“I’m not pregnant,” I announced.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Look at the test. There’s no second blue line. There’s not even the shadow of another line.”
“Maybe it’s too soon.”
“It says in the directions that the test can detect a pregnancy in a few days. It’s been two weeks.”
He took my hand and led me to the salon. “We’ll try again. It will be fine.”
I felt tears stinging my eyes. I remembered how it had happened: how I had returned from watching the men praying in the street and collapsed into my husband’s arms. How we had held each other after making love, both of us so certain that we’d conceived a child that Frédéric had whispered in my ear, “Wahh! Wahh!” like a baby crying.
Outside, I could hear the merchants calling back and forth. Frédéric was oddly quiet.
“Frédéric?”
He looked up at me.
“You didn’t tell the neighbors I’m pregnant, did you?”
He blushed. “Just Abu Hossam.”
“What?”
“And Abu Walid.”
I stared at him. “You told the falafel guys before we told our parents?”
“I was excited,” he mumbled. “I didn’t say that you were pregnant. I said that you might be pregnant.”
“Oh God. Now they’ll think that something went wrong.”
“They won’t say a thing, Stephanie. They know how to be discreet about these things.”
• • •
The child I was not carrying became like some seed of sadness planted in me. Spring passed on. Each time I left the house, the neighbors subtly examined me, trying to measure if I looked more tired than usual, if my clothes were tight, and finally, if I might have lost the baby. Eventually Frédéric told them that he had been mistaken. From then on, I sensed their quiet sympathy as I pushed the door open onto the street, and they were gentler with me. Times had not changed much since the book of Genesis, I guess. There were few things, it seemed, more tragic in the region than a woman who had tried to have a child but did not.
Joyeux Noël
That summer we escaped the blistering heat and returned to France, traveling to Frédéric’s vacant family house in the high Alps. After my months of disappointment, I had rarely been so grateful to see the world disappearing beneath me. I sought solace in loaves of bread and Beaufort cheese, in the din of cowbells moving in the fields. I comforted myself with the names of flowers coming into season: eglantine and alpine aster, coltsfoot, marguerite, dog violet.
The last month had felt like an accumulation of losses. Fatah and Hamas—the two main Palestinian political factions—had gone to war in Gaza, and I’d read about militants being thrown off the roofs of buildings. It was unclear who would take control of the West Bank—another development in an area that was already becoming intolerable, with checkpoints and walls and settlements eating up the landscape. I had recently begun part-time work on a development project in the West Bank, which required traveling regularly through checkpoints, and the week before I left for France, every single partner had quit. I also found myself physically depleted. My feet ached upon touching the ground. I imagined my back a field of blue and green bruises.
Once we arrived in France, I repeatedly collapsed into sleep for hours at a time—a dark and faraway slumber unlike any I had known. Frédéric would tiptoe into the room and kiss my forehead. I told myself that it was war that had been building in my body, a poison that I now needed to extinguish. But days passed, and the pain intensified. I sensed that it might be something else.
We had been in France for a week when I received an urgent email from my friend Julie, who I had known during my year in Syria. She informed me that she had tested positive for exposure to tuberculosis. Since the two of us had been together regularly—at times daily—chances were that I had been exposed too.
I was almost relieved that the news was as terrible as I had anticipated. I had always suspected that I would die some horrible death, like John Keats or the Brontë sisters.
“I have tuberculosis,” I announced to Frédéric.
“You do not have tuberculosis.”
“I do. I’m probably dying.”
“You are not dying. Didn’t you get shots?”
“I don’t think they give those shots in America, because no one there gets tuberculosis. I made the mistake of traveling to countries where people have it.”
“I promise you that you don’t have tuberculosis. But if you want me to make an appointment to go to the doctor’s tomorrow and be tested, I will.”
“Please do. I could be contagious.”
He shook his head. I retired to the bedroom, once again, to collapse into sleep.
The next day, Frédéric valiantly drove me down the mountain to the doctor’s office. In the waiting room, I imagined the sickness hovering as a phantom inside my chest. The doctor walked in, brisk in her high heels, and called me into her office, where she placed a stethoscope against my chest and listened.
I informed her that I probably had tuberculosis.
“I’m fairly certain that you don’t have tuberculosis,” she countered, moving the stethoscope around on my chest.
“I’m exhausted all of the time. It’s not normal.”
“Didn’t you have shots?” she asked.
I sighed.
“I’m going to give you a pulmonary exam. It will show whether you have any blockage in your chest or lungs. But before I start, I need to ask you a few questions. Is there any chance that you could be pregnant?”
Enceinte. A wall protecting a castle. Or to be pregnant with child.
“I suppose there’s a chance,” I conceded. “There’s always a chance.”
“Have you missed a period?”
“I have no idea.”
“When do you usually have your period?”
“I have no idea. I never even know what day it is.”
She gave me a look of disdain that seemed to have been perfected by certain French women. “Why don’t you take some blood tests and then come back in a few days?” she suggested. “In the meantime, I’ll make the appointment to check your lungs.”
“Okay,” I said. At the same time I was thinking, My God. When was the last time I had my period?
We took the blood tests. They called us with the results that evening. But by then, I somehow already knew that we were having a child.
• • •
A few days later, we returned to the clinic to have my lungs x-rayed. This time a much kinder doctor was on duty, and we informed him that I still wanted to be screened for tuberculosis, but that in the meantime we had learned that I was pregnant. He told me that the first doctor had been wrong, and that the x-rays in this case would do me no harm. He checked my lungs first. When he was finished, he did an ultrasound. He covered my abdomen with a clear, thin layer of gelatin, cold to the touch, and instead of searching for disease, he went searching for a child. And there you were. Sleeping. Already fully formed, your small head facing skyward, cradled into the placenta as though resting in a small raft set out to water, your tiny feet just visible, and indentations of eyes and mouth, small thumbprints.
Frédéric gasped.
I realized that I had already known in some part of me, for you were not a stranger to me.
In his office, the doctor handed us two sets of images. The first showed my lungs, free of consumption. The second held a body sleeping in light, with ribs pronounced, like a white harmonica.
“When was your last period?” the doctor asked me.
“I have no idea,” I answered.
He sighed, as French doctors do, and then he measured the length of the cranium, which told him how many weeks along I was. Then he consulted a chart, turning a dial forward on the calendar until it arrived on my due date. He showed it to Frédéric and smiled.
“C’est le vingt-sept—non, le vingt-cinq décembre. Joyeux noël!”
“It’s the twenty-fifth of December,” he translated softly. “Merry Christmas.”
• • •
The world changed overnight. Or so it changed for me. It collapsed into something infinitely smaller, a thin and fractured crust of earth, floating on lava and fire, continuously worn down by water, and I was afraid.
Christmas. I imagined Mary’s moment with the angel who slipped into her room.
“How can I be pregnant, if the pregnancy test said negative?”
• • •
When we ascended again to the mountaintop, I became aware for the first time that there was not enough air. I imagined the baby’s lungs as two small moths, trapped beneath a tiny, overturned glass.
“I’m an awful mother,” I fretted to Frédéric as the village came into view. “I carried a child for three months, and I didn’t even know that he existed. Then I took him to a place where he couldn’t breathe. I managed to neglect my child before he was even born.”
“Look on the bright side,” he answered. “Everyone says that the first three months are the hardest. And they’re already gone.”
“Oh God. I never should have bought the pregnancy test on sale.”
“You just took the test too soon.”
“And there was the wedding we went to. Do you have any idea how much I had to drink? I have no idea, because I can’t remember any of it.”
“He’ll be fine. It was just one night.”
“I was already…five weeks pregnant that night. My God.”
“Do you have any idea how much alcohol French people used to drink? They drank wine instead of water because the water wasn’t clean. They smoked through all of their pregnancies. And yet somehow the French as a people survived.”
Somehow, the survival of the French people was of little comfort to me.
• • •
It was already July. We had planned on spending only two months in the mountains and then returning to Jerusalem at the end of August, only now there seemed little incentive to go back. We had yet to discover our bearings completely in Jerusalem. Frédéric, who had finished his high school diploma before our wedding, had spent the time since finishing a college degree in Islamic studies, and was hoping to continue on to a graduate degree. I reasoned that this would be best accomplished if we remained in France. I was certain that Frédéric would be only too happy to remain in his own country. But instead he was already figuring out which of our eleven rooms on Nablus Road would be the nursery.
“Are we really going to go back there to have a child?” I asked.
“Of course we are. You’re due at Christmas. You can’t be due at Christmas and not have the baby in Bethlehem.”
“Bethlehem? Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious. There’s a very good French hospital in Bethlehem.”
This almost made me smile. The French desire to maintain everything French—even to the extent of seeking out hospitals in conflict zones—was nothing if not admirable.
“But I have to go through a checkpoint to get to Bethlehem,” I objected. “Every mother’s nightmare is to be caught at a checkpoint while in labor.” This was my suspicion, at least. In reality, I didn’t know any mother who’d had to go through a checkpoint to give birth.
He shrugged. “It’s your first baby. You’ll have forever.”
Oddly, the idea of having “forever” at a checkpoint didn’t make me feel better. “How do you know I’ll have forever?”
“Everyone knows that the first baby takes hours.”
“But we could just stay here in the Alps.”
“Being on top of a mountain in the middle of winter with meters of snow is a little bit like being stuck behind a checkpoint.”
He had a point. “We could rent a home.”
“Where? Do we want to be in some random rented house in the middle of the French countryside after we have a baby? Don’t you think we’ll want to be in our own home?”
Was it home, those rooms in Jerusalem? “Frédéric, I don’t think I can go back there now. Don’t you remember how all of the children play with toy guns? I don’t want my son to grow up playing war.”
“You don’t even know if it’s a boy.”
“Okay, I don’t want my daughter playing war.”
“But I played war growing up. All boys play war growing up. It’s completely natural.”
“You did not play war. You played Zorro.”
“No, I played cowboys and Indians.”
“That’s different. In our neighborhood they play Israelis and Palestinians. You pretended to shoot someone imaginary. They pretend to shoot their neighbors.”
“You can do what you want. But boys will play war.”
“This from a former novice monk.”
“Yes.”
“No toy guns in the house.”
“He’ll just use sticks and pretend they’re guns. But agreed: no guns in the house.”
I could tell, in that strange way, that the baby did not fully exist for him yet—that he had not fully internalized the anxiety of being responsible for a human life.
“Aren’t you scared of raising a child in a country that seems to go to war every year?” I finally asked.
“Listen, Stephanie,” he said, quietly but with assurance. “Whoever that baby is, he or she is going to be strong. You’re strong. Anyone who goes almost four months without knowing she’s pregnant is strong.”
“Or stupid.”
“Can you try for me? Then, if Jerusalem doesn’t work out, we can come back to France. But I can’t keep floating around like this. We need to plant roots somewhere. Let’s just try. See how it feels when we go back.”
I never expected that my very French husband would be coaxing us to go back to Jerusalem, while I pushed for us to say in the Alpine countryside. How things had changed.
That night I phoned my father.
“Hi, pregnant girl,” he said.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Is everything okay?”
“I think so. Dad? I was just wondering… Was Mom in labor for a long time before you went to the hospital for the first child?”
He laughed. “Are you kidding me? Your mother didn’t even know she was in labor! She made us go to see my mother to make sure. My mom opened the door, took one look at her and said—my God—why aren’t you in the hospital? You’re in labor!”
He laughed. “She had your sister while I was still signing in.”
• • •
I was lying in bed the next day when Frédéric tiptoed in. I still had not fully forgiven him for his fearlessness. Earlier he had reminded me that women had given birth since the beginning of time, after which I had reminded him that they had also died in childbirth.
Now he lay down beside me. He gently placed his hand on my belly and whispered to the baby, “Bonjour, toi.”
Then he seemed to say it almost to himself. “Five and a half months left,” he whispered, finally. “I needed more time.”
And I forgave him. He was just as terrified as I was, the way every character in the Bible—Abraham, Sarah, Mary—is terrified when an angel appears and announces that a child will be born. Sarah even laughs out loud. It is so absurdly ridiculous.
You will have a child.
Me? Do you know how old I am?
Mary doesn’t even say a word.
You will have a child.
We had missed his earliest heartbeats. We would never have them, like lost pieces of music. Now Frédéric would come and place his head against my belly, and whisper: “C’est mon bébé, ça!” You’re my baby, you are.
We remained in France until August, long enough to see the very first leaves falling. Seasons always come to a mountaintop early, and there is a peculiar joy in descending a mountain in a single day and falling into a different season at the bottom, defeating fate. Yet the opposite is also true, and we seemed to move ahead in time, the year collapsing upon
us. Autumn came early, and we watched the cows ambling toward lower pasture in search of life, the top of the mountain razed of its wildflowers.
Then it was time to go back to a place in the world where we were strangers, but strangers together. I packed a bag, and the pictures of the baby asleep in the raft of my body, taken alongside the large black sheet meant for finding broken bones or disease, which instead had discovered life.
I had never considered how many sharks slept in water, or how sidewalks could narrow beside a street, or how strong the sun was; I had never registered how frail bones are and how easily they might break. There were poisonous berries, small plastic parts that might be swallowed. The air was too thin in the sky, and the earth was too fragile, and I had no idea, from the very first day, where in the world to place you. To what thin crust of earth we could possibly belong.
• • •
My dearest Joseph, I will always believe that I brought you twice into the world; once in a hospital room in Bethlehem, and once on that day, when we drove down the winding road of the mountain, your father slowing at every turn to keep you safe—when we abandoned yellow flowers and eglantine bushes and sky, when we descended into the skyless patch of earth that we had chosen, and we placed a child into it.
There were brakes that could fail, or turns that could be missed. I could not build your body. There would be no clocks within it, and no knives or compass; there were not even words, only vowels and consonants swimming in water. You waited in my womb, saturated in water and sounds, to be released. We would bring you into war. I had lived enough on the periphery of it to know that it was terrible, and that it could burn up the soul of a man.
But lemon trees can only grow at low altitudes, and fig trees, and even most birds do not venture so high into the air as we had escaped. We carried you down into the inhabited world, into the river of air—or I carried you—for this is the same in all three languages: to bear a child; to haml, in Arabic; in French, to say je porte ton enfant, I carry your child—as in a cross, as in a burden, but also the word for a tree bearing fruit.
This much I have always suspected: everything that is beautiful must also have a weight.
A Country Between Page 12