It was late August when we arrived in Jerusalem. The neighbors were exactly where we had left them. They stared at us as though we were ghosts.
Jamil, the gardener from the neighboring convent, was standing in front of the gate. He ran to meet us.
“You came back!” he shouted.
“Yes, we did.”
He shook his head. “Nobody ever comes back,” he said.
Mary of the Shattered Ones
A week later, I set out for my first doctor’s visit in Bethlehem. As I watched the walls of the Old City disappear behind me, the land gradually changed from treescape to barren desert hills, and I was once again amazed at how quickly the earth shifted in those parts. Bethlehem was only seven kilometers away by bus, but it was also on the other side of the separation wall, so that entering it meant passing through a border. Though Palestine was not officially a country, Bethlehem was not mixed between Israelis and Palestinians like Jerusalem. It was firmly in the Arab world, with the only Israeli presence being the soldiers who manned the checkpoint to enter it, and the settlers who lived in the settlements scattered around it.
There was something altogether concrete about needing to travel to a more dangerous place in order to give birth to a child. I remembered the song that we used to sing at Christmas mass every year in my childhood:
O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie.
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light.
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
Even as a child I recognized something in those last lines: an entire lifetime collapsed into a single moment, when a child is born.
There is no better way to describe being pregnant than to say that the hopes and fears of all the years have somehow been given body: that when hope takes a body, that body is a child. There is also no way to avoid saying that it scared the shit out of me. My own “all the years,” beginning with my childhood, had not been easy. I had battled depression for much of my teenage years, so much so that I eventually ended up in the psychiatric ward of a mental hospital for two weeks, recovering from a suicide attempt when I was fifteen years old. I was not the first in my family to do so: my mother’s mother had suffered from depression and finally committed suicide as an adult, and my mother’s father had been mysteriously murdered in his own home, with his own shotgun. My mother’s sister had been tragically run over and killed by a bus. My own experience of my mother was that of a woman who loved us, but who had also spent years doing battle against the hellish circumstances of her own past. The fears of all the years…
I had moved forward, somehow, miraculously. I had never forgotten Frédéric’s accusation: You don’t believe in resurrection. So I had searched for it. Insisted upon it. Held onto it like my life depended on it, because, quite frankly, it did. And in the midst of so much fear, marriage had already felt like a miracle, less my own doing than that of an angel who had wandered onto a train, who had moved my life in a direction against gravity—a life full of fear now edging carefully toward hope.
But to decide to have a child! To think that I should be entrusted with a person! This was to choose to leap into the abyss, and to take another human with me. There was something about that decision, set against the reality of my family’s past, that seemed altogether reckless. To have managed some happiness for myself was already lucky, but to think that I could pass on happiness to another generation was chutzpah. I remembered the words of Franz Kafka to his friend Max Brod: “Oh [there is] plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope—but not for us.”
And it would have been enough had I decided to give birth in a suburban house in Texas, or rural France. But I was going to have a child in a region of war.
• • •
After twenty minutes, the blue-and-white-striped minibus from Jerusalem stopped beside the separation barrier: a gray slab of concrete crowned in snarled barbed wire, with a military watchtower at the center, circled with small windows. The separation wall began in Bethlehem and stretched as far as the eye could see, a brutal interruption in the landscape. I descended from the bus, walked inside the checkpoint, and flashed my passport for a soldier waiting at a window who breezily waved me through a turnstile. So it was in the West Bank—nearly anyone could enter. It was the leaving that was difficult.
In front of me stood another pair of turnstiles, then a vacant lot separating the checkpoint from yet a third set of turnstiles, and then the concrete wall. For a brief moment, walking through the vacant lot, I wondered in which country I was standing. An elderly Palestinian man crossed my path, putting on his belt again after passing through security. The metal made a small, almost imperceptible tinkling sound like a bell. In front of me, hanging over the wall, a banner read: “Welcome to Bethlehem. Peace Be with You.”
And in all of this, I was aware of the child I was carrying inside me, moving and swimming and breathing within the raft of my body, crossing a checkpoint for the very first time in his life through the vantage of my womb. I wondered if he could sense the quickening of my own heart. It was the end of summer, and soon I would be six months pregnant.
• • •
The Holy Family Hospital was set high on the slope of a hill looking over the entrance to the city. On the roof, a statue of the Virgin Mary stood, cloaked in a heavy, folded robe and with her hands outstretched, oddly familiar. I entered and approached the reception window, where the secretary peered down at me. He attempted to speak to me in English first, and then Arabic. At eight thirty in the morning, I did not feel up to the task of speaking any language at all.
“Do you speak Arabic?” he asked.
“Sort of,” I apologized. “I speak Syrian Arabic.”
He laughed. “What’s your name?”
“Stephanie Saldaña.” He appeared to ponder my name for a moment before turning to the documents and scrawling from right to left: some invented, transliterated version of my name in Arabic.
“What is your husband’s name?”
“Frédéric.”
“What?” He leaned into the counter.
“Farid, you can call my husband Farid.” He carefully wrote this out in Arabic letters, and I decided that it would have to do. Farid meant “the unique one” in Arabic. Frédéric would appreciate that.
“How long have you been married?” This seemed totally irrelevant to the task of signing up to give birth, but it was a Catholic hospital, so I humored him.
“One year.”
“Have you been pregnant long?”
“Is it that obvious I’m pregnant?” I teased.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“Yes, six months.”
He wrote that down. “Khamsin shekels,” he ordered, and I handed him the rough equivalent of twelve dollars.
The doctors’ offices were around the corner, but there was no real waiting room. Instead, women filled the seats and the hallways in a somewhat chaotic assemblage: poor women from the surrounding countryside with drawn faces trying to keep their children from running around, wealthier local Christian women adorned in chic dresses with crosses conspicuously displayed around their necks, women in headscarves and others in short sleeves with perfectly styled hair. A doctor called a woman’s name, and her entire family of children and sisters and aunts and mother and grandmother stood with her and moved toward the doctor’s office, an entire village that appeared for an update on news of the coming member. I looked at them all, and it dawned on me that we had all once swum in our mother’s wombs, that we were now carrying children, and that in some way we all inhabited the same country.
A doctor peeked out the door and called my name. I entered the examination room and handed him an envelope of papers from France: the image that contained not a disease, but the black-and-white outline of a child swimming in my body.
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“Don’t tell me if it’s a boy or a girl,” I insisted. “I don’t want to know.”
He laughed. “Really? You’re the first. Here the women only come to see me twice when they’re pregnant: once to find out if it’s a boy or a girl, and a second time when they’re in labor.”
I remembered the crowd in the hallway and reasoned that they had all assembled for exactly such news. “I don’t want to know,” I repeated.
“Okay, I’ll try not to forget. But it might accidentally slip out. When was your last period?”
Since we had been to our first appointment in France, Frédéric had been the designated supplier of information. He knew when my last period was, what my weight was in kilograms instead of pounds, and my family illnesses. Since he was not with me, I shrugged. “In France they said that the baby is due on Christmas day.”
“We’ll see.” He attached me to an aging sonogram machine. We were quiet. I could hear the crowds of women chatting in the hallway outside. I looked to see a single heart beating, an oval, a ribcage like a round harmonica. I gasped.
“There’s the baby.”
I kept staring. There were the hands. The feet. The indentation of eyes, nose.
The doctor wrote down an address. “That’s my private clinic. Come and see me there in two weeks.”
“That’s all?”
“Here’s a prescription for vitamins. That’s all.”
It was finished, after only five minutes. I had traveled such a long journey for something so brief. I walked into the hall, and the crowds looked up at me expectantly. I smiled at them, and we shared the secret shared between women across time.
I have someone alive inside of me. And so do you.
I thought of Mary, rushing after learning of her pregnancy to see her cousin Elizabeth, just so that they could marvel at each other, so that the babies in their bellies could bounce and wave in greeting, recognizing each other already.
• • •
From the garden, women were visible in the glass-walled hallways walking back and forth in their slippered feet, holding newborns.
I sat down at a table beside the olive trees, under the protective gaze of the statue of the Virgin Mary, took out a notebook and a pen, and wrote a letter to my unborn child.
Dear ,
It’s so hot today. I was thinking of you, my beauty, my little one…
When I was finished, I tucked the blank book into my purse and walked up the hill into the ancient city center, through the narrow streets, down the bustling markets of the mostly Muslim town. There was a sweetness to Bethlehem, the sidewalks packed with village women selling dried yogurt and plums and great piles of sage. Unlike Jerusalem, which was torn between so many fighting identities, Bethlehem was surer of what it was. As I ascended the hill, the main street branched off into two, and then everything descended, running beneath ancient stone arches until it led to Manger Square, where a stone basilica towered above the cave where Jesus was born.
The first church at the site of the Church of the Nativity had been dedicated in 339, but the present-day basilica dated from the reign of Justinian in the sixth century. Since then, it had almost miraculously survived in a world of vanishings. Tradition said that in the seventh century, when the Persians set out to destroy churches all over the region, including the Holy Sepulchre, they allegedly refrained from tearing down the Church of the Nativity because they saw a mosaic on the facade of the three magi, dressed as men from Persia and arriving to pay homage to the infant Jesus. Today, it is still visited by Muslims and Christians alike, who come to honor the son of a virgin named Mariam: the Prophet Jesus, who according to the Quran spoke from the cradle, healed the sick and raised the dead, breathed into clay birds and released them into the open air. In a region where religions so often fought over holy places, it was a relief to enter into a Christian basilica that was nonetheless the pride of a largely Muslim city.
Like the monastery in the desert, the Church of the Nativity’s entrance was a miniature door of humility. I kneeled to make my way inside. The church opened into a magnificent nave, and on each side, two rows of pillars barely revealed the ghosts of ancient, painted saints staring out. Oil lamps swung from the ceilings at intervals. I descended the stairs to the cave beneath, where dozens of candles were burning among the stones blackened with centuries of smoke, and I knelt on the ground and kissed the star where a child was born.
Dear God, if you can do me just one single favor, then let my child live.
There is nothing like having a child to knock the shit out of you, to break any nonsense ideas that you are well, and healed, and competent. No, a child awakens every doubting voice within.
“How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Mary asked.
How can it be true, if I don’t even know what day it is, if I leave my laundry undone for weeks, if I still use a mattress on the floor as my bed? If I don’t know how much I weigh, if I don’t even know when my last period was?
How can it be true, when I have spent so much of my life afraid—not just of angels, but of everything?
How can it be true, if we live in a place on the verge of falling apart?
• • •
If any city reminded me of falling apart, it was Bethlehem. I had first traveled there when I was twenty-two years old, a young student just out of college on a scholarship to journey through the Middle East and Europe for a year. I had walked from the Old City of Jerusalem, during a time when the only border between the two cities had been not a wall, but a few orange traffic cones on the road and a handful of soldiers lazily watching the cars pass by. Once I’d walked passed them, I approached a small shop on the side of the road.
“Do you know where Bethlehem is?” I had asked the man working there.
“Wait five minutes, and I’ll take you there!” he’d responded.
Sure enough, five minutes later I had found myself in the front seat of his car heading toward Bethlehem. Eventually, he had dropped me off in the middle of Manger Square. I had centered my backpack on my back, entered the first souvenir store I saw, and asked the owner: “Do you know of a place where I can stay the night?”
He had smiled. “Just wait five minutes, and I’ll take you there!”
That was how I found myself, walking next to the owner of a souvenir store, knocking at various convents and asking if they had vacancies. After several tries, we arrived at a large yellow door and rang the bell. A young Palestinian nun in a gray habit opened the door with a beaming smile. Her name was Hannah.
“Do you take guests for the night?” I asked her hesitantly.
She grinned. “We always thought that we might. I guess that you will be our first.”
It was an encounter that would change the course of my life—much like the angel who had appeared on Frédéric’s train. I spent the following week in Bethlehem, and it was in those streets, among that particular wind in the alleys where Muslims and Christians had lived side by side for centuries, that I decided to give my life to studying the Middle East. I knew, then and there, that I would research Islam and Eastern Christianity and learn to speak Arabic—a total shift from the life I had imagined for myself as a writer and poet. It was a choice that would eventually take me to Syria—to Father Paolo, an expert on Muslim–Christian dialogue, and then to the man who would become my husband. Every evening in Bethlehem, I would end my day by walking to the cave beneath the basilica and kissing the star on the ground where tradition said a child had been born. It was 1999, and the city was re-cobbling the streets to celebrate two thousand years of Christianity.
Nine months after I left, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—known to Palestinians as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound or al-Haram al-Sharif—an event that helped set off the Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. The following years would see massive demonstrations, invasions, suicide bombs, and battles, as a slowly simmering war between Israelis and Palestinians finally explo
ded into the streets of Israel and the West Bank, resulting in thousands of deaths. Bethlehem became the first city that I’d known intimately to collapse into war. In time, a dozen other cities would follow. I would look at the news and remember that star on the earth, among the dying, and think: A child was born into this.
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
I grew tired. On the way back to the bus, I passed the hospital one more time. I looked up at Mary on the roof, her hands held out. Then I recognized her.
Where had I seen that face before? After I spent a year working as a journalist in Beirut in 2001, I had returned to the United States for graduate school. One day in the library, I had come across a photo on the front page of the newspaper from the recent fighting in Bethlehem: the image of a statue of the Virgin Mary, radiant in white, with her arms stretched out, shot clean through with bullets. When fighting broke out in the city in 2002, her body had been decimated by shrapnel, one hand torn off, and her nose broken. I had torn the picture from the newspaper and carried it with me, calling her Mary of the Shattered Ones.
Unknowingly, I had sat beneath that same Mary’s protective gaze in the hospital garden that morning, minutes after I had seen my child’s beating heart, as I sat down to write a letter to my unborn child.
Now I thought of her again, her outstretched hands, and the terrors she had passed through, of war and bullets and tanks moving through the streets. Her wounds had been patched over, the shrapnel removed. Was she truly made new? How much of the past do we carry with us as we stumble forward, waiting to give birth?
Rilke wrote that “every angel is terrifying.” But surely none is so terrifying as the one who appears to every mother who will give birth, in spite of her past and her wounds, who tells her that out of those wounds an infant will arrive: hope in the form of a body.
I made my way back to the checkpoint, again passing through three turnstiles, metal detectors, barbed wire. I found my way onto the waiting bus. And as Jerusalem appeared again in the distance, I removed the small book from my bag and read the letter I had written to my child that afternoon:
A Country Between Page 13