language of the New Testament, the first ones here were the last to return, and the last to settle on this land were the first ones here. Things shift, nothing can be taken at face value, and everything always means too much.
This land is awash with memory, driven by memory. And memory, like spite, is bottomless. Nothing is ever forgotten, much less forgiven, and time is a revolving door, where faith runs loops around fact and fact turns into fiction, fiction into history, and history into enduring gall. Between you and everyone else here there is—as Rousseau said of his lifelong, devoted mistress—not the least spark of love.
Politics and religion are so intricately braided that, in talking about the current conflict, it is customary to refer to the Israelis as Jews and to the Palestinians as Arabs. Apples and oranges. We speak of nationalism, but what we are witnessing is the Ayatollization of nationalism—a mix of barbarism, spirituality, and abominable claptrap. It killed Sadat. It killed Rabin. It will kill others.
But there are temperate moments as well. To celebrate the indivisible Muslim-Christian coalition in the new Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, someone suggested releasing inflatable Santas into the night sky. Then they decided to release inflatable Arafats as well. Both ideas were nixed.
A man opens the door to Mayor Freij’s conference room and carries in two demitasses. He places one before the mayor, another before me. The mayor is a cordial man, but he is uncomfortable with mannered civilities and assumes I will drink my coffee without being prompted. I remember visiting powerful Egyptians in their offices with my father thirty years ago, and watching him try to negotiate thorny points in the best Arabic he—a foreigner and a Jew—could muster while sipping coffee. I, too, am now drinking coffee with an Arab, discussing, after many years, more or less the same unspoken, unresolved issue: can there be truth, let alone friendship, between Arabs and Jews? The answer, even if it is no, is irrelevant. There will never be real trust between the English and the French either. What matters is not so much peace as willingness to consider peace.
“Process” is a tricky word: it embraces neither the present nor the future tense but something grammarians might call the imperfect conditional. In other words, neither here nor there. Still, people speak of the fruits of the peace process as if something that is neither here nor there could actually bear fruit. Itzhak, who is very lucid, could not have said it more clearly. “I trust the peace process not because I have faith in it but because I have nothing e
lse.” Some of the best contracts are forged that way.
Freij, then seventy-seven, the mayor of Bethlehem since 1972, whose political savvy allowed him to survive Jordanian rule, the Israeli occupation, the Intifada, and the ensuing terrorism with surprising agility, says he may seek re-election, though some suspect he covets the ministry of tourism under Arafat. He believes that Bethlehem and the Palestinians have yet to reap the fruits of peace. He complains that the closing of the Israeli borders has had a disastrous and humiliating effect on people who—he points out the window—are right now standing in the rain to obtain entry permits to Israel. The unemployment rate here stands at approximately 40 percent, and yet the mayor claims that with the closing of the border following a wave of terrorist attacks, 80,000 to 100,000 jobs in Israel have gone to Romanian, Thai, Filipino, and Portuguese workers. He understands Israeli fears … His sentence trails off.
The mayor turns his attention to the Christmas revels. The date originally proposed for the transfer to Palestinian self-rule was December 25. Christian Palestinians, however, who now constitute a minority of the city’s population (they used to be the majority in the 1940s), wanted to hold a Christmas service in an independent Bethlehem. So the Israelis agreed to pull out a week earlier, on December 18. An Italian company has offered, free of charge, to install Christmas lights around Manger Square. The mayor expects the celebrations to be substantial and tourism to boom. “But we need hotels,” he laments. He wants to redesign Manger Square to accommodate more buses, tourists, restaurants, and hotels, so that the pilgrims can stay the night and not hurry back to Jerusalem after a two-hour visit.
