A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  It was late morning when we arrived in the city, so we retired to rest. In the early afternoon we pulled ourselves from sleep, and Frédéric took my hand as we walked across West Jerusalem. I tried to absorb the magnitude of what we had just done. For the first few streets, it was not so different from an American or European city: modern hotels with their evenly spaced rows of windows and balconies, tourists speaking English, signs in Hebrew, coffee shops with tables outside, and signs for King of Falafel. But the August air was on fire. Then the Old City came into view, a walled city so compact that it resembled a fortress on top of a hill, the roofs within it alive with crosses and minarets and balconies and the satellite dishes of its inhabitants. After living in the isolated French countryside, I was relieved at the sheer presence of so much life. We followed the line of gravity, descending along the Old City walls and down a hill and into a valley, and I was conscious that the largest city in the country felt both like a village and a wilderness. A gust of wind hit us, a tunnel of air that swept us into it. We stopped at the lowest point and stood at the entrance to Nablus Road.

  Invisibly, in the space between a few city streets, we had crossed into another country entirely. Now the vendors shouted not in Hebrew but in Arabic. Veiled women walked by in ankle-length coats, and a row of men grilled lamb kabobs on skewers over roasting coals, the smoke clouding a section of the pavement. A vendor wearing a maroon fez wandered back and forth, pouring glasses of prune juice from an immense copper pitcher strapped to his back. Buses honked, but they were different buses from those crossing the other side of the city. Tomatoes were ten shekels for three kilograms. A voice shouted, “Tenzilat, ya banat!” Sales, girls! Sales!

  In front of us stood the Damascus Gate, carrying the name of the city we had left behind.

  Frédéric pressed my hand. I looked up at him.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  I did not tell him what I was thinking: that it was the first time since I had met him in Syria that we were both strangers together, bound by our strangeness.

  “It feels like home,” I said.

  Part Two

  Nablus Road

  “It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”

  —Diane Ackerman

  The Valley

  So it was, my dear Joseph, that your father and I came to live in Jerusalem.

  The first house of our married life lay in a country between, near the beginning of Nablus Road, close to the invisible line dividing Jerusalem into East and West, Palestinian and Israeli. Our house stood just outside of the Old City gates and fell on the eastern side of the border, the only house like it on that part of the street, an enormous Arab stone edifice of red roof tiles and a facade of Jerusalem stones, surrounded by grocery stores and convents and shoe stores and butcher shops. Later, even old Jerusalemites would tell me that they had passed the house thousands of times without noticing its presence, because it was so out of place there that it refused to be seen. Most of the other houses in the neighborhood had ended up on the Israeli side of the Green Line after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War left the city divided. Ours was one of the few in the neighborhood remaining on the Palestinian side, a remnant of a country now gone.

  The house seemed to have been purposefully built as an observation point and was set high enough above the street so that it was possible to navigate Jerusalem below—with all of its complexities and contradictions—by looking out the windows. On one side of the house, stretching from Nablus Road all the way out toward the Mount of Olives, lay Arabic-speaking East Jerusalem, which from the end of the British Mandate in 1948 until the 1967 war had been part of Jordan. In many ways, it did not feel markedly different from the surrounding Arab countries I had lived in for years, and so it was easy to imagine how visitors had once climbed into taxis from Damascus Gate and continued on to Amman and Damascus, transferring for even farther journeys to Baghdad or the hajj to Mecca. Visible from the windows on the opposite side of the house, from the parking lot and up toward Jaffa Road, was Hebrew-speaking, largely Jewish West Jerusalem. Our house was in the middle, just barely on the Palestinian side. The sun rose in the east speaking Arabic and set in the west speaking Hebrew, and we tried to find our way in between. In the sky above, thousands of migratory birds flew over the narrow strip of land between Europe and Africa that we lived on, a riot of woodpeckers and sunbirds, warblers and starlings and hoopoes. In the earth below, the bodies of the dead dating back centuries kept to their sleep, and Byzantine houses lay long abandoned and buried beneath the pavement stones.

  Jerusalem was a city in time, and as the days passed, the streets’ noises came to rule our lives, imprinting our bodies with the movement and habits of the city’s inhabitants. At dawn, the call to prayer would filter into our sleep from the corner mosque, finding its place among our dreams. An hour later, at five thirty, the faint chiming of bells would sound from the garden beneath us, awakening us and summoning nuns to their prayers. The sound of their feet scampering across the courtyard resembled that of cats moving among rose bushes. By seven o’clock, more insistent bells would toll, this time from the chapel at the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center at the top of the hill in West Jerusalem. At seven thirty, the opposite side of the house would swell with the excited cries of the uniformed girls from Schmidt-Schule, the German school across the street, chasing one another and jumping rope. The doorbell of the doctor’s office in the building beside us would play a song like an ice-cream truck every time a patient would ring it. A few streets away, a dog belonging to the taxi drivers who headed to the Jordanian border would yelp and bark. At the neighboring bus station, drivers would shout out the names of destinations in Arabic: Ramallah! Ramallah! Beit Hanina! Shuafat! Al-Issawiya! So the world would rise to us every morning, long before we descended into it. I would make my way from the bedroom to the kitchen, parting the air of different sounds as I passed through each room.

  Then there was Frédéric, your father and now my husband of three months, which was still a much shorter time than the three years he had spent as a novice monk in a monastery. Even now he had not lost the habit of awakening early in the morning for monastic matins, so he would always be waiting for me at the kitchen table, already awake for hours, standing in his gray ankle-length monk’s cassock, which he had not given up wearing, and offering me a glass of tea.

  “Must you continue to wear that?” I asked him one morning. He smiled.

  “It was tailored for me,” he answered. “You know it fits perfectly.”

  Then we sat down and drank our morning tea together on the seam between two countries, in our first home.

  • • •

  Later, Frédéric would say that we did not move to a country; we simply moved to a house. And it was not only a house, but a house in time, situated at a moment in history. For centuries, Damascus Gate had been the main entrance into Jerusalem’s Old City, the thoroughfare to some of the most important sites of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the world, and the largest gate of the Ottoman Empire. Pilgrims would pass by our house on their way to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which stands on the site where many Christians believe that Jesus was crucified and raised from his tomb; the Western Wall, sacred to Jews as the last remnant of the Second Temple, which they believe had housed God’s Divine presence; and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, called al-Haram al-Sharif—“the Noble Sanctuary”—by Muslims, where, according to their tradition, the Prophet Muhammad mounted a winged horse and ascended through the seven heavens. A single road into a single gate led to all three of these holy sites, like an artery into the city’s beating heart, the earth beneath it bearing the memory of thousands of years of footprints.

  When life within the Old City walls became too cramped during the late nineteenth century, wealthy Christian Arabs moved just outside the walls and formed the neighborhood where our house would stand: Musrara, an elegant patchwork of large stone houses interrupted
by narrow, cobbled lanes; staircases of Jerusalem stone; colorful tiles; and gardens. Situated directly beside the Old City walls, it was as if Musrara was always standing at attention, finding its meaning in its proximity. As Jerusalem expanded under the British Mandate to include more neighborhoods beyond the confines of the Old City, Musrara also found itself at a crossroads—as one of crossing points between the Old City and the New.

  This is not a history book, and many others have already written about the tragic events that passed along the old city walls over the past century. So I will be as brief as I can be—for as much as I don’t want to dwell on those wars, their effect on this story cannot be denied. Musrara was once a continuous neighborhood, and it was only in 1948 that it was divided, a casualty of what would be referred to as the Nakba, or disaster, by the Palestinians and the War of Independence by the Israelis. When the British abandoned their Mandate and war broke out between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries, the neighborhood found itself trapped in the middle of the fighting. When the war was finished, most of the original inhabitants were gone—some having fled, some having been pushed out and not allowed to return—and the neighborhood was split, unevenly, in two. Now, in the middle of what had been a single city, a hostile border separated two countries. Most of the houses of Musrara ended up on the western side of the line, in the newly declared State of Israel, precariously close to what was now the new border of an enemy country on the eastern side of the wall: Jordan. The houses that had been emptied of their Palestinian inhabitants on the Israeli side now filled up with new Jewish immigrants, many of them Mizrahi Jews fleeing Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East. Dozens of other houses were bulldozed to the ground to create a no-man’s-land, and only a few houses—including ours—ended up on the eastern side, in Jordan. The neighborhood found itself gouged out and then divided, one part exiled from the other.

  In 1967, Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, and our street—still inhabited by Palestinians—came under Israeli control. The dividing wall in the middle of the neighborhood came down, and the Israeli government would say that the city was finally reunited. On a map, our neighborhood appeared whole again, but that was not the reality: three quarters of it remained up the hill, inhabited by Israelis who spoke Hebrew; the no-man’s-land was now a parking lot and a highway; and in East Jerusalem, only two small, Arabic-speaking streets of Musrara remained—one of which was ours. In time, the municipality changed the name of the Israeli section of the neighborhood from Musrara to Morasha, which was meant to sound Hebrew. But no one ever called it that—not even the Israelis—so Musrara it remained, despite what the street signs said. Whatever it was called, it stood wounded and confused, in its same place beside the Old City walls, containing all of the contradictions of a city now claimed by two countries as their capital. As for the United Nations, it deemed Jerusalem neither Israeli nor Palestinian, but instead as corpus separatum, a separate body, not belonging to anyone, whose identity would be decided in the future.

  We arrived in a divided city still bearing its scars. But somehow, the identity of our street—Nablus Road—had long been in flux. For now, our house stood in Palestinian East Jerusalem, on a street claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians. A street that, in the previous century, stood under the control of the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, and Jordan—always the same street, the same houses, the same people, but the country through which it ran named something else.

  House Hunting

  The question of how we ended up living in our house is as complicated as anything belonging to life with a man like Frédéric. I was learning that he was the kind of man who could easily start a fire in the wilderness and fix broken windows with a pocketknife, but who couldn’t type into a cell phone and was convinced that people became sick when exposed to air-conditioning. He had very strong opinions about sleeping with the window open and the healing properties of various herbal teas when sick, much like other people’s Mediterranean grandmothers.

  So it should not have surprised me that his ideas for how to find a house were more appropriate for the thirteenth century. My immediate impulse upon arriving in Jerusalem had been to log onto the Internet so that we could see what apartments were available to rent. As I scribbled down neighborhoods, Frédéric kissed me on the cheek.

  “I’m going to Mass,” he said. “You can stay here and rest.”

  I had no idea that by saying, “I’m going to Mass,” Frédéric was actually saying, “I’m going to look for a house.”

  Like any good novice monk, particularly one from Europe, Frédéric understood that the Roman Catholic Church functioned as a mini-empire, with its own schools and honey and printing presses, its own vineyards and soapmakers, its own postal stamps. In a city like Jerusalem, in which each community tended to take care of its own, it would not be a bad place to start if one were searching for a place to live. So while I slept, Frédéric walked to the Church of St. Thomas, hidden in a drab, concrete alley in East Jerusalem, across from a ceramic street sign that read “Nablus Road” in English, Arabic, and Hebrew and was pocked with bullet holes from the wars and uprisings that had passed since its installation. The church itself, looming like a fortress, was squeezed between a parking lot and a mom-and-pop grocery store named Che Guevara, and it had been built only two decades before, to replace a much older church that was destroyed in the fighting of 1948. It had very little to distinguish it in a city with some of the most famous churches on earth. Compared to Gethsemane, where Jesus spent his last hours before his arrest, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead, this church barely warranted mention.

  Yet hidden within this modern building was one of the oldest spoken languages in the region—if not the world—and a remnant of Frédéric’s former life. The Church of St. Thomas was the sole Syrian Catholic church in Jerusalem in which Christians still prayed in Syriac—a dialect of Aramaic, the language of Jesus. It was in this liturgy that Frédéric had worshipped during his three years in the Syrian desert, in one of a handful of communities—scattered throughout the Middle East and now almost extinct—that passed on, from generation to generation, the traditions deemed closest to those practiced by the earliest Christians and Jesus himself. And if there was one thing that Frédéric believed, it was that prophecy was bound up in the tiniest details of our lives, and that if we remained faithful to the events of the past, then they would always lead us, in some mysterious way, to what would happen to us in the future. In other words—Frédéric could only hope to move forward in his life by remaining faithful to his past.

  As he entered the sanctuary, he took in a familiar vision: a church wafting with smoke and incense and the light from lines of candles burning in front of icons.

  The congregation sang out in Syriac:

  Qadishat aloho

  Qadishat qadishat

  Qadishat hayilthono

  Qadishat, qadishat

  Qadishat lo mo you tho

  Qadish, Qadish, Qadishat

  Ithiraham ilein

  Holy, holy, holy. As the mass finished, Frédéric, recognizing the bishop from his distinctive liturgical clothing, waited at the door for him to pass. He leaned down and kissed the ring on his hand and spoke to him in Arabic. The bishop, originally from northeastern Syria but having recently arrived in Jerusalem after years of living in Montréal, answered him in French. It was a promising start.

  Frédéric carefully set out his case. He told the story of how he had arrived in a Syrian Catholic monastery in the deserts of Syria, where he had remained for three years, intent on becoming a monk. And there he would have stayed, for the rest of his life, had he not fallen in love. He spoke of the community he had left behind, of the abbot who had married us, and of the life he now hoped to live in Jerusalem. He no doubt spoke as a man who had prayed in a monastery for three years and had been married for less than three months, so that it was not quite clear
where he belonged.

  The bishop listened.

  At last, Frédéric posed his question:, “I was wondering if the church might know of some place where we could live?”

  The bishop thought. He was a serious man, but he allowed himself to betray the barest hint of a smile. “There is a place, just down the road at the beginning of Nablus Road,” he said. “It is an enormous old Arab house, owned by the Franciscans, but lived in by a group of religious brothers for twenty-three years.” He paused. “I believe that they turned in their key yesterday.”

  The Bishop Sent Us

  The following morning, an elderly French nun named Sister Pascal was waiting for us in front of the Franciscan convent to show us the house. Frédéric was perfectly at ease, but I had been married to a former novice monk for such a short period of time that I still felt nervous in the presence of clergy, as though they were store clerks looking at me like I might steal the merchandise. Sister Pascal was not helping matters. She was of that generation of nuns who still played the part with almost cinematic perfection, with her white hair closely cropped behind her ears and her face set in a mask of stern disapproval, so that she reminded me instantly of a particularly difficult fifth-grade math teacher named Sister Candice, who always tapped our desks with her ruler. Sister Pascal had placed the key to the house in the front pocket of her nun’s smock, and every few seconds she removed it and weighed it heavily in her palm, to remind us that it was hers, before placing it back into her pocket again.

  Frédéric took her frail hand. “Bonjour, ma sœur,” he greeted her.

  “Bonjour,” she answered curtly.

  “Shall we go?”

  She turned and reluctantly led us down the street, steadfastly ignoring everyone we passed. “Normally the house is reserved for religious communities,” she reminded us.