I had never been to Ramallah, which was another reason I went along. Jenna’s friend Layla was with us to help with Noor and because it was her day off; also, she wanted to buy donuts. “Ramallah has the best donuts,” Layla said. “They’re just like American ones.”
Layla was Jenna’s age, but single. “She wants something that doesn’t exist,” Jenna had confided in me earlier. “An Arab man, who will help equally with the children and the cooking. She doesn’t want to do anything—her family spoils her. She doesn’t even know how to clean.”
Jenna was going to Ramallah to visit the fertility clinic. Her husband wanted another son, and there was something they could do at the clinic to determine the sex of the child. She was a little vague about what they did—spin the sperm or something—but she was clear on the value of going to Ramallah rather than Tel Aviv or Jordan. “It’s just much cheaper,” she said. “Everyone who needs a fertility clinic should go to Ramallah. It’s a great deal.”
As soon as I buckled my seatbelt Jenna said, “You’d better keep a close eye on your children. Someone is stealing children—for their organs.”
“Their organs,” I said, and she nodded emphatically.
“I’m keeping a close watch, I’ll tell you that,” she said. “I’m not letting them play outside by themselves anymore.”
“How do you know?” I said.
“Know what?” Jenna asked.
“Know about the children.”
“My neighbour told me,” she said. “She saw it on the internet. You don’t have to believe me, all I’m saying is, watch out.”
Beth Lechem Road was crowded, and Jenna swung in and out of the lanes. She had just been on a cruise in Turkey with her husband, and she showed me pictures on the back of her digital camera, leaning away from the steering wheel to look. They had gone golfing. They had seen a belly dancer. She said they’d visited too many mosques on the tour, and that the mosques were all boring. She liked the boat. There was a picture of the two of them taken against the backdrop of the water. The light was behind them and their faces were in shadow.
We were driving towards the desert, along the curving highway, the Judean hills stubbled and dry on either side of us, the unfinished security wall rising in and out of the dry landscape, apparitional.
“Watch this,” Jenna said, “I never get stopped.”
She sped past the checkpoint. Bored faces; eyes barely flickered up.
“Ha,” Jenna said.
“You did get stopped with me that once,” Layla piped up from the back seat.
Noor was wandering around the back seat, and Layla tried to get her to sit down, but without much conviction. The city gave way to the desert more quickly than seemed possible. In the middle of that tan and arid wasteland, the wall was going up. A bulldozer stood idle beside a grey concrete stretch of wall. It was so brutalist, so unbeautiful; the wall cut into the landscape like a scar.
A few months earlier, a man had commandeered a front loader and had driven into a bus on Jaffa Road, yelling “Allahu Akbar.” He was a terrorist or a drug addict or both, depending on whom you believed. Since then there had been several copycat attacks, so that the ubiquitous construction equipment on the Jerusalem roads began to seem threatening—the Caterpillars, bulldozers, front loaders, cranes, the machines that ate up dirt and spat it out in a bulimic frenzy of building.
Ramallah was larger than I expected. Huge white estates fronted the valley, though they seemed strangely uninhabited.
“I love Ramallah,” Layla said. “They have the best clubs, the best nightlife. Jerusalem has nothing.”
“When’s the last time you went to a club, Layla?” Jenna said.
We pulled into the parking lot at the clinic. A boy was walking down the street with an enormous helium balloon in the shape of a fighter jet. My boys would like that, I thought idly, before checking myself. As soon as we stepped outside I felt dusty, just like I did in Jerusalem. At the end of the day, you could rub your skin and the dirt would roll off on your fingers. It reminded me of Freud’s first lesson on mortality, learnt in his mother’s kitchen, when he was only a child. His mother was rolling dumplings, and she rubbed her hands together briskly and showed him the dark, dead skin. To dust we return.
Recently, Sam had become obsessed with the idea of my death. “You’re going to die,” he would announce to me. “But not very soon. Only when you are old.” Sometimes when we were walking down the street he’d check in with me—“You’re going to die, right?” “Right,” I would confirm. “Everybody dies. But I won’t die for a long time (probably, I added in my head), not until you are all grown up and don’t need me anymore.”
We’d been in the park with another child, and they’d both been fascinated by a dead beetle in the pathway. “What’s that?” I said, coming close to see what their rounded backs were hiding. “Is it dead?” The boy’s mother came up behind me and said, “Shhh! Moshe, Moshe, the beetle is only napping.” She whispered, “We don’t use the ‘D’ word in our house.”
My son was oddly chipper about the prospect of my death. It was just another fact about the world that he was trying to put together in the giant puzzle he had begun to assemble. Except that one day he began to cry, “I don’t want you to die, and I don’t want to grow up!” Somehow my reassurance—“I won’t die for a long time”—had turned into a threat, so he now associated growing older with my death.
The office at the fertility clinic was enormous, clean, and empty. The floors were stone and there were large, uncomfortable leather chairs and glass, hard-edged coffee tables. On the coffee table was a catalogue of jewelry, necklaces of harsh yellow gold and earrings dripping with diamonds. I tried to imagine the calculations: this baby will be equivalent to this many carats of gold, this many diamonds. The fertility clinic had its own logo, a stylized mother and child wrapped up in the Arabic script that spelled out the name of the health centre.
I had never had any trouble getting pregnant. The first time I got pregnant, we had just stopped using birth control; it was in the first month, maybe even the first time. We were playful and vague and theoretical about it; of course, it could take a long time, up to a year or more, we were prepared for that. A few days later the planes hit the towers. I thought I was going insane; I watched the news again and again, as images of the towers collapsing played all day long. “We should wait,” I said. “This isn’t the time.” In my body, the cells had already begun to divide and multiply, to develop a beating heart that would show up a few weeks later on a monitor as a faint blinking point of light, like a star in a distant solar system.
Jenna disappeared with the nurse, and Noor ripped page after page out of the jewelry brochure. Jenna wasn’t in the doctor’s office for long; she emerged not ten minutes later. “Not yet,” she announced, “which means I have to come back out here tomorrow.” She seemed neither relieved nor disappointed. “Donuts?” she said.
When we came out of the building her husband was waiting in the parking lot.
“What’s he doing here?” I asked.
She said, “Look at that, he’s following me.”
Aden stayed in his car. Though he saw me and saw Layla he didn’t get out, didn’t say hello. He was wearing sunglasses and the windows of his car were only partially rolled down; it was as if he was hiding from someone. Jenna walked towards him, unsteady on her high heels. From the back she still looked like a girl. As she approached him, he revved the car, as if he was about to drive away, then pulled in sharply and turned the motor off. He got out of his car, his back to us. He was like a tight coil, ready to spring.
Layla watched Noor deliberately—it was as if she was averting her eyes from Jenna and Aden. In the end, what did I know about either of them? I suddenly felt very far from home.
Aden was gesticulating, and his gestures were getting broader, as if he was striking the air. But then he seemed
to deflate, slumped into his tallness, lowered his head. They exchanged a few more hurried, muttered words and she kissed him quickly on the cheek. He got back into his tall black car without acknowledging me or Layla and rolled up the smoked windows to hide his face as he pulled out of the parking lot.
“What was that about?” I said when Jenna got back.
Jenna was ominously calm. “He doesn’t trust me,” she said. “You know why? I used to check his cellphone, to see when he was having affairs. And I’d catch him, too, and he’d say they broke up, but he’d find someone else right away, that’s how he is. So I got sick of it. I said, ‘Do what you want. I’m not checking your phone anymore.’ So now he thinks I’m having an affair, because otherwise, why would I back off? But the truth is I’m just waiting for him to get overconfident and then I’m going to catch him again.”
Layla walked ahead of us, clicking along, hobbled by her tight jeans and high heels.
In a low voice Jenna said, “Let him have his secrets. I have secrets too. He doesn’t know I was married before. To a real jerk, in Jordan. He was ugly and short. A face like a frog. I don’t know what my family thought they were doing, letting me marry him. He tricked me into it, some people have that ability. He tried to blackmail me, said he was going to tell Aden about us, but I shut that right down.”
She glanced at me, chin up and defiant. The street was loud. It was hard to hear her speaking. “Why couldn’t you tell Aden about it?” I said. “You were young. You made a mistake.”
“Aden?” Jenna laughed. “Aden doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know that I wasn’t a virgin when we got married. Layla doesn’t know that either, so keep your voice down. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, that’s what I always say. Anyway, it’s not like he’s so pure himself.”
We kept walking. Marwan Barghouti’s handsome face stared at us from the wall. He was serving a life sentence in prison for his role in the last Intifada, but some people said he might be the next prime minister of Palestine. In prison he had become martyred, heroic, and his image was everywhere. His fist was raised and he wore a keffiyeh on his head. When Arafat was alive, people said that he arranged his keffiyeh in a triangular shape over his shoulder in order to indicate that he wanted Palestine, all of it. The message was subliminal; back then we were obsessed with subliminal messages, coded signals. I was tired of trying to figure out what was true.
Jenna looked exhausted. “I always feel sad when I come to the clinic, because I had three abortions before we were married. Layla doesn’t know that either.”
There was a lot of traffic on the street. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Three?” I said, but we’d reached the donut shop and she was heading up the stairs.
When Gabriel was born, I cried for hours every day. I thought that was normal; every mother went through it. I wanted more children but could not think of conceiving again, until one day I woke up to find I had Sam. That was years ago; it was all in the past, only I still couldn’t think of it without running out of breath. I didn’t understand Jenna, but I admired her fearlessness. Nothing would slow her down: not Aden’s suspicions, not her secret history, not her crazy family.
The donut shop looked like a Tim Hortons, only even a little seedier and with servers in headscarves. As we drove back to Jerusalem, Jenna said, “It’s a good thing you weren’t kidnapped or nothing, with my family they’d think I was in on it for sure. They’re—not Hamas, but something like Hamas, you know?”
“Are you kidding me?” I said, but she didn’t answer me. Once again, we flew right through the checkpoint. We were past the wall, and back in Jerusalem.
If you look at a map of the separation wall, it runs for hundreds of miles around a section in the middle of the country, more or less along the Green Line, except that squiggles allow for the inclusion or exclusion of territory. The area around Jerusalem looks like someone has taken a big bite out of its bottom third. From North to South the wall runs parallel with the Mediterranean, and in some places the ocean is only ten miles away as the crow flies, or twenty by the roads. When the wall was built, it cut the territories off from the ocean, except of course for the toenail sliver of Gaza, between the devil and the deep blue sea. You can even see the ocean from some of the hilltops if the day is clear. On a hot day in summertime, when the air is so thick and choked that walking is like moving through quicksand and breathing is like sipping air through a straw, it must feel like you are Tantalus with his vanishing pool of water when you look over the wall at that ribbon of blue. It must feel like being robbed of the very horizon.
32.
Simon’s sabbatical was almost over, and we had only a few weeks left to our year. I couldn’t walk past a corner without wondering if I would ever walk that way again. Our days were full of hectic final meetings, and furiously crammed with the things we loved.
I had never been to the Dome of the Rock, and I wanted to go at least once before I left the country. The mosque was a forbidden fruit; I had always been told never to go, because you could accidentally wander into the spot where the Holy of Holies, the sacred crucible of the Temple, was once located. The shrine capped the Old City like a golden peach. I was no longer worried about the exact location of the Holy of Holies, though I would skirt the centre of the site, just in case. Belief was a residue; it had degraded into superstition.
I’d dressed for the mosque but also for the heat—it was nearly forty degrees. I stopped at a jewelry stall I had frequented to say goodbye to the owner, but this time it felt strange.
He said, “I will have to hug you for one half hour!”
I must have looked a little confused, so he added, “Because you are my friend.”
He seemed different, more distant and more lewd at once. He kept glancing at my chest. I would not realize until the end of the day that my T-shirt was translucent in certain lights. He hung a collar of silver pomegranates around my neck and said, “Everything looks beautiful on you because you are beautiful.”
I said, “And your wife must be very beautiful.”
He said, “But you are achla,” which was a superlative.
I said, “Not really,” and he looked embarrassed and said, “That is an expression. If someone gives you a compliment you say that.”
His father disapprovingly folded scarves at the entrance to the stall, his back turned away from us.
Further in were the rank butcher shops of the market, the smells coppery and thick. I passed rows of chessmen and walls of tiles and every so often the green and red graffitied entrances that marked the houses of the hajji. Vendors called out, “Come into my shop! Only look! I have everything!”
One of the stall owners asked me where I was going and I said, “I’m going to the mosque.”
He said, “Wait, you can’t go like that. They won’t let you in like that.”
He reached for something on an open shelf and came towards me, his arms filled with russet fabric. “You can put it on in here,” he said, gesturing towards a nook in the shop, and he faced away from me to give me privacy.
He’d handed me a long tunic, a floor-length skirt and a scarf; I could see myself in pieces in the copper mirrors on the walls. Crowns of thorns hung on a rope over my head. The clothes smelled metallic and new.
As I stepped out he nodded, and said, “Just bring it back when you’re done.”
There was a checkpoint, and then a rickety walkway that led up to the Dome of the Rock. I had seen the walkway from the platform at the bottom a hundred times. It was walled in because people had once used it as a launching point for throwing stones. The scaffolding looked sloppy and poorly constructed, cagelike and undignified. Two security guards lounged by the metal detector, their long guns strapped to their hips. There was no line.
The first security guard was Ethiopian, and looked no more than fifteen years old. Each year that passed, the soldiers looked younger to me,
and it seemed stranger and stranger to be surrounded by teenagers with guns.
He leaned towards me and said, “Are you Muslim?”
I thought of saying yes. I said, “No.”
“Then why are you dressed like that?” he asked. I had wrapped the scarf from the market around my head, and was beginning to feel very hot.
“Out of respect,” I said.
His friend, who was still leaning against the wall, said, “Kvod hamakom, nu, hi mechabedet hamakom,” “Respect of the place, come on, she’s respecting the place.” I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic—with Israeli men it was impossible to tell.
The guard who was questioning me paused, and I thought he was going to turn me away. “Do you drink coffee?” he said. “Would you like to have a coffee with me?”
The platform was immense. It was splendid at the centre, but desolate at the edges. A guide approached me and said, “Are you Muslim?”
I said “No,” and he said, “Well, you can’t go inside but let me show you around this place, you know, by the side windows you can see into the mosque.”
I waved him off but went over to the windows anyway. They were latticed with iron diamonds. Through the glass panes I saw a woman sitting quietly in an expanse of red carpet as two children played around the pillars. She seemed peaceful and at ease, kneeling in a sea of space. I was beginning to get worried about the old taboos and holy tabernacles, so I walked to the edge of the stairs by the Golden Dome but went no further. Some children were begging, and as I gave one child a few coins the others pressed around me. They reminded me of children that I had seen in Morocco; they had the same aggressive, ragged insistence. A woman was with them; she sat on the ground a few feet away in a small triangle of shade, in a puddle of dark fabric. A tall man came up to me and waved the children off. He wore mirrored sunglasses, a pink short-sleeved polo shirt, pressed dark jeans, a belt, and a fanny pack.
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