“The Jordanians?” I suggested.
“The Jordanians threw me in prison for being a Communist!” he replied.
• • •
Ours was a neighborhood made holy by nearness. Musrara watched the holy city from a quiet corner, content to be next to the ancient walls instead of within them. Sometimes I would walk across the open space that used to be no-man’s-land and find myself among those houses a block away on the other half of Musrara, now in Israeli West Jerusalem, houses that looked identical to ours, but which had been broken up into pieces after the war of 1948. A house such as ours was now five apartments, the spacious salons split into twos and fours. Houses built to accommodate large, extended Palestinian families became the refuges of Moroccan, Syrian, and Iraqi Jews, who had fled their own countries and now crowded into the beautiful tenements that had become theirs only because, as second-class Israeli citizens after the war, no one had minded putting them close to the shelling along the newly created border. A different world had moved in, families calling out in Hebrew and hanging their laundry out to dry, tending their olive trees, playing Moroccan music out the window.
Yes, life changed from place to place—not even from street to street, but from shop to shop, from layer to layer. And there was Abu Hossam knowing all of this in advance, one day selling umbrellas, the next day scarves to keep the sand from our eyes, and the very next day icy beverages to keep us cool from the heat, all the while noting our coming and going, and insisting, “Khaliha, khaliha.” Take it as an offering from me.
Seasons
We passed through seasons. When we had arrived the air was hot and smelled of mint, but in time the cold came with a vengeance and the smell of the air turned first to za’atar—wild thyme sold on the sidewalks outside—and finally to sage leaves, bruising the air. The wind was bitterly cold and, like everything in Jerusalem, winter came quickly and harshly, settling beneath our bones. The winds accumulated in the valley that was Nablus Road, amplified, so that the world took on a force. Rains glazed the windows with water and breath, swelling the walls, shaking the trees. The entire world was pulled forward in space. I tried not to venture outside. The streets flooded. The wind refused to let up. We woke one morning to find that the entire bougainvillea plant had been lifted from the roof and then held up over the earth, stripped bare, so that the stairs were awash in pink petals and wet green leaves. When I went outside and ascended the hill toward the New City, the sidewalks were littered with the skeletons of defeated black umbrellas, torn inside out by the wind and finally abandoned on the roadside.
Then one day I walked outside into a nearly empty street, to men covering their mouths with scarves. The khamsin had come: those sandstorms of legend, named after the fifty-day period during which they were said to blow through, though here they mercifully lasted only for the space of an afternoon. But for that afternoon, the air was yellow dust, rapping against our eyes, flying into our mouths, some otherworldly, biblical storm. Our scalps crawled with dust. Orange found its way into the winter hats Abu Hossam was still selling outdoors. The wind stripped the leaves from the trees, suddenly and with violence, so that the gutters filled up with blossoms and branches and all of that sand from the deserts outside the city: the earth of another place that had blown into ours.
I would write, and Frédéric would keep his hours in the small bookstore, and in the afternoons we would cross through the streets between us—the streets of memory and the actual ones, the graves and the thieves, the invisible boundaries—to meet.
Frédéric once told me that he fell in love with me the moment he met me. I fell in love with him one afternoon, months later, when we were washing dishes in a desert monastery. We both loved each other first, and knew each other later. I have met those couples who claim to know everything about each other, and I have sometimes envied them, but I mostly look at them like aliens who inhabit a planet different from mine.
Perhaps we did everything backward. We had no other choice.
In those early months on Nablus Road, I called to him. No, we were calling to each other; two strangers who wanted to find their way to each other but did not know, quite yet, how. I loved him then. I did not know how to do so well. This much I am certain of. I had worked hard all of my life to be good at things, but I was not sure that I was any good at being married, and I was still too young to know that almost no one is good at being married—at least not in the beginning—and that for those accustomed to solitude, marriage is like a muscle we have to work on because it has never been used. The romance, in the end, was a walk to meet each other, day after day, a promise, a shy approaching, two people still terrified of the permanence of this long dance we had entered that no one had prepared us for. In time, we walked faster. I left early in order to meet him more than halfway. Earlier still. Then early enough so that I could pretend to browse books in the bookstore where he worked, while I peered from beside the shelves, watching him become animated as he gave advice to customers.
My husband. The way he spoke with his hands, a patch in his beard that never grew, the patterns of his breathing in sleep—a stranger slowly coming into focus. Time stitched us together, the opening of some windows and the closing of others, so that a balance settled into the house. In time, I learned that though leaving the monastery had been the ultimate grand gesture, that was not what came naturally to my husband. Frédéric was a master of the small gesture, and three years in a monastery had prepared him for the art of noticing as prayer. So he did, over and over: the cup of tea he infused each morning, the leaky faucet that needed to be fixed, the glass of water asking for refilling, the creak in the door, the windows patched up so that the wind would not seep in. Hot water prepared for the shower. A constant and quiet repairing of the immediate world. His way of showing affection was rarely by saying anything, but instead in placing my damp shoes beside the heater to dry.
So we danced closer to each other. The neighbors sensed it now, and they were watching us, protecting us. A vegetable vendor on the corner silently slipped in a bunch of mint with my cucumbers, or opened the black plastic bag in front of me so that I could place the carrots inside—an inch of relief, but enough. Abu Hossam wordlessly placed a circle of date bread into my hands along with the sesame bread and nodded, instructing me to take it. The men on the front stoop moved aside in the morning without me asking them to. The same world that had worked to push us away now silently—as though it realized that it had bent us too far——conspired to make an inch of space for us.
I do not know what marriage is like for other people. I only know that for us there was the initial “I do” in the church, and then the one that happened each day after, the “I still do.” We had married as strangers, and as we came to know each other we had to say it over and over: I know you miss the monastery, but I still do; I know you don’t like having guests in the house, but I still do; I know you don’t wake up early enough, but I still do; I know you don’t speak my language, but I still do… That daily renewal of promise: I still do, I still do, I still do.
• • •
A Sunday morning before church. We disagreed about how we would spend the afternoon. Our argument must have been audible as we descended the stairs. We opened the door. Abu Hossam was waiting for us.
He scolded Frédéric. “You must never disagree with your wife in public. But in fact, you should never argue with her at all.”
I was embarrassed. I was the one who had started the disagreement, but Frédéric didn’t correct him. I thanked him silently for that. We stood side by side, admonished on the front two steps of our own home.
Abu Hossam removed a silver Arabic coffee pot from a flame burning next to the front door. He poured two strong cups of coffee. It was the traditional Arabic sign for the settling of any dispute. He handed one to each of us.
“Now drink,” he ordered.
We drank.
And we continued on through the filthy streets of Nablus Road, absolved.
From very early on, there were signs that something on our street was off. Frédéric and I woke up. We drank our tea. We went to work. We bought our spaghetti from the Freij family, our glasses from the Baramkehs; we spoke French and Spanish and Arabic with the neighbors. But it was now early March, months since the war with Lebanon had finished, and it was increasingly clear that some other, more invisible war was being carried out on the streets where we lived.
At any moment, it could break to the surface. But no one would talk about it or even say its name out loud—as though simply mentioning war would summon it into being.
I began noticing Palestinian men being asked for their papers in the streets around our house. Nearly every day, just at the top of the hill, two or three Israeli soldiers were stationed, dressed in green uniforms, with guns slung casually over their shoulders. Every few minutes they would spot a Palestinian making his way into the New City, call him over, and ask him to show his papers.
The first time I saw it, I thought that it was a coincidence. But every day I saw it happen anew. Usually these brief interactions came to nothing, and yet I often watched young teenage boys from my neighborhood, schooled in toughness, with slicked-back hair and crisp blue jeans, wrestle with how to respond to being asked for their papers within the streets of their own city. Sometimes they shrugged, but just as often they laughed—visibly, defiantly. And so it unfolded again and again, these small encounters and the even smaller laughter: young men pushed against walls, their hands pressed behind their backs, patted down and searched, then hastened along their way.
This drama played out in the very center of the city in plain sight, but the strangest thing was that no one appeared to notice. Cars continued past. Pedestrians waited for the light to turn and then hurried down Jaffa Road, the main thoroughfare in the city center. Even the other Palestinians continued walking, eyes on the concrete. It was not normal, and yet an entire city had decided together, in some bizarre contract, to pretend that it was.
In time I learned that the soldiers were asking those boys for their Jerusalem ID cards, the blue IDs all Palestinians in the city were required to carry at all times, in order to prove that they were allowed to enter into the city of Jerusalem. Most young Palestinians had no passports, unlike the Israelis in the city, who were citizens, and these cards were a painful proof of their liminal and fragile status.
I found myself bound to these invisible people, even when I left the confines of my neighborhood and walked in West Jerusalem. I did not speak Hebrew, but I spoke Arabic, and so my ears perked up every time one spoke. It was like a secret that I never intended to be let in on. They were everywhere. But no one seemed to notice them.
I walked down the streets of downtown, and my head kept turning at the signal. They were beneath the bowels of the earth, wearing fluorescent vests and digging into the ground, placing metal grids for the tramway. This line of men extended throughout the city, singing songs by the legendary Lebanese singer Fairuz, in Arabic, a thread of men lifting out dust in the heart of the metropolis. Sometimes they paused to pray in the middle of the road, the cars seeming to disappear around them.
I heard them working in kitchens in restaurants throughout the mainly Jewish West Jerusalem, under an unwritten rule that an Arab could wash the dishes or chop the vegetables, but could almost never wait a table. I heard them through the barrier between front counter and kitchen, boys slicing tomatoes and calling out to one another—in a language of intimacy that seemed certain that no one else around them could ever understand.
There they were, sweeping streets, cleaning parks, driving taxis. Fixing the electrical wires. Scrubbing the municipal toilets. Hiding in plain sight, collecting cigarette butts, holding the city in place. In the Israeli market of Mahane Yehuda, bag boys maneuvered boxes behind the scenes, hurriedly throwing out garbage, pushing back and forth great carts of fish. If I should chance to brush against one by accident, he would blush and whisper, immediately, “Slikha”—“Excuse me” in Hebrew—as though apologizing not so much for the accident as for the very fact of making himself known.
There they were, there they were. Everywhere in West Jerusalem, over the hill, tidying the streets of neighborhoods that had once housed Palestinian aristocrats. Arab taxi drivers memorizing the Hebrew names for places they had long known by Arabic names—Talpiot for Tel Beyout, Shar Yaffo for Bab al-Khalil, the ancient gate named after the Prophet Abraham. Women silently mopping floors, living among streets that had slipped away. Trying to hide as well as they could in plain sight, mindful of the signs out the window: the old Arabic lintel still hanging on a building in the German Colony, the Muslim graves still scattered in Mamilla Cemetery in the center of the city, which contained the bones of the soldiers of Saladin, every moment a reminder of how fragile the earth was, and how quickly it could be lost.
And then those same men and women passed the dividing line back to East Jerusalem, and they walked onto Nablus Road, and they instantly became visible once again. They shouted. Yes, they always shouted greetings at the top of their lungs: “Ahlan, ahlan ahlan!” So it was that my street was always loud, as if to compensate for all the silence of so many other places in their split lives.
Even then I knew that it could not be sustained. There was so much despair in the hiding. So much violence in those daily encounters, in plain sight, the asking for papers. I did not know what I was seeing yet. I only knew that the city was split between itself, and that we had placed ourselves on the scar. It was not only the two languages. There were two separate bus systems, separate school systems. Our streets were filthy and our trash was not always taken out, the health clinics in our neighborhood were in shambles, and more than two-thirds of the Palestinians lived below the poverty line. I had to remind myself that my neighbors considered themselves lucky, for at least they were better off than the vast majority of Palestinians who lived on the other side of the separation wall, who had green ID cards and in most cases could not enter Jerusalem at all, unless they applied for a permit. Many had never seen the city in their entire lives.
So Frédéric and I passed the first months of our marriage, entangled in a space that we could not understand but that felt, more and more, like it might erupt at any moment. The most tragic invisibles we knew were those we could not meet: Palestinians who lived in Jerusalem but did not have Jerusalem identification papers, and so could not risk leaving their homes at all. I learned about these by accident, when I asked about the wife of an acquaintance, only to be hushed and told later that she was “at home.” This was the secret of East Jerusalem—women from the West Bank who had married Jerusalem men, despite the fact that they were not entitled to assume their husbands’ status as residents of Jerusalem. These women had been lucky to enter Jerusalem once, somehow, but now they were imprisoned in their own homes, for fear of policemen asking them for their papers, forcing them to leave the city.
Whenever I saw that acquaintance, out of superstition, I never asked about his wife and did not even say the traditional “Selem,” give my greetings to her, afraid that by mentioning her name, I might summon her onto the street, from which she might then be gone.
• • •
One morning I woke up and opened the front door to a military checkpoint set up directly in front of our house. It had simply appeared, in the early hours of the morning, while we were sleeping. Soldiers outfitted with guns stood watch in their olive-green uniforms, and they had made a metal gate with a small opening in the center where people might pass. They stopped all Palestinians, most of whom were headed to the Old City for Friday prayers, and asked them for their papers. All of the men who were under fifty years old were turned away.
Life continued around it, with Michel still selling his plastic plant holders and stickers and engraved prayer plaques, his plastic animals and training toilets. The girls still went to school and jumped rope in the school courtyard. Yet there it was, in the midst of everything, with the l
ine of men and women growing every second, preparing their papers, then parting quietly in two as half of them were turned away.
On another afternoon, we watched from the balcony as a fight broke out among teenage Palestinian boys, just outside of the gates of the girls’ school across the street. One after another, the boys removed their belts from their waists, as though choreographed to do so, and brandished them as weapons.
It was in those days that I began to understand that violence, once it had happened, would remain on Nablus Road, in the same way the wind and the dust settled there. We could feel the residue of it, hovering for hours and sometimes days after the fact, and it would rub into the shoulders and into the bones, so that I would be exhausted when I fell asleep and still exhausted when I woke up in the morning. Enemies walked past one another and often against one another in a strange intimacy. Whatever violence could not be expressed between enemies was expressed among one another instead, like a law of physics that seemed to demand that violence, once triggered within the body, must be set in motion.
To cope, our neighbors sought solace in invisible cities, the cities of the past. Abu Tamer would speak of those days of his childhood when thousands of Christians from Syria and Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan would rush onto Nablus Road during the Easter holidays, and the cafés would stay open late at night as children ate sweets and parents lit candles at the Holy Sepulchre.
A Country Between Page 10