As the days and then weeks passed, every afternoon we would take our walk through East Jerusalem, as much a routine as his morning nap. When I opened the door to Nablus Road and lowered the stroller onto the sidewalk, the old men smoking cigarettes on our stoop would part ways for him, and Hossam—Abu Hossam’s oldest son—would lift the stroller gently over the piles of sesame bread, so that Joseph’s legs briefly dangled in the air. In time, Joseph would hold out his hand for the traditional greeting, and in return Hossam would place into it a round pastry filled with date paste, which Joseph would hold protectively by the hole in the middle, the way most children might cling to a rattle. As we continued down the street, women would stop to grab his bare feet or tousle his sandy hair, and whisper in Arabic: “May God protect him.”
Though it was easy enough to become accustomed to strangers loving my child, it was infinitely harder to get used to them raising him. The American boundaries between family and stranger did not exist on our street, which is perhaps why Arabic children are taught to refer to adults close to the family as “auntie” or “uncle.” I could not walk Joseph through the neighborhood without him being overwhelmed with gifts from his many dozen “uncles.” Omar, two shops down, would shake Joseph’s hand and then give him a small mountain of chewy Turkish candies; I would wait until we were out of eyesight and then immediately confiscate them, worried that Joseph would choke. Next, the vegetable vendors, upon seeing his tears, would break off a banana from the bunch and open it carefully before trying to place it into his fist, which was very often still clutching the date bread from Abu Hossam. Men working the counter at the coffee shop would sneak him chocolates wrapped in colorful foil that he would stuff into his mouth, foil and all, before looking at me guiltily and appealing for help. Souvenir store owners would run inside to fetch him stuffed camels with small bells around their necks. He collected bracelets with the word “Palestine” sewn into them, olive-wood crosses, and plastic packets of chocolate coins that had been manufactured for Hanukkah but were now many months out of season and somehow marooned among the Muslims of East Jerusalem.
“Umm Yusuf,” the storekeepers would shout when they saw me alone. “Where is Yusuf?”
It took me time to notice that those men, too, were missing parts of themselves. Loneliness reveals itself in details: a street of men who commuted early in the morning to arrive at their stalls at eight o’clock, where they swept the sidewalk in front of them, beneath the glow of the Old City walls and to the chanting of the Quran. They did not go home again until late at night, which meant that they rarely saw their families. We were surrounded by convents, shops, and vegetable stalls, with no other houses on the street but ours, and so Joseph had no other children to compete with for attention. He was a chance for all of those men to have a child to dote on, a momentary standin for their own children, amid the heat and exhaustion and tension of the workday, an opportunity for tenderness.
Still, we could only handle so many camels.
One afternoon, the three of us returned home from a walk around the neighborhood, piles of plush sheep and chocolates and plastic key chains collected in the basket beneath Joseph’s stroller. At the front door, Abu Hossam reached to hand Joseph date bread. Frédéric cut him off. He had reached his limit.
“Please stop,” he begged. “Otherwise he’ll be spoiled, and he’ll think that he can have whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.”
But then Abu Hossam looked at Frédéric with a rare expression of reproach. “This is between me and your son,” he insisted, and handed Joseph the date bread.
Humbled, Frédéric went inside.
Later that afternoon, Abu Hossam felt the need to explain himself. He told Frédéric, “If you give a child something each time you see him, then he will grow up thinking that giving things away is the most natural thing in the world. Giving children gifts is how we teach them generosity.”
Dear Joseph,
This is how I remember the first year of your life: I read and wrote and sang you to sleep, memorized the grasp of your fingers and your calls in the night, practiced the balance of holding you close and letting you go. In the mornings, I would let you nod off in my arms, where I could be certain of your breath and your heart beating; but in the late afternoons, I would always release you into Nablus Road, where we strolled through love and languages. And often, by evening, after so many salaams and so many gifts, you would have drifted off to sleep in your stroller, your head nuzzled against the sheepskin, a toy camel in your clenched fist. At the door, I wouldn’t dare wake you. So I would unlock the door, and Hossam would lift you up—stroller and all—and carry you inside, all the way up the great flight of stairs, raising you high into the air and then placing the stroller gently on the floor in front of our front door.
And then he would tiptoe down the stairs, so as not to undo his work, turning to me before closing the door.
“Ma salama, Umm Yusuf,” he would mouth softly. Good-bye, mother of Joseph.
Lessons
Looking back, I can forgive myself for making the amateur mistake of believing that we might fully belong to the city, and that the piles of candy and camels meant that the ordinary rules of conflict did not apply to us. I had forgotten the primary rule of the Middle East—that everything hangs on a thread. So much depends upon what moment you decide to leave the house to buy the vegetables.
Joseph was nine months old on the afternoon that Frédéric and I diverted from our normal stroll around the immediate neighborhood and instead took a walk near Damascus Gate, just far enough from our house that we were no longer in a zone of protection. We had been walking only a few moments when I saw something land on the ground nearby. I jumped. Stones began raining down around us. I turned to see a gang of young boys chasing us up the hill, each of them with something clenched in his fist. No one was stopping them. We ran. I could hear the stones landing behind us. A stone fell dangerously close to Joseph’s head, and Frédéric tried to push the stroller faster. As we fled, I thought better of it. Frédéric continued on with Joseph, but I turned and sprinted toward the boys in a rage.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I screamed in Arabic. “He’s just a child!”
They continued pelting stones. Tears burned my eyes. I fled up the hill again, defeated.
It had happened less than a hundred meters from our front door.
We continued our walk, but something had been severed, and soon we made our way back home. On Nablus Road, we stopped into the shop of Sheikh Mazen and his brother Omar and told them what had happened. They shook their heads sadly. “They would have thrown stones at us too,” Omar said, but it was only out of kindness.
For months, I had sustained myself with the belief that some magical membrane had protected us because we had a child. But that night, I placed Joseph in his crib with a sense of a fragile world. For centuries—and perhaps still longer than that—mothers have tried to prepare their children for pain through story and song: a rock-a-bye-baby about a tree bough that would eventually break and send an infant tumbling to the ground; a ring-around-the-rosy about flowers placed in a pocket, perhaps to ward off the black death; a mockingbird promise about a bird that might not sing, a diamond ring that might not shine. London Bridge fell down; Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put together again. Perhaps if we slowly inoculated our children against this reality with melody, with gentle rocking, then the violence would not sting so much when they came upon it.
I kissed Joseph on the forehead and left him to sleep.
Later that night, I sat with Frédéric at the kitchen table of our house between countries, chastened and afraid. “I don’t know what we’re doing,” I confessed. “The longer I live in this city, the less any of it makes sense to me. Sometimes I think that after all of these years, I’ve learned less and less, until finally I’ve learned nothing at all.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said softly, “That’s not true, Stephanie. This city is teaching us humility
.”
War
War came that same winter. It was only a matter of time. Ours was a reality that was bound to shatter—as inevitable as the fact that we grow up and forget our languages, that the bough breaks and the cradle falls.
We had flown to America to visit my family for Christmas when the news came that Israel and Hamas had gone to war in Gaza, in an operation that would be known as Operation Cast Lead. As with most things in the Middle East, the details of the war were disputed, with Israel claiming that they were responding to rocket fire into their territory, and Hamas insisting that they were responding to the breaking of a cease-fire and ongoing border closures. It did not much matter now. We watched from across the world as the first images of rockets appeared, soon followed by bodies and hundreds of casualties in Gaza, many of them children.
We had started our life in Jerusalem during the war with Lebanon, and the civil war between Hamas and Fatah had broken out the next summer. I had lived on the periphery of war in the Middle East for years, in the tensions of a post-9/11 world, and in Damascus as it flooded with refugees from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But to be a mother during war was altogether different.
“Are you sure you’re going back?” my father asked me.
“Gaza’s far away from Jerusalem,” I assured him, even though it wasn’t, and he didn’t try to dissuade us because he knew there was no use.
Now that I had a child, I began to understand how much pain I had put my father through by living in war zones. Now he would also worry about his grandson. I had spent the last two weeks watching a complicity build between my father and Joseph. Every morning, I would awaken exhausted to Joseph’s cries, nurse him in bed, and then stumble with him down the stairs. My father would be waiting at the bottom, his arms already out, to take his first grandchild and feed him oatmeal.
“You know my grandfather died when I was six years old,” my father explained to me. “My most vivid memory of him is of eating oatmeal with him, every single time I saw him, for the first few years of my life.” He spooned some into Joseph’s mouth. “You’re grandpa’s oatmeal boy, aren’t you?” he asked.
And I watched how eternity enters into time through bowls of oatmeal, the clink of bowls against spoons linking the span of more than half a century.
We passed the holidays as the deaths mounted on the television. I went through the motions of making a birthday cake, and let Joseph blow out the first candle, and that is how our son turned one year old.
A few days later, my father drove us to the airport, where he slipped twenty dollars into my pocket, in a habit he had never been able to shake. He held Joseph and clasped my hand and kept catching Frédéric’s gaze for assurance. It turns out that one never stops being a parent.
We said good-bye. We moved ahead toward airport security. I turned around, to see my father’s tears streaming down his face. He let out a single sob.
I had no idea anymore if our choices made any sense at all.
• • •
It was freezing when we arrived on Nablus Road, almost exactly a year after I had arrived there with Joseph from the hospital in Bethlehem. Now new life cohabited with death, and we awakened the next morning into war—both far away, and at the same time on Nablus Road, pulled to our front door by gravity. War is a poison that infects the air. It was difficult to part the space in front of us with our bodies. The men in their storefronts labored in the simple acts of unlocking doors, making change. Televisions and radios played nonstop out of kiosks and falafel restaurants.
I awakened on our first morning back and opened the door onto the balcony overlooking Nablus Road to count as many soldiers as I could see. I stopped at fifty-seven. That afternoon, I sent Frédéric down to buy milk and eggs. I would not leave the house with my son.
• • •
The next morning, I looked down from the balcony to discover that a temporary checkpoint—called a flying checkpoint in that particular poetry that belongs to war—had been hastily assembled in front of our house, just beside Abu Hossam’s front steps. Soldiers manning it busily inspected passports and stopped men from entering the Old City. It was confirmation of what we had always known: that our house marked a border. I left Joseph with Frédéric and exited the house to write at a coffee shop at the end of the street. I returned three hours later to find myself at the end of a line of men trying to pass the checkpoint. I waited for my turn. The soldier demanded, “What are you doing here?”
I pointed to the front door behind him. “I live here,” I said with steelier confidence than I knew I possessed.
He let me through.
The wind had stripped the Great Tree in the courtyard bare of its leaves, and there were only resident birds, left behind when the others migrated farther south, exposed on the January branches, staring out in full feather. In the mornings, collared doves, startled, would catch my gaze from the balcony before flying off to leave the tree barren. The bougainvillea shed its color and stained the stairs with wet, rose-hued petals, and the sky clouded over into gray. The newspapers showed the bodies of the dead collapsed into rubble. Only oranges came into season, and in the mornings I could look down from our balcony and see the branches of the orange trees awash in green leaves and weighed down with color, the fruit afire. I remembered that promise to Joseph, one year before, from the night before he was born. But now these same oranges made me angry, for it seemed to me that they had been placed there as some sort of joke, promising everything and offering nothing, for despite their fire it was still January, and the world was still cold.
War is always terrible, but the full horror of death was only made apparent to me now that I was a mother, forced to confront the way in which it contrasted with the innocence of childhood. This death, this killing—this was not who we were born to be, but who we had become. I meditated on the amount of time put into creating a single life: the nine months in the womb, the nights awakening with early contractions, the vitamin supplements and doctor’s appointments, the excruciating labor. Then the life after, the rousing from sleep every few hours in the night, the suckling from the breast, the crawling, sitting, standing, walking, the first words, the vaccinations, the attention to allergies and sleep patterns. Bowls of oatmeal. Running to be sure that a blanket has not fallen.
All of this life snuffed out, in a single instant: with a bullet, a bomb, a collapsing house. The physics of it seemed impossible—that so much time could be placed on one side of the balance, only to be erased in no time at all. The contrast between the time it takes to create a life and the time it takes to destroy it.
The ancient Greeks and Romans knew this: in The Odyssey, Odysseus descends to the underworld only to discover that his mother has died of a broken heart, waiting for her son to return from battle. In The Aeneid, the mother of a soldier named Euryalus loves her son so much that she follows him to battle, only for him to sneak away in the middle of the night to die with his best friend. Her words, immortalized in Latin, are reminders not only of the futility of war, but also of the invisible scars it leaves on mothers:
Thus, then, my lov’d Euryalus appears!
Thus looks the prop my declining years!
Was’t on this face my famish’d eyes I fed?
Ah! how unlike the living is the dead!
And could’st thou leave me, cruel, thus alone?
Not one kind kiss from a departing son!
• • •
There is no choice, in such times, but to try to continue to live. Joseph had started day care before we traveled to America, so two days after we returned, I awakened, forced myself to dress, bundled him up in layers of winter clothes, and strapped him into his stroller to drop him off in the morning. When we arrived, I noticed that his babysitter, Anoush, had replaced the cartoons in Arabic that she regularly had on the big-screen television in the mornings with the news, and in the midst of the day care, there were tanks exploding and missiles raining down from the sky. A voice in Arabic announc
ed the day’s dead, numbers so high that the children would not learn to count them for many years. The Christmas decorations were still up, a green plastic tree decorated with red garlands. And there was Joseph among the toy plastic balls, with Snow White on the wall nearby, a bluebird perched in her hand, and he sat and tried to put wooden puzzle pieces into places where they would not quite fit.
I did not feel that I could tell Anoush to turn off the news. I asked her to silence it.
• • •
I walked home in the cold. The death count was approaching a thousand people. Abu Salaam was still on the corner of Nablus Road selling newspapers, and the boys were still calling out the prices for round sesame bread, but somehow it didn’t feel like my street anymore; it had become heavy and strange and steeped in winter in our absence, and I understood that death can be a palpable weight in the air when it comes, that it saturates everything it comes in contact with: glasses of water, swaths of fabric, dreams. When I walked into the house, the sink was full of dishes, the water freezing cold, and I left the kitchen and sat alone at the table and no longer recognized my own life. I had a one-year-old child. I was sitting nearby my second war in three years—my third if you counted the summer’s civil war in Gaza.
I thought of the line from the gospel of Luke, when the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and asks her to change her entire life. Against her fear, she finally says yes.
“And the angel left her,” it concludes. Exactly when she needed an angel most.
I closed myself into my office. On the shelf was a book that a Palestinian ornithologist had given me about the wildlife of Gaza. I turned the pages from right to left, still unaccustomed to Arabic books that seemed to read from the future to the past.
I sat down at my desk and scrawled out a list of names of birds:
Bluethroat
Song thrush
Stonechat
Chiffchaff
Graceful warbler
A Country Between Page 18
