I’d visited the City of the Dead the first time I went to North Ossetia, less than a year after the collapse of communism. I stood by the doors of the tombs. Ancient corpses in rotting centuries-old clothes lay higgledy-piggledy at my feet. A woman’s arm joints poked out of the sleeves of what would have been a fine dress when she was interred. Grave robbers had been at work. The country had gone overnight from the ideal of everything belonging to everyone to the idea that everything had to belong to someone. Everything: oil refineries, hotels, trinkets you could rake from the limbs of the ancient dead.
In Vladikavkaz at that time, the Ossetians were hosting a pan-Caucasian congress designed to show how all the peoples of the region could get along. Young Ossetians, Chechens, and Ingush were dancing together in a hotel restaurant, holding their arms out horizontally like the branches of a tree. There was a Soviet banquet—vodka, sturgeon, platters of cold meat and fish, kebabs—and I drank too much. I suggested that apart from their local languages the Caucausian peoples didn’t seem different. Heavy men with sunken eyes I was talking to tilted their cigarettes and looked at me in surprise as they agreed with me, thinking perhaps that I’d saved a few ounces of their conscience for them; usually they had to utter the lie themselves.
On September 20, 2002, a glacier on the northern slope of the Kazbek massif collapsed, sending a crushing flow of mud, ice, and debris two hundred yards wide into the Karmadon valley. Most of the village of lower Karmadon—an area never built on by the ancient Ossetians, who knew better—was destroyed. Among the 125 people killed were a visiting film crew and Russian actor Sergei Bodrov. To this day there is a monument to Stalin in the valley. Fewer than half the Ingush have returned to their homes. On Mount Tbau, the Ossetians still gather each year to honor Watsilla and eat their sacred pies.
THE HOUSE OF BREAD
~ BETHLEHEM ~
CHARLES M. SENNOTT
IN THE STERILE SILENCE OF CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL IN BOSTON, I AM watching my son Gabriel’s vital signs, monitoring every line of his heart rate and waiting for any change in the digital readout of his oxygen intake. By now, my wife, Julie, and I are exhausted and scared. A hospital tray with his uneaten breakfast sits on the nightstand.
Julie stares at the depressing plate of food and begins to read the ingredients with shock, which is quickly followed by contempt. “How do they feed children this crap when they’re sick?” she asks, looking at the side of the box of Froot Loops and pointing. “Look at this sugar content!”
She picks up a rubbery piece of white bread that is coated in an unnatural yellow, spongy film of “egg substitute” batter. On the menu, it’s called French toast. It looks completely inedible.
“This isn’t maple syrup! Look at this, it is just pure high fructose corn syrup. One hundred percent high fructose corn syrup. Really, look at this,” she says, putting the little plastic container of syrup in front of me.
But I don’t take my gaze from the monitor. She’s right, of course. American hospitals provide absolutely horrible food for patients, who, more than any of us, need nutrition and the healing power of good, wholesome meals. This is true even at great hospitals like Children’s, which is one of the world’s best medical institutions. For Julie, this terrible hospital food devoid of all taste and nutrition is where she is investing her anger. She’s railing about the red dyes in the Jell-O and the unbelievable gall and carelessness of offering all the soda and pudding and cookies and Frosted Flakes that kids can get their hands on in the little kitchenette that’s open all night. Julie believes in eating well, and our children have for the most part been fed organic and, whenever possible, locally grown food in our home. For sure, I am known to join my boys’ chorus of groans over all the tofu and sprouts, though deep down I respect her for the time and energy she invests in helping us all eat healthy food. But at this point I just can’t care about it.
My head is somewhere else, and I can’t take my eyes off the monitor. I am channeling my rage more in the direction of the doctor at the emergency room at our local hospital who first misdiagnosed our nine-year-old son’s stomachache. He sent us home, urging Gabriel to “drink fluids.” And he did this even though Gabriel was exhibiting what we now know is every classic symptom of appendicitis. The doctor blew it. And when we got home from the local hospital in the predawn darkness, Gabriel’s appendix burst and left him doubled over in excruciating pain. That’s when we rushed him here to Children’s Hospital Boston. He’s in serious condition now with toxins coursing through his intestines and causing intense pain. The battle now is fighting the massive infection, which can be fatal. We are very frightened.
The way Gabriel moaned and winced when he first got here reminded me of the gut shot I once saw a Syrian fedayeen fighter suffer in Kurdistan in March 2003. But this wasn’t a war zone and this wasn’t a soldier, this was my rail-thin nine-year-old son, with the gentle soul of a poet and boyish dreams of being a boxer. He just didn’t deserve a painful blow like this. And all I can keep coming back to is how much I want to strangle the admitting doctor who blew a simple diagnosis for appendicitis. Julie’s thinking food, I’m thinking revenge.
In the long, empty silence of a hospital room, Julie and I try to distract ourselves by thinking back to the day Gabriel was born nine years ago. We have four sons and, of course, every one of their births is etched forever in our memory. But Gabriel’s birth was the most memorable of all. It was laden with meaning as he was born in the biblical town of Bethlehem in December of the year 2000. We were living in Jerusalem, where I served as the Middle East bureau chief for the Boston Globe.
I was working on a book at the time, retracing the path of Jesus’ life in the year 2000. I can feel—and sometimes see—people roll their eyes when they hear we had a child born in Bethlehem in that year of researching the book. The whole reality we were living sometimes felt a bit too contrived. It didn’t go unnoticed by my fellow correspondents, who relished teasing us about it. Some jokingly suggested that we might even be suffering from Jerusalem Syndrome, the extraordinary psychosis in which people living in the Holy Land take on biblical characters as part of their persona. There’s even a mental ward dedicated to such sufferers in Jerusalem, and in the millennial year the ward was packed with several John the Baptists, a few Marys, and at least one Moses and one Jesus.
The truth about how Gabriel came to be born in Bethlehem is a simple story, but one that got increasingly complicated as time went on. We certainly wouldn’t be described as particularly religious, and there was absolutely no conscious level at which we decided to have the birth there for any religious reasons. After all, Julie is from a Jewish family, and I am tribally Catholic, though hardly a practicing one. The reason Julie had chosen the Holy Family Hospital in Bethlehem was that there was simply no Israeli hospital that allowed women to have natural childbirth with a midwife. The Jewish hospital Misgovladak, where our son Riley Joseph had been born nearly two years earlier, had closed. At most Israeli hospitals there was a big focus on high-tech intervention and a high rate of C-sections. At Hadassah in Jerusalem, the nurses took the baby away at night and fed the child formula even if you insisted on nursing. Bethlehem’s Holy Family was the only nearby hospital that had midwives and allowed women to nurse through the night. When Julie first made what then seemed like a very rational decision, it was months before the violence of the second Palestinian intifada had really broken out. By the time she had reached her third trimester, the violence was all around us. There were bus bombings and raging machine-gun battles and the loud thud of tank fire that could be heard from our home.
As we think back to our son’s birth, I can almost smell the tear gas, burning tires, and cordite that usually accompanied the sounds of fighting at the time. But mixed among the memory of those bitter smells are mouthwatering aromas, as comforting to us now as they were delicious then: take-out orders of falafel and tabbouleh salads of finely chopped bulgur, parsley, and green onions soaked with lemon and olive oil; the lamb
that Julie craved when she was pregnant—typically seasoned with garlic, rosemary, and thyme, with a hint of the tangy olives on which the lambs graze in the chalky hills of the West Bank clearly noticeable in the tender and delicious meat; and, more than anything, soft Palestinian bread, warm and fresh from the oven.
On November 13, 2000, the Israeli military checkpoint into Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, was unsettlingly quiet.
Looking back, these were actually the quaint days of foreign reporting before September 11, 2001, when we still placed “Foreign Press” signs on our dashboard or taped “TV” on the car doors of our four-wheel-drive vehicles. And we still believed these symbols were as good as white flags or papers of transport that could get us through almost anything.
On this day, something intangible but ominous hung in the air as we approached the first checkpoint, and I adjusted the “Foreign Press” sign to draw more attention to the pretext that I was just a journalist trying to get through. Julie was eight months pregnant and she had an appointment at Holy Family Hospital. The decision to have the baby there made sense at the time, and despite the outbreak of violence we hadn’t changed our plans. That is always what it’s like to live in a place that is in conflict. We adapt in incremental and almost imperceptible ways until the peril surrounds us, and even then it’s hard to see. We just go on living, breathing, and eating even as the fighting intensifies. It all just seems to be part of life. We had reasons beyond Julie’s preference for natural childbirth and the closure of Misgovladak. Holy Family Hospital was actually closer to our home in West Jerusalem than the Hadassah Hospital at Mount Scopus. And we liked the obstetrician there, Dr. Nihad Salsa. The nurses were well trained, and no small consideration was the fact that the French nuns who ran the hospital were fantastic cooks. Julie, who was a journalist and documentary producer before we moved to Jerusalem for my job, had volunteered in the orphanage there. She’d come to know the French nuns and Palestinian nurses trained in Ireland and their cooking, which was a perfect blend of local Palestinian recipes with a distinctly European elegance and seasoning.
We were set on having the baby in Bethlehem, but the palpable tension around us was making it seem like a bad idea, particularly on this day. I had a distinctly bad feeling as we rolled to a stop in the long line of trucks and vans packed with Palestinian day laborers. It was quiet and there was no sign of any clashes. But just in case I reached into the backseat of the Isuzu Trooper, grabbed a Kevlar vest, and wrapped it around Julie’s pregnant belly, positioning it to best protect her and the baby from possible gunfire. Despite the bad feeling in my gut, we pressed on to our ultrasound appointment with Dr. Salsa.
We rolled up slowly to the checkpoint. The Israeli border guard confidently waved us through, and I felt my nerves settle for a moment. Then at the second checkpoint, near Rachel’s Tomb, an Israeli border policeman with a drawn M-16 banged on the hood of the car and waved us back. There were spent rounds littering the road, and the pavement was pocked by gunfire and what appeared to be tank rounds. Rocks carpeted the road from the Palestinian shabab, or “boys,” who had barraged the post in a demonstration the evening before.
The Israeli border policeman shouted “Y’allah!” and waved us back. It’s an Arabic expression that translates as “Go with God,” but the Israelis have annexed the phrase and made it sound more like “Move it!” We explained that we had a doctor’s appointment and I pointed to my wife’s very obvious condition. “Go to hospital in Jerusalem. This is danger here now,” the Israeli said in broken English with a dismissive wave.
We retreated to the first checkpoint. On our way back we heard a loud explosion to the east near the Palestinian village of Beit Sahour. I later learned that it was a helicopter missile attack on a local leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which were largely under the direction of the Abayat tribe, a Muslim clan in this largely Christian town. The Abayats’ heavily armed militia had stepped up their involvement in the intifada.
We pulled over to the side of the road and called the doctor to explain that we could not get through. Like all Palestinians, Dr. Salsa had learned over many years to accept the unpredictability of life under occupation, and she and Julie were going over dates to reschedule the visit. But just then the border police started waving the line of traffic through again, so we decided to go forward and try to keep the appointment. We made it. The ultrasound was fine. The baby was due any day. This was our third child, so we were not necessarily new to this drill, but having to navigate a drive to a doctor’s appointment through a war zone was a first, and I was increasingly nervous about how we’d get through the checkpoint when Julie went into labor.
I loved the way Julie ate whenever she was pregnant. There was a ravenousness to it that was wild and joyous and full of life and often involved her buying huge legs of lamb and abandoning any earlier inclinations toward being a vegetarian. On one occasion she had bought an entire lamb from the Palestinian butchers, and the legs and loins and rack of ribs were all wrapped in white butcher paper and stuffed in our freezer.
But as we drove through Bethlehem, Julie said she was craving bread, a simple basket of warm bread. And I knew that a nearby hotel, the Jacir Palace, which was located just before the checkpoint, had delicious Palestinian bread from one of the better local bakeries. So we pulled in. All the excitement of getting to the appointment and the great relief knowing that the baby was healthy had made us powerfully hungry. We ordered a meze plate with hummus, baba ganoush, finely chopped tomatoes with thyme, and rolled grape leaves stuffed with rice. We also ordered delicious freshly squeezed orange juice. Julie mostly focused on the bread, working her way through the basket.
The name of this ancient town comes from the Hebrew beit lehem, “house of bread.” And the town lives up to its name. In the warren of narrow streets that cling to the steep hills of Bethlehem, there are busy bakeries with wood- and coal-fired ovens, or taboons, that begin to burn in the predawn darkness every morning. The ovens produce soft, warm layered pita bread and the heartier taboon bread, which is baked directly on the hot coals. The taboons are round loaves of bread typically about eighteen inches in diameter. I watched with great happiness as Julie pushed the folds of the taboon into her mouth and quietly and happily devoured it.
Bread is a universal food, a culinary core that lies at the center of just about all cultures. In our neighborhood in Jerusalem’s German Colony, our garden backed up to a kosher bakery just off Emek Refaim Street where we would buy warm challah bread on Friday mornings, standing in line with Israelis doing their shopping before Shabbat. Our children, especially Gabriel, loved challah bread, and in our home outside Boston we traditionally had sweet loaves of challah on Sunday mornings. The wonderful, warm smells of the kosher bakery wafted through our memories of Jerusalem.
In Bethlehem, where tradition holds that Jesus was born, the bread is not just delicious, it also serves as a religious metaphor and a sacrament that lies at the center of the Christian faith. There is, of course, the obvious and laden imagery of the bread of life in Christianity, which harkens back to the Last Supper, when Jesus broke bread and drank wine with his disciples. Bread is also central in the Transubstantiation, which for Catholics means quite literally a mystery of faith in which bread is consecrated and becomes the body of Christ. For the Palestinian Christians who live in Bethlehem this kind of weighty religious idea of bread is about the furthest thing from their minds as they go about their daily routine, which every day involves buying warm, fresh taboon. They are not thinking about bread as a sacrament. They’re just hungry, and the bread is cheap and delicious. In modern Bethlehem, life is hard under military occupation, but the enduring simplicity of warm, fresh bread is a wonderful and very straightforward part of that daily life.
The Christian Palestinians, who tend to be middle-class, love not only their bread but also finer pastries and cookies that imitate European styles of baguettes and sweet breads. This more bourgeois kind of baking has be
en brought to the Christian Palestinians through the French, Italian, and German religious orders that have played a role in the Holy Land since at least the Crusades. The cookies in particular are famous. But the core bakery experience for Palestinians is still the warm, pillowlike pita bread, or taboon, or the rugged carpets of braided Iraqi bread.
After we had spent about a half hour eating bread in the nineteenth-century grandeur of the old Jacir Palace hotel, the manager came to us and politely asked us if we were finished, as we might want to consider leaving very quickly. He said there was a large demonstration taking shape, and it was about to descend on the checkpoint in front of the hotel. With a grim, weary look, he politely explained that there was almost certain to be gunfire and violence. A waiter wrapped the warm bread in a cloth napkin and guided us to our car, which was waiting out front.
We set out from the hotel entrance, and literally ten yards behind us was the front line of the demonstration. I could see the angry and determined faces of young Palestinian men pushing forward with fists raised in protest. Many were clutching rocks. As we passed the Israeli border guards, they were just loading tear gas canisters into their weapons, and we heard the soft pop of the first volley as it lofted into the crowd, forcing them to disperse into doorways and cover their mouths and noses with kaffiyehs, the signature Palestinian headscarves.
In the next few weeks the intifada raged and reached new heights of violence that stunned us all. I was very worried about having Julie deliver the baby in Bethlehem, and Julie and I agreed that if there was any problem at the checkpoint when she was in labor we would go to a Jerusalem hospital without hesitation.
Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Page 20