All Roads Lead to Jerusalem

by Jenny Lynn Jones

  It wasn’t the first time I’d been sick in Palestine. On my previous visit, about three years before, I’d been afflicted with what seemed to me one of the plagues of Job—thousands of tiny canker sores covering the inside of my mouth. It was horrible, but at least then, Ahmad had been there to help—to interpret, watch the kids and hold my hand (as I medicated myself out of the experience with whatever opioids Dr. Muhammad could give to me).

  This time I walked in the house as darkness was falling, dropped my laptop bag on the floor, and lay down on the couch, riding out the first real wave of pain and dread I was to become intimately acquainted with that night. I was alone, the kids needed dinner, and I was growing sicker by the minute—pretty sure I’d fallen prey to food poisoning.

  Hoping to ride it out, I hurried to make the kids what had become their favorite fast food: fresh Arabic Taboon bread topped with green olive oil, garlic and the local Israeli pasteurized process cheese food that passed acceptably for mozzarella. I broiled it all to a bubbly crisp under my oven’s gigantic gas burner while I stood there holding my stomach, praying that the pain wouldn’t get any worse.

  However, by the time the kids were finished eating and cozy in their beds, I was huddled on the couch with cramps so knife-sharp they reminded me of labor pains. Still, it was only when I started vomiting as well, and realized I would probably have to stay in the bathroom all night, that I started to panic. I was convinced I’d fallen prey to a fatal case of something, probably contracted from one of downtown Hebron’s falafel stands that my students had repeatedly (and ineffectively) warned me about.

  An hour went by, then two. By midnight I was trying hard not to scream from the pain, and my moaning had scared Ibrahim enough to go and get Manar for help, despite my protests. By the time she and Huda returned a few minutes later, I could barely talk, reduced to huddling miserably on the bed and crying pitifully. Whatever bug had me, it was taking its job seriously—so seriously, in fact, that when my mother-in-law arrived, the first thing I did was look up at her with my mascara-streaked face and ask her to please, “Help me die.”

  I didn’t even try to maintain the careful facade I usually presented around Ahmad’s, family. When you’re really sick, you’re also really, really human. Your ego is one of the first things to go.

  In Palestine there seemed to be a general preference for my type of appearance: pale skin, blonde hair, blue or green eyes, and a round face (the bane of my existence back home). Consequently, I could hardly be blamed for my pride in my appearance. It seemed to be my claim to fame, especially because culturally, linguistically, and socially I often felt like a bumbling idiot.

  So when my breathlessly beautiful looks were gone, as they must be whilst puking one’s guts out to an audience, I was surprised that it just didn’t bother me. There was no pretense of perfection, no toughing it out and no stiff upper lip. I was a sobbing, retching, wild-haired mess, and I needed their help. As more people arrived, the pain grew to terrible, wringing cramps in my gut that made me tremble and cry between the bouts of nausea. Whenever I closed my eyes, visions of e-coli bacteria, squirming in their microscopic horrid evilness, swirled in my head. I knew that I was becoming dehydrated and probably needed an IV, but the thought of repeating Karim’s experience in that Bethlehem hospital only made me feel worse.

  As for Jerusalem’s modern hospitals, I hadn’t counted on the fact that maybe I would be the next one to need them. I was certainly in no condition to drive myself anywhere, and as nobody in the family had a permit to cross the checkpoint, I decided that I wasn’t budging from home.

  Word quickly spread in Safa that I was sick, and family members—at first, all women—began to pour into the house until at least forty people were standing around me, wringing their hands and offering clucking encouragement as I lay in the middle of the living room floor on one of the foam mattresses—bucket at the ready.

  By the time Sameeha showed up at the scene with her daughter, the room was packed with women and kids standing around my mattress in a semicircle. Parting the crowd with her usual assurance, she took one look at me and pulled out her cell phone to summon Dr. Muhammad, which prompted a flurry of activity as the women searched for a scarf to cover my hair. It was a move that, for some reason, sparked a flash of anger in me. I remember I even tried to push the blasted thing away when they put it over my head.

  Who the hell would look at my hair right now?! I thought. It just hit me as fundamentally stupid. Still, I was in no condition to make any philosophical arguments, so I let them finish pinning it on before the doctor arrived.

  Of course, it turned out that the women were right. The arrival of the doctor meant that I was properly covered, which the men of the family took it as a green light to follow in his wake so they, too, could take a gander at me—just to make sure my last shred of dignity be properly extinguished. Stepping in through the parting crowd, he knelt next to the mattress with his characteristic calm and asked, “So what seems to be the problem?”

  If by then Arabic was gone from my linguistic capabilities, what with all of my energy going toward things like puking and crying, I still managed to make my insistence that I would not to go to the hospital for re-hydration very clear in simple, if flowery English—and a short, choppy diatribe about how I wasn’t going to die in one of those “filthy places.”

  Understanding as ever, the doctor walked home to fetch an IV and a strong shot for the pain, with which he quickly returned to administer in front of the crowd. It was at that moment—with a rivulet of blood rolling down my arm, and the delicious rush of relief flooding my body, that I swore he was the best doctor on the fucking planet.

  It wasn’t until the next day when I woke up that I learned the rest of what happened that night, particularly how I’d fallen asleep in front of the whole family while they took turns holding the IV bag aloft for five minutes at a time—for three hours. And suddenly, I loved these people.

  Well, most of them.

  My Arabic kept on improving in spite my lack of real study, but that’s probably because I’d settled for atrocious grammar and single-form verbs. Still, in spite of sounding like a precocious toddler, I noticed that lately I began feeling as if I could really communicate and—perhaps more important—understand what was being said. I was actually starting to find conversation, particularly Safa gossip, fascinating. I enjoyed that constant running hum of commentary, interpretation, invention and re-invention of the story of the village and its people!

  I couldn’t deny that I felt much closer to the family after I recovered from my stomach bug, and I even started participating in communal chores, including scything wheat that grew wild on the hillsides that would later be roasted into the smoky kernels that were added to a meat soup called Freekah. This was an activity Asya and most of the other younger women disdained, but I loved it—rather like the days I spent as a teenager mucking out the cow stalls at the county fair.

  It was even more peaceful to work alongside my mother and father-in-law, the family horse, and the flock of sheep brought along to graze. I didn’t even mind when the large turtle I found under the stalks (thankfully before I made my slash with the scythe) saw fit to shit directly onto my open-toed sandals as I held it aloft in pride. It hadn’t even occurred to me that they did that!

  There was no doubt about it; I was developing a thing for the village’s pastoral pastimes—carrying water, picking shiny new grape leaves to make delicious Warag Dawali (leaves rolled like cigars filled with rice, garlic, tomatoes, lemon and cooked atop layers of chicken, onions and more garlic—tons of it in a huge pot a-simmer—good Lord, it’s heaven), cooking the large communal Mansafs in cauldrons over giant propane burners, trying to make bread like Huda.

  This was, in fact, the one aspect of village life that seemed to be acting as a balm to what had become over the years a real tendency toward deep and unrelenting depression. For me, it was a “Chop Wood, Carry Water” realization.

  Of course, a p
art of me knew that most of the charm of these Little House on the Prairie moments probably corresponded to their novelty. After all, I certainly didn’t see any locals rushing to the fields if they didn’t have to, but I decided to go with it anyway. Years of therapy, medication, and self-help books had failed to address the chronic melancholy that plagued me, so I wasn’t going to ignore the fact that my spirits were lifting when I did my field work. I’d take what I could get.

  Taking the sheep out to pasture, learning to tie and stack sheaves of wheat like days of yore, and figuring out how to clean turtle crap from between my toes with wadded chaff felt good.

  And that’s when the turkeys came.

  Turkeys are not native to the Holy Land, and it wasn’t until Israeli poultry farmers brought large-scale turkey farms to the region that their meat began to be consumed occasionally; which probably explained why most of the Palestinians I knew had no real idea how to cook it whole. It just wasn’t deep enough in their food history yet.

  So when Khalid brought in a surprise buy of about two hundred turkeys to sell and slaughter, I decided to buy and cook one of them in the traditional American style—after all, I had a couple of generations of North American turkey knowhow in my genes (and if necessary, I could call my grandma back in Oregon for her recipes). We would have a full Thanksgiving dinner—I’m sure for the first time in Safa history

  It wasn’t until I’d helped the other wives clean and skin their turkeys that I knew I’d bitten off more than I could chew. These were no Butterballs, all clean and ready to stuff. No, these were walking, pooping, giant, frickin’ strong birds, covered in feathers, full of life, that made eye-contact, for Pete’s sake!

  Still, I’d said I wanted one….and everyone who was anyone in Safa was getting one, so I waited my turn, chose the nearest turkey in view and in so doing marked him for death. One muttered Bismillah (”In the name of Allah,” a phrase uttered at every animal slaughter), and there I had it—a giant dead, feathered, bloating bird. And then I realized my mistake.

  It was huge, ridiculously huge! I must have grossly miscalculated when I’d sized up the live animal, but with all of the others around, it didn’t look that big. It was only after I had it finally gutted (a disgusting procedure that I have no wish to repeat—ever) that I realized how heavy it was—certainly over fifty pounds—and I still had to pluck the sucker in the bathtub with pots of scalding water. It took two of us to lift it out.

  After finding a large piece of sheet metal to cook the bird on, I set about finding the ingredients I needed to cook the meal, and the next day, after waking up at three in the morning to start the roasting, I prepared huge quantities of mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, dinner rolls, and my grandmother’s delicious escalloped corn. Every dish was made from scratch.

  By afternoon, the house was full of the same people who’d held up my IV bag when I was convinced they all hated me, all of them eating my exotic fare with flimsy plastic spoons and plates on long plastic sheets I’d spread on the floor. The only thing missing was pumpkin pie and cranberries. Still, it was the best Thanksgiving I’d had in ages.

  CHAPTER 20

  Shifting Normal

  It is possible to be different and still be all right.

  -ANNE WILSON SCHAEF

  Peter Shaneb looked just like a vampire—or at least what I imagined one would look like before Twilight ruined my mental picture. Tall, dark, with a widow’s peak and a long salt and pepper ponytail, he was founding a fledgling Christian organization in Jerusalem called The Holy Landers, a name evoking images of medieval knights on crusade.

  I met Peter after reading a posting on a Jerusalem Christian message board about lesser- known miraculous Christian sites in the area. As I sat across from him at a little bistro table on the balcony of the old Jerusalem Imperial Hotel, I couldn’t help but notice that he looked resigned, somehow, as if he’d realized only too late that “they” had won. According to Peter, infighting, personal interests, and the financial, emotional, and physical stress of life under military occupation had sapped the community of its critical mass. Slowly but surely, the Palestinian Christian community was dying out.

  The total number of Palestinian Christians remaining in the Holy Land is estimated to represent between 40,000 and 90,000 people in the West Bank and Gaza, with a further 144,000 to 200,000 inside of Israel. Descendants of the first Christians, the once-robust Palestinian Christian community has dwindled to endangered status, with the majority living abroad. Still, despite the relatively low percentage of Palestinians who are Christian (about one in seventy-five), Peter still found it astonishing that relatively few Western Christians seemed to know about their community at all. Even worse, some (including the same tourists who aimed their cameras down from their giant tour busses, slumming for a few hours in Bethlehem) considered this group of Christians irrelevant, a bump on the road of a prophecy that said that the future of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus depended upon the triumph of Israel.

  The question of whether the descendants of the first Christian disciples deserved to survive in the Holy Land seemed far less important than the success of the Jewish State, and that was an idea that indigenous Christians like Peter felt they could not embrace for obvious reasons.

  It was Peter, struggling to start his own Christian organization, actually, more of a kind of social club, aimed at convincing the younger generation to stay around the country, who told me that if I was looking for an interesting, creepy, miraculous Christian story, I should check with another, larger organization in Jerusalem called Sabeel.

  That’s when I heard about the dead body.

  Omar Haramy, a young Palestinian Christian, welcomed me into his office at Sabeel’s Jerusalem headquarters. This organization was co-founded by Palestinian Christians and endorsed by Desmond Tutu to challenge the idea that Palestinians (Muslim and Christian) were doomed to continue this occupation according to the “will of God.” It also supported continued non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation.

  Sabeel was a growing organization, with chapters in eleven Western countries, including the United States. Its goal was to support the local Christian community, educate the world about the plight of the Palestinian people and, according to Omar, “get in the way” of the occupation.

  Obviously used to visitors of a more political bent, Omar nonetheless was happy to give me some suggestions about some of the more unusual Christian sites around the country. Ticking off the obvious places, his eyes suddenly lit up. “Well, there’s the monastery in Al Lud, where St. George was tortured to death. They still have the chains, which they say are miraculous!” Then, he said, much like an afterthought, “Of course, there’s the miracle of the murdered priest up in Nablus…”

  “What was that all about?” I interrupted, leaning forward in my chair.

  “There was this priest who was a caretaker up at Jacob’s Well in Nablus. Well, there were some settlers there who got mad because they wanted the site, so they killed him with an ax. Anyway, the cool thing is that his body is still there, looking the same as the day he died.”

  “And when did he die, Omar?” I asked.

  “Oh, I think something like thirty years ago,” he replied with a grin.

  Nablus is located in the northern West Bank. It’s one of the cities in the Holy Land outside of Jerusalem and Bethlehem that still has a sizeable Christian population, as well as being the only surviving community of Samaritans. It has tons of history and an ancient vaulted market that rivals Jerusalem’s. It was also reported to have the best Kanefe—a baked confection consisting of a layer of sweet, locally produced cheese, buttery dough, and hot, sugary syrup—in the entire region. I decided to go, regardless of the fact that this was probably going to be a frivolous jaunt.

  For some women, I think many, little decisions are never made because it is just too much trouble to explain the urge to do them. One of the great things about being in Palestine, though—maybe the best thing—was
the fact that I could choose to go wherever I wanted without explaining myself to anyone, and if I really had to, it was usually only after I returned, fait accompli. Surprisingly, though, it seemed that now that the family and I really started to know each other, I began to look forward to telling them about my plans—because they seemed to actually be starting to get me.

  Before visiting Nablus, though, was the first time that I really told the family in advance where I was going: Why, to see a dead body in a church, of course! And this time they didn’t bat an eyelash. Although it probably didn’t hurt that I promised to bring them back some Nablus Kanefe…

  The road to Nablus from Jerusalem is hilly and marked by sweeping green pastures and winding roads. Unfortunately, it also had one of the most notorious and volatile checkpoints in Palestine just outside of the city of Huwwara.

  Because it was one of the larger checkpoints, located in an area dotted with Israeli settlements and patrols, I knew that getting through probably wouldn’t be an easy or pleasant experience, so I was pretty nervous once I neared the omnipresent warning signs that led up to it. Still, I expected that after the usual paperwork check, the soldiers would finally let me through, just as they had at the other two checkpoints on the way. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be that easy.

  Approaching the checkpoint, I stopped the car at a concrete barrier designed to protect the soldiers manning the post from bullets, bombs, or any shady behavior from the natives.