There were no lawn chairs, there was no outdoor furniture at all, so we sat on the ground. The fruit bag was filled with tiny sour-sweet yellow plums. The lot was large and built into the hillside, layered in terraces. Jenna stopped to finger the crisp dry petals of a rose on a bush, and the flower crumbled into dust. “I planted all these flowers, but he doesn’t water them so they’re all dead now.” A funnel lined in plastic led to an empty pool. She followed my eyes and said, “He started to build a waterfall. He has a lot of ideas.”
Noor grabbed a plum, and Jenna plucked it back, split it with a long fingernail, pulled out the stone, and gave back the fruit. Noor threw it away and reached for Jenna’s fist, with that practiced, hiccupping cry. “Do you see her, she wants the pit?” Jenna drew back her arm and threw the plum pit, like the American softball player she had once been. Noor waddled towards the bushes to look for it.
“I told you she spies on me,” Jenna said, nodding her head towards the bungalow. “She came over because she knew you were coming. She wants to see who I’m hanging out with. She doesn’t usually wear the headscarf—she wore it for you. She’s such a hypocrite. She lets herself in when I’m out and she looks around the house.”
“Why does she have the key?” I said.
“I tried to take it away, but she cried to Aden, and she has him wrapped around her little finger. Anyway, let her look. I have nothing to hide. More than she can say.”
“God, it’s beautiful here,” I said. “Who owns all this land? How long has this been in your family? Who owns the rest of it?”
The hillside was covered with fenced-off squares of land. A few of the parcels had been cleared, but most of them were orchards of olive trees, so that the hillside resembled a chessboard in shades of green. Near the bottom, someone had built a three-story house, entirely tiled on the outside and slightly aslant, like a house in a fairy tale. In the distance, on a neighbouring hillside, a white stone apartment complex glittered in rectangles and cubes. An apartment in downtown Jerusalem, a small apartment, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I had no way to calculate what this land was worth; it was beyond price, since those who owned it would never sell it, and those who wanted it would give anything to possess it.
Jenna shouted up to the scarfed figure in the house and her mother-in-law shouted back down. “She says two hundred years, maybe. And they belong to lots of different families, mostly related to us. They come pick the olives in season. My father’s land is down that way. He hasn’t been there for twelve years—he can’t get a visa. He keeps applying every year, and every year they turn him down. We’ll go visit it in a minute. But you can’t get permission to build down there, near the bottom of the hill. This guy built a little shack, just to store his garden tools, and the army came and blew it up, said it was a security risk. They were worried he was going to hide something in there. And you see that”—she pointed at the glittering sugar cubes in the distance—“that’s a Jewish settlement, and they don’t want anyone building a house too close to it.”
“These lots must be worth a fortune,” I said, and she said, “Oh, they are. You’d be amazed at how much you can get for the olive oil.”
We walked down the dirt road together. Jenna was awkward and unsteady in her high-heeled clogs, Noor on her hip again. “I wouldn’t dare walk down here in the summer,” she said. “Too hot. And there are snakes. They leap up and wrap themselves around your neck, like this”—she gestured at her collarbone. “I swear it.”
One of the groves held a clearing with a plastic table, three chairs arranged around it, all facing west. “The men come in the evening,” Jenna said. “They play cards and drink tea and watch the sunset.”
“Only men?”
“Only men.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
She looked at me. “Why would I care? I don’t play cards.”
The sky was a deep aching blue, and the leaves of the olive trees glittered green and silver. It was quiet. Noor squirmed to be let down and ran ahead of us, looking over her shoulder and laughing as if she was getting away with something.
Two hundred years.
Jenna took a long contemplative drag of her cigarette and said, looking over the mountains, “You know, when the end of days comes, the blood is going to be up to here”—she swiped a hand across the jewelled denim of her calf.
Her father’s fence was a less serious affair than her husband’s. She reached over the top of the gate and unlatched it, and Noor stumbled inside. There were no chairs, no tables, not even a shed, just trees and rocks and the bare ground. The trunks of the olive trees looked like knotted muscles. I leaned my hand on one, and the bark was warm.
“I have to check on the land. My father asks me about it when he calls. I never come down here anymore—we used to come all the time when I was a kid, and have barbecues. I hated it.”
“Hated it? Why?” The spot was lovely, paradisiacal, in the true sense, since “paradise” once meant “an orchard.” There were thirty or forty trees, silver-green and regal. You could see straight down into the valley. The evenings must have been glorious.
“There was nothing to do. It was hot. Me and my cousins, we used to kill ants. That was all we had to entertain us. The red ones, they bite. They hide under the rocks. Look.”
She kicked a large stone with her heel, twice, three times to dislodge it. Noor squatted down to watch the scurrying, miniature world. She reached out a chubby fist.
“No,” Jenna said to Noor. “NO.” And to me, “Look at her, she wants to eat them. We need to go or we’ll be late.”
She kicked the rock back over and covered the ants, restored their roof of shade.
Noor could not believe it. She wailed, scrabbled at the rock, trying to lift it back up with her fingers, crying for her lost world.
15.
At the kerem, my neck started to hurt, and for days after my visit the pain persisted and worsened. For years, my neck and shoulders had stored all the tension of my bad posture. My head stuck out several inches in front of my shoulders, as if I was always anticipating bad news. My shoulders slumped, and I spent all my time reading, which exaggerated both the curve of my neck and the hump in my back. I was so crooked that it felt crooked to pull myself straight.
When my father died, it suddenly became much worse. I developed a hacking cough that haunted me for months, and I couldn’t turn my neck to either side. From then on, the pain had come and gone. I had started to think of it as a chronic condition. The worst of it was that it made me so aware of my body, which was most real to me when I was hurting. When I wasn’t in pain I forgot about it, but when the pain came back it was all I really knew.
My osteopath was a parent at the school. Like everyone there, he was from somewhere else—Austria, someone said, but someone else said Switzerland, or Germany. He lived in a beautiful old stone house in a neighbourhood
that had been abandoned in 1949 by wealthy Arab families who fled east when the city was cut in two. It was a beautiful, expensive area, the Ottoman houses graciously renovated, the streets lined with flowering trees. But I wondered about the ghosts.
A lemon tree grew in a pot by the door. The thin branches were bowed with the fresh, heavy fruit. I always wanted to pause there, by the lemons, to finger their smooth, bumpy flesh.
I would lie there on the treatment table, my shirt off. As he pushed and pulled at my limbs he asked me questions. How did I sit when I worked at the computer? How long since it started to hurt? Was it a burning pain or a stabbing pain? Did I believe in God? He showed me exercises to do, windmilling his long arms from his shoulders in demonstration, pushing my knees up to my chest and pressing them down in what my yoga teacher used to comically call “wind-relieving pose.” He had the curly tight hair of a poodle in a colour neither blond nor brown nor grey, and dramatic, non-Jewish cheekbones. His age was indeterminable—somewhe
re between forty and sixty.
He told me that my back pain would vanish if I could believe in God again. He said that when I lost my father I also lost my faith and then had to carry that heaviness on my shoulders. All I had to do, he said, was ask God for forgiveness for my disbelief, and my pain would go away. He cradled my head in his hands and pulled back, as if it would pop off like a Lego head, and with it all of my old knots and tensions. When he put my head back on it would be on straight.
He leaned over, and I could see his grey teeth, could smell the mouthwash-clean of his breath. “You need to ask God to forgive you, because he loves you as you are.”
He told me to eat breakfast, to try swimming, to walk over to the Old City whenever I had the time and to feel the sacredness of the stones. Try lemon with ginger, sit like this at the computer, start to pray again. He left the room as I put my shirt back on, though that seemed an odd modesty on both of our parts, and then he would stand by the door, arms loose at his sides, and duck his head at me as I left. He had the kind of face that always leaves you aware of the bone under the flesh, that plush, wrapped skull.
I did walk up to the Old City, sometimes, in the dreamlike intervals when the boys were both in school, when my time seemed to be briefly my own. There was a man who always sat near the entrance to Jaffa Gate, on a folding chair under an awning. He wore traditional Palestinian robes, and his hair was perfectly white, but his face was young and walnut brown. He called himself a poet of peace, and insisted I come up and have tea in his room over the square. It was spare: a single red rug, a wooden desk, a narrow bed, two rickety chairs. The tea was made from herbs he grew on his balcony, and he gave me a handful of them and told me they were very calming, good for the nervous system. He left the door open to the staircase as if to reassure me. He had photocopies of his one long poem, translated into English, French, and Spanish. He said he’d given copies to people who lived all over the world. He read it to me out loud; it didn’t rhyme, though there was a generous use of repetition and refrain, birds flying free and children laughing in the street and finally the sons of Abraham and Moses, that sort of thing. Sunsets, rainbows. He gave me a copy in a manila envelope, along with a business card that had his name and title—“Poet of peace.” I felt ambivalent about throwing it out, as if it was peace and poetry themselves that I was in danger of discarding. I found the envelope wedged behind the bookcase a few months later.
A beautiful park across the street from the daycare faced the walls of the Old City. A stretch of the park dipped below the level of the street. The green lawns and benches were mostly deserted during the day. I sat there one day with my notebook, trying to work on my dissertation, which felt a little like swimming in mud. A boy started hovering around me like a hummingbird—that same nervous energy, dips and feints towards the spot where I sat. He looked about seventeen years old, though I was old enough now that I had become bad at guessing ages.
“What are you doing?” he said finally. He spoke to me in careful, accented English.
“Writing,” I said, and looked back down at my book.
He wore that uniform of youth in the developing world—the acid wash, the white T-shirt, the semi-mullet. He even wore a bleached jean jacket, the collar turned up.
“Where are you from?” he asked, and I said, “America.” The blankness of my replies didn’t dissuade him, though he seemed to have trouble coming up with the next question.
“But where do you live,” he said.
I said, “I live here.”
“Where?” he asked quickly, and I gestured back with my arm and said, “That way. And you?”
He looked panicked for a minute, and pointed towards Jaffa Gate.
“In the Old City?” I said.
He nodded, and then said in a breath, “Are you a Jew?”
“Yes,” I said, taken aback. “Are you?”
He looked at me, glanced back towards the Old City.
“Yes,” he said.
We both knew he was lying. “I have to go now,” I said, standing up, and he looked startled but more relieved than disappointed. I could feel his eyes in my back as I walked away.
I couldn’t figure out why he had lied to me. He couldn’t have expected me to believe him. I was chronically, compulsively truthful; I didn’t have the fortitude for lying. Once I had bumped into Jenna and Aden on the steps of the daycare. They were going on a date; their babysitter had come with them to take the children. When Zac and Aisha wept and clung they said, “We’re going to a doctor. We’re going to get a shot.” Jenna had mimed the plunging of the needle, right into her ass. I’d asked her about it, and she’d looked at me in wonder. “We always say we’re getting a shot when we need to get away from them,” she said. “They hate shots. It works every time.” “But don’t you feel bad, lying to them?” I said, and she said, “How do you get anything done without lying to your children?”
I told Shayna about the incident in the park when we met the next day. “You should watch out,” she said. “You think you can talk to anybody in this city. But that’s naive. You have children to think about—you can’t just be wandering around, talking to strange men. It’s dangerous. How does Simon feel about it, anyway?”
“I don’t think it’s any of his business,” I said quickly. “I’m not doing anything wrong.” Even though I had spoken the truth, it felt a little like a lie.
Shayna was by far the most serious student in our Arabic class. She had two older children and a new baby and needed the intellectual stimulation.
“I just want to think about something else,” she said, “not school lunches and what to make for dinner and when to clean the house. Did you know I was my high school valedictorian?”
We were having breakfast in Baka, at a cafe with old mosaic floors and cracked stained-glass windows and notoriously unfriendly staff, beautiful young women with long, haughty necks who wore slim black aprons. Breakfast was the best meal to eat out in Jerusalem. They brought a mezze of tiny plates; smoked salmon with dill, tiny moist cubes of feta, homemade apricot jam with thick chunks of fruit, baby tomatoes with fresh basil and wet white slices of mozzarella, a dark salad of shredded greens mixed with toasted walnuts, sour labne and honeyed dates, a basket of hot bread, an omelette cooked to order, a cappuccino dark and wakeful under a coverlet of foam, a jewel-like narrow glass of grapefruit juice. Shayna sighed happily as she gazed at her plate, and shivered a little bit in anticipation.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
Outside, the day was grey, but the glass threw coloured lozenges onto the floor and warmed the skies. The cold juice clattered against the top of my head as I drank it in a single gulp.
“I’ll get breakfast,” I said, and she said, “You will not.”
“How are things with Elijah?” I said.
Her husband was looking for a job. Shayna’s face showed no good news.
“Mmmm.” She looked at the scattered, shifting light drops on the floor. “OK, I guess. Did you know he had an interview at the Ministry of Defence?”
“How did that go?” I said.
“Strange. They have a complex in Tel Aviv. It’s a fortified bunker, but it’s massive—they lead you underground, and then through a maze of hallways. He said there were two people at the interview, but only one of them asked questions. The other one just leaned on the side of the desk and stared at him. It was like some kind of mental kung fu. He thought they were trying to psych him out. He was pretty nervous.”
“So what did they ask him?”
“He said they wanted to know how he would build a plane that was as light as possible, and could go as fast as possible. They gave him a number, and he looked it up when he got home—it was roughly the distance to Iran. He asked them about the weight of the pilot and they said, ‘No, there’s no pilot.’ He said that he started to calculate the weight of the fuel, the drag on the plane, an
d then he said, ‘Wait a minute, what about the weight of the landing gear?’ ‘No landing gear,’ they said.”
“What kind of plane doesn’t need landing gear?” I said.
“Exactly. Then they took him to a small cubicle, and they gave him a pencil and a piece of paper and they told him to start writing a personal history. ‘Anything compromising,’ they said. ‘If you’ve had an affair or you’ve ever been involved with any kind of radical politics, and every time you’ve taken drugs, any drugs. If you’re not sure whether or not to include it, write it down. We know anyway.’ Anyway, it’s a good thing they asked him and not his brother, who’s a total pothead. He said it was crazy.”
“Does he want the job?” I said.
Shayna shrugged. “He wants a job. God knows this isn’t what he trained for. He wanted to do green energy, but that whole industry collapsed six months after we got here. And do you know what the worst of it is? Weapons are a for-profit branch of the military. They sell the stuff.”
She had stirred all the foam out of her cappuccino. She picked it up, took a sip and made a face. “It got cold,” she said. “Anyway, enough about me. How’s that girl?”
“Who?” I said.
“The one you’re always talking about from the daycare. The Palestinian girl. What’s her name? Anna.”
“Jenna,” I said. “I don’t talk about her that much.”
“Right,” she said, and leaned in and lowered her voice. Beside us, a table over, was a group of women as raucous as crows and all dressed in black. Israelis took up so much space.
“You know, you wouldn’t be friends with her at all if she wasn’t Palestinian. You’re nothing alike.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “I like her. She’s interesting.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Shayna said. “Interesting. As if she’s a science experiment. I’m sorry, that’s not a friendship.” She gave me a stare. “That’s anthropology.” She collapsed back in her seat. She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “The babysitter is leaving soon.”
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