“The bishop sent us,” Frédéric answered cheerfully.
“I heard.” It was clear that this was the only reason she had consented to show us the house.
The three of us reached a gray metal door just a few meters down from the convent, hidden behind a man selling piles of sesame bread and balls of falafel. He looked up at us and nodded.
She turned the key and pushed open the door. Then we were inside, in an inner courtyard with a staircase ascending to the second story. Sister Pascal climbed the stairs carefully, pausing so as not to stumble on the Jerusalem stone that had worn away from more than a century of footsteps, shaded beneath a bougainvillea tree that littered the steps with bold, pink petals. Looking down from the top of the stairs, we could see a larger courtyard below, revealing a secret garden belonging to a community of Mexican nuns, with rows of lemon and orange trees and two long lines of pink rosebushes ringed in white stones, all hidden in the midst of one of the busiest streets of the city. On the garden’s edge, a pomegranate tree was alive with red bulbs pressing up against the windowpanes. I had imagined encountering a house, but not an entire ecosystem.
We passed along the balcony until Sister Pascal led us through yet another set of doors. Then we were inside. I must have gasped at the size of it. At its heart stood a cavernous salon with an arch in the center and stone-rimmed windows on the sides, looking down at the street below. The ceilings were two stories high.
There are those moments in life when you allow yourself to hope for what is impossible: for an angel to appear on a train or a garden to reveal itself in the midst of a city street. For a house of light and space to arrive just when you need it most, with nothing more than a very stern French nun keeping you from grabbing hold of it.
We strolled from room to room. There were two ways of life molded into a single structure: the bygone ways of the old Palestinian Christian world with its grand stone houses, and the monastic life of the nuns who had been gifted the house and inhabited it earlier in the twentieth century. One grand receiving room led into another, only slightly smaller public room, which then led to a long and narrow hallway. On the sides of the hall, a series of tiny bedrooms sat clustered like boxes in a beehive, each one barely large enough to fit a bed and a dresser inside, cloisters for the nuns who had slept there long before. I felt their presence, still. At the end of the hall, a slight room of exposed stone must have once been a chapel. Next to it, a bedroom had been left entirely vacant, save for a mural still painted onto the wall of a turquoise sky, a sea of waves beneath it, and a boat set to sail.
“This room belonged to a Brazilian,” Sister Pascal explained, clearly not amused by the spectacle of a sailboat set adrift on the walls of her property. For a moment, I could see the Brazilian too, in that house on a busy street, painting his dream of somewhere else.
The previous tenants had been six male members of the Focolare, a Roman Catholic movement, and though they had not officially been monks, they had nonetheless taken lifelong vows to serve the church. Their austerity was admirable but had done the house no favors. Rarely had I seen a house so badly in need of what my grandmother would call a “woman’s touch.” The doors had all been painted a utilitarian shade of gray, and the door handles would have been right at home in prison cells. When the front doorbell was pushed, a loud, echoing buzz rattled the entire house. The men had taken everything with them when they moved out, even the light sockets and the hooks in the walls, so that each wall was bruised with the evidence of what had recently been there.
Even still, it was not so much a house as a monastery in the world, complete with two salons, six bedrooms, a narrow kitchen with an attached breakfast room, and a single bathroom with two sinks, two toilets, and two showers. From the edge of the kitchen, a door led out to an immense roof terrace. I stood there with Frédéric and the disapproving Sister Pascal, and I could see the walls of the Old City just ahead and the majestic Damascus Gate, the houses of West Jerusalem in the near distance, the gardens of nuns below us on two sides, and finally, Nablus Road. The sky was studded with red roofs and laundry hung out to dry, tanks full of gasoline for the winter, folding chairs left out on terraces, and windows—an entire level of habitation existing just over the earth.
“It’s much too big for two people,” Sister Pascal remarked.
“I think we can manage,” Frédéric assured her, and I smiled.
She was right, though—not so much that the house was too big, but that there was something unwieldy about it, too much for a couple to handle. There was a sense that the house would possess its owners, and not the other way around. When we returned to the salon, she pointed to a series of long, jagged cracks in the walls, to a dozen tiles lifting from the floor. Paint was peeling from two of the bedrooms, and long tubes of fluorescent lighting were hanging, exposed, from the ceiling. I would later suspect that the cracks dated back to the great Jerusalem earthquake of 1927 and had never been fixed.
“We were planning on renovating this year while it was empty,” she lamented. “Now what will we do?”
“Why don’t I help to renovate the house?” Frédéric suggested. I shot him a look. I had never known him to fix anything. He shrugged.
“We’ll have to ask the Mother Superior in Jordan before we know anything,” she said. “It’s her decision. Until then you’ll just have to wait.”
And then we left.
If I had learned anything from my years in the Middle East, it was that hope is a dangerous and fragile thing, something to be handled carefully. But that night, I allowed myself to hope for passing a few years in an impossible city, in rooms suspended over the earth. We gathered our bags from where we had been staying across town and moved into the guesthouse of the Franciscan Sisters, the nuns who owned the house, where we would stay until they gave us a response. We had decided that the best way to encourage them to give in was to force them to confront our poor, homeless faces every day at breakfast. Our room in the convent had two single beds with a desk and a crucifix between them, and I quietly removed the desk and pushed the beds together.
From the window of our room we could peer out at the house we hoped to rent next door: its rows of windows, the terrace overlooking gardens on each side, the thick stone walls that I knew concealed its many rooms.
That evening, an elderly Spanish nun named Sister Flores knocked on our door. She spoke French gently, with a thick Spanish accent, and had the air of an elderly grandmother who was coming to tuck us in.
She poised herself at the edge of the bed. “I hear that you want to live in the house next door,” she began.
“It’s a beautiful house,” Frédéric answered.
She nodded. She was the kindest nun we had met so far, and yet she still seemed to be measuring us up. I was bewildered as to why these nuns were so suspicious of us. I did not yet know that we were moving into a neighborhood in which dozens of houses had been lost in wartime and never returned to their original owners, in which the act of allowing strangers to move into your home would be fraught with fear and historical memory.
She managed a look of encouragement and gently touched my shoulder.
“When will you know?” she asked.
“They need to ask the Mother Superior for permission,” Frédéric said.
She sighed. Something in our conversation seemed to have drained her of her initial enthusiasm. “I see.”
She wished us luck. When she reached the door, she turned around abruptly.
“Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?” she asked.
I was momentarily taken aback. It was Frédéric who answered.
“Yes.”
“Good,” she snapped. “Then you’d better start praying now. That Mother Superior isn’t easy.”
• • •
We waited for three days. In the same way that landlords ask potential new tenants for references, the nuns looked to the last house where Frédéric had lived for any length of time, which happened to be an ancien
t monastery in the Syrian desert. Unable to phone Syria directly from Jerusalem, they phoned instead a convent in Jordan, whose nuns phoned in turn Frédéric’s former monastery to speak to Father Paolo. They informed him that his former novice had turned up in Jerusalem. He seemed pleased to hear this.
“Frédéric is a fine man,” Paolo insisted. “No, he didn’t leave in scandal. He met a nice girl, and I even married them myself. You can trust him… What? He said he’d fix the walls? No, as far as I know, he doesn’t know how to fix anything.”
The nuns in Jordan passed this news on to the Mother Superior.
That night, Sister Pascal knocked on our door. When we opened it, she was trying her best to conceal a mischievous smile.
“The Mother Superior called,” she announced. “It seems that four years ago, when she was on pilgrimage in Syria, she decided to visit a desert monastery. She had to climb hundreds of steps in order to reach the monastery, and when she finally arrived, she was exhausted and thirsty.”
She stopped for a moment and examined Frédéric. “She said that a young Frenchman who had just become a novice monk approached her. She still remembers him. He very kindly offered her a glass of tea.”
The Opening and Closing of Windows
We moved in the following day.
Since Frédéric had given most of his belongings to the poor and I had spent the last year living out of a suitcase, we were hardly prepared for the task of furnishing an entire house of many rooms. We possessed two highly sentimental bags between us: Frédéric’s old traveler’s backpack swelling with flutes and diaries and icons, mine with short dresses I had purchased in France but could never wear on Nablus Road, scraps of paper inscribed by friends I had left behind in Syria, and a carpet I thought I could not live without. There was not a pot or a cookbook between us.
Luckily, the Franciscan convent had been an orphanage earlier in the century, so the nuns were well prepared to take care of us. Sister Pascal led us to a storage room full of pea-green curtains, an ancient stove with a door that closed only with twine, several 1970s art deco tables in orange and lime green, egg cups for poaching eggs à la coque, forks and knives with plastic blue and white handles, two desks, threadbare sheets that had covered the bodies of hundreds of sleeping pilgrims, and several twin-sized beds with metal frames and old, sturdy mattresses designed to conjure in the brain nothing but discipline and prayer. Most of the items had clearly not seen the light of day since before the 1967 war.
“Whatever you want, it’s yours,” she announced.
So far, the only thing we had discovered in the house from its previous inhabitants was a bag full of wooden rosaries in one of the dresser drawers.
“We’ll take everything,” I responded.
We spent the rest of the afternoon dragging mattresses and old tables out the side entrance of their convent, through the rose garden and up the stairs to our front door. Soon the house was furnished with an assortment of mismatched green and orange tables and plastic-backed chairs that even the nuns knew were outdated. I hurried out in search of a bedouin woman I had seen sitting at the entrance to Damascus Gate, surrounded by desert plants, and came back laden with potted mint and thyme and a small bougainvillea tree, determined that, even if the house felt spare, at least it would be alive.
“How is it possible?” I asked Frédéric, heaving from lugging the mattresses up the stairs. “The more we fill it, the emptier the house becomes.” We had somehow managed to obtain the clown car of ancient Jerusalem houses. “And there’s no way we’ll keep it clean.”
Frédéric, accustomed by now to my anxiety, took my hand by way of answering.
I chose one of the six bedrooms and sat on the floor. A pigeon with a red breast stopped in the window frame and looked in. I dragged two mattresses from the salon onto the floor in front of her. The bird came and went and came again, until we closed the arched metal shutters and collapsed onto the floor in sleep: the first night we’d ever slept together in a home of our own.
• • •
Frédéric initiated the next morning—and every morning thereafter—by walking the length of the house on the western side and opening the windows, one by one, to let the cool air in. For the first half of our day, we lived in that country facing west, sealed off from the noise of Nablus Road and the oppressive sun. On the western side, birds moved among the branches of an enormous tree that stood at the center of the Mexican convent’s garden beneath us, every now and then breaking free and fluttering down onto our windowsills, and a Syrian woodpecker with his red tuft of feathers assumed his place high upon its trunk and began hammering. Beneath the tree, the nuns walked back and forth in their Alice-blue habits, the sound of their brooms wshsh, wshsh, wshshing against the courtyard floors.
Beyond the courtyard, a row of shops sold dried goods, pomegranates and dates, and whatever fruit was in season, and lambs hanging by their ankles in glass windows. In front of them, a parking lot had replaced the vacancy that used to be no-man’s-land—the space dividing the city in half after dozens of houses had been razed following the 1948 war. Then the earth moved uphill, and we could see the first Israeli houses and the outer wall of the Old City lifting toward the New Gate.
In the late afternoon, the sun began to set, and Frédéric closed the windows on the western side to keep the heat out as the sun passed over. To let the house breathe new air, he opened all the windows on the eastern half, facing Nablus road, which by now had grown cooler. Up came the wind of our street, the smell of mint and za’atar spice, and with it voices—of our neighbors calling out greetings to one another in Arabic, of merchants singing out prices of hats and herbs and hot tea for sale, of shoppers in the grocery store beneath us, which also, somehow, occupied our house, as though a single building could be broken up into infinite compartments—and the noises of a truck emptying trash bins, of a car speeding past with its radio blaring Arabic dabke music, of a street that had been tread upon for more than two thousand years.
In time, I would come to think of Nablus Road as not entirely East or West but a country of its own, so weighed down with history that it seemed insincere to limit it to whatever nation it happened to find itself in during a particular moment. Even to call it a “road” seemed to limit it in time, for in the longer view it was not a road but a valley disguised as a road, still called wadi in Arabic, a paved-over gorge running through the center of a city built on hills. It was a natural barrier, with two different worlds rising on either side. Though the sides tried to keep separated, as the lowest point of gravity in the city, everything from both sides fell onto our street. When it rained, the water flooded down, both Hebrew and Arabic, and when it stormed, the wind formed a tunnel of air that howled through the night. Any direction in which we headed required us to climb, so that the smallest tasks of daily life required effort, and coming home was a kind of falling to the lowest possible place in the city and remaining there, both for the sake of being home and for the sake of not having to climb out again. So it was with people, with voices, and with birds, that they lived in all directions, and yet gravity urged them, at certain moments, to land at our front door.
• • •
For days I kept awakening in the middle of the night, uncertain of what exactly had roused me. It had not escaped me that my husband had left the monastery only to move us into a convent, and during that first night, I felt uneasy with our proximity to the nuns below, as though they were part of a past he could not yet release. We dragged the mattresses to another room, where still, I slept fitfully. The shouting from the street below, on Nablus Road, reminded me of Damascus, so that I woke up disoriented. The following night, we moved again. We tried the rooms against the garden, the rooms against the street, the rooms abutting the ice-cream-truck doorbell. For a week, every night, we moved from room to room. Each room was different, so that it was too warm or too cold, too bright or too full of shadows—in a city where the ecosystem shifted not by street, but by centimeter. T
he rooms on the eastern side of the house were too loud, while the western rooms were burdened by their uneasy proximity to no-man’s-land, that eerily silent scar, which even now carried the ghosts of those who had fled or died. Finally, after a week of moving from room to room, we dragged the mattresses to the room where we had started, with the bird at the window, facing the garden of orange and lemon trees, and settled there to stay.
At night, when Frédéric fell asleep, I looked at him, trying to recognize him. And, in his sleep, I could remember the man I first knew, tall and full of grace in a monastery in the clouds. The way he raced after children in the monastery courtyard, his robe lifting as he ran. His face catching the light. The way he disappeared into the paths of the desert as though he belonged to them. Leaning over to talk to birds. The way he could, so very quickly, break into laughter. And the way he always told me, gently: “Why would God give a man stones who asked for bread?”
Pour un moine, quitter à jamais son monastère
ne peut être qu’un acte de foi, ou une fuite.
For a monk, to leave his monastery forever
can only be an act of faith, or of running away.
Until then, it had only been waiting, an entire year of waiting. First I had thought that he would never leave the monastery, and there had been months of waiting to see if he would. Then there had been months of waiting to be married. Then the months of waiting to see where we would move next.
And now we had finally landed—not in his country, not in mine, but in a precarious landscape scarred by war. It was not, perhaps, what he had imagined.
I watched him, his sleeping body almost aglow in the faint light coming in through the window. Here was a man who had expected to spend the rest of his life sleeping in a small, stone cell in his monastery. A man who had convinced himself that leaving to marry me was his final, and greatest, act of obedience. I allowed a thought to surface that I had been carrying within me all of those months.
A Country Between Page 6
