A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  White wagtail

  Yellow-vented bulbul

  Crested lark

  Common swallow

  Little ringed plover

  Night heron

  Glossy ibis

  How were they faring in this war, this winter? Would they, who knew by instinct how to make their way home from the cold, know how to navigate this?

  Less than a mile away, Joseph was piling up wooden blocks. I wondered how anything survived these brutal human seasons unscathed.

  • • •

  That night, Joseph burned his hand. It was late, and he had not adjusted to the time change back from America and so would not fall asleep. I stayed awake as long as I could, and finally drifted off. Frédéric paced back and forth, listening to Joseph calling out for him.

  Hours passed. Frédéric was worried that, with his blanket off, Joseph would catch cold. He could not leave him to stand at the edge of the crib. Finally, he gave in and took Joseph into his arms, held him against the heat of his body. He settled in the warmest place in the house, near the woodstove.

  He held him for hours, the boy nestled in the nook between his father’s neck and shoulders, the two of them awake. I lay fast asleep in the bedroom. Then at some point, Frédéric must have drifted off.

  I awakened to screaming. Joseph had somehow pulled away and placed his hand directly on the stove. From his high vantage point, on his father’s shoulder, he had reached above the protective screen around it. The flesh on his hand was burning. He did not know how to walk yet and could not stand without holding onto something, so he did not know how to take his hand off the stove—equally afraid of the burning and the falling down.

  I ran to them. I sobbed. I held Joseph, and said again and again: “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  In a time of war, everything collapses into a single trauma. I wrapped his hand in a towel, and we rushed down to the street and caught a taxi to the hospital. I knew that the stove had burned him, but something kept making me think that it was because of the war. I shouted at the driver to go faster.

  If we had not returned here, then my boy would not have burned his hand.

  The taxi pulled up to the hospital curb, and I fumbled in my bag but could not find the twenty-five shekels to pay the fare. The taxi driver waited. Every moment that passed was another moment that my son was in pain. All of the rage I felt at the world was directed at the driver now. Couldn’t he see that my child was hurt? Couldn’t he just let us go, for Christ’s sake?

  I found the money, gave it to him, rushed inside. I am not sure that I have forgiven him, even today.

  It was four in the morning when we signed in at the window and waited. Joseph was wailing. Many of the doctors were gone, having been called up to serve in the war.

  A doctor arrived, inspected Joseph’s hand, cleaned it, and bandaged it.

  “You’re lucky,” he said. “It didn’t penetrate the second layer of skin.”

  I sobbed.

  The nurse attending us looked at me callously. “Why are you crying?” she asked. “It’s only a burned hand.”

  She was right: it was only a burned hand. Perhaps she had a son too, and he had been called to the war, where the stakes were much higher. At that moment, around fifty miles away in Gaza, people were killing and dying on both sides—children, really—both killing and dying, and my son had only burned his hand. She was not wrong. But a child is a child, and he was mine.

  It was early morning when we emerged from the hospital to make our way home again, Joseph’s hand bandaged, proudly clutching a white doctor’s glove inflated as a balloon. The sun was rising over the Old City walls. A group of workers, who awakened early to commute, huddled together in the cold and drank coffee, their breath visible in the morning air.

  Abu Salaam was putting out the first newspapers. I glimpsed the headline from Al-Ahram, an Egyptian newspaper, about the war in Gaza. It said, in English: “Raining Death.”

  • • •

  I have never understood whether the impulse to continue with the ordinary during times of conflict is resistance, or denial, or a kind of magical thinking that makes us believe that if we pretend that everything is normal, then it will be. In Arabic culture, samoud—or steadfastness—is recognized as the highest virtue, the will to continue living in the midst of despair. And it was true, that life could only become normal again through toothbrushes and pasta and the passing of time. The next day, I bundled Joseph up and brought him to his day care in the Old City. It was Friday, and soldiers were already setting up barricades outside Damascus Gate for the clashes in front of our house. On the way out, I crossed Mother Maria, who asked if I would be home in the afternoon.

  “I want to drop a bag of oranges and lemons in front of your door,” she said. I thanked her, remembering the line from the gospel of Luke: “And Mary pondered all of these things in her heart.” The small details that take on greater meaning for a mother, contemplating her child. I would live the rest of the day for the lemons and oranges, waiting at the entrance of home.

  The clashes at Damascus Gate usually took place in the early afternoon. Nablus Road was so dangerous during such moments that it was safer for Joseph to be at day care than in his room, vulnerable as it was to tear gas that could waft up and into the rooms through the cracks of the windows. When I opened the front door, Abu Hossam’s stand was locked firmly shut.

  So Joseph and I climbed the long hill toward day care. When I arrived, scenes from the war were playing again on the news. I watched Joseph piling blocks with his bandaged hand, and I worried that it might hurt him to touch the world.

  “Will you call me if there are clashes in the Old City?” I asked Anoush.

  “Why? He’s safer here than at your house.”

  This was true.

  “Don’t worry,” she continued. “I’ll pull the metal blinds shut, and no one will even know that the children are inside.”

  It was the most absurd idea, that we could somehow make our children invisible if we needed to, but I chose to believe.

  • • •

  It was our darkest period in that city. We had built our life on a street of great beauty and great violence, but on those days it often felt like the violence was the stronger of the two. I would write in the afternoons. Frédéric, who now worked on a development project in the West Bank, would cross the checkpoint in the mornings and then again in the afternoons, and come home exhausted. In the evenings, my husband and I would sleep on the western half of the house, holding each other on the narrow mattress, and Joseph would sleep on the eastern half, but in truth none of us slept much at all.

  At night, I sometimes dreamt that we had made our life somewhere else. In the image, Frédéric was holding Joseph on his shoulders, and there was a wind. I had a writing desk facing the sea. I looked much younger. In this dream, there was never war, because war came only in other dreams; they were careful not to mix, and I believed that this must be the kindness of God.

  Time passed slowly. I finished the last edits on my book. I stood on the balcony, waiting for birds. And I remembered.

  I remembered falling in love, the leaves changing colors.

  I remembered reading books in the library all afternoon.

  I remembered climbing into the ruins of an ancient Roman city under the full moon.

  I remembered a silence in the desert penetrating my bones.

  I remembered sleeping on my roof and staring at the stars.

  I remembered living slowly enough to memorize language.

  I remembered gathering rain in glass bottles.

  I remembered the Aztec Theatre in San Antonio and double features and kissing my first boyfriend in the back of a movie theater when I was fourteen years old.

  I remembered the voice in the dream I had once, when I almost became a nun, warning me: “You cannot take the piano with you.”

  I had not become a nun in the desert, and still I had not bought a pi
ano, afraid as I was of owning anything too large to throw in a suitcase in the middle of the night, lest we need to escape.

  I sat in my office, for a long time, staring out the window. I remembered an elegant potted plant with red spiky flowers that my friend Karen had given to me as a gift for my birthday the week before. I had already completely forgotten about it, abandoning it on the windowsill looking down at the nun’s garden. Surely it had died by now.

  I rushed out of my office, poured water in a glass, and hurried to the flowers. Keeping this single plant alive took on a sudden urgency; it wasn’t much, but it was something I could do. I rushed to the window, where I found it blooming on the windowsill, tiny drops of water already gathered inside of the spiky leaves.

  Frédéric walked into the room.

  “Frédéric, did you water my flowers?” I asked.

  “Of course I did,” he said and looked at me curiously. “I always do. You never noticed?”

  The world was mine already, and I hadn’t even known.

  • • •

  Then we woke up, and the war was over.

  Later, only the most terrible and most beautiful parts of that season remained in my memory: an image of a Syrian woodpecker, with black plumage and a red shock of feathers on his head, staring back at me from the barren tree; Joseph leaning against me at night when I changed the bandages on his hand, his cheek touching mine. Three o’clock in the morning, when again he called my name, and I ran to him afraid, only to hear him ask, in French, for a glass of sparkling water—some of his very first words.

  That morning I rushed to Abu Salaam’s to see the news. And instead of headlines of war in Gaza, they were of a plane in New York that ran into a flock of birds and lost its engines. The pilot made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, and everyone survived.

  Oranges and lemons left on the front doorstep, oranges we peeled by hand, so that the smell of them remained on our skin for hours, even as we read the newspapers.

  Frédéric slowly repairing the gate around the woodstove, making it higher, so that no one would be burned again.

  Hospitals

  A few weeks after the war ended, Frédéric descended the stairs from our house early in the morning to buy bread and returned with a stricken look on his face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Hossam and Saleh were stabbed.”

  It had happened late the night before, according to our neighbors. Hossam and Saleh, the two oldest sons of Abu Hossam, had finished up their work selling hats and umbrellas in front of our door and packed up their merchandise in boxes. Then they had driven to the nearby Flowers Gate of the Old City to pick up a delivery. When they arrived and opened the car door, local boys ambushed them, pinning them down and stabbing them, repeatedly, in the back.

  “We have to go to them,” I said.

  They had been sent to separate hospitals, so we went to find Hossam first, who was in more critical condition. We traveled to a hospital across town, and there we saw him: handsome Hossam, pale in a white hospital gown, strapped to tubes in a bed.

  Umm Hossam held her oldest son’s hand.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly.

  “Of course,” I answered. “You’re our family here.”

  Joseph reached out to touch him. Until now, he had known Hossam only as the young man who had carried him, like a prince, in his stroller up the stairs a hundred times since he was born. Hossam, with his hands full of tubes, wrapped his fingers lightly around Joseph’s small hand. I was relieved that my son was still too young for me to have to explain. Hossam glanced at me. It was a culture in which men and women kept a distance from each other. Now he held my gaze for an instant, and I nodded at him, and thought that this eighteen-year-old boy who stood outside of my front door every day would never be a stranger again.

  Umm Hossam had become pale. “This hospital,” she told me wistfully. “I haven’t been here since I gave birth to Adam.” Adam was her youngest son, a year older than Joseph.

  I remembered what someone had told me once about Jerusalem, that the city is divided, but at least everyone comes to the same hospitals to be born and to die.

  When visiting hours finished, Frédéric and I walked outside. I pulled Joseph against me and turned to Frédéric. “They’re so lucky that the knives just missed their spines.”

  He looked at me, sadly. “You don’t get it?” he asked. “That wasn’t luck. They missed the spine on purpose. These attacks were a warning. They were meant to wound both of them as much as possible without actually killing them.”

  A friend of mine once described life in conflict zones as a violence that begins at an infinite distance and creeps in closely. First it happens on television to a city nearby. In the newspaper, you glimpse the bombed-out picture of a place you once visited. Then the relative of a neighbor is killed. A distant cousin is next. Then a cousin. A neighbor. Finally, a parent, a child. But once it enters into your intimate circle, it never leaves again.

  Our street changed for me when Hossam and Saleh were stabbed. Now the conflict had come to our front door. I had steadied myself for the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but not for the more confusing part of the conflict: how violence seeps into daily life, how people who appear to be on the same side turn against one another.

  A week later, I walked downstairs and Hossam and Saleh were working at their old stand, wearing new clothes, masking their wounds.

  “You came back?” I asked Saleh.

  “Of course,” he said. “I couldn’t let them see me not come back.”

  What Passes and What Remains

  A month later, I accepted a teaching job at a university in the West Bank, and the confines of my life changed. Now I would no longer pass my days on our street and in the Old City, but in Abu Dis, a small village on the opposite side of the separation wall. In the mornings, I would drop off Joseph at his day care in the Old City and then set out to campus, which, though it should have been only ten minutes away from our front door, took me nearly an hour to get to by bus, since we had to travel until we reached an opening in the separation wall, miles away, that would allow us to cross to the other side and circle back again. By the time I finally arrived at the university, I could stand at the highest point of the hill on which it stood and look down over the wall, where I could see the place from which I had set out nearly an hour before, almost right in front of me.

  It was also a reminder of how cut off I had been from the real violence that inflicted the region. Though East Jerusalem was difficult, it was mild compared to the tension in the neighboring West Bank, where checkpoints separated the major cities, military incursions into villages were regular events, and an entire generation—racked by the violence of the Second Intifada and a stagnant political process, many cut off from ever visiting Jerusalem and their holy sites, their physical landscape closing in on them—had grown up without hope. They had also, due to war, missed critical parts of their educations.

  I taught two classes: English Composition and Introduction to Literature. My students did not care much about learning to write essays, but they fell in love with literature. It was an oral culture and we read the stories out loud, and I savored the sound of words in air. On the first day, I selected a quote by Yevgeny Yevtushenko from the very opening of their course packets: “Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”

  “What does that mean?” Nada, a student from Bethlehem asked. She was tall and thin, with her hair purposefully pulled back in a way that reminded me of college freshmen the world over. The girl sitting beside her turned. “It means that poetry is free,” she explained in Arabic. “It doesn’t have checkpoints.”

  • • •

  There is much to be learned about a generation from teaching them literature, about what it feels like to live life in the passive tense. Students who could not easily travel from city to city because of checkpoints and had no way to encounter others in the wider world learne
d to find their companions in books. They became kin with those exiled in pages: with Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, turned into a vermin, who sees all of the possessions of his life taken from him even as he stays watching in the room. Or Odysseus, surviving war and exile, who does not believe, when he finally returns home after so many trials, that it is possible that home could still exist. Students who lived in refugee camps connected with Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, exiled from heaven, the paradise that should have been his, given over to others so that they might live in it. A former prisoner found himself in Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” an insect left alone, his soul trying to connect to the outside world, reaching out filament by filament.

  I would take their suffering and their laughter into my body in the mornings. When class was finished, I would catch the bus home to hold my son in my arms. The separation wall butted up against one side of the campus, but the other side offered a view out to the desert and sky. As the bus started, I would watch the clouds moving over the wall. I decided then that it was the sky that made the wall look so ghastly—like two windows put up against each other, only one was moving and the other remained still. In the sky, the birds passed over, the clouds passed over, and the light and shadows passed over. But on the earth, no one passed over.

  • • •

  Sometimes miracles come to us in people we meet. Sometimes they come to us in orange trees, in full fruit in the middle of winter. And sometimes they come to us in books. I have always believed that a book that arrives in one’s hands at a certain moment is a message from another space and time.

  That winter of 2009 in Jerusalem, in the wake of the war and teaching, I was in need of such a book. I found myself suspended between realities increasingly difficult to reconcile: a husband I loved; a son learning to walk and speak his first words in French, English, and Arabic; and a world stumbling from one war to another. I was more and more uncertain of how to navigate between them.

  One morning, I climbed the hill with Joseph and dropped him off at his day care. I continued on to Jaffa Road, at that hour already alive with cars and construction, and then onto a quiet alley descending the hill, to an English used bookstore, the way others might look for a chapel in a moment of grief. I slipped inside, nodded at the woman working at the front desk, then disappeared among books. It was as though I were seven years old again, completely lost. I passed an hour that way. There was nothing I wanted to buy. I just didn’t want to be alone, and I longed to be in my own language.