A Country Between

by Stephanie Saldaña

  Dear ,

  It’s so hot today. I was thinking of you, my beauty, my little one, as I walked into the parking lot of the hospital. You aren’t even born. I thought: Why? Why am I even bringing you into this, already?

  This is the life I have chosen, my love. Forgive me. It’s the only life I know how to bring you into.

  Umm Yusuf

  I had always expected the division between pregnancy and childbirth to be neat: first there was no child, and then one arrived. But it was not that way at all. The baby was already very much with us, every day, in the swelling of my breasts, the rounding of my womb, the shoes that no longer fit. Even the neighbors acknowledged the presence of a new person within me before he arrived.

  It turns out that the easiest way to make your neighbors stop thinking that you are a spy is to have a baby. Every trip up the stairs with a crib to install or paint for the nursery seemed to confirm in our neighbors’ eyes that spies do not have children, so all of their suspicions about us were likely unfounded. The last lines of resistance were quietly crossed, and we became part of the neighborhood at last.

  The old men sitting on the front steps and smoking cigarettes would part when I opened the front door, to let me pass. Abu Hossam would nod solemnly. “We’re praying for you!” he would say, before handing me sesame bread and refusing to let me pay. I encountered Sister Pascal at the Freij grocery store, who had now transformed into the kindest nun in the world, in her white habit. “Nous prions pour vous,” she whispered quietly. Sheikh Mazen, descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, announced solemnly: “Nusallee mishanik.” Surely there was no other unborn child who had so many prayers protecting him.

  In the mornings, I would cross Mother Superior Maria, who lived beneath us, as I headed to the front door to buy bread. “¡Estoy orando por ti!”—I’m praying for you!—she would call out in Spanish, hastily making a sign of the cross in the air. Then she would sweep the space in front of me, as if blessing the earth so that I could walk on it.

  In Arabic society, a mother and father adopt the name of their oldest son as their honorific title, a symbol of the importance of having a child and a tradition reminiscent of the name changes we see repeatedly in the book of Genesis to signal major life events. It seemed odd to me that I could live for thirty years and then suddenly have my name changed to that of someone I had, for most of my life, not known existed.

  It did not come naturally to me. When Frédéric and I married, I had changed my last name on the French marriage certificate, but then had not been able to bring myself to use it. It had felt too strange, too forced, like taking on an identity that was not truly mine—to overnight become French instead of Spanish. And maybe I was scared. My parents’ marriage had ended in divorce. So had his parents’. To keep my own name was to keep one extra skin of resistance to the possibility of loss.

  But now I no longer had the choice. The neighbors did it without asking me. Once they learned that, if we had a boy, we wanted to name him Joseph, the entire neighborhood began calling me Umm Yusuf, which meant “Mother of Joseph.”

  “Umm Yusuf! Your bag is open!”

  “Umm Yusuf! Let me carry that for you!”

  “Umm Yusuf!”

  It took some getting used to, and more than once someone shouted after me, “Umm Yusuf!” and I forgot to turn around.

  I didn’t even know if the child was a boy. But even this did not matter. A Palestinian friend informed me that, now that the neighborhood had decided that I was going to have a boy, there would be no changing my name. They would persist in calling me Umm Yusuf, even if I had a girl. In fact, they would continue with the name until I had a boy, as a reminder of the boy I had not yet conceived. And she would know: when she was pregnant with her first child, the entire neighborhood began calling her Umm Faris, until she had no choice but to name her first son Faris. I had to admire a society in which the neighborhood had a say in such matters.

  But what if something went wrong? I was uneasy about naming a child who was not even born. Every step that we took toward investing emotionally in this child meant more pain if he or she were lost.

  My Israeli friend Karen seemed to understand this intuitively when she called me to congratulate me on the pregnancy.

  “Do you need anything?” she asked.

  “No, I think I’m fine.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “Because I know I’m supposed to ask, but I don’t actually want to get you anything until he’s born. It’s a Jewish thing. If you give a baby something before he’s born, then you might give him the evil eye.” Many Jewish people take this so seriously that they will not even tell a pregnant woman mazel tov, or congratulations, lest they jinx something; instead, they’ll only say b’shaah tova—may you give birth in an auspicious time.

  “Oh God, don’t give him the evil eye,” I begged her.

  “Yeah,” she confirmed, “I thought that there probably isn’t anything you need so much that it’s worth risking the evil eye for.”

  • • •

  Ramadan came in September that year, and the street crowded every day with worshippers ferried in by bus from the West Bank to attend prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, so that the space in front of our house was transformed into a carnival. It was too hot to not eat all day, and among the fasting crowds, men snapped at one another and longed for their cigarettes. The buses that dropped them off and picked them up parked on either side of our house, and at night the air swelled with men shouting out destinations to those passing by: “Ramallah, Ramallah! Ramallah!” The bus to Issawiya, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, parked directly beneath the balcony.

  “Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya!” the drivers shouted.

  “Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya! Issawiya!”

  Frédéric and I sat beside the breeze provided by the open window, listening. I had my baby book open, which informed me that by six months in the womb, a baby could recognize his own name if you spoke it aloud often enough. I turned to Frédéric grimly.

  “Our child probably thinks that his name is Issawiya.”

  When the cannon shot fired, the long day of fasting was over. The sun set, and over the street a thousand lights were illuminated in the dusk, complete with crescent moons fastened to the lampposts. Only the poorest street vendors did not return home to eat with their families, huddling together to share hummus instead, unable to abandon their vacuum cleaners and blenders and tanks of fish and bags of chocolate to take a meal elsewhere. Ramadan was the busiest time of the year for street vendors, and they would likely earn more in a month’s time than they would for the rest of the year. I watched the young men huddled in a circle on the pavement across the street.

  For the first time, they did not seem like strangers, but part of my own field of belonging. Yes—I looked at them and, oddly, sensed, from the deepest part of me, that we belonged to one another, despite the fact that we had never met.

  “Do you think we might bring them some fruit?” I asked Frédéric hesitantly.

  “Why not?”

  I rushed to assemble what we had in the kitchen—apples and bananas, a few ripe peaches and dates—and I placed them in a pile on a platter, together with two knives. I hurried down to the street and shyly offered the platter to the men circled around their meal. They looked up in surprise, and then one reached out and gladly accepted. I disappeared upstairs.

  From the window, we watched them eating the fruit, peeling the apples with the knives as though engaged in a ceremony. Twenty minutes later, a knock at the door. I ran downstairs. One of the men handed me the platter and asked, cautiously, “Do you think we could we have some coffee?”

  I ran upstairs. “They want coffee,” I announced.

  For some reason, this request gave me immense joy—where we lived, it was only the owners of the house who offered coffee, and the guests who accepted. A few minutes later, Frédéric appeared on the street with a tray full of small cups
of Arabic coffee and a small bowl of sugar. The men drank them on the spot, thanked him, and put the glasses back on the tray. Had I known how to inspect the grains they left behind, I might have, in the local tradition, known all of their futures.

  And I marveled. Marveled because of something new, something that had caused me to recognize men who had always been strangers in the street. Some new way of being in the world had touched me. It wasn’t me. It was the child in me, the child who had told me. And it occurred to me that the greatest gift a child might give me would be to release me from the burden of myself. For the first time in my life, I felt like I might actually have it in me to be a mother—not because I was any good at taking care of anyone, but because this child, even from the womb, seemed determined to teach me how.

  The next day, I invited Umm Hossam, the wife of Abu Hossam, over to drink tea. She had raised eight children, exactly like my own grandmother, and I was hoping that she might be able to give me some advice.

  She arrived in the afternoon wearing a long navy coat, her hair veiled, and made a place for herself in the salon. Her youngest son, just under a year, lay beside her on the cushion. I brought her tea, and then the two of us sat down to drink together.

  “Umm Hossam,” I began, “I’m having a child in three months, and I have no idea what to do. I was hoping that you could help me.”

  She laughed. “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.”

  She touched my hand. I knew that her life had not been easy. But she was made of something more solid than I was, more resilient.

  “I had my first child when I was sixteen years old,” she began. “I was so worried. I asked myself: How will I know how to feed him? How will I know how to put him to sleep? But then Hossam was born, and when he was hungry he told me he was hungry, and when he was tired he cried until I helped him to sleep.

  “Don’t you worry,” she said softly. “Our children know far more than we can ever know. Just wait, and your child will teach you everything.”

  Linea Nigra

  Late summer turned to fall and then to winter, in that curious time in the city during which three seasons seemed to overlap. The intense heat faded, and migratory birds began their journey overhead to seek shelter in Africa for wintertime. Then winter approached, and the leaves of the Great Tree drifted onto the balcony, until all that remained were the empty branches staring back at us.

  My own body also passed through seasons. Dark rings formed around my nipples. I was stunned to discover a long brown line, called a linea nigra, appear seemingly overnight on my abdomen, like a border, marking the passage from one stage of my life to the next. From where had it come? What other parts of myself lay there, dormant and unrecognized, ready to ink themselves to the surface with this child?

  Everything seemed to be in movement. I looked at Frédéric in the morning, still in his monk’s cassock as a robe, handing me a cup of tea, and I was astonished to think that this frail and imperfect love we had built between us—a love on pilgrimage—had created a child. Had taken a form: hope in a body, with arms and legs; the sum of us and yet surpassing us; both entirely ours and entirely other.

  “Do you know that you have a soul inside of you?” Frédéric asked at breakfast. “What does that feel like?”

  “A small, white bird, nesting.”

  • • •

  In late September, I headed again to the Holy Family Hospital, where I had signed up to take classes that would help coach me through the labor process. While in America these would have been couples’ classes, among Palestinians childbirth was seen as a woman’s business, and men were largely relegated to pacing back and forth as they waited in the wings, or nervously smoking cigarettes outside.

  Immediately following the class, I would have my first meeting with Dr. George, my obstetrician, in his private clinic.

  By now I had reached the exhausted, very cranky stage of pregnancy. When I arrived at the other side of the checkpoint in Bethlehem, I waved to a taxi driver immediately, shouted out the price, and hopped inside his car before any other driver could speak to me.

  “Mustashfa francowi,” I barked. The French hospital.

  He turned around from his seat to examine me. “Are you Arab?”

  “No.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Your father?”

  “No.” Then, despite my attempts to be bullish, I fell into the Syrian habit of melodrama. “Just my heart.”

  He smiled. “That’s the most important part of the body, the heart.” He turned back toward the road. “Why are you in Bethlehem?”

  “I’m having a child.”

  “At the French hospital?” he asked. “I have eight children. I had all of them there. I didn’t pay full price because I’m from the camp. A lehje. How do you say that in English?”

  “You’re a refugee,” I said quietly.

  “Yes,” he said. “What’s the name of your doctor?”

  “Dr. George.”

  “Ahhh, yes,” he answered. “He delivered one of my children too.”

  He slowed down now, aware of the invisible life in his taxi, and he maneuvered the vehicle around every pothole so that the taxi wouldn’t bounce, until I arrived at the hospital gates.

  “Khaleenee,” he said as I placed the money in his hand. I insist: take it as an offering from me.

  “Next time,” I said, and closed the door before he could hand the money back. “Allah maik,” he called out the window as I left. God be with you.

  • • •

  By the time I arrived at the hospital, a small class of nervous-looking Palestinian women had assembled in a room on the far side of the hospital courtyard.

  A nurse bounced in, all energy in her uniform. She asked for our names, which we called out, one after another, as she checked them against a list on her clipboard. Then she announced, rather abruptly, “So, you are all going to have babies.”

  A murmur of giggles responded.

  She clarified. “Each one of you is going to have a baby come out of your vagina.”

  There was an audible gasp. To be fair, she did not actually say “vagina,” which is really only used in Arabic as a curse word. She used a term that meant something like our “hidden place.” But we knew what she meant.

  She smiled through her teeth. “Here you are going to learn everything you need to have a natural labor. If you have any questions, you can ask me. Now listen. I know your mother thinks she knows what you should do when you go into labor. I know that your grandmother thinks she knows what you should do when you go into labor. I know that your husband’s mother thinks that she knows what you should do when you go into labor. But they are not a nurse or a doctor, so if you have a question, ask one of us.”

  There were nods of recognition around the room, from women who had clearly been getting an earful from the women in their families.

  She continued. “So everyone in this room is at least five months pregnant. Now, how many of you have ever taken a mirror and looked at your ‘hidden place’?”

  Horrified silence followed.

  The nurse repeated herself, forcefully now. “I want all of you to go home, get out a mirror, and look at your ‘hidden place.’ Because whether you like it or not, a baby is going to come out of there.”

  And on that point, there was no arguing with her.

  • • •

  When the class was finished, I walked up the hill toward Dr. George’s private office. Behind the secretary’s desk, the door to the doctor’s office was open, and inside I could see Dr. George, with his wide belly, busy leaning back in his chair and smoking a cigarette.

  “Come in! Come in!” he called.

  I pointed. “I’ll come in when you put out your cigarette.”

  He smiled. “You should come more often. Maybe I’d quit.” He put out his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him, and I waited for the smoke to clear before I sat down. I noticed a Virgi
n Mary calendar prominently displayed behind him, with Arabic writing spelling out the feast days, a hint that he was part of Bethlehem’s ancient Arab Christian community.

  “You’re Christian?”

  “Greek Orthodox,” he said.

  “I’m due on Christmas day,” I reminded him. “Will you be working on Christmas day? Or will you take the day off because it’s your holiday?”

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he assured me. “You’re due on December twenty-fifth, right? Greek Orthodox Christmas isn’t celebrated in Bethlehem until the sixth of January. You have an extra twelve days to have the baby.” And I was momentarily relieved that at least the schism between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches in 1054 meant that my doctor would be with me on the day my child was born.

  But a seed of doubt had been planted within me. “So you’ll work on Christmas,” I prodded. “That’s good. But what if I give birth in the middle of the night? Will you be there, then?”

  He sighed and nodded. “I don’t know what it is about women. But you are always having your babies in the middle of the night.”

  We moved to the neighboring room, where he hooked me up to an ultrasound machine. He rubbed cold gel on my stomach, and I waited for the baby to appear on the screen.

  “Don’t forget, I don’t want to know the sex,” I reminded him.

  Then you were there. Swimming. Enormous. Kicking to get out.

  “Looks like he’s going to be a little football player,” the doctor said.

  I grimaced.

  “Nope, a ballerina,” he corrected himself.

  There was the hand. And there was the heart. It sounded like horses running next to the sea.

  He printed out the two photos and put the date at the top. I could not stop staring at them as I walked back to the bus: the smudge of eyes, the dent of a nose.

  It was alarming, really, to contain an actual living person. Once, years before, I had seen in the Byzantine monastery of Chora in Istanbul a mosaic of the Virgin Mary frowning, with the baby Jesus in her womb. She held out her two arms, seemingly in a look of exasperation, as if to say: “What do you want me to do? Smile all the time? There’s a baby in my womb!”