That evening, I was boiling water for the gnocchi and found that I had forgotten salt. I ran down to a grocery store not far from the house, passing on the way Abu Hossam, who nodded his greeting in a way that made me feel, for a moment, that he knew everything.
As I browsed the aisle of dried goods, I noticed something peculiar. Much of what was stocked in this Palestinian grocery store, in the most nationalist area of the city, was labeled in Hebrew. A large section of the store was dedicated to Israeli products: Israeli cookies and Israeli juices, Coca-Cola written out in Hebrew letters. Confused, I bought Israeli salt and made my way back home.
I was accustomed to a world where borders marked the lines of wars, but in Jerusalem it appeared that the borders kept moving and changing shape. In cities like Tripoli in Lebanon and Damascus, Israeli products did not exist. Some Arab shops specifically boycotted products that they perceived to be tied to Israel in any way. As a young journalist, I had once covered the story of a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Lebanon that was bombed because it was thought to represent American culture. I tried to make sense of the fact that in parts of the Arab world, people were engaging in protests against Israel as an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but that in Jerusalem, Palestinian shops stocked Israeli products. Clearly, this was partly because Israel controlled much of what was exported from and imported into the city, leaving shopkeepers with little choice, but that was not the only reason; in several instances, the Arab and Israeli brands of the same product pushed up against each other on the shelves, side by side. I could not make sense of it. These were not enemies as I had come to think of them. The lines were blurred. Many of the Palestinians on my street could speak some Hebrew, and it was not uncommon to hear a Palestinian speaking Hebrew on the phone, or deciphering for a neighbor a bill from the Israeli electric company. Some of these neighbors, during more peaceful times, had worked in Israeli hotels, in two worlds that merged and unmerged like tides, depending on the weather. The city seemed to exist in contradiction: in some respects, the boundary between two worlds was clear, but in others, it was impossible to understand where one world ended and the other began.
And the next day, I did not understand when two Israeli soldiers with their guns, stationed in the middle of my street to monitor potential unrest, took their lunch break in the early afternoon. They headed to the Palestinian falafel stand just around the corner, rifles and all, where they stood at the counter and calmly took their lunch, chatting with each other among the Palestinian patrons, before paying their bill and returning to their posts.
Abu Hossam
It had not been immediately apparent to us when we moved to Nablus Road that we were moving to a shady border town, hidden in the guise of a city street. But the neighbors knew this very well, and Abu Hossam, by virtue of his location in front of our house, soon appointed himself our protector. By the laws of the street, we were now an extension of him and his family. Anyone who harmed us harmed him. The endless rings of free sesame bread he offered us every morning were not only a small kindness, but also a reminder that, though he had only a tiny falafel cart on wheels and we had eleven rooms, it was we who were guests in his house.
There was a timeless quality about Abu Hossam that made it impossible to ascertain how old he was—he could have been anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five, and his face was both battle-hardened and kind, with graying hair and a moustache, leathery skin, and eyes that looked in need of sleep but nonetheless crinkled around the corners, almost reluctantly, when he smiled. He did not speak often, but when he did it was in a thick Hebronite accent and with absolute and total authority. When I’d pass his cart on the way into the house, he would relay information. “It’s going to rain this afternoon,” he would announce, or, “A khamsin is on its way,” referring to the dust storms that blew into the city several times a year. If I returned in the afternoon, he would inform me, “Your husband just left the house ten minutes ago,” or, “A nun from next door just came by to see you. I told her that you would be back around three o’clock.”
I would not have told Abu Hossam that I would be back at that time. He just possessed a sixth sense and was able to determine what time it would rain, how the weather was changing, and if children would fall sick. On days when there were skirmishes between locals and the Israeli army on our street, I would descend the stairs to find his falafel stand locked, as though he had predicted that such a thing might happen.
And so, in a city where we had no family, Abu Hossam took on the role of my father, as if I were a child, inspecting me as I left the door, reinspecting me when I came home.
“Your bag is open.”
“It’s too cold to be outside.”
“It’s going to be windy.”
“Deer balik.” Take care of yourself.
• • •
Beside Abu Hossam’s cart, a slightly chubby man stood in front of his shop, and I regularly noticed him observing me and making mental notes as I entered the street. Finally, I descended the steps one day to find him waiting. He had clearly been anticipating making his grand entrance into my life.
“You’re new here?” he asked in perfect English.
“Yes.”
“I’m Michel,” he said, offering his hand.
“Stephanie,” I answered, shaking his hand with a bit of confusion, since no one in this part of the world said hello like that, especially to a woman.
Behind him, I could see a store stocked with an array of objects selected seemingly at random: vegetable peelers and plaques with verses of the Quran, staples and coffee cups, plastic toy trucks and toilets for toilet training, notebooks and Tupperware and Christmas tree decorations.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I moved here with my husband.”
“From where?”
“I’m from America.”
“You moved into the house of the Focolare?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “I used to go there sometimes and drink tea. They had these chairs that were made out of tree trunks and you could sit on them. Except now, of course, it is too hot to sit outside.”
“I see.”
“Do you still have the chairs made of tree trunks?”
“No, they took them with them.”
He sighed. “Oh, that’s too bad. They were really nice chairs.”
• • •
The shops outside were built into the wall of the street itself, so that they curiously became part of the landscape. Our house had been on the street for such a long time that the bottom of it had been incorporated into the wall of the street as well, with the lowest part of it serving as a grocery shop. The effect was that everything felt separate but interconnected, like a honeycomb, and the neighbors slowly worked their way into the intimacy of our lives, much as their noises siphoned into the air of our rooms when we awakened in the morning.
A week after our first meeting, Michel stopped me again. His shop fell at a particular angle so that if he intersected me, I would be trapped between him and Abu Hossam’s falafel stand, with no way of accessing the street.
“Are you part of a religious community?” he demanded.
“No. We just rent from nuns.”
“So, are you Muslim or Christian?”
“Christian.”
“Really?” He sounded suspicious.
“Really.”
“Well then, say the Our Father.”
I could not believe that I was being interrogated in front of my own house.
“Seriously?”
“You said that you’re Christian!”
Dutifully, I stood in the street and chanted the Our Father in Arabic, thankful that I had passed enough time in a monastery in the desert to know it by heart.
“Abana, alladhi fi as-samawat…”
“Okay, okay.” He looked briefly satisfied, but then appeared to change his mind; perhaps he thought I could have memorized it just to trick him. “Well then, do you know an
ything about Islam?”
“I studied it.”
“Well then, say the Fatiha.”
This was absurd. I took a deep breath and began to recite the opening chapter of the Quran:
“Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim…”
He quickly interrupted me. “I thought you said that you were Christian!”
“I am Christian!” I had fallen for his trap.
“What kind of Christian?” Everything here, even Christianity, was broken into families.
“Roman Catholic.”
“Well then, say the Nicene Creed.” Great. He was asking for the Christian profession of faith adopted at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325.
“Are you kidding me? I can’t say that in Arabic.”
He sighed. “Okay. Then say it in English.”
This time I was thankful for all of those years of Catholic school. “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth…”
He dismissed me with a brush of his hand, as if he couldn’t bear the sound of it in English, and then began to recite it in Arabic. “N’oumin b’illahi wahid…”
“Now you’re just showing off,” I accused him, and he laughed. “And you? What are you?” I challenged.
“What do you mean?” he scoffed, apparently offended that I had asked the very same question he had just asked me. Just then a street sweeper came by and leaned on his broom. “Speak to her in Arabic!” he scolded Michel. “I heard her earlier. She speaks Arabic like a parrot!”
I had no idea that the street sweeper knew me well enough to have formed an opinion of me. Michel waved his hand to brush him off and leaned in with a conspiring tone in his voice. “I prefer to speak to you in English so that no one else will understand me. So what was I saying?”
“You were telling me what you are.”
“Well, you know.” He waved his hand dismissively.
I did not know. I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I used to be Greek Orthodox. But then I like going to the other churches. Sometimes I go to the Greek Catholic. Sometimes to the Syrian Catholic church. It depends, you know, on what I feel like. I just don’t like to go to the Evangelical church. Have you seen that church down the road? They have all of those Koreans. I’ve heard strange things about them.”
From then on, I had to navigate both Abu Hossam and Michel on my way out the front door. Abu Hossam provided the weather report. Michel was more complicated. He stopped me nearly every morning, as if he had been waiting for years for someone with whom he could speak English to show up. I was writing a book? Well, it didn’t sound very interesting. Did I know that there were flies that came into the back of his shop? It was terrible, really, the result of plants from the side of our building climbing up into his shop windows. Could Frédéric and I talk to the nuns about it and make them take those plants down? Where did we go to church? Were we missionaries? You know there had been missionaries on the street. They handed out verses from the Bible, and people threw them on the ground and into the trash. One local woman was so appalled to see the Bible on the sidewalk that every day she walked up and down the street, gathering the pieces. Had I ever seen her?
So I settled into the street, and I slowly became familiar with the logic of a one-street village with thousands of visitors who passed through daily. I could say nothing, wear nothing, or feel nothing without it being noticed by the neighbors and pocketed as potential information, something that might help them make sense of these two strangers who had moved into their territory.
And within the house, Frédéric and I were watching each other, also as two strangers—every day a little less strange—grabbing any scrap of information so that our life together might become a bit less complicated.
• • •
My dearest Joseph, I have not told you much about those first weeks in Jerusalem with your father. It’s hard to know what to say about the beginning of married life. Before I met him, I had lived in relationships much as I had lived in houses, moving between them, from country to country. I was terrified—that compared to all that he had given up to be with me, I would disappoint him, that an ordinary life, among vendors and plants and sesame bread, could never measure up to the holiness in which he had lived in the desert.
Rainer Maria Rilke once said, “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” Still, I was not prepared for how lonely falling in love would be, for being put in front of the vast fields of foreignness contained in the one you want to be closest to. There was something in how far I felt from him that was parallel with how foreign I felt in the world we now inhabited, a strangeness from both within and without. More than once, the words of Paolo echoed in my head: “Stephanie, do not think that this will be easy.”
And I was just as scared that he would discover me, and that I wouldn’t be the same woman he’d imagined he’d met in the desert. I may as well tell you this now, because, in my experience, this is the secret of marriage that no one wants to talk about—that you look at another human being and understand that he contains an entire world, full of trees and roads and turning points, languages and birthmarks and doubts, and moments of despair, and that it might take a lifetime for you to even approach that world. I am guessing that perhaps not all men are that mysterious, but I had not married all men, just your father, and he was a country unto himself. I was scared that I would never know him completely. I felt haunted and still somehow touched by the words of the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote of his wife of more than forty years, after she died: “I loved her, without knowing who she really was.”
I loved your father, without knowing who he really was.
I was also not entirely sure who I was, either.
Even when two people hold each other, a border passes between them. I watched your father across this border. He seemed to be getting used to the inhabited world—accustomed as he was to living on the top of a mountain, some fallen bird trying to find his bearings. After the desert, he seemed alarmed to be in a world of so many things.
And I came to accept that even though it took him only one afternoon to descend from his monastery, in reality it would take much longer to leave it behind—years perhaps, a fact that I remembered whenever I came upon another pair of rosary beads in his pockets when I did the laundry, or discovered him up early in the morning, sitting in a quiet corner of the house in prayer.
That November, your father left for a week on a religious retreat. I found myself living alone again for the first time since our wedding, walking between the empty rooms, trying to fill them.
In the grocery store beneath the house, I placed instant noodles, spaghetti, and jars of tomato sauce into a basket.
“This is what you cook for your husband?” the shopkeeper scolded me when I went to pay. Imad manned the store with his father, his younger brother, and assorted youth from the street who moved boxes and measured out blocks of white cheese and ladles of olives, like a mom-and-pop affair from the 1950s.
“Frédéric is out of town,” I responded.
He sighed in exaggerated relief. I had spared him the scandal of knowing that I was preparing noodles and canned sauce for my husband’s dinner.
“When is he coming back?”
“In a few days.”
“Where did he go?”
“On retreat.”
“Ahhh.” He winked. “On retreat.”
I scowled at him. In what world was it okay for my neighbor the grocer to suggest that my husband was having an affair? I was tempted to tell him that if my husband were in love with someone else, then that someone else was God.
Still, I did not easily forget what he had said.
That night, I sat in the empty house, settled on a very crowded space on the earth, to take stock of what had happened to my life in the twelve months since Frédéric had left the monastery and we had boarded that train. I remembered a dream I’d once had in the monastery, when I was contemplati
ng becoming a nun, of my childhood piano, passed on from my grandmother, an enormous grand piano of worn wood and old keys. In the dream, I heard a voice say: “You cannot take the piano with you.”
• • •
Your father had passed through the knowledge of all that he could not take with him into the monastery. And on returning to this world, the hardest thing to give up, in the end, was not things, but his poverty—the freedom of being unbound to anyone but God. Being married had obliged him to be attached, once again, to the world and what was in it. To be attached to me. I sometimes wondered if he could bear being bound to the earth.
Because the shopkeeper was right: he was still in love with the monastery, even if he was also in love with me. And what I had told the neighbors was not true. He was not on retreat. He had traveled to Syria, using his new, clean passport to visit his old monastery in the desert, to see his best friend Rana be ordained a nun—in the ceremony that had been meant to be his own ordination into the monastic life. They had been so close that when he decided to leave the monastery, she had been angry—not that he was leaving, but that he had kept a secret from her.
She had traveled all the way to our wedding in France, and now Frédéric had promised her that he would not miss the equivalent of her wedding day, in spite of the risk of traveling between enemy countries. So he had gone. He was there, visiting his past life, and I had remained here, visiting my past life.
I missed him. Even if I still didn’t know entirely who he was.
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