A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  What if he had made a mistake?

  It was early morning. I sensed a quiet trembling in the house: the call to prayer from the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque inside of the Old City. It was the first time I’d heard it; though it would have called out five times every day, it must have been muffled by the noise of cars and feet and voices. Only now did it come—a whispering, a quiet singing beneath the floorboards of the house. It continued for a long, long time, so faint and so distant that it seemed to occupy the space between sleep and waking.

  I left Frédéric’s side and went to sit alone in the salon. Outside I could hear faint footsteps, answering the ritual of calling and being drawn into the half-light. The lantern outside turned on automatically each time someone passed by.

  I sat in the dark. The prayers trembled beneath me. I watched as the room filled up with the flicker, flicker, flicker of passing men.

  Borders

  I had willed myself not to think too much about the war between Israel and Lebanon still raging on the northern border. But a week after we arrived, it was still raging, and by now nearly a thousand people had died—many of them Lebanese women and children. Though the fighting would not come to Jerusalem, it was present in other, less visible ways, playing out on the border that was our street. The tension in the air was palpable. The Green Line, which now ran invisibly through our neighborhood, seemed to function in some way as a microcosm of the front lines of other distant battles, so that every struggle that happened to the Palestinians anywhere in the country would simultaneously find its way to our front door, as if our street were wired to react in resonance with the surrounding region’s tensions. Young men would gather to protest or throw stones, or to pray if they were banned from entering the gates of the Old City.

  The image of Damascus Gate became a fixture on the international news, and even when conflicts happened in other places, journalists would gather and interview the men passing on our street, near our front door, as though it were the same as traveling to the war itself. And there was something to their logic. From the bus stations on either side of our house emptied out passengers from separate corners of the region, from Ramallah and Bethlehem and Hebron, as they arrived in the city and headed to Al-Aqsa Mosque to pray, all of them funneling past our house, carrying their lost hopes and battles with them. Yes, our street was still a battlefield, in ways it would take me years to understand.

  In time, I would determine that this was a city of tens of thousands of borders, where every inch of earth was accounted for, battled over, and protected fiercely. Our home was not exempt, and its border was marked precisely at the line of the door onto Nablus Road. Though the two steps in front of our door on Nablus Road technically belonged to us, the world had decided long before we arrived that they in fact belonged to Abu Hossam, the falafel seller who worked on the sidewalk in front of our house. He in turn had decided that they belonged to everyone else on the street, and he invited them to sit on the steps with the same hospitality that one usually uses to invite guests into the home. Abu Hossam had the full authority to make such grand decisions, because he was not just a falafel seller—in reality he was also a neighborhood leader who had taken hold of half the block, running with his eight children a sidewalk empire that included hawking hats, women’s headscarves, baby socks, Coca-Cola, syrupy drinks, and walls and walls of stacked sesame bread in long, pale ovals, referred to in the local parlance as kaak. In the morning, after Frédéric served our tea, I would walk down the outside stairs that connected our second-story house to the lower courtyard and open the door to find Abu Hossam already in front of it, assembling rows of sesame bread.

  “Ahlan!” he would announce, welcoming me to his steps.

  “Ahlan.”

  I would then attempt to hand him money for sesame bread, which he would refuse.

  “Khaliha a’lay,” he’d insist, “Take it as an offering from us.”

  We would argue back and forth until I gave up and let him give me the bread for free. Local custom dictated that I should let this continue for three days, but three days turned into four and then six and then a week, and I was still helpless to stop it, held hostage by the hospitality of this falafel vendor, who seemed to take particular delight each morning in welcoming me to my own front steps.

  “Selem,” he would call as I closed the door, imploring me to send his greetings to my husband and anyone else who might need to be blessed.

  The front steps to our house were rarely the same any two days in a row, or even any two hours in a row, and I had to build up courage just to open the front door and discover what might be waiting for me there. In the very early morning, the bakery would make deliveries of sesame bread before anyone arrived on the street, so that if I tried to go outside before Abu Hossam took his post, I would be confronted with a tall wall of bread rings on old wooden trays, stacked several layers high and blocking my exit. Since there was no way to move them, I was stuck inside until someone came to my rescue. A few hours later, if I descended again, the bread would be gone, but instead I would often find two or three old, whiskered men sitting on the step, leaning up against the front door, drinking coffee—perturbed by the fact that by opening the door, I effectively removed the back of their chairs. The first few times I interrupted them, they apologized profusely and made way for me, and Abu Hossam at least pretended to admonish them for being in my way. But after a few days, there were no more apologies, and it became clear enough that the step, by some unspoken consensus, had become the neighborhood front porch, like those of old southern houses in America, where neighbors sit and greet all who pass by. In fact, as far as the street was concerned, it wasn’t that those two steps were in the way of our house, but that our house was in the way of those two steps. In the afternoons, women out shopping would pile their heavy bags up against the door to retrieve later. On the left-hand corner of the top step, Abu Hossam kept a steady flame from a small yellow gas tank going, on which he made rotating cups of coffee for workers on the street, as well as an afternoon meal shared by other vendors, who huddled shoulder to shoulder on those same steps, passing sesame bread among themselves.

  A few days into our stay, I descended the stairs to find a tough young boy with thick, gelled black hair standing beside the falafel stand, talking nonchalantly to one of Abu Hossam’s sons while a giant snake made itself comfortable around his neck. Like the steps, the snake also belonged to the entire neighborhood; later that afternoon it appeared on a different teenage neck farther down the street, and then wrapped around a man waiting to receive a haircut in the corner barbershop. The snake was later replaced by a neighborhood parrot that was so popular that they hung a white sheet from the entrance to Schmidt-Schule across the street, where brave pedestrians could have their photo taken, for a few coins, with the parrot on their shoulder.

  The outside world was not so much hostile as it was unpredictable, an amalgam of bread walls, circus animals, curious neighbors, war, and other people’s groceries. Abu Hossam, the falafel seller who was unknown to us save for our daily exchange of bread, nonetheless assumed the role of our official spokesman, taking it upon himself to explain our presence to the neighborhood. As I descended and ascended the stairs, I would hear him lecturing to crowds of local shoppers assembled around the front porch, as though describing a rare species of bird to a hiking group in the Amazon:

  “She and her husband are from the Catholic church. They speak Arabic. They are from somewhere in Europe.” And for the moment, at least, that seemed enough to satisfy them.

  Once I could get past how unfamiliar it all was, I came to appreciate the beautiful messiness that was our street. One could find blenders and tea sets, cheap carpets with pictures of Mickey Mouse or tigers on them, dancing dolls, year-old chocolate coins left unsold from Hanukkah on the other side of town sold at a deep discount, Islamic cookbooks, and long rows of old, cast-off, second-hand shoes. Bedouin women sold mint and wild spinach from mesh bags, and a blind man held out his
hand and begged for coins, shouting out:

  “May God bless your daughter.”

  “May God bless your son.”

  “May God bless you.”

  Over and over, in summoning and in gratitude.

  Spies

  Those first days, as two solitary people unaccustomed to living in the world, we often arrived at the end of the afternoon to discover that we had no food in the house. After a few days of this, I became determined to at least accomplish one task each day: to simply venture a few streets over to buy vegetables. It might seem like buying vegetables should not warrant mention, but a great many of the dramas that happen in the Middle East begin with the simple intention of leaving the house to buy vegetables. Anyone who has lived in the region for any amount of time has become so scarred by these stories that they approach even the simplest tasks with odd, existential dread. The stories are all the same: a woman leaves her house to buy vegetables and is killed by a bomb or hit by a car, or she tries to return and discovers that there is a checkpoint that she can no longer cross between the vegetable stand and her house, or that in her absence the vegetable stand has been declared to be in another country, or that her brothers have been arrested, or that some other unimaginable horror has occurred that could have been avoided entirely had she had the foresight to simply not go outside and buy vegetables that day. I could imagine a fitting tombstone epitaph: “She was full of promise, and then she went to buy vegetables.”

  Nevertheless, I was off to buy vegetables. It was a hot September afternoon as I parted the crowd on the front step and made my way to a vegetable stand two blocks to the east, where two very conservative Muslim men with long beards and clothing in the Salafi style were busy arranging mangoes in heaping piles. On a radio, they were listening to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, speaking in Lebanon about the ongoing war, so that his voice cried out over lemons and apples, dates and pomegranates.

  I selected cucumbers, tomatoes, avocados. I approached one of the men and asked in Arabic how much it cost. He jumped back in surprise.

  “Are you Syrian?” he asked me.

  I had been aware that my accent might betray that I had lived in Syria and learned most of my Arabic there, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen with two words.

  “No, but I lived in Syria.”

  “I swear by God, you speak just like a Syrian,” he said, laughing.

  “Likan!” I answered, “Yes, of course!”

  He thought for a moment and then asked, “Which is more beautiful, Jerusalem or Syria?”

  I looked at him blankly, briefly stunned. It was an innocent question, but something about it had caught me off guard. I tried to regain my composure. “They’re different,” I lied. “There are beautiful things here and beautiful things in Syria.”

  He sadly shook his head and looked at the ground. “Suria ahle,” he pronounced, his voice lingering on the second word. “Syria’s more beautiful.”

  And he was right.

  It was 2006, and Syria was more beautiful. There were no soldiers in the pedestrian streets holding guns, and the shops stayed open late into the night, when warm half-moons of chocolate croissants would emerge from ovens. Strangers constantly asked visitors to tea, and to dinner, and to stay in their homes. The custom of the local dialect was to be overly kind—so that beat-up old cars were compared to princesses, women compared to stars. I remembered the evening call to prayer from the Umayyad Mosque, down the street from my old home: three voices threaded together, descending the stone stairs and walking across the roofs, whispering through the windows.

  We had barely arrived in Jerusalem, but already it seemed that Damascus Gate held little in common with the city it was named after. Nablus Road, which had once been the departure point for journeys from my house here, all the way to my former home in Syria, was now tied up with walls and barriers and checkpoints, UN soldiers, and countries at war with one another. Something had been lost in the interim, and little of the lightness I had come to expect from the rest of the Arab world was on display here. East Jerusalem, and Damascus Gate in particular, wore its toughness aggressively on its sleeve. Everything was charged. Here was a city that could make you tired just from walking through it.

  The man told me the price of my vegetables, giving me a discount because I spoke Arabic like a Syrian, and I walked the two blocks home. Two young boys passed me and taunted me in the street—calling “Shalom! Shalom!”—mistaking me for an Israeli who they clearly felt had no business walking in their neighborhood. It seemed that I was always reminding people of somewhere else.

  I missed Syria then. I wondered if I had made a mistake by so quickly dismissing Frédéric’s suggestion that we return. It was hardly perfect—a land where citizens and visitors alike lived under the constant surveillance of the secret police, where all of the movies at the cinema were censored, where I was judged as a member of an enemy state. But that wasn’t really why I had been reluctant to go back. It was more that I could not summon up the courage to return to a place where people used to run across the street to kiss my husband’s hand because he had once been a novice monk. If I were more honest with myself, I would admit that I could not return to a place where the beauty of his past would always be measured against what I could offer him in the present.

  Yet in saying no to Damascus, I had also said no to the bazaars—Ottoman houses converted into cafés, pistachio ice cream, boxes made of inlaid wood—to Father Paolo, and to easy access to Lebanon and Jordan. When we decided to move to Jerusalem, I had thought only of whether, after living in Syria, they would let us in. Only now did I understand that they had let us in, but as a result we could never easily go back.

  In Lebanon and Syria, Jerusalem had always been described as paradise, a city longed for by the millions who could not access it. It had not occurred to me that for those in Jerusalem, paradise might be imagined to be on the other side. There was an Arabic expression for this: everything that is forbidden is desired. I did not yet understand much about Jerusalem. But I did know that being here meant severing ourselves from entire worlds we had previously inhabited—cutting ourselves off from belonging to the rest of the Middle East. The border to Syria was closed. The northern border to Lebanon was at war. Forty years ago, we could have hopped in a car and driven to Damascus that very afternoon. Depending on traffic, it may have taken three hours, the same as it used to take someone from Jerusalem to drive to Beirut or to enjoy dinner beside the sea in Byblos.

  I had been waiting in vain for the neighbors on Nablus Road to invite us to tea, but so far it had not happened. There were other small details from life in Damascus that I missed already: there, when you asked a stranger for directions, he almost always left his work and walked you himself. It seemed that no task was so important that it could not be dropped in favor of human contact.

  But here, my mere presence on the street seemed to be met with suspicion, and I had the sense that we were not wanted. No one was talking to us. Everyone was watching us.

  “I think the neighbors might think that we’re spies,” I finally told Frédéric.

  “They don’t think that we’re spies.”

  “Why not? I would. We look like Europeans, we speak Arabic like Syrians, and we moved into their neighborhood in the middle of a war.”

  “You’re making movies in your head. Where did you come up with this idea?”

  This was a typical Frédéric expression. Other people imagine things. But we Americans make movies in our heads.

  “Why don’t they ever invite us for dinner?” I challenged him. “Or for tea? No one is inviting us to anything.”

  “It’s going to be different here,” Frédéric answered. “You can’t be in conflict for this long without becoming closed in on yourself. People are more suspicious. And they have reason to be.”

  There are few more frustrating moments in a first year of marriage than when one’s husband is perfectly reasonable and absolutely correct.


  I remembered Hassan Nasrallah’s speech drifting over the mangoes. “I thought that the whole point of coming here was to move to a place that would feel more familiar than France. But this doesn’t feel familiar at all. I mean, do you see how many children are playing with plastic guns? And they’re not even normal plastic guns. They’re some kind of Russian-made machine guns. I didn’t even know that toys like that existed.”

  He held me, in a room on the seam of two countries. “These kids have lived with war their whole lives. We’ll just have to be patient.”

  “I know. I guess I just didn’t realize how hard it would be.”

  • • •

  The next day, exhausted from Nablus Road, I climbed the long hill from our street to Jaffa Road in West Jerusalem. I just wanted to travel to a landscape where no one would notice me. Because the city was essentially two countries, I wore modest clothes for the space of a few blocks passing through conservative East Jerusalem. When I reached the top of the hill, I took off my scarf and cardigan and put them in my bag, allowing my bare arms to be exposed to the sun of what was effectively another country. Now I ambled through a country of coffee shops and outdoor cafés, with menus written in Hebrew and English—a country that, at first glance, was more Brooklyn or Berlin than Cairo. A few minutes later, I arrived at the entrance to Mahane Yehuda, the sprawling outdoor market crowded with religious Jews in long black coats with dark hats, Iraqis and Kurds and Yemenis and Moroccans, young Israeli hipsters in cafés, and old men from Baghdad playing backgammon in a hidden courtyard. It was one of those Jerusalem curiosities, a place where you could find Moroccan pickled lemons, real Iranian barberries, Russian pork sausages, and Ethiopian lentils—a testament to the diversity of Jewish people who had immigrated to the city over the course of a century. I bought two baguettes, a log of French chèvre, and Italian gnocchi, and I held them to my chest like some absurd comfort as I made my way home.

  I was crossing the threshold into my neighborhood, into the heart of East Jerusalem, when I noticed the Hebrew letters on all of the grocery bags that I carried, advertising that I had slipped into the other side. I tried to fold one bag into another in order to conceal them. I panicked. Perhaps my neighbors would suspect that I was secretly Israeli and living among them, a common concern for them as more and more settlers took over houses in East Jerusalem. I pressed the bags against my body, hastily said hello to Abu Hossam, fussed with my key in the lock until it mercifully caught, and made my way up the long staircase and home again. I was exhausted from living in a place where everything was political, even where you buy your cheese.