But I suspect that he also recognized something in Frédéric: a generous stubbornness that might make him able to handle his youngest daughter. Frédéric was the sort of man who, if he saw me in deep water, would both want to save me and know how to build a boat.
Later, I would learn that their conversation outside went something like this:
“Son,” my father told Frédéric, “I have four children, and I love all of them. But Stephanie is different from the others. She’s… You’ll see. She’s special. She’s not easy, but she’s special. I love her very, very much. So I know that you’ll take good care of her.”
Then he paused. “And if you do anything to hurt her, know that I have a shotgun, and I will kill you.”
Frédéric didn’t flinch. My father challenged him to a chess game for my hand. Frédéric had been playing chess since he was a boy and won handily, much to my father’s surprise.
• • •
There was one other place we needed to go before we could return to France. My father had managed to procure for us two tickets to a San Antonio Spurs basketball game. Just as I had only known Frédéric as a monk in the desert, he had also only known me as a student and a traveler—certainly not as a girl who shouts at seven-foot-tall men and drinks bad beer out of Styrofoam cups. It was only fair that he know what he was getting into.
We found our seats in a stadium-sized sardine can of spectacle and noise, amid the deafening pounding of the sound system. More people were packed into that stadium than Frédéric must have come upon in a year in the monastery. He had been expecting cowboy outposts when we landed in Texas and so was not quite ready for this. I pointed out a man in a coyote suit dancing with the Spurs Silver Dancers.
“Is it always like this?” he asked. I didn’t even ask if he was referring to the dancing coyote, the hundreds of foam hands waving in the air, the towering players, or the cheerleaders.
“It’s always like this.”
The buzzer sounded. Frédéric tried to focus on Tony Parker, the French point guard, his only point of reference, particularly since he had been asked about him three times since his arrival. He, like other Europeans, was mostly accustomed to soccer, and could not believe how often the basketball teams were scoring. He found it rather exhausting.
We were well into the second quarter when the Jumbotron announced that the kiss cam was starting.
“The kiss cam?” Frédéric repeated.
“You don’t know what the kiss cam is?” I teased him. “The camera focuses on a couple, and one of them has to kiss the other.”
“C’est pas vrai.”
“Oui, c’est vrai.” The camera moved across the crowd, stopped. Frédéric glanced up, to see the two of us projected above thousands of screaming fans.
He panicked. “What do I do?”
“You kiss me.”
He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then he turned and kissed me. When he pulled away, his cheeks were flushed red. The crowd roared in approval.
When the cheering died down, I turned to the man who would be my husband.
“Your secret is out. There’s no going back to the monastery now.”
• • •
That night, my father stopped me at the base of the staircase as I headed up toward my childhood bedroom.
“I like him,” he whispered. “He’s solid. He’ll take good care of you.”
I grinned.
“Really,” he said. “I told him about my shotgun. I hope that I didn’t scare him too much.”
“You should have seen him with the kiss cam.”
He embraced me, and we held each other on the last step of a long flight of stairs, my father and his youngest daughter.
“You’re my beautiful little girl,” he whispered.
Joseph, if I had known then what was to come, I would have held him longer too.
Passing Storms
When I was five years old, I awakened one night from a nightmare. In the dream, my mother was falling from the top of a cliff. I watched her fall, a sliver disappearing over the edge of the rocks, and heard the impact of her body in the valley below. I woke up screaming.
“Dad! Dad!”
I could hear my father scrambling to get out of bed. Then he was beside me, holding my hand, whispering, “It’s okay. It was only a dream.”
He waited until I stopped shaking. Then he whispered, “Close your eyes. Now picture a field full of green grass. Do you see it? There are trees growing, and a piece of shade perfect for sitting, and yellow daffodils. And there are so many butterflies. Do you see the butterflies?”
I closed my eyes until all I could see was a field of yellow flowers, waving in the breeze with butterflies hovering over the petals.
“Now keep your eyes closed,” my father whispered. “Go to that place.”
I fell asleep. Those words were stitched into my heart. I did not know that they would guide me through what would come after: wars, marriage, death, birth. Behind every dark moment, there is hidden another world. The trick is to hold out long enough to make it there.
• • •
Frédéric and I returned to France, and I somehow managed to survive the following months. I memorized a dozen words—myrtille, noisette, sauvage; blueberry, hazelnut, wild—and the simple art of singing bonjour! while entering village cafés. On my birthday, Frédéric coaxed his beat-up car all the way to the city of Avignon, a fortified city of cobbled streets surrounding a palace. It rained the whole afternoon, and he held my hand as I tried to keep my balance. As the sun set, I peered into a shop window and saw a pair of pink ballet flats with bows. We had no money at all, but he saw my expression and rushed into the shop to buy them nonetheless.
It stopped raining. I slipped them on. For a moment, it was the fairy tale.
The days passed. Impossibly, I received news of my first book deal, so we were no longer forced to confront the prospect of living in dire poverty, at least for the immediate future. I could allow myself to dream, again, that we might have a home of our own. And as our wedding approached, I became more adept at reading the language that was Frédéric, the moods that I at first read as distance revealing themselves as his own worry that he might have given up an entire world, only for the new world he had chosen to collapse beneath him. Such were the terrors of being attached to the world: they brought with them the possibility of loss. But there was no other way forward.
One morning, he looked out at the fields with alarm.
“Look, the hirondelles are flying low. That means a storm is coming,” he called out.
But then he looked again at the swallows and corrected himself.
“No, I was wrong. They’re not flying low enough.”
And indeed, the storm passed us over.
• • •
For as long as I could remember, I had longed for a home of my own. I had left my home in Texas when I was eighteen, moving to Vermont and then to Boston and England, traveling through the Middle East and walking across Spain, passing a year in China, another in Lebanon, a third in Syria. There were details I came to long for that others took for granted: a postal address, books to fill up my bookcases, my piano. Phone calls within the same time zone. I sometimes feared that I would spend my entire life living in other people’s rooms.
Now, after so much wandering, it was not so much that I longed for home, but that I could no longer imagine what home might look like. If Frédéric no longer belonged to the world at all, I no longer belonged to a country. On a recent trip to New York, I had spent an afternoon walking through the rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art before I finally sat on a bench in the center, overwhelmed. There, reflected against paintings and stone sarcophagi, were hundreds of moments from my past: my childhood with my father in the American wing among the quilts and Tiffany glass; my hours with Father Paolo in the monastery among the Byzantine art; my time studying the Quran with a Syrian sheykha (a female sheikh) among the Islamic pottery; my year stumbling and overwh
elmed in Beijing among the Ming vases. Here, months walking through Rome; there, the cathedrals of England. If only home could somehow also contain all of these rooms of the past, a dozen countries side by side beneath a roof of the present.
This was too much to ask. But it felt more and more like France was not a compromise but a complete annihilation of my own past, and that every day spent in it was a life inhabiting someone else’s rooms. I had promised Frédéric that I would follow him anywhere. Now I was only hoping that he wouldn’t hold me to it.
• • •
That May, Frédéric and I were married in a small, blue-and-rose-frescoed church near his mother’s village. Father Paolo traveled from Syria to celebrate the mass in his characteristic blend of Arabic, Syriac, French, and English. My father, wearing a tuxedo, walked me down the aisle, and he wept as he lifted my veil to give me a kiss. In the audience sat a nun from the monastery, friends from America and Syria and Iraq and Israel and India, from a lifetime of travels that had finally landed us in that place. Frédéric’s sisters, who were anarchists, refused to wear the same blue dress as the bridesmaids, and somehow that made sense too. We forgot to bring our written vows. One friend, an Iraqi war photographer I had met in Syria, kept running up to the altar to snap close-ups, as though we might explode at any moment.
In one photo of the event, my father stands beside me lifting my veil, and Paolo stands in front of us with his hands clasped in blessing, his eyes aglow with reluctant joy, so that it is hard to tell which one of them is giving me away. Frédéric stands across from me in a linen suit with his shirt untucked, wearing a tie for the first time in his life.
And I loved him. God, how I loved that man. I loved all of them, Joseph: my Texan father; my spiritual father; and your father, a man who had climbed down from his monastery in the clouds to marry me.
I whispered the vows that I knew, and he said them back, in the beautiful mess that was everything that we set out to do:
In richer and poorer.
In sickness and in health.
Till death do us part.
I do. I do. Somehow.
Dear Joseph,
By now you must be wondering when your part of the story will begin. We are almost there. The problem is that so many threads led to your arrival that it is hard to remove any of them, lest the entire story fall apart. If this were fiction, then I could decide what moment led to your birth. But I have so much less confidence in piecing together our own history. I have told you that your story began when an angel appeared to your father on a train. But now I am beginning to doubt myself. Is that really when it began? Perhaps it was only when Paolo blessed us in the corner of the church. Or when your father won my hand in a game of chess.
I suspect that all of them are beginnings, in their own way, that we carried the places and the people of our past in our bodies as we traveled forward. I was once told of Armenian priests who, in the violent upheavals of 1915, were given orders to flee their monastery. And so they tied their holy books to their backs and carried them as they escaped.
It was something like that. We carried men and countries and languages with us, until we were bound up somewhere between the countries we were in and the places we left behind. Only your father and I had very different books tied to our backs.
Jerusalem
In July of 2006, two months after our wedding, I summoned up the courage to ask your father if we could live somewhere other than France.
We thought, at first, we would move to Beirut. We bought our tickets and packed our bags, deciding to spend a few weeks in Istanbul en route. We were about to depart when the news came that bombs had started falling in Lebanon, and that refugees were packing their bags and fleeing the city where we were supposed to be arriving. Israel and Lebanon had gone to war.
I glanced toward Frédéric.
“Maybe it will pass?” he suggested.
I reminded him that the Lebanese Civil War had lasted fifteen years.
We decided to set out anyway. We arrived in Istanbul, and during our first night in the hotel, I turned on the television and saw footage of a family in Lebanon piling their bags on the top of their car quickly but calmly, with a manner of finesse, as though packing their belongings and fleeing bombs was something that they did all the time.
We settled into uneasy sleep.
• • •
We spent the next week waiting for the war to pass, and it didn’t. Finally, as we strolled in Sultanahmet in downtown Istanbul, I spotted a man working for a travel agency unfolding a sign on the sidewalk.
CHEAP TICKETS:
ISTANBUL–TEL AVIV.
Frédéric and I looked at each other. I suppose there is a danger when two monastically trained individuals are given, literally, a sign.
“Could we move to Jerusalem?” I asked.
It was a legitimate question. For the last several years, both of us had been forbidden to travel to Jerusalem; we would have been unable to reenter Syria with an Israeli stamp on our passports. Israel, which had occupied the Golan Heights region of Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and held onto it ever since, was permanently at war with Syria. Travelers in Syria did not even dare say the name of Israel out loud.
But now that we had decided to leave Syria, we were free to travel to Jerusalem for the first time in years, without the fear of that stamp in our passports.
For a moment I forgot the rather obvious complication: since Lebanon and Israel were now at war, by moving to Jerusalem instead of Beirut, we were simply foregoing one side of the fighting in exchange for the other.
“No one will bomb Jerusalem,” Frédéric offered. “That’s the good thing about moving to a city holy to everyone.”
I nodded, deciding in a stroke of magical thinking to ignore the fact that many bombs had gone off and wars had been fought in the city holy to everyone.
“Why don’t we just try it?” he suggested. “If it doesn’t work, we can just move somewhere else.”
He made it sound so easy, like stopping into a shoe store to slip on a pair of ballet flats that might or might not fit.
• • •
Three days later, we arrived at the airport in Tel Aviv. At passport control, we were quietly escorted away by security for interrogation. Frédéric still had a Syrian residency in his passport.
“Why didn’t you get a new passport?” I whispered to him.
“I didn’t know we were moving to Jerusalem until three days ago,” he whispered back.
The woman who questioned us was composed of creases and sharp corners, her shirt perfectly ironed and her hair pulled back—some combination of an army general and a flight attendant. When she spoke, it was with a Hebrew accent and the false casual tone that I recognized from interrogations in Syria as meant to inspire trust.
“Frédéric?” she called. He stood up, and she opened his passport and looked at the photo, then looked at him, and then looked at the photo again.
“So you were living in Syria?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“For three years.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“I was a novice monk.”
“A what?” She seemed honestly confused, and I wondered if she truly did not know what a monk was, or if she was simply exceptionally good at her job.
“A novice monk.”
“And what is a monk?”
“A monk is a religious person. Who prays.”
“I see. And you were praying in Syria.”
“Yes.”
“And where were you living?”
“In a monastery.”
“Where was this monastery?”
“In the desert.”
“Okay.” She seemed to lean forward on one foot, and pursed her lips as though it was not okay at all. “And they do not have any of these places for you to pray in France?”
“They do. But I wanted to live in the one in Syria.”
; “I see.” She clearly did not see at all. “And you spent three years in this place.”
“Yes.”
“Praying.”
“Yes.”
“But now you say that this is your wife?”
“Yes.”
“So you are done with this praying now?”
“Yes.”
I had to smile at that.
He was questioned for the next six hours. Other officers arrived and posed the same questions as the woman with the crisp uniform and perfect hair, before she returned and asked them again. I did not know what story they were waiting for that was more ridiculous than that of a man who had lived in the desert for three years, only to show up now in an airport with his wife.
We had arrived at night, but by now the sun was coming up outside. I nodded off on Frédéric’s shoulder. I opened my eyes, and the woman was standing there again. She ran through the same list of questions, and I wondered if she tired of them. When she finished, she moved to walk away, but then hesitated. She turned.
“Is it nice, Syria?” she asked, her voice now almost vulnerable. “Because you know we cannot go there. I always wondered if it was nice.”
“It’s beautiful,” Frédéric said quietly.
She disappeared. I was sleeping on Frédéric’s shoulder again when she returned and handed us our passports, with two entry stamps inside.
• • •
I should have known then that we would be strangers in this new country—strangers to whom everything would feel oddly familiar, strangers who carried the memories of neighboring countries that were not supposed to coexist with this place, but that resembled it all the same. But that would take much longer to understand. As it was, as our taxi made its way to Jerusalem, the sun was rising over the mountains of the desert, endowing them with color.
Frédéric looked out. “It looks just like Syria,” he whispered. “I think the mountains of the monastery run all the way through the desert to here.”
I peered out at the landscape, stark and bare, and remembered that Paolo and the monastery and the world we left behind were only two or three impossible hours away, across borders that could not be traversed.
A Country Between Page 4