Omar and Sheikh Mazen shared the memory of their father’s tailor shop, where suits were designed for the aristocracy and fabric was ordered from the Armenian who had a fine shop around the corner. Those stairs in front of Damascus Gate? They only appeared to be stairs. And beneath them lay the memory of the taxi stand, where, according to our neighbors, taxis used to go directly to Damascus in two and a half hours, to Beirut in three, or to Amman, where you would transfer if you wanted to continue on to Baghdad.
Back then you could even travel to Gaza to swim in the sea.
Maybe we all possess cities of memory, but on Nablus Road, people lived in the memory city. They had even kept the memory name for Damascus Gate: Bab al-Amoud, which in Arabic meant “the Gate of the Pillar.” For centuries, Arabs called it that, perhaps without even knowing why. It was only when archaeologists unearthed the sixth-century Madaba Map that they discovered that, during the Byzantine period, a giant pillar had stood at that entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem. Locals back then must have called it the Gate of the Pillar.
My neighbors never stopped, long after the pillar was gone.
Bird Country
It was not easy to build a marriage in such a place, where so much weight was leaning toward the past. It was hard to look forward, to resist the temptation to fall into nostalgia for what was irrevocably gone. We learned, together, every day a terrifying act of hope. We lived each day in wait of either grace or violence, knowing that one or the other would break through.
It took time to find a place of solace. I had learned to pray—truly pray—only when I climbed to a monastery 350 steps above the earth in a desert in Syria. That world was lost to me now. On Nablus Road, our stairs were infinitely smaller, only a flight of ten or so steps leading to the second story where we lived. But on difficult days, even that was something, and on those afternoons when the world became too much, I learned to look skyward, where the cramped quarters of our life on earth opened up and bird country appeared.
In all of my years in the Middle East, I had never stayed in one place long enough to notice that the slender expanse of earth between Europe and Africa formed a bottleneck—the only stretch of land over which more than five hundred million birds would pass each year, threading their way from Europe all the way to Africa and back, filling the sky with their riot of wings. It was a narrow space of survival, for if they veered too far west they would arrive over the sea, with no place to land, and if they veered too far east they would be stranded over the desert. So they came to us for sanctuary, millions of them.
In central Jerusalem, where pavement and houses and cars had, in the last century, eaten up the area outside of the less-than-square-mile of the Old City, there were precious few green places left for the birds to find shelter. I could imagine them, on each successive migration, discovering old fields and trees and open spaces covered over. But the Great Tree in our backyard survived one generation to the next, so they arrived to it on pilgrimage, seemingly almost all of them at once, and what had been a simple backyard was transformed into a bird sanctuary.
I had never formed a relationship with a tree before. I came from a city dense with trees, so that I never took much notice of cedars or pines, or felt drawn to one over another. But trees here were different; they contained the roots of other times, some semblance of a world more permanent than the world of men that was constantly shifting. Tradition said that an olive tree on the Mount of Olives had witnessed Jesus weeping at Gethsemane before his crucifixion. A sycamore in Jericho was marked as precisely the one that Zacchaeus climbed to see Jesus on the road. An oak in Hebron was reported to be the place where the three angels visited Abraham at Mamre.
The Great Tree in our courtyard also possessed stories. It was a massive, impressive tree, a presence—like some storybook tree guarding the entire neighborhood, with an immense, rough trunk that featured a hollow in its center, where birds could find shelter. It rose high above our house—indeed, above the entire neighborhood, its branches extending out onto our balcony and then up, so that from the vantage point of our second story, we looked into limbs and twigs and nesting places. All year long, resident birds filled its branches: great tits and woodpeckers, swifts and bulbuls, their voices in conversation. The birds would spill over onto our balcony, a cascade of laughing doves and sparrows, and the Palestine sunbird, with its dark coat of silver blue, would gather among the red flowers of the pomegranate tree and hover near the orange trees.
Then migration season arrived, not so unlike the monastery’s busy tourist season, and the birds of Europe circled overhead and descended to meet us—starlings and kestrels and swifts and robins, the air around us alive with wings. They brought news of countries we were exiled from—the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and the coast of Syria—and of movement in freedom. They graced us, settling among the trees like ornaments, like stars.
One day I left the house door open and was astounded when I returned to find a yellow-vented bulbul quietly flitting about in the kitchen. I expected to see it startled when I entered, but it merely glided, quietly, quietly, from nook to nook, until we cradled it in a handkerchief and released it into the open air outside, its belly flashing like a burst of fire as it disappeared into the trees.
On another afternoon, I left the house and forgot to check if the front door had caught on its hinge when I swung it closed. When I came home, the door was wide open, and there was a pigeon trapped inside. He flew frantically in circles, attempting to escape through the closed window, unable to conceive that what looked like air was a pane of glass. I rushed to rescue him. The house echoed with the desperate flapping of his wings. On the other side of the window, another redbreasted bird waited for him. Was it his mother? His mate? Neither of them could understand the invisible line between them—how they could still be so close to each other, but one of them in a room beyond retrieving. I grabbed the wooden edge of a broom and tried to guide him to the door. I opened all of the windows.
For a terrible moment, he was trapped behind the door. Just on the opposite side of the window, the other bird waited for him to appear.
Then he escaped, finally, into the open air.
• • •
I still missed our monastery in the clouds of Syria. I had expected to find holiness in Jerusalem, in the hundreds of churches, but the longer we remained, the more I felt alienated from them, full as they were of postcards and pilgrims flashing cameras. But there was holiness in the sky that March, as birds that had escaped from Europe in the fall slowly, tentatively made their way home again—proof that all storms pass if we give them time. An endangered species of falcon known as the lesser kestrel stopped in the red-tiled roofs of Musrara to make their nests. Swifts nested in the crannies of the Western Wall.
Even at my most exhausted, I could summon up the courage to walk onto the terrace and wait for the birds to appear. The family of pigeons who had greeted us when we arrived never left, and they laid their nests in the windows of the house. Now and then, we’d find a shattered egg on the staircase; now and then, a small, still fragile bird. Sunbirds found their way to the wine-colored, collapsing shells of pomegranates, and at breakfast we could watch the beating of their wings through the windows.
Then there was the afternoon when Frédéric pointed out a ring-necked parakeet squawking in the highest branches of our tree, a strange transplant from a distant, tropical forest. He did not stay—but on rare afternoons we would see him passing through to rest, with his elegant green feathers, red-rimmed eyes, and red beak, cut off from his original homeland and now with nowhere left to go. The hoopoe, known as King Solomon’s messenger, appeared with his long black bill and distinct black-and-white wings, as did the robin redbreast, which legend said had stood by the cross of Jesus, its chest pricked red by the thorns on his crown.
Above the birds lay thousands of stars, with names like akhir alnar, meaning the end of the river, or al-ghumaisa, the bleary-eyed one, from when Arab astronomers first witnessed
them more than a thousand years ago. And beneath us another layer: for our house was just beyond the city walls, where the dead were traditionally buried, and so it made sense that they would pile up in layers and centuries around the places of my daily life, where I bought my bread and drank my coffee.
Those first several months, we moved along the gentle crust between the birds and the dead. There is that which is hidden that is terrible, and that which is hidden that is beautiful. They appeared in turn. But when the beautiful came, I tried to turn to it and call it by name. Maybe love was always, in the end, composed of this noticing, the small gesture repeated over and over again until it becomes the country in which we live.
• • •
Months passed like this. And then one night, Frédéric and I settled into the room we had finally chosen, with the window looking out to the light of the garden, and we held each other in the spare patch of earth we had been given, between countries, in order to rest. I remembered a dream I once had, of the monastery drifting from its mountaintop and quietly descending to the world below.
“You don’t ever leave me, okay?” he whispered. “Because if you leave me, there’s no one else in the world for me. I’ll have to climb all the way back to that monastery.”
We held each other, in that slender place in a country between, perhaps the only thin space in the earth where we belonged. But it was enough.
I married a man who believed in miracles. Who could tell the weather based on the movement of clouds. Who dreamt in a language I could not understand. Who seemed to draw birds to the window, and who saw an angel appear to him on a train. Who loved through the opening and closing of windows, the replacing of lost keys, the finding of houses.
As I lay my head on his chest, I knew that I would never be able to replace the monastery for him. I was never supposed to. He had known what he was giving up all along. I was never meant to take the place his old life. I was supposed to be a new one.
It would take me longer—years even—to understand his silences, voids I first thought of as distance, but later learned was fear—that something might happen to me, that he would lose me too. There is only so much loss a person can take. This is the risk of giving up a life of non-attachment—of attaching oneself to what can be lost. But there is no other way.
It is tempting to tell the story of a marriage by leaving out the difficult parts. It is even more tempting to pretend that there existed some perfect arc, a gradual ease toward harmony after a rocky beginning. And it is true that marriage is an act of migration, of outlasting storms and making a home on the other side of them.
But, if I am honest, I can recognize that love for me was not an arc but a rupture in the natural order of things, a defiance of gravity. There is no getting used to it. It is a permanent interruption. I suspect that most miracles happen that way.
Later, I would read what Simone Weil wrote, that love has its own physics, that the smallest amount of love, of pure good, is enough to outweigh much greater darkness. That is what Frédéric taught me first, in those early months of marriage—that love is in the small, the almost invisible, but that this is enough to save. The number of times, in the midst of sorrow, that he lifted me with a glass of tea. It takes time to recognize such physics: the loaf of bread, the hand held out across the bed, the kiss on the forehead, and the eternity contained within them.
Every single one a vow of its own: I still do.
Friday
For an entire week, fighting between Palestinians and Israelis raged in the city. Our front door became the front line. Riots broke out in the surrounding streets, and young boys, their faces covered to conceal their identities and protect them from tear gas, launched stones at Israeli soldiers. On Nablus Road, just beyond our front step where our neighbors congregated, soldiers set up a roaming checkpoint, banning Palestinian men under the age of fifty from entering the Old City for Friday prayers.
The violence became such that we could not leave the house. We lay in wait. Frédéric collapsed in the salon to rest. I walked out to the back terrace, which afforded a view of both gardens, as well as Nablus Road. There they were. The soldiers appeared to be in their late teens. They stood, fully armed, holding steady at the metal barriers, turning back men, one after another.
I watched them until I understood that the men knew they could not pass and had entered the line for the express purpose of being turned away, a strange ritual of resistance. When they were turned away, they did not disappear. Instead, they gradually formed rows extending down the road, until there must have been two hundred men, waiting for something to happen.
The soldiers braced themselves. A man released himself from the rows of men, walked, confidently, to the front of the crowd, and slowly called out the call to prayer.
I watched, holding my breath.
C’est comme si un miracle allait bientôt se produire.
The men all stood at once.
And then.
I waited for riots, for the fight between men that everything in front of me told me would happen next. But instead there was no collision. Hundreds of men prostrated together on the filthy asphalt of Nablus Road, and they prayed.
I watched them for a long time. It was almost as though their bodies were moving against gravity. Their heads approached the asphalt. The street took on stillness. The soldiers seemed unsure of what to do. The street filled up with walls and walls of bodies pressing their foreheads to the ground, and there were no cameras and no microphones and no one watching, not even the men themselves, who appeared focused on redeeming the filthy earth in their gestures.
When it was finished, the men stood. And then they walked away.
I went inside, into the salon where Frédéric was waiting.
He looked up at me.
“What is it?” he asked.
Then I was in his arms, whispering, “I want to have a child.”
Part Three
The Child in Bethlehem
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
—Frederick Buechner
Dear Joseph,
If I could have built you myself, I would have written a map of the world inside of your body. There would have been rivers, great open spaces, and very particular trees that you could climb and then swing from; and there would be long, straight roads extending from one country to another, easy to navigate. You would be able to see your destination many miles in advance. The names of cities would be signposted large, always in your language. Resting stations marked. And into yourself I would bury the name of every spring of water, the coordinates, so that all of your life you would be drawn, without understanding why, from source to source.
And I would have written names into your bones, so that you would never have a moment, standing in a shop in a corner, or pointing to a sign at a bus station, when you could not understand the destination, or the name of a flower. If I could have written your body I would have given you a compass, etched into your heart like an extra organ. I would have carved in the instructions to build a fire, or to purify water, to sail a boat, or to make your way out of forests after your tracks have been washed out by rain.
As it was, I gave birth to you across a border, in a place that was not yet a country, and may never be one.
A Test
In April of our first year in Jerusalem, I walked into a pharmacy on Sultan Suleiman Street, just along the ancient walls of the Old City, to buy a pregnancy test. I had chosen a pharmacy far enough from the house on Nablus Road that no one would see me entering and ask questions later. If I were pregnant, I at least wanted my parents to know before the falafel vendors did.
An elderly man behind the counter, with a graying moustache and dressed in a white pharmacy coat, smiled at me, slightly amused that I was waiting for everyone else to finish their purchases and leave before I approached the counter.
“I need an imtihan,” I said quietly, using the only Arabic word I knew f
or “test,” though I had originally learned it in the context of “Arabic language test.”
“A test?”
“Yes, a test. To see if I’m carrying something.” My Arabic was failing me.
He laughed. “Do you want a pregnancy test?” he asked me in English.
I looked around. “Yes, exactly.”
“Are you pregnant?”
“I have no idea. That’s why I need to take a test.”
He smiled, clearly enjoying himself. “We have three models. The expensive test, the cheap test, and the middle one.”
“How much is the middle one?”
“Twelve shekels. It should be fifteen shekels, but since you speak Arabic, I’ll give it to you for twelve.” He winked at me.
“That discount will be good luck for the child,” I assured him, though using an unborn child already as leverage in bargaining seemed in poor taste. “Does it have directions in English?”
He opened the package, pulled out the directions, and confirmed that it did. “That’s good. One needs to understand these things.”
“We have it in Arabic, if you prefer.”
“No, no. No Arabic.”
He chuckled.
“Can I have a bag, so that the neighbors won’t gossip?”
He smiled knowingly, took the pregnancy test, slid it into a black plastic bag, and then folded it over as though he were concealing a secret. He handed it to me.
“This is between us, until I know the answer, okay?” I reminded him. “Don’t tell a soul.”
He laughed. “Good luck!” he called after me as I went through the door, the small, tingling bell singing behind me as I swung it closed.
Once home, I drank a liter of water, chose one of our two toilets, and then took the test. For a full ten minutes I stared at the white plastic stick, as though time might change the one faint line on the test to two. I emerged from the bathroom to find Frédéric nervously waiting at the kitchen table.
A Country Between Page 11
