After an hour, I stood up to leave. Outside the entrance to the store, I noticed boxes of books lined up beneath the window and a sign in front of them advertising: “Books, 2 shekels.” It was the equivalent of fifty cents. I sorted through them absently. Among the volumes, I spotted two that were clearly left over from someone’s old British collection:
Pears’ Cyclopaedia: Twenty-Two Complete Works of Reference in One Handy Volume of Nearly 1,000 Pages
The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds, Part II: Containing the Flowers, Flowering Shrubs and Trees, Evergreens, and Hardy Ferns for the Open-Air Flower Garden in the British Isles, with Their Cultivation and the Positions Most Suitable for Them in Gardens.
The forty-ninth edition of Pears’ Cyclopaedia, issued in 1938 by A. & F. Pears, a soapmaking company, wore a rich red cover, the binding long ago taped from overuse. I could almost imagine some young boy in England, stealing off beneath a tree, to study the maps among its pages.
I opened The English Flower Garden to page upon page of black-and-white illustrations of flowers. I turned absently to page 691, where a delicate etching of Lonicera periclymenum, or the honeysuckle, covered almost an entire page.
I paid the woman four shekels and carried them home.
• • •
That night, when the house was asleep save for the call of birds outside, I escaped to my office and opened the books, in the magical hours.
The flowers in The English Flower Garden appeared beside their scientific names in alphabetical order: Adiantum, or maidenhair fern; Adlumia, or climbing fumitory. Adonis, pheasant’s eye; Aesculus, horse chestnut. Every name seemed more delicate than the last: Anomatheca, flowering grass; Carbenia, blessed thistle. The author had painstakingly sketched out every turn of leaf, so as to capture each vein. I absorbed myself in reciting the names out loud—an inventory of the beautiful.
Memories flashed back: my father kneeling beside my childhood bed, talking me through my nightmares by describing a green field, awash with flowers. There are moments when there is so much horror that you have to willfully summon beauty into the world, say its name out loud, in the hopes that you might replace one with the other and tip the balance, so that the world might be made right again.
Lilium canadense. Gladiolus. A world healed with the particular.
I picked up the second book, the red-bound encyclopedia of that little boy from long ago: Pears’ Cyclopaedia from the year 1938. On the opening page, a colored painting depicted a young boy blowing bubbles. It was a child’s book, once owned by a little boy in England, his name still stamped in the cover: “Eli Strauss.” I ran my finger over the stamp of his name.
It recorded, year by year, a world on the edge of collapse.
By 1939, the world would tumble into a war that would destroy a continent, lead to millions of deaths, and decimate the Jewish community to which that little boy belonged. But he did not know that yet when he stamped his name on the inside cover.
I turned to the chapter titled “Events.” As promised, it was an attempt to explain in child’s language all of recorded history, from the beginning of civilization to the moment in which the encyclopedia was published. The earliest entries were only a single line.
2234—Chaldean astronomical observations began.
2200—Hia dynasty founded in China.
1273—Assyrian empire founded.
For pages, the descriptions continued—entire histories condensed into single lines: Alexander was born, as was Jesus Christ. The First Crusade merited only a few words. But as the book tumbled toward the present, lines turned into paragraphs, the ordinary mixed in with the terrible, a world about to go mad.
1935—Miss Amelia Earhart flew from Honolulu to California in 18¼ hours. A chimpanzee was born in the Zoological Gardens, the first to be born in captivity in London. The swastika became the German National flag.
1936—Much rain caused widespread flooding in England. Mr. Roosevelt reelected President of the U.S. Germany repudiated the waterways clauses of the Versailles Treaty.
1937—Three wolves escaped from the Oxford Zoo and after several days of roaming free were shot.
1938—January 20: A brilliant display of the Northern Lights was seen from all over England. January 25: The Falls View Bridge at Niagara collapsed under the strain of piled-up ice. Drastic changes made in the control of the armed forces in Germany. Herr Hitler became chief of the supreme command of the armed forces.
History in the present does not know what will become of it. I thought of that boy, reading his encyclopedia beneath a tree, and wondered if he had been aware of how much more terrible the world was about to become, before it got better. In the section titled “Prominent People,” Adolf Hitler was listed with Auguste Rodin, John Keats, Beethoven. In the section showing maps of the countries of the world, I mouthed the names of places that would soon no longer exist.
On the final page of the encyclopedia was a blank calendar for 1940 and 1941, both waiting to be filled.
There was little comfort to be drawn from such a book. I wondered if I had brought my son into a similarly unsustainable world. Surely things would get worse before they got better—not only in Jerusalem, but in the entire Middle East. In the midst of the daily obscurities, day care and sesame bread, things were shaping up to spiral out of control. I somehow knew that my little boy was that little English boy, now asleep in his bed, but positioned at the edge of a world that was about to unravel.
I prepared to put the books away, the solace of flowers gone.
But then something made me turn one final time to the opening two pages of the encyclopedia. The early pages were illustrated with the flags of the world. There is something that appears so permanent, so official in a flag that one forgets that it is only temporary. Here, first, were displayed the “Flags of the British Empire,” then the “Flags of Foreign Countries.” I examined them. United States. France. Italy. Belgium.
Then I stopped. There, among the familiar emblems, was the Nazi flag, the swastika, with the name Germany typed under it, placed securely among the other flags of Europe. Even seventy years later it was shocking, the swastika a claw in its center.
But something had been written over it in ink. I squinted to read it. The little boy, Eli, had not thrown his encyclopedia away during the war. Instead, he had held onto it. When the war had finished, he had returned to the pages of the year 1938, now in his past, and in black pen had drawn a single line in ink through the center of the Nazi flag to cancel it out. He placed brackets around the flag itself, as if to signal that it was temporary. And beneath it, that boy, who had returned to his childhood book as a man who had lived through war, had written in English cursive:
No longer existent.
I ran my finger over his words: “No longer existent.”
For a moment, I felt as though that boy had also traveled through time to whisper to me.
And I sat in my office, alone in the middle of the night, and I wept.
• • •
Simone Weil wrote, “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.”
I had spent years trying to understand what she meant, but I think I was beginning to comprehend now—that there are those supernatural physics that allow for a flower to be stronger than an entire war. We can call that flower beauty, or grace, or hope. What is sure is that which is beautiful not only saves us, but it also belongs to the eternal, while the terrible passes away. Borders do not last. The names of countries do not last. And the names of flowers, they, too, do not last. But flowers themselves remain. Music remains. Certain phrases from childhood, sewn into our memories, passed down imperceptibly in the way we speak to children, they also remain, and will continue to after we are gone.
Childbirth remains.
Lemon trees. Fig trees. Stories remain.
I had seen jars from the Roman period, unexpectedly lifted up from the bowels of t
he sea, intact, after two thousand years.
Love remains, above all.
That night, while my husband and son were asleep in their beds, I made a list of what lasts: snowdrops and periwinkles, lullabies and prayers. And I knew that we don’t just carry beauty but that we cling to it, as a resistance against gravity. That perhaps, in the end, that is the single task we must set out to do in our lives.
We lived in a terrible time. Perhaps it was only going to get darker. But to have a child was to have faith that the world, against all logic, was moving toward something better, eventually, even if horror came first. That the future could also transform the past, like that man, who had returned to comfort his childhood self in the only way he knew how, by writing in his book.
I prayed that our lives would also be written down in a book, and that one day my son would return to the book of my life, after these wars were over, and whisper the beautiful parts out loud. And then bracket out the worst parts with a pen, and write:
No longer existent.
Part Five
Sirens in Jerusalem
“Here is the time of the Sayable, here is its home.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Afternoons in Eternity
I had often thought that to visit Jerusalem was to participate in sacred space, to witness the Dome of the Rock where Mohammed ascended through the heavens, the remaining wall of the Temple, the narrow alleys where Jesus dragged his cross on the way to his crucifixion. Every corner remembered the past: where a battle once raged, a saint once slept.
But the more time passed, the less I took notice of these physical places, for to live in Jerusalem was to be drawn instead into holiness in time—in the hours siphoned off by the call to prayer, the church bells marking off vespers or matins, the traffic dying off as the sun set on the Sabbath day, its onset marked by the wailing of a siren. We were living not only in a place, but in a moment in eternity, a single swath of time suspended between a past already gone and a future not yet realized, both of which were embedded in the present in a way I did not yet grasp.
• • •
By the time Joseph was two years old, his day care—with its two simple rooms—was much too small for a boy who wanted nothing more than great open spaces and rocks to climb on. In the absence of nearby parks and playgrounds, we headed each afternoon to the nearest open space we could find: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
It was a difficult route by stroller. Dozens of stairs descended through the Old City marketplace and down into what was once the valley beneath Golgotha, the mountain where tradition held that Jesus was crucified, which now was a square perfectly situated halfway between Joseph’s day care and our house on Nablus Road. I learned to balance two of the four wheels of his tiny black stroller on the ramps made for produce carts and to carefully slide Joseph down the stairs toward the church. He squealed in delight, gripping the side of the stroller with one hand, waving to all of the shopkeepers with the other, Prince Joseph in his chariot.
I came to a stop at a souvenir shop beside the courtyard at the entrance to the church, where a Greek Orthodox shopkeeper sat on his stool, smoking a cigarette among piles of candles and wooden icons and glow-in-the-dark rosaries for sale. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and I didn’t know his name, but he knew Joseph’s, and every day at three thirty sharp, he waited for us with a bundle of five white candles in his hand. Joseph reached out from his stroller and shook the man’s hand seriously, and he grinned in return. “Habibi, inta,” he declared. You’re my sweetheart. Then he handed over the candles and said, to both of us: “Say a prayer for me.”
I don’t know why he singled out Joseph for this daily ritual, or why, day after day, he refused my entreaties to pay him. When I tried, he rebuked me sternly. “This is between me and Joseph,” he insisted. He seemed to have assigned some power to the prayers of a little boy. Joseph held the bundle in his fist as we said good-bye and rolled through the tiny arched entrance marked “Holy Sepulchre.”
If the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was the place where eternity entered into time in the form of a child, then locals believed that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre contained eternity itself. First built by Constantine the Great beginning in AD 326 to mark the place where his mother Helena was said to have discovered the “true cross,” the vast stone church at the heart of the Old City was perhaps the holiest place in the Christian world, where pilgrims believed that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, before he was resurrected three days later. For centuries, Christians have journeyed toward the omphalos, the navel of the world on which they were certain that the rest of the universe spun, so much so that medieval maps placed the church directly in the center of the world. And at the center of that center was the Anastasis, the empty tomb where Christians believed that Jesus was raised from the dead, defeating not only death but also time. Once a year, on Holy Saturday in the Greek Orthodox calendar, thousands of pilgrims wait outside of the tomb for the Holy Fire to miraculously appear at the moment of the resurrection: proof that the past had been shattered, that we are all travelers in eternity, still participating in a moment that came two thousand years before us. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
Today it remained a complicated space, a church holding many different denominations of Christians, each in their respective corners, praying in their respective languages, a maze of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christian, Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox, Egyptian Coptic and Roman Catholic—an arrangement that led to spectacle and chaos and the occasional fight between clerics wielding candlesticks. But for Joseph, the Holy Sepulchre was like being set loose in a carnival, dense with religious men wearing colorful, hooded costumes, many of whom seemed to play with fire; with bearded priests waving censers that released clouds of incense smoke into the air; and with roaming choirs singing in Greek or Armenian as they slowly walked in procession from station to station. As we approached the towering wooden doors to the entrance, Joseph leaned out of his stroller and caressed the stone pillars on each side, their surface covered with hundreds of names carved in Syriac, Greek, and Arabic, left by visiting pilgrims over centuries. He kissed his hand and planted a kiss on their names with quiet reverence, as he had watched a hundred visitors do before him. I tried not to think of all the germs he was putting into his mouth.
Then we were pulled into a church so vast that it felt as though a piece of sky had been siphoned off to make room for it. Joseph motioned to me to unstrap him from his stroller. He climbed out on wobbly legs, straightened his shoulders, and strutted straight ahead to the Stone of Unction, the long marble slab in front of the entrance where Christians believed the body of the crucified Christ was laid out by his followers to be anointed and blessed with oils before burial. Around him, Russian pilgrims pressed their rosaries against the stone. Joseph knelt beneath the eight hanging lamps and kissed the stone. For added effect, he climbed onto it entirely and lay prostrate, pressing his forehead against the perfumed surface. It was only a matter of seconds before cameras began flashing.
“Bambino!” Italians gushed, rushing over to take a photo of the blond child in the midst of worship. Joseph lifted his head before dramatically kissing the stone again. I gave him a minute or two to charm tourists before lifting him off, his forehead smelling of roses.
Then we turned the corner to the Anastasis at the heart of the church: the place of rising. I remembered a lifetime of Easter services, hearing as a child the priest describe Mary Magdalene arriving at the tomb to find the stone pushed aside, the space empty. Her anguish, until Jesus appeared and asked: “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Now, I stood with my own child beside the tomb. Joseph surveyed the rows of candles in awe. Afraid that he would burn his fingers or set his hair on fire, I tried to move quickly. I lifted him up and held him, squirming, in my arms, and we reached out and removed the
five candles, one by one, and set them alight with holy fire.
“Papa,” he whispered. “Mama. Grandpa. Anoush.” Then he paused. “Thank you.”
We always ended with a prayer for the man outside, the man whose name I did not know, who asked us to pray for him.
I was surprised how much this short prayer, whispered in the space of a minute, moved me. For our years in Jerusalem, I had grown resigned to simply going to church on Sundays at the Syrian Catholic parish around the corner, where I was often too tired to concentrate on understanding the difficult language of the sermon.
My prayer had become this: Dear God. I keep showing up, at least. Does that count for something?
But now I prayed with Joseph. There is something about praying with a child that is life stripped bare—pure reverence, a boy close enough to his emergence from eternity that he still might remember something of it, and offer it to me.
Thank you. I love you. I have not forgotten you.
When we finished lighting candles, Joseph wriggled out of my arms and ran to the chapel behind the tomb, where an Egyptian Coptic priest in a flowing black robe, a pointed hood, and a beard was waiting. On a good day, he spirited a small wooden rosary from one of the many pockets of his robe and place it into Joseph’s hand. I thanked him, and he nodded his head, and I wheeled the empty stroller over the uneven stones of the church floor, while Joseph raced ahead to the Catholic chapel.
When the Franciscans came into view in their brown cassocks, Joseph’s face became overcome with wonder. He ran to them and quietly bowed his head. Then he whispered, in solemn greeting, “Heigh-ho. Heigh-ho.”
A Country Between Page 20
