I had expected marriage to be a leap. Instead, it had turned out to be a total migration—like the story of Abraham, leaving everything for a promise of a blessing still far off, or that of Mary, saying yes to an angel, without having any idea of what that yes meant. I had not known this when we caught that train in Syria—that both of us were leaving our former lives, perhaps forever, for a future that promised something that we could not yet see.
It had taken such courage that I had not allowed myself to think about all that I’d left behind. But now the eleven rooms of the house were empty, and they began to fill with images from my past. I sat by the window and wrote them down.
I had left a language.
I had left my family. Friends.
I had left embracing my father at the bottom of the stairs.
I had left certain blue flowers that came into season in Texas every spring.
I had left skirts that came to the knee, and exposed shoulders.
I had left libraries of books I could choose at random.
I had left the ease of ordering in restaurants, of reading street signs, of not bearing the burden of translating an entire world. I had left a life in which I knew the names of the most intimate and random objects: doorknob, corkscrew, glass shard, light socket, filament, dust mite.
It struck me that, even if I spent the rest of my life in the Arab world, I would never learn to say grain of sand, or be able to describe the equivalent of paint chipping or color bleeding, that the time in my life in which I could absorb such obscurities in another tongue had passed. Now I would inhabit a world far less precise.
I had not become a nun. And yet, still, I could not take the piano with me.
• • •
I awakened the next morning to the faint bells in the garden below. There was no reason to hurry out of bed. When I finally roused myself and went to the kitchen, Frédéric was not there with my morning cup of tea. The house was out of balance, and I could not remember which windows to open and which ones to close.
I went to make breakfast, only to discover that the insistent hum of the refrigerator had gone silent. The food would spoil quickly. The mere act of telling the neighboring nuns that the refrigerator had broken would require me to speak French, which I could not do. I picked up the phone and dialed the number, stumbling in my few words of French, then restated the problem in English, and then a final time in Arabic, hoping that they might understand enough from one of the three versions to send a repairman.
Twenty minutes later, he rang downstairs. I descended the staircase and opened the door onto Nablus Road. The meeting of men on the front step of my house looked at the repairman, looked at me, and then shook their collective heads in disapproval. As a woman whose husband was out of town, it was a scandal that I should let in a man who was not a relative.
“He’s fixing the refrigerator,” I explained desperately. I could hear them clucking as he mounted the stairs.
For a moment, I stood on the stairs, beneath the bougainvillea raining petals, exhausted, before mounting and letting him in. The man fixed the refrigerator as quickly as he could and hurried out the door.
When I heard the door bolt shut, I sat on the stairs with my face in my hands. I had lost a great deal by that small miscalculation. Next time I would know better, and I would let the food spoil. It was only food, after all. It was easier to replace than so many other things I was trying to keep.
The Man of the House
Frédéric returned from Syria more settled to the earth. It was as though he had simply needed to make sure that the monastery still existed and had not disappeared while we were away.
I had a sense that Father Paolo had shifted also, that he had finally come to accept that we were married for good and that we wouldn’t miraculously find ourselves back in his monastery as a monk and a nun. Soon after Frédéric’s return, strangers began stopping by the house on Nablus Road to say hello, to ask for a bed to sleep in, or to deliver a letter.
Each of them would say the same thing: “When Father Paolo heard I was coming to Jerusalem, he said that I should knock and find you here.”
I would arrive home at the end of the afternoon to Abu Hossam pointing out letters taped to our front door by strangers passing through—Paolo’s way of telling us that he had not forgotten us. In a world of such separation, I held onto these envelopes and scribbled messages as consolation, as hope.
In the meantime, Frédéric took a job at the English-language bookstore of the American Colony Hotel, the iconic Jerusalem hotel originally built for a pasha and his four wives and later acquired in the nineteenth century by the Christian family that founded the American colony of Protestants settling in the Holy Land. Now perhaps the most luxurious hotel in the city, decorated in colorful ceramic tiles and adorned with fountains, it was not the type of place I had anticipated Frédéric would find work. But he was rarely predictable, and the fact that he did not read in English did not stop him from confidently striding into the bookstore and asking for a job. He had a self-assurance about him from his years in the monastery that seemed to encourage people to take his advice, in matters of life and in books, and soon he did a brisk business selling travelogues, fiction, and books of political analysis to diplomats and journalists who passed through. In the afternoons when he returned home, he would ask for my suggestions and then push those tomes fervently, so that he must have sold half the city Ali and Nino, an obscure novel by Kurban Said that takes place in Baku, Azerbaijan. When the heat kept customers at home, he would sit alone for long spells, interrupted every now and then when a total stranger would come and asked him for advice. It was not unlike the monastic life.
I would sit in my office and write draft after draft of my first book, about the year I spent living in Syria, and as I would close my eyes and remember the men calling out from the streets outside my home near Straight Street in Damascus, they would converge with the voices calling out from Damascus Gate, so that I sometimes had difficulty distinguishing where one world ended and the other began. In the evenings, we would reconvene at home, just in time to close the windows on the western side and open up the windows to the east, to the let the voices in.
Frédéric and I had lived in the house for a month before the Alice-blue habits that skirted across the garden beneath us finally properly introduced themselves. The tiny community of Spanish-speaking nuns also rented from the French nuns next door, and one morning Maria, the Mother Superior of the community, invited us to tour the bottom half of our own house, which happened to be their convent. The house had taken such hold of us that it felt like finally being reconciled to the other half of ourselves. Their rooms circled a garden of roses and fruit trees hedged in by stones. Maria, at first stern in her habit, led us to their chapel, where she showed us the Eucharist contained in a compartment behind the altar. Catholics consider the Eucharist—or Blessed Sacrament—to be the body of Christ.
“He’s the man of the house,” she said, pointing and trying to keep a straight face. It was a very Catholic joke.
We were ambling in the garden among the rose bushes when she turned serious. “We were relieved when we learned a family would be moving upstairs,” she said. “We were scared to be alone in the house.” Maria lived with two other nuns from Mexico, and none of them spoke a word of Arabic. I thought of the sound of their brooms, the faint twinkling of their bells holding us in place. Perhaps, in the end, we balanced each other.
I mentioned to Maria that I had grown up in San Antonio, and that Spanish was my mother’s first language. From then on, the sisters greeted me in Spanish every time we crossed one another at the bottom of the stairs. We had decided that the sisters owned the entrance to the house, while we owned the stairs. So they dutifully swept the entrance every morning, and I let the stairs go wild, so that pink bougainvillea petals marked the border between us.
“¡Buenos días!” Maria would sing out every morning at eight o’clock.
“¡Buenos
días!” I would sing back. And for a moment I would be carried back to childhood afternoons with my mother’s family in San Antonio, and the vision of her pressing the moons of tortillas beneath her palms, speaking in a mysterious language I could barely understand.
And so it was that our street revealed itself to carry traces of distant homes. During the British Mandate, the convent next door, called the Franciscaines de Marie, taught a generation of young Palestinian women to sew, insisting that they only speak in French. Though the sewing machines and pupils were long gone, the nuns, hailing from Malta and Spain, France and Lebanon, still spoke to one another largely in French. When Frédéric would go next door to pay the rent, he would enter into his native country, complete with its former colonies.
“Bonjour, ma sœur. Ça va?”
“Bonjour, Frédéric! Est-ce que vous êtes contents dans votre maison?”
Watching him, I had the impression of glimpsing a man in exile who had spoken in his native language for just an instant—and who, for a moment, was home again.
That is how we found ourselves, in a far-off country, but with the languages of southern Texas and the French Alps—and the daily reminders of a monastery in Syria—mysteriously in the background of each moment, inhabiting the spaces around us, and lingering within our eleven rooms.
It was not the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it was something.
Palimpsest
As the war slowly faded into the background of our daily lives, I found the courage to venture out more and more in search of the street on which we lived. Nablus Road was not so much a single story as it was a palimpsest, cities and eras written over one another in time, some sections erased, others remaining through a single family, a doorway, an accent, a house. No era was ever truly wiped out; it only became harder to see, among all the clutter and noise, the fish tanks and bread. You had to learn to see through the world as it appeared to be into the world as it actually was. And, as I came to know them, the neighbors helped me by telling me the stories of their pasts, over cups of coffee or daily errands of purchasing milk. I began to recognize the fragments of other eras, languages, countries, stories—for ours was a street of stories, if ever there was one.
The surface level of Nablus Road was really four or five streets from different eras collapsed into one, with remnants of the first Arab families from the seventh century, of the Crusades, and of the British Mandate, to name a few. Yet this mishmash of history was unintelligible at first glance, and a visitor to our street looking at a map might be forgiven for believing that the British Mandate had never really ended and that European Christians still owned much of the street, from that period when foreign powers used their churches to stake claim on properties beside the Old City. German nuns still ran the Schmidt-Schule for girls, across the street from us, an enormous, castle-like fortress designed in the nineteenth century. Beside it, British volunteers still ushered groups around the Garden Tomb, where some Protestants argue that Jesus was crucified and buried, and where once I happened upon tourists speaking in tongues. Farther down the street, French Dominican priests in long white habits still lived in the walled complex of the École Biblique, where they translated the Bible into French and occasionally appeared beside the gate, looking out of sorts and angelic beside the Che Guevara grocery store. For a moment, the Empires appeared alive and well.
Yet in reality, the monks, nuns, priests, and pilgrims largely stayed behind their walls, leaving room for the real presence of our street: the Muslim Palestinian vendors who would show up every morning and unpack their juices, bags of candies, winter hats, fish aquariums, used vacuum cleaners, old shoes, and spices and set out to work. They commuted in from the outskirts of town, so that the street had the feeling of a bustling and crowded carnival that appeared only in the mornings and disappeared entirely at night, a city of phantoms. Many of the vendors were originally from Hebron—a city famous as the burial place of Abraham, and named in Arabic Al-Khalil, “the friend of God.” Hebronites carried a reputation both for their toughness and their extreme piety—and they spoke their own distinctive dialect of Arabic, so that when you descended onto Nablus Road you were hit by the sound not of Jerusalem but of another city, calling out the price of bread.
Between the vendors and the European buildings, in a narrow seam separating the two, was a third story: a single row of shops that contained the very last remnants of more than a thousand years of old Jerusalem families. The shop beneath us was owned by Greek Orthodox grocers named Freij, who hung a picture of the Virgin Mary over the entrance beside a wall hanging of the Hail Mary in Arabic. The Freij family had been in the Middle East for centuries, and in this century their name had become synonymous with the grocery stores that they owned throughout the region. The one beneath us was run by a man in his sixties named Nadim, along with his two sons.
Nadim was one of eight Freij brothers. When I asked him how long his family had been in Jerusalem, he shrugged. “Four hundred years? A thousand years?”
His oldest son piped up from the dairy aisle. “We’ve just always been here.”
Nadim Freij had the misfortune of being born in 1944, in British Mandate Palestine in a house in the Katamon neighborhood of West Jerusalem, up the hill. When the war of 1948 broke out, he and his family fled their house, believing that they could return in two weeks. “It’s been fifty-eight years,” he remarked sadly. That year Nadim’s father opened their family store on Nablus Road, where he grew up beside the wall that separated Jordan from the just-declared State of Israel—and from his family’s longtime home. The wall also cut him off from the other half of the neighborhood of Musrara, which before the war had been inhabited largely by Greek Orthodox Christians. The Freij family now found themselves to be a minority. In the space of a year, his entire world had, in every imaginable way, turned upside down.
“We were Bab al-Amoud boys,” he said, giving the Arabic name for Damascus Gate. He had passed most of the last sixty years on Nablus Road, watching as more and more Christians moved away, until they were reduced to only a fragment of the neighborhood—and the city. He had not moved, but the country he was born in had all but disappeared.
Only our front door and Abu Hossam’s cart separated the Freij grocery store from Michel and his older brother, Abu Tamer, who together ran their shop of Christmas-tree lights, Chinese dishes, plastic dolls, and Quranic verses. They were also from an old Jerusalem Christian family, but with a far more complicated history, for they descended from the historic Baramkeh family—whose story was so complicated that Abu Tamer told me, simply, to “look it up.” To my astonishment, I found it immediately in Encyclopedia of Islam, scattered among academic articles. According to scholars, the Baramkeh family had likely been Buddhist priests in Afghanistan before they were called by the Abbasid caliphs to move to the city of Baghdad, where they converted to Islam. Yahya ibn Khalid al-Barmak became the mentor to Harun al-Rashid, who went on to become the caliph during its Golden Age, making the Baramkehs one of the most powerful families in the Empire. Yet theirs was not a story that ended well. In 803, the family fell out of favor for reasons that are still controversial. Djaf’ar, Yahya’s son, was executed, his remains left on display in Baghdad for a year. The rest of the family was sent into exile. According to family tradition, Michel and Abu Tamer’s ancestors fled to Turkey and then to Greece, where family legend said they converted to Christianity and became icon painters, so famous that they eventually came to Jerusalem to paint the icons at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Beside Michel and Abu Tamer’s store, the nondescript grocery store belonging to the Abu-Khalaf family, where I went for essentials like toilet paper and paper towels, concealed the legends of the Crusades and great medieval battles. A portrait on the shop wall of a gloriously dressed man on his horse soon led me to the story that the Abu-Khalaf family had ridden into Jerusalem with the Kurdish tribes that fought along Saladin in the twelfth century, later settling in Jerusalem and Hebron. Now in his
late seventies, the eldest Abu-Khalaf still sat behind a desk, with a long white turban around his head tied with a black rope. Though the shop didn’t look like much, for decades his family had been in charge of organizing the hajj, the pilgrimage from Jerusalem to Mecca. I would never see the simple act of buying paper towels in the same way again.
Beside the Abu-Khalaf’s shop was likely the most respected family on the street: Omar and Sheikh Mazen, who ran a small grocery store. Sheikh Mazen only appeared to be a typical grocer—in reality he was a sheikh at Al-Aqsa Mosque and an Islamic scholar who also happened to spend his off hours manning the store counter and selling olives and bread. He was one of the last remnants of the Sufism—Islamic mysticism—that had thrived in Jerusalem during the Ottoman period, when devout Muslims completed their hajj to Mecca by blessing the visit at the nearby Dome of the Rock, and when Sufis asked to be buried as close as possible to the place where Mohammed ascended into heaven on his winged horse—known as the place in which the distance between earth and heaven was shortest. According to tradition, Sheikh Mazen’s family was descended from the Prophet Mohammad, with some members having come to the city with Umar ibn al-Khattab in the seventh century, when Arab armies first took control of the city from the Byzantine Empire. The Mazens brought the corner grocery store business to an entirely new level.
“How are you doing?” Omar would ask me when I went to pay.
“Alhamdulillah! Thanks be to God!” I would answer.
“Alhamdulillah! Alhamdulillah! Daiman alhamdulillah!” he would answer joyfully. Praise God! Praise God! We must always praise God! And it was worth going there to buy yogurt, just for that.
Finally, the last and most famous vendor on the street was barely visible on the corner. Every morning, Abu Salaam, the seventy-six-year-old newspaper vendor, would set up shop from a blue iron window frame lodged into the wall of the street, from which he sold Israeli and Palestinian and American and Egyptian newspapers, their headlines displayed to the hundreds of pedestrians who passed by on their way to the Old City. Every night, he would magically collapse his shop into the wall of the street, so that it disappeared entirely. The next morning, he would unfold it again, complete with a lip just wide enough to serve as his chair. He had been selling newspapers on that exact corner since he was seven years old, through the British Mandate, the Jordanians, the Israelis, and Palestinians—he had handed out the headlines of wars and horrors and could show the bullets that had lodged in his iron cabinet. I once asked him which of the governments that he had lived under had been the best, but he refused to indulge me with an answer. I had the sense that he’d had his fill of bad news from all of them.
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