Unlike the images in my sonograms, that Jesus sat upright and stared straight ahead, out of her belly, through the fabric of her blue gown. He looked like a toddler, completely aware, with a halo, and he appeared to be eating a popsicle and wearing golden pajamas. Mary’s hands were outstretched to two angels, who paused in midflight beside her. And beneath her was written in Greek:
The Mother of God, the dwelling place of the uncontainable.
As I walked back toward the checkpoint, holding those photos in my hands, a man who sold jewelry chased after me, his bracelets clinking in his hands as he tried to catch me.
“I know you,” he said. “Do you know me?”
“Yes.” I had often seen him selling bracelets at the checkpoint. “But not today. I can’t talk to you today.”
“Don’t you want to help me?”
I tried to think of what I could say to him. “I’m pregnant,” I announced.
He stopped in his tracks.
“Mashallah! Mabrouk. Congratulations!” he said, beaming at me. Then he quickly added, “Inshallah, it will be a boy.”
Ze Christmas Tree
Waiting for Christmas became waiting for the baby to arrive. I thought of those Advent calendars of childhood, the windows we opened every day with a picture inside, as Mary and Joseph approached the stable in Bethlehem. Now every day opened to another list of things we needed: a doctor’s appointment, a package of newborn diapers, a bag now fully packed for the hospital, with socks and a sleeping cap and something to read, an overnight bag for the most unpredictable journey.
Frédéric nested. All of the small, attentive gestures he had paid toward me, the cup of tea or the shoes placed next to the fire—were now extended to a child not yet born. He bought a new woodstove, afraid that the petroleum fumes from the old one would harm the baby. He asked his mother to mail a sheep’s hide for the baby to sleep in, having heard that the wool would soothe the baby much like the warmth of the mother’s womb, and he placed it in the empty crib expectantly. I told myself that this was what happened when a girl from the city fell in love with a Frenchman from the Alps: there were bound to be sheepskins and woodstoves involved, at one time or another.
And I marveled at how much a child made each of us want to offer up our most authentic selves. Although Frédéric had always spoken to me in English and done his own dreaming in French, now in the night he placed his face against my belly and whispered, “C’est mon bébé ça!” in his own language, and we were no longer separate. There was a country between us now that spoke both of our languages, waiting to be born.
At night I would wake up with the baby kicking and pace back and forth, holding him in the salon, letting him swim, as the floorboards trembled with the nearby call to prayer.
The winter so far had been bitingly cold and soaked with rain. But in the mornings, I would peer outside the window to the lemon and orange trees in the garden of the nuns below, swelling with fruit and aglow with water, and they offered strange comfort. I could never have believed that objects so bright could be borne out in such coldness: the miracle of oranges and lemons at a moment when everything else that grows seemed to die. But there they were.
• • •
Time worked differently on Nablus Road. It was a culture in which seasons were marked out by crops and winds, the passing of birds, in which holidays were initiated by the appearance of the moon. A pregnancy was watched with its own calendar. No one ever asked me when the baby was due. Instead they seemed to inspect me each day in order to do their own calculation.
“Still no baby?” Abu Hossam would ask me each time I opened the front door to buy bread in the morning.
“Still no baby,” I would sigh.
“Inshallah,” he would say helpfully.
A young boy who worked shelving groceries at the next-door grocer’s asked, “Umm Yusuf, where is Yusuf?”
“He’s coming,” I assured him. “He’s on his way,” though I was becoming less and less certain of that with every passing day.
As Christmas approached, the visits to Bethlehem changed from every three weeks to every two weeks and finally every week, and as I surveyed each new sonogram, the memories of war in that city were slowly replaced with weight charts, blood pressure numbers, baby books on nutrition, rosebushes in the garden, the miracle of the ordinary. Dr. George reminded me to be certain that the baby was moving. And so I did, every movement a prayer, a promise: You are still alive.
Two weeks before Christmas, Frédéric accompanied me to Bethlehem to buy our first Christmas tree.
“Why don’t we just buy a Christmas tree in Jerusalem?” I complained.
“There are no Christmas trees in Jerusalem. Besides, I know a guy in Bethlehem.”
You know you have lived in the Middle East for too long when you will purchase something from an entirely different city because you know the guy selling it.
That afternoon we found ourselves inspecting Christmas trees, surrounded by dozens of poinsettia plants, in a plant store that stood not fifty meters in front of the separation barrier. I suggested something small, but Frédéric would have nothing of it—a house with high ceilings required a monumental Christmas tree. He pointed to a pine tree the full height of his body, more than six feet tall. Someone clearly needed to ask the question of how we would get a six-foot Christmas tree from Bethlehem to Jerusalem without a car, but I decided not to be that person, and so we paid, and Frédéric grabbed the trunk and dragged the Christmas tree down the busy street, past the jewelry seller and the swarm of taxi drivers awaiting passengers.
“Mabrouk!” they called out. “Congratulations on your purchase!” We waved. Frédéric beamed. I remembered that his national service had been to work in the French forestry service, clearing trees along rural roads.
We walked the length of the separation wall, toward the first set of turnstiles at the checkpoint. I cheerfully showed our passports. Frédéric lifted the tree up vertically and pushed it through the turnstile, letting the tree fall on the other side before he followed it. The soldier on duty stared.
By now the Christmas tree was becoming burdensome. Frédéric continued dragging it through the parking lot and into the building that held the final checkpoint to Jerusalem. The line stretched for some twenty people. We took our places: me, Frédéric, the baby in my womb, and our six-foot Christmas tree. I was nine months pregnant.
“I feel like we’re a piece of Dadaist art,” I sighed.
Just then, the light on the checkpoint, which turned from red to green as it allowed each person through the turnstiles to pass security, stopped working. It hurt to stand. I was nauseated from the prospect of being trapped in a military zone in a long line full of people, stuck behind a Christmas tree.
Someone started laughing. Someone else. A man snapped a photo of us with his cell phone. I smiled, despite myself.
At last, the light began working again, and we reached the front of the line. Frédéric patiently pulled the Christmas tree through. I pushed it from the top, where the star would have been. The floor of the checkpoint was littered with pine needles. The soldier on duty didn’t know what to do. He was tasked with checking if we were carrying anything dangerous.
“Ma ze?” he asked in Hebrew. What’s this?
“Ze Christmas tree,” Frédéric answered cheerfully.
The soldier, bewildered, waved us through. We waited for the white-and-blue bus on the other side, then Frédéric convinced the driver to cram the tree in the back, and we made it home with the smell of pine lingering among the plastic seats and rows of passengers. It was our first Christmas miracle.
The Hopes and Fears
My sister arrived a week before Christmas and settled into one of the many rooms of the house, and we waited. Even my maternity clothes no longer fit. I ate everything I could think of to make the baby want to come out early: pineapple, hot peppers, salsa, Thai food. I tried tango dancing at two in the morning. I ended up with heartburn, swollen feet, an
d still no baby.
Every day my sister would ask: “Do you think you’ll have the baby today?”
“Yes,” I would answer, as though positive thinking were enough to induce labor.
It was not. The baby earned his first nickname: No Show.
Finally, Frédéric and I decided upon a foolproof plan for bringing the baby on time: we would walk the seven kilometers to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. I had read that walking was an effective way of bringing on labor. More importantly, if I were to go into labor in Jerusalem on Christmas Eve, the crowds of pilgrims traveling to Bethlehem for the holiday would make it almost impossible to reach the hospital in a taxi. But if we walked, not only would I almost certainly go into labor, but I would also conveniently end up right next to the Holy Family Hospital, where I needed to give birth. Genius.
On Christmas Eve, Frédéric, my sister, and I met up with a group of French nuns and a priest we had recruited to make the journey with us. As we set out along the road toward Bethlehem, I searched the sky for a star more radiant than others—one that might guide us.
I was already thinking of what a wonderful story this would be to tell my child. In retrospect, I had succumbed to the great writer’s fallacy of believing that, if there is a story good enough to be told, then everything in the universe will come together to tell it.
The first mile was magnificent. By the second mile, I was becoming slightly resentful of the buoyant energy of the French nuns, who kept breaking into song. I had forgotten how swollen my feet had become with the additional weight, and they started developing blisters. When the French priest disappeared to relieve himself on the side of the road, it dawned on me that fate was not writing the romantic story I had hoped it would.
By the time we arrived in Shepherds’ Field, the field where tradition said that the shepherds had seen the star that led them to the manger, I was sore and cranky and certainly not in labor. Around me were the caves that locals believed that the shepherds had once dwelled in, sleeping when they were not keeping watch over their flocks. A volunteer was assigning caves to the different pilgrims arriving for mass. We were in Cave Number 3. This struck me as utterly depressing, as though I had arrived at the megamall of biblical caves. The site was swarming with tourists wearing Santa Claus hats covered in flashing lights.
I found a chair at the corner of the very crowded Cave Number 3. The priest who walked with us now appeared at the altar, transformed in his liturgical vestments, and though he was speaking French, I understood. He read out from the gospel of Luke:
While they were there, the time came for her to have her child,
And she gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes,
And laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.
Frédéric reached for my hand. The priest looked in our direction. Then, I watched him gather his breath before he turned to the expectant faces in front of him.
“Brothers and sisters,” he began. “You’ve just heard me read from the gospel of Luke. And like all of you, I’ve listened to this story, year after year on Christmas Eve, all of my life. I’ve gotten used to it.” He paused and looked at the crowd, assembled in the cave. “But then tonight, something happened. I walked to Bethlehem with a man and his wife, who is nine months pregnant, waiting for their first child to be born. And suddenly, the story became real to me again. I remembered that it isn’t only a story in a book, but that it actually happened, to people like you and me. That it isn’t over. It continues to be real, even today.”
I could feel myself trying not to cry. All that had transpired—and had not transpired—that night was a blessing. Life is messy. It is full of bathroom breaks, and swollen ankles, and bad calculations, and Christmas trees dragged through checkpoints: apparently it is even full of Santa hats with flashing lights. It is a story that we do not get to write ourselves. Why else are we so moved when Mary calls out to the angel: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?”
“How can this be?” What a perfect way to begin the quintessential story of childbirth, with a mother who learns that all bets are off, that this story will not be written on her terms.
To say yes to this, to this miraculous, messy, untimely act of creation, is all that we can ask of ourselves.
That Christmas Eve, I sat there, in Cave Number 3, somewhere nearby the place where a star had appeared two thousand years before, and I did not have a child. But I was part of a mystery borne again and again: broken and burnt out and imperfect as I was, inheriting still this “How can this be?”—this impossible gift.
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
A World Made New
Christmas came and went, and there was still no child.
“Nu?” my friend Benjy wrote me, asking in Yiddish where the baby was. I looked up a phrase and wrote him back.
“Der mentsh trakht un Got lakht.” I responded. Man makes plans, and God laughs.
My sister stayed on in the house, but now my father and stepmother arrived, having originally booked their tickets to fly in a week after the birth. When I opened the door to buy bread in the morning, Abu Hossam just shook his head and sighed.
Ten days after Christmas, Dr. George ordered us to the hospital to have the baby induced. It was not the way I had imagined the story for myself. I had spent four months worrying about passing through the checkpoint during childbirth, but since I was not in labor, we had plenty of time, calmly arriving at the Holy Family Hospital at midday.
Dr. George came as the nurses were checking to see if I was dilated.
“Still no baby?” he asked.
“Still no baby.”
There comes a time in a pregnancy when the fact that the baby hasn’t arrived feels like a personal failure, as though that baby would rather do anything in the world other than be born and spend time with you.
“You know that when you’re ten days overdue, we have to induce.”
“I know, doctor. That’s why I’m here.”
“On the other hand, as you said, you’re here. Nothing can happen to you once you’re here, and we can keep an eye on you.”
“That’s good to know.”
“You’re not at all dilated. I know that you want to have a natural birth, that you don’t want me to induce—so I need you to tell me what to do.”
I had become accustomed to the fact that nothing in this pregnancy was happening on my terms. I looked up at him curiously. “Really, doctor?”
He nodded. “Really.”
In fact, all I wanted to do was sleep. There was no longer a checkpoint between my house and the hospital room. Someone else was cooking my meals. My room was not crowded with family. I was suddenly not in any hurry to have the baby. I was exhausted—from waiting, from the stress of not knowing if I would arrive at the hospital safely, from my family hovering over me and looking for indications that I might go into labor, from the street vendors and nuns and relatives of the Prophet Muhammad watching me for signs of an infant.
“I’m so, so tired. If you induce me now, I don’t think I’ll have the strength to make it through the labor. Is there any limit to how long I can stay here?”
“You can stay here as long as you need to,” he said.
“Can you induce the baby tomorrow?” I asked. “Tonight I just want to rest.”
He patted my head. “Sleep, then. We just have to keep checking on the baby’s heartbeat every few hours to make sure that everything’s okay.”
The hospital grew dark with the silence of winter. Bethlehem lay on the edge of the desert, and January took on a stillness I remembered from the monastery in Syria, a certain quality that made objects come into focus. Outside, in the courtyard, the statue of Mary remained aglow, holding out her arms, and beneath her the orange and lemon trees weighed down with fruit, that same miracle following me from Nablus Road, trees bearing fruit when everything else that grows was dying, color bearing forth
in this coldness.
Frédéric and I found my room, at the very end of the farthest hall of the hospital. I watched the women we passed as if they were returning pilgrims who might give me some secrets of the coming journey, some lying down and holding their babies wrapped in thick blankets, others pacing with them up and down the halls. Grandmothers handed out chocolates to relatives assembled at bedsides. Everything was in Arabic, everything beyond language.
In the middle of the hallway, a room held rows of newly born infants asleep in plastic beds. At the window, two men, who clearly had never met before, stood shoulder to shoulder and shyly pointed out their babies through the window, whispering.
“Haitha ilee.” This one is mine.
We entered my room, and within a moment I had collapsed into bed. Frédéric kissed me on my forehead and left me to rest. To preserve the intimacy of the hospital for the other women there, Frédéric had used his church connections to arrange for a private room on the other side of the hospital—this man always had ways to secure houses, hospital beds, and Christmas trees. He would come when I needed him. But now I was glad to be left alone.
I pulled the covers over my head, and a minute later I fell into the sleep of the dead. I had never slept like that before, and I never would again. I disappeared, taken out of the world momentarily. When I awakened, I suspected that days had passed. It had only been four hours.
I called the nurse. She led me into another room, and Dr. George was there again, checking me.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“You’re three centimeters dilated now,” he said. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
I was confused. I was just asking why I had fallen into such deep sleep. “What does that mean?”
“What it means is that you’ll give birth tonight or tomorrow.”
I had been waiting so long to go into labor that now, when it was happening, it seemed to be a mistake.
“I’m having a baby?”
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