As I packed the last boxes, I whispered, “Thank you.”
On the last day, Umm Hossam climbed our stairs to say good-bye. I pulled the remaining teacups from boxes to make tea, and we sat on the few spare cushions left on the floor.
“I still can’t believe that we’re leaving,” I confessed. “I have so many memories of this place.”
“They won’t just be memories,” she insisted. “You must tell your children about this house. If you tell them stories, then this house will always be yours, because it will continue to live in them. Every time you walk past, point to the house and tell them: ‘Here was where you lived when you were a baby. Here was where Abu Hossam and Umm Hossam came every Ramadan to eat a meal with us. Here was where you began to walk.’”
Among the boxes, I pointed to a tree that I had bought the first week we arrived in the city. Somehow it had managed to survive our summers away, the falling snow, weeks when I would forget to water it.
“I want you to have this tree,” I told Umm Hossam.
“I’ll plant it in our yard,” she promised. “And anytime someone walks past, I’ll say: ‘That is Stephanie’s tree.’”
Then she left. I closed the door to the street and walked up the stairs. In the outdoor closet, a dove had built its nest, perhaps some kin to the bird that had greeted us upon our arrival. I said good-bye.
• • •
Your father found us a new house a ten-minute walk away, up the hill and inside the walls of the Old City, just inside the New Gate. No longer would we be living in the valley where all things fall. Instead, we would move into a house nearby the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to the alleys of rising.
When we went to visit, your father took my hand and led me inside to show me the Crusader archways. Through the window of our bedroom we could see an immense garden of olive and orange trees buzzing with sunbirds in flight.
“That’s the garden of the monks of the Greek Orthodox monastery,” he announced.
“Of course it is,” I laughed, for only Frédéric would move our family from a convent to a monastery.
It was only four small rooms, but he had made sure that there was just enough space for the piano.
And he held my hand, and I told him: “This looks like home.”
• • •
Catherine of Siena once said, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” That’s true, my Joseph, even if it’s hard to remember sometimes. Everything that was difficult was beautiful in the end. Everything led to you.
Soon after we left Nablus Road, the disappearing began. Abu Salaam finally closed his newspaper stand at the corner of Nablus Road, after some seventy years, and a few months later he died. Then Sister Pascal, the cranky French nun who showed us our house, and later adopted you as her own, died too, until there was no one remaining on the street who remembered what it had been, when it was only a valley of birds and stars. The city municipality decided to repave the sidewalks, and the vendors with their fish and parrots and herbs and Mickey Mouse carpets left. Even Abu Hossam’s falafel cart in front of our house closed, until the space took on some unearthly calmness of a country gone.
The English bookstore closed. So did your day care, where you assembled wooden towers with your bandaged hands. I tried to cross from east to west through the neighborhood one day, only to find that the Love Stairs had been torn down.
But on some afternoons, I would descend to the place where all things fall, and walk along the valley of Nablus Road. The remaining vendors would lean out of their storefronts and call: “Umm Yusuf, where is Yusuf?” And I quietly thanked them for the finest years of my life.
• • •
By the time you were in kindergarten, the war in Syria had begun. We tried to serve you breakfast, to remember your winter jacket, as our minds wandered to distant battles. I tell you this so that you might forgive us one day, for a kiss forgotten, for hair left uncombed. We did our best.
During the first year of the war, Father Paolo criticized the regime of Bashar al-Assad and called for international intervention, so he was exiled from the country where he had lived for thirty years. Part of me was relieved. I had already lost one father, and I did not want to lose another.
But in the end, I think that he could not forgive himself for watching from a distance as his friends were killed. That July, he called us on Skype when we were in France. His eyes had grown tired, and his beard had turned completely gray.
It was time to finally finish our conversation.
“You look wonderful,” he said, smiling sadly. “It makes me so very happy to see you so happy.”
He had called to tell me that he would soon sneak back into Syria, into the war, to negotiate the release of hostages.
I was no longer a novice in the art of taking leave of those I loved. I tried to hold his gaze as well as I could. We spoke of what we always did, of books, of you and your brother, of the war. Then, he returned to our oldest conversation.
“Do you remember our talk?” he asked. “The one about crucifixion?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “You quoted Simone Weil, who wrote, ‘Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.’”
He smiled faintly. “And you said that God does not want us to suffer.”
I tried not to burst into tears.
He looked at me with tenderness. “Maybe you were right,” he admitted quietly. “Perhaps God does not want us to suffer. But still, you stayed in Jerusalem for these seven years,” he continued carefully. “You had children. You lived through war. You traveled through checkpoints. You made choices that were not easy. How do you think of our conversation after all of these years?”
“What do you want me to say, that you were right?” I whispered, trying to smile.
But he was waiting for something else.
I had stayed because everything that I loved was bound up in the staying. I tried to choose my words carefully. Simone Weil had believed something else: that the world is mostly darkness. But that grace, even if it is the size of a mustard seed, is stronger than all of the darkness in the world.
I paused. “I guess I believe that if we recognize beauty, then we make it real. And in this way, we can live in the kingdom already, no matter how difficult the reality.”
He nodded. He was quiet for a long moment. My teacher then looked at me with a weakness I had never seen.
“I know what you’re saying, and I believe it. But it’s hard, isn’t it?” His voice cracked with emotion.
“Yes, Paolo,” I said. “It’s hard. Sometimes it is almost too much to bear.”
I wanted to ask him not to go, but I knew that he would not listen. So I told him that I loved him, instead.
• • •
Father Paolo crossed the border into Syria two weeks later, on July 29, 2013. We were later told that he asked to meet a man by the name of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of a group that was calling itself the Islamic State, in the hopes of negotiating the release of hostages. We never saw him again.
Nearly one year later, Father Frans van der Lugt, a Jesuit priest we had known in Syria who had stayed behind in Homs delivering bread on his bicycle amid the shelling, answered to a knock at the door. He was shot in the head.
Then our friend Father Jacques was kidnapped, his church razed, his parish taken hostage…
Roman cities I had once wandered through at night were bombed, markets that once smelled of bread reduced to rubble, bridges that I once stood on collapsed, students and teachers and friends fled into exile. Even the train was likely gone. But in my mind, Syria would always be a country with a monastery in the clouds, where your father taught me resurrection. Where we boarded a train, and he whispered those words:
Ami
Douleur
Chanson
• • •
As I finish this, bodies are floating up on shores and suffocating in trucks, thousands fighting their way onto trains. In our streets in Jerusalem,
men are stabbing and shooting each another, and checkpoints are dividing the neighborhoods, as the war that had always been invisible now rises to the surface. My love, I fear that this will be the book of your life.
And yet, still. Woodpeckers. Song thrush. Warblers.
A few weeks ago, I gave birth to a little girl, your sister, Carmel.
• • •
My Joseph, I’m sorry if some of this is confusing. I would be lying if I pretended that it all makes sense to me. But it must be pronounced, despite that. Long ago, your father told me that during the Second World War, Radio Londres broadcast messages into Nazi-occupied France, secret codes played on the nightly radio. There, hidden among the sentences of daily life, lay secrets meant for the French Resistance. The news of a coming invasion was disguised as poetry. Men and women, sitting down to hear the radio after dinner, would be met with the sentence: “Before we begin, please listen to some personal messages…”
La villa est silencieuse.
L’étoile filante repassera.
Le chien du jardinier pleure.
La belle aussitôt la suit.
La belle aussitôt la suit.
La dernière heure a sonné.
Gabriel garde l’anonyme…
The villa is silent.
The shooting star will pass again.
The gardener’s dog is crying.
Immediately, the beautiful follows her.
Immediately, the beautiful follows her.
The final hour tolls
Gabriel remains anonymous…
I often imagine those men and women, sitting down after their nightly meal, struggling to listen through the sentences to recognize some clue that might make sense of a world gone mad. I have often wondered if all of our lives in a time of war resemble that, our days full of moments concealing signs and codes we cannot fully understand, but on which everything depends. It will always be confusing to think that that which is terrible and that which is beautiful have the same materials to work with, the brick and mortar and earth and stars of our immediate world. There is that which can kill us, and that which will save us, and we live among them, struggling to discern our way through. And it is terrifying, my love. It has never stopped being terrifying.
Even now, I don’t know how we can possibly be sure if the Love Stairs are only pieces of metal or if they contain some larger promise, if there is hope to be taken from where a bird leaves his nest. I do not know the meaning of the orange trees covered with snow, a book picked up, at the last moment, in a bookstore. Perhaps it is a way of imagining ourselves out of this darkness and into eternity. But it is all that I know how to do—to interpret the world, and hope that this act helps in saving it.
• • •
My love, in the end, all of us live in a country between, in that fragile space between those events of the past that called us into being and those events in our lives that we push forward, participating in an eternity that we will not see. It is a country of violence and great beauty, of birds and the dead. Where the daily events of dishes and oatmeal become sacraments. In this world, I have lived the most immense sadness. In this world, I have received the gift that is you, and your father, and your brother and sister. I would not trade it for the world.
Joseph, you are now seven years old. Much has been lost in your lifetime. But as your father taught me long ago, nothing we love is ever gone. It is only transformed. Every child is part of what remains.
If I can ask you to remember only one thing, then let it be this: keep watch. You have not been born into an easy world. But every now and then, in the midst of our daily lives, a miracle strikes.
An angel appears on a train.
A handwritten sign, with the name of a city.
A crowd of men, praying on the filthy streets.
A little boy’s encyclopedia.
A flight of stairs.
Sirens in Jerusalem.
We cannot know what any of it means. Still, everything depends upon the noticing. They are ruptures in eternity, I think. You will see for yourself.
I don’t know when this book will find you. But if it is in a dark time, know that the beautiful will come. Sometimes you’ll have to stand in front of the terrible for a long time before it appears—sometimes it will seem like whole spaces of your life are filled up with that standing. But beauty will come. I promise you that—and the long expanses without it will help you know when it happens.
There might be years in your life when you forget how to see it. But if you are lucky, as I have been lucky, you might have a child, or spend a night beside a man who is about to die, and they might teach you how to recognize it. Those who are emerging from or returning to that other place know how to see where it has fallen into our lives. I was lucky enough to have my father. And I was lucky enough to have you and your brother, and now your sister.
Most of all, I was lucky to have your father, the master of the small gesture, who took care of the world, and watered the flowers, and carried your backpacks, and waited for all of us to come home. Who took the eternity he discovered in the desert and carried it down 350 stairs, so that all of us might share it, distilled into a cup of tea.
One day, it will be time for me to go. When this happens, you will have to keep your promise. You will be my father, and I will be your little girl.
I will ask for you to tell me one last story.
Tell me this story.
Of a man who climbed down a mountain for the woman he loved. Who won her hand in a game of chess.
Of a father who held his daughter’s hand and walked her out of a nightmare.
Tell me the story of two little boys, looking at birds out the window.
Of a broken city, sewn together by a narrow flight of stairs.
Of mermaids who appeared in a city at war.
I give you all of these details for you to keep, but one day I’ll ask you to give them back to me.
Start with this story:
On the night before you were born, I looked out the window in Bethlehem. There was an orange tree and a lemon tree, and a pair of wounded hands, now healed. I took that image, and I sewed it into your heart.
Acknowledgments
I began this book when I was pregnant with my first son, and it spans some of the most difficult and important years of my life. It would never have been possible without the love and support of a great many people.
I would like to thank my agent and dear friend Judy Heiblum, who encouraged me to be a writer when we met each other years ago, and has coaxed me through each book and worked hard to find a home for them. Many thanks also to Stephanie Bowen, who acquired A Country Between, to my editor Anna Michels, who saw it through to completion, and to my copy editor Michelle Lecuyer, who courageously fixed errors in so many languages.
To the community of Mar Musa: Father Paolo, Deema, Huda, Jens, Jihad, Jacques. To Father Eric Wyckoff, Father Peter DeBruel, Father Hans Puttman, Father Ivo Coelho, Father Giuseppe DiSario, Monsignor Boutros Melki, and in memory of Father Frans van der Lugt. Thank you for reminding me that hope is possible, even in the midst of war.
To my family: my mother, Steve, Rob, Lisa, Graham, Vanessa, Miranda, Henriette, Bernard, Elise, Nina, Toni, and my entire extended family of beloved aunts, uncles, and cousins—all equally dear but too numerous to mention here.
To my many friends in Jerusalem and abroad who sustained me during the long years of writing this book: Karen Brunwasser, Rebecca Granato, Molly Mayfield and Eric Barbee, Benjamin Balint, Matti Friedman, Wendell Steavenson, Charles Stang, Dustin Atlas, Jeffrey Champlin, Michael Fagenblat, Julia Meltzer, George Tsouros, David and Anna Dintaman Landis, Celia Bland, Jessica Marglin, Nada Sarkis, and many others.
Thank you to Al-Quds Bard College, which gave me time off and support to work on this manuscript, and to my students, who have reminded me daily that how we interpret stories will always be bound up in how we interpret the world: Sondos Shehedeh, Deena al-Halabieh, Ahmed Hmeedat, Noor
Hamayel, Lana Ramadan, Abdullah Erikat, Adel Hroub, Muntaha Abed, Yara al-Efendi, and hundreds of others.
For the historical sections of this book, I often sought help from Jerome Murphy-O’Conner’s marvelous Oxford archaeological guide to the Holy Land. The author lived just at the end of Nablus Road within the walls of the Ecole Biblique, and so I knew that he was approaching the city from the same vantage point that I was. His insights were invaluable. The writings of Naomi Shihab Nye were also never far from me, as her father went to school just around the corner from where I wrote this book. The Princeton Field Guide to the Birds of the Middle East was also invaluable, as was the Jerusalem Bird Observatory, where staff patiently answered my questions about the birds passing through my neighborhood.
To my teachers: Huda al-Habash, Barbara Ganley, Harvey Cox, Larry Yarbrough, and Helmut Koester, among so many others—I will forever be in your debt.
To my beautiful children: Joseph, Sebastian, Carmel. I cannot begin to tell you how much happiness you bring to my life. And to Frédéric: you will always be a miracle, for all of us. Thank you for holding the world in place.
Finally, to those who gave me their stories on Nablus Road: Abu Hossam, Umm Hossam, Sheikh Mazen, Omar Mazen, the Freij family, the Baramkeh family, Abu Salaam, the convent of the White Sisters, and all of the other neighbors, bread vendors, parrots, snakes, nuns, and priests. Thank you for welcoming us into your country. I promise that I will never forget.
Reading Group Guide
1. At the beginning of the memoir, Stephanie describes the Syrian monastery where she meets Frédéric as “a kind of anchor in world in which so much seemed in movement.” Have you ever felt anchored to a specific place in that way? Where was it, and what made you feel grounded there?
2. Stephanie describes having a strong connection to Father Paolo and to her own father. Compare and contrast Stephanie’s biological father with her spiritual father. Have you ever had a deep familial connection with someone who was not biologically related to you?
3. Nablus Road is a complicated street with an even more complicated history, dividing Jerusalem into East and West, Palestinian and Israeli. Explain the significance of the new couple settling on this fractured street. How does it affect them? Their new marriage?
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